Power (Blake's 7 anthology published in the UK)

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You may be looking for Power, a Blake's 7 two-issue anthology published in the US that focuses on the female characters, self-describes as "feminist oriented," originally published by McEwan.

Zine
Title: Power
Publisher: Horizon
Editor(s): Susie Carnell
Date(s): March 1998
Series?:
Medium: print, zine
Size:
Genre:
Fandom: Blake’s 7
Language: English
External Links:
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Powerblakes.jpg

Power is a gen Blake's 7 digest-sized 104-page anthology published in the UK. Its focus is the female characters on the show.

Regarding the Title

And speaking of "Power"-- does anyone at Horizon realize that that title had already been used for a zine focusing specifically on the female characters, in the U.S. about ten years ago? I thought it was pretty strange that, having lifted someone else's idea for a zine title based on the name of an episode, they should then be making all that ridiculous fuss about the name of their convention being "intellectual property" that no one else was allowed to mention!

Have to admit the naming of the new Horizon zine was *entirely* down to me...originally it was just going to be a "girl power" special issue of the general "Horizon" zine...then we decided to make it a special and somewhere along the line it came into my mind to call it Power. No infringement intended - just a neat coincidence with girls and the Spices and the episode. Nothing sinister or spooky...Just my plagiaristic mind, obviously.<g> [1]

Contents

  • Hammer, Anvil, Forge by Russ Massey (28 pages)
  • Starlight by Tim Pieraccini (10 pages)
  • Beautiful by Starlight by Helen Speight (53 pages)
  • Strings by Nicky Barnard (10 pages)
  • Melting Ice by Isobel Macbeth (3 pages)

Reactions and Reviews

A good zine, much better than Horizon #21-- perhaps they saved up the best stories for this one? IMO the two standouts are the first and last stories, which of course is how clever zine editors often arrange an anthology zine; come to think of it, the two best items in Horizon #21 were placed first and last, also.

Russ's story is an extremely well-written, angsty account of Cally's experience on Saurian Major, from her arrival (breathtakingly described in a wonderful hard-SF sequence) to the death of the rest of her group, with a nasty little kicker of a plot device that goes a long way toward explaining why Cally was so crazed by those events. "Melting Ice" is another almost-adult story, Soolin's thoughts about her lover Avon. Both stories have a pleasingly bleak tone that is very B7.

"Strings," my third favorite, is a study in contrasting but equally strong-minded types, as Anna clashes with Servalan for the first time. "Starlight" pits Dayna against a female Federation interrogator; my least favorite item in the zine, but not a bad story. "Beautiful by Starlight" is a long pre-series Jenna saga. Nicely done, but personally, I prefer the idea that she was born into a swashbuckling smuggler family to the vision of her as an aristocrat educated by the Federation to become a pilot. (Though there is that comment of Servalan's that she is a high-grade citizen of the Federation.)

Overall, recommended. [2]

References

  1. ^ comment by Sarah, reply by Susie Carnell at Lysator
  2. ^ from Sarah Thompson at Judith Proctor's Blake's 7 site