Off the Printed Page

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Title:	Off the Printed Page
Creator:	Harry Warner, Jr.
Date(s):	May 1969
Medium:	print
Fandom:	science fiction, Star Trek: TOS
Topic:
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Off the Printed Page is a 1969 essay by Harry Warner, Jr.

It was printed in Triskelion #3.

Some Topics Discussed

• print science fiction
• Star Trek: TOS
• predictability and archetypes
• Spock
• the relatively new medium of television
• Science Fiction Fandom vs. Media Fandom

From the Essay

I don't mean that I consider Star Trek similar in quality to that bad Western. It couldn't be as cliche-ridden because it is a pioneer venture with little or nothing to imitate. I couldn't have grown tired even of the repetitions within the Star Trek episodes because working hours have limited my exposure to Star Trek; and I know that most Star Trek fans don't wonder as they watch why they like this. But there is something in common between that Western and Star Trek, something so easy to see that hardly anyone notices it. It explains the emergence of Star Trek fandom, the vigorous campaigns launched to save the series when it was threatened with earlier cancellations, and the inability of older people in general fandom to comprehend fully the Star Trek subfandom.

I d been reading for the second or third time "Vanity Fair," just before looking at that bad Western. Thackeray was either the best or second-best 19th century British novelist, that's his most celebrated novel, I admired it so much on first reading that I considered it worth rereading, and yet today I can visualize more clearly, can understand as human beings more fully, the stock figures in that Western whom I saw for only a few minutes than the immortal characters whose adventures cover hundreds of pages of the novel. It's not Thackeray's fault or to the credit of the screenplay's author. It's just the result of the forgotten fact that everyone knows too well to acknowledge: imaginary characters can come to more vivid life on a screen or the tube than they can on the printed page.

Keep that banal, simple statement in mind, and almost everything about Star Trek and its fandom becomes easy to understand. Harlan Ellison throws a fit because his carefully contrived script is altered but that episode is still liked by most of its viewers. Star Trek fans complain when Star Trek shows an alarming trend toward episodes set in the present or past Earth, and yet they keep on watching as long as the network rolls Star Trek. A pair of pointed ears become better known in the science fiction universe than all the astonishing monstrosities and incredible new forms of extra- terrestrial life in the books and magazines. You can read for a dozen hours about the evil deeds of Rawdon Crawley and he doesn't stick in your mind's eye in quite the same manner as the villain wearing the black hat in an incompletely seen old movie. Frank Herbert's painstakingly thought-out, elaborately detailed Dune world lacks a certain something that comes along with any of the far-off planets that the Enterprise crew visited for less than an hour.

It's interesting to conjecture about an alternate time track in which our world had acquired the movies and television before reading and writing became generally available skills. Would anyone have ever written any science fiction stories, in such a world of if? I doubt it, somehow. Most of us read much more science fiction than we watch on television and in the theaters, partly because it's still scarce on the screens and tubes, partly because films and video tapes aren't used with the imagination that writers put into the magazines and books. But if the pictorial medium for dramatic presentation had been there first, when science fiction was invented (under some other name, naturally), what writer would have had the audacity to try to equal through clumsy words the effect that the moving pictures and actual voices produced on an audience? In such a probability world, though, Mr. Spock might have found it harder to gain a big audience of fans, against such dramatic competition as a Giles Habibula or Asimov's Mule. In the actual world that we have, the ears have it. You can see them with your eyes and later can see them almost as well through through memory and they're more vivid than the much greater oddities of appearance of Giles or the First Citizen.

Star Trek spawned such an unprecedented fandom because it was the first, of its kind: stories that are elementary

enough to be understood even by small boys and girls, but dramatized m adult manner; a continuing cast of characters with whom watchers could grow increasingly familiar as the weeks passed; and a logical general background with which all the episodes were consistent. Well, almost all. The movies that had strong science fiction themes had been one-shots or were followed by impossibly inferior sequels, Previous television ventures into science fiction had either offered entirely different stories each week with no continuity between episodes, or had been so impossibly juvenile that their admirers didn't have enough muscles yet to staple fanzines. There wasn’t even anything on the legitimate stage to prepare the way for Star Trek -- the genre simply isn't suited to the live theater because it involves too many tricky future mechanisms, real-looking beams, and impossible sets. Can you imagine a stage version of The Skylark of Space as your senior class play?

So I hope that any lingering self-consciousness among Star Trek fans will vanish, just in case some of them still feel a bit ashamed of taking so seriously a money-making project on network television. I hope just as strongly that general fandom will think more clearly about the Star Trek subfandom and its members, Even if Star Trek is entering a new form of existence composed solely of reruns, there will be other science fiction series on television and well accept the simple fact that well-done science fiction on film or video tape is going to appeal quicker to more people in the future than well-done written science fiction.

If someone swings a baseball bat at your head, you react more vigorously than if that person writes you an insulting letter. Few of us are so intellectual that we can ignore the direct message to the ears and the eyes and pay attention only to the unseen, unheard scenes that come to us through the printed page. Unless a global war throws us all back into barbarism, visual forms of entertainment will take an increasingly important place in all our lives and subfandoms like the Star Trek enthusiasts are going to form an ever greater part of general fandom.