Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who
| Title: | Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who |
| Creator: | Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch |
| Date(s): | 1995 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek, Doctor Who |
| Language: | English |
| External Links: | |
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Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who is a 1995 book by Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch.
Chapters
- Beyond the Star Trek phenomenon: reconceptualizing the science fiction audience by Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch
- Positioning the SF audience: Star Trek, Doctor Who and the texts of science fiction by John Tulloch
- The changing audiences of science fiction by John Tulloch
- ‘Throwing a little bit of poison into future generations': Doctor Who audiences and ideology by John Tulloch
- ‘It’s meant to be fantasy': teenage audiences and genre by John Tulloch (with Marian Tulloch)
- 'But why is Doctor Who so attractive?': negotiating ideology and pleasure by John Tulloch
- ‘But he’s a Time Lord! He’s a Time Lord!’: reading formations, followers and fans by John Tulloch
- 'We're only a speck in the ocean': the fans as powerless elite by by John Tulloch
- 'Infinite diversity in infinite combinations': genre and authorship in Star Trek by Henry Jenkins
- ‘At other times, like females’: gender and Star Trek fan fiction by Henry Jenkins
- ‘How many Starfleet officers does it take to change a lightbulb?': Star Trek at MIT by Henry Jenkins (with Greg Dancer)
- ‘Out of the closed and into the universe’: queers and Star Trek by Henry Jenkins
Comments by Jenkins
Jenkins presented this book to fans in early 1995:
The big news on this front is the release in March of Science Fiction Audiences! Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who...the new book which I have co-authored with John Tulloch, an Australian based scholar. Tulloch has spent the better part of two decades studying Who, its producers, its episodes, and its audiences in England and Australia. While I was still in grad school, Tulloch asked me to contribute chapters to his book on American star Trek audiences. I did three case studies — one looking at the romance genre in fanzine stories, specifically looking at Jane Land's Demeter and Kista, two Chapel-Spock novels which I particularly admire; a second looking at Star Trek at MIT, specifically looking at the more technological/scientific orientation of MIT male fans; and third, a close examination of the Gaylaxians' letter-writing campaign to get a queer character on the series. The book also includes a brief history of Star Trek fandom and a chapter looking critically at the place of the series in the history of science fiction. If Textual Poachers looks at a fandom which incorporates many different series, I wanted to look here at the many different fandoms that surround Star Trek and the differences in how they approach the series.
I have had mixed feelings about this project all along. In many ways, Tulloch and I come from different perspectives on fandom. His view is not necessarily negative (though he takes some critics of media science fiction more seriously than I do) but he also is less prepared to embrace fandom from within and we have had a lot of disagreements in writing the book. On the other hand, I consider the Gaylaxian essay to be one of the best things I've ever written and a particularly important contribution to work on media audiences. [1]
About the "Monstrous" Cover
Jenkins Distanced Himself from the Cover
Henry Jenkins disowned this cover when the book was first published, calling it, among other things, "monstrous," and encouraged fans to write letters of protest.
In early 1995, he also asked fans to let other fans know his disdain for the cover, and how he'd originally tried to have Jean Kluge do the art, as she had done for his book, Textual Poachers.
My ambiguities have gotten worse over the past few months because of fights that I had and lost with the publishers about [Science Fiction Audiences! Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who's] cover. I had originally wanted to get Jean Kluge to do another cover for the book. Routledge balked, fearing it would look too much like Textual Poachers and I tried to convince them that Kluge worked in many different styles and it was important to have fan art on the cover. Finally, they said yes, provided that I could get art from Kluge in something over a month. This, of course, proved impossible with an artist as busy as Jean. So, they insisted that they would get their in-house designers to do the cover with constant consultation with me. I had real misgivings and spelled out to them some of the things I did not want on the cover, ranging from rubber Spock ears to tables full of collectables or adults playing with Star Trek toys, explaining to the artist the range of stereotypes that Newsweek, Time, and the other mundane media perpetuate. They said they wanted to use "models" in this new color-saturated technique that is taking off on record covers and Aids posters. I was even more apprehensive, trying to verify that they did not mean toys or action figures. They assured me that they meant the expensive models sold at specialty shops and I said that the only way I thought this would work would be if it was impossible to tell they were models (i.e. to achieve an effect not unlike the special effects on the program) and suggested that if they wanted to do color saturation, they should work from stills from the program. They said they understood my concerns and would meet them.
