To all who have read my Colin fanfic series,
I remember back during my senior year in high school when I first heard of a new television show called Sliders to premiere on Fox in February of 1995. One of the promos said that a student was to get an "A" for adventure, and it involved traveling to worlds with different histories.
I watched the two-hour pilot on Wednesday. The pilot starred Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks, and John Rhys-Davies. I remember Quinn's first slide, his journey to the icy San Francisco, and their adventures in Communist America. And we all remember the surprise ending when Quinn's father came home for dinner. (Earlier scenes in the pilot established one important fact about Quinn's father.)
The four of them left that world in search of home. Sliders was on every Wednesday night at 9 P.M., right after Beverly Hills, 90210. The first season stories incorporated one of two themes. The sliders dealt with a history different from Earth Prime (the popular terminology used to describe the world where Quinn's sliding generator was built.) or dealt with the lives of their duplicates. The season finale had Quinn shot in the back of his shoulder.
The second season premiere continued their journey, as Quinn was recovering from his gunshot wound. He meets another version of himself who is also a slider. The second season had the sliders deal with more parallel universe ideas, such as a world where Texas took over western North America during the Civil War, or where the Mexicans maintained sovereignty of the section of North America between the Rockies and the Pacific, or where dinosaurs survived in North and South America. The second season also introduced the kromaggs, who would be an integral part of the storyline two seasons later.
The third season expanded the sliders' sliding radius to include Los Angeles. (It still baffles me why such a thing was done, as Universal Studios has a street in its backlot which is commonly used to film exterior scenes that are set in San Francisco.) It was in this season when the show took a departure from the staple of dealing with alternate histories or alternate versions of the sliders. Thus, we have episodes like "Desert Storm" and "The Dream Masters" and "Paradise Lost". The third season introduced a new timer, acquired from a world where Egyptians colonized North America. And it introduced an important change, which was the departure of John Rhys-Davies.
The pivotal episode was the two-parter called "The Exodus". (This would not be the last Sliders episode named after a book of the Bible.) It too dealt with an alternate history, one in which the Cold War was still going strong. Of course, there was this other problem. Something from space, believed to be pulsars, was coming to irradiate the whole Earth. (I know what some of you will say, those objects were not pulsars because of their shape. The characters in the episode never actually sighted these objects up close, so they had no reason to believe they were something other than pulsars.) The sliders meet Captain Maggie Beckett and Colonel Angus Rickman. Soon they were helping them with the evacuation of some people from this doomed world. Along the way, they stumble upon Earth Prime. Of course, Colonel Rickman had this disease and he survived by stealing brain fluid from others. Eventually he murdered Maggie's husband as well as Professor Maximilian Arturo. The sliders then chase him to avenge the professor's death as well as obtain the timer that has Earth Prime's coordinates.
The post-Arturo episodes of the third season did not deal with alternate histories at all, and only one episode dealt with an alternate Quinn. Each episode involved the monster-of-the-week. The season finale separated the sliders. Wade and Rembrandt slid to Earth Prime, while Quinn and Maggie were separated due to some malfunction on the timer. It was then that Fox dropped Sliders, thanks to the dumb writing.
Foruntately, the Sci-Fi channel picked it up for a fourth season. And immedaitely there was a dilemna. If Wade and Rembrandt made it home, and Quinn and Maggie manage to fix the timer to open the path to Earth Prime, then what reason could there possibly be to continue sliding. On top of that, Sabrina Lloyd did not sign up for the fourth season. One suggestion would be that the world Rembrandt and Wade slid to was not really Earth Prime. But the producers had a better idea.
They brought back the kromaggs who were introduced in the second season. Quinn and Maggie would slide back to Earth Prime and find out it was ruled by the kromaggs. They found out the kromaggs took Wade away. The two of them rescue Rembrandt from a prison camp and then make a startling discovery. Quinn was not born on Earth Prime. He was born on the kromaggs' home world, and his parents hid him with their Earth Prime duplicates during a war between the humans and kromaggs. Quinn also had a brother named Colin (portrayed by Jerry's brother Charlie O' Connell). So when the timer counted down to zero, the sliders had thre missions-find Colin, find Wade, and find the kromaggs' home world.
