Revolt on the Benterprise

Author Commentaries

John

Wow. Revolt on the Benterprise is the story that started it all. What to say about it?

Well, for starters, none of this would have come about if our ninth-grade English Comp. teacher, Mr. Sundberg, hadn't introduced us all to this idea of a cooperative story. He introduced us to it in his class as a sort of game... the person at the head of a row of desks would write one paragraph to start a story, and then pass it back. The next student would write a second paragraph to continue the story, and so on. The results of these were usually quite amusing.

Gordon and I both often found ourselves hanging around after school waiting for our moms, both of whom worked on campus. Although I'm not certain which of us had the idea first, the opening paragraph of ROTB is mine. Gordon took over the story after a few sentences, and then it went back and forth from there. As you can see, it didn't take long to turn into an epic struggle between the two young authors, each trying get their pet character ahead in the story while dealing out setbacks to the other writer's counterpart.

I do think a brief word of explanation is in order regarding the technical jargon used to describe some of the battles in ROTB and the Lame Trek stories that came after it. All three of us, Gordon, Ben, and myself, were frequent players of the Starfleet Battles gaming system, and its extensive rules and regulations formed the basis for a lot of our ships and systems described in the stories.

The illustrations you see here were all drawn by me, and are second generation drawings. Both Gordon and I would draw pictures throughout our parts of the story to illustrate what was going on, but every time I got my turn to write, I would re-copy everything into a separate notebook and re-draw both my and Gordon's illustrations. In glorious color using a Bic four-color pen, no less!

Gordon

John has pretty much covered the origins of our first cooperative story, so I think I will talk a little more about the mechanics and conventions of this groundbreaking "epic". One of the enduring memories I have of RotB is the circumstances of bringing the story to a close. The main reason John and I had for wrapping up the narrative was that the story was simply way too long. This is, of course ridiculous when taken in light of most (or shall I even say all) of our other endeavors. Ironically, RotB takes its place as the shortest of all the continuing stories that we made over the years. My only justification for our thinking the story was getting too lengthy was that we were comparing our story to the ones written in the aforementioned comp class, which almost always wound up maybe a page and a half in length. At a hefty FOUR pages in length (on standard notebook paper), Revolt on the Benterprise was the largest cooperative story we had ever done!

A few Lame Trek standard conventions make their debut in our inaugural story:

The convention of always showing Lamefleet captains literally "astride" their stately vessels when showing ship exteriors. This in turn has its origins in some sketches done by John and Ben while fooling around— er— paying rapt attention to the teacher in chemistry class.
The first appearance of the mythical "AH, BUT!" statement, used on rare occasions when an author takes exception to a previous excerpt in the story.
The first appearance of tuba-related in-jokes in conjunction with Captain Avery in the narrative. All of our group of friends were involved in the school band and/or orchestra while in high school, and the tuba was Ben's instrument of choice. While my instrument, the clarinet, made its one and only appearance in the form of the CLR-NET transwarp drive in this story, Ben's tuba became a recurring motif throughout the Lame Trek saga.
Captain Avery and Captain Scot would carry an undertone of animosity towards each other as initiated in this episode all the way through to Lame Trek III: The Quest of Ben, where they finally reconciled.

Check out: Revolt on the Benterprise

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