Drew Wagar

Drew Wagar, courtesy of drewwagar.com

Drew Wagar is an author of Oolite stories.

Elite biography

Drew Wagar first played Classic Elite at age 13, a month after it was released on the BBC Model B. A friend (with rich parents) had received the game as a Christmas present. His most vivid recall is the wireframe presentation but with addition of a new technique - 'hidden line removal', making the objects appear solid, a remarkable achievement he had not seen before. Wagar played Elite mostly on a ZX Spectrum. He originally had a 16k model and bought the extra 32k mostly in order to play Elite. He genuinely reached Elite Rating after many months of playing, despite lensloks and the occasional "R: Tape Loading Error".

Somewhere in the open ended game play, the vast nature of the universe portrayed, the encouragement for the player to put their own imagination into the game and the novelisation that set the scene... he discovered the magic that is Elite. Drew considers that the game, combined with some of the TV and books of the time (Ulysses 31, Hitch Hikers Guide, Blakes 7 etc), was a perfect moment in time.

He was never too enamoured with computers in the 16 bit age, and pretty much ignored the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. His next machine was a 386 SX PC. He enjoyed Frontier: Elite II. As an astronomy buff, the realistic physics was actually more fun to him. Drew considers FFE, however, to be a backwards step in many ways. In any case, neither FE2 nor FEE were 'Elite'. Elite didn't come back into his conscious thought until he came across "The New Kind" a few years ago. He was very disappointed that the Palm version of Elite was never released. Then on a search for an Elite that would run on Linux he discovered Oolite in early 2006. This would result in a body of Oolite fiction, starting with the chapter-by-chapter publication of Status Quo, which was shared during the final months of Oolite's first programmer Aegidian's tenure.

In 2012 during the Elite: Dangerous kickstarter drive, he came upon the idea of writing official E:D fiction, though it was later revealed that this privilege would be offered to the party willing to pay £4500. When suggested to him that he too should in turn use kickstarter to fund this goal, he was initially pensive, gave it serious thought, and finally declared that he would go for it. The target amount was raised in 9 days. Having become an official Elite: Dangerous fiction author, gradually his Oolite work became difficult to access. He explained in a 2023 BB post,

Hi Folks,

Just dropping on the off chance that somebody somewhere might still be paying attention to this thread.

After much water under the bridge, I've decided this year (2023) to re-write the Oolite Saga and comprehensively "delite" it for fear of inadvertently stepping on a certain organisation's IP. I've asked the places that hosted the files to no longer do so. Clearly there's not much I can do about the (lots of?) copies that have been downloaded historically, but my intention is simply to no longer actively promote the distribution of any material that might be considered to be potentially IP infringing... ;)

Rather than consign all that work to the great abyss, I've re-written the books (which needed a dust off anyway) and republished them without the Elite/Oolite content, so that the stories can still be enjoyed for what they were. It's now known as the "Elect Saga".

https://www.drewwagar.com/elect/

I've put them on Amazon and a few other vendors to ensure that they become regarded as the "official" versions over time (which stops some of the pirates from uploading the old copies and trying to sell them - a constant nuisance!). Amazon doesn't allow them to be free unfortunately, but that may get picked up by the algorithm over time.

If you've got your own personal copies of the originals, keep 'em! They are creative commons, so as long as you don't sell them, all good. I'm just trying to ensure I'm not seen to be actively promoting the distribution of anything that might potentially upset they who I don't need to name. ;)

Would you want to get the new versions? Probably not, they're substantially the same story, but with names,locales and specifics changed. There's nothing new other than a general spring clean and a bit of editing. However, they are now available as a complete set of paperbacks for the first time ever, which may interest some of you if you like dead tree versions.

The one bit of actual good news with all this is that because the lore of the "Elect Saga" is now inspired by rather than directly derivative of Elite, it does mean I can look at the possibility of writing some more stuff... After 12 years it's probably about time that Jim and Rebecca had a new adventure, eh?

Cheers,

Drew. March 3, 2023

Contributions to Oolite

Archived banner from when The Oolite Saga was visible among the work of Drew Wagar (ca.2014).

Literary

Inspired by the Oolite game, Wagar has written an Oolite novella named Status Quo. Status Quo was an attempt to provide a link between the back stories of Elite, Oolite and the later events of FE2/FFE, giving a newcomer to Oolite some information on how things differ from Elite in a narrative context, reminiscent of the original Elite novella, The Dark Wheel by Robert Holdstock.

Drew has written four sequels to Status Quo.

Drew has also written a short story about the Generation Ships called Schism, a very short story about an attempt to travel to the 'ninth chart', called Nine, a further very short story called Ascension and another called Replay.

Game contributions

• Tianve OXP v1.3 [archived link] creates the features mentioned in Status Quo and the player can thus go sightseeing in the Tianve star system in the North East area of Galactic Chart One

• Drew also contributed the Tionisla Chronicle articles for Snoopers.

Stories

• Status Quo - An Oolite novella - source of the Lave OXP, the Tianve OXP and the Tionisla Chronicle Array.
• Mutabilis - A second Oolite novella, and sequel to Status Quo.
• Incursio - A third Oolite novella, sequel to Mutabilis, and the final part of the Oolite Saga.
• Finis - A fourth Oolite novella, sequel to Incursion and an even more final part of the Oolite Saga.
• Altera - A fifth Oolite novella, sequel to Finis and absolutely the final part of the Oolite Saga.
• Schism - An Oolite short story based on the 'Generation Ships'
• Nine - An Oolite short story about an attempt to reach the ninth chart
• Ascension - An Oolite short story about what happens when a spaceship crashes on a pre-spacefaring world
• Replay - An Oolite short story about Thargoid experiments
• Reclamation - A new novel based on Elite: Dangerous by Frontier Developments - first in a series.

• Status Quo and Mutabilis are downloadable through the Expansions Manager to read from your ship's library.

Personal life

Drew is married with two young sons, a dog and a feline lifeform from the planet Tianve.

It is reported that he spends most of his time on a rather backward planet called 'Earth', that he does not live in Essex, that he does not require any double glazing or a conservatory and disposes of unsolicited callers with a small plasma accelerator.

Non-Elite interests

• Amateur astronomer
• Plays the piano tolerably well
• Plays the guitar and clarinet tolerably less well, in that order
• Enjoys cycling and walking the dog
• Writing passable fiction
• Mucking about with Linux, pretending he knows something about computers

Links

Internal

• Ah.. how I came across Elite... (2006)
• The Oolite Saga Note his post of Thu Sep 21, 2017 4:22 pm
• See discussion in Lore

External

• Drew Wagar's Oolite fiction as archived by the Wayback Machine
• Drew's website/blog (he has removed the Oolite content - presumably due to ED breathing down the back of his neck!).
• Drew Wagar Facebook fanpage (He has removed the Oolite content).
• Drew Wagar Twitch stream channel
• Drew Wagar YouTube channel
• "How a video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy" The Guardian