For all its interstellar scale, The Chronicles of Astrimos thrives on the human stories at its core — stories shaped by writer/producer Declan Dineen, whose character‑first approach gives the series its resonance. Astrimos blends futuristic conflict with grounded emotional beats and nostalgic reflections, creating a universe that feels both vast and intimate. Today, we dive into Dineen’s creative process, the relationships that anchor the narrative, and the thematic threads that make Astrimos more than just another sci‑fi drama. So, let’s welcome writer/producer and magician Declan Dineen to GVN Interview. [This is an edited version of our conversation with Declan. You can check out the full interview on YouTube below]
Creative Beginnings
GVN: Before we jump into The Chronicles of Astrimos, and since this is our first opportunity to chat, let’s start with some of your creative beginnings. You have degrees in English Literature and Television writing. What inspired those interests, and were there any shows, films, or books that inspired that ambition?
DECLAN: I mean, so many. I grew up in Wales, so another country within Great Britain, and I’ve had arthritis since I was very young. I’ve had it in my knees, so, as much as I quite enjoyed playing out and playing with my friends, I was never very good at it, particularly at sports. I was always quite bad at that, and so I tended just to become a bit of an indoor kid. This is just pre-internet, and I would just watch TV. I watched TV, I watched movies.
So I grew up in South Wales, so there was no TV or film industry to speak of. Everything was still very much focused in London at the time, and I certainly didn’t know anyone, and nobody in my family knew anyone. So I decided I would be a novelist, or I would be a journalist, like I’d write for magazines, and so I started on both of those paths.
However, about five or six years after I left South Wales, that’s when Russell T. Davis relaunched Doctor Who, and suddenly South Wales became an absolute hub for some of the best British sci-fi in decades. So I slightly missed the boat there a little bit, but certainly all of those kind of shows were what I was obsessed with. But I didn’t actually start writing proper until I was, you know, I’d say my late 20s.
I was doing magic at the time, I was a magician, and I met a screenwriter at a party. And we did a deal where he would give me some advice on how I could break in if I did magic for his son’s 12th birthday party. And so that was the beginnings of my career, and I’ve been writing ever since.
Making Magic Happen
GVN: So, you mentioned your work as a magician. What type of magic did you perform? Sleight of hand or the full-blown illusion shows?
DECLAN: Yeah, I mean, it was very much close up magic. And it was kind of, it was very much a slightly unusual path into it. I’d met a person at university who did magic, and he gave me a book, Expert Card Technique by Huguard and Bray. Most of the great magic books are at least 100 years old. So they’re very verbose, really densely written, quite hard to kind of get a handle on. And so I started reading it. I thought, oh, you know, I can’t, this is too much like hard work. I’m not going to bother with this.
But I found myself with a lot of free time and very little money. So I actually first started doing magic in an attempt to make money. Because where I lived in Glasgow, there were lots of bars around. So I learned a few tricks, like card tricks, essentially, nothing particularly groundbreaking. But the kind of the hubris of youth allowed me to go around to every bar in the merchant city in Glasgow and say, I’m a professional magician, would you like to hire me? And one of them did.
The Chronicles of Astrimos
GVN: Ok, let’s get into The Chronicles of Astrimos. This audio drama introduces listeners to a richly layered sci‑fi universe. Did you write this with audio performance in mind, or did it take another form originally?
DECLAN: No, this is one of those things that will probably never happen to me ever again. But I was working with a producer called Michel de France, who deserves a lot of credit for this, because he kind of made a lot of it happen. We were working together on a horror pilot for Audible, like an audio series, because he was really interested in doing something that was kind of very POV led. So we made this sort of pilot episode, and it didn’t go any further than that. And I think he was the one initially approached by Echoverse, just as they were starting out.
And this is one of those questions, like, you know, you dream of hearing is, he messaged me and said, Have you got a space opera? Because that could be sort of filling out this slate, and they’re looking for a space opera. And I did have a kind of a version of this idea, and just in my notes, like, just like a scrap of an idea.
So I think this, I think we could do something really fun here, because I really love audio drama, like, like, my first credit was an audio drama for the BBC. And I thought, you know, playing with audio drama as a record, and you know, there’s so many great kind of American and British as well, kind of, you know, classic 50s and 60s, sci fi audio drama. So that’s a really fun world to play around with.
Personal Recollections
GVN: Were there any other of your own personal recollections that you built into the story? Myself, I relate to the use of the story-based LP. I used to listen to such stories when I was young.
DECLAN: I was I was thinking about this recently, because like I’m a huge video game fan, and there’s been a lot of news recently about Sony discontinuing physical discs for games and stuff. And I think, you know, we’ve seen over the last couple of decades how physical media has kind of died out a little bit. And I do think that’s a real shame, because one of the the more personal aspects of this story was when I was 18, my dad died.
And, you know, we were close. You know, he was my dad. But, we weren’t super close. I never felt we really kind of got on as well as we could have. But he left me his record collection after he died. So he had all these records that he had collected over his life. And it was weird. We kind of I felt like we developed a deeper relationship after he had died just through me discovering all these records that he loved that he clearly loved as as a younger man as well.
