From Me to Q

Star Trek TNG Fanfiction
Title:	From Me to Q
Author(s):	Julia Houston
Date(s):	1997
Length:
Genre:
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Next Generation
External Links:	online here
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From Me to Q is a Star Trek: TNG Picard/Q story by Julia Houston.

The story is an ensemble adventure with an episode-like feel.

Reactions and Reviews

Can be seen as P&Q or P/Q unrequited. Reads like it actually could have been an episode of the series. On a mission to a world consumed with apocalyptic fear of Cleansing, the Enterprise crew run into Q, who's there on his own agenda, and a mysterious woman who turns out to not actually be an OC at all.

This story was Julia Houston's introduction onto the newsgroups, and what an introduction it was. I didn't read it at first, as she humbly first kept it off Usenet and on her homepage. However, despite this unjustified humility on Julia's part, word-of-mouth traveled fast. From the brilliantlly described opening that put me on her new planet such as is expressed in the following pair of sentences: "A movement caught his eye, and he turned fiercely to the woman who brought in a large bowl of fruits to set on a side table. A small bracelet on her right wrist told him she was a daughter of the First House, doubtlessly one of the hostages Im'pel had taken from the Hill during his last foray." to the set-up of the intricate plot with its beautiful details such as the flowers of the land of Ha't, and to the stunning conclusion, I was drawn in and captured. You could call this story P/Q, but to do so would be to mock the genre, because it is a Picard/Q story only in the most metaphorical sense, a yearning that is all the poignant for how lightly it is expressed. Julia knows how to tell a richly detailed story while still showing only as much as the reader needs to know -- a gift I would very much like to share.

From the title I thought it would be a homage or an author-character romance so I had a pleasant surprise. It was an involved story involving a strange religion with a nice mystery and a quest for a solution.

There's something very satisfying about a fanfic that reads *almost* like an actual episode. Sure, we've all read fics with loads more sex than you'd ever see on TV, hot explicit manly love, and plenty of intense romance. But a story that's *almost* like an episode, except with just a tantalizing hint of more emotion from certain characters than we get to see in the series, gives you a feeling like it could *be* an episode, and therefore, it feels more *real* than the hot'n'heavy manlove.

In this story, Picard and crew go to investigate the disappearance of a Federation anthropological team on a world undergoing an upheaval. They run into Q, who warns them to leave. They also run into Mary Sue. Except she's *not.* In one of the most entertaining sudden reversals I've ever read, an enjoyably written but somewhat Sue-ish original female character who's played up by the author as being all mysterious and intense and stuff turns out to be a canon character from the future... and it would spoil it to say who, except to say that the characters are both nothing alike, and enough alike that you can, indeed, believe that this woman is the future self of the canon character. Somebody's going to do a lot of growing up one of these days, you see.

The thing with the crew happening to run into Q doing something that has nothing to do with them but is his own agenda is something I *always* wanted to see on TNG (sadly, when it finally appeared on Voyager it wasn't nearly as cool as this story is.) The regulars all get something to do-- this story doesn't fall in the "I only care about one or two TNG characters so only they will get anything to do" trap fanfic often falls into. And I may be rare, but I *like* stories where the slash is kept at just a slight level higher than the series subtext. Q's feelings for Picard eventually become evident to the reader, but never actually to Picard himself, which frankly is more in Q's character than the passionate declarations of love I've seen in some fanfic.

Interesting alien species, plausible crew characterisations, plus a plot, to boot! An oldie but a goodie