Granted, it was more my love for SF/SFR that led me to begin my choose your own path spoof series, the Adventures of Mari Shu, but being an equal opportunity mocker -- I like to think of myself as the Weird Al of SFR -- I figure I manage to make fun of at least one different SF/SFR/Popular Media commodity per badly-written page.
Here's just a short list of properties I jigged around on like a demented leprechaun during the 3 volumes (so far) of Mari Shu's adventures. The first volume, by the way, is FREE.
50 Shades of Grey
The 100
1984
2001: A Space Odyssey
2002: Bad References In This Book
Across the Universe
Alien
All BDSM Romance
Are You Serious?
Battlestar Galactica
The Beyond Series
Defiance
Dexter
Doctor Who
Dragon Bound
Firefly
Forest of Hands and Teeth
Harry Potter
Hunger Games
I, Robot
I, Don't Even Know
Ironman
James Bond
Jurassic Park
The Last Hour of Gann
Logan's Run
LOST
The Matrix
Maze Runner
No Way That's Really In There
Old Man's War
Pirates of the Caribbean
Rulebreaker
Secretary
Scooby Doo
Shadow Fires
Sherlock (Cumberbatch version)
Some random book where there's a bride auction that I can't remember
Something with foretold mates and alpha males
Soylent Green
Star Trek
Star Wars
Stargate
Starman
Starwobblies
Superman
Superpeen
Transformers
Voyager
What Is This Crap?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Wizard of Oz
Wreck of the Nebula Dream
Y Did You Write This?
*
The Relocation Committee (RLC) employees herded Mari Shu and her two sisters through the opening in the high fence around the landing port. Electric spits and barbs lined the top of the fence in an ominous fashion Mari Shu failed to note until she was on the other side of it.
Almost as if…they were prisoners.
“Have a good trip!” Just Right Hair said. “Your meager belongings are already on the SS Rentaprise.”
“Wait…how did you know which ship we’d choose?” Mari Shu asked.
Instead of responding, the RLC workers slammed and latched the final gate behind her and her sisters as if dusting their hands of the problem. Considering they proceeded to literally dust their hands, Mari Shu wondered at the author’s ability to come up with fresh descriptions.
A horn blared from the SS Rentaprise, proceeded by mechanized loudspeaking. “Departure for the final frontier in five minutes! All aboard!”
Mari Shu and her sisters raced up the gangplank of the SS New Terra. She ignored the flash of the Rentaprise’s engine glow on the silver hand of the cybermech, watching her from the ramp of the other ship. Good riddance. She didn’t want to associate with criminals. Unless they were her treasured sisters. Voyaging into skies unknown was such a better choice than breaking her unbreakable vow to her sainted grandmother about becoming a sexxorer.
On New Terra, there would be no boundaries! No barriers! No drudgery! No crime after dark! They would have a real shot at happiness! And the chance to eat grass, like people on Mars! Perhaps there would even be unicorns and snowflakes of the special variety!
Mingling among the other thousand passengers, give or take, in the long corridors, the sisters located their assigned bunk, denoted by their names on the door panel. Inside, the tiny room featured a sonic shower and shitter, three narrow beds, and their possessions in a pitiful heap. Their new quarters were smaller than their flat, barely large enough for all three of them at the same time.
A screen above the door scrolled constant announcements and helpful factoids, such as, “Passengers will report at six am and six pm to the mess hall for nutrition. Lights out at eight pm. Peak fitness will be maintained. Jobs will be assigned for New Terra training. Violators will be spaced. Unless they’re below the age of consent. Then they’ll be put in cells until they turn twenty, at which point they’ll be spaced. Also, don’t have babies. We have to keep our population stable until we get to New Terra due to oxygen constraints.”
“Spaced? I’d like more space,” Cassie said. “As well as new pants. I seem to get bigger every day. Luckily, sturdy females are all the rage. What do we have to violate to get this space?”
“That’s not what spaced means, goo for brains,” Trish said. “It means shoved out an airlock.”
Mari Shu stiffened in horror at the thought. It was one thing to be sent to a Venusian penile colony for committing felonies, but it was another to simply be killed! What kind of extremist ship had they boarded? What kind of freedom was this?