Storytelling Through Audio
GVN: Audio drama is a different kind of storytelling, because you have to approach doing your scenes and everything, when every moment has to land through the sound alone. How hard was that for you to plan your writing in that manner?
DECLAN: I mean, it is tricky. The trickiest thing in terms of the writing is, you can’t do anything with a look. But we had such an incredible cast, and we were so lucky to get the cast that we did. But there are definitely moments in the show that could have been expressed with a look or a sideways glance that simply does not work in audio.
So you have to be slightly more specific in terms of the dialogue to really make moments land. But I mean, honestly, aside from that, people talk about it being quite limited. I really don’t think it is, especially if you’ve got excellent production, which we did with this, you know, it’s a real immersive experience.
A Great Cast
GVN: Echoverse has brought together a great cast for your story, including the aforementioned Darren Criss, Maya Hawke, as well as Alfred Molina and Kate Mulgrew, who (needless to say) bring major emotional and dramatic weight to this saga. Did you have certain voices in mind as you wrote?
DECLAN: That’s a really interesting point. Honestly, I didn’t really have specific voices in mind, but I had a very specific tone in mind. It was really important that the modern day be very real, very cynical, for want of a better word. And the sci fi world had to be really genuinely earnest. And like, we are the good guys, and we’re going to beat the bad guys.
I listened to so much old sci fi, like Dimension X was a huge one. And there is a tone to it. It’s very much like, Flash Gordon. Especially the Flash Gordon movie, you know, where there’s a real commitment to the earnestness of that story, like, this is the world we’re going to do.So I wasn’t necessarily thinking of specific voices for the characters, but very much the tone of these two worlds, and getting that right. And yeah, the cast, because that’s something that could have gone wrong. So, so badly.
I remember when the first day Maya Hawke was in, which in itself was a real exciting thing to be able to see her perform. And she’s the only character in the show that only exists in the world of the record. A lot of the other actors kind of flip back and forth in a kind of a Wizard of Oz style thing where the characters mirror across the two stories.
But Maya Hawke is only in that the world of the records. And so a lot of the tone of that story is reliant on her delivery. And she just immediately nailed it. And it was like, phew, okay, we’re going to be fine. She got that tone right out of the gates. And it was like, this is going to be this is going to be great fun.
Working with Echoverse
GVN: Echoverse Studios has a reputation for immersive cinematic audio storytelling. What did that collaboration look like for you behind the scenes, and how did it influence the final shape of Astrimos? The series thrives on complex relationships and shifting alliances. Which character dynamic surprised you the most as the story evolved?
DECLAN: Absolutely. We came into this with a very loose outline, maybe a couple of pages. And the two kind of guiding principles were this kind of dual world story where someone is from the real world going into this science fiction story. And this kind of notion that the right story at the right time could change everything. I think in my original pitch, he was a bus driver, I believe. And it was kind of he was having like an existential crisis, like almost like a midlife crisis.
But there was a lot of kind of back and forth with them, (the Echoverse team) because they’re all like super experienced, especially Mark, like he was such a great sounding board throughout. And Michelle is my the original producer that brought me in. There was so much collaboration as we kind of progressed.
And even right up to the very end, I think, you know, maybe when we had just started thinking about casting, I think it was Mark, or Nick who had the idea that maybe his boss in the law firm should be his dad. And just that, oh, my God, that transformed everything! Suddenly everything just kind of closed in on itself and became so much more powerful and intimate. And that was I remember that coming in quite late in the day and being like, okay, that that really helps kind of solidify everything.
Expanding the Astrimos Universe
GVN: Thank you once again, Declan, for your kind indulgence. Finally, now that you have worked with the wizards at Echoverse Studios, could you see another collaboration in the future?
DECLAN: Oh, absolutely. I’m certain I’ll be pitching more ideas. And you know, as I said at the start, that one of the central premises of Astrimos was that the right story at the right time can change everything. So, you know, that is true of my life as much as it is of anyone else’s. And also, it’s perfect for future stories. You could do more of the series as an anthology, different characters with just different versions of the record, finding them at the right time.
At the heart of Astrimos’ cosmic scale are characters shaped with care, conflict, and emotional clarity — and that’s where Declan Dineen’s storytelling shines. Echoverse’s The Chronicles of Astrimos feels vast, but never distant, thanks to the human threads woven through its future and the audio wizardry of Echoverse. Our thanks to Dineen for sharing the creative pulse behind the series, and for crafting a world that invites viewers to invest deeply.
You can check out Echoverse’s The Chronicles of Astrimos trailer below and our full interview with Declan.
Senior Writer at GeekVibesNation – I am a 60 something child of the 70’s who admits to being a Star Trek/Star Wars/Comic Book junkie who once dove headfirst over a cliff (Ok, it was a small hill) to try to rescue his Fantastic Four comic from a watery grave. I am married to a lovely woman who is as crazy as I am and the proud parent of a 21-year-old young man with autism. My wife and son are my real heroes.
