The Alternate (Star Trek: TOS story)
| Star Trek TOS Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Alternate |
| Author(s): | Laura Harris |
| Date(s): | September 1968 |
| Length: | |
| Genre: | het |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: The Original Series |
| External Links: | |
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"The Alternate" is a het Star Trek: TOS story by Laura Harris. It was published in Spockanalia #3.
It is the first lay story in a media zine. It is narrated by an unnamed woman, musings about having a relationship with Spock from the mirror universe, during some strong PG-13 or perhaps mild R-rated sex.
The editors were bombasted with letters about this. While it was nothing compared to what a child could pick up on any grocery store newsstand at the time, many fans young and old considered it too explicit for Star Trek standards. It's possible that fans were simply shocked by any depiction of "onscreen" sex. At this time, American culture was just coming to terms with the Kinsey reports, which revealed that women as well as men had explicit sexual fantasies. The 1976 Hite reports would go into this in more detail.
Author's Note
Author's note: This is about the alternate-Spock of "Mirror, Mirror," or someone very like him. I originally intended just to write something raunchy to get something out of my system, but it turned into something else. I'm just a hopeless romantic.
Excerpt
He is saying something to me. I have allowed my attention to wander and he realizes that something is wrong. I should know better. He has shifted his position slightly and is inquiring if I am uncomfortable. Strange... he is capable of insisting that I do almost anything that occurs to him if his curiosity demands fulfillment, but he will then be quite gentle and, as long as he is satisfied with the results, take pains to insure that I am not hurt or made to suffer acute discomfort. The point is, after all, not cruelty but satisfaction. For him, the two do not necessarily go together. I pretend not to hear or understand his question, and with a small half-groan-half-growl dig my fingernails into his ribs. He is obviously satisfied that I am not in distress and says no more. His lips wander up from my ear, across my cheek, brush my lips, the gentle movements of his lips and hands punctuated steadily, rhythmically by more virile caresses... you bearded virile bastard, it is I who will penetrate to the center of you and learn your secrets, learn if you are truly a lord to be feared, a black-maned lion who roars and rules, or one of us, with fears and weaknesses... (how very strange, it is like having a tooth pulled while thoroughly numbed, feeling pressure but no pain... I feel individual movements but they seem to have no relation to the feeling that permeates my body, there is no localized sensation but a tingling, nerve-jangling, fiery, desperate feeling, that spreads, meets itself, overlaps, and flows back again toward the source, I am like a basin being filled by the overflow from a smaller basin above it, and at the very top, the fountainhead that flows into the first basin, which fills itself to bursting and then gives its overflow to its sister basin below.... there seems to be no end to it, it is an eternal process, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, like the universe itself...) For one second only, one blazing white second that illuminates like the flash from a photon-torpedo, I know — if I find them, unearth the buried secrets of your inmost heart, I will shield the gaping holes with my body and let you continue to walk proudly, roaring fear into the timid hearts around you. It is I who have given up my secrets to you, told you by the fierceness and madness of my giving which of my lies not to believe. You have won again.
Reactions and Reviews
From the editorial in Spockanalia #4 regarding this story, as well as in anticipation of the story Time Enough:
We've been told that a couple of the items in Spockanalia #3 are embarrassing, dirty, or downright trashy. If we've embarrassed you, we are sincerely sorry. The recurrence of the theme of sex isn't surprising. Sex is a recurrent theme of life. The recurrence of the theme of sex involving Spock is also unsurprising. We Star Trek femmefans find him attractive and highly masculine. Some of us are articulate, and the result is predictable (and even logical.)If anyone is seriously concerned.,.psychiatrists regard such feelings as perfectly normal (if they are non-obsessive) and artistic endeavour as a healthy outlet.
Perhaps some of our readers are too accustomed to the tradition, in popular literature, of the male protagonist being aroused by the presence of attractive women. When they find that women write it the other way around, they find it strange. We, the editors of Spockanalia, try our best to print only material which we consider well-written, interesting to us, and written within our format. We do not choose to limit ourselves by eliminating one effective segment of our submissions.