In the twenty-second episode of the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “The Wire” (which is a holy text), we learn of the existence of a genre of Cardassian literature called “the repetitive epic.” The text under discussion, in this particular meeting of Garak and Bashir’s Lunch Time Flirting Book Club, is called The Never-Ending Sacrifice, which chronicles seven generations of a single family selflessly devoting their lives to the state. Garak claims that the repetitive epic is the most elegant form in Cardassian literature, and that The Never-Ending Sacrifice is its finest example. I have written a book called The Never-Ending Sacrifice, about what happens to Cardassia during the Dominion War, and therefore on this occasion I am prepared to believe that Garak is speaking the truth.

I have now spent more than a quarter of a century writing stories about Garak. It’s been a full life, if a trifle banal. I’ve told the story many times (including in this publication) of the damage wrought upon me at the tender age of nine, shortly before Christmas, when I watched the last episode of Blake’s 7, and how it subsequently led to me spending a large chunk of my adolescence and twenties writing Blake’s 7 fanfiction. No sooner had these therapeutic interventions achieved their goal than the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was aired, leaving both me and the Cardassian Union in a state of post-apocalyptic devastation from which I—and the Cardassian Union—have only recently begun to emerge.

My natural instinct in the wake of this tragedy (rather than to stop, say, responding so viscerally to what I was watching on the telly) was of course to start producing fanfiction. In between 1981 (when Blake’s 7 fucked me up) and 1999 (when Deep Space 9 fucked me up), the internet had been invented. This suited me nicely; I was able to post my cris de coeur to a generous and receptive audience who encouraged me to write more. I’m glad they did. I wrote passionately and uninhibitedly; a fellow reader and writer who also happened to be literature professor generously guided me, across the course of a year, in the writing and completion of my first long piece of prose. The themes of my writing were straightforward enough: How does a manifestly sophisticated civilization turn to barbarism and, ultimately, through the inevitable death spiral, end in almost complete annihilation? The character of Garak was the individual lens through which these themes could be dramatized. In one piece, which I never published online, I explored a scenario in which Garak, as a young man on Bajor, takes reprisals that end in the murder of several people and the destruction of a temple. And in that first long piece of prose, which is set in an alternate timeline, Garak returns early from exile and oversees a second and more violent period of Cardassian imperial expansion, ending up with a second exile and a conviction for war crimes. I consciously drew on my readings of the collapse of Germany in the 1930s, and some of the figures responsible for that savagery; in particular I was influenced by journalist Gitta Sereny’s biography of the Nazi minister for war, Albert Speer.

For some reason, these stories caught the eye of the editor in charge of the Star Trek book range at what was then Pocket Books. Out of the blue, I received an email inviting me to pitch a few ideas, to which I (stuck in the middle of writing a particularly dispiriting PhD thesis) responded with great enthusiasm and delight. What followed was what I would call “an absolute blast”: a series of commissions in which I got to expand the ideas I had begun to explore in those earlier fanfiction pieces. I published a novella, The Lotus Flower (2004), set during the immediate postwar reconstruction of Cardassia, in which a commitment to democratic processes and freedom of the press has been made and comes briefly under threat. A novel, Hollow Men (2005), follows up on the legendary sixth season episode “In the Pale Moonlight” (another holy text). In my book, Garak and Sisko go to Earth and engage in a le Carré-esque thriller round the streets of London, all the time trading barbed bon mots. I then published what is probably my best book, The Never-Ending Sacrifice (2009), which tells the story of the collapse and destruction of the Cardassian Union through the eyes of a young man who has been forcibly repatriated to Cardassia, and correctly thinks they’ve all gone stark raving mad. I’m grateful to the proprietor of Garak’s Clothiers for the generous blurb.

At the time when I was writing my original fanfiction stories, I was of course reflecting on history. By 2013, it was pretty clear to me which way we were heading. My novel from that year, The Crimson Shadow, deals with how a nascent democracy might come under threat from bad faith actors aiming to set back the clock on progressive change, and what can be done to prevent that. The answer to that question turned out to be—set Garak on the case, and elect him head-of-state. Job done—or is it? Garak—for all the posturing—has quite simple motivations. He is a Cardassian patriot who wants what is best for his homeland. But what does a patriot do, when the path he’s followed so far has led to the near destruction of his homeland? Surely an intelligent man recalibrates? My next book, Enigma Tales (2017), picks up several years into a Garakian administration. We see a more mature democracy in operation, with Garak surrounded by a set of people tasked to ensure checks and balances. The main drama is concerned with the political fallout from the publication of a government report into Cardassian actions during the Occupation of Bajor, which recommends prosecution to the full extent of the law. You are intended to hear, I hope, the clock ticking loudly behind the current leader of the Cardassian government. How is he going to get out of this trap he is apparently setting for himself?

