Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The First Ladies of Fandom!

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As we've noticed occasionally in our bibliographical notes, there are two kinds of Star Trek fiction. There's the kind where the outward garments of Star Trek – a captain named Kirk, a ship called Enterprise, etc. - are simply and crudely draped over a pre-existing science fiction hobbyhorse. And there's the kind where the essence of Star Trek comes first and finds the stories it wants to tell. In a very real sense, this division is established during the original three seasons of the TV show itself – some of those episodes (a great many of them, to be honest) are pure sci-fi potboilers into which elements of Gene Roddenberry's creation are inserted with greater or lesser degrees of success, and some of them (the best of them, with one or two exceptions) are pure Trek, operating on its own principles.

As with the show, so too with the fiction. On the one hand, we have James Blish's dutiful script adaptations – sometimes heartfelt, yes, but most often mechanical yarns churned out on deadline, featuring wandering terminology and interchangeable characters. And on the other hand, there were all those fanzines, evangelical, written by fans, for fans.

The script adaptations were financially successful beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and they weren't the only sign that something unprecedented was going on in the wake of Star Trek's cancellation. Conventions were springing up all over the country, informally organized, fueled by enthusiasm and beer, swarmed by fans who came out of the woodwork to meet other people infected with a love of this particular show. That might sound routine these days, but it was Star Trek that created that mindframe and set it in motion.

So then: a confluence of passion and profit, generated by a TV show that was no longer on the air. Inevitably, books. And with books, the haploid nature of Star Trek fiction, blossoming to manuscript length. 1976 was the scene.

In that year, the first official exponents of each strain of Star Trek fiction appeared almost simultaneously: a novel called Spock, Messiah! (by Theodore Cogswell and Charles Spano), and a story anthology called Star Trek: The New Voyages (edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath).

Spock, Messiah gives away its nature in its very attribution. Spano was a new writer, a diehard fan of the show who knew his kevas from his trillium – and Bantam Books, acting at the behest of Paramount, partnered him with Cogswell, an old, practiced hand at sci-fi potboilers. And the result is … a sci-fi potboiler in which the newcomer has been allowed to interject some weird, show-specific details. Our crew is monitoring the explosive situation on the planet Kryos when a subverted Vulcan mind-meld traps Mr. Spock in the sway of a religious zealot intent on inflaming the entire planet to war. Kirk and company must somehow save Spock and restore order without violating the Prime Directive that forbids Starfleet officers from interfering in the normal development of pre-spaceflight civilizations. Thanks to Cogswell, gigantic swaths of pages are devoted to scene-setting and Amazing Fantasy-style descriptions of the people and society of Kryos. When our characters do traipse onstage, they hardly ever sound or act like themselves, as in the quick dressing-down Captain Kirk gives poor Ensign Chekhov for breaking character around the natives:

“I wasn't talking about that,” Kirk snapped. “You're Beshwa, you idiot! You're never supposed to have handled a sword in your entire life. If you don't act as if you don't know one end of a sword from the other when you get out there, you're going to blow our cover. On the other hand, if you kill Greth, we won't be in any better shape. Either way, we'll be dead by morning. Well, we've got a couple of hours yet. Maybe we can think of something. Bones, you'd better get to work on the wounded.”

For those of us who bought a copy of Spock, Messiah the instant we saw it (for the pause-inducing price of $1.75), the book represented a classic win-lose scenario. It was original Star Trek fiction, at least technically – the first since Spock Must Die, a new adventure in which there was no pre-memorized dialogue. But it was all so, well, dull. By the numbers. Impersonal. Without knowing it or meaning to, this novel set the template for an endless torrent of Star Trek novels to come – and if it was the only such novel you read in 1976, you might have had cause for a bit of depression.

But there was another Star Trek book published that year, and to put it mildly, it wasn't impersonal.

Star Trek: The New Voyages was born of those earliest conventions, and it owes its genesis to the first ladies of fandom, the girls who were geeks before the word existed, who banded together initially to save the show from cancellation and then stayed banded together to keep its memory alive. It's easy to see the appeal for these particular fans: not only did Star Trek feature dozens of incredibly memorable female guest-characters – a forlornly brave ice age exile (“a very inventive mind, that man”), a fiercely independent blind diplomat (“I could play tennis with you, Captain Kirk – I might even beat you”), an imperious, calculating Vulcan princess (“And as the years went by, I came to know that I did not want to be the consort of a legend”), and perhaps most incredibly of all, a Romulan woman in command of her own starship (“We can appreciate the Vulcans, our distant brothers”) - but its central cast had three refreshingly realized female characters: Yeoman Janice Rand, who could be feisty and sardonic when the occasion demanded, Nurse Christine Chapel, in whom tenderness and professionalism never clashed, and most of all Lieutenant Uhura, mainstay of the bridge crew itself, voice of the Enterprise and voice of common sense to her male comrades. For the first time, young women could look at a science fiction world and feel invited instead of excluded.

