Monthly Archives: March 2013

Axel’s Flight

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beyondborders_lorraineSchleter600pxScheduled for a late May release is ReDeus: Beyond Borders, the second volume in a series created by Bob Greenberger, Paul Kupperberg and Aaron Rosenberg. The gods are back and ready to be worshiped, but is humanity ready for them? This time out, our team of authors left the United States behind to visit the homelands of the many pantheons from around the world.

In the last volume, I told how the Norse God Bragi came to mentor a desperate musician who was down and out as a result of the fall of YouTube. This time, I chose to take my young rock star, Axel Sage, to Sweden, where Odin and the Aesir are assembling a new brotherhood of Vikings and a new sisterhood of Valkyries. The Aesir are probably the most techno-friendly of the gods, so they’ve embraced reality TV. Their new followers are recruited on the twin series Who Wants to Be a Viking? and Who Wants to Be a Valkyrie? Axel lands right in the thick of it, falling for a beautiful warrior maiden. Trouble is, a Valkyrie’s hand goes to the warrior who’s willing to fight for her, and Loki has a champion in the wings.

This volume will also feature the work of veterans Lawrence M. Schoen, Scott Pearson, Dave Galanter, Phil Giunta, William Leisner, and Allyn Gibson, plus new ReDeus authors Kelly Meding, Janna Silverstein, David McDonald, Steve Lyons, and Lorraine Anderson. And, of course, creators Aaron, Paul, and Bob will all have stories as well. The cover art above is by Lorraine Schleter.

Enterprise Regained – A Star Trek Fan Fiction Novella (1984)

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EnterpriseRegainedCoversEnterprise Regained

by Steven H. Wilson

Published separately in June, 1984 — 40 pages, illustrated

 Original Author’s Intro

It seems to me that this, my first fanzine and first completed Star Trek story (though hopefully not the last of the former and definitely not the last of the latter) calls for an introduction. My personal feelings are of disbelief: disbelief that this two-year pro­ject is finally completed; but I’ll spare you my creative euphoria. I can inflict that on the same people who’ve been following this story chapter for chapter, praising and proofreading (they didn’t have much choice–I inflicted the earliest drafts on them, too).

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My First Fanzine

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I spent some time last week with a friend I haven’t seen in 30 years. He’s seventeen, he wants to be a science fiction writer, and his name’s Steve Wilson. Which is my roundabout way of saying that I recently sat down and read, for the first time in a looooonnnggg time, the first piece of fiction I completed once I realized that, whatever else I did with my life, I wanted to spend most of it writing.

I read it because, in the course of preparing my website and making it the complete guide to all things me, I wanted to make my fan fiction available to anyone who should care to read it. Since I started writing back in the dim time before the WordPerfect, email and PDF (hell, the IBM Personal Computer was experiencing the terrible twos around that time!), making it available means taking it off paper, running it through OCR and then verifying that the OCR worked. On fanzines 30 – 50 years old, OCR rarely works very well.

Farewell Constellation Books

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http://constellationbooks.com/files/constellation/logo.jpgIt’s a sad time – Constellation Books is closing next weekend. Everything in the store (except special orders) is 50% off. Lauretta has been a friend to local cons and local authors. We held Lance’s premiere part for Heroic Park here, and it’s a wonderful store. If Reisterstown is at all convenient to you, please come by and help out by making a purchase. Shelves are for sale, too.

 

Phase II – Chapter One: The Invitation

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By Beverly J. Volker and Nancy J. Kippax
Art by Russ Volker

This is the first of four installments in an unfinished series by Bev and Nancy, speculating on the future of the Enterprise crew. Ironically, in 1975, only six years after Trek had gone off the air, Bev and Nancy took the characters two decades into their futures, past the point time would take them when they actually returned in their movie series. This is very early Bev and Nancy, and I had to resist my editor’s urges as I verified the OCR. I admit I did correct their baffling insistence on misspelling “Chief,” and I did fix one case of “with whom he had worked for years with.” They would have fixed those too, if their intent to finish and collect this series had been fulfilled. Bev loved melodrama, and this series shows it, especially as it digs into the history of the tragic Tarra St. John. But I think there’s nothing more fun than digging into the predictions fan writers made about the future of Trek before we knew it would have a future. So enjoy this first part of Phase II. I’ll keep restoring it, and, hopefully soon, make sense of quite a few pages of (unpublished, I think) manuscript Bev left behind.

— Steve

PHASE II

CHAPTER ONE

The Invitation

Admiral James T. Kirk pushed the button to open his door.

A recurring stab of loneliness filled him. The rooms were so empty now, without Areel to share them. He spent as little time as possible here these days.

Since his wife’s tragic death in a shuttle crash six months ago, Jim had been burying himself deeper and deeper into his work, concentrating all his effort on accepting what had happened. They had a good life together, a good marriage; he felt fortunate to have found such unexpected happiness at all, albeit short-lived.

