STARSHIP OF FOOLS - (C) 1986 Jerry Kindall and Rex Crossley

Introduction to the Millennium Edition by One of the Authors

Rex Crossley and I wrote STARSHIP OF FOOLS during the 1985-1986 school
year at Grove City High School, in Grove City, Ohio. We were seniors,
and we had a couple of study halls together. We had both read Douglas
Adams' HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE novels, and Rex was seriously into comic
books, fantasy, and horror. We decided to collaborate, mostly to amuse
ourselves. Every day we spent at least an hour in the school's Writing
Center, hogging the 128K Apple IIe and typing our feverish imaginings
into AppleWorks. (The teacher, Mr. Queener, told us we'd have to give up
the Apple if anyone else needed it for real school work, but that hardly
ever happened.) By the end of the year, we had finished thirty-six
chapters, brought the story more or less to a conclusion, and called it
a novel. A copy was printed out and donated to the school as our legacy.
I heard some years afterward that people at the school still talked
about it, though I have no idea whether that's still true fifteen years
after the fact. At one point, I must have uploaded it to a BBS system or
two, and it apparently spread from there; I recently received e-mail
from someone who remembered it and found a mention of it on my Web site.

Rex came up with most of the characters and situations; I dealt mainly
with the mechanics of the writing. In fact, he actually drew many of the
characters (he also worked on comic books with some other friends) so
we'd have a mental picture of what they looked like. I've found in later
fiction projects that I work best with people like Rex, people who have
ideas. My strength is working out the implications of ideas, not so much
in coming up with them in the first place. This is why I haven't
finished much fiction since 1987.

The novel is juvenile and derivative, as you'd expect of a novel written
by a couple of teenagers who had just read Douglas Adams but who hadn't
quite got all his jokes. (In addition to HITCHHIKER'S, it also rips off
STAR TREK a fair amount.) It contains what might be considered
insensitivity toward women, as well as in-jokes so obscure that even I
don't get them anymore. One I do remember: Donald Whimperwort's curse of
"sellftof!" was derived from the buttons on the front of the Apple Dot
Matrix Printer in the Writing Center: SEL (select), LF (linefeed), and
TOF (top-of-form). The novel also has many technical flaws, not the
least of which is the continual switching of viewpoint between
first-person (in scenes in which Matt Baker appears) and third-person
(in scenes in which he does not). In its defense, however, I will say
that it is pretty short. Furthermore, most of the words are spelled
correctly, and some of the gags do still make me laugh. And it is from a
part of my past that I remember fondly. Frankly, working on this project
was one of the few things that made school tolerable that year.

For this so-called Millennium Edition, which I'm releasing in honor of
National Novel Writing Month, I went through and corrected a few
lingering typos and also changed some of the phrasing where it seemed
particularly awkward, adding one or two extra bits of exposition to
explain things that were so unclear they interfered with the story.
However, I resisted the temptation to improve it too much. This work was
of very much of its time, and I wanted to keep it there. I have also, in
the tradition of Douglas Adams' "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe," included
"Melvin's Crew," a short story Rex and I (mostly me, if I remember
correctly) wrote the year after finishing the novel. It was intended to
be sort of a prequel to STARSHIP OF FOOLS. There are some minor
inconsistencies between the short and the novel, but I fixed the worst
one: in the novel, the ship's computer's name was an acronym for a
different phrase than in the short story. I thought the short story's
version was slightly better and changed the novel to use it in the two
places where it appears. The short story used a different name for the
ship, since I wasn't fond of "Glorkwinkle," but I couldn't come up with
anything noticeably better, so I changed it to use the novel's version.

We planned a sequel to STARSHIP OF FOOLS, tentatively titled THE RETURN
OF THE SON OF THE THING THAT CRAWLED FROM THE SLIMY DEPTHS OF PLANET X
STRIKES AGAIN, and you can see that being set up in the original novel.
It would have dealt with another subclass of humans, the jocks, who are
mentioned briefly in the prologue to STARSHIP OF FOOLS, and their
attempt to defeat the nerds, who had always ridiculed them. Matt's
ex-girlfriend, Tammy, was to play a part, having been kidnapped by her
new jock boyfriend. It was never completed -- or even started, for that
matter.

Rex and I went on to attend Ohio State. He went into a fine arts program
and I went into engineering -- and then I dropped out of Ohio State, got
an associate degree at a community college, and lost touch with him over
the years. I found him listed on Classmates.com, but he didn't respond
to my e-mail. I think he's still into comics and gaming, as I once found
a picture of him on Wizards of the Coast's Web site as a member of one
of their play-testing groups. If anyone out there knows him, please see
if you can get him to drop me a line.

I hope that by now I've lowered your expectations sufficiently for you
to enjoy the novel for what it is. It's one of the few pieces of fiction
I've ever completed, thanks to Rex. I'm proud of that fact, even if the
resulting novel has some flaws.

Jerry Kindall
Lynnwood, WA
November, 2001