Then, a month later, the cover came. It is monstrous. The "models" are the 3.95 action figures sold at Toys'R'Us and it shows. There is no mistaking what they are. The color saturation only makes them more lurid. For "artistic effect," they are out of focus, so much so that neither I nor Tulloch could tell who the female figure was. It turns out that it was Troi, an "excellent" choice, just one notch up from putting Wesley on the cover. Tulloch and I sent rather strong letters to the press protesting the cover and spelling out chapter and verse why we felt fans would find the cover offensive. They insisted to me that they had consulted their research and marketing departments and were reassured that there was no way that anyone could find this cover offensive. After all, I had just written two books for that company on the fan community and been a part of it for almost two decades. Their research and marketing departments obviously knew more about fans and their tastes than I did. They pointed out that my contract did not give me a veto power over the cover and that they were going forward with the cover over my objections.
[...]
I wanted, therefore, to make the dispute public here and hope that you will help me disclaim the cover in fandom. I want to apologize to any fan who finds it offensive and just remind you that authors do not always have control over what goes onto their covers. If, after seeing the cover, you felt moved to write a protest letter to Routledge, I will be happy to forward it for you. [2]
From the Book: "About the Cover" Blurb"
Jenkins explained to fans in early 1995 that he was allowed to write an explanation of the cover in the book: "In a last gasp negotiation, I got them to agree to let me write an "About the Cover" blurb for the inside, which I used to signal some of the ways that I felt the cover stereotyped fans and how it differed from the book's views, though the version that passed their approval is far too tame." [3]}}
The "blurb" itself:
The challenge of visually representing science fiction audiences proves vexing. Stereotypes abound - pimple-faced nerds in rubber Vulcan ears or wrapped in multi-coloured scarfs, overweight women clutching collectables and dolls. Such images of the science fiction audience surface throughout the popular press, bringing with them familiar assumptions that these fans and followers are obsessed with trivia and gadgetry, unable to separate fiction from reality, incapable of fitting within mainstream society, and incapable of resisting the latest programme-related merchandise. The persistence of these stereotypes has more to do with the limited background (and imagination) of more casual viewers than with the reality of active fan experience. Since this book challenges those stereotypes, we hoped to avoid reproducing them on the book’s cover. Yet, the designers also had to face the problem of evoking the programmes and their audiences for readers who may have a limited range of images and associations with Star Trek and Doctor Who. The current design represents a compromise between these two goals, one debated among those involved in preparing this book.
If the cover still risks reproducing stereotypes of fans as consumers and collectors, it hopes to represent a different relationship between audiences and programme materials. The aura of supersaturated colours evokes the glow of the television screen and the immediacy of our experience of popular texts. As this book argues, fans and followers are not so much transfixed by these images as engaged by them, both fascinated and frustrated by their potentials. The figures here - the machine, the hero, the alien and the female companion/counsellor - are archetypes central to the science fiction genre, though different audiences will place different emphasis upon their meaning and importance to their appreciation of the programmes. These images are diffused, unfocused, incomplete, depending always on the acts of perception and interpretation to give them meaning. The absence of background details runs counter to the fan's desire to master fully the programme universe but suggests the degree that various audiences contextualize these images in different ways, reading them within different interpretive frameworks. The cover thus suggests through abstraction and simplification the protean nature of these programme characters and their availability to diverse and multiple science fiction audiences.
Fan Comments: The Cover
Your trouble with the cover, sounds rather like the effort of trying to get a decent SFTV show accepted by a big Network without them fiddling with it (say, NBC, for example) - the letter writing campaigns are viewed as the product of a bunch of bored weirdos and housewives, and the Network is really the only one who knows what their audience wants to see. [4]
I feel for you about the covers of Science-Fiction Audiences but I'm sure no intelligent fan will blame you for them. Everyone knows publishers put covers on books that they think will sell them, and that they operate on the principle that no one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public.[5]
Sorry to hear about your problems with the cover of the new book. It sounds like some of the horrid-cover stories I've heard from writers of fiction. You've given me one more reason to be glad I'm in art history— we usually just get a photo of one of the works of art the book is about, instead of some designer's notion of "art." [6]
References
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #8 (February 1995)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #8 (February 1995)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #8 (February 1995)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #9 (1995)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #9 (1995)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows (APA) #9 (1995)