This week’s conversation is with James Swallow who has an upcoming Trek novel coming out in 2025 titled “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward The Night“. We start the conversation by talking about that story, obviously he wasn’t able to go into too much detail due to not wanting to spoil the story, but I’ll say this much, I verified I had a preorder for it after talking to him!
We follow that up by talking about his comic book work and how much he’s love to have a chance to write some Trek books, an endeavor I would fully support. We move onto talking about his recent publishing experiences writing comics and the books that made his childhood, including the original Ghost Rider. I even get an answer about which version of the character is his favorite. The answer is obvious, but we have a cool discussion to get to that inevitable answer.
James is also an extremely accomplished Warhammer 40k author, with 20 books written in the franchise. I get to completely geek out with him about how cool it is to have such a long running series of books that were authored by so many talented authors.
Even with the dozens upon dozens of tie-in books that he’s written, he’s written several of his own stories, including the Marc Dane series and two stand alone stories that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, Dark Horizon and Airside, but if you check out the covers for them, you’ll see why I asked if there were connections due to the aeronautically themed covers. They’re truly not, but my question prompted a fun detour in the conversation to talking about airplanes for about half the interview. If you like airplanes, you’ll love it. If not…sorry? Just enjoy the joy of two nerds nerding out over a fun topic that I know much less than he does. He does a great job of making me interested in both the books, so I’m going to likely end up reading them soon.
We move on from airplanes to talk about attending Shore-Leave, he’s gone to more shows than me, but we both agree it’s the best place to be if you enjoy Treklit.
