Author Una McCormack on writing Picard and Janeway, and Star Trek’s “great hope”
The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway, by Una McCormack. Image Titan Books
DECEMBER 20, 2020 - 2020 has been monumental for Star Trek author Una McCormack. In February, her novel Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope was released, and just this October, her Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway also came out. Last week, SYFY WIRE published an interview with the veteran author, exploring what those two novels mean to her, and why she thinks Star Trek still speaks to readers, after all these years.
McCormack is a former creative writing lecturer who lives in Cambridge, in England. She got her start in Star Trek with fan fiction and short stories based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, followed by her first Star Trek novel, Hollow Men, which came out in 2005. That novel was based on the acclaimed DS9 episode “In the Pale Moonlight”, and explores the aftermath of Captain Sisko’s actions in the Dominion War.
Fast forward to 2020 and McCormack has expanded her repertoire beyond Deep Space Nine, all the way to her favorite captain, Jean-Luc Picard. “Picard arrived when I was 16, and he’s the one I’ll always feel fondly towards. TNG was my Trek,” she said. Fitting, then, that she would be selected to write the prequel novel for the first season of Star Trek: Picard. In the book, she describes the time after the destruction of Romulus, when Picard led efforts to try and help the Romulan people.
But Picard isn’t the only captain McCormack has written this year; she was also entrusted with the voice of Captain Janeway in her fictional autobiography. The Janeway book took a completely different tone from the Picard one, which she described as being “very dark and quite intense.” She said about Janeway, “To do this book, which I wanted to make celebratory, was really refreshing, really joyful.”
And what about other Star Trek captains? Of classic-era Star Trek, only Sisko and Archer remain without autobiographies. McCormack said that she’d “love to do a Sisko bio.” “I love Sisko,” she said. “He’s a phenomenal character. His pull between public idealism and private grief… all this power and this passion. DS9 gets better with every view.”
Una McCormack knows that Star Trek will still have a long future ahead of it, and she attributes that longevity to the franchise's sense of hope: “It’s a future that we all yearn towards, this sense of exploration,” she said. “That we really do make it, that we really do get off this planet, and that we really do discover all those incredible species and places that in our secret hearts we know is out there. [...] Even when it becomes darker or dystopian, there’s always this great hope - that’s something we shouldn’t be sentimental or ashamed about because we all need a little bit of hope.”
To read McCormack’s SYFY WIRE interview in full, head to syfy.com, and check out the rest of her novels, which cover standalone stories in addition to her Star Trek and Doctor Who tie-ins, at Amazon.com or wherever you get your books.
