Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating new worlds

Diane Duane doesn’t remember the plot of her first novel but she remembers the crayon she wrote it with.

She was eight years old, she says.

“It was a constant frustration for me at that point that I was never going to be able to be a writer until I could write much smaller,” she said on Monday in The Flowing Tide on Abbey Street Lower.

She has always written to entertain herself, she says.

Then, one day in 1966, around the age of 14, something new, strange and exciting appeared on her television set.

It was Star Trek – now referred to in the fandom as The Original Series (TOS), starring William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock, a logic-driven Vulcan, and DeForrest Kelley as Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy.

Set in the 23rd century, creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future was bold and optimistic.

As a young teenager in New York, Duane was hooked.

In a post-scarcity world, the series depicted a humanity that had grown out of its infancy.

The good people of Earth had learned to celebrate their diversity and were out there exploring the galaxy as a founding member of the United Federation of Planets.

The bridge crew of the USS Enterprise 1701 included a Japanese man, a Russian man, and a Black woman – all in officer roles. It was simply unheard of on US television in the mid-1960s.

Duane found herself writing Trek “fan-fiction” – although, she says, she didn’t know that’s what it was called then.

Taking a sip of her cabernet sauvignon, she remembers her first effort as a crossover between Trek and musical sitcom The Monkees.

“I don't know why I'm even admitting this in a public place, but it's true,” she says, laughing.

Her early days writing fan fiction would eventually lead to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer.

She has written novels for enormous franchises like Marvel’s X-Men and Spiderman. She has also written her own original series.

Started in 1983, her Young Wizard series has 11 main entries plus some spin-offs.

Fans around the world still eagerly await the fourth entry in her beloved Middle Kingdom fantasy series. Duane gets regular messages asking when it’s coming, she says.

And then there is her screen-writing career.

Since the 1970s, she has written for some of the biggest animated TV shows in the world. 

Among them, Batman: The Animated Series, Scooby & Scrappy Doo, The Flintstone Comedy Show, Captain Caveman, Gargoyles, and DuckTales.

But, she says, finally getting commissioned to tell her own Star Trek stories, in novel form, in the early 1980s was a beautiful full-circle moment.

Spock’s World, among others

Derryman Liam Dillon is a lifelong fan of Star Trek.

He is well-known in fan circles for his passion for authentic, detailed – and self-made – Trek-inspired cosplay. He often hosts his own talks and events at conventions.

He is admin and founder of the 6,500 member-strong Star Trek Costume Group on Facebook.

Like Duane, he was smitten from the first time he saw The Original Series on TV in the 1960s – on BBC 2, as it was in his corner of the globe.

TOS was cancelled after its third season, and a run of Star Trek: The Animated Series met the same fate after two seasons in the early 1970s.

After that, Dillon would search for any Trek he could find.

He discovered the expanded Trek universe novels. “It was another way to get your Star Trek fix.”

Today, there is seemingly endless Trek-centric content. Thirteen separate TV shows, 14 movies, podcasts, comics, audiobooks, novels and video games.

Dillon is also a fan of the 340,000-subscriber YouTube channel, TrekCulture – hosted by Dubliner Seán Ferrick.

In an email sent from onboard the official Star Trek Cruise on Wednesday, Ferrick called Duane a “legend in the community”.

During his early exploration of Trek novels, though, Dillon found that some entries seemed to be written by people who had never seen the show or understood the characters. 

When he found Duane’s first Trek novel The Wounded Sky in the early 1980s, he knew it was something special, he said.

Its follow-up, Spock's World, spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

It was another cracker, says Dillon.

In Spock’s World, Duane dived into Vulcan culture in a way that hadn’t been done before, says Dillon. “It was just great to find her.”

The influence of Duane’s Trek novels was wide-reaching.

Celebrated fantasy author Ursula Vernon – who also sometimes writes under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher – has been a fan of Duane’s work since she was very young.

And it began with Trek.

“I started out reading Diane's Trek work when I was a kid – my dad had a copy of The Wounded Sky – and fell madly in love with it,” said Vernon, by email from New Mexico on Wednesday.

It wasn't until years later, and the advent of the internet and search engines, that Vernon discovered her other books, she says.

“That was an absolutely wonderful week, since I ended up bingeing almost all the Young Wizards books one after another,” said Vernon.

Vernon says her own writing has been inspired by Duane’s. “Probably in ways I don't even know about! When you read that much of someone's work at a formative age, as I did, it definitely gets lodged in there deep.”

She loves “the very practical kindness” of Duane’s work, she says.

“It's usually a lot of people trying to make the world better in some way, whether it's wizards or Starfleet,” she says.

“And the aliens are wonderfully alien but they still feel like people, and the ideas are wonderful and build on each other logically until a T-rex is eating Pavarotti in Central Park and it makes perfect sense and even feels somewhat inevitable,” says Vernon.

