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The Final Frontier 9
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Final Frontier 9 (Disk 2 of 3).adf
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STAG_Introduction
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1995-11-09
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TF01
3,STAG Introduction
4,by Simon Plumbe and Colin Gunn
THE S.T.A.G. COLLECTION
-------------------------
by Simon Plumbe and Colin Gunn
--------------------------------
You may be wondering what this section in TFF (started in Issue 6) is
all about. We thought it would be a good idea to include this small
file to fill you in on the idea behind this series, and how it all
came about.
The idea started from Colin Gunn and Simon Plumbe, when we saw in a
number of fan club newsletters that many clubs were either stopping
or reducing their zine output, due to poor sales, the increasing
competition from professional novels from Pocket Books and so on. We
didn't really agree with that and we have always felt that there is a
huge demand for good quality zines, it's just that many clubs don't
have the resources to tap into that potential readership or they seem
to be disillusioned with the whole zine idea.
Also we began to realise that many zines that have been published
over the years were produced on a very limited print run (usually no
more than 250 copies) and that once these have sold out, the zines
are rarely, if ever re-printed. Okay, we can understand that if the
publishers are certain that they aren't going to sell more than 250
copies, but that means that there are a vast number of Trekkers who
simply aren't getting the opportunity to read some wonderful pieces
of fiction, simply because the clubs can't afford to release it.
The idea then formed to contact one of the UK's bigger clubs,
negotiate with them and try and obtain the rights to re-print all
their old, out-of-print zines in TFF, promote their forthcoming zines
and to try and offer the club financial assistance in creating/
producing new zines for the future.
Simon initially contacted IDIC who, for reasons we won't go into
here, weren't interested in the idea, so Colin then attempted to
contact the Star Trek Action Group of whom he had a large number of
zines that he had bought over the years. The organiser, Lynne
Bannister, was not only interested in the idea, but was very
enthusiastic and immediately started to help us out and said that, as
long as we obtained permission from the original authors, we could
use any STAG zine we wished.
We then got together and started to sift through all of Colin's old
STAG zines, looking for names to contact and suitable zines that we
wanted to reprint (in other words, zines that were suitable for a
family audience the same way TFF is), and we quickly found a large
pile of over 50 stories! However, many of these zines were written in
the mid-late 70's, and we felt that the best way to get the addresses
of the original authors was from the organiser of STAG at the time,
Sylvia Billings.
Unfortunately, the address we had for Sylvia was out of date, and we
had no luck with directory enquiries, or literally dozens of other
sources including the local council that covered the area in which
she used to live! Finally, we managed to contact Sylvia, arrange
permission to use all of her zines and she then told us that she had
been working on a new zine for some time and when it was finished, we
could have exclusive use of it in TFF! What was even better was that
Sylvia managed to help us out with a number of the more elusive
addresses we had been trying to find.
In every case, we offered to either send the authors a print-out of
their zine as it appears in TFF or a copy of TFF if they have an
Amiga. What surprised us was the sheer level of support and
enthusiasm we have encountered from all of the authors with this
project. All of them are only too happy for us to re-print their
work, knowing how many new readers their zines are going to reach,
and many are offering help in tracking down other authors and some
are even offering to lend us their own STAG zines.
Not all of the zines will appear in the disk version of TFF. As you
are aware, we are preparing to release a paper edition of TFF and
we're sure that some of the shorter stories will appear in there and
some of the bigger pieces may be re-released as stand-alone zines
once more for a new generation of Trek fans to enjoy.
It's not an easy task producing this section (it's almost as
difficult to produce as the convention talks!), as each zine has to
be completely re-typed by hand, but we think you'll agree the results
are worth it. Also there are no TNG or DS9 zines here, because STAG
stopped producing zines before either show premiered, but we think
you'll enjoy the stories on offer.