I was not meaning to suggest you rip-off SA at all. And if you look at the evoloution of Starhunt specifically, it began as a story proposal for TOS. That story proposal became the genesis of both Starhunt as well as Gerrold's Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool.
Well,
Yesterday's Children (the novel he later renamed
Starhunt) started out as a novel version of that Trek proposal, but after the first couple of chapters writing about the original spaceship crew he came up with, he got so caught up in what they were doing that he veered off into a completely different story that ultimately had nothing to do with his Trek outline. That's why he eventually went back and wrote
The Galactic Whirlpool, which actually was based on that outline. (And I wish he'd changed the name from
Yesterday's Children to
Starhunt right at the start, instead of a decade later, because the YC title has absolutely nothing to do with the original novel he wrote under that name, and would've been a far better title for the Trek novel.)
And either way, the point is that it was still derived from his own original concepts that never actually ended up as part of ST. So it's a very different thing from an author basing something on an existing series that the author had nothing to do with.
I said it badly, but I did mean to suggest you develop your ideas in your own original universe(s). Apologies for the misunderstanding.
I guess I should clarify, these are ideas I already had in mind for my own stuff, and I thought it would be fun to reinvent SA/JoSC in a way that made use of those ideas. Kinda like how some of my Trek novels and my X-Men novel are built around ideas I initially devised for my original fiction.
Westerns were big in my house so I liked John Russell (blue makeup and all) when he replaced Doohan.
We had a black-and-white TV at home, but one week we went on vacation and I got to see JoSC on the color TV in the hotel room, and I was startled to discover that Commander Stone was blue! I remember, that was also the first time I saw
Star Trek: "The Immunity Syndrome" in color, and I was blown away by the full-color space amoeba.
And since people are mentioning
Space: 1999, one of my local stations used to have a weekly "Showcase" package of
Star Trek and
Space: 1999 back to back (I think they had Showcases of different genres on different nights), and one week they showed ST's "The Immunity Syndrome" in the first hour and S99's "The Immunity Syndrome" in the second hour! That was kinda weird.
