“I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.”35
Fan discussion of this passage has been—of course—rather extensive. Paratextual, parasexual, and incredibly noncommittal, the famous footnote displays Roddenberry’s excellent qualifications for Federation diplomacy. It apparently puts an end to a “lovers” rumor without placing any negative judgment on homosexuality, and furthermore makes such a reasonable interpretation on linguistic grounds as well as a logical assumption based on the men’s unusual closeness. Reading closely—as fans and English professors tend to, and as the footnote models through its attention to language and itself—highlights some additional teasing: that Kirk’s “best gratification” has been with women certainly implies a more varied experience. Spock’s reaction is not firsthand, and the fact that his raised eyebrow “usually connoted” a range of reactions explicitly leaves the door open to others. That Kirk “would dislike being thought of” as choosing such a rarely active sex partner speaks to perception rather than reality. It’s cagey, playful. It begs interpretation. It got it. Star Trek’s creators recognized the importance of talking to fans early on, although these talks did not always go smoothly among all parties (witness Shatner’s mocking of Trekkies on a 1986 episode of Saturday Night Live).
The early days of Star Trek fandom have been documented in Star Trek Lives!, Enterprising Women, Textual Poachers, and a host of other academic and less academic articles and essays. Of course, Trek fandom is not just history. It is alive and well today, with fic still written for the original series and its many offshoots: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise all continue to inspire fic, as does, of course, The Original Series. Most recently, J. J. Abrams’ original-series reboot has inspired a whole new generation of fic-writing fans. Older fans sometimes welcome the new influx of fans each incarnation brings, but can also treat them with suspicion, even derision. The early Star Trek fandom faced similar rejection by the broader sci-fi fan culture, as “literary fans” of print-based SF decried the supposed superficiality of “media fans,” who were also dismissed on account of their (often female) gender.
Patricia Poole, a retired Canadian family law barrister and still-active fic writer (currently writing for Sherlock, her twelfth fandom), offers her own historical perspective on the evolution of fandom and its gendered and generational conflicts:
I’m a Star Trek “dinosaur.” I saw the show first run on NBC in 1966–69. At age 57 I remain committed to fandom, even though fandom has evolved beyond recognition. (Or, maybe that’s “committed due to fandom.” :-) )
At the same time as I was “writing for money” at my job, I wrote fanfic for the love of it in fanzines of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and one pseudo-scholarly piece about literary references within Beauty and the Beast episodes).
My father was a comics and science fiction aficionado back in the 1930s when the term “fandom” was coined. He inculcated me with some beliefs almost universally held by fans, but not necessarily by the “mundane” world then: “The future will be better much better than we can imagine.” “There are no limits to what one dedicated person can change and accomplish.” He made sure I watched Star Trek with him. He convinced Mom to bend my bedtime so I could.
I attended my first con on Halloween 1973. StarCon was a Detroit Star Trek convention. Attendance was equally split between males and females, but ages skewed far younger than most SF cons of the time. The “Discovery Effect” was in the air that weekend, more seductive than pheromones.
I was one of the many fans who corresponded with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joanie Winston through my friend Carol Frisbie about that “Discovery Effect” and other fannish matters. The resulting book, Star Trek Lives! may have been the first book about fandom. I remember being stunned to find things I had written transformed into pages in a real book, albeit uncredited.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rising number of women in science fiction fandom coincided with SF appearing in places other than in books. A schism developed. “Media fans” were interested in SF, but mainly as depicted in TV or film. “Literary fans” maintained true SF was in print.
In these early days, media fans were only 60–75 percent female. But, media fans who wrote *media fanfic* skewed closer to 90 percent female. Literary fans were about 90 percent male.
Here in Michigan and Ontario, with the particular people I knew, and from what I could see on the ground, it looked a whole lot like a Battle of the Sexes to me. Certainly the epithets hurled were along gender lines.
A multitude of further schisms have followed over the decades, like the spreading limbs of a logic tree. Fandom is certainly much more diverse and diffuse than it used to be.
I’ve participated in about a dozen fandoms. Initially, all of them were SF related. Over the years, the links to SF in my personal interests became tenuous. My latest fandom has nothing to do with SF.
But, I’m still on the email list of a group in which most of the members self-identify as “literary” SF fans. Recently I was involved in a discussion about “Welcoming New Fans.” Comments were exchanged bemoaning the dearth of young fans joining the group. Members speculated on why the new cohort has “different interests” and “don’t attend cons.”
The comments got progressively sillier until I snapped and replied: The 2012 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago had 5,000 members, much lower than in the past. Yet Dragon*Con 2012 in Atlanta (which describes itself as a “multimedia, popular culture” con) had 52,000 attendees, and 130,000 fans showed up at Comic-Con 2012 in San Diego.
I also pointed out the “literary” club had never traditionally “welcomed” those with “different interests.” In fact, some of the current members corresponding on this subject were the same people who “welcomed” me 30 years ago with the words, “Oh, Jesus, not another dumb chick media fan!”
