The Learning Curve (Star Trek: TOS story by raku)

Fanfiction
Title:	The Learning Curve
Author(s):	raku
Date(s):	1999
Length:
Genre(s):
Fandom(s):	Star Trek
Relationship(s):	Kirk/Spock
External Links:	Read Mary Ellen Curtin's essay on the story
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Learning Curve is a unfinished Star Trek slash story by raku. It was the first major piece of hypertext fanfic posted online, allowing readers to choose between alternative forks in the storyline.

The story won an ASC Award for Best Kirk/Spock Romance story in 1999.

See: The Learning Curve: Introduction, ^{Archived version}

See: Clickable Map for The Learning Curve, ^{Archived version}

See: Structure of "The Learning Curve", ^{Archived version}

Author's Summary

"When Spock passes through fal-tor-pan, his human side is not well restored. He does not regain his human feelings for his bondmate James Kirk nor does he really remember their relationship. In 'The Learning Curve', Kirk, Spock, and McCoy all struggle with this situation. The reader of the story will click on links to make choices about how the story will turn out. The story has something like ten endings, depending on which links are chosen. Not all endings were written; not all links work. Set sometime after the movie "ST III: The Voyage Home".

Essay

In her 1999 essay "The Learning Curve": Hypertext, Fan Fiction, and the Calculus of Human Nature, Mary Ellen Curtin writes:

"It is also, in my opinion, a major work of the Western literary tradition....

I believe that raku is exploring a philosophically different approach. In the movie Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Kirk says (to Spock's brother Sybok): "Are you telling me I've made the wrong choices in my life - that I turned left, when I should have turned right?" These lines seem to imply that Kirk's life choices have been trivial or random - an attitude very much at variance with the rest of TOS (Star Trek Original Series) screen canon, in which Kirk is presented as a decider, a chooser, par excellence.

What raku has done in much of TLC is to follow up this remark: to suppose that life-altering choices are as apparently simple and uninformative as left versus right, that you cannot tell from the triviality of the choice how grave the consequences might be. It is a difficult and profoundly unsettling idea. Fan fiction gives raku a way to argue for or work through this disturbing idea using familiar characters with whom hir audience is deeply engaged."

Reactions/Reviews

• The story inspired one fan to write her own story: "This part is where all this stuff really began. It started as a slightly different, less bloody take on plotline 1 in TLC - The Learning Curve by raku (1999), at http://www.alternateuniverses.com/tlc. As I began reading raku’s hypertext and following the first alternative offered at each step, I found myself reading (passionately) a sequence of events which turned out to lead to the inevitable, irreparable, death of Kirk, version 1. Heartbreaking: Kirk grooming himself for his own funeral. Illogical: the death he chooses is indeed a messy one."
• "I just reread this - nonstop tonight. It jst sucked me in and devoured my entire night. anyway - it made me cry with agony & joy."
• "Okay, so this was the start of all the hypertext stuff for me. I remember reading it and, even though there are little hints along the way, almost agonizing over which path to take. There's a scene in it with a John Donne poem and green silk that will fry your scalp off in a good way."
• "As far as I'm concerned, "The Learning Curve" is one of the most significant works ever in Trek fiction, maybe in any fan fiction. Aside from the ingenious use of the hypertext format, it is a powerful, powerful story, and superbly written. Among its many wonderful qualities I appreciated the opening dialogue, which drew me raptly into the story. I'm a sucker for dialogue that treats the characters as the intelligent, sophisticated, worldly (galaxy-ly?) guys that they are."