Natasha Solten
| Fan | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Natasha Solten |
| Alias(es): | Wendy Rathbone, Andrea Arat, Kami Saaid, Alled Navesih, Derriny Dark, Nathan St. Germaine OR Keith Donovan [1], and others (see this fan's 2011 comments on the talk/discussion page) |
| Type: | fan writer & fanzine publisher & convention organizer |
| Fandoms: | Star Trek: TOS, Blake's 7, Wiseguy, Star Wars |
| Communities: | |
| Other: | |
| URL: | AO3 profile Her K/S fan fiction archive bio Livejournal |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Natasha Solten is a Star Trek: TOS slash fan writer who began writing in 1975 [2].
She wrote both fan fiction and poetry and also published Charisma and One Night Stand, two long running Star Trek slash fanzines. She also co-wrote several stories with Dovya Blacque. She is perhaps best known for her K/S novel, The Prince.
She helped organize and run the K/S convention Koon-ut-Cali-Con in the late 1980s (even coming up with the name for the convention).
She branched out into writing Blake's 7 fan fiction and Star Wars poetry in the late 1980s. After taking a break from fandom, she became newly interested in Wiseguy and started writing again. Her most recent publication was The War Inside, a Wiseguy anthology in 2010.
From a 2007 Interview
Solten was interviewed as part of the K/S Legacy project. In that interview she discussed how early K/S fans grappled with whether Kirk and Spock were to be 'read' as homosexual:
[I think it is a fascinating kind of leap of evolutionary thinking, and not an insult to gays, that so many K/Sers wrote about Kirk and Spock doing any and all kinds of unmentionable things with each other, but fought hard to NOT label them as homosexual. Stories of bonding and marriage still didn’t convince the K/S fans to use that label. It is not because of prejudice, but I think in spite of it. I think Star Trek itself, if a person embraced its philosophy, taught principles of a kind of open-mindedness that saw people as people and not just labels. Also, K/S writers saw this relationship as special, not one of a series of affairs Kirk or Spock might have. And therefore, the specialness meant that this relationship defied labels and boundaries. So writers were able, with glee, to write about Kirk and Spock “in character” and not have too many discrepancies pop up. It seemed believable that Spock could love Leila, and Kirk could love Ruth, in the past, and that they could find each other and not have their pasts conflict with that. In an ideological world, two people in love would be just that, and whether man/woman, man/man, woman/ woman was a non-issue. To write in that kind of future milieu was, for me, a wonderful thing. I think this topic is important to address in a history of K/S because it was and is a different kind of thinking because it is, after all, in the future and science fiction. [3]
Interviews
References
- ^ Keith Donovan and Nathan St. Germaine are linked on the Fanzines Plus website -- "TIME OUT OF MIND Publication date: 1985 164 pgs.- 2 column, very small print. Originally pubbed under the pseudonym, "Nathan St. Germaine & Keith Donovan", this is an alternate universe K/S novel by A.F. Black & Natasha Solten." -- STAR TREK FanZineS Gay Romance K/S Novels of Alexis Fegan Black, male/male, ship
- ^ Solten had contributions in Plomik Soup #1
- ^ from Legacy Interview with Natasha Solten