Spock Among the Women

News Media Commentary
Title:	Spock Among the Women
Commentator:	Camille Bacon-Smith
Date(s):	November 16, 1986
Venue:	newspaper article
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
External Links:	abstract, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Spock Among the Women was a one-page article in the New York Times Book Review on November 16, 1986 by Camille Bacon-Smith, at the time an archivist at the University of Pennsylvania's Archive of Folklore and Folklife.

It discusses and quotes Kraith and Night of the Twin Moons, and it includes photos of Kraith Collected #1 and NTM Collected #2.

Excerpts

Last month Paramount Television announced it would produce a new Star Trek series, to premiere next September; fans are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the series with a convention in Boston this weekend; and another movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, will be released Nov. 26. BUT there is another world of Star Trek. Close to 10,000 fans, most of them women, have created over 30,000 pieces of fiction, poetry, song, criticism, commentary and graphic art based on the television show, movies and the writing of other fans. The work appears in amateur publications called fanzines, distributed at conventions and through the mail.

Because they use the copyrighted products of others as a basis for their art but do not pay for that use, writers in the community are legally constrained from making a profit. This partially explains the predominance of women in the community: male fans of the show generally balk at the restriction and prefer to engage in activities such as costuming or crafts, for which payment is not a traditional reward. Women, who traditionally spend large portions of their lives working in relative isolation for little or no pay, bring a different set of motivations to their writing and art. They want to talk to other women, to express themselves in the science fiction form that until recently has all but excluded them. The writers cannot sell their work, but they don't have to meet commercial criteria for success either: they must please only the predominantly female Star Trek fan community. For the past 10 years, at least, women have accounted for over 90 percent of the writing and graphic arts and for almost all the editing of the Star Trek fan publications. Together the writers, editors, artists and reader-critics form an artistic community that shares work and appreciation. The first thing I discovered about Star Trek is that individual, unique creation is not as important to these women as sharing a fantasy universe in which real-life concerns such as sexuality and equality can be discussed in the metaphorical language of Star Trek. This sharing may take the form of a story tree, a group of stories, poems, pieces of artwork, or novels by one or more authors. The most characteristic feature of the story tree is that the stories do not fall in a linear sequence. A root story may offer unresolved situations, secondary characters whose actions during the main events are not described or a resolution that is unsatisfactory to some readers. Writers then branch out from that story, completing dropped subplots, exploring the reactions of minor characters to major events.

In a few short stories written as group, Ms. Lichtenberg set up the basic cultural milieu and the course of events the story tree would follow. The Kraith is a cup, a religious symbol integral to the most important rituals on Vulcan, the home planet of Sarek, who is the father of the half-alien Spock. In the basic story line, the cup has been lost, and Sarek has been kidnapped. Though he is only a minor character in the television series and in the third movie, in the Kraith universe he becomes, as so often happens in story trees, a central figure. Ms. Lichtenberg created both the cup and the rituals, yet she depended on her readers' knowledge of Vulcan culture and physiology (as established in the television episode Amok Time) and the relationship between Spock and his father (as established in another episode, Journey to Babel) to ground the new material in the familiar. A classic Grail quest might have followed from the author's invention, but she resolved that quest early in the series. Sarek and then the cup are found, and what for Ms. Lichtenberg is the real quest, to discover the self as it grows in relationships with others, openly moves to the fore. Star Trek provides the metaphorical means Continued on page 28 for it to do so. Fan writers explore telepathy both as an integral part of Vulcan culture and as a device to examine relationships between characters. In the Kraith series, Captain Kirk, a highly intuitive military officer, develops into a telepath. Spock's family adopts the captain to train him in Vulcan techniques for controlling his talent. To Kraith writers this development of one of Spock's more important relationships, his friendship with Captain Kirk, was inevitable. But telepathy means more to them than this. It represents the possibility of complete understanding of another person, of incorporating into the self that other being with all its strangeness and of exposing the self to the stranger. The theme of the individual in tension with the whole is never far from the surface here. Kraith excited the community to rejoinder, as Ms. Lichtenberg had hoped.

Fan publications printed stories by Ruth Berman offering alternative Kraith experiences. Other writers asked to join the story tree, and Ms. Lichtenberg published a Timeline so new participants, who might have read only a few of the growing number of stories, could fit their work into the body of the multiwriter universe. Judy Segal wrote Understanding Kraith, a dictionary of special terms in the Kraith universe for both writers and readers. COMMUNITY members continue to write Kraith stories. The most recent Kraith story I have seen, Death's Crystal Kingdom, appears in the fanzine Maine (ly) Trek 4, issued in late 1985. The story tree continues to offer an expanded vocabulary of metaphors with which Star Trek fan writers discuss friendship and family loyalty, marriage, sex and religion.

