About Mission: Evacuation, Episode 1

Mission: Evacuation is the first piece of fan fiction of an established universe that I have tried. The setting is the PC game Total Annihilation (TA), which, admittedly, didn’t have a very detailed universe. TA was a revolutionary real-time strategy game that came out in 1997, but I won’t go into the merits of the game here. Even though story was not the strong point for the game, TA was very popular in its time. With that popularity came the fan fiction.

Many people drew on the basic threads established by the game’s creators and wove their own stories, sometimes with only the most tenuous of links to the original story. The premise of the game was simple: two warring factions have waged deadly battle over centuries, spanning galaxies in their conquests. One side, the Arm, and the other side, the Core. Some backstory was provided in the campaign mode of the game, but there were more questions than answers. So when the fans started writing their own stories, there were many different takes on the universe.

I wrote my own fan fiction during Christmas break, 1998. It was my first time writing fan fiction, but it was easy considering I didn’t have much canon to consider. I wanted to bring a more human element to the universe, since too much focus had already been given to the “mechanical” aspects of war. I have fixed some spelling and glaring grammatical errors in this first story, but otherwise it is left intact. I had started on Episode 2, but did not get far, and I’m not sure I will continue this.