Home Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The End of an Era!

Meta
Title:	Home Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The End of an Era!
Creator:	Steve Donoghue
Date(s):	February 1, 2011
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	Home Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The End of an Era!
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Home Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The End of an Era! is an essay by Steve Donoghue.

It was posted to Donoghue's blog on February 1, 2011.

It includes a comment by Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

Topics Discussed

• Star Trek Tie-in Novels
• Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath's The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix, which Donoghue calls "the Star Trek fan fiction novels to end all Star Trek fan fiction novels"
• a link to Star Trek Then and Now! , another post by the author (October 24, 2009)

From the Essay

All things work toward their own perfection, and unless you’re a horseshoe crab, that perfection tends to presage your doom. As true as this is for cheetahs and concert violinists, it’s also true for Star Trek fiction – specifically, the first, wild-and-woolly type of Star Trek fiction we’ve been chronicling in this series so far.

That type, as some of you will recall, was born in boozy convention rooms and lonely basements across the country even before the original series left the airwaves, written by fans so desperate to read more adventures of these characters they loved that they were willing to write those adventures themselves. And they did, in unprecedented numbers, and fanzines were born of that samizdat fervor. Random chance has almost always smiled on Star Trek (a free book to the first of you who can tell me the Star Trek quote that acknowledges this phenomenon), and here was no exception: some of those fans turned out to be talented writers, and some talented writers turned out to be fans. Actual, honest-to-gosh novels were born.

As we’ve discovered, they were of unequal quality...

[...]

They were syrupy and sentimental. They were inconsistent (different books would hand out different fates to the same supporting characters, until it became almost a game to find out what crazy thing would happen to T’Pring or Doctor M’Benga this time). And once professional hacks learned there was a little money to be made, a great many of those earliest novels were the unthinkable: bland.

The one thing all of it had in common was simple: it was all still largely unnoticed by its nominal parent company, Paramount Pictures. Spin-off novels about a canceled series? Somebody somewhere in the vast motion picture conglomerate might have cared a bit, but the corporation sure as hell didn’t.

And the way to tell that somebody somewhere cared at least a little? Those early Star Trek novels steered further and further away from the sado-erotic excesses of the earliest fan fiction. Even with the earliest professional novels, somebody somewhere must have said ‘Kirk and Spock can’t die, or be tortured, or kill out of anger’ – even though those three things were staples of fan fiction.

Of course I’m referring to The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix, by the writing team of Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.

The Price of the Phoenix came out in 1977 and is, I make no secret of it, my favorite Star Trek novel of them all (not all the novels featuring the original cast, but all the novels – this is my favorite out of 700, not 70) – a designation rendered all the more melancholy for me by the realization that this book could never be published today. Even though its every page is glowing not only with knowledge of the show (this writing team was even briefly in love with the idea of footnotes in Star Trek novels – imagine if that had caught on! They’d be running at Gibbon-esque length in the most recent books!) but with fidelity to its spirit, these books are too violent, too sexually charged, too adult to get green-lighted in today’s franchise sci-fi market. Not to mention the fact that all of those fan fiction staples feature prominently here: our logical, unemotional Mr. Spock threatens murder with savage ferocity; characters are tortured with sheer brute force; and best of all, somebody dies – Captain Kirk, no less, and he’s dead before the book opens...

[MUCH snipped about the plot]

The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix sold very well, but more importantly, they were very much loved by Star Trek fans eager for the novels they were reading to more faithfully mirror the show they loved. Both books have been reprinted several times with an array of different cover illustrations – including one for The Fate of the Phoenix that features Kirk kneeling before a shadowy figure we only see from the rear and must assume is Omne – reflecting the fact that in the entire course of both books, Culbreath and Marshak never once explicitly tell us what color Omne’s skin is – he’s called Black Omne, but that’s easily interpreted as a reflection of his malevolence only, and sometimes our authors will refer to his ‘heathen idol face’ – but again, the truly telling specifics simply aren’t included.

In the interval between The Price of the Phoenix and its sequel, our two authors came out with yet another sequel: Star Trek the New Voyages 2, the sequel to their first volume of fan-generated short stories. There’s the usual mix of quality in the second volume, but the whole thing is bracketed by two short stories by Culbreath and Marshak themselves – the first story in the collection, “Surprise!” a somewhat fluffy little lark about an alien gremlin playing pranks on the Enterprise, and the final story in the book, the horrendously titled “The Procrustean Petard,” in which Kirk and crew are abducted by inscrutable alien technology – and have their genders reversed on a genetic level. In the story’s brief interval during which they wonder if they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives that way, the characters do some fun and surprisingly knowing introspection about the deeper roles gender has played in their lives without them realizing it. The moment in the story where the now-voluptuous Kirk is nearly raped by a Klingon is not only classic Star Trek thought-provoking but classic fanzine erotic overkill. It and the Phoenix volumes couldn’t help but remind long-time fans of some of the truly atrocious fan-generated fiction they’d read in messy dot-matrix printings over the years – and given the popularity of Culbreath and Marshak’s books, those fans might have been forgiven for thinking that in addition to the more sanitized ‘mainstream’ volumes being published regularly, there’d always be a place for this rougher, more suggestive, and entirely more entertaining branch of the genre.

Those fans were wrong, however. Something was about to happen to the world of Star Trek fiction – something so vast and all-pervasive that not the most optimistic fan in the entire world could have seen it coming. After ten long years of cult status and endless syndicated reruns, Star Trek was about to become a billion-dollar world-wide juggernaut. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came to theaters in 1979, and the world of Star Trek fiction would never be the same again.

Comment by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

I was browsing the sales statistics on my current, newly released, novels in my Sime~Gen universe on Amazon, when I remembered how House of Zeor was mentioned in STAR TREK LIVES! and so remembered Sondra Marshak.

I keep looking for her online, but I don’t find a homepage or Facebook presence for her. Since Joan Winston passed, and I don’t have touch with her heirs, there’s no hope that we can re-release STAR TREK LIVES! in ebook format, as most of my other books have been. Since I basically live online these days, with a presence on a wide variety of social networks (Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, blogger etc etc) I can’t understand why I haven’t run into Sondra.

But google tossed up this blog item and I was glad to find it! Thank you.