Although Willis was certainly not the only fan who emphasized humor and satire and a focus on fan personalities rather than a desire to write or criticize science fiction, he was quickly identified as a master of the quip and the humorous column. His light yet incisively intelligent style made him popular on both sides of the Atlantic. He loved what he read, but did not take it seriously, if by “seriously” one means “solemnly.” In fact, because he took what he read very seriously indeed, Willis encouraged mocking the idiosyncrasies of fandom and of science fiction itself.
We first meet the Belfast Group in “Coming Up for the Third Time,” first published in Willis’ Hyphen (1954). Berry, an Englishman who had moved to Northern Ireland in 1949 to be with his fiancée, Diane, had joined the police force and was posted to Belfast. Discovering references to a fan group in the city, Berry wrote to Willis and was invited to meet him. In “Coming Up” he describes his nervousness in meeting WALT WILLIS (his capitals). At first distracted by a prominently displayed picture of Marilyn Monroe (mild salaciousness is a constant presence in his stories), Berry settles into conversation with Willis and is invited back to meet the rest of the group: Bob Shaw, James White, and George Charters, described here as an inveterate punster, but who in later stories is teased (as the oldest member of the group) as being a hard-of-hearing, senile old buffer in a wheelchair.
Berry’s stories are usually opportunities to tease his friends rather than specifically plotted fictions: each of them are given specific personae. They are slippery stories because they start with the assumption that their readers are familiar with these personae, and then gently satirize them. They are not a stable source for biography. Charters was older, but not that much older. “Bob Shaw” is surrounded by decrepit machinery and greedily devours Madeline’s cakes. James White worked for a clothing store, and is therefore depicted as being sartorially elegant and always ready to sell a friend a suit of clothes. Each writer is both admired for being a “pro” and teased for their prolific output: “If I hurry home now,” says James White in “Star Struck,” “I’ll just have time enough to bash out another chapter for Carnell before Peggy wakes up.”25 Willis is the group’s “genius” and natural leader. Berry himself is the “neo,” naïvely hero-worshipping his new friends. In “Arrested Development” (Triode, 1955; collected in A Time Regained), he writes about how Bob Shaw intends to join the police force, and how Walt Willis invents a fiendishly difficult “examination paper” for him. Berry addresses Shaw as “Mr. Shaw” throughout and Willis as “Sir.”
A typical story is “Bob and the Typewriter” (Oopsla, 1957; collected in The If Files26), which plays upon the connection between Shaw and machinery. Berry expresses a desire for a typewriter. Willis sets things in motion by remarking, “Here’s a client for your typewriter, Bob.” We are set up for the joke by Shaw’s salesman-like actions as he prepares the innocent for the kill. Berry stresses the difference in status between neophyte and professional author: “What a glorious opportunity, I thought. Me, getting a pro-author’s typewriter.” Shaw offers Berry an opportunity to test it. An experienced if slow typist (“I can do it blindfolded so there was no need for me to remove the layer of scum off the keys”), Berry tries and fails to type the test word. Shaw covers up his typewriter’s failure by technical gobbledygook (“something wrong with the gribble draw-back lever”), and finally offers to sell it “dirt cheap.” When Shaw suggests three pounds for an object Berry has already calculated would cost several times that amount to fix, Berry is torn between not wanting to be cheated and their bond as fans. The joke, of course, is that Bob is offering him three pounds to “take the bloody thing away.”
More fictionalized are the Goon Defective Agency stories,27 in which John Berry rewrites himself as “Goon Bleary,” a bumbling private eye who investigates cases in which fandom and fanzines appear prominently. Spoofing the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler, the stories also owe something to the surreal British radio comedy The Goon Show, which aired from 1951 to 1960. “Goon,” of course, is also a slang expression for a dim-witted thug, and Goon Bleary solves his cases more by luck than judgment. “This Goon for Hire” (whose title echoes the 1942 film This Gun for Hire) recasts Irish Fandom as characters in a noir novel. The Goon is summoned to the Willis residence by a telegram from Walt:
Madeline opened the door.
“What gives, sister?” I growled.
She looked at me. She was pale, apprehensive.
“Upstairs,” she breathed.
I pushed past her, then halted. I thought I heard machine-gun fire. I tiptoed to a door on my left . . . listened. The staccato noise stopped.
“Page ninety-two of my new story just completed,” I heard a tired voice gasp.28
(The writer churning out fiction at high speed is Bob Shaw.) Goon Bleary enters Willis’ study and is offered a new case: someone has stolen Willis’ autographed copy of the fanzine Star Rockets. The joke here is that Star Rockets was, as a note to the story in Ken Cheslin’s reprint tells us, a fanzine that was “fabulously awful.” The Goon solves his case and claims his reward—although Willis backtracks on his offer of a set of smutty magazines and thrusts upon him a complete set of—Star Rockets.
