Enterprise Lost – Prologue

Welcome to Fan Fiction Fridays! Think I have enough “themed” blog entries yet? I’ve decided to start sharing fan fiction produced by myself, my family and my friends herein, because, well, we put a lot of work into it. It’s the reason we got involved in crazy ventures like Farpoint and Firebringer Press. And I think it deserves to be remembered. I’ve shared some of my fic already. You can access it from the Fan Fic menu item above. But there are some big chunks missing.

In 1982, I wrote a Star Trek fan fic titled “A Noble Mind is Here Oer’Thrown.” Terrible title, right? I got news for you. Most of my titles suck. Not news. By 1984, it became its own fanzine novella, Enterprise Regained. You can read that here.

People liked “Regained” so much (and when I say “people,” I mean probably two or three) that they told me to write a sequel. “But,” I said, “‘Regained’ was a continuation of ST II, and ST III invalidated it. How can I write a sequel?” “Make it reconcile the two,” they said.

And Enterprise Lost was born. It has never seen the light of digital day, to my knowledge. So here it is, the prologue, anyway. I’ll post a chapter a week. My thoughts on this segment follow it.

Oh, and I did the artwork, too. I beg your forgiveness.  Continue reading

The Pretender – Epilogue

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EPILOGUE

The former radiation-proof bunker under what Tanya had dubbed “Moonbase Beta” had space enough for each of the seven human occupants to have separate quarters. Jackie would live with Sue, of course; but soon enough, he would grow and want his own room.

If they lived that long.

It wasn’t a bitter reflection from Victor Bergman, only a matter-of-fact one. The odds were against them. They had no Eagles, and couldn’t leave the confines of what was once a humble monitoring station. They had power, but only if they could keep the generator going. Food, water and oxygen they had, with the same caveat for the recycling plants. One failure would wipe them out.

The same had always been true of Alpha. But they had smaller numbers, and they didn’t have John Koenig.

Still, where there was life, there was hope.

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The Pretender – Act Four

Pretender_SmAfter the previous act, a few readers wondered if there would even be another. Hey, I said “Four acts,” right? I did. Go back and check. And, after this, there’s a brief epilogue.

Thanks again to my beta readers and proofreader, as well as to those of you who’ve shared and commented. Please Note re: Facebook: While I am still pushing blog links to FB, I am not monitoring my wall there. Needed to take a break for at least a couple of days, perhaps a permanent one. So, if you comment on FB, I won’t see it. You’re welcome and encouraged to comment here, though.

ACT FOUR

Victor Bergman was pleasantly surprised to find that he was not dead. He was also mildly surprised to find that he was still on the Moon, although not on Alpha. More of Quince’s trickery? He looked around him at the small room in which he’d appeared–as far as he knew–instantly after vanishing from Main Mission. He glanced out the viewports at a familiar lunar landscape, festooned with slagged heaps of white metal, scarred from a firestorm. He knew this place. He’d last been here months ago. Really, this was where everything had begun.

How could these buildings possibly have survived?

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The Pretender – Act Three

Pretender_SmACT THREE

The Author was prompt in his appearance. He materialized in the center of Main Mission and glared at Tanya Alexander. “Well, Koenig, have you made your choice?”

Koenig stepped forward, interposing himself between Tanya and the alien. “The boy has made it for us. He’s gone.”

The Author stared for a moment. Perhaps he was attempting to read Koenig’s facial expression, perhaps his mind. Perhaps he was merely scanning the base with his own extrasensory abilities. When he spoke, he said, “You’re lying.”

Koenig made a sweeping gesture. “You can search anywhere you like. You won’t find him here.”

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The Pretender – Act Two

Pretender_Sm ACT 2

 “This person you’re running from,” said Victor, “who is he?”

“He is–I suppose you’d call him an author,” said the boy.

They were in Victor’s lab, with Verdeschi stationed outside. Koenig had agreed to let Victor, who seemed to share an affinity with the boy, question him alone. Before they decided what to do about the ultimatum they had received, they needed more information.

“And, ah, what does this author write?” Victor asked.

“He doesn’t write. He creates–stories, realities. He brings them into being for amusement. His own and that of others.”

“Do you mean to say that he–he creates universes? As entertainment?”

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The Pretender – Act One

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Pencils by Steven H. Wilson, Inks by Ethan H. Wilson

Shout-out to Paul Balze for–as always–speedy and thorough proofreading!

ACT ONE

 In Medical Centre, Koenig and Bergman looked up as Helena Russell entered from the isolation ward. She’d insisted the boy be kept separate from other patients, due to his unknown origins.

“He’s alive,” said Helena, scratching her head. “But in a coma.”

“I swear he was dead, Helena,” said Koenig. “There was no pulse.” Continue reading

The Pretender – Teaser

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Pencils by Steven H. Wilson, Inks by Ethan H. Wilson

Okay, I’m a little self-conscious about this. Forty years ago this Fall, ten-year-old me fell in love with a new TV show called Space:1999. I started writing when I was 11, and, after my first “original” short story was complete, I began writing Space: 1999 fan fic. It was my passion and it launched me on the path to an addiction–I mean a career–albeit only a part-time career, in writing. So, near the end of the show’s 40th anniversary year, and, quite frankly, exhausted from almost two decades of building my own universes, I decided to return to my roots and honor the show by writing a “lost episode.” This is prose, but it’s built on the four-act structure that dramatic television used in the 1970s. I hope it feels like a novelization of an episode you never saw. 

And, as with all fan fic, the characters and world are not mine, aside from the guest star characters I created. I’m borrowing them without permission, not for profit of any kind, just to celebrate something I loved with other people who may have loved it too. I hope you’ll pardon an otherwise professional writer taking a detour. And I’d like to further point out that a lot of very talented people like John Kenneth Muir and Andrew E.C. Gaska have actually been licensed to write new Space: 1999 adventures, and I don’t mean to detract from their work in any way. 

Oh, and I’d like to thank my beta-readers: Sharon Van Blarcom, Russell Wooldridge, Susanna Reilly and Cheri Rosen, for encouragement and insight. 

The Pretender

Computers can go mad.

An ignorant man would say a computer was mad when it simply did what he asked it to do, but not what he expected it to do. The more sophisticated idiot knew this was folly, but assumed that the computer would always do exactly what it was told to do. David Kano knew better. He knew that, just like every other intelligent creature, an artificial intelligence could be touched by madness.

David had been given his first computer at the age of 13 and had fallen in love. But when the burgeoning personal computer industry had died a-borning, consumed by a devastating world war, David had taken up working on the massive, shared systems owned only by governments, universities and industrial giants.

Moonbase Alpha’s computer had been his employer’s masterpiece, and he had been her lead developer. She was the most sophisticated brain ever built, superior, in David’s eyes, to a human brain. When she was installed, David had come with her. For five years they’d been intimates, partners, practically a human/machine married couple. He knew her every habit and idiosyncrasy.

Today, he feared for her sanity. Continue reading

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

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

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.

Transition: 2000 – A Space:1999 Short Story

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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