Recommended “Harry Potter in Sci-Fi Settings” fics

Last Updated: 2017-08-13 (Added “Harry’s Trek”)
See Also: Recommended “Sci-Fi Discovers Harry Potter” fics

So many things happen “yesterday” that we don’t act on. “Yesterday”, I re-read a Harry Potter fanfic… it took two yesterdays to finish. So “yesterday”, when I realized that it would make a good seed for another themed collection of fanfic recommendations, I acted on it… but ereyesterday, I had already made a blog post (and I wanted to use “ereyesterday”), so I decided to delay this by a couple of days.

Enough silly word-play. Today’s list is my favourite “Harry Potter dumped into some crossover future world” fics.

In most of these, the general plot will be “Harry winds up in a future without wizards and, as one of his goals, tries to bring magic back.”

As before, this mix of quality and following a theme means that each entry will epitomize some specific combination, so more than one entry per fandom will be the exception in this list. (To be fair, often because finding any good fics is difficult.)

Best of the Best

Browncoat, Green Eyes by nonjon

Length: 298,538 Words
Status: Complete
Crossover: Firefly/Serenity

This time, I decided to put the best first.

Having defeated multiple dark lords over the course of his life, when Harry Potter outlived his wife and decided to alleviate his boredom by putting himself into stasis, bound to the Weasley family line, he never expected to awake to a world where Earth has been abandoned, and a muggle descendant who would make Percy Weasley proud inherited the ring.

He promptly escapes from the government that thought he could be a useful tool to seek out this River Tam, discover the truth for himself, and determine what became of the wizarding world.

This is a nonjon fic, so it’s got some really fun and creative stuff to it, both in the world-building and the wit, I’d recommend it to anyone.

Harry Potter: Geth by mjimeyg

Length: 276,717 Words
Status: Complete
Crossover: Mass Effect

This fic is a bit hard to classify. It’s got a bit of fix-fic to it, in that the introduction of Harry makes the Mass Effect series play out in a more favourable way, but it doesn’t really have that limited appeal for me that most fix-fics have.

That said, I still enjoy it enough that I’ve re-read it a couple of times… the appeal is just too diffuse to put my finger on a single thing I like about it.

The basic premise is that, during the final battle with Voldemort, Hermione hit Harry with an obscure luck spell, only to later discover that it doesn’t necessarily bring good luck for the one it applies to. As a result, an interaction between Voldemort and Harry’s spells sends him to a point 400 meters above the surface of Rannoch. The Geth proceed to pull their own Lazarus Project and recruit him as their emissary.

Entertaining character interactions, some enjoyable OCs, and Harry’s “saving people thing” ensue.

Gods Among Us by arturus

Length: 189,956 Words
Status: Incomplete
Crossover: Battlestar Galactica (2003) with Stargate: SG-1 coming in very late

The first chapter of this post-Hogwarts fic begins with Hermione Granger, apprentice curse-breaker, asking Harry to help excavate a tomb where, true to his luck, Harry reveals an undiscovered passage by accidentally speaking parseltongue when he flippantly says “Typical, eh lads?” to a couple of snake carvings.

What follows is the discovery of a mothballed Furling ship, the accidental awakening of the onboard A.I., a startled attempt to apparate out, an emergency jump calculation by the A.I. to prevent resonances in the jump drive from causing a catastrophic explosion, the resulting failure the geriatric components in many key systems, and a Harry and Hermione, left unconscious but alive by life support failure, being picked up by a patrol from one of the surviving ships outside Galactica’s refuge fleet.

As with any well-structured fic, this setup doesn’t extend beyond the first chapter and Harry and Hermione wake to find themselves stranded with humans not of Earth and a ship nobody knows how to repair.

After a peaceful resolution to an initial misunderstanding, it is decided that they will be given a place on the ship and keep a low profile while they try to find a way home… a plan that goes out the window when an emergency forces them to use their magic in plain sight to save three people’s lives.

I really like the rather unique feel of how it integrates Harry and Hermione into things, but I love how, rather than being a story where Harry and Hermione take front and centre stage in the colonial drama, they merely serve an important role in a much deeper narrative where the cylons and figures from a deeper lore are the main characters for once.

I’d highly recommend this to anyone who’s OK with reading unfinished stories. (With the caveat that the first chapter needlessly uses bad Harry Potter clichés so, if don’t like those, you may want to just start reading from chapter 2 and treat the synopsis I wrote as chapter 1. You won’t miss anything important.)

The Voyage Home by Kinsfire

Length: 56,505
Status: Complete
Fandom: Star Trek (pre-Voyager and Voyager)

During the battle in the Department of Mysteries, Harry breathes in a load of dust from shattered time turners. He wakes up in 2358, where he discovers that muggles have replicated various magical effects via technology, prompting the statute of secrecy to finally fall, and that wizards and witches have even founded their own colony, New Londinium.

However, despite all that, there is still hope that he will be reunited with his friends. Records show that he somehow returned to the past… a future past which he decides is best brought about by completing his education on New Londinium, then joining Starfleet Academy.

…he winds up serving on Voyager when it gets pulled into the Delta Quadrant.

This is another story like Harry Potter: Geth in that there aren’t really any scenes or aspects I can point to as being amazing… it’s just a worthwhile read with an interesting idea for the romance subplot. (The ongoing “benign Moriarty incident” with the Hermione hologram from his re-creation of Hogwarts.)

That said, it does have two significant flaws that need to be mentioned:

First, in the early parts of Harry’s time on Voyager, it’s too eager to use “Harry induces canon characters to do canon things” or “Harry prevents a canon story arc” as a lazy way to hurry to the meat of the story and that gets irritating.

Second, Kinsfire’s ability to write a high-quality Star Trek story seem directly proportional to how far the plot distances itself from canon events.

