Worlds Enough and Time: Una McCormack’s science-fiction journey
Author Una McCormack has had quite the journey to science fiction writing. Here, she describes it all, from the first hints all the way to today.
My route to loving science fiction was probably much the same as for anyone else of my generation: a wide-eyed six-year-old, sitting in the cinema in January 1978, watching the world-changing spectacle that was Star Wars. There followed a hundred playground games in which I ran around with other small people using the Force, and the school dustbins were cast as Artoo, all trying to recapture the magic of those limitless adventures across the vastness of space.
Once that longing for a starscape had been created, I went looking it for everywhere. Mostly, in Britain in the 1970s, it was to be found on Doctor Who. Less impressively realised than on the big screen, it has to be admitted, but these things don’t matter when you’re small enough, and your imagination is flexible enough to do all the work that the budget can’t quite stretch to. And when I ran out of stories to watch on television, I went in search of more.
Fortunately, there was a great deal more. I have a very clear memory of sitting in my local library, cross-legged on the floor in front of a long line of books with the distinctive Target logo – the Doctor Who novelisations. In my memory there are hundreds (there were probably a couple of dozen), almost all of them written by Terrance Dicks. Dicks had studied English at Cambridge under Leavis. He went on to become script editor of Doctor Who, and took on the job of novelising the stories throughout the ’70s and ’80s. His brisk prose – so readable, so efficient – made him the unsung hero of childhood literacy for my generation.
Reading these books, I learned about stories that had been on screen long before I was born, and could never been seen again, thanks to the BBC’s short-sighted policy of destroying the tapes holding archive television. Through these books, television became participatory: I could carry on these stories, extend them, expand them, retool them to my own purposes. My first long story, scribbled aged nine in a school exercise book, was inspired by the apocalyptic battle between Light and Dark that I had watched unfold on Doctor Who during the ‘Guardians’ trilogy. In my story, Light and Dark continued their battle – with Light winning thanks to the assistance of a nine-year-old girl. All by myself, I had invented Mary Sue. I had put myself into the story. I have carried on doing this ever since, albeit with increasing guile and sleight of hand. In the meantime, I’d also found what was to be my big childhood love: Blake’s 7. Rebels in space. But BBC space, where hairdryers are turned into spaceships, and the lack of budget means that the dialogue has to crackle. I loved it more than anything in the world. It was my last playground game, my first inter-library loan (the novelisation of the first episode, of course) and my first writing habit (stick man cartoons in little notebooks).
But times were changing, and I was growing up, and off I went to high school. Being a geek at a girls’ convent school in the 1980s was a lonely vocation, but I gave it my best shot. I memorised The Lord of the Rings, and large parts of The Silmarillion. I discovered Ursula Le Guin and the seeds of feminism were sown. I kept on quietly watching Doctor Who (more or less). I made people take me to the Star Trek films. I read and reread the novelisation of WarGames and The Wrath of Khan, and I started to think about how the stories that I had seen on screen could be expanded on the page.
But it was hard to keep the interest going alone. You couldn’t hop online and find a circle of like-minded people, so there came a point where I drifted. I stopped watching Doctor Who. I mostly abandoned storytelling. I was busy with exams and Duran Duran. But try as you might, you can’t take the geek out of the girl. At seventeen, I escaped the convent school and went to a big, busy (and mixed) sixth form college. This coincided with a new Doctor arriving (Sylvester McCoy, for the initiated). I turned on again and watched. I mentioned to a new friend that I’d enjoyed a story set in a rundown block of flats (‘Paradise Towers’, for the super-initiated).
He said, “Oh, I’ll lend you the book!” I borrowed it. I read it. And…
BOOM.
It came back. I remembered what I loved best. I loved adventures set in space. I remembered Blake’s 7. Somehow, I found out there was a fan club, and I joined. I discovered letters of comment, and the big glossy newsletter and, most importantly, I laid my hands upon zines — little books with tiny print full of story upon story about the characters that I adored. I read and read, and I thought, “I want to do this.” And that, broadly, was what I did for the next decade. I wrote some Blake’s 7 stories (and poetry, yes!), and some people were nice enough to say that they thought they were decent enough to put into their zine. I wrote some more. I wrote a Doctor Who story, and an editor – a real editor – said that he thought it was good enough to put into Doctor Who Magazine. And then something crucial happened. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
I’d like to think that Tim Berners-Lee did this specifically so that I could start posting fanfiction online and thereby create my entire writing career, but I have a suspicion that I wasn’t at the forefront of his mind. Nevertheless, I am extremely grateful, because this career has only happened because, suddenly, I was able to connect with a large number of people across the world with a broad range of experience who held the same interests of me, and who thought there was in fact nothing odd about my odd hobby of writing stories about people I’d seen on the telly. From Blake’s 7, I progressed to Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and here I got a couple of lucky breaks.
First of all, I met online a professor of English literature who also liked writing deeply heartfelt stories about Garak and the fall of Cardassia, and who took the time to coach me through writing my first long piece (30,000 words – it took her a year to coax it out of me). And then, sitting at home, innocently ignoring my PhD thesis, and instead posting my heartfelt stories to Usenet, I got an email out of the blue from someone who introduced himself as the editor of the Star Trek books range at Simon and Schuster. My work had been recommended to him. Would I like to pitch?
Of course I would. Yes, please, yes, I would like that very much. From this email came my first Star Trek novels, and from those came everything I’ve done since: more Star Trek novels, Doctor Who novels, and then – joy of joys! – scripts for the range of Blake’s 7 audio dramas produced by Big Finish (the second woman to have a writer credit on the show, which my seven-year-old self simply cannot believe is true, and neither can my forty-seven-year-old self, to be honest). Alongside this, I kept writing thousands and thousands of words of fanfiction: this time in a world where I could not work professionally, Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I realised at some point that I had written an awful lot, and that I had also acquired a great deal of practical experience, and I began to teach creative writing. I supervised Master’s theses and PhDs.
And at the back of mind, I thought… Maybe, one day, I’ll do something of my very own. I’ll take all this immersion in reading and writing, and those deep feelings of desire and awe and amazement that come to me when I imagine the bright prickle and promise of stars against the limitless dark, and I’ll tell some stories of my very own. I’ll work out what it is that I want to add to that great, evolving, ongoing conversation that is science fiction, and I’ll work out how I want to say it. And it seems that’s started to happen. The story of The Undefeated (commissioned by the same person who gave me that break all those years ago) has come from all the source material I’ve been mulching over decades: the starscapes of Star Wars, the good fight of Blake’s 7, the chaos of the Dominion War, the feminism of Le Guin. And that huge participatory work, the unfolding text, of science fiction.
Una McCormack is the author of several Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Doctor Who tie-in novels. Her latest work, The Undefeated, is on sale now.