Doppleganger (Star Trek: TOS RPF story)

Star Trek TOS Fanfiction
Title:	Doppleganger
Author(s):	Sonni Cooper
Date(s):	1981
Length:	10 pages
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
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Doppleganger is a very early Star Trek RPF story by Sonni Cooper.

It was published in 1981 in the zine Infinite Diversity.

In the story, William Shatner is accidentally exchanged for Jim Kirk during fan convention.

Reactions and Reviews

This was written in Sonni's early days of fandom. Fantasy meets reality when Sulu, Chekov & Riley accidentally beam into a Star Trek Con & have the time of their lives. Kirk, Spock & McCoy follow to bail them out. The best of its kind!

Above average stories, but little outstanding. I very much enjoyed, however, "Doppleganger" where our beloved crew beam down into a 20th Century Star Trek convention. This idea has been used many times, but I have not met anywhere it has been as well done as by Sonni. Can you imagine Sulu's face in the dealer's room when he sees a picture, full-frontal, of Spock? (And the rest of the crew's expressions when he smuggles it into the ship?)

[zine]: If you enjoy strong, independent women characters, avoid this fanzine. The first two stories [snipped]. 'Doppleganger' by Cooper is much better written. However, it relies on an idea which was fresh when Jean Lorrah wrote Visit to a Weird Planet and Ruth Berman wrote Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited used it nearly 20 years ago -- but is no longer.

My final disappointment in [the zine "Infinite Diversity] was "Doppleganger" by Sonni Cooper. While considerably better written, its premise and set-up are a blatant rip-off of Jean Lorrah's "Visit to a Weird Planet" (and its flip-side "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman), which have been so widely re-printed in fandom that it is hard to understand the printing of a story such as this one —at least, without some acknowledgement of one or both of those stories.