Another story, “The Fan Who Never Was,”29 mingles the confusion of identity from the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, about the wartime planting of a corpse with forged letters to fool the Germans into thinking the planned Allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere, with a hoax famous among British fandom in the 1950s. Goon Bleary is called in by the security service to investigate a problem at the War Office. Central here is “Sergeant H. P. Sanderson”—who was, as Berry’s readers would have immediately grasped, a fan named “Sandy” Sanderson who was a sergeant in the army. There are opportunities for in-jokes when the security agent fails to understand what Bleary means when he quotes fanzine titles and fannish expressions, but eventually Bleary is planted, disguised as a typist in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, in Sanderson’s office. The opportunity here for salacious sniggering is not lost (“He looked me up and down. ‘Come in, my deah,’ he said, sort of throbbing like.”30), but more important is the plotting, which is among Berry’s most skilful. Just as an agent is trailing Sanderson, someone is trailing the agent. It turns out to be Bleary’s assistant, Art, who is helping a young woman, grievously wronged by Sanderson, to get her revenge.
The woman’s name, Joan Carr, is the clue. In 1952, the “real” Sanderson had decided to hoax fandom by inventing a completely fictitious fan. Partly because there were few women in fandom at the time, and partly because it would highlight his ingenuity if he succeeded, he decided to make this fan a woman. So “Joan Carr” was born. “Joan” was, like Sanderson, a member of the armed forces, serving abroad, so her absence from conventions was not unusual. “She” engaged in correspondence with other fans and eventually became one of the editors of Femizine, along with Sanderson’s coconspirator, Frances Evans. The hoax was eventually revealed in 1956.
For “The Fan Who Never Was,” Berry invents a real Joan Carr who “knew she couldn’t go to conventions and write to people and say she was Joan Carr, because they would laugh.”31 Joan goes on to say that “they would laugh at her, revile her, maybe even suggest she was a hoax and was using the name for notoriety.” It has certainly been argued that the hoax, while well-intentioned, made it more difficult for women to become involved in fandom for more or less those reasons.
Joan has arranged for Sanderson to be posted to the Pacific, destroying his life in fandom. Goon Bleary solves the case by making the agent an offer he can’t refuse (the phone number of a woman who does “artistic poses”), but also saves Joan Carr from being prosecuted by the authorities for illegal entry and forgery by pointing out the logic of the situation. If she were to be caught and prosecuted by the authorities for illegal entry and forgery, it would be possible to provide documentary proof and hundreds of witnesses who would swear she does not exist.32
I Am Woman, Read My Fic
IN THE HISTORY OF FANFICTION, Star Trek fulfilled its stated mission: to boldly go where no (f)an had gone before. While fanzines focusing on commentary were the norm in science fiction fandom in the 1960s, zines devoted to fanfiction, in the sense of amateur-authored stories set in an already created universe, were not. As Andy Sawyer explained, science fiction fandom had “fan fiction” that treated fans as characters; zines also published original science fiction stories by fans as opposed to commercially published writers. But while individual texts that resembled what we would now call fanfiction had been around for a long time, they were not an element of early science fiction zines. With Star Trek, they exploded onto the scene.
Star Trek, and even more so its body of fanworks, created science fiction centered on relationships, whether platonic, romantic, or (controversially) sexual. Star Trek was not, as we’ve seen, the first fanfiction fandom, nor the first driven by a close relationship between two men. There was, in fact, significant overlap between these early fic fandoms. Several of the central Trek fandom pioneers were also active in Sherlock Holmes circles: Ruth Berman, who founded T-Negative, was behind SH-sf Fanthology (1967–1973), a zine that collected a variety of writings about Sherlock Holmes and science fiction; the third issue of Spockanalia includes speculation by Sherlockian John Boardman on the Holmesian origins of Mr. Spock; and Roberta Rogow (editor of the zine Grip as well a filk singer and fandom archivist) has written a number of published Sherlock Holmes pastiches. But Star Trek was the first fandom where fanfiction became so central it could sustain multiple fanzines devoted exclusively to fic. With Star Trek, fanfiction becomes a true collective . . . enterprise, the kind of super-social community affair it is today.
Mass-media broadcasts of the source material, increasing access to technologies of reproduction (initially mimeographs, then offset printing, photocopying, and desktop publishing), the sexual revolution, and even Women’s Lib all combined to create the conditions for these women fans to take charge. Largely through their efforts, beginning in the late 1960s, fanfiction became a vibrant, active, eclectic, and even driving sector of fan activity. Star Trek fanfiction is not the exclusive terrain of women, and never has been, but Star Trek was the first sci-fi fandom to engage a really substantial number of them. Women formed a large majority of Star Trek fic writers.
