"The Nausea Effect": Star Trek Lives!

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Title:	"The Nausea Effect": Star Trek Lives!
Creator:	Sharon Ferraro
Date(s):	November 1975
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Topic:
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"The Nausea Effect": Star Trek Lives! is a 1975 essay by Sharon Ferraro.

It was printed in Spectrum #21.

The topic was Star Trek Lives!, an enormously influential book by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston which had been published just four months previously.

Some Topics Discussed

• comparing the tone of the book, and the authors themselves, to a Mary Sue, even going so far as to closely word its opening sentence from the first line from A Trekkie's Tale
• the essay's author refers to Joan Winston, Sondra Marshak, and Jacqueline Lichtenberg as "the three of her"
• the book treats fans like breathless 13-year olds
• the last chapter of the book, the one that talks about fanfiction, is too focused on sex
  • Ferraro dislikes the quote chosen from The Daneswoman because it focuses on Damion and Spock in bed, rather than Damion's strength in chess or as a captain of her ship
  • Ferraro dislikes the quoted scene from either "To Seek Thee Out" and "From Whatever Distant Hill," both stories by Judith Brownlee in Eridani Triad: "An actual sex act. Great. Why this scene... as an example of fan fiction? Why not another scene where T'Pell [sic] shows her smarts?"
  • Ferraro dislikes the quote used from Surak Plays: "Again, the scene is one of the few sexually orientated scenes in the 3 plays. As a representative quote, why now one of Surak's scenes -- that was the point of the whole drama -- the pon farr/marriage bit was the secondary and weaker plot."
• the book's content might be okay in a fanzine, but in a for-profit book, "... it exposed our most vulnerable side to the harshness of ridicule of the reading public."

From the Essay

Gosh-wow, golly, gloriosky! Isn't Star Trek just the niftiest show on teevee! Doesn't Mr. Spock just turn you on? U know that I could melt his cold Vulcan heart!)

Lt. Mary Sue lives, gang. Today- in fact the three of her wrote a book. And guess what? It's all about Star Trek. You know that crazy TV show with all those people flying around in space meeting monsters and Klingons and furry things. The one that's always on around dinner times on weekends now. Yeah, that's the one. Well, anyway, three ladies wrote this book and they figure out why the show is so popular, About 14 times. And half of the reasons contradicting the other half. And they have these interviews with the fellow who created the show explaining where his ideas came from. Which was pretty neat.

Gene Roddenberry is a good man, an adequate writer and a dreamer. All of these things, Maybe more. He says some fine things, like that people ought to live together and take joy in their differences- physical, or mental, or cultural; and that the future may not be perfect, but at least we won't wipe ourselves out between now and then. He was saying it just when a lot of us needed it to be said, and the fine philosophy embodied in the Federation's Prime Directive. Then why do the authors of this book claim that what he is saying is that the unknown is to be joyfully conquered? Maybe they mix up conquest with exploration. Maybe they didn't understand what Mr. Roddenberry meant? The The unknown is to be explored, curiosity satisfied. Conquest implies claiming.

Later on, the authors quote another intelligent, sensitive person, Leonard Nimoy. They ask him about Spock, about Kirk, about their future. They push him to dissect things which he does not wish to dissect publicly, or perhaps not at all. One does not ask an artist why or (outside of mechanics- "I hold a paintbrush like this.") how. This is a gut feeling often voiced by new amateur writers as-"Don't dissect my work- it hurts."

Enough of meandering. A solid statement: Star Trek Lives! has done inestimable harm to the image of the Trekfan today. Why?, (Outside of the obvious anguish brought by it upon STW.) There are two major reasons. Now that it has been about 3 months since the first appearance of the book, emotions have cooled and the nausea level sunk.

