Fan Fiction

Fan Fiction is a short story from The Concourse to Victory, volume III of the Course Books. It is the chronological successor to CTRL+Z from The Road to War, and deals with Hunter's punishment and re-enstatement after the incidents of that story. Its villain is Joseph Manse.

Plot Summary

Within the Known Worlds, it is not uncommon to pick up radio and television broadcasts, often from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and often from distant worlds. Often, the language would be similar enough for them to understand. It could be as simple as, “one day everyone's radios started picking up Lester Brown and his Band of Renown”. They might not have even realized at first that they were getting signals from another planet. Just while cruising the airways, people heard things.

Therefore, a popular fictional trend is for a company to find a complete movie or television series by digging through radio telescope telemetry, clean up the distortion, then release it in theaters. It's much cheaper then trying to film a new movie, and takes no creativity. Occasionally these companies will even hire actors to pretend to have worked on the production; other times they'll just say it was on a distant world, or just not bother because, again, they only have to sell it a few times to make a good profit.

This is the story, within the Course Books universe, behind Star Wars. With the (original) trilogy in the public domain, it has been shown, recut, shown again, broadcast, lost, found, adapted, and shown again since the Mage Wars. The near-ubiquitous presence and head-scratching popularity reached a peak in the late Sixth Age, when one particularly enterprising fan (Joseph Manse) was able to kick-start his own Death Star, which was destroyed by Hunter, completely and entirely without the use of the Force.