About the Third Imperium fanzine
One of my treasured Traveller possessions from the 1980s, alongside the Imperium poster and Spinward Marches map, is an original copy of Third Imperium, No. 5.
Third Imperium was a fanzine created and in large part authored by fellow Canadian Mike Jackson, who later contributed articles and artwork to DGP's Travellers' Digest and a handful of GDW products. More than twenty years on, as director, editor, and co-founder of Steam Powered Films, his career has progressed to include work on video games, film and television productions (including two of my personal favorites, Reboot and Aeon Flux) and has garnered Emmy nominations and won several awards.
Eleven issues were published by Mike from the spring of 1986 through the fall of 1988. The fanzine was the first to detail the sector later known as Trojan Reach, and is a favorite of many in the Travellercommunity, including Marc W. Miller
When working on my map site I came to realize the importance of Mike's contributions to the Traveller milieu. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I was able to easily get in touch with Mike and see if he'd be amenable to letting us dust off our old copies of Third Imperium and make them accessible to the Traveller community once again. He was, and this site is the result.
Third Imperium Fanzine Use & Redistribution
c/o Mike Jackson, December 2nd 2006:
You have my complete permission to post and distribute all issues of Third Imperium and their contents online. I also grant you permission to incorporate any of the contents (like maps and sector data) into related collections of data (such as map collections), online, on CD / DVD, or in print, as long as such items are available for free.
Issue Index
- Issue #1, Spring 1986
- Issue #2, Summer 1986
- Issue #3, Fall 1986
- Issue #4, Winter 1987
- Issue #5, Spring 1987
- Issue #6. Summer 1987
- Issue #7, Fall 1987
- Issue #8, Winter 1988
- Issue #9, Spring 1988
- Issue #10, Summer 1988
- Issue #11, Fall 1988
Cover Index
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Cover images from the Traveller Bibliography [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine], except Issue #4 and #5.
Article Index
References: Traveller Bibliography [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine]
Trojan Reach Subsector
Index
Subsector B (Egyrn) and C (Pax Rulin) are detailed in Adventure 4: Leviathan. Later publications of maps and data for the Trojan Reach sector (Travellers' Digest #20, MegaTraveller Journal #3, and the Regency Sourcebook) derive from the data initially published in Third Imperium.
Map fetish? Download all of the Trojan Reach
subsectors detailed in Third Imperium in one file!
References: Traveller Bibliography, Traveller Sector Information [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine]
Other Fanzines
This project was inspired by Mark "Geo" Gelinas Sr.'s The Times [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine], which hosted freely downloadable copies of his fanzine Tidewater Traveller TIMES/Terra Traveller TIMES.
Security Leak, a fanzine which advertised in the pages of Third Imperium, has been reborn on the web with all of the printed articles available online.
Paul J. Drye's Coreward fanzine (which only made it to two issues) is hosted by BeRKA's Zhodani Base.
Signal-GK [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] was also re-released on the web.
A high quality contemporary Traveller fanzine is Stellar Reaches, published on the web. The author (and contributor to this page) was inspired by Third Imperium.
Jeff Zeitlin's Freelance Traveller magazine has been published monthly since January 2010.
Learn more about other Traveller-related periodicals at the Traveller Bibliography [via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine].
Needed
- I'm not a professional PDF creator, so there may be optimizations that can be made to the files. Advice appreciated. In particular, the OCR text could use extensive cleanup, but I'm unaware of tools that enable this.
Contact me via email at inexorabletash@gmail.com if you can contribute.
Notes
- Traveller Starship Counters, advertised starting in issue #2, were never finished. Mike writes, "I got about half way through, but my university course load was piling up, and they sadly just fell through the cracks. No idea where the original artwork is now..."
Site History
- 2015-12-19 - Redirected some dead links to the Wayback Machine.
- 2014-10-10 - Moved to custom domain: thirdimperiumfanzine.info
- 2011-12-23 - A few link corrections and HTML updates.
- 2007-01-11 - Issue #4 updated with a new scan, c/o Elliot Vernon.
- 2006-12-17 - Traveller Chronology insert from Issue #6 added, c/o Mike Jackson
- 2006-12-14 - Issue #9 is up. Done!
- 2006-12-13 - Issue #6 is up, #9 is pending, c/o Marc M.
- 2006-12-09 - Issues #8, #10 and #11 added c/o Dan Holmberg.
- 2006-12-08 - Issue #7 added c/o Dan Holmberg.
- 2006-12-05 - Issues 1-4 added c/o Jason "Flynn" Kemp of Stellar Reaches fanzine fame.
- 2006-12-03 - just getting started. I have Issue #5 up. The rest of the page is a placeholder.
Traveller Copyright Information
The Traveller game in all forms is owned by Far Future Enterprises. Copyright © 1977 - 2014 Far Future Enterprises. Traveller is a registered trademark of Far Future Enterprises. Far Future permits web sites and fanzines for this game, provided it contains this notice, that Far Future is notified, and subject to a withdrawal of permission on 90 days notice. The contents of this site are for personal, non-commercial use only. Any use of Far Future Enterprises's copyrighted material or trademarks anywhere on this web site and its files should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks. In addition, any program/articles/file on this site cannot be republished or distributed without the consent of the author who contributed it.
Postscript
Yes, this was all just an attempt to read the issues I've never seen... but to give back to the community while doing it!