The fourth season went back to the basic concepts that the first season was based on. Once again, the focus was on alternate histories or alternate people. There were also quite a few episodes where the sliders dealt with the kromaggs, as they were an integral part of the storyline. Colin was introduced, and Maggie met up with a live duplicate of her deceased husband. (Incidentally, there was only one episode where the sliders got involved with a duplicate of Colin Mallory.) The season finale had the sliders go to a world where there was a war between humans and kromaggs, and where the Mallories hid their sons. Of course, that was not really home, as it was the humans who waged a war of genocide against the kromaggs. Thus they continued on.
The fifth season had an unexpected turn of events. Both Jerry and Charlie were gone, so the producers had to come up with something. And they did. They had Quinn fuse with one of his duplicates, resulting in Mallory, played by Robert Floyd. As for Colin Mallory, he became unstuck, which means sliding randomly without a timer. The fifth season premiere introduced Dr. Diana Davis (played by Tembi Locke) and Dr. Oberon Geiger, another unstuck man.
And so the sliders continued. In addition to finding the way home and finding Wade, they also had to find a way to separate Mallory and to reunite with Colin. Most of the fifth season episodes dealt with alternate histories or alternate people. There were two episodes where they had to deal with the kromaggs, and both were significant. the first episode revealed that the weapon used to defeat the kromaggs ruined the environment, and the second episode dealt with the fate of Wade Welles.
The final episode was "The Seer", where the sliders found a world where their exploits are on a television show. They also meet up with Quinn's adoptive mother. In the end, Rembrandt injects an anti-kromagg virus into his blood and slides home. And so after five years, Sliders ends.
Because of the plot of Sliders (travelling through parallel universes) there are thousands of possibilities for story ideas. I already had a couiple of parallel Earth ideas. I wondered what to write about. I wanted to maintain continuity and write about the characters introduced in the series, rather than their duplicates who also went sliding. The fifth season, which featured the departure of the Mallory brothers, gave me an idea. I would chronicle Colin Mallory's adventures in unstuck sliding, from the beginning of "The Unstuck Man" to the end of "The Seer".
It was obvious that I would write these stories in a first-person perspective. Colin was the only slider in these stories, so his point-of-view would be the only point-of-view. And since I wanted to maintain continuity (I wanted to wriote about THE Colin, not an alternate Colin) I browsed the Internet to get details about the past episodes.
My first story was titled "The Unstuck Man"; I chose the title of this story because it started off where the fifth season premiere started off, and focused on what Colin was doing. I had three world ideas to incorporate. the first world Colin visited wouild be a world where Arabs colonized North America. The second world was a world where the Cold War was between the United States and Nazi Germany. And the third world idea was where the United States was an Axis Power during World War II and was a totalitarian police state ruled by white supremacists as of June of 1999. I made sure to incorporate duplicates of characters that appeared in previous episodes; this would be a pattern for my other stories. My favorite part was Colin's encounter with his native duplicate. You should read the story to find out what it was.
I then wrote the rest of the Unstuck Colin series. Some of these stories incorporated ideas I had in the beginning, such as a world where California is under martial law, or where Native Americans believe that the kromaggs are servants of their Creator, or where a maximum security federal prison employs explosive collars to prevent prisoners from escaping, or where kromaggs were testing a device similar to the Combine that caused Colin to be unstuck, or where sex and dating and marriage are strictly regulated by an agenct under the U.S. Department of Justice. And the other stories incorporated ideas I came up with later, such as a world where a plague wiped out almost all the adults or where a witness from a parallel world was relocated.
And then I wrote "The Slidemaster", which you have just read. I do not need to tell you what ideas I incorporated. But if you skipped some of the chapters, I will tell you that it involves an unstuck duplicate of one of the original sliders, more kromaggs, and a family reunion.
I want to thank you for reading through all my stories. The subject of parallel universes is fascinating, and the fact is that they do exist. David Deutsch makes a convicing argument in his book The Fabric of Reality. If you have any coments about a particular story, just post a review to the appropriate story. If you have any comments about the series in general, you may e-mail me at mejercit@hotmail.com.
You must be wondering if I will write any more Sliders stories. I wil as soon as I get the idea.