I really ought to move, he mused, entering the living area.

But as usual, he shoved the thought aside, reluctant to go through the ordeal of sorting through their possessions.

He was meeting “Bones” McCoy for dinner this evening; a pleasant interlude which he was greatly looking forward to. Both of them living on the same Starbase as they did, the two old friends didn’t see as much of one another as they’d like.

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An Unfinished Piece of Artwork

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Deforest Kelley and Jane WyattRifling through old papers from college, I found several dozen illustrations I’d done for fanzines back in the day. This unfinished piece was intended for my story “Mandy,” but I ran out of time. The circa-1987 Jane Wyatt and De Kelley in the center were to be flanked by circa-1966 De at the top left and circa-1937 Jane at the bottom. (You can see just a little of where I’d sketched an oval to place her face.) I think I couldn’t find a decent publicity shot of her from Lost Horizon in those pre-Internet days, although I know one of my sketchbooks does contain a thumbnail of Jane at a young age. 47 year-old Steve is not the artist 21 year-old Steve was. My attempts to draw now usually end in frustration and anger at my failing eyes. I’d be afraid to try and finish it. But, since I’ve got the story on my site, I thought I should post the illo that might have been.

Transition: 2000 – A Space:1999 Short Story

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Back in 1997, Farpoint, my home convention, decided to publish a fanzine featuring works by committee and interested members. The zine was called Encounters, and it was edited by Beverly Volker, my mother-in-law and a Fandom legend for her work on the zine Contact. It was a mixed media zine, meaning it was open to stories from any fandom you could name. I decided to do four shorts based on four of my favorite SF shows, showcasing drastic changes in the lives of the characters, changes which either occurred during the runs of the shows, or after they were off the air.

We published them in chronological order. The first was this one, based on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Space: 1999. This is a “during the run” transition, chronicling why the character of Victor Bergman disappeared without explanation between the first and second series of the show. The same subject has since been addressed in the authorized novel Survival, published by Powys Books.

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Everything Old…

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I’ve been working on this site for months, and quietly hiding it under the domain name thearbiterchronicles.com. Just brought it live, and I’m still adding to it. For a while, you’re going to see a lot of older stuff — fan fiction, reviews, old scripts — surface on the main feed below. As it drops off the front page, it’ll be correctly catalogued on the category pages linked above. I’ll leave my current blog entries (still hosted on LiveJournal for the time being) on the right for ease of identification.

Gradivus – A Star Trek Novella with Captain Sulu

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I suppose you could say that this story was Captain Sulu when Captain Sulu wasn’t cool. I wrote this right after Star Trek III. At that point, none of us knew that Star Trek IV would sentence Kirk’s officers to stagnation hell. (Sure, the ending was heartwarming, but would fifty-year-olds REALLY want to do the same jobs they did when they were twenty?)

At that time, it was assumed, it having been written into the shooting script of Star Trek II, that Sulu would be commanding the Excelsior immediately, not eight years later as actually happened. Well, I figured you didn’t just walk into command of such a big ship, Sulu must have commanded another vessel pre-Trek II. Knowing that Sulu wanted to be on border patrol (yes, I take The Entropy Effect as Sulu gospel), I thought it made sense that his first command would be a border patrol ship.

I gave him an all-new crew (except for Mr. Hadley, the silent bridge officer from Classic Trek, and Terry Metcalfe, whom I’d created earlier), and named his ship the Phoenix. (No, I didn’t know that would be the name of the first warp-drive ship. Phoenix was my then-still-dead favorite X-man.)

Re-reading this story after all these years, I realize it breaks a lot of the rules of plotting I now follow, and that its plot is very similar to the TNG episode “The Defector.” (I wrote this first, of course.) Still, I think there’s a lot to enjoy within. And yes, Arbiter Chronicles fans will recognize that this marks the first major appearance of Kevin Carson and a Vulcan with the somewhat-familiar name of “Sernak,” as well as the first appearances of Kayan’na Atal, Aer’La and Dr. Celia Faulkner. They may have been born in Starfleet garb, but they’re all mine. And boy, does this one beat them all with my favorite storytelling device: what we now lovingly call “the dreaded Angst Stick ™.”

Originally published in Destiny’s Children #1

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For Enterprise – A Star Trek Short Story

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Okay, I admit it, I loved the Animated Series. I loved Arex and M’ress. It may have had to do with being the right age when the series premiered, but I’ve never gotten over my fondness for the cartoon adventures of the USS Enterprise. Even in these days of revisionist history where we pretend they never happened, I’m not giving up.

If you share my affection for Arex and M’ress, whom we never saw again in canon Trek, you might get a smile from this story, set during Star Trek III, right as a certain Admiral was about to commit grand theft starship…

This one was published in Vault of Tomorrow #11.

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