Fan fiction memories!

I first heard of fan fiction in the book, Star Trek Lives! by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Sondra Marshak (1975). I bought the book from the airport bookshop while waiting for a relative to arrive. Fan fiction seemed like a good idea, so I wrote several stories about the Star Trek characters and submitted them to SPOCK. SPOCK was the fanzine published by Austrek, the Melbourne Trek fan club. It went for about 65 issues and I had stories in nearly every issue.

Trek fan fiction started with an American fanzine called Spockanalia in 1967. The show was cancelled after only three seasons, and fans wanted to have more stories, so wrote their own. Fan fiction is still going strong, mostly online now. There is fanfiction.net and Archive Of Our Own (AO3). You can download the stories, some of which are over 100,000 words long. And you can write your own fan fiction and upload it to the website. There is a lot more variety than when we were publishing SPOCK, which was a general fanzine, no naughty stories.

Speaking of naughty stories, would you believe the very first “slash” story in fan fiction, ever, was written by a member of Austrek, of which I was also a member? I’m not kidding. 

Slash fiction is called that because of the slash between the names “Kirk” and “Spock” when describing this kind of story – or K/S. In these stories, there are relationships between same-sex characters. This is so common these days that nobody thinks twice about it, but nobody had written K/S fiction until...

The late Diane Marchant, a Melbourne fan, was a friend of the entire cast and Gene Roddenberry. She wrote to them often, also visiting them in the USA. She had many American fan friends, and at the end of a letter to one fan friend – just for fun – she wrote a short piece about our heroes in which they – er... do it. She hadn't expected the story to be published, and was horrified when it was; Diane preferred  the relationship between Spock and Christine Chapel. And then people thought slash was such a good idea that they wrote their own, and the rest is history.

Believe it. Everything has to start somewhere, after all. For example, I personally know Paula Smith, the fan writer who created the term “Mary Sue”, which is used everywhere these days – not only in fan fiction – for a female character who is loved by everyone; if not becoming pregnant by the male character of the author's choice and dying, she saves the universe and, possibly, dies. Or marries the hero. Or was a foster sister of Spock. In my opinion, the first Mary Sue was Miramanee in The Paradise Syndrome, who married Kirk, got pregnant and died, but there wasn't a name for that in those days. If you are curious, google “A Trekkie's Tale” by Paula Smith. It's online and very funny. 

I remember how we shared our fanzines at Austrek meetings and borrowed them from each other. In fact, it's how I became a pen pal of Paula Smith. Someone lent me a copy of Paula’s fanzine Menagerie. I got a stain on it, so I ordered another copy from Paula and we started corresponding. The Austrek member who had lent me the fanzine got the replacement copy and said, “Oh, that's not necessary, I don't mind!” They lent it to someone else and never got it back.

As I said, SPOCK was a general fanzine. There were some wonderful stories in it, about our favourite characters. In the early issues, we were just writing about the TV series, because we missed the show. Then the films came out and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and writers got story ideas from those.

There were some fan writers and artists who went on to be professionals. As a professional, of course, you have to create your own universe, but writing fan fiction and articles is a good way to practise your writing. You have to think about the the psychology of the characters and you have to get them right, or someone will write something rude about your story. After reviewing fanzines, I got a lot of free books for reviewing, and sold stories and books as an outcome of my fan fiction.

But a lot of others – writers and readers alike – just like to stick to fan fiction. And that's fine. I still read it, though I don't write it any more. I know of some big name authors who still write fan fiction, under pen names. Once, on social media, I told a well-known writer, Diane Duane, that I had enjoyed her fan fiction in the past. Her reply was: “What makes you think I've stopped?”