“How long does this trip take if having babies would disrupt it?” Perhaps they’d only be on board a few days. They could follow yet more rules for a few weeks. The trip to Mars only took a couple hours.
“Approximately ten Olde Earth years. I saw it on the data scroll,” Trish answered.
“So we’ll be decrepit hags by the time we get to New Terra?” Cassie shrieked. “My glowing orange skin wrinkled like a peach pit, which I’ve never seen but the readers have, so they’ll know what I’m talking about? What kind of joke is this? I want off this ship!”
“We can’t go back. We’re already billions of light years from Olde Earth since we passed through the gatestar technological device that enables transport between far-flung galaxies,” Trish said. “I saw it on…”
“The data scroll?” Mari Shu guessed, wishing she’d paid attention, too. However, she’d been stiff with horror, which wasn’t conducive to observing pertinent details like a device that provided whatever information the characters needed to move the scene forward. “If our people invented these convenient gatestar devices, why does it take years to get to New Terra? Why couldn’t they slingshot us into the proper galaxy?”
“That I don’t know.” Trish shook her head. “I’m not an astrophysicist.”
“What’s an astrophysicist?” Cassie asked.
All three women looked at each other and shrugged.
“It probably doesn’t matter,” Mari Shu decided. “We’re merely passengers on a pilgrim-filled ocean liner through the stars. We don’t need to know anything about astros or physics. It will never affect us. We’ll never be asked to emergency land a ship or navigate through a wormhole.”
“That’s a relief,” Trish said. “I’m sure the jobs we’ll be assigned on New Terra will be modest, productive occupations with zero chance we’ll be auctioned off to rapacious, extremely patriarchal lizard men waiting for their promised human concubines to arrive. I’m also sure our ten-year journey will involve some type of cryosleep so the readers don’t have to endure such a lengthy segment without any action.”
“Unless,” Mari Shu hypothesized, “I were to wake up halfway through the trip and find out someone was secretly killing off the cryosleeping passengers. I mean, it really depends on what the author’s going to spoof next.”
“There’s no guarantee of cryosleep,” Cassie argued. “A wreck is more likely, with the three of us plus a few eligible male passengers and at least one annoying child forging an intrepid path through the titanic vessel that was billed as the ship that couldn’t possibly fail. We’ll have to race against time to the lifeboat pods before we drift into a star or self-destruct.”
“If we don’t wreck, my money’s on New Terra being a backwater mining planet.” Trish smacked her fist into her palm. “I foresee low tech crime capers with a dose of bad weather, corrupt drug lords, and some kick-ass lesbians in hard hats.”
“Silly. You don’t have any money. Nobody’s going to take that bet,” Mari Shu pointed out. “We’ll probably get blown off course by a stellar tornado or mistimed gatestar explosion into a quadrant where no human has e’er ventured, with no way to contact our scientists back on Olde Earth and Mars. Talk about getting stuck in the boonies.”
“We should totally call it the boonie quadrant if that happens,” Cassie said. “I call dibs on the hive-melded hunk we rescue from the Galactic Bee Queen and attempt to waken back into individuality.”
Mari Shu threw up her hands. “Have you considered we might accidentally time travel into the Earth’s past where we must ponder the ramifications of the butterfly effect weighed against the fact that the future we’re building toward kind of sucks anyway, and that we’d be better off altering the space time continuum?”
“Timey wimey stuff.” Trish nodded wisely. “One practically has to be a doctor to understand that. However, I really don’t think that’s the way this segment is going.”
“What makes you say that?” Mari Shu asked.
“Because a space cowboy’s sneaky ferret class vessel has uncloaked right outside our tiny porthole. And look, it’s called the Quietude. I get the feeling it’s ironically named.”
*
I think the segments where I spoofed on Sherlock might have been my favorites. No, wait, the appearance of my version of Ben Kenobi was pretty hilarious too. And I can't forget the epic spurt off during the bride auction or the billionaire Dom, Master Jannifer! Oh, God, that Transformers reference, though...
I guess I'm saying it's hard to pick a favorite, just like with the SF/SFR properties themselves.
Jody Wallace
Smart. Snarky. Seductive. And that's just the books.
http://www.jodywallace.com * http://www.meankitty.com
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