Editor’s Foreword
Oddly enough, I already own two paper copies of this story, and remember when it was serialized in fanzine form. I guess it’s only because my copies are currently in storage, or at least where I can’t get to at the moment, and I can’t afford to track down six fairly sought-after back issues, that I went ahead and downloaded a copy (many thanks to StarCruiser on TrekBBS for posting the link!). And in the course of correcting the bizarre spacing (gotta love ASCII conversions!) I noticed a few errors and typos (I don’t recall if any of these made it to the store bought copies, but they were certainly in the online version). And, with all due respect to the author, some odd syntax, questionable verbiage in places, too much use of a passive voice, and more than a few instances where it wasn’t immediately clear who was speaking that just took me out of the story.
That’s where the fun began.
With an audacity that could only be possible through having my own copy of the story on my own computer, and probably an ego worthy of a Time Lord, I went though the story and did a proper polish on the gem, with an eye towards only tweaking those errors that showed up and making some of the more awkward bits of dialogue (mainly dealing with technobabble or spoken numbers) flow a bit better.
Starting with the sniggling little matter of how in the original text, nobody really introduced themselves, or questioned the Doctor on that left turn at Albuquerque, while on route to 1980 London, that landed him in the Enterprise’s transporter room, and moving on to setting up of scenes, descriptions of actions, throwing a few bones to the longsuffering Nurse Chapel, who’s referred to frequently but never actually says a thing, snipping bit that didn’t really add anything to the story…in short, what started out as a simple proofreading exercise turned into a full blown rewrite, keeping as much of the original text as possible, but streamlining the prose so that it didn’t get in the way of the story.
So, in the interests of full disclosure, the original text has been tampered with, sometimes significantly, but hopefully to good effect. How well I succeeded is up to you, dear reader. Hopefully, Ms. Airey doesn’t consider this another “complete travesty”.
What really started this is that I always had a problem with much of the artwork that accompanied this story, in whatever form that saw the light of day, and was only hoping to get my own copy that I could attach my own artwork to, starting with the front cover. It’s supposed to be a serious crossover, it should have serious illustrations.
So, I present to you Jean Airey’s “The Doctor and the Enterprise,” polished to a slightly higher shine.
Enjoy
Bob Littlepage
Arvada, Colorado
August 2009
PS. I’ve started to give some thought to adapting this story into a script format, probably for a radio play of sorts. Stay tuned, sports fans.
