Welcome to the "Star Trek: Athena" website, a site on the Web featuring the stories of the Starship Athena. On this site, in addition to the stories, is some background information on the ship and the characters. The creators of this site welcomes reader submissions and ideas and corrections to the stories and any other details that can be found here.
NEW ON THE SITE:
Well, finally, there is a new episode of "Star Trek: Athena" posted. The problem has been a simple lack of time, and far too much to do that it takes time to get back to posting episodes, but hopefully this one will be the start of more frequent postings. Some good stories are coming up and I am anxious to get things posted--but that can be said about many things. I could really use some twenty-eight hour days. Anyway, with J.J. Abram's new movie in the theatres, there has been an increase of interest in "Star Trek" and all things related to it. However, the "Athena" stories do not and cannot exist in the universe that Abrams has created. I regard his universe, as entertaining as the movie was, to be completely separate, not an alternate timeline or a parallel dimension, but a completely separate science-fiction universe, essentially something like "Star Wars" (which the movie resembles more than "Star Trek") or the "Firefly" universe and others. I will continue to work in the interpretation of the "Star Trek" universe that I have created, and so I have a new episode of "Athena" here. Episode 61 is Outside the Box. After the events of "The Unimaginable," the Athena is sent to Ramsadon as Ambassador St. Pierre and her staff assess the planet as a potential location for the Rigel evacuees to go. En route, however, something starts to go wrong. At the same time, Sanjay Indesakar is running a command simulation program on the holodeck, and he is presented with a scenario... with little idea of what is going on. This is the "Athena" malfunctioning-holodeck story, and every series is allowed one (that is a fan-fiction rule, don't you know). COMING SOON:
Episode 62, "Euclid's Day," is the next episode to be posted. When writing the "Athena" stories, I would like to have a balance of stories, with some stories featuring balls-to-the-wall action, quieter more introspective stories, "strange new worlds" stories and more. The idea is to create a variety of different stories. This one is an attempt at a murder-mystery story. Against the backdrop of Ambassador St. Pierre investigating Ramsadon as a possible evacuee site and Indesakar meeting with his friend Pali Arudhupur, there is the matter of a suspicious death of a scientist, and T'Kor is on the case.
Becuase of the failure of the hard drive on my computer and an incomplete understanding on how e-mail addresses are stored (Windows obscured this, and I thought I saved the address book, but I was wrong), all the e-mail addresses for the "Star Trek: Athena" e-mail notification list were lost. If you are interested in continuing to be notified when new content is posted on this site, please send me an e-mail and I will add you to the list. I will come up with a better backup solution, perhaps even writing down the e-mail addresses, to prevent this from happening again. In addition, a lot of people who have joined the notification list no longer have valid e-mail addresses. If you had sent me an e-mail previously, and have not received any notifications, plesae send another e-mail with an updated address.
First-time visitors to "Star Trek: Athena" should read About Star Trek: Athena first, to understand exactly what is going on here. Like all other "Star Trek" fan fiction sites, there are slight differences between the "Star Trek" universe as portrayed in television and film and the universe as it is revealed in these stories.
For those who have a story idea
or even a complete story that they would like to see developed
into a "Star Trek: Athena" episode, submissions are
most welcome, but read the Reader Submissions
page first.
To learn a little about the men and
women who are the starring characters for "Star Trek:
Athena," not to mention the supporting cast in terms of
other members of the crew, check out the Crew Profiles page. There are eight individuals who could be
called the "main characters," as well as a whole
shipful of secondary characters.
The Athena is a Nebula-class
starship, although there are differences from other Nebula-class
vessels as seen in the movies and various episodes, not to
mention other fan fiction sites. To learn a little more about the
ship, consult the Starship Specifications page. One warning, though, your browser must support graphics for this page.
Click on the icon to the left to view the Athena dedication plaque, the one found on the bridge. Some of the names on the plaque represents those who helped put this site together. To return to this page, click on the browser back button.
Stories of the Athena are not the only ones on this site. Stories of other ships and crews have been written, and a selection will appear on the Other Ships index page.
These are the longer stories, the novels basically, although so far, there is just one.
The stories that make up the majority of the website are on the story home page. Click on the icon to go to the list of currently available stories. Instructions on how to navigate through the stories are given on that page.
No website is complete without links, and the links page have some of the better "Star Trek" related ones. These are relatively stable sites and the links should be unbroken.
The map of Known Space where the Athena conducts its travels, showing the relative location of the major space powers is found here. This is an on-going project and more maps will be added in the future. Graphics are required for this section.
Enjoy the stories and the other contents on this site, but remember that "Star Trek" is a licensed property of Paramount Pictures. For that reason, this site is provided for the non-commerical enjoyment of the author of the stories and the visitors to the site. All content on this site belongs to the author and White Tornado Publishing and cannot be used for any commercial purposes. Please do not take content from this site and post it on another without permission of the author.TECHNICAL INFORMATION
This website was created on a notebook computer with a 640X480 screen set at 64K colors, and the page was tested on Internet Explorer 4.0. If your configuration is the same at that, then the "Star Trek: Athena" site should look as I created it. If you are using a different combination, especially a higher-resolution monitor, it might not look right. If there are problems, e-mail me with the problem and I will attempt to rectify the situation so that the site displays properly on more configurations. Be warned that this site uses some HTML tags not supported by Netscape Navigator.
If there are any questions, any comments or any concerns that you may have about "Star Trek:
Athena," you are welcome to E-Mail
Me. If possible, I will respond to e-mails I receive, and if the comments are of general interest, there could be a "reader response" page on this site in the future. Thank you for taking the time to visit "Star Trek: Athena", and I hope you enjoy your stay here.
The "TrekCreative Writers Guild" is a new attempt to create a directory of Star Trek fan fiction sites, including this one, and other good and recommended sites. The latest story on each site is (usually) listed, especially if the site owner, Garry Stahl, can keep it up to date. Click on the logo to go to the new Trekcreative Writers Guild site for more original-character "Star Trek" fan fiction.
The following are four original-character Star Trek fan fiction sites that I strongly recommend because of the quality of the story-telling and the effort that the creators have put into making interesting and informative "Star Trek" sites. They features some top-quality story-telling. Although their vision of the "Star Trek" universe do not necessarily agree with mine, they are still quality sites.
The stories of Garry Stahl, with various ships and captains set in various eras of the Star Trek universe; very well done with a well-developed alien race, the Ane, always a positive feature in fan fiction when done as well as it is here.
"Star Trek-Outwardly Mobile" is a large collection of well-written stories by Jay Hailey, featuring the captain with the same name (but not the same person). Well done and thought-provoking, and now he has a new and improved site.
"USS Liberty" is the work of Joseph Manno, who not only writes interesting and compelling stories, but also devotes serious time to editing, something not often seen in fan-fiction writing. This site is just about as good as it gets.
A great new site to check out is "Star Trek: Dark Horizons," the work of Michael Gray. Climb on board the largest starhip in the Federation, the U.S.S. Chamberlain, on its voyages. This site is one of the best for the images and illustrations that accompany the stories and background materials on the site.
Also check out the TrekCreative Home Page, if you really want to see what I and the other authors here look like, plus brief bios of us and the others on the "TrekCreative" mailing list. If you are interested in the "TrekCreative" mailing list, click on the TrekCreative Writers Guild link and follow the instructions there.