Back in June, when I was in Copenhagen with a few friends for Nasty Cut Fest (a small DIY punk festival that I might still write about – it was awesome fun), an email dropped into my inbox:
I first stumbled upon your fanfiction when I read your story about the Inquisitors, who only exist as a footnote in the X-COM timeline, on Fanfiction.net back in 2001 or so. I collect old websites and online works and host them on my own website. Would you be open to allowing me to re-publish your X-COM fanfics on my own? Or is there a chance you might repost your fanfics on your current website?
Suffice to say this wasn’t an email I’d expected to receive – ever. I responded saying that I’d be happy for the stories to be re-published, and was touched to learn that they were “in any way remembered”.
It is now a quarter century (!!!) since I wrote any fan fiction, but this email took me back to the time when I was arguably at my most prolific as a writer – certainly, as a fiction writer. I found writing fan fiction for the games I loved – it was almost always games – to come quite naturally to me, in a way I’ve rarely experienced with original fiction.
I was also taken back to the context in which I wrote those stories; a lot of memories surfaced. Borrowing the 3.5″ floppy disks containing UFO: Enemy Unknown from a school friend. The thrill and terror of grinding away at the brutally unforgiving tactical missions. The sadness I was feeling when my friend called me up on our landline to tell me that he had beaten Cydonia – the final assault mission where the game culminates – which happened to be the same evening our pet cat was hit and killed by a car, and I gently carried her body into our back garden. The elation when I finally beat Cydonia for myself; I remember this being years after I first played the game, but in the differently-experienced time of youth, it was probably months. The camaraderie of new friends I found online when, our family having gained dial-up home internet, I discovered Usenet, and dived into newsgroups including alt.games.x-com, where I spent many hours discussing the games and, yes, the setting and stories around them with other fans.
The email was concerning my X-COM stories, but I also wrote a lot of fan fiction set in the Star Control universe. A friend I made via the ‘writer’s collective’ I set up – inspired by the official StarSiege Writers Collective (itself somewhat preserved online) – is still a friend today, and the chance events of life have resulted in us both living in the same city in Finland. I dabbled with other settings too; Warhammer 40,000, Starship Troopers, and obscure games like Missionforce: Cyberstorm and Realms of the Haunting.
So, yeah, I have roots in fan fiction. Yet it’s not something I write or talk much about today. It was now so long ago. As I grew older and went to university and built new social circles in a new city, and discovered the usual things that distract young men, I slightly disassociated from that part of my past. It was somehow lesser than the ‘serious’ science fiction and fantasy I wanted to write. (It wasn’t just me. I dimly recall reading something by Ben Fischer, author of the ‘Kansai Arc’ – which at the time I felt was the best X-COM fanfic then written – posting something similar to his website. I wonder where he is today. His X-COM stories don’t appear to be online any more, although I do have copies of them saved myself.)
Today I’m in my 40s, I work on video games for a living, I paint Warhammer miniatures, I only occasionally write, and I couldn’t give a fuck about what is considered worthy, cool or respectable. It’s a boring observation at this point to point out that geek media conquered the world, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s this was very much not the case. Additionally, today fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off gets publishing deals – it is a very different media landscape. So it’s perhaps past time to look back at what I did all those years ago, and celebrate that part of my creative past.
The email I received was from a pseudonymous account named NationSim Archivist, and they maintain a deliciously old-school HTML website named NationSim archives. This apparently began as a project to archive collaborative narrative games from the Something Awful forums, and has since expanded into archiving other offline, lost or obscure content. This is a wonderful initiative and I am happy it exists.
My X-COM fan fiction is now archived on the site here, and so is an even earlier work of fan fiction based on MissionForce: Cyberstorm. The latter, incidentally, is set in a future timeline of the StarSiege setting I mentioned earlier.
I’ve re-read a few of my stories since receiving that email, and would say that ‘Take Me Home’ is my favourite, mostly because it features the slight twist of including the alien perspective. You’ll also find my take on a unified X-COM timeline, something which I think floated around fan communities for some years afterwards as a canonical or official timeline. Oops? I dimly recall I injected more melodrama and Apocalypse material into a framework provided by a drier timeline included with Terror From The Deep. Also, all original typos have been retained, so you too can enjoy the mention in ‘Last Rites’ of “Her Majesty’s Special Boast Service”. Sounds about right!
I still want to re-read the CyberStorm story. I think I still have the original draft of that, handwritten on A4. The game came out in 1996 so I must have been 14 or 15 when I wrote it.
As for my Star Control fan fiction, well, that never truly went offline, as in 2001 or thereabouts the Star Control Writers’ Collective was absorbed into the largest fan site, The Pages of Now and Forever, where it has remained to this day. It is buried a few clicks deep, but can be found.
I can’t vouch for the quality of these stories to you, dear reader, but for me I do think they are fun, and frequently melodramatic as was my style as a teen, and pretty good for what they are, which is quick tales from a teenager who wrote them for an online community of other people also writing fanfic, and who didn’t expect to be thinking about them so many years later. I’m proud of these works of juvenalia remain delighted that they are remembered, even if only by one other person.
