LeapTrek

Zine
Title:	LeapTrek
Publisher:	Buffalo Chip Press
Editor(s):	Jim Rondeau
Date(s):	1996
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	Quantum Leap/Star Trek:TNG
Language:	English
External Links:
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cover by Zaquia Tarhuntassa

sample text page

LeapTrek is an 80 page gen anthology of crossover fiction by Katriena Knights. The cover is by Zaquia Tarhuntassa.

The first chapter of this novel appeared in 1993 in the zine Chain Reactions.

Summary

The zine starts with the landing of a rough leap. Sam blacks out after hitting his forehead, and wakes to find "a dark-haired, bearded man about Sam’s age" looking at him. He’s landed right in Captain Picard’s seat and after a short wait, Al appears and informs him that it’s February 27, 1995, and the ship he is on has traveled from the future . . . nobody’s quite sure why yet.

Reactions and Reviews

Nicely written, but with a few glitches.

I like crossovers. I think they’re great fun, and offer us a chance to see how the characters of different shows would interact with one another. I was crossing classic Star Trek and any one of Lucille Ball’s characters long before I had heard of crossovers. . . or zines, for that matter. (Well, um, you see Classic Trek was a Desilu production, which meant that Lucille Ball owned it for a while, which meant that a crossover could have been conceivable well, urn, never mind...) But crossovers are problematical as stories. If you have two heroes in a story, unless the writer is very careful, one hero ends up being the fall guy . . . and that leads to a sense of disappointment for the reader. Using the zine I edited as an example, one author’s Alien Nation/QL crossover worked as a story because she didn’t use any of the main characters. My QL/classic Trek was less successful because I made Kirk the fall guy . . . literally, he was knocked unconscious in a crisis. . . and Spock, whom Sam leapt into, was unable to release the emotional feelings to get the ship through the crisis. Sam was a hero, yes, but not Spock or Kirk. . . therefore the story ultimately disappoints Trek fans. This long prologue meant that yes, I really liked this zine. Does that mean I can’t find some things that disturb me? Well, yes. The zine starts with the landing of a rough leap. Sam blacks out after hitting his forehead, and wakes to find "a dark-haired, bearded man about Sam’s age" looking at him. He’s landed right in Captain Picard’s seat and after a short wait, Al appears and informs him that it’s February 27, 1995, and the ship he is on has traveled from the future . . . nobody’s quite sure why yet. (As it turns out, internally caused sabotage is the problem.) Sam does, of course, eventually get discovered. After a lot of discussion, during which Al, relaying for Picard, informs Sam that "He wishes you’d all quit yapping and do something," the Enterprise makes it back to its own time. And then the fun really begins, when Al finds out the next Leapee is Commander William Riker, and Sam is now 400 years in the future. The rest of the book lands Sam in almost every human bridge officer, even one simo-leap with Al as a male and Sam as a female in one hilarious, albeit slightly unrealistic scene (I have a hard time believing even Al, who admires females greatly, would be quite that sex-crazed in a crisis like this.) OK, my main quibbles. (1) This is just my opinion, but it seems to me that Data should see Sam without the body aura: animals, small children . . . why not sentient machines? (2) Data has a mighty short memory when it came to ultimately remembering Sam. The rest of the bridge crew may be magnafoozled and they never did tell Worf about this, but Data? I don’t think so. OK, he wasn’t there in the ultimate scene. Why didn’t Sam think to ask for him? (3) Gee, it’s awfully convenient that Geordi’s VISOR traveled with him. OK, I’ll accept that on faith . . . (4) This is going back to the hero thing: I still can’t believe that Sam, even if combined with Geordi, would have the screaming meanies. Sure, it worked to get him out of this difficulty. Sure, even Sam couldn’t figure out why he was doing that. Sam is the hero: in order to be believable, he shouldn’t break like this. Ah, well. In spite of my quibbles, I had a rollicking good time with this zine, in which Al has some of the best observations of the bridge crew since Q. I had trouble putting it down, in fact. It has a wonderful cover by Zaquia Tarhuntassa, one of the talented fan artists appearing in Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance. If you’re a fan of crossovers, TNG, and Quantum Leap I’d highly recommend this zine.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to purchase a few fanzines. After due consideration, I decided that, while Star Trek: The Next Generation has long been my favorite fiction medium, it was time I branched out a bit. But only a very small bit. In the Rondeaus' zine catalog, I saw a crossover of TNG and Quantum Leap, another favorite series, and decided to take a chance and buy it.

When LeapTrek arrived in my mailbox, I was a little dubious about it. Its plain blue, staple-bound cover contains the only piece of artwork in the entire zine, and I like zines with good artwork. The uneven block print of the text, while neat, looks amateurish, but as with any written material, it's the content that really matters, not the presentation.

Suspicion that Sam Beckett was about to boldly go into the future, only to spend the next sixty pages avoiding the Enterprise crew until he could Leap back to his own time, gripped me. Or even worse, that Sam would become romantically involved with Deanna Troi, who would sense that he was a stranger, whereupon the Enterprise crew would have to agonize over how his presence would affect their own timeline. I opened the cover, prepared for anything.

To my great surprise and relief, LeapTrek is a very well thought out story, with a good grasp of the rules and characters in both series. The Enterprise is caught in a time anomaly (big surprise there, uh-huh...), and as a result, they are stuck in 1995. Sam has Leaped into Captain Picard, and must decide how to help send the ship back to the twenty-fourth century, where it belongs. To add to his difficulties, certain members of the bridge crew can tell that their captain is not who he is supposed to be.

I found quite a bit of amusement in the reactions of Sam and Al to the appearance of the alien officers, but even more in the nostalgic and amused reactions of the Enterprise "leapees" to the "primitive" technology of Sam's project.

Sam spends the entire story leaping from one ST:TNG character to another. Before the adventure ends, he switches places with Picard, Riker, Troi, Crusher, and LaForge. With each new leapee, the Project Quantum Leap team learns a little bit more about the officers from the future. They attempt to send the Enterprise back to its proper time and set Sam back into his normal routine. (Personally, I think everyone involved shows a little too much blind faith that everyone will have 'swiss-cheese brains' and forget everything.)

Actually, there are a few little holes like that one sprinkled throughout the plot. For example, it's never made clear just how the Enterprise got stuck in 1995 in the first place.

ENDING GIVEAWAY ALERT: STOP HERE IF YOU DONT WANNA KNOW! I also found myself wondering why Ziggy, the Quantum Leap computer, could be souped up to the point where she could help send the Enterprise home, but nobody thought to use that extra power to try retrieving Sam. Could it be that *gasp* they don't want him back as much as they claim? We're told that Ziggy doesn't want to return the ship because she believes that she fell in love while interfacing with Data, and wants to keep him with her. Somehow, even as they work to change her mind, nobody thinks to try to leap Sam home. Go figure!

END OF ALERT: PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED READING Here and there, the author stretches believability a hair for the sake of getting out of a particularly difficult plot maneuver. But, more importantly, the characters stay true to the television shows that spawned them, and neither series is used purely for set decoration. Altogether, LeapTrek is an interesting story, and worth the eight dollars it cost to buy it. I found no typos, no grammatical errors, and no irritating mysteries over just which character is speaking at any given moment (I hate that!).

My conclusion? Good stuff for a rainy Sunday afternoon. This zine isn't much to look at, but if you see it on a convention table somewhere, give it a try. You may be glad you did.