Dorothy Jones Heydt

Fan
Name:	Dorothy Jones Heydt
Alias(es):	Katherine Blake
Type:	author
Fandoms:	Science Fiction Fandom, Star Trek, Darkover
Communities:
Other:
URL:	at Wikipedia Profic Bibliography
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Dorothy Jones (looking down) and Ruth Berman in 1968 at Fun Con

Dorothy Jones Heydt was a science fiction and fantasy author. She published numerous short stories and two professional novels under her own name and as Katherine Blake. Some of her stories were published in anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Dorothy passed away in June 2022.

She was an active participant in the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom, and in science fiction fandom in general. She was the originator of the Eight Deadly Words and other fannish proverbs and sayings.

Jones was the compiler and editor of the Star Trek Concordance, an extensive resource guide first published in March 1969. At that time, she was also an early member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Her first SCA event was the second one held.

In Star Trek fandom, she was known as the creator of the first detailed Vulcan language conlang, which was detailed in the zine Spockanalia.

Jones coined the term ni var, which means "two form" and was defined by her as an art motif in which two aspects of a subject are compared and contrasted. Her poem "The Territory of Rigel" (Spockanalia 1) is an example of a ni var song lyric.

Jones also wrote "Vulcan Love Song" (Spockanalia 2), in which an Ancient Vulcan bride on her wedding day describes her emotions during pon farr ("in my heart was a great silence") as she witnesses koon-ut kal-if-fee combat, and her joy as she is united with the one she loves. It is written in what Jones described as a traditional Vulcan stanza consisting of paired eight-syllable lines ("The sky arched fire; my path was made. / I rose up to the sound of bells.")

Along with Astrid Anderson, the daughter of science fiction author Poul Anderson, she created the "Dorothy and Myfanwy" series of short stories published in T-Negative beginning in 1969.

Vulcan Language

Jones' Vulcan language included roots, grammatical rules and syntax, and was used in her own stories and articles, then picked up by a number of other fan authors. She proposed that "Vulcan is an isolating language; no word ever changes its form. Grammatical meaning (as opposed to lexical, or dictionary, meaning) is expressed by word order and the use of particles."

Ni Var

The term ni var was invented by Jones. She said, "Ni var literally means 'two form', and it is basically a piece comparing and contrasting two aspects of the same thing." (Spockanalia 1, 1967) Any form of art can be used to express a ni var.

The first published ni var and probably the best known in fandom is Jones' "The Territory of Rigel", originally published in Spockanalia 1 and reprinted in Joan Verba's Boldly Writing. It is supposedly composed by Spock while he's alone on night watch on the bridge. He has the overhead lights off and is admiring the brilliance of the star Rigel in the scanner, contrasting it with the darkness of the bridge and the blackness of space.

"Ni Var", a cut-down version of Claire Gabriel's The Thousandth Man, was published in the anthology Star Trek: The New Voyages. In this story, Spock is split physically into two people, one human, the other Vulcan. Leonard Nimoy wrote the introduction. Perhaps thinking of the Hebrew tradition of the mizpah, Nimoy partially misunderstood the meaning of ni var and said it was "two who are one; two halves which make up a unity". In the Enterprise episode "Shadows of P'Jem", the Ni'Var [sic] was a Suurok-class Vulcan starship, commanded by Sopek. The screenwriters confirmed that their use of the term came from Gabriel's story. They knew nothing of Jones' original work.

More recently, ni var became a term used by fans to refer to K/S, and as a kind of synonym for t'hy'la.

In 2020, the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Unification III" (November 26, 2020) revealed that the Vulcans and Romulans reconciled and reunified, and the planet Vulcan itself was renamed Ni Var to reflect this, returning to Dorothy Jones' original concept. According to an article on startrek.com, writer Kirsten Beyer credited Jones and explained: "In researching what little we have of Vulcan language, I came across a reference to a Vulcan art form, Ni var, which essentially meant 'two forms'; an object was examined from two different viewpoints or as having two different natures. It was coined by a linguist named Dorothy Jones, who wrote for some Star Trek fanzines in the late 1960s. I just thought it was beautiful, and captured perfectly what would be happening on Vulcan should they truly attempt reunification with the Romulans."

The article includes screenshots of "The Territory of Rigel" as it originally appeared in Spockanalia 1, and pages from Star Trek: The New Voyages showing its use in Claire Gabriel's story, along with part of Leonard Nimoy's introduction. The article concludes: "With 'Unification III,' the use of the word Ni’Var to rename the new planet shared by Vulcans and Romulans is more than just a nifty Easter egg. It honors not just the history of Trek fandom, but also of the influence that fandom has had on the real world."

"I don't care what happens to these people."

"I don't care what happens to these people" is a phrase coined by Dorothy Jones Heydt at rec.arts.sf.written, a science-fiction based Usenet group in June 1991. The phrase has been later used to describe a reader's reaction to a work of fiction where the characters are either so uninteresting and boring or unlikable that the reader simply loses interest in what happens to them, and to the rest of the book or story.

See Eight Deadly Words.