[Kyuusaku]

The Kyuu Continuum #2
by {UFP}Kyuusaku

Issue Two: Scribo Ergo Sum
September 25, 2011

NOTE: The following views are to be treated as opinions unless otherwise stated and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or policies of {UFP}.

Last week we spent some time getting to know who I am, and this week we'll dive right into a facet of Trek fandom: The history of Trek Fan fiction.

This subject is a little close to my heart because I'm a fic writer myself. I've been writing Trek fanfic since 1989 when I wrote a novel called "Twice Upon a Time," involving the crews of the Enterprise-A and Enterprise-D meeting shortly after the events of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It was truly awful and barely scratched forty thousand words (more of a novella than a novel), and in reading it now I cringe at hos so very immature I was in trying to put a plot together. I was all of thirteen years old and in the final year of junior high.

Since then, I've become heavily involved in the Trek fanfic-writing community. I produce a TNG-era series and write a number of one-shot fics when the mood strikes me. I currently host one of the fastest-growing archive on the Internet: The Ad Astra Star Trek Fanfiction Archive (http://www.adastrafanfic.com).

Trek fan fiction began in the mid-to-late 1960s with the fanzine Spockanalia. Though it contained the first fanfic entries in Trek, it is also considered to be the first appearance of "modern fanfic." Spockanalia was probably the only fanzine to have tacit approval from Gene Roddenberry and Dorothy Fontana. The first issue contained a letter from Leonard Nimoy, and the second issue contained letters from Roddenberry and Fontana. Interestingly enough, Fontana (who wrote Spock's backstory) indicated that Spock had no siblings whatsoever. She did this to curtail the overwhelming number of unsolicited submissions to the show involving Spock's brother or sister. Too bad they forgot that when Sybok hit the scene.

By the time Spockanalia's third issue was published, included in it was another letter from Roddenberry states very clearly that the fanzine has become "required reading for everyone" in the Star Trek offices. He went on to write that he wanted to make sure that "every writer, and anyone that makes decisions on show policy, have read [the fanzine]" in order to make sure that they "all understand what the fans see in the show; and try to understand why they're fans at all" so they could "continue to hold those fans." This would be the first and only time that Roddenberry would write such letters to any fanzine or fanfic authors. In 1968, Roddenberry and his executive assistant, Susan Sackett, would produce Inside Star Trek (changed to the Star Trektennial News in '76), the official Trek newsletter. It would contain a mailbag, interviews and pictures, and include fan-written poetry but not fanfic.

Spockanalia, originally scheduled to be a one-shot magazine, eventually ran for five issues total, with the final issue distributed in 1970. Though it might be considered a short fanzine run by comparison with its successors, within those five issues resides material written by future Pocket Books Trek authors such as Allan Asherman, Jean Lorrah, and Lois McMaster Bujold (who would later publish her own zine, Star Date), as well as future professional author Jacqueline Lichtenberg (Sime~Gen Universe).

Between 1970 and the advent of the web, Trek fanzines flourished. Those who worked on Spockanalia went on to produce their own zines, including T-Negative and Masiform D. When Star Trek: The Next Generation hit the scene in 1987, it also was the focus for several fanzines.

Prior to Web 2.0 or even Web 1.0, the USENET group alt.startrek.creative, or "ASC" (http://www.trekiverse.org) became the home to many fanfic'ers, including myself. Taking over where the zines were beginning to fade, the myriad of university students out there used ASC as a constant stream of fanfics touching on the spectrum from amazingly brilliant to total crapfest. The revolution of the USENET group over a zine was that there was no editor or moderator to really control the quality of the submissions. Everyone read everything anyone posted, including a series of fanfics based upon the episode "Disaster" in TNG's 4th season. Author Stephen Ratliff remains alone infamous for taking the three children trapped in the turbolift with Captain Picard and launching a prolific series of episodes that most found to be a proper send-up of Star Trek's ills and holes. Until they found out that Ratliff never intended it to be a parody; he was actually writing seriously! Of course, the response was even more hysterical. These works were so awful that it became a habit of the denizens to poke fun at the every tale his published. They would organize and formed a unit of roasters in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (http://home.netcom.com/~mblackwl/mst.html). Even today, his name invokes a shudder from those who remember, and if you ever have some spare time, I highly recommend reading the MST versions to save your sanity.

In the modern age, web publishing is so push-button that it could possibly be as uncontrolled as ASC is, but in the time since ASC's dominance faded, the quality control and formation of writing groups and communities has led to a wave of high quality writing. Sites like the aforementioned Ad Astra, and the Trek Writers Guild (http://www.twguild.com) make writing quality an issue through various controls and checks, but on the other end of the spectrum lies FanFiction.net (http://www.fanfiction.net) which has no controls and is quite probably the modern web-equivalent of ASC.

With the many avenues to explore fan creativity available in this day and age, it's easy to search on Google and find a hub of Trek writing. It takes a dedicated fan to track down and find the fan-written pieces that you'll remember for a long time. And whether it's fan-written or published by Pocket Books, fiction is fiction. Enjoy it for what it is.

Until next time,

[Airik]

Really good read im enjoying your series of articles, and hey i have learned lots new in the last 10 mins