They took to it with a passion. Most of those primitive fanzines we've already discussed were the brain-children of women, who did all the typing, all the proofreading, all the story-solicitation, all the tedious mailing – and most of the best writing. Most of those earliest conventions were organized by women. The two mega-selling nonfiction (hence, outside our purview) books about Star Trek – The World of Star Trek and especially Star Trek Lives – were mostly written by women, about women.

These first ladies of fandom are the ones who first realized the potential in all those Star Trek stories written by countless fans who could expect no possibility of publication. That potential was brought to the attention of Fred Pohl at Bantam, and he pounced on it, using his bottomless charm (and the seemingly limitless number of connections he had, everywhere) to get an actual book authorized. Suddenly, these first ladies had a shot at creating some new legends of their own.

The result was Star Trek: The New Voyages, and it was mainly the prodigy of two of that first generation of fans: Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Their infectious enthusiasm got the project off the ground and helped it soar – and unlike in a production such as Spock, Messiah, that enthusiasm is palpable on every page of this anthology (in which, in yet another industry first inaugurated by Star Trek, there are no stories by men). Here there is no question of precedent: these are stories that grew entirely out of love for the show and its characters. So the characters are in character, from first to last – the passions, the wisecracks, the ethical dilemmas … everything reads as if these, too, were novelizations of broadcast episodes, as though this were a companion volume to the fourth season original fans never got.

Virtually all the first ladies are represented here. There's Claire Gabriel (in “Ni Var” Spock is genetically separated into two beings – one human, one Vulcan, both Spock), Juanita Coulson (in “Intersection Point” the Enterprise crashes into something that isn't there), Ruth Berman (in “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited,” William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley find themselves accidentally beamed onto the real Enterprise during a crisis – the companion and continuation of the fanzine story “Visit to a Weird Planet”), and in the best story of the collection, Shirley Maiewski (in “Mind-Sifter,” a memory-shattered Kirk is stranded in a 20^th century mental hospital) – and many others.

Although they will later be quite prolific, Marshak and Culbreath give us no story of their own in this first anthology – although their prose is all over it in other guises. Paramount requested that each of the stars of the original series pen a short introduction to one of the stories in the collection, and, well, several of these introductions sound quite a bit like our editors, writing in their telltale breathlessly, charmingly hyperbolic diction. And there's their introduction, a short piece of prose in which the clean breath of vindication moves like a wind through the barley:

Here are not merely bold knights and fair damsels, but flesh-and-blood men and women of courage and achievement, knowing the value of love, and of laughter. They know also tears and terrors, doubts and divisions, frailties and fears, yet they do not bemoan their fate, and they do not merely endure; they prevail.

If Camelot and Man of La Mancha are legends of glorious quests for the unattainable, and Star Trek is our new dream, the possible dream – to reach for the reachable stars.

No, we have not forgotten Camelot.

But if this be our new Camelot, even more shining – make the most of it.

Spock, Messiah racked up decent sales numbers - fans clearly did their duty and bought it - but Star Trek: The New Voyages was a meteor: fans bought two or three copies apiece, passed them around, read them until they were falling apart, underlined, annotated, cross-referenced. This was the first true taste of Star Trek fiction – the first real taste of Star Trek itself since the show went off the air. A calm retrospective now can hardly convey the water-in-the-desert perfect satisfaction it produced – long before there was firm talk of a new movie, these women had been tending the flame and writing the further adventures, and this book stands as a monument to their dedication. A geeky monument, but a monument all the same.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Fanzines!

Response from the Silent Majority was surprisingly favorable for my new ongoing regular feature (I love regular features! I'm only allowed just so many over at Open Letters, my overlords there being reactionary tween tyrants, but here at Stevereads I can have has many as I like!) on the long, strange literary history of Star Trek. Apparently, most of you have watched the show in one incarnation or other over the decades, and several of you have loved it dearly.

