It Ain't Dead, Jim
A fan recently wrote me a deeply personal letter regarding what her concerns for the Orion Press website. We haven't had much to offer in terms of new material as of late, and as a result, she's worried that our website is dying, she's worried I'm moving on to Project Potemkin and leaving Orion Press behind, and she wanted to know what she could do to help.
To be honest, pickings have been very slim lately at Orion Press, and it's been that way for some time. As the editor and publisher of all our fiction these days, I really work on making sure the material we publish reflect my Star Trek perspective as much as it does the authors'. That can lead to the butting of some heads, and folks come and go. To be sure, we haven't had a lot of new material coming in lately. I'm very picky as an editor, and that has never and will never change.
Many of our writers over the years have moved on to other things. We'll occasionally hear from Nomad and Linda McInnis and even Chris Dickenson, but for the most part, they've transitioned to different interests. Some of our contributors, such as Ann Zewen and Joan Winston, have passed away. Some have simply GAFIAted (gotten-away-from-it-all) for personal reasons or FAFIAted (forced-away-from-it-all) for financial, work or family reasons. Some have gotten pissed off and left in a huff (*shrug* it happens, you know). Some just have no interest in writing or illustrating/drawing these days. Some are even trying their hand at going pro.
It seems like that this was all of a sudden for a variety of reasons, but it's not quite true. You see, the decline has been going on for three or four years, but over the past few years, we turned to some of our sister publications to determine if stories from those publications could be worked into the Orion Universe. About half of them could and were, in fact, posted and published as part of the Orion Universe. These stories included some of the racier Beyond the Farthest Star stories, several stories from Idylls and Tantalus and even the obscure Total Entropy. The publishing/posting of these stories added to the illusion that there was no decline in material, but in all honesty, there's been quite a drop.
We've had a fewer submissions in the past two years than ever before, although recently we've had a brief upswing in submissions. We had a really nice little novella submitted, and while the author went through a great deal of effort to accomodate it into the Orion Universe, it basically conflicted with Chris Dickenson's massive novel, Keeper of the Katra. There's simply no way I could minimize the events in it (or conflict with a story featuring T'Liba that's been in the works for a few years) as would be required by accepting the novella, so I passed on it.
A few submissions came in at a time when I was really burning out on Orion Press. There were two stories from two different authors that came in within the past six months that led to some head-butting, and afterwards, I simply chose not even to read half a dozen stories that came in from other writers. No, it wasn't fair to do that, but it also would've been terribly unfair to read them in my frame of mind at the time. I came close to burning out on keeping our Star Trek website going. (Anyone who hasn't maintained a website has no idea of exactly how much work is needed to keep it going, especially when updating it monthly.)
So here I was, pissed off and close to burning out when I came across this article on Paragon's Paragon. Suddenly, I was inspired again. I'd been thinking of doing a stop-motion animated version of Classic Trek (I'd even built part of the bridge set), and it dawned on me that I could do a live action version, set on a different starship with a different crew. Would it be any different than say doing Chekov's Enterprise stories? Not at all, I realized, and so after checking on a few details, made the decision to create Project Potemkin, a fan film series set after Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. The stories of Starship Potemkin will be set in the Orion Universe. As the staff grows and the project is approaching its construction date, I realized that not only can we do Potemkin-related fan films, we can even create some Third Mission, Chekov's Enterprise and Captain Sulu fan films! Fan films, after all, are simply fan stories told in a new medium. First there were paper fanzines, then electronic ones, and now comes the next logical progression: digital video/audio.
And yet this does not mean that our fanzines are going away. I'm still planning on publishing ANTARES 19 this summer. I'm still planning on updating this website often (especially with the help of folks like Diane Doyle and Carolyn Kaberline who help keep material coming in). I'm even contemplating contacting some of my favorite writers of the 70's and 80's and asking if they'd be willing to have their stories original published elsewhere posted on-line here at Orion Press.
I'm not going anywhere, and I hope that you readers aren't either. I do need some help, though, as I told the concerned fan who'd written me. I need some stories and artwork to publish. So if you've got a story, send it in and let me take a look at it. Don't worry about whether or not it fits the Orion Universe--let me deal with that. But send it in, and soon!
Randy
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