(In fact, given how quality dips when Voyager comes into the picture, then slowly climbs back up, I get the impression that Kinsfire underestimated the effort required to keep recycled elements interesting.)

Also, the story spent enough time on the setup between “Harry arrives in the future” and “Harry is stationed on Voyager” for me to get a feel for what it would have been like if the whole fic followed that “generalized Star Trek story, not intersecting with canon events” pattern …and I’d have liked to see how that introduction could have done as a complete, Voyager-free fic.

All in all, at times, it was difficult deciding whether to put this at the bottom of the “best” or the top of the “runners-up” but the deciding factor was how transient the parts I object to are and how unfair it would be to penalize a story for my attachment to another story that could have sprung from the same beginning.

Harry’s Trek by kb0

Length: 66,125 Words
Status: Complete
Crossover: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Here’s the story to read if you want a “Harry on the Enterprise” story that’s just generally good. No brilliant bits of philosophical insight or genius bits of world-building… just a good fic.

The setup is simple. A wormhole dumps Harry and a bisected Voldemort’s body on the bridge of the Enterprise, fresh from the battle for Hogwarts, just in time for Harry to express relief at Voldemort’s state and pass out.

What happens next proceeds in a fairly Star Trek fashion. Medical scans and later conversation reveal that, in this story, wizards’ and witches’ bodies are saturated with anaphasic radiation and expect to replenish their supplies from Earth’s ambient field. Harry keeps magic secret but, with the OK from Troi, the crew and some enjoyably-done OCs start to befriend him.

The story then can be seen in two phases: Revealing Harry’s magic to others, and finding him a new norm to settle into.

The former is begun when the Borg show up to try to reclaim Picard and, rather than simply let Picard self-destruct the Enterprise to prevent its assimilation, Harry chooses to break secrecy by apparating over and catching the Borg by surprise by firing the strongest curse he can at some parts which look sort of like the ones Geordi showed him in engineering.

The latter, when Harry starts to form a relationship forming with a half-Klingon, half-Romulan girl after he saves her life when a damaged emergency forcefield generator gives out.

My memories of the details of Star Trek characterization have had close to 20 years to fade and I never saw many episodes of The Next Generation to begin with, so I can’t judge how in-character people are, but I found this an enjoyable read, so I’d suggest that you give this a try and draw your own conclusions if this summary interests you.

Runners-up

The Forever Mage by Darth Marrs

Length: 102,957 Words
Status: Complete
Crossover: Star Trek: The Next Generation

This is a story you’ll either love or hate.

On the one hand, it’s the only Star Trek fic I can remember which acknowledges the macro-level social commentary inherent in the historical progression of the Star Trek universe… but, on the other hand, it’s a rather heavy-handed polygamous shipfic with some Harry Potter clichés in it.

The basic plot is that, in the years following the ST:TNG movies, a young lady and her three friends are left a last request by her adoptive grandmother, a woman so ancient that nobody knows how old she really was. That request? Please go to a remote location in Scotland which was bombed during the Eugenics wars and perform a ritual to “memorialize the passing of the last of a bloodline”.

“Naturally”, what results upon calling forth “The Lord of the Light” is a young, naked, amnesiac Harry Potter who must try to discover his identity and the nature of the strange abilities he knows how to use, but not why.

In the process, he will start awakening the magic within five young women and Beverly Crusher, help the Federation rediscover and memorialize a lost chapter in the story of the Eugenics wars (that Colonel Green was actually a squib of the Greengrass line and wizarding genocide was his goal), and begin the long, hard task of bringing a forgotten branch of humanity’s evolution back from extinction.

Flawed as it is, I appreciate the author’s world-building and I especially love the artistry of the scene at the war memorial. There’s a spark to this story that feels like, with help from the right authors, it might have grown into another Browncoat, Green Eyes.

The Next Lord of Kobol by jbern

Length: 104,608 Words
Status: Incomplete
Crossover: Battlestar Galactica (2003)

This is a story with a lot of potential, but both its flawed pacing and how little progress has been made on the story arc prevent it from being considered for anything but runner-up.

The basic plot is “Harry wastes 6 chapters on what should have been one, then he gets thrown through the veil and finds himself on Caprica where the actual story starts and he has to build a life for himself while trying to also prepare for a vague threat he was warned about.”

My advice is to read the scene where Harry summons Athena via the resurrection stone at the end of chapter 4 (for context), then start reading from the latter half of chapter 6 onward. That way, you get what a professional editor would have cut down to a prologue and first chapter. (It’s simply not acceptable to waste an entire first act worth of text before the driving conflict shows up and things finally take on the form the rest of the story will follow.)

If you skip all of the needlessly verbose setup, this is an engaging fic about Harry living in the Colonies in the decade up to when canon would have the cylons attack. As a “decent fic focusing on pre-annihilation colonies” life blended with “Harry Potter in a sci-fi setting”, I quite enjoy it.

…and, in case anyone’s still wondering, here’s why I didn’t include these fics which represent or contain memorable HP crosses for their respective fandoms…

• Is Your Great-Aunt an AI?!: Portal is too contemporary.
• The Wizard Ashikabi: Sekirei is too contemporary and has its own list.
• Magic Online: Sword Art Online is too contemporary.
• dunuelos‘s Lone Traveler series: They’re theme-based fix-fic drabble anthologies.
  • Stories of the Lone Traveller, ch. 25-26 (Star Trek: TNG)
  • Stories of the Lone Traveller, ch. 64 (Battlestar Galactica (2003))
  • Further Adventures of the Lone Traveller, ch. 6-9 (Star Trek)
  • etc.

…not to mention, none of them really have the feel I was going for.

Recommended “Harry Potter in Sci-Fi Settings” fics by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.