Publishing: the final frontier. These are the science-fiction romance novels of Donna S. Frelick, whose childhood love of reading and writing stories found an outlet after she “retired from public life” and wrote Star Trek fan fiction.

Frelick was a voracious reader growing up—she loved Charles Dickens and recalls checking The Swiss Family Robinson out of her local library 15 times. One of her favorite books was an installment in the Ace Doubles series, which offered two SF books in one volume. One of the stories was written by Ursula K. Le Guin, who became a favorite. (Years later at her marriage ceremony, Frelick quoted from Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.)

Frelick’s interest in science fiction grew apace. Inspired by the cult favorite TV series Star Trek, which debuted when she was 13 years old, as well as Rod Serling’s fantastical anthology series The Twilight Zone—“I watched episodes through my fingers”—and such film classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still, her own writing began to boldly go where it had never gone before.

What she loves about SF, she says, “is the idea that things are not as they appear; there is always something beneath the surface. That is a big aspect of my books.”

That theme is certainly at the core of Frelick’s award-winning Interstellar Rescue series, a melding of science fiction and romance. Kirkus Reviews praises the first volume in the series, Unchained Memory, as a “suspenseful and steamy otherworldly tale…[that] offers imaginative descriptions and pulse-pounding action.”

Unchained Memory introduces Asia, who is devastated to learn that her children perished in a house fire after she awakens from a mysterious blackout in her car. Her nightmare is compounded by terrifying dreams of an alien civilization in which she and other humans are brutalized as slave labor. She gets a new lease on life and love when she is assigned to handsome psychologist Ethan, who specializes in such matters, and they discover that not only is Asia not alone, but also that she is a target of those who don’t want her story to get out.

The novel was years in gestation. At the time, Frelick lived in the Virginia countryside, and she would leave her preteen children at home asleep to drive their babysitter home a few miles away. During these trips, a scenario formed in her imagination: What if she were abducted by aliens, leaving her children vulnerable to any number of dangers?

From this narrative thread, Frelick imagined an interstellar unit of rescuers whose mission is to find and return abductees back to Earth. In most cases, the victims have no memory of being taken, and no time has been lost. But Asia’s is a special case.

“I didn’t really imagine that the book would branch out into a series,” Frelick says. “But what happens is characters present themselves to you and ask what’s going to happen next, and it naturally flows from there. As soon as I finished Unchained Memory, the second book, Trouble in Mind, was right there. It had practically written itself.”

Frelick embarked on a stint in the Peace Corps in the mid-1970s, after which she worked for the World Bank in Gambia for a couple of years while her husband worked there with USAID. They returned to the U.S., where they lived and worked in Washington, D.C. The couple then moved to Caroline County, Virginia, where she began writing in earnest. Frelick’s first books were Star Trek fan fiction for Orion Press, a fanzine publisher. There is a “big element of romance” in the stories “for Captain Kirk,” she says with a laugh. “He was my guy.”

She sold her books at Shore Leave, an annual fan-run SF convention, to which she plans to return this summer. She has also attended official Star Trek conventions, where she once met William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Klingons in a conga line,” she says of the experience.

Frelick notes that she and Asia have little in common. “I’m not an adventurous person,” she admits. Though when she began to write her fan fiction, she took martial arts classes for insights into writing a strong fight scene. She is now a fourth-degree black belt. She also took courses with romance writers. She considers Angela Knight and Ann C. Crispin to be mentors.

Crispin, Frelick says, gave her the most impactful advice: “You need to give your protagonist all kinds of problems to overcome. You need to send them up a tree and put lions all around them.” “I think about that all the time,” Frelick says. “How is that person going to get out of that tree?”

At one point in Unchained Memory, she has to get Asia and Ethan out of a hotel room once two menacing intruders burst in after the couple have enjoyed a vigorous bout of shower sex:

Someone tried to pin his arms, and he grappled with him, twisting first right, then left. He caught the bastard in the nose with an elbow and heard a grunt. It wasn’t just his blood flying now. The man’s partner barreled into him, and all three catapulted into the bedside table. Ethan’s hand closed on the lamp, and he smashed it into the side of the little guy’s face. The man collapsed, moaning, but his friend kept coming, driving Ethan to the floor with a punishing knee to the ribs. He heard a snarled “motherfucker,” before the bastard punched him twice across the face and ended it. Stunned and sick, Ethan had no defense as the man swung toward him with something sharp and shiny. It jabbed into the top of Ethan’s shoulder, sending a hot burn up his neck. He fought for consciousness in the time he had left.

Next up for Frelick is the new series Alienville, which was inspired by a road sign. “The town was called Allenville,” she says with a laugh, “but somehow [I substituted an i for an l] to make it Alienville.” Set in the Appalachians, it tells the story of two races of shape-shifting aliens who have been hunting each other when they crash-land in western North Carolina in the 1700s.

Frelick’s audience is “basically women,” she notes, “but when I look at the numbers, I’m covering a wide age group. Guys like my stuff because I’m good at the fight and battle scenes. I hope all my readers are engaged with the characters and that their minds are expanded a little bit.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based freelance writer who has been published in the Washington Post and on Vanity Fair.com.