Star Trek Lives!

[louiselux]

... is the title of a book I bought from Oxfam yesterday. It's a fan's account of fandom, basically. It's utterly fascinating, as it was written circa 1975, I suppose when the Star Trek fandom was really becoming entrenched. It's a social document. Fanfiction is mentioned often, as is the type of person most likely to write it. Many of the descriptions of women fanfiction writers could be me, now.

As you can imagine from the title, it's quite evangelical on the all-round wonderfulness of the Trek. I haven't got to the chapter about fanfiction yet, but am waiting with some excitement to see if slash is mentioned anywhere. At the moment I'm plowing through the many sub-divisions of 'The Spock Effect', and we all know what that is, don't we?

'You, Scoggins, the five main theories underlying the Spock Effect, now!'

This book got me thinking too about what being a 'fan'is. Fan is short for 'fanatic'. That already tells us a lot. I think that being a fan is different to liking and writing slash, though I've noticed the two things naturally blur into each other. You can't have one withough the other, because to write half-decent fanfiction, you have to be a fan, and to love the characters. But I think of myself as a person who likes slash, rather than a person who is a fan, although I am a fan. Confused? Let me tell you, this is far, far less befuddling than trying to write a story about a hat and man.

Comments

[emrinalexander.livejournal.com]

I love this little book. I bought it in 1975 and it is what initially introduced me to (1) fandom in general and (2) the concept of fanfic (3) leading to my first fannish friend, Janet, who (4) introduced me to slash.

Sadly, the book doesn't, if memory serves correctly, ever mention K/S, they sort of ignore it like a pink elephant in the corner.

Such is the power of print.