Michael
I remember back during my senior year in high school when I first heard of a new television show called Sliders to premiere on Fox in February of 1995. One of the promos said that a student was to get an "A" for adventure, and it involved traveling to worlds with different histories.
I watched the two-hour pilot on Wednesday. The pilot starred Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks, and John Rhys-Davies. I remember Quinn's first slide, his journey to the icy San Francisco, and their adventures in Communist America. And we all remember the surprise ending when Quinn's father came home for dinner. (Earlier scenes in the pilot established one important fact about Quinn's father.)
The four of them left that world in search of home. Sliders was on every Wednesday night at 9 P.M., right after Beverly Hills, 90210. The first season stories incorporated one of two themes. The sliders dealt with a history different from Earth Prime (the popular terminology used to describe the world where Quinn's sliding generator was built.) or dealt with the lives of their duplicates. The season finale had Quinn shot in the back of his shoulder.
The second season premiere continued their journey, as Quinn was recovering from his gunshot wound. He meets another version of himself who is also a slider. The second season had the sliders deal with more parallel universe ideas, such as a world where Texas took over western North America during the Civil War, or where the Mexicans maintained sovereignty of the section of North America between the Rockies and the Pacific, or where dinosaurs survived in North and South America. The second season also introduced the kromaggs, who would be an integral part of the storyline two seasons later.
The third season expanded the sliders' sliding radius to include Los Angeles. (It still baffles me why such a thing was done, as Universal Studios has a street in its backlot which is commonly used to film exterior scenes that are set in San Francisco.) It was in this season when the show took a departure from the staple of dealing with alternate histories or alternate versions of the sliders. Thus, we have episodes like "Desert Storm" and "The Dream Masters" and "Paradise Lost". The third season introduced a new timer, acquired from a world where Egyptians colonized North America. And it introduced an important change, which was the departure of John Rhys-Davies.
The pivotal episode was the two-parter called "The Exodus". (This would not be the last Sliders episode named after a book of the Bible.) It too dealt with an alternate history, one in which the Cold War was still going strong. Of course, there was this other problem. Something from space, believed to be pulsars, was coming to irradiate the whole Earth. (I know what some of you will say, those objects were not pulsars because of their shape. The characters in the episode never actually sighted these objects up close, so they had no reason to believe they were something other than pulsars.) The sliders meet Captain Maggie Beckett and Colonel Angus Rickman. Soon they were helping them with the evacuation of some people from this doomed world. Along the way, they stumble upon Earth Prime. Of course, Colonel Rickman had this disease and he survived by stealing brain fluid from others. Eventually he murdered Maggie's husband as well as Professor Maximilian Arturo. The sliders then chase him to avenge the professor's death as well as obtain the timer that has Earth Prime's coordinates.
The post-Arturo episodes of the third season did not deal with alternate histories at all, and only one episode dealt with an alternate Quinn. Each episode involved the monster-of-the-week. The season finale separated the sliders. Wade and Rembrandt slid to Earth Prime, while Quinn and Maggie were separated due to some malfunction on the timer. It was then that Fox dropped Sliders, thanks to the dumb writing.
Foruntately, the Sci-Fi channel picked it up for a fourth season. And immedaitely there was a dilemna. If Wade and Rembrandt made it home, and Quinn and Maggie manage to fix the timer to open the path to Earth Prime, then what reason could there possibly be to continue sliding. On top of that, Sabrina Lloyd did not sign up for the fourth season. One suggestion would be that the world Rembrandt and Wade slid to was not really Earth Prime. But the producers had a better idea.
They brought back the kromaggs who were introduced in the second season. Quinn and Maggie would slide back to Earth Prime and find out it was ruled by the kromaggs. They found out the kromaggs took Wade away. The two of them rescue Rembrandt from a prison camp and then make a startling discovery. Quinn was not born on Earth Prime. He was born on the kromaggs' home world, and his parents hid him with their Earth Prime duplicates during a war between the humans and kromaggs. Quinn also had a brother named Colin (portrayed by Jerry's brother Charlie O' Connell). So when the timer counted down to zero, the sliders had thre missions-find Colin, find Wade, and find the kromaggs' home world.
