Dorothy Jones Heydt

Fan
Name:	Dorothy Jones Heydt
Alias(es):	Katherine Blake
Type:
Fandoms:	Science Fiction Fandom, Star Trek, Darkover
Communities:
Other:
URL:	Dorothy J. Heydt at Wikipedia Profic Bibliography
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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.

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.

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

Dorothy Jones Heydt passed away in June 2022.

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 Heydt. 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 Heydt's "The Territory of Rigel", originally published in Spockanalia 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 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-Heydt's original work.

Today, ni var is sometimes used to refer to K/S, and is a kind of synonym for t'hy'la.

"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.