Author Commentaries

Gordon

Gordon's commentary will be forthcoming...

John

My memory of the writing of this story is extremely fuzzy. And since part one has been lost and can't be used to jog my memory, I really don't remember how or why this particular effort got started. I don't even recall with certainty which of us penned the opening lines, but I suspect it was Gordon.

A special thanks to Gordon, by the way, for his efforts in preserving this rather comical attempt of ours at writing a space epic. While neither of us knows what became of part I (or the conclusion for that matter, though for my part I don't think we ever wrote it), it was Gordon who discovered this part of the narrative while going through some of his old school papers. Gordon completed the time-consuming task of transcribing the story into a digital file, and although I have not included them in the on-line version, he included many little footnotes along the way providing interesting little observations about the original copy. Gordon also did the job of scanning in all of his and my original illustrations, which I have included in this on-line version of the tale.

It would seem that even this far into our saga, we hadn't quite settled consistently on the spellings of our characters' names. The first nine or so of Gordon's footnotes detail the various and sundry alternate spellings used, such as "Breiaga" in stead of "Briega," "Jooblan" in place of "Jooblon," or "Dekanar" replacing "Darakon." Gordon claims that "Jooblan" is actually the original, correct spelling of our ill-fated Necctuian, but that he began spelling it my way by the third page of the story. Of course, without part I to refer to, who knows which of us actually invented the character in the first place?

Another of Gordon's amusing footnotes deals with the random passerby in the story who askes Darakon if his ship is a "Super-Duper-Dry-n-Fly-O'Matic". To quote Gordon:

"Okay, I am the author of that statement, and I'm confused by its origins. I'm wondering if that was a crossover quote from the Kaa'Noost stories. It would make sense, with the presence of Ho-Hos and all..."

Gordon and I have both referred to the Kaa'Noost stories in our commentaries for Stranded, so check out that story and our comments if you don't know what he's talking about.

I find it interesting how we drew upon and sort of mixed and matched the themes of the Star Wars universe together with the technology of Star Trek. For example, we have the oppressed underdogs rebelling against the evil empire, and we have "transport cubicles" (i.e. turbolifts) and transporter beams (we didn't even try to come up with an alternate name for those). We tried to include some originality in our plot by having twin brothers, one evil and one good on opposite sides of conflict, but even that was a pretty clichéd plot idea if only we'd realized it.

I find that I keep thinking of this story as our attempt at a "serious work" or "epic saga," but upon reading it you find that it's really no different from everything else we wrote in high school. It's full of silly gags and jokes, some of them inside jokes or references to things that only we would find funny. Our grammar is often atrocious and the writing clearly makes an attempt at being grandios but falls flat. It's quite funny, really, but it makes me glad that neither of us ever seriously considered a career as a writer.

Check out: Revolt of the Powers

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