We started by asking the inhabitants of Freedom City for their faves, then worked our way through most of the 164 A-B stories in Sarah's GUIDE TO B7 GEN, along with a bundle of other stories that we discovered for ourselves. Along the way we realised we were developing our own idiosyncratic definition of A-B. In Sarah's guide, A-B indicates stories where Avon and Blake are the main characters - for example, Sarah lists Anne Collins Smith's 'Shoot Feds and Dodge' as A-B, because it's a parody of Dr Seuss's 'Green Eggs and Ham' in the form of a dialogue between Blake and Avon, but she doesn't list Lillian Shepherd's THE MACHIAVELLI FACTOR as A-B because it follows the separate adventures of the full third season crew, even though Shepherd incorporates a lyrical and powerful account of Avon and Blake sorting out their differences.
For us, conversely, A-B means stories that in some way explore or expand the series characterisation of Avon and Blake, so we were happy to include stories about the whole crew, as long as those stories centred around Avon and Blake. We like Avon and Blake (in case you hadn't noticed), so, while there are some comic stories here, you won't find any stories that just plain take the micky out of them. And in our version of A-B the massacre at Gauda Prime is usually survived or averted, unless the story is very, very well-written.
The process of collaborating on the list was startlingly easy - especially given that Sally reluctantly but firmly believes that, from what we see on the screen, the entire B7 crew are apparently under a vow of perpetual chastity, which means that all adult and slash pairings except Tarrant/Servalan are AU, whereas Jenny equally firmly believes that A/B slash is implicit in the TV series. (It's just that the BBC couldn't show explicit homosexuality during family viewing time in the late 70s and early 80s, right?) However, unlike Our Heroes, we never argued: although we didn't agree about every story, we could always agree to disagree.
Our main problem was the sheer volume of good A-B gen. Fairly early on, we decided to restrict ourselves to stories that had been published in print zines before 2000 but even then, we found it hard to settle on fifty favourites, so we added the Bonus List ... and we remain convinced that there are some great stories that we've missed. But there are plenty of great stories here, ranging from prequels to PGPs, from hurt/comfort to politics, from comedy to Gen For Slash Fans - in short, something for everyone.
Some of the out of print stories (and many more) can be found at the following sites:
Hammer to Fall: a Blake's 7 Story Archive and Bang and Blame: A Blake's 7 Series E Story Archive Most of these and many others are in the The Hermit Library on this site.
All archives are being added to continually, so others both on the list - and maybe some that we haven't seen - may appear in the future.
We want to thank all those dedicated gen zine writers and editors, the Freedom City members who offered suggestions, Pat Fenech who filled in some gaps and, most of all, Sarah Thompson, not only for the amazing amount of work that went into her definitive gen guide but also for generously giving us access to her gen collection. And we hope you enjoy browsing through this list as much as we enjoyed writing it.
Sally Manton
Jenny Pausacker
December 2000
Last updated on 07th of January 2001.