The fourth season went back to the basic concepts that the first season was based on. Once again, the focus was on alternate histories or alternate people. There were also quite a few episodes where the sliders dealt with the kromaggs, as they were an integral part of the storyline. Colin was introduced, and Maggie met up with a live duplicate of her deceased husband. (Incidentally, there was only one episode where the sliders got involved with a duplicate of Colin Mallory.) The season finale had the sliders go to a world where there was a war between humans and kromaggs, and where the Mallories hid their sons. Of course, that was not really home, as it was the humans who waged a war of genocide against the kromaggs. Thus they continued on.
The fifth season had an unexpected turn of events. Both Jerry and Charlie were gone, so the producers had to come up with something. And they did. They had Quinn fuse with one of his duplicates, resulting in Mallory, played by Robert Floyd. As for Colin Mallory, he became unstuck, which means sliding randomly without a timer. The fifth season premiere introduced Dr. Diana Davis (played by Tembi Locke) and Dr. Oberon Geiger, another unstuck man.
And so the sliders continued. In addition to finding the way home and finding Wade, they also had to find a way to separate Mallory and to reunite with Colin. Most of the fifth season episodes dealt with alternate histories or alternate people. There were two episodes where they had to deal with the kromaggs, and both were significant. the first episode revealed that the weapon used to defeat the kromaggs ruined the environment, and the second episode dealt with the fate of Wade Welles.
The final episode was "The Seer", where the sliders found a world where their exploits are on a television show. They also meet up with Quinn's adoptive mother. In the end, Rembrandt injects an anti-kromagg virus into his blood and slides home. And so after five years, Sliders ends.
Because of the plot of Sliders (travelling through parallel universes) there are thousands of possibilities for story ideas. I already had a couiple of parallel Earth ideas. I wondered what to write about. I wanted to maintain continuity and write about the characters introduced in the series, rather than their duplicates who also went sliding. The fifth season, which featured the departure of the Mallory brothers, gave me an idea. I would chronicle Colin Mallory's adventures in unstuck sliding, from the beginning of "The Unstuck Man" to the end of "The Seer".
It was obvious that I would write these stories in a first-person perspective. Colin was the only slider in these stories, so his point-of-view would be the only point-of-view. And since I wanted to maintain continuity (I wanted to wriote about THE Colin, not an alternate Colin) I browsed the Internet to get details about the past episodes.
My first story was titled "The Unstuck Man"; I chose the title of this story because it started off where the fifth season premiere started off, and focused on what Colin was doing. I had three world ideas to incorporate. the first world Colin visited wouild be a world where Arabs colonized North America. The second world was a world where the Cold War was between the United States and Nazi Germany. And the third world idea was where the United States was an Axis Power during World War II and was a totalitarian police state ruled by white supremacists as of June of 1999. I made sure to incorporate duplicates of characters that appeared in previous episodes; this would be a pattern for my other stories. My favorite part was Colin's encounter with his native duplicate. You should read the story to find out what it was.
I then wrote the rest of the Unstuck Colin series. Some of these stories incorporated ideas I had in the beginning, such as a world where California is under martial law, or where Native Americans believe that the kromaggs are servants of their Creator, or where a maximum security federal prison employs explosive collars to prevent prisoners from escaping, or where kromaggs were testing a device similar to the Combine that caused Colin to be unstuck, or where sex and dating and marriage are strictly regulated by an agenct under the U.S. Department of Justice. And the other stories incorporated ideas I came up with later, such as a world where a plague wiped out almost all the adults or where a witness from a parallel world was relocated.
And then I wrote "The Slidemaster", which you have just read. I do not need to tell you what ideas I incorporated. But if you skipped some of the chapters, I will tell you that it involves an unstuck duplicate of one of the original sliders, more kromaggs, and a family reunion.
I want to thank you for reading through all my stories. The subject of parallel universes is fascinating, and the fact is that they do exist. David Deutsch makes a convicing argument in his book The Fabric of Reality. If you have any coments about a particular story, just post a review to the appropriate story. If you have any comments about the series in general, you may e-mail me at mejercit@hotmail.com.
You must be wondering if I will write any more Sliders stories. I wil as soon as I get the idea.
Michael
