Looking Back To the Future...

Today, a beautiful calendar from Alaska arrived with my mail, courtesy of honorh. Am still admiring the photos. Also, the beta for my Multiverse story came and allowed me to correct it and send it off. Now I'm really looking forward to reading the others.

Now, I can see I have some new people on my flist, and some of the old people have by now watched shows they had not last year and the year before that, and I love those stories anyway, so let me take the opportunity to repeat my recs for the last two years of Multiverse stories. In case you're wondering: Multiverse = Ficathon where shiny space show crossovers take place. The requisite condition being that a) they're sci fi shows and/or movies, and b) at least some episodes/part of same take place in space.

So, my favourite stories in 2004 and 2005 were:

Crosses and Naughts (Farscape/Firefly): written before either Peacekeeper Wars or Serenity made it to the screen(s), set after both shows; a fantastic portrait of both Aeryn Sun and Mal Reynolds, and the future envisioned for both sounds true to character for me.

Displaced Persons (Blake's 7/Farscape): Scorpius, meet Kerr Avon. Lovely and sharp.

Perfect Imperfections (Farscape/Voyager) Scorpius gets around in this particular ficathon. Here he meets Seven of Nine. I've always had a not so hidden soft spot for Seven, and her interaction with Scorpius makes so much sense here...

Playing Poster Child (Farscape/Babylon 5): once upon a time there were two saints who were really bloody minded ruthless terrorists before they found serenity (not that one, the other one). Pre-series Zhaan meets pre-series G'Kar.

There And Back Again (Stargate/ Deep Space Nine): despite having seen only four episodes of Stargate, I adore this. Sam Carter goes through a wormhole and ends up on Deep Space Nine. It's just her luck that she hits it off with Jadzia Dax. (Jadzia does well in this ficathon, too, and her rendition here is just spot-on and perfect in all its vivacity. Extra bonus for fragment of a bad poem by Quark.)

Take Care Of Yourself For Me (Firefly/Babylon 5): River Tam in all her wiste, lunatic, poetic glory. And that doomed, abandoned telepath from B5, Talia Winters.

Catch a Tiger by the Tail (New Battlestar Galactica/ Farscape): everyone who saw both shows thinks it sooner rather than later: Six ought to meet Harvey. And vice versa. Neuralclones with a mission, unite! Or not. Considering one of them is a religious zealot and the other really has just had enough of being someone's instrument...

Resistance (Farscape/ Voyager): Scorpius again. This time, he meets the Borg and their Queen. Who have rather different things in mind than Seven did...

Resting Place (New Battlestar Galactica/ Firefly): it just happens that one of those ships in the human fleet came from another place altogether. Yep, it's Serenity, and when during early s2 of BSG, Laura Roslin and Lee Adama really need a place to hide, she's just the ship...

An Element of Blank (Dr. Who/ Deep Space Nine): my girl Jadzia Dax again, she who knows quite a bit about changing personalities with each new life while still retaing an ongoing core. Here she meets the Ninth Doctor.

Travel Light (Dr. Who/ Farscape): The Seventh Doctor and Ace become entangled in a rebellion against the Peacekeepers. It's just the sort of thing which would happen to them, the Ace point of view is to die for, and my favourite Doctor/Companion team deals beautifully with the moral ambiguities of the Farscape-verse.

Yours truly also wrote some stories, and discovered on the way that crossovers, which I used to shy away from, can get quite addictive to write. So, my contributions to Multiverse 2004 and 2005 were:


Crossroads (Star Wars/ Star Trek: The Next Generation). Which I still like to nickname "the two most unpopular characters in each fandom meet each other", though Anakin Skywalker has had a bit of a boost in popularity since Revenge of the Sith hit the screen (which it hadn't yet back then). Post-show Wesley Crusher ends up in a galaxy far, far away.

The One Who Got Away (Deep Space Nine/ Farscape): While doing their mountain climbing act in the episode Ascent, Quark and Odo trade stories. Or rather, Quark talks and Odo snarks. What Quark talks about is this really intriguing girl named Chiana. 'Twas a fun request to write.

Ghost in the Machine (Star Wars/ Farscape). Set between trilogies. During his hermit years on Tattoine, Obi-Wan Kenobi meets a young man with a dark past and a darker future. Yes, you guessed it, it's Scorpius.

Coming in from the Cold (Deep Space Nine/ Babylon 5): Garak reveals a hidden episode from the Dominion War, co-starring one Alfred Bester. This one was probably the easiest prompt for me, because a) both have a gift for one-liners, and b) neither would reveal any information he doesn't absolutely have to reveal to anyone, which makes for minimal exposition. Oh, and c) they're also utterly ruthless, with a gift to seize opportunities when they get them. Like I said, easy.

Pretty in Pink (Firefly/ Babylon 5): this, on the other hand, was the story which caused me the most headaches in advance. Because it stars two very nice, polite, sensitive people, one of them the sweetest guy in the universe. You see my problem? But I figured I could take two points in their respective canons where they could really need some comfort after the hurt. So, post-show and pre-movie Inara meets middle-of-season 4 Vir Cotto.