Fanfiction – Infinity Box

It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have time to do my usual “go back and re-read something which stuck with me as good” routine, so here’s something reasonably worthwhile from my fresh reads:

Infinity Box by HMaxMarius

It’s a response to to Zaion’s Ship of the Line challenge and, for those not familiar with it, the challenge has to do with writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction in which, rather than just some knowledge of the French language, some kind of sci-fi ship sticks around when everything is over. …such fics are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me.

While I don’t have time to build a recommendation list, Infinity Box is one I happened to read over the weekend which is complete enough and decent enough to serve as a good sampler. (If you want more, the challenge page contains a listing of responses.)

As with all Ship of the Line stories, it begins with the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2, Episode 6 (“Halloween”), in which everyone gets temporarily turned into their costumes by Ethan Rayne’s idea of a prank. In this story, however, the relevant characters decided to dress to a Star Trek: The Next Generation theme instead.

The fic then does two things which aren’t specified in the challenge, but most fics seem to wind up doing:

• What exists feels like just the first act in a longer story, though, unlike so many, it’s actually complete.
• It’s a crossover with Stargate: SG-1 in which they ally themselves with the SGC while maintaining political independence.

Notice that I said most fics wind up doing that. If you want something more complete, there are a handful of things that progressed further and you can can choose the “Length (Desc)” sort order on the listing to find them.

The writing in Infinity Box one is generally good as far as Halloween fics go (they have a whole filterable tag to themselves on Twisting the Hellmouth), HMaxMarius is smart enough to do as little rehashing of canon events as possible, and I’d give it a 4 out of 5, which would be equivalent to +1 on a scale from -2 to +2.

In other words, it’s about average for what I’d find on the Fanfiction.net favourites list of someone like me. (Someone who has taste but also isn’t stingy with their faves.)

On a related note, given that this and alternative Mass Effect first contact fics (which don’t waste time following boring human soliders on the ground) are both guilty pleasures of mine, can anyone suggest another class of fic I might enjoy?

Fanfiction – Infinity Box by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.