The first is a gut reaction, seived[?] by how to an intellectual awareness of its source. Chapters One thru Eight, excluding Three (Which I found delightful, frenzied, and lacking the pretentious philosophical weight of its companions) explore in horrible detail, minute and nitpicking, the reasons for Star Trek's continuing popularity- repeatedly, saying one thing in one chapter and another in the next. The Optimism Effect, the Goal Effect, the Charisma Effect...the Whoopee Effect. I am reminded, more than anything else of the mindless babblings of my short lived days as a Monkees fan. The "Effects" are fairly well thought out, if a little muddled in transmission, but their overwhelming enthusiasm is completely untempered. There is no criticism stated or implied about the creation that was "Star Trek." Like the blind followers of Landru or the spores, enthusiasm is a good thing, but untempered by reality or criticism; it cannot last...

Star Trek fandom, as implied in STL!, is thousands of wide-eyed innocents waiting breathlessly for guidance from the Great Bird and examining with the studiousness of a Talmudic scholar, all of the aspects and bits of its Bible. Star Trek fandom is not that. Zines like Halkan Council and Spectrum would not exist if it were. It is, for many, many of us, a growing creative hobby.' A fascinating concept that filled an imaginative void in our lives and brought us new friends amid expanded horizons. STL! looks inward, delving ever deeper into their own navels and the innards of the televised drama. It is restricted and introspective. It has, been claimed that much of the fault for the book's glaring bald cuteness is with the publishers and editors at Bantam. Maybe Bantam sees us all as 13 year old kids who wouldn't understand one of the marvelous "Effects" unless it was repeated twice or more.

Onward. The second reason: take that last chapter. Rewrite it. Do anything - even eliminating it would leave fandom better off with the gosh-wow rest of this book still intact. Why? It took me a couple of months to figure out why I felt repulsed and depressed after I finished this book. (As an aside, when I finished David Gerrold's World of ST, I felt elated, inspired, and intrigued.) A major part of the reason lies in that last chapter. Numbers are black and white. There are 12 stories in that last chapter that are quoted in part, all written by fans, some by the best. Half of those quotes deal with sexually oriented material. (I am no prude. Reading, writing, etc, sex are an enjoyable small part of my life.) There are six- the first six in the chapter - that deal with erotic or near erotic material - some in a sado-masochistic way that compels me to skip the pages.

The next two quoted stories [quoted in the book] answer the question on p. 236, "How is he [Spock] to keep from dying in his next pon farr?" The answers are explicit, or heavily implied. The last objectionable bit quoted was from Steiner's Spock Enslaved - scenes quoted could hardly be avoided. From a novel filled with humiliations and implied if not blatant sado-masochism, there could be no alternatives.

These 6 quotes stories are half of the quotes in the chapter. The other half deal, honestly, with the spectrum of fan writing - some of Juanita Coulson's work, more of Laura Basta's, etc.

This last chapter is the worst of all. Sex was not the main emphasis in the televised Star Trek episodes and is not the main emphasis in 50% of fan fiction as is implied in this chapter. Bedding one of the main characters is not the appeal that drew me into ST fandom or into interest in the universe it created. It is not the obsession of the majority of fans. This last chapter gives the non-fan the impression that Star Trek fandom is the haven for sex-starved people bent on laying Spock in fantasy or reality. (It has already elicited negative response from the mothers of adolescent boys asking the question- "Is it safe to let my son go to a convention of sex-starved women?" I kid you not. You and I know otherwise, but the thousands upon thousands of non-fans don't know of the wonderful variety of fan fiction that exists. All they have seen is in that last chapter.)

All the material that was included in ST Lives! was at best average in writing quality. It would have been very special material published in fanzine form. Published professionally it exposed our most vulnerable side to the harshness of ridicule of the reading public. The massive impression I have gotten from those who have read the book and are not involved in fandom is a sad pity- that we are wasting our time idolizing a defunct TV show. They may not see the magic in the fascination, but this book did little to show the Trekfan to the public in a realistic manner- as the intelligent, curious, imaginative individual; not the starry-eyed groupie.