Story trees like Kraith are a response to a concern I hear from many of the writers. The women in the Star Trek community see their art not in terms of self-sufficient units but as an expression of a continuing experience. Traditional closure doesn't makes sense to them. At the end of a story, they feel, characters go on living in the nebulous world of the not

yet written. They develop, modify their relationships over time, age, raise families. Nor do these stories begin in a vacuum when the characters are all 35 years old. Spock has a childhood - sometimes happy, sometimes strained. Jean Lorrah's Night of the Twin Moons story tree, named after the fan novel that inspired it, concentrates on the relationship of Sarek and his human wife, Amanda, from their first meeting to their later years. Ms. Lorrah's story tree is notable for two reasons. It deals explicitly with sexual love in marriage, focusing on the main characters as young newlyweds and as an older, well-established couple. With didactic intent, the author takes the relationship of Amanda and Sarek, the human and the alien, beyond the romance to the point at which women meet the alien male in their homes and bedrooms. Through the Night of the Twin Moons story tree, Ms. Lorrah teaches young women quite specifically that, though men may seem rough and strange, a committed and equal relationship is possible with the sacrifice of neither partner's identity. Amanda is a professor and ambassador like her husband.

She often works with him but is not subservient to him. In the story The Tenth Night she teaches Sarek the importance of an equal partnership in bed as well as in professional life. Amanda has grown tired of taking the passive role in their sexual relationship. On the night in question, she asks her husband to grip a bedpost while she takes over the dominant sexual role. By the end of the story, the brass bedpost has taken the imprint of Sarek's hand, and he has come to understand his wife's sexual frustration. In fact, Amanda's brass bed has become a symbol in the community for the ideal of sexual equality. The Night of the Twin Moons story tree begins where the traditional romance ends. It explores the equality possible in a committed relationship, a concept to which the romance pays lip service while denying it in action. Jean Lorrah's universe is a popular one, and echoes of it can be found in her Vulcan Academy Murders, published by Pocket Books in 1984. A reader of the Night of the Twin Moons story tree finds a dense code of references here, calling up a rich, shared lifetime for fans. The reader unfamiliar with the noncommercial story tree will find the book fairly typical of Pocket Book's line of Star Trek novels.

A number of writers Pocket Books has published since 1984 come out of the fan community. While fan writers are pleased to be paid for their work, the move has caused serious debate. The very nature of commercial publishing is antithetical to the forms and structures of fan fiction. Pocket Books requires its Star Trek writers to return all characters to the status quo by the end of each book. The restriction reasonably excludes stories that end with the deaths of central characters, but it also means that children, wives, lovers must be eliminated or left behind by the final chapter. For the same reason characters cannot learn from their mistakes and grow. In the commercial world there is room for only one vision of Star Trek, and alternative universes have no place. The amount and nature of erotic material in the commercial publications is also more limited than some fanzine publications allow. Books such as Vulcan Academy Murders, however, do offer community members an experience of shared knowledge within the publisher's constraints. In surveys I have conducted, Star Trek fan writers have said that they do not watch television soap operas. Since most of them work full time to support themselves and devote much of their free time to fan activities, this is understandable. But the similarities in the esthetic form of the story tree and the soap opera cannot be overlooked. Fan writers, like soap opera fans, want to see characters change and evolve, have families and rise to the challenge of internal and external crises in a nonlinear, dense tapestry of experience. Whether because of innate qualities or socialization, women perceive their lives in this way, and they like to see that structure reproduced in their literature. Fan writers, as a group, are highly educated and verbally skilled (the average educational level attained is that of a master's degree). These women are not satisfied to accept passively the creations of others but exercise their esthetic preferences in their own stories, art, poetry and commentary. The writing experience then becomes one of participation in the lives of the characters. It is living day to day that matters, not the single events that make up individual plots, an esthetic preference these artists share with the wider community of women readers. Experiences shared with a like-minded community take priority over the status of the solitary individual laboring alone on her art. It is to communicate, within the code of Star Trek, that the community expends so much creative energy.