I still self identify as a “media” fan. Yet, both “literary” and “media” are laughably outdated terms. Does anyone outside my generation even know what either means?
Nonetheless, discrimination about race or creed or physical abilities was truly less prevalent than in mundane society of the 70s, 80s and even the 90s. But fen discriminated over and fought about—arguably—some incredibly silly things. They weren’t yet called flamewars, but they burned just as hot. Some older fans speculate pre-internet fandoms weren’t as negative because of the slower speed of fannish communication back then. Telephones worked just fine to spread nasty whispers.
Fandom is really fandoms, plural—an always diverse and contentious sphere. Mass media representations of fanfiction and fan culture present it at best as a “wacky world,” or more typically as a bastion of the physically, socially, and literarily inept. Academic accounts of fandom overcompensate, often presenting overly utopian pictures of sisterly collaboration and feminist critique. Utopias and dystopias, though, are not parallel but rather intersecting universes. This is surely one of the great lessons of Star Trek—and of its fandom.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg has been a mover, a shaker, and a fixture in science fiction and science fiction fandom for decades, both as a fan and as a publishing writer. She also acted as an archivist and fandom historian for the original Star Trek (TOS) fandom—both in zine format and, with Joan Winston and Sondra Marshak, in Star Trek Lives! (1975), the first book published on media fandom. Of special note is the way she used early zine fanfiction culture to originate and
ultimately administer and collect a multiauthored, multigenre fandom universe, complete with its own distinctive world rules and conventions: Kraith.
Kraith remains notable among fan productions for taking a critical look at issues of ethnic and racial tension, imagining how minority races and cultures—primarily the Vulcans, Lichtenberg’s focus—would respond to the human- and Earth-centric governance of the Federation as it was portrayed in the series. The Kraith universe received mainstream critical attention as early as 1986 (from the New York Times) and has been discussed in pioneering books on fandom culture such as Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992) and Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992). While neither sexually explicit (usually) nor driven by a particular pairing, Kraith nonetheless portrays intricacies of sexual, reproductive, and gender politics, complete with a guide for those who wished to begin writing within its boundaries. Lichtenberg is also the creator of the Sime~Gen universe, a series of published works (and, soon, a video game) that creates an even more detailed and unusual interspecies exchange system.
Here, Lichtenberg explains how various influences, from women fantasy writers to zines to science fiction fandom to potlucks, converged as the Star Trek fandom was bringing fanfiction culture as we know it today—including creating social media in an analog world—into being.
Recollections of a Collating Party
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
It was a mild, sunny afternoon in a far-flung suburb of Manhattan, on a cul-de-sac lined with maple trees, no sidewalks, unpaved driveways, converted 1920s cottages, unfenced, huge back yards, and swarming bunches of neighborhood kids filling the street, which was lined with parked cars, mostly from my guests.
It was the early 1970s, and Star Trek was nowhere to be found in that suburb, except maybe in my tiny living room.
The occasion was called a “collating party.” My memory is not clear on what we were collating, but I suspect it was either volume one or volume two of Kraith Collected, my Star Trek fanfic series; volume one was first published in 1972. Most of the people involved, including Joan Winston, who made the trip from Manhattan by bus, were friends from Star Trek fandom. A lot of them, like Joan and like Devra Langsam, children’s librarian and editor of the first Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia, were members of the first New York Star Trek Convention committee. (Various members of that committee, and other members of the Lunarians, who still run one of the first science fiction conventions, Lunacon, showed up at different collating parties, so I don’t recall exactly who was at which party, but we always had fun.)
Down in my half-underground basement, where I stored cabinets full of Star Trek fanzines, sat Roberta Rogow, one of the soon-to-be stellar lights of Trek historians. Like Devra, Roberta was a children’s librarian at the time. She was cataloguing my collection of Trek zines because it contained items she hadn’t heard of elsewhere, a real treasure trove of Trekdom. Roberta eventually published her index of Star Trek fan stories as a fanzine, and she went on to be a widely published mystery writer. One amazing claim to fame, though, is that very soon after this collating party at my house, Roberta published her slashy/raunchy stories in a fanzine that was called, I think, GRIP (a sendup of zines Grope and Grup), and published many funny stories by subsequently famous slash writers. But all that was still in the future, and at that party, we as yet had no idea of what was to come.
Upstairs everyone was walking round and round a row of folding tables, picking up a page from each stack of printed pages, to collate into a complete zine copy, and handing off stacks to proofers to check that each page was in place, right side up. Then they passed the stacks to staplers, who’d drive in three staples to bind them together and put them back in printer’s boxes to be ferried to various conventions from Toronto to San Diego. When you have a couple dozen people to do it, collating a thousand copies of a zine takes only a few hours.