As Star Trek fic culture evolved, it began the trend of including erotic content in fanfiction (although certainly, bawdy or porny adventures using existing characters and story is nothing new—see “A Prehistory of Fanfiction” and the fates of Samuel Richardson’s virtuous heroines). As Jacqueline Lichtenberg explains in her essay “Recollections of a Collating Party,” however, this fanfiction trend coincided with and mutually influenced the growing inclusion of sexuality in mainstream science fiction and fantasy literature. Most controversially of all, Star Trek also inspired the first slash fandom (slash here and throughout this volume defined as homoerotic romance, usually between characters canonically portrayed as straight), although this element was hardly embraced or even tolerated by the majority of fans.
In the focus of their interest, female Star Trek fans surprised the show’s creators from the outset. They had thought Captain Kirk would be the big draw and had structured the show accordingly, but Spock got the biggest fan reaction, especially among women. The first zines, Spockanalia and T-Negative (named after Spock’s blood type), reflect this enthusiasm. The show’s creators kept up with such zines as a valuable source of insight into fan taste and concerns, and occasionally even contributed in the form of letters from cast members—usually in character.
Like Samuel Richardson before them, Star Trek’s creators soon learned the wisdom of engaging seriously with the tastes and interests of the show’s assertive, vocal female fans. For example, at the suggestion of Isaac Asimov (a close friend of Roddenberry’s), the show sought to help Kirk share in some of the female interest in Spock by making this friendship even more central to the series. This response, in turn, gave “Enterprising Women” (to borrow the title from Camille Bacon-Smith’s groundbreaking work) even more material to work with.
Focusing on this central relationship dramatically influenced the dynamic of the show and the fanfiction it inspired. Kirk’s relationship to women followed the model of the “lone womanizer,” always available to a new romantic interest—and to the fantasies of the female viewer: an established and long-standing formula for male leads in television. With Spock, however, Kirk sustained a complex, long-term commitment of affection and mutual respect. Spock, the withholding, logical one (always a turn-on, apparently), maintained and valued such a relationship with Kirk—but not with a woman (though Nurse Chapel certainly tried). Their relationship fascinated viewers—and more than forty years later, continues to do so.
While Star Trek fanfiction explores many relationships, Kirk–Spock (and later, Kirk/Spock) had the greatest impact and proved the greatest draw. A common account of the evolution of slash explains that women fans wanted to explore the possibilities of a romantic or sexual pairing in the context of a long-term, complex relationship between equals: a structure mainstream culture was nowhere offering, and certainly not on Star Trek. The show allowed for the possibility of such a relationship, but its model of sustained intimacy, trust, and love was between men. When heterosexual liaisons intervened (or, some might argue, interfered) in the Kirk-Spock friendship, as in the pon farr Vulcan mating ritual (e.g., “Amok Time”: Spock is overpowered by the need to mate and believes he has killed Kirk) or on the sex pollen planet (e.g., “This Side of Paradise”: Spock falls in love as a result of spores and neglects his duty), it is Kirk who brings Spock back to himself, his duties, and their friendship—by inspiring an equally powerful negative emotion: rage at the racially tinged insults Kirk hurls at him. When Spock shows emotion not caused by spores or mating cycles, it happens only in relation to Kirk. (Sex spores and irresistible mating cycles both went on to become long-standing multifandom tropes, still going strong today.)
Fanfiction explorations of this central friendship were not predominantly slash—especially not at first. Hurt/comfort (vulnerability showcased, friendship tested and proved) in the context of a strictly platonic friendship was extremely popular and remains one of the most popular genres in all fandoms. In the early days, in fact, the slash (as in Kirk/Spock, or K/S) that today identifies a sexual relationship only indicated that the relationship was central to the story. Many fics gave both Kirk and Spock female love interests, with erotic encounters at first implied and in later years detailed with specificity. Slash in the contemporary sense did not begin appearing even in zine publication until 1974 (though it was circulated before that), when the Kirk–Spock relationship as a driving interest of fic was already long established.
That zine publication long postdates the underground existence and circulation of slash stories is anecdotally established. And while the heyday of K/S slash was not until the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of Kirk and Spock as potential romantic partners was commonplace enough in 1979 fo
r Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, to address it himself, in response to the following question:
There’s a great deal of writing in the Star Trek movement which compares the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion to the relationship between Kirk and Spock—focusing on the closeness of the friendship, the feeling that they would die for one another . . .
[Roddenberry:] Yes, there’s certainly some of that—certainly with love overtones. Deep love. The only difference being, the Greek ideal—we never suggested in the series—physical love between the two. But it’s the—we certainly had the feeling that the affection was sufficient for that, if that were the particular style of the 23rd century.34
Writing as Captain Kirk in the novelization of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry took to the Vulcan language, and a footnote, to coyly comment on the nature of Kirk–Spock:
Editor’s note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t’hy’la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock’s recollection (from which this chapter has drawn) is that it was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t’hy’la can be used to mean lover, and since Kirk’s and Spock’s friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:
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