Fanfiction – Moving Sci-Fi MLP Oneshot Fics

While I do try to minimize the amount of MLP fic I post here, rather than in my recommendations group, I just re-read a couple of short fics that really go above and beyond.

One of the interesting details about the MLP fandom is that, as far as I (and various other commenting readers) can tell, it has a higher than average proportion of authors who are also into science fiction (and the proportion of those who are into more than just the most common pop sci-fi like Star Trek, Star Wars, Mass Effect, etc.).

I could write an entire blog post about great crossover fics like The Maretian or elegant non-crossover first-contact fics like Arrow 18, or even stuff that barely got started, but is noteworthy just for existing, like The Long Trot but, today, I felt like talking about fics that give you the feels.

For this, I’ve chosen two which cross over with real life, so to speak. They’re quite short and their impact is the sort of thing that is best experienced fresh, so I’ll be brief in my descriptions this time:

Voyage’s End by The DM

This is a little 7,205-word story which could be thought of as two oneshots, each with a “punchline” designed to make you tear up. In the first one, Equestrian ponies catch one of the Voyager probes as it serendipitously passes through their solar system and then discover the golden record. In the second one, they follow the “map” on the record cover back to Earth.

One small step

In this 4,262-word story, written as a memorial to Neil Armstrong, contact has already come and gone (I’d assume, via trans-dimensional means) and Rainbow Dash is used as a vehicle to try to bring some of the wonder and emotion of the Apollo 11 mission to a generation who grew up reading it as history like any other.

It helps that the author embedded illustrations of the launch to drive the experience home further (one of the benefits of posting a fic to a site other than Fanfiction.net), but there’s a minor detail which could easily have been left out which spoils the second chapter for me. Thankfully, the first chapter was written to stand alone.

I think the first is the most powerful, but I’m not sure I can remember running into anything that hit me this hard in other fandoms… I’m sure that’s partly because I’m unmoved by the more personal, more TV-like means authors in other fandoms tend to prefer.

(Though there is one very un-TV-like fic in another fandom which I’d likewise recommend for its very distinctive style: A Ranma ½ oneshot named Elegy for a Golden Youth by Reid Carson. It’s been years but, if I remember correctly, it was inspired by Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.)

Fanfiction – Moving Sci-Fi MLP Oneshot Fics by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.