I start off my conversation with Una McCormack with a mutual admiration for time shenanigans, then we move on to talk about the audio adaptation of her upcoming book “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum” and features “Una by Una”, which is a clever way of saying that this is the first time that Una McCormack has written a story specifically for Una Chin-Riley, the first officer of the Enterprise under Captain Pike. The story features multiple types of sentient alien cats, linguistic shenanigans, and a student production of The Mikado!
We have a great conversation about the origins of the story and how it changed from the initial concept to what we’re about to read and how the various strikes effected the final outcome, then briefly talk about how fun it is to be writing a character that’s been named after you. Una says Una (the character) is an onion with a solid but complicated relationship with Pike and they rely on each other in a wonderful way.
We then talk about her work in the Doctor Who franchise and the fantastic audio series that has hundreds upon hundreds of entries from “Big Finish”, something that we both feel Trek could learn and benefit from.
I ask her about the Weird Universe book series, it was started by Eric Brown and she’s written two of the four books in the series. It has a cool concept that I think I’d like to eventually check out.
Una McCormack can be found at her website, Mastodon, and Twitter