I had a third book more or less planned, in which the answers to this question—and others, posed over half-a-dozen novels in total—would be resolved. At the back of my mind, I conceived of the three books—The Crimson Shadow, Enigma Tales, and this third one, which I tentatively titled The End of This Day’s Business—as a coherent trilogy that tracked the postwar physical reconstruction of Cardassia and its moral reconstitution into a democratic and progressive state. By Enigma Tales, written on the back of the UK’s ludicrous exit from the European Union, and the disastrous election of Donald Trump, questions of how we protect and preserve our democratic institutions from outright assault seemed to me even more urgent. What had been history was now simply current affairs. The End of This Day’s Business, I hoped, would address seriously the question of what a colonial power owes to a people that have liberated themselves from their rule, and what constitutes justice and reconciliation. As ever, the story of the state would be refracted through the personal story of Garak, and, at the back of my mind, I saw where that unpublished story of his actions on Bajor as a young man might find a home, at last. How long can one man outrun his past? And, if the second half of his life has been a project of atonement and restitution, would he want to outrun that past? What would be the just and fair outcome?

One of the quirks of working in the field of tie-in fiction is that one is dependent both on what the publishers want, and also what is happening with the source text. In 2017, Star Trek: Discovery aired, the first new series in the franchise since Star Trek: Enterprise ended in 2005. Those of us who had been writing the books immediately understood that big changes were on the way. Uniquely, space was made to wrap up the almost twenty years of storytelling that had been happening since the book range was given a “relaunch” in 2001. This was an amazing feat of writing, the trilogy Star Trek: Coda (2021), co-authored by Dayton Ward, James Swallow, and David Mack. Dozens of storylines were drawn together so that long-time and faithful readers weren’t left with an unfinished tale. I wasn’t available to participate in this project, and so my plans for that third and final book were completely shelved. I was, as you can imagine, pretty disappointed. But I had plenty of hugely fun projects in the works—not least the first tie-in novel based on Picard, titled The Last Best Hope (2020)—so I was very brave and consigned the project to the status of what-might-have been.

Then, lockdown. Leaving aside everything else, one of the most glaring lessons was the extent to which our institutions were now so frayed and undermined that they were struggling to cope with the impact of a global pandemic. In winter 2020, tucked up safely with my little family in our little home, I opened the file and—with no hope of ever seeing it published—began working on The End of This Day’s Business, my statement to myself that we don’t have to work this way, and that meaningful and lasting change is achievable and desirable. Over the course of about six weeks, I wrote 50,000 words, before stalling. As well as reaching a point in the plot where I needed to do some thinking, I found it hard, frankly, in a world where forces seem to be set on making it impossible to make a living from your art or craft, to justify writing something so entirely unsellable. When I went back to that story about young Garak, and retooled it for another novel, Second Self (2022), which brings Garak’s story to what was to me a completely unexpected and satisfactory conclusion, I assumed that my quiet wish to finish my little trilogy was one that would go forever unfulfilled. I would still open it up every so often, however, and tinker with it, but I knew it was going nowhere. I knew it was just for me.

I felt sad, though; I was repeatedly asked by readers where the stories would have gone—particularly a rather delicious love triangle I had been setting up between Garak, Bashir, and a very minor character, Parmak—but all I could say was, “I think I know where it would have gone; it’s a shame we never got there.” Who wants to be George R. R. Martin? I felt bad, too, that where I’d left that part of the story seemed to reinforce a “bury your gays” trope that is the exact opposite of anything I would want to say in my fiction. Over the years I turned the tale over and over in my mind, thought about the questions I’d set myself, but I couldn’t find quite find the way through or justify the use of time to say them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the file at the start of February 2026 and, in a matter of ten days and 10,000 words, put the whole project to bed in a way that I would not have believed could be so exactly what I wanted. (Even that old story found its way back, in yet another telling of the tale. Garak never tells the same lie twice.) In this completed version, all the questions that I intended to explore—Will Cardassia make it? What constitutes justice? Do present good deeds mitigate against past crimes? And, most pressingly, will Garak and Bashir finally snog?—are addressed. But what’s a girl to do with an unpublishable novel that plays fast and loose with every kind of canon and is stuffed full of original characters from her small but perfectly formed oeuvre, the final act in a sequence that stalled almost a decade ago? What else? It’s up on AO3, of course. I told you my life was a repetitive epic.

Now I’m not sure there’s a moral to be drawn from all this, but one thing I will say is—never give up on a story. This strange and beautiful compulsion that I have, to take the thoughts that are ceaselessly running through my head, commit them to the page, and then offer them to others for their scrutiny—it is the most delightful and joyful thing that I know. It transcends time, ambition, career; it is the best means that I have discovered to take stock of myself, and to express the deep desire that I have for a world in which we all live without pain or fear, in peace and joy. It is what makes me feel alive, and I guess I’ll just have to carry on doing it till they drag me off. Until then—thanks, Garak, it’s been a hell of a ride. For Cardassia.

© 2026 Una McCormack