Duane has always been supportive of the writers who followed, Vernon says.

“We chat about books and publishing and weird things online, we're always congratulating each other on our successes, things like that,” she says.

After high school, Duane won a New York State Regents Science and Nursing Scholarship. This was the only way she could have afforded to go to college, she says.

She gave astrophysics a whirl but she discovered her maths wasn’t up to scratch, she said. “I hit the calculus and I bounced.”

She moved to nursing school, which her scholarship also covered.

Duane worked for several years as a psychiatric nurse in Long Island. It was tough going, she says. 

“We were up against a time when there was not really community care yet for people with mental-health issues. And the idea was you warehouse them essentially,” she says.

But her experience in psychiatric nursing gave her a particular understanding of human beings that has helped in her writing – developing strong, defined characters and even, whole fictional societies, she says.

Indeed, creating entire worlds, cultures and even languages is what appeals to Duane, she says.

So when she got the opportunity to develop Vulcan civilisation, or the Romulan culture, in ways that hadn’t been seen or read before, it was a dream come true, she says.

According to a well-known Star Trek-centred YouTuber, Jessie Earl – better known as Jessie Gender – Spock’s World influenced much of the Vulcans’ on-screen development that is later seen throughout the Trek franchise.

The plot of Spock’s World revolves around a proposed secession of the planet Vulcan from the United Federation of Planets.

It’s revealed that malevolent forces are driving the push for secession from within, for their own gain.

Duane says the book has been nicknamed “Vexit” by some fans, over its eerie similarity to the real-life Brexit that followed decades after the novel’s release.  

As both a fantasy and a science fiction writer, she says, she always has her eyes on politics.

“I'm willing to take systems that exist and twist them. That's fine by me. It's part of the job.”

However, being so predictive was not something she revelled in, she says.

On honeymoon

Around Duane’s neck is a Hermès silk scarf decorated with pictures of hot chillis.

She had tried to buy it vintage on eBay, but got outbid, by “some bastard”.

That Christmas, she opened a package from her husband, Peter Morwood. It was the same scarf. 

“I began calling him dreadful things in front of his mother, God bless her,” says Duane.

Morwood, an author in his own right, came from Lisburn in Northern Ireland.

They were set-up by a friend and fell for each other – gradually, she says.

There was never a marriage proposal, she says. But one day, in a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham, a plan arrived.

“An agreement was reached sometime between the hot and sour soup and the lemon chicken, and it had nothing to do with the quality of the food,” she says. “It just became plain we were going to be married, and that was that.”

The pair travelled the world together, sharing their passions. Food, art, history – an endless list.

After perusing the entire island of Ireland, they eventually settled in Wicklow, where Duane still lives.

Last year, Morwood died suddenly after a very short illness.

The silk scarf around her neck is far from the only piece of Morwood that she still carries with her.

Along with a lifetime of memories, there is the issue of his enormous fountain pen collection which she isn’t quite sure what to do with. “The man has left writing implements everywhere.”

And, his own embattled literary estate.

Both Morwood and Duane’s catalogues – or at least parts of them – are wrapped up in a landmark, class-action lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic.

It’s alleged Anthropic used hundreds of thousands of pirated books to train its Claude language models. Including the works of Morwood and Duane.

The copyright lawsuit was filed in 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

“The Anthropic people had, I think, kind of been leaning on the concept that the people they'd stolen from wouldn't have the money to go after them. Well, some of them did,” she says.

Although the company is rightly now being held to account, she says, the payments in question will still be peanuts. “It’s pocket change. Really terrible.”

Managing her husband’s and her own works in the deal has resulted in a mountain of paper work, she says. “I now know more about Excel spreadsheets than I ever wanted.”

While they had distinct, separate careers, the pair once co-authored a Star Trek novel together, written in 18 days, on their honeymoon in Los Angeles. “As one does.”

“When we got married, you know, other people exchanged much more sensible gifts. We exchanged literary agencies. So, my US agent took him on, and his UK agent took me on, so that was delightful,” she says.

At the same time, Duane was still working as story editor on Dinosaucers and found herself with a fast-approaching deadline with publisher Pocket Books.

She owed them another entry in her Trek-centred Rihannsu series – which explores the culture of the secretive, militaristic Romulan species.

They agreed to write The Romulan Way together.

When one was resting, the other was working on a chapter. Then, they’d swap.

She says they barely slept in the same bed, as one was always working. “They call it hot-bunking in the Navy.”

That was partly possible because she writes careful outlines when starting a project. “That's really nine-tenths of the law.”

There's a huge gap right now in writer-think between “plotters” and “pantsers” – people who write by the seat of their pants and people who plot, she says.

“And because of my animation background, I have been a plotter more or less since day one,” she says.

Looking back on her and Morwood’s adventures together, she wouldn’t change a thing, Duane says. “I had the privilege of being married to a good man for 40 years.”

