The Alternative Warp

Zine
Title:	The Alternative Warp
Publisher:	Christopher Fletcher
Editor(s):	Christopher Fletcher & ?
Date(s):	mid-1980s (1986-1987)
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Language:	English
External Links:
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Alternative Warp is a gen Star Trek: TOS anthology with at least fourteen issues of fiction, interviews, and articles. It was published monthly. Issues generally ranged from 32 to 40 pages. The editors were fifteen years old.

The editor talks about issue #4: "In September of that year, a friend and I published the fourth issue of our monthly Star Trek zine The Alternative Warp. In our youthful enthusiasm, we committed ourselves to making that issue a 100-page spectacular commemorating twenty years of Star Trek. A normal issue ranged from 32 to 48 pages (and we didn't quite make our goal of 100 pages--I think it was about 88 when done). If I had a copy of it here, I would take a pic of myself holding it up and post it here. I doubt many of its original 120 copies are extant, but I believe that my father has one at his home in Wisconsin. Indeed, I am somewhat glad that I do not have my own copy here because I am sure that I would find the whole thing quite embarrassing now and would need to bury it in the bottom of a drawer.

But embarrassing or not, it was the work of fifteen-year-olds, and created with great enthusiasm and attention to detail, and it even had a little bit of fairly high-end content in it as compared to most of our issues. The 20th Anniversary edition featured a fairly extensive interview with David "The Trouble With Tribbles" Gerrold (which he graciously allowed us to conduct with him by phone) and a transcript of a speech by Trek creator Gene Roddenberry that I tape-recorded when I saw him speak at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and then painstakingly put on paper in columnar format with a manual typewriter. Other items included our "news" pages where we would gather short articles about Trek-pertinent current events. How we even found anything to report on during the pre-Web Era, I have no idea, but we did. The biggest bulk of it was filled with Trek fan fiction, written mostly by my co-editor and me, including a novella-length concatenation of nonsense titled "Peace in Our Time" by yours truly. I don't remember many of its details, but it dealt with a vast and secret infiltration of the Federation by a mysterious alien menace called the "Exoscan." As I recall, the Federation was being taken apart from the inside by this entity as a gigantic spacecraft or huge cluster of linked spacecraft of unknown (possibly extra-galactic) origin moved toward Federation space. It was all very portentous and frightfully epic." [1]

Issue 1

Alternative Warp 1 was published in June 1986.

Issue 2

Alternative Warp 2 was published in July 1986.

Issue 3

Alternative Warp 3 was published in August 1986.

Issue 4

Alternative Warp 4 was published in September 1986 and contains 92 pages.

• David Gerrold Interview (6 pages)
• Peace In Our Time (16 pages)
• Jean Lorrah Interview (3 pages)
• Gene Roddenberry Interview (3 pages)
• Live To Succeed (20 pages)
• Aliens Reports (12 pages)
• Analysis “City On The Edge Of Forever” (2 pages)
• Analysis “Mirror Mirror” (2 pages)
• Analysis “Balance Of Terror” (2 pages)
• McCoy Reports
• What If (5 pages)
• Merchandise Review (3 pages)
• On The Horizon (2 pages)

Issue 5

Alternative Warp 5 was published in October 1986.

Issue 6

Alternative Warp 6 was published in November 1986.

Issue 7

Alternative Warp 7 was published in December 1986.

Issue 8

Alternative Warp 8 was published in January 1987.

Issue 9

Alternative Warp 9 was published in February 1987.

Issue 10

Alternative Warp 10 was published in March 1987.

Issue 11

Alternative Warp 11 was published in April 1987.

Issue 12

Alternative Warp 12 was published in May 1987.

Issue 13

Alternative Warp 13 was published in June 1987. Cover by C. Kyle.

Issue 14

Alternative Warp 14 was published in July 1987. Cover by C. Kyle.

Gallery

• 

  cover of issue #4

• 

  cover of issue #13, C. Kyle

• 

  cover of issue #14, C. Kyle