Teen actor Darien Freeman used to live for cons—before he was famous. Now they’re nothing but autographs and awkward meet-and-greets. Playing Carmindor is all he’s ever wanted, but the Starfield fandom has written him off as just another dumb heartthrob. As ExcelsiCon draws near, Darien feels more and more like a fake—until he meets a girl who shows him otherwise.
Part romance, part love letter to nerd culture, and all totally adorbs, Geekerella is a fairy tale for anyone who believes in the magic of fandom.
Starfield: The Unimagined
Frontier
By Ashley Poston
It is a not-so-secret
fact that I love sci-fi. Be it Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar
Galactica, Stargate SG-1, or
don’t-you-dare-talk-about-leafs-on-the-wind Firefly,
if it has space in it? I’m there faster than the Enterprise at warp speed. So,
it only felt natural to put my favorite bits of everything I loved into Starfield.
At first, it was a
daunting task. What did I want the universe of Starfield to look like? How did I want it to act? What did I want
the show to mean to the theoretical fans who watched it? The last question I
answered first—I wanted Starfield to
mean that anything was possible. That there was no such thing as zero-odds.
That cosmic dragons, no matter how big they seemed, could be defeated. I also
wanted Starfield to be a critique on
most sci-fi shows that are littered with white male leads (and admittedly, while
I was crafting Starfield I was still
raging over the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Kahn in Star Trek Into Darkness. Yes, I know it’s been years but no I will
not make like Elsa and let it go). In
the TV show Starfield, Prince
Carmindor is played by an Indian-American, and that’s a big part of one of the
main character’s draw to the fandom. I took the best of everything I loved
about Star Trek—the command bridge,
the Prime Directive, the show’s legacy on television—and combined it with what
I loved about Firefly—the
rogueishness, the witty banter—and the power play in Battlestar Galactica, along with the gun-slinging epic adventure of
Mass Effect, one of my favorite video
game series.
While crafting Starfield, I created episode summaries,
character designs, mission statements. I crafted seasonal villains who are
never mentioned in the book, designs for alien species and the complicated
political nuances between them and the universe at large. The quotes found at
the beginning of each section header are inspired from witty Mal one-liners in Firefly, and each episode title is a pun
on a film title. Basically, I just went wild and had fun. I let myself imagine
the kind of show that could draw two people together who could not be more
different, and once I found out how to do that, the rest was easy.
And it helps, really,
when your show’s biggest fans are the characters already in your head.