Favorable, yet nit-picky! In my very first chapter of this feature, I looked at James Blish's Spock Must Die! - I used it as a kind of starting point, noting the slim pickings that came before it: a moronic kids book and a vast sea of fanzines. My implication was that those primordial beginnings weren't worth the time to examine in detail, but I reckoned without the x-factor of curiosity! This makes sense: virtually none of you will have been around and involved in the production and reading of those early fanzines, and the only other place to come across them is deep in the bowels of a Star Trek convention, which is not a place sane and healthy people go. Curiosity would naturally prompt you all to wonder what those fanzines were like, back at the very dawn of Star Trek itself.

They were mostly awful. I was there from the very beginning, I read most of them, I may even have participated in some of them (back when I was declasse enough to use pseudonyms), and I'm telling you: they were mostly awful. Labors of love, every one of them – and like all labors of love, ugly and ill-conceived. “Labor of Love” is a recognized euphemism for 'ugly and ill-conceived,' for Pete's sake!

Still, several of you wrote (privately, of course! Don't know what I'd even do if a lively debate erupted in, oh I don't know, the Comments field) expressing curiosity over this sub-layer of forest flooring you've missed all these years, so I'm pausing from my look at Star Trek BOOKS for a brief posting on the Star Trek fanzines that came before everything. This is where the very earliest Star Trek fiction was born – this is where it underwent its first mitosis from Star Trek, the show, itself. And like all infants, it was loud, ungainly, and prone to soil itself.



One thing some of you younger readers must understand: we did all this without technology, using the equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. There were no personal computers then, no scanners, no Internet. There were gigantic mimeograph machines, and there were typewriters (some of them which were electric, so if you paused to think you got a row of mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm's – and you couldn't just 'delete' – you had to start again on a new sheet of paper), and there were heavy metal telephones connected to cords that came out of the wall, and these were the only tools available to the earliest Star Trek fiction pioneers. So the results look primitive by today's standards. Fan homages now take the form of unbelievably sophisticated pastiches done on video. Are there any privately circulated print-fanzines anymore? I don't know.

Fifty years ago, they sprouted like toadstools. From the very first, Star Trek created in its fans an urgent desire not just to watch but to contribute. The show seemed to belong to us, rather than to some studio that only let us watch it. Fanzines were born of that urge, and they started appearing soon after the original series started airing. One of the earliest, something called “Spockanalia” (you were warned), was already several issues old before the original three-season run was done.



And even in the midst of that fabled run, fans were doing what fans do best: complaining. Even back in 1968, one issue of “Spockanalia” could feature the following wail of disappointment from its editors:

There's a new season starting. Please [it was addressed directly to Gene Roddenberry, who did indeed read it]. Bring back your original standards. Write us another “Menagerie” and let the “Omega” [a reference to the episode “The Omega Glory”] be past. If we fans have any voice in the creation of STAR TREK, then we say, “Keep it the way it was. That is what we want.”

It's one of the little ironies of the fanzines that although they were all animated by that same geek-anthem of “keep it the way it was,” they all featured Star Trek scenarios that Roddenberry would never have countenanced in any incarnation of his show. Main characters are usually only caricatures of themselves; dialogue is clumsy and blockish, torture and degradation are frequent and gratuitous, and illicit romantic relationships are everywhere (the main variation being a homosexual pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock – all because Roddenberry and his writers dared to show two grown men whose close friendship with each other actually meant something to each). At the same time the harried and hard-working editors of these fanzines were urging Roddenberry not to abandon his vision, they were publishing stories that threw that vision out the nearest airlock.

'Publishing' here is an extremely equivocal term. These things were hand-mimeographed, hand-stapled, hand-set, and hand-distributed. Some of the funky sci-fi bookshops in San Francisco and New York at the time might actually have one or two of them for sale, but they were novelty items only. You read one largely because you were in some way involved in producing one, otherwise you got one in the mail (late, and bent) if you paid your 75 cents postage.

And this provincial distribution reflected – and in many cases encouraged – a provincial tone in the contents. There were innumerable typos. There were execrable puns and in-jokes. There were inept doodles and insufferably earnest fan drawings. There were limericks. If somebody's sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend's brother so much as breathed on the galley sheets, he was solemnly thanked in the credits. Reading through one of those early fanzines was like having a lump of raw faith in your hands. Potent, but sloppy.