Walking on water

Some of Star Trek’s most celebrated writers, on screen and page, have been women – like Dorothy Fontana who wrote for the original series and early on in the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which first aired in 1987.

When Fontana wrote for Trek in the 1960s, she used the name D.C. Fontana, a tactic to distract the boys, says Duane.

If ever someone suggested women and Trek didn’t mix, Duane would ask, “What about Dorothy Fontana?”

They would reply, “You mean D.C.?”

It was amazing how many people didn’t know Fontana was a woman, says Duane.

Even as Duane’s own screen-writing career took off in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was sexism, she says.

She didn’t let it get to her.

“I am, as far as I know, the first woman to story edit an animation series, where there was not a male co-story editor holding her hand,” says Duane, in the Flowing Tide snug, sat beneath pictures of literary giants W.B. Yeats,  Samuel Beckett and J.M. Synge.

The show was 1987’s Dinosaucers.

Duane, and her team, including writer Brynne Stephens, were given the gargantuan task of producing 65 episodes in around four months.

“All the guys in the studio were going, ‘They’re fucked’,” she says.

She suddenly felt an even greater pressure, she says.

She thought that if she dropped the ball, her failure would be held against other women writers working in animation coming up behind her.

“But you could do one of two things. You can run away with your tail between your legs, or you could walk on water and annoy the boys.”

Duane turned in all 65 episodes to her deadline. “I did my job.”

Where no one has gone before

Duane is a credited co-writer of the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) season one episode, Where No One Has Gone Before.

Every writer in Hollywood was scrambling to write a Trek script at the time, she says.

Although it has since changed, animated writers were not allowed to join the Writers Guild of America at the time.

But her friend Michael Reaves asked if she wanted to work on a script together based on her Trek novel, The Wounded Sky.

“That was my foot in the door,” she says.

She had met Gene Roddenberry before a few times. But to be in a meeting with him, pitching her own Trek story, was a surreal moment, she says.

At that time, they didn’t even know who the TNG cast would be.

“If I’d known they were going to cast the gorgeous Patrick Stewart as the captain, I would have written him hotter,” she says, through a hearty laugh.

However, what ended up on screen was very far from the original script the pair turned in, she says.

Infamously, at the time, Roddenberry’s lawyer and right-hand man, Leonard Maizlish would re-write the early TNG scripts, seemingly acting unaccountably.

It’s a tale documented in William Shatner’s documentary Chaos on the Bridge, exploring the early days of TNG.

Still, she gets paid every time the episode airs, or if original characters written for the episode are mentioned in other sections of the franchise.

Trek today and tomorrow

Duane says she didn’t get into Star Trek: Discovery, which was the first new Trek TV show in 12 years when it debuted in 2016.

But she isn’t keen on bashing it either.

When she gets messages from fans suggesting she should take over writing the new era of TV shows, she always says she wouldn’t do anything that involved the firing of her fellow union members.

She has been enjoying the current series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but is bemused by the hate it, and other newer Trek shows like Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks, get fired at them by a loud right-wing cohort online – who also claim to be huge fans of the franchise.

Newer Trek has been decried by voices like Elon Musk and US homeland security advisor Stephen Miller as “woke”.

“What they hate is the very idea that Martin Luther King asked Nichelle Nichols not to leave Star Trek, but to stay on track, because Black people needed her for them,” she says.

African-American actor Nichols played communications officer Nyota Uhura on the original series, and six subsequent motion pictures focusing on the original cast.

“These people need to see the bullshit that Roddenberry went through to keep non-white people in Star Trek for the first series,” she says, her demeanour moving, briefly, from jovial to frustrated.

“And you know, they don't quite dare bad-mouth Roddenberry, they'll bad-mouth the characters,” she says.

How people could describe the franchise as “woke”, in a derogatory sense, baffles her.

Star Trek, she points out, has always championed the underdog, minorities, the vulnerable, since day one. “It’s a tradition that has always been woke.”

“Why don't you start by using a term that you didn't steal from Black people?” she says.

“Who do we have to slap around to make that happen? The trouble is, these guys have no memory,” she says.

“They have no time-binding ability worth noticing. They should all go and just learn how to remember things.”

The next idea 

Duane is always writing, always working on the next thing, she says. And the muse can be unpredictable.

She gets regular messages from fans asking when the next Young Wizards or Middle Kingdom books are due.

She doesn’t know herself.

Two weeks ago, she was enjoying the Winter Olympics at home in Wicklow. Suddenly, the image of a werewolf on skis came to her.

She shrugged it off, at first. But the idea grew and grew.

Last weekend, she spent her time making various lamb-based dishes – because, she thinks, that’s what her werewolf characters would eat.

She’s not sure where it’s leading yet precisely, she says, but it feels like the start of something.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.