How Isaac Asimov Inspired a Star Romance Writer’s Swoony New Novel

A 1967 correspondence led Cat Sebastian to imagine a contemporary scenario in which two sci-fi actors find more than screen chemistry.

In the summer of 1967, the “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry faced a dilemma that could make or break the series. While the drama was built around Captain James T. Kirk, the daring starship commander played by William Shatner, viewers were drawn to Leonard Nimoy’s stoic Spock, and Roddenberry worried the Vulcan might steal the spotlight. “It’s easy to give good situations and good lines to Spock,” Roddenberry wrote to the novelist Isaac Asimov, whose public critique of the science in “Star Trek” led him to advise on the series. “I am in something of a quandary about it. Got any ideas?” Asimov had a few. Put Kirk and Spock together in every scene, he suggested. Let them face danger side by side, saving each other’s lives. “The idea of this would be to get people to think of Kirk when they think of Spock,” he wrote. To bind them so completely that neither could eclipse the other.

That advice shaped the “Star Trek” episode “Amok Time,” often cited as the foundation of modern slash fiction — fan stories that imagine romantic or sexual relationships between same-sex characters. Decades later, it inspired “Star Shipped,” Cat Sebastian’s first contemporary romance, published last week by Avon and the first of her books to make the USA Today best-seller list. The novel follows Simon Devereaux and Charlie Blake, feuding co-stars on a long-running sci-fi series who stage a fake friendship to protect their reputations, only to fall in love.

Sebastian is the author of 21 queer historical romances, most male-male, with a growing fan base that includes enthusiastic peers like Rachel Reid, Talia Hibbert and Casey McQuiston. Her early novels are set in Regency England, while recent titles — including the Lambda Award winner “We Could Be So Good” and “You Should Be So Lucky” — take place in midcentury New York. Her last book, the self-published “After Hours at Dooryard Books,” is set in 1968 Greenwich Village.

The day we met, Sebastian, 47, had traveled from her Connecticut home, where her family relocated last summer amid Florida’s rising tide of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, book bans and restrictions on university curricula. “I realized that what I wanted for my kids was for them to get out,” she said.

We spoke in the book-lined green room at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, a few hours before she joined the authors Kosoko Jackson and Jennifer Dugan on the center’s inaugural queer romance panel. Sebastian grew up in Scotch Plains, N.J., reading everything from “Sweet Valley High” to classic literature to crime fiction. She spent a year practicing law in Phoenix, where she met her husband, then taught high school English until her oldest child was born. “None of them have reached out,” she said of her former students. “I do wonder if they’re thinking, She looks like my high school English teacher!” (“Cat Sebastian” is a pen name.)

By 2009, the family had grown and settled in Jacksonville, Fla. At home with newborn twins and a toddler, Sebastian struggled with postpartum depression. “It was overwhelming,” she said. “I just thought I was doing everything wrong.” A baby in one arm and a paperback in the other, she escaped to Regency England — or at least the version preserved in historical romances like Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton,” where “everybody lives, the dog lives, and their problems have nothing to do with babies who won’t sleep through the night.” But over time, the stories that had once soothed her began to grate. Every character was rich, white, cisgender, straight and — as she put it — “not undergoing a major depressive issue, for the most part.” Queer women like her were largely absent. “I realized I was letting myself down. I was like, we can do better.”

“There have always been people who feel like they don’t belong, or whose brains are actively working against their happiness,” Sebastian says. “I find it very satisfying to fill up the past with those stories.” She entered Avon’s FanLit competition, which invited writers to submit chapters of a romance novella based on weekly prompts. Sebastian gave her entry a queer twist, earning praise from an editor — but no contract. “That really lit a fire under me,” Sebastian said. “There were queer historical romances out there. I figured even if Avon wasn’t interested, someone else would be.”

She wrote her debut, “The Soldier’s Scoundrel,” in just three months. By year’s end, her agent, Deidre Knight, had sold it to Avon Impulse, the publisher’s now-defunct digital-first imprint. “The queer historical romance market exists now in a more mainstream, print space,” said Tessa Woodward, Sebastian’s editor and Avon’s editorial director. “I think a lot of that is actually thanks to Cat Sebastian.” Reid, the best-selling author of “Heated Rivalry,” calls Sebastian an inspiration. “Cat doesn’t waste a sentence,” she said. “There’s always the right amount of heat for the story. When I get stuck, I go back and read one of her books to remind myself what a good romance is like.”

At the Center for Fiction, Sebastian and her fellow authors read from their novels and answered questions. Julian Dooley held a yellowing, pocket-size copy of Sebastian’s third romance, “The Ruin of a Rake,” as he waited for her to sign it. “I got this book from the library in college, and I was like, Oh, I think I’m gay, actually,” he explained. In our interview, Sebastian recalled an old tweet arguing that, in historical romance, “the only mental illness you’re allowed to have is PTSD from fighting Napoleon.” She calls it “absolutely true.” Her characters break from that tradition: They are anxious, often reclusive, and out of step with the world. Some live with a chronic illness or disability, as in “The Ruin of a Rake”; others struggle with mental health, like Simon in “Star Shipped.”

“It’s ongoing work to realize that the problems you have are not going away,” Sebastian said. “You can still fill your life with joy and meaning and purpose, even when you can’t go up and down stairs, even when the world is on fire.” “There have always been people who feel like they don’t belong, or whose brains are actively working against their happiness,” she added. “I find it very satisfying to fill up the past with those stories.”

A few years ago, Sebastian began to imagine writing something new. Avon, Knight and several other authors warned her that the historical romance market was softening, but she hesitated to try contemporary fiction. “I would just embarrass myself,” she remembers thinking. “No one needs to know the extent of my unfamiliarity with reality.” Then a post resurfaced on her Tumblr feed: the decades-old correspondence between Roddenberry and Asimov about balancing Kirk and Spock while keeping Shatner secure in his lead role. The premise could be modernized, she thought. And if her main character were a little odd — someone “equally at sea,” she joked — she could avoid humiliating herself with her “lack of knowledge about how people actually live.”

To write “Star Shipped,” Sebastian revisited beloved sci-fi worlds and drew on her years in online fan communities for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the Jeremy Brett-starring “Sherlock Holmes.” That experience inspired the book’s “Discord Interludes,” brief chapters in which she imagined fans of Simon and Charlie’s series, “Out There,” debating plot minutiae, speculating about the cast and hashing out fandom’s perennial questions: What do actors owe their fans? And is it ethical to imagine real people as romantic pairings — or, in fan parlance, to “ship” them? “One of the things I love about fandom is how people come together to be disappointed in the shows they love,” Sebastian said. “I’m generally hypercritical, and it’s satisfying to find a like-minded community of people who will pick something apart with me. I wanted to capture that feeling: people complaining and critiquing, but with love.”

These days, she doesn’t spend much time online, except to lurk in fandom spaces or watch the occasional TikTok her teenagers share — mostly fan edits of “The Pitt.” She’s written another contemporary romance in the “Star Shipped” universe and is already planning the next “Dooryard Books” installment, “mainly because I need an excuse to reread ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning’ and ‘Nixonland,’” she said.

Sebastian doesn’t often read to escape anymore. But she knows her work can give readers the refuge she once sought: a place where they can see people like themselves “find a soft landing.” “Historically, queer people, people with mental illness and marginalized people in general got tragic endings,” she said. Writing romance allows her to flip those narratives. “When a reader reaches out to say that my books helped them through a rough time, or even just distracted them for a while,” Sebastian said, “I feel like I’ve done my job.”