Reactions and Reviews

1986

Camille Bacon-Smith, an Archivist at the University of Pennsylvania's Archive of Folklore and Folklife, starts this article with an experience she had several years ago while taking a course in writing fiction. She stated that a professor made a statement that was meant to 'console' the women in the class, who were over 30 and had not yet sold a work of fiction. The professor pointed out, that 'women commonly break into print in their 30's, rather than in their 20's as men often do, Men write in the linear style recognized as fictional narrative at a much earlier age than women, who must learn linear narrative slowly and with much greater difficulty.'... Ms. Bacon-Smith herself wrote, 'As a social scientist, I found the idea that women learn linear narrative slowly and with greater difficulty intriguing, If women weren't, writing "correctly," was there a consistent pattern to their "error"?'. I was beginning to wonder about it also. Do women actually write in an errorous pattern? And if they did, could other women recognize those patterns as pleasing? The answers to these questions, Ms. Bacon-Smith wrote, could not be found in published serious fiction if women publish later than men, after they have 'learned how to do it properly.' She concludes that the answers, '... if not the answers', to the question about the ability of women writing in the narrative form did exist, But in the most unlikely place. STAR TREK. Star Trek, invokes the images of a masculine world. Admiral (Capt.) James T. Kirk and his First Officer, Captain Spock promenading all over the galaxy up holding truth, justice, and the monetary way. It is not the world of TV or movies that, can answer the questions to the writing style of women, but a world that we are more familiar with. A world that permeates our very existence. A world that 'close to 10,000 fans, most of them women, have created over 30,000 pieces of fiction, poetry, song, criticism, commentary and graphic art based on the television show and movies.' These works will often appear in amateur publications called fanzines. Because they use the copyrighted products of others as a basis for their art., story line and creations, they are obliged not to make a large profit. Male fans of Star Trek will normally balk at such restrictions and will try to tame another animal: Costumes and/or crafts. This being that, the pay is much better. Women, who can spend a large portion of their time, write and create for an entirely different reason. And this is the important part; 'They want to talk to other women, to express themselves in the science fiction form.' I thought this was fascinating. Women were passionately devoting what little time they had in other but commercial works. It wasn't that they had difficulty in learning to write in the 'Linear Narrative' fiction. They didn't want to write in that form. Then it hit me. Most of the books that are out, are only one track and one minded. They take the hero and pit him/her through existence, fight, flight, conquest, happy/sad ending. That was it, Have you ever asked yourself, what happens after the villain dies? Who gets the guy/gal? What next? Women want to see characters change and evolve, have families and experiences, rise to the challenge of internal and external crises in a 'NONLINEAR . . .tense, tapestry of experience.' Men see their lives as one dimensional. Birth, live, love one plot at a time. Women perceive their lives in a 'NONLINEAR, tense, tapestry of experience,' and they like to see that structure reproduced in their literature. To end this article, I would like to quote Ms. Bacon-Smith. I hope you agree with what she says. I do. 'Fan writers, as a group, are highly educated and verbally skilled (the average educational level attained is that of a master's degree). These women are not satisfied to accept passively the creations of others but exercise their esthetic preferences in their own stories, art, poetry and commentary, The writing experience then becomes one of participation in the lives of the characters. It is living day to day that matters, not the single events that make up individual plots (Linear Narrative), anf esthetic preference these artists share with the wider community of women readers. Experiences shared with a like-minded community take priority over the status of the solitary individual laboring alone on her art. It is to communicate, within the code of Star Trek, that the community expends so much creative energy'.

Thanks for sharing the article by Camille Bacon-Smith, "Spock Among the Women"; thoroughly enjoyed it. Being pro writers, it's understandable that Jean Lorrah & Jacqueline Lichtenberg comprise the majority of discussion — but I would like to have seen some of the other long-time fan favorites as well (Connie Faddis, for example). Personally, I find most of KRAITH excruciatingly boring; any story that requires research to understand and a glossary at hand loses me instantly. Not to say they aren't well written, they simply don't hold my interest.

1987

I read an excellent article in the New York Times by Camille Bacon-Smith entitled 'Spock Among the Women.' Ms. Bacon-Smith does the best job I have ever read of explaining what media fans do and why they do it. The points made apply to all fandoms, not just Star Trek. If you're tired of reading about Trekkies in pointed ears who attend huge profession conventions only to be celebrities, read this article.

1996

I recall a meeting at a More Eastly in 1985, in which several of us talked to someone about the state of Star Trek fan fiction; Camille was the one we spoke to. The article, for the most part, speculated that fanzines arose out of the female storytelling perspective of a 'non-linear narrative,' a narrative of relationships, as opposed to the male view of the 'linear narrative.' The author also claimed that 10,000 fans had created 'over 30,000 pieces of poetry, song, criticism, and art,' although I do not know how she came by those figures unless she had a complete set of Trexindexes and made an actual count. It was an interesting article; it avoided the K/S issue entirely. The only item missing in the analysis was that Bacon-Smith did not tell readers how to find fanzines, either in this article, or later in her book, Enterprising Women.