INTRODUCTION -------------- by Simon Plumbe ----------------- Once more into the breach, dear friends! Yes, welcome to yet another packed issue of THE FINAL FRONTIER and, as usual, this issue is bigger and better than ever! This issue sees our first pieces of music from the renowned Allister Brimble. All of the music from Allister is brand new and has never been used before anywhere else although I think some of you may recognise the piece on this disk - it's a 17 minute re-mix of the theme to Team 17's "ALIEN BREED"! Not only is this a great piece of music, but it's also the longest piece ever to be seen (well, heard actually!) on TFF! In fact, this issue is a bit of a musical extravaganza with no less than 9 pieces of music lasting for a total of over 45 minutes!!! As well as this, we see the start of the STAG Collection as promised in the last issue. Basically, we have negotiated with the fan club, the Star Trek Action Group, and have managed to secure the re-print rights to all of their old Classic Trek 'zines, subject to clearing it with the original authors. We have already managed to get permission from 3 writers, giving us access to over 50 stories and the first two of these are in this issue. As well as running these in TFF, many may be re-printed in the paper edition of TFF being released early next year. If you have any old STAG zines we could borrow, we'd love to hear from you! Also, we have decided to finally lay the readers charts to rest. After an almost respectable start last time, the response has almost totally dropped off and I have decided that the disk space could be better used on something else. If we ever find ourselves with readers wanting to play an active role in the future of the mag, it may come back, but don't expect to see it in the next 12 months. However, to replace it starts our new Questions & Answers section where we'll try and answer any general questions on Trek, Trek merchandise and fandom in general. This has also resulted in a slight revamp of the trivia section, but you can read about the specific details for yourself. Still, if there is anything you ever wanted to know about Trek, now's your chance! Unfortunately, because of time restrictions and work commitments, we weren't able to bring you a convention talk this issue, but I've been working flat out on TFF now for a long time, and in order to get this issue out in November, I had to have a week off work and I did nothing but write and edit material for this issue. I just hope you lot appreciate it!!! As well as all this, for a couple of months I did some work on a mag called CD GOLD which is a new disk mag on CD for the CDTV/CD³². Whether this is going to be a success or not, I don't know, but it has unfortunately dragged me away from TFF on more than a couple of occasions and has had me travelling all over the country working on it! However, that level of involvement shouldn't happen again and for the next issue I'll be able to devote as much time as I usually do - in short, TWO con talks!!! One thing I'm still getting very annoyed over is the ridiculously low number of you that write in with contributions to TFF or those of you who send in responses to competitions/surveys or who submit entries for the letters section. I don't know whether you are aware of it or not, but TFF is the BIGGEST Star Trek fanzine in the UK with over 10,000 readers, more than 4 times that of it's closest rival, and well over double that of the Official UK Fan Club (and as many as their current maximum membership limit!), and yet each issue only sees work from between 20 and 30 people. Why? I don't know but most Trek clubs I've seen seem to get quite a high percentage of readers contributing (somewhere in the region of 10%) and yet we can't even get 1%! Come on, if nothing else, at least send something in for the letters section or just tell us what you think of TFF. We NEED your feedback to help us make TFF a better mag. Another gripe in relation to this is the number of people I and many of our dealers keep having to deal with, phoning up at all times of the day asking the same basic question, "When is the next issue out?". To be blunt... I DON'T KNOW AND PLEASE STOP ASKING!! To make things worse, whenever a reader asks a dealer this question, the dealers often end up calling me and to be honest, I'm getting rather sick of it. I have to stress that TFF is an AMATEUR production - we do this for fun and enjoyment, and we get nothing out of working on TFF other than the satisfaction of knowing that our work is being appreciated. The last thing we need is for people pestering us wanting to know when our next issue is coming out. We do have lives outside TFF, you know! If you want to see TFF out faster, why not start writing for it - I am NOT going to rush an issue out just to meet a release schedule. I'd much rather wait until we have enough good material before we release an issue and if that means relying on our in- house team of 20 or so writers, then so be it. If we had a writing team of around 50 writers including in-house and freelance (which is quite feasible considering our readership), then we could quite easily release an issue of The Final Frontier every two months or so and EVERYONE would be happy! That was one of the reasons for creating Beyond Reality - to act as a newsletter to keep readers informed of what we are doing, and when our new titles are due to be released. If so many of you want to know when the next issue of TFF is due, why is it that only a few of you have taken up the offer of a free subscription to Beyond Reality? For more details on getting this, see the adverts section, but please STOP calling if you're only asking about release dates. If you are a subscriber, you'll get the next issue as soon as it is released, if you're not, look out for adverts and reviews in the major Amiga mags. The only caller I haven't really been annoyed about is a reader, Patrick Ceupens who has called on a couple of times asking for advice in general and about TFF's release dates... from BELGIUM!! Hi Patrick, nice hearing from you! Yet again, I'd like to say hello to a few more new members of INFINITE FRONTIERS. First is Mark Platts who is joining the group as our new ray- tracing artist. All I can say is this - if you love ray-traced Trek art, you're going to love what's in store in future issues. We're already released a slideshow of Mark's work and you can get this either from ourselves or from Cynostic or 17-Bit. Next is Errol from E.M. Computergraphic. Errol will be handling all the image scanning for us (on a 24-bit flatbed scanner!) along with taking photos at cons etc. and I'm sure you'll appreciate the care and attention he has put into producing some very high quality scans for this issue. As you'll see, at the bottom of this file, we have a new mailing address! We recently set up this P.O. Box to try and speed up handling of all mail to Inifinte Frontiers and to allow me to have mail divided up depending on which magazine it is for or whether it is for orders or submissions or not. Could you all please make sure you use the new address from now on. Thanks. Don't forget, we are still collecting used stamps which we will pass on to the fan club IDIC towards their collections to raise money for guide dogs. Just send any stamps to use with your usual correspondance and we'll do the rest. Please DON'T remove the stamps from the envelopes - just tear or cut them off and, if you can, trim them so there is 1 or 2 mm of paper around the edges. Please don't send damaged or torn stamps though, as these are of no value. Thanks. This mag was produced and edited by Simon Plumbe, Colin Gunn and Sven Harvey. Additional help from John Kitts, Gary Moffat, Tim Smith, Sven Harvey, Matthew Dean, Neil Safi, and all the other guys at INFINITE FRONTIERS. Thanks! Editorial Address ----------------- To contact THE FINAL FRONTIER either with contributions (all text to be sent on paper or Amiga (High or double density)/Atari ST/PC-formatted 3.5 inch disks as 74-column ASCII files or on audio cassette as dictated articles!), donations, orders or just comments or if you are a software house or magazine interested in contacting one of our contributors then write to:- The Final Frontier INFINITE FRONTIERS P.O. Box 8966 Great Barr Birmingham B43 5ST ENGLAND Or you can call me (Simon Plumbe) on (+44) (0)21 358 1213 between 7:00 pm and 10:00 pm, Mondays - Fridays, or at anytime on weekends. Warning - if you call on Wednesdays between 6:00 pm and 7:00 pm you will get no answer - I'm not getting up to answer the phone while Star Trek is on!! Peace And Long Life...... Please note - we are NOT connected in any way with THE FINAL FRONTIER audio fanzine (is this still going?), the TNG fan club or the GERMAN fan club with the same name or the British Trek mag (why is it that everyone seems to take great pride in using our name?!). Still, we were around before ANY of the others, so this is the ORIGINAL TFF (not counting the film, of course!).