Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture

Fanwork
Title:	Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture
Creator:	Leslie Fish
Date(s):	June 1976
Medium:	print, online
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
External Links:	archived at Archive of Our Own; "The Andor Files"
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Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture is an article "by F. Sigmund Mead, Journal of Xenoanthropology, June 2341, edited by Leslie Fish."

It was first published in June 1976 in Sehlat's Roar #2 and reprinted in Tetrumbriant #14 in February 1978 and Southern Star #4 in March 1978.

In 1997, Leslie Fish granted permission to Ian McLean to upload the article and its accompanying illustrations to a Geocities site. From 2009, the online HTML version is included at "The Andor Files" blog.

Author's Comments: 2017

From Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Leslie Fish:

Oh yeah! I had fun with that [article]:

Well, this was before Star Trek: The Next Generation or any movies that actually mentioned Andorian, so I just had free reign. Nobody knew anything about Andorian except that they were blue, had antennae, and we had not seen a female one yet. After reading a few more stories with Ted Sturgeon – amazing! Nobody would admit in public that he was gay until after he was dead. They can’t [garbled] to his writing. I got the idea of, okay, to start with, their basic planet, whatever — we’ll assume that it’s temperate. How did they manage to evolve with intelligence? They would have had to be carnivores with omnivorous capabilities, meaning that they can digest vegetables but they need meat. It takes a hell of a lot of protein to support a complex nervous system.

I had a horse when I was a kid, and I knew a lot about horses and their intelligence and their diet, and how to [garbled] for an herbivore to support an intelligent brain, means that they have to spend most of their waking time eating. I also read that herbivores—there were pure herbivores because as they eat, as they chomp up the grass, leaves, roots, whatever they can get, they’re also eating small insects, so they had to have some mechanism to deal with the insects, and the more buggy their food gets, the more they evolved into becoming omnivores. Also, carnivores—like my cats! Pure carnivores still need to eat grass or some vegetable fiber, in order to clean out their guts, to keep their bowels regular and also for trace minerals and vitamins that they usually get in their food. I started with that. Okay, let’s assume the Andorians are carnivores who can digest plant life. All right. How do they evolve? Let’s assume that they had plenty of threats to keep their natural selection high. All right. What’s the easiest way to deal with a lot of threats in the environment? Have a lot of young. How would you do that? I thought Wow! Well, why — and then I put the idea of three-stage pregnancy for them. The idea of bonding in order to become sexually mature. I think that idea was purely my own. They had to telepathically bond in order to become completely fertile, whereupon they become incredibly fertile, and a female Andorian — well, actually an Andorian pair can have three litters going at the same time. One in the uterus, one in the male’s uterus, one in the pouch, and still be nursing a fourth litter. That’s why I came up with the idea that a female Andorian had six breasts. You need a lot of breasts to feed a lot of kids. I took the inspiration from cats, and also on observing how hungry nursing mother cats get. They need a lot of food, and this means that the only way they could control their population was to keep a lot of people from bonding, becoming totally mature. It evolved from there. And because they started off eating a lot of food, a lot of meat. Their approach as hunters, and the next eating stage you get into is herding. Keep the game all in one place, where you can get at them easily. From there to farming to feed the animals. I looked at the societies of primitive hunting-gathering-herding, and [garbled] farming societies. It worked out from there.

[I didn't do any world-building like that for other Star Trek characters.] I didn’t want to touch the Klingon because other people were scrambling to explain them. Remember, I was working from the original series. The original series and maybe the first and second movies, but that was it. Before, I had to beam out—fade out of fandom—that was about all we had for basic canon.

Sample Pages

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  sample art (original) from issue #2 for "Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture," artist and author is Leslie Fish

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  sample art (original) from issue #2 for "Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture"

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  art from issue #2, showing how Fish's art and and text were portrayed

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  sample art (original) from issue #2 for "Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture"

Fan Comments

1977

Everything [in the zine] was good, especially the long article on the Andorians. While I may not necessarily agree with it, I found it a thorough, imaginative, and most interesting work.

Leslie Fish's xenoanthropological study of Andorians was excellent and seemed remarkable consistent in explaining those Andorian traits we've seen on the show. Indeed, I think your cultural exploration features are the best thing in the zine, and certainly the most innovative. Both have been expertly done. Perhaps you could convince someone to do a similar feature on 23rd-century humans, also, as written for the Vulcan Journal of Alien Studies or some equally "scholarly" journal.

The hit of this zine is a dead-pan dissertation on Andorian culture by Leslie Fish. It is ingenious, imaginative, subtly hilarious, and captivating. We might express some doubts that a nomadic people would be able to create a civilization capable of space flight, but that's a pretty cavil in the face of the fascinations of Andorian reproduction. Leslie Fish, you have a head on your shoulders -- full of weird ideas, but definitely a very good head.

2008

Leslie recalls that she drew the original artwork that accompanies the article in simple pen-and-ink, and Randy traced over them onto mimeograph stencils! Leslie says she's amazed that they came out readable at all.