Welcome back to the Great Derelict and yes, this one's a little self-indulgent. But it's my podcast, so I'm allowed.

Andy is joined by longtime collaborator and friend John Concagh to mark five years of Edge of Midnight, the sprawling, in-universe history of the Federation–Klingon Cold War that began life as a lockdown experiment and quietly grew into something much bigger.

The conversation looks back on how Edge of Midnight evolved from a small writing project into a landmark work of fictional non-fiction: part Star Trek history, part political analysis, part character study. They dig into why the project leans so heavily into the aesthetics and anxieties of the 1960s, how Discovery reshaped the work (sometimes awkwardly), and why treating Star Trek as a changing historical world—rather than a fixed setting—matters.

Along the way they discuss:

Why Edge of Midnight starts with Discovery but speaks in the language of TOS
Writing Star Trek as history, not lore
Klingons as an evolving political system, not a static warrior stereotype
The importance of characters, bias, and unreliable narrators
Trusting the audience to join the dots
And what it means to write Star Trek that embraces risk, ambiguity, and change

It's a candid, funny, and deeply thoughtful conversation about worldbuilding, historiography, fandom, and why freedom is always in peril.

You can find more from John on Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/badsocialism.bsky.social

and Edge of Midnight here: https://edgeofmidnight.weebly.com/

And you can find more of Andy here:

https://linktr.ee/andy3e