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startrek2010-05-08 01:04 am
beatrice_otter) wrote in startrek2010-05-08 01:04 am
Fic Rec: anything by Macedon, now available on AO3
So, I have done my good deed for the week. For those of you who have never heard of him, Macedon was arguably the greatest Star Trek fanfic writer of the 1990s, before he gafiated. He was one of the big names on alt.startek.creative, not only as a writer but also as a moderator and mentor. His writing is some of the best stuff you'll find, but alas, his website was on a free hosted AOL site that went down a couple of years ago. Someone rescued it--yay! ... but they uploaded it onto geocities. (Oops.) His stuff was still available if you knew where to find it on trekiverse.org (which is ancient, creaky, and cumbersome). In the hopes of preserving his fic in useful function for posterity, I have uploaded it all to AO3.
Macedon came to my attention because he writes great Vulcans. In particular, Wisdom and Beauty. If you have any interest in Vulcans at all, you absolutely must read this story. It is a story of a Vulcan/Human bonding in the 24th century and the details and richness of the story. Vulcan comes alive. The society, the planet, the people. They are irrevocably threaded through this story in a masterful way. No canon characters appear, but the whole story is so incredibly well done that it doesn't matter. (Warning, there is a graphic description of a rape, and the psychological after-effects.)
Then I read his Jeu-Parti series. Macedon's greatest gift is the ability to take an idea, a theme, a moral (or a set of them, for his longer works) and make them come to life in the lives and thoughts of his characters. He explores issues realistically, without ever becoming preachy or moralistic or filled with platitudes, and he does it because everything (plot, theme, world-building, etc.) flows naturally from the lives of his characters. He makes every character he writes (original or not) be realistic, three-dimensional, and fascinating. Jeu-Parti is the three-part story of Jake Sisko, the son of Commander Benjamin Sisko, and his relationship with a Vulcan named Salene. But it's also about more than that. It's about choosing to be different, about choosing to pursue your dreams at the expense of normality, about dealing with society's disapproval, about friendship, about love, about family, about mental illness, about the difficulty of building a relationship--friendship or other--across cultural lines. If you don't like slash, you can read the first story without any qualms; each story stands on its own, and the first one is pure friendship. But I would still encourage you to try the other two stories. They're definitely worth reading.
Voyager is my least favorite Star Trek series, but I loved his other work, and so I decided to try the eight part "braided novel" he wrote with Peg Robinson, Talking Stick/Circle. And was in awe. The story is too sprawling (in the grand sense) in scale and reach to reduce to a mere synopsis; let us just say that this is Voyager unfettered and red in tooth and claw, such as Paramount with its nice tidy pander-to-the-demographics mentality could only dream of producing. This is what the show could have been if they had allowed the characters to be real, flawed, but still courageous people. This is what the show could have been if they had allowed it to actually deal seriously with issues instead of platitudes. The writing is awesome, the characters and plot will grip you, and if it doesn't make you think, you have no brain. There are not words to describe the awesomeness of this series. When I read it, I stayed up all night to read the whole thing despite having to work in the morning because it was just that incredible.
Among the many issues that the TV series ignored or glossed over that this series does not:
1) the fact that Chakotay is an Indian from a tribe that has somehow managed to keep its identity as a tribe despite the fact that the Federation has screwed it over almost as much as the US did back in the white settlement of the West.
2) the fact that Janeway and most of the Starfleet officers, enlightened and culturally sensitive as they may be, still carry the backpack of privilege, still look at the world through that lens.
3) the fact that the Maquis are not Starfleet, and have their own identity and pride, and that is very different from Starfleet identity and pride.
4) the fact that religion isn't just a nice bit of local color for the Indian character, but a true and deep faith.
5) how to build a community despite all of that.
I cannot rec Macedon's fic highly enough. Go and read. You won't regret it.
Macedon came to my attention because he writes great Vulcans. In particular, Wisdom and Beauty. If you have any interest in Vulcans at all, you absolutely must read this story. It is a story of a Vulcan/Human bonding in the 24th century and the details and richness of the story. Vulcan comes alive. The society, the planet, the people. They are irrevocably threaded through this story in a masterful way. No canon characters appear, but the whole story is so incredibly well done that it doesn't matter. (Warning, there is a graphic description of a rape, and the psychological after-effects.)
Then I read his Jeu-Parti series. Macedon's greatest gift is the ability to take an idea, a theme, a moral (or a set of them, for his longer works) and make them come to life in the lives and thoughts of his characters. He explores issues realistically, without ever becoming preachy or moralistic or filled with platitudes, and he does it because everything (plot, theme, world-building, etc.) flows naturally from the lives of his characters. He makes every character he writes (original or not) be realistic, three-dimensional, and fascinating. Jeu-Parti is the three-part story of Jake Sisko, the son of Commander Benjamin Sisko, and his relationship with a Vulcan named Salene. But it's also about more than that. It's about choosing to be different, about choosing to pursue your dreams at the expense of normality, about dealing with society's disapproval, about friendship, about love, about family, about mental illness, about the difficulty of building a relationship--friendship or other--across cultural lines. If you don't like slash, you can read the first story without any qualms; each story stands on its own, and the first one is pure friendship. But I would still encourage you to try the other two stories. They're definitely worth reading.
Voyager is my least favorite Star Trek series, but I loved his other work, and so I decided to try the eight part "braided novel" he wrote with Peg Robinson, Talking Stick/Circle. And was in awe. The story is too sprawling (in the grand sense) in scale and reach to reduce to a mere synopsis; let us just say that this is Voyager unfettered and red in tooth and claw, such as Paramount with its nice tidy pander-to-the-demographics mentality could only dream of producing. This is what the show could have been if they had allowed the characters to be real, flawed, but still courageous people. This is what the show could have been if they had allowed it to actually deal seriously with issues instead of platitudes. The writing is awesome, the characters and plot will grip you, and if it doesn't make you think, you have no brain. There are not words to describe the awesomeness of this series. When I read it, I stayed up all night to read the whole thing despite having to work in the morning because it was just that incredible.
Among the many issues that the TV series ignored or glossed over that this series does not:
1) the fact that Chakotay is an Indian from a tribe that has somehow managed to keep its identity as a tribe despite the fact that the Federation has screwed it over almost as much as the US did back in the white settlement of the West.
2) the fact that Janeway and most of the Starfleet officers, enlightened and culturally sensitive as they may be, still carry the backpack of privilege, still look at the world through that lens.
3) the fact that the Maquis are not Starfleet, and have their own identity and pride, and that is very different from Starfleet identity and pride.
4) the fact that religion isn't just a nice bit of local color for the Indian character, but a true and deep faith.
5) how to build a community despite all of that.
I cannot rec Macedon's fic highly enough. Go and read. You won't regret it.
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I'm so excited to get started on all this!
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(Yeah, after Macedon site went down, on my delicious I had the "Jeu-parti" series linked to the old .txt files of trekiverse.org, cumbersome doesn't begin to cover it...)
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