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A step into fanfiction
Jun. 1st, 2023 10:24 pmI only knew Captain Rich from the message boards on the college mainframe circa 1994. He was deeply into two things: Fundamentalist Christianity, and writing self insert Star Trek fanfiction. His lackey was the only one who took his religious posts seriously, but we all followed his Star Trek serial writing.
His was a crossover universe with Star Wars, so that in addition to being captain of the USS Grim (the most capable and heavily armed ship in Starfleet), he was also a Jedi: A more powerful one than Luke Skywalker, it turned out.
It sounds cringey. But he wove a narrative interesting enough to keep us reading.
In the middle of his story, bad guys took over the Grim. The heroes received a report that it had destroyed two Federation starships, including the USS Fulton. This was a nod to Fulton Hall. (It turns out that the U.S. Navy had an unrelated "USS Fulton".)
I was inspired by two things. First, I lived in Fulton Hall. Second, while I knew zero about writing, I intuited that a story about people desperately trying to recover from a disaster might carry more dramatic tension than a story about the most powerful ship around, captained by the most powerful Jedi around.
There had been no details of the battle, so I had a few serene chapters introducing the close-knit crew (all people I knew, following Captain Rich's lead) and the ship. Then the Grim shot the Fulton out of orbit. The helmsperson and engineer barely kept the Fulton from cracking up during reentry. The Fulton wound up sunk before the (larger and therefore less atmosphere worthy) Grim could follow and finish the job, and the surviving crew were stranded on an alien world.
I had a lot of fun writing it, and no idea what I was doing. I introduced a crossover with Roger Zelazny's Amber novels: A mysterious person led Captain Blimix on a tour of wondrous parallel worlds ("shadows") before giving him a small, blue stone (a "tragolith") and leaving. The crew got the Fulton raised from the depths, and started repairs in secret.
Captain Rich and I kept our ongoing stories consistent with each other, though mine moved slowly enough to be of little consequence.
His story was 90% done when some asshole employee noticed that it was taking up a lot of space on the mainframe's Tempdisk, and deleted it without warning. Luckily, my friend Stephanie had saved most of it to her hard drive, so only a small portion had to be rewritten. (My story was saved on my computer.) I was furious with the university staff, and decided to give Captain Rich a safer place to post his story. So I programmed a bulletin board system over the course of two days. It was the biggest program I had written, and I skipped meals and classes to do it.
He asked me where I'd intended my story to go with the shadow walker and the tragolith, then wrote them in to bring Captain Blimix to join him for the saving-the-world climax of his story.
With the reading community gone at the end of the semester, I never finished my story. Later, with better social and literary understanding, I reread and cringed at some of the things I had written. But Captain Rich had highly praised my vivid depictions of parallel worlds, and that stuck with me.
I've written very little fanfiction since, but I'm glad that I didn't have to be good at it to enjoy it.
Subsequent decades have changed me: I feel as though I am not recognizably the same person. Except, perhaps, for my impetus to act on righteous indignation. And the fact that the story I wanted to tell was about a group of competent friends who had lost everything except each other, but "each other" was enough.
His was a crossover universe with Star Wars, so that in addition to being captain of the USS Grim (the most capable and heavily armed ship in Starfleet), he was also a Jedi: A more powerful one than Luke Skywalker, it turned out.
It sounds cringey. But he wove a narrative interesting enough to keep us reading.
In the middle of his story, bad guys took over the Grim. The heroes received a report that it had destroyed two Federation starships, including the USS Fulton. This was a nod to Fulton Hall. (It turns out that the U.S. Navy had an unrelated "USS Fulton".)
I was inspired by two things. First, I lived in Fulton Hall. Second, while I knew zero about writing, I intuited that a story about people desperately trying to recover from a disaster might carry more dramatic tension than a story about the most powerful ship around, captained by the most powerful Jedi around.
There had been no details of the battle, so I had a few serene chapters introducing the close-knit crew (all people I knew, following Captain Rich's lead) and the ship. Then the Grim shot the Fulton out of orbit. The helmsperson and engineer barely kept the Fulton from cracking up during reentry. The Fulton wound up sunk before the (larger and therefore less atmosphere worthy) Grim could follow and finish the job, and the surviving crew were stranded on an alien world.
I had a lot of fun writing it, and no idea what I was doing. I introduced a crossover with Roger Zelazny's Amber novels: A mysterious person led Captain Blimix on a tour of wondrous parallel worlds ("shadows") before giving him a small, blue stone (a "tragolith") and leaving. The crew got the Fulton raised from the depths, and started repairs in secret.
Captain Rich and I kept our ongoing stories consistent with each other, though mine moved slowly enough to be of little consequence.
His story was 90% done when some asshole employee noticed that it was taking up a lot of space on the mainframe's Tempdisk, and deleted it without warning. Luckily, my friend Stephanie had saved most of it to her hard drive, so only a small portion had to be rewritten. (My story was saved on my computer.) I was furious with the university staff, and decided to give Captain Rich a safer place to post his story. So I programmed a bulletin board system over the course of two days. It was the biggest program I had written, and I skipped meals and classes to do it.
He asked me where I'd intended my story to go with the shadow walker and the tragolith, then wrote them in to bring Captain Blimix to join him for the saving-the-world climax of his story.
With the reading community gone at the end of the semester, I never finished my story. Later, with better social and literary understanding, I reread and cringed at some of the things I had written. But Captain Rich had highly praised my vivid depictions of parallel worlds, and that stuck with me.
I've written very little fanfiction since, but I'm glad that I didn't have to be good at it to enjoy it.
Subsequent decades have changed me: I feel as though I am not recognizably the same person. Except, perhaps, for my impetus to act on righteous indignation. And the fact that the story I wanted to tell was about a group of competent friends who had lost everything except each other, but "each other" was enough.