The reason people turned up, other than a free meal, was to talk to each other. This was before Twitter and #scifichat every Friday, before Facebook, when you used telephones (voice only) or went to conventions to have an intelligent conversation about the rare, hard-to-find literature you loved most, and the guilty pleasure of the TV show you dreamed new stories for.
So while marching round and round the extended table as fast as possible, the voices roared over the BAM! from the stapling folks. Every once in a while people would switch jobs to avoid getting dizzy, and juggle several conversations shouted over the growing din in half-sentences. It was a balmy day. The windows were open. The neighbors no doubt thought we were utterly nuts. I wasn’t asking them.
As hostess, I didn’t do much marching in circles that day. I recall I was running back and forth to the kitchen, wafting the aroma of frying onions and meat through the house, poking baking potatoes, dashing outside to wrangle my two kids, yelling for people to move cars so my husband could get in and out of the 120-foot driveway, and running downstairs to be sure Roberta was finding all the zines tucked into dark corners.
At one point, with dinner nearly ready to serve, I was passing through our house’s office, noticed a copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The World Wreckers, and dragged it in to wave at the crowd yelling at each other across the kitchen table, hoping to settle them down so they’d eat. There had to be at least three different conversations per pair at the table. It was just like watching a Twitter-chat stream, which is why I feel so at home in online chats. It’s how a family talks over dinner. I shouted down the yelling group and tried to explain Darkover to them as being Trekkish (since Spock is a telepathic half-breed).
If you haven’t read The World Wreckers, here’s the skinny. Humans shipwrecked on this alien world called Darkover intermarry with the remnants of its intelligent natives, the chieri, and produce seven families of telepaths and espers who are only partly human. Many generations later, the last of the chieri gets into a sexual relationship with one of those mostly human descendants in which they bond telepathically.
Marion later told me she got the inspiration for The World Wreckers from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the natives of the planet Winter can change sexual orientation (though Marion had built shifting sexual physiology into Darkover’s chieri more than a decade prior to Left Hand’s 1969 publication). Le Guin’s novel was considered a “literary” intrusion into traditional science fiction and sparked controversy because of it. It won both the Hugo (fan-voted) and Nebula (professional SF writer–voted) Awards not so much because of the odd alien sexuality, but because of the sheer literary power of the writing, which was necessary, in 1969, to make the approach to sexuality forgivable. When Marion read The Left Hand of Darkness, her reaction to the sex scene was that Le Guin had done what Marion was trying to teach me not to do—pulled the punch, not followed through on the promise the subtext made to the reader. Marion wrote The World Wreckers to illustrate how that sex scene had to go; it was now the 1970s, and things could be said aloud (if only in private) that couldn’t have been even a few years before.
After dinner, the conversation wove around and through The World Wreckers and, of course, Star Trek. The group couldn’t stop chattering at each other. My husband put the kids to bed, and we (all women) were clustered in my tiny living room while I deliberately didn’t think about the pile of dishes in the sink. Out of the blue, someone mentioned a carbon copy of a Star Trek story that had circulated hand to hand. I do believe the story was the famous one titled “The Price of a Handful of Snowflakes.” The website 1001 Trek Tales lists the copyright date on “Handful of Snowflakes” as 1979, which may have been its first printing in a bound fanzine. I believe this story was first disseminated as an oral telling, then as clandestine carbon copies, and finally published and just burst on the scene. But it’s possible the story now known by this title is not the same as the oral one I heard about at this first encounter.
The story’s topic was sexuality, a topic that printed science fiction barely touched on at that time, never del
ving into its erotic dimensions. Today you can’t sell fantasy without a sex scene, preferably twelve or so. With the topic of sexuality broached, the standard trope, the half-breed as presented on Star Trek, suddenly opened an issue: how can you have a half-breed without breeding? Well, how exactly did that go? We know it was “the logical thing to do,” but what was done and why? And where did that leave Spock? Who would he do it with, and why?
That stray comment in my living room turned into an hours-long, intense conversation about the erotic stories, still largely kept under wraps, that were being created by other Star Trek fans. And it was during this discussion that I first heard of the existence of slash fiction, as part of a larger conversation. Much larger.
Star Trek had hit me at just the right time to reignite the enormous frustration I’d grown up suffering—a frustration, it turns out, that a huge percentage of teens suffer. In short, it’s “But they’re writing it all wrong!” And, for a narrow percentage of those teens, that frustration results in stories dreamed and/or written down and hidden under their beds, eventually to be burned out of sheer embarrassment of ever having been so young and so naïve. Today, that material is posted on FanFiction.Net.
I had grown up inside science fiction fandom since I was in seventh grade, when I wrote my first letter to the editor, in this case to Fred Pohl, the award-winning science fiction writer and lifelong fan who, as editor at Bantam, eventually bought Star Trek Lives! The letter, which was published with my address, lambasted artists for inaccuracies, and brought me myriad letters from other science fiction readers and membership in the National Fantasy Fan Federation (n3f.org). I knew professional writers through fandom and saw them interact with their fans in fanzines.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 11