Potent, sloppy, and, as mentioned, mostly awful. Paragraphs like this one abound:

The U.S.S. Enterprise, an unbelievably massive and graceful island of life, appeared first as a small shape of credible proportions, then as a gigantic array of metal, lights, and plastics gleaming in the glare of a crimson sun. From that moment on, I became a part of the vessel's life. And, along with the regular personnel of the Enterprise, I became fascinated with one phase of Starship life in particular … a Vulcan-Terran humanoid known as Spock Xtmprsquzntwlfb. Mr. Spock (as he is referred to by his ship-mates …) is the logic-minded science-officer. Aboard the Enterprise he is second-in-command. Within Starfleet, he holds the rank of “Commander.”

(In the interests of painful accuracy, not one hyphen, capitalization, or quotation-mark of the above has been altered)

The 'phase' in question here, the character of Mr. Spock, is a perennial object of, well, fascination in the fanzines – as indeed he was on the original show. Fans seized on every conceivable detail of the character, from his green blood to his enhanced physical strength to his race's odd mating habits, even to the fact that in the episode “This Side of Paradise” he tells Leila Kalomi that she “couldn't pronounce” his real name – hence the alphabet-soup stand-in that fans (encouraged, it should be noted, by Roddenberry) concocted to serve as his 'last name' (fans concentrated so much on creating a last name made of English language letters in such a sequence as to be unsayable that they overlooked the far more explosive implication of the original question and answer: that Spock itself is simply a nonsense-word, that when this character's at home he's actually called something else entirely). The emphasis gets tiresome very quickly, but readers looking for a little relief will be sorry when they find it – characterizations of everybody else are ever so much worse. Kirk is the golden jock every nerd and geek (hence, every Star Trek fan) loves to hate in these earliest stories, and Dr. McCoy is most often portrayed as a ranting drunk. The secondary characters are almost always delineated by how similar/dissimilar they are to Mr. Spock, or else how deeply they lust after him (in the fanzines, as in all later Star Trek fiction, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is the least explored character of all – later on in this regular feature, when we get to Character Dossiers, we'll examine reasons for that).

The miracle of Star Trek is this: when the show was canceled, the fanzines didn't limp along and die out the way they would have with any other show. They kept going. They flourished. In the barren years between the last aired episode of the original series and the appearance of roughly regularized Star Trek novels, the fanzines were the lifeline through which Star Trek survived in print (meanwhile, an innovative and largely unprecedented deployment of network reruns of the original series was keeping the visuals alive and making new fans all over the Western hemisphere).

Even as the 'technology' of producing that lifeline improved (better mimeograph machines, better binding, even clunky, primitive dot-matrix printers), the lifeline itself was still mostly awful. Relatively successful later fanzines like “It Takes Time on Impulse” were still self-confessedly amateur productions (a poem at the beginning of one issue reads: “red's running out of ribbon/and I'm running out of words./red's going to be repaired/and I'm going to bed./typos there are,/apologies there aren't”)(“red” being a typewriter – we named our machines, back in 1985) full of clumsy, largely deplorable fiction and nonfiction. But these later fanzines had one key difference: they were all animated by hope. By that point, every Star Trek fan was feeling the first flickers of that hope – that somehow, in some way, their beloved show would return.

There were, against all odds, some good stories in those early fanzines (including a couple that became legends, like “Visit to a Strange Planet,” in which a transporter accident – that again! - lands the real Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on the set of Roddenberry's TV show – a story that spawned an entertaining sequel, as we'll see), and some good writers (Juanita Coulson deserves special mention for consistently hitting a level of professionalism – on the page and in the 'back room' – that so often eluded her colleagues) managed to show up amidst the dregs, but by and large there is no reason to return to the fanzines yellowing in attics or preserved in Mylar bags at conventions, any more than even the fondest yearning for the innocence of childhood would make strained beets appealing to an adult. But the fanzines are worth contemplating, mainly because they're remnants of a world that no longer exists, a world that will never exist again (now that the various entertainment conglomerates have learned that there's money in that there franchise): a world without Star Trek.

We have regular novels now, and we just had a very successful movie relaunch of the whole concept (a relaunch that's been curiously shy about kicking off its own line of books – another thing we'll examine in due time), and we have Fanfiction.net to handle the continuously swelling tide of fan writings that were once the sole province of fanzines. The ratio of crap to quality hasn't changed (the great science fiction writer Ted Sturgeon hinted that it was a physical constant, like absolute zero) – you still have to sift through a huge mountain of poorly written garbage to find the one or two gems worth reading. But at least you get to keep your 75 cents.