My Fan Fic World!

 So, I’ve been hunting up some old fanzines with my stories in them, from back in the days when fan fiction was printed and posted out to fans. I published a few myself, which gave me the practice for when I edited an issue of semiprozine Andromeda Spaceways. 

The hunt for fanzines made me remember the worldbuilding I did with my friend Robert Jan, when we created our planet New Wales, which was in the constellation of the Unicorn and had been settled centuries ago by a group led by Arthur’s knight Bedwyr, after the battle of Camlann, where both Arthur and his son Medraut died. 

They had reached the planet using a teleport portal from Earth. They found themselves with some Earth animals which had wandered through the portal themselves - animals such as unicorns, now extinct on Earth. There were also intelligent dragons which walked on two feet and were a part of the community. One dragon in our world was a space fleet admiral, Admiral Kirilli - Robert created that character. Mine was a pipe-smoking university professor, Rhisiart. 

We kept it as silly and over the top as we could. (I remember one reviewer referring to it a a sweet little tea party of a world - which I guess it was). It existed in three media universes - the worlds of Star Trek, Blake’s 7 and Robin Of Sherwood.  

Although Robin Of Sherwood might seem the most appropriate universe to host New Wales, I only wrote one story set there. 

Most of the New Wales stories were set in the world of the original Star Trek series. Robert and I alternated those stories, which were published first in the fanzine SPOCK, then some reprinted in my own fanzine, Trek Tales From New Wales. In one story, Ensign Chekhov, trying to impress a girl (a fellow crew member) while on shore leave on New Wales, was horribly embarrassed when a local unicorn, a mare called Maggie, followed him around. 

But our unicorns were shaggy Shetland ponies with horns, and had nothing to do with the traditional tropes about unicorns. If they liked you, they liked you, simple as that. I confess I got the idea for them from an early episode of Lost In Space, when the Robinsons, exploring their new planet, found a chimpanzee with a high domed head and a Shetland unicorn. Penny kept the chimp as a pet, not the unicorn! Still, I think I made those Shetland unicorns very much my own. Maggie was a semi regular character.

In the Blake’s 7 universe - which you will probably not be familiar with unless you are my age or were brought up by fannish parents - New Wales was the original home of the anti-hero Kerr Avon. He still had relatives there. The evil Federation had tried to take it over but not succeeded, due to - well, magic. Sort of. More of a mass telepathic barrier. One of the original characters, the telepathic alien Cally, who was killed during the fourth season of the show was, in fact, in a healing trance (like Spock) and was found alive by members of New Wales’ space fleet. She ended up joining them and settling on New Wales.

I did consider working up a novel using the world, without the media universes, but then Patricia Kennealy Morrison published a novel called The Copper Crown which had a similar premise to my universe, and she was a much bigger name than me, so that was that. 

The annoying thing is, her novel was much more deadly serious than my stories. I much prefer funny, myself.

Ah, well…