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2003-01-28 - 1:56 a.m. A Fanficcer's Guide to Star Trek: VoyagerThis is the first in a proposed series of fandom guides, intended to escort the prospective fanfic reader or writer around the main sites and provide handy links even to BOFQ's. Contact zendom if you would like to contribute to a guide. The ShowStar Trek: Voyager (VOY) is the epic tale of a Starfleet vessel stranded on the wrong side of the galaxy. The crew is a mix of Starfleet officers, Maquis rebels, and a few hitchhikers picked up along the way. Voyager ran for seven seasons, but major events of the Voyager timeline are few: the ship got stranded in the Delta Quadrant in the premiere, Seven of Nine was added to the cast in at the beginning of Season 4 (at which time Kes left), and the crew made a final attempt to return to the Alpha Quadrant in the series finale.The EpisodesSadly, I must report that Voyager is off the air. Reruns, especially of the earlier seasons, are rare and Paramount has not yet gotten around to fleecing the fans for the DVD collection. That leaves one major resource for the reader or writer who wants to find out what happened in canon: Jim Wright's Delta Blues [broken link] Voyager review archive. Jim's reviews are humorous but detailed and accurate. In the later seasons, all dialogue is included in the review. With the added descriptions, Jim verges on novelization and can be a very long read, but it's worth every minute. If you're pressed for time, Zeke gives quicker, even less reverent overviews at Five-Minute Voyager. As memories of the show fade, visual aids become useful. Janet's Star Trek Voyager Site hosts thousands of screencaps, some with accompanying dialogue. It's a difficult site to navigate, but well worth the effort. Star Trek in Sound and Vision is another huge repository of screenshots, promos and soundbites. The CharactersThe major characters are abbreviated as follows:
Recurring characters include Seska (seasons 1-3), Vorik (Vulcan, Engineering), Naomi Wildman (cute child) and Icheb (former Borg drone and non-cute teen). Kashyk (Ka) appeared in only one episode but made an inordinate impact on fanfic. Q and the Borg Queen were frequent guests. Many more characters have appeared or been mentioned; the full "minor" crew list is useful for writing fic and can be found either at Roll Call or Lower Decks. The PairingsThe most popular pairing in the fandom is without doubt J/C, the protocol-crossed relationship of Voyager's straight-laced Starfleet captain and the former Maquis rebel who became her first officer. Countless electrons have been spilled in the cause of getting them together, and great was the wailing and moaning in fandom when TPTB finally laid their para-canonical relationship to rest by springing C/7 on the audience late in seventh season. The second most popular pairing is P/T, the union of Tom Paris, the rakish, devil-may-care, insert-cliché-here pilot and B'Elanna Torres, the temperamental half-Klingon Maquis chief engineer. TPTB ran hot and cold with P/T, devoting the occasional episode to their canonical relationship, and letting it lapse for months in between. The faithful were rewarded in seventh season with both a wedding and a baby. What more could a fan ask for? And that brings us to the other Most Eligible Bachelorette of Voyager, Seven of Nine. Her relationships are all controversial. A few casual scenes with Harry Kim led to reams of K/7 fanfic and attracted an unusual number of male writers to Voyager fanfic. Despite much more support in canon, EMH/7 stories are quite rare, while J/7 is a popular slash pairing. Tragedy or bliss, depending on your perspective, struck in seventh season when C/7 became a much-reviled canon pairing, prompting Rocky's vicious yet hilarious Die Seven Die challenge. J/P may disgust the uninitiated, but the fic is plentiful. J/Kashyk is a dark subgenre all its own. In general, you can pair Janeway with anyone because everyone wants to read about her. The bad-boy Tom Paris of early seasons also made his way around the crew. Note his appearance in both of the other popular slash pairings, C/P and P/K. The FanfictionVoyager boasts oodles of fine gen fic, more properly known as crew stories. The best place to find it is through the Trek newsgroup, alt.startrek.creative (ASC). To read posts to the newsgroup without a newsreader, either use Google Groups or sign up for the stories-only mailing list ASCL at Yahoo Groups. ASC and its companion groups alt.startrek.creative.all-ages and alt.startrek.creative.erotica are also the best place to publish your fanfic. Awards are held annually for which all stories posted to the newsgroups during the year are eligible. Trekiverse, the ASC archive, covers all Trek series and all story types, and is the only major story repository of Voyager fandom. All other large archives are primarily link lists. Of those, the biggest general list is Voyager's Delights. The Lower Decks site has a small list focusing on the rest of the crew, the ones who only appear in the credits when they're taking that final redshirt beam-out to oblivion. Pairing FicHet fic is distinguished as such only by the pairing codes. As noted above, the major archives do not actually host much fic on-site. Instead they link to stories on authors' websites or FFN.
SlashVoyager has not inspired nearly as much slash as other fandoms, nor even other Trek shows (all of which have fewer female leads). The largest m/m slash archive is the Tom Paris Dorm, mainly devoted to C/P though all other Tom stories are allowed. The Infinity Complex is an extensive f/f archive. See also the self-describing Femme Fuhq Fest, which has attracted many of Voyager's best fan writers. Mailing ListsMost pairings have mailing lists, though activity has been dying down somewhat since the show went off the air. See the archives above for links to the larger pairing lists. There are too many small lists to mention. For general fanfic, one of the more active mailing lists is Enterprise and Beyond, which, as the name indicates, is an all-series Trek list. They will also critique your fic if you ask. ReviewsReviews of good fic can be found at The Best of Trek (BoTrek). Badfic is held up at Godawful. As with many links here, these sites cover all Trek series but have Voyager-specific sections. BoTrek is not particularly up-to-date and Voyager stories only rarely pop up on cross-fandom rec lists, so to find good fic a reader should also check the winners [alternate link for later years] or the feedback posts in the ASC Awards. Famous FicsThe following is, I hope, a list of stories that most people in Voyager fandom have heard of and, if they haven't read them or enjoyed them properly, feel guilty about it:
Virtual SeasonsSome people can't leave well enough alone. The best-known Voyager virtual seasons are VVSP, a post-series adventure in two seasons which has come to an end, and VS7.5, a rewrite of Season 7 now continuing into a ninth season. Delta Fleet, a very post-series K/7 virtual season, is just beginning. MiscellanyZendom was founded by five Trek writers from Project S-31, the source of all that dark Section 31 fanfiction on ASC a year back. Prime movers ChristineCGB and Liz Barr have fled to other fandoms. Jemima, a known Borg sympathizer, keeps up the Borg Species List, for those moments when you need to know what number, if any, the Borg have assigned to your flawed, weak, organic species. Lori hosts the If My Aunt From Minnesota Wrote ST Fanfic archive, which features several fine Voyager spoofs. Seema is our token Trek BNF. They and other Voyager fans on Zendom helped in the assembly of this guide, especially the slashy bits. Jemima Pereira is a semi-retired Voyager and BtVS fanfic writer who founded the zendom list one evening when she really should have been finishing a fic. Her latest project involves saving fandom through XML.
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