The Mortal Fire

K/S Fanfiction
Title:	The Mortal Fire
Author(s):	Natasha Solten
Date(s):	1987
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
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The Mortal Fire is a Kirk/Spock story by Natasha Solten.

It was published in Charisma #1.

Summary

"Returning to Exo III, Kirk and Spock discover that more was done to Kirk than he knew."

Reactions and Reviews

This is a masterpiece that addresses the problem of identity. Kirk and Spock beam back down to the planet that had been Roger Korby's base soon after "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and find Kirk's corpse. Who is the Kirk who is still alive: How does he feel about himself? How does Spock feel about him? All of these questions and some more metaphysical ones are dealt with in this story. It doesn't only deal with philosophical concept. however. In fact, I found it to be a very intense reading experience.

[part of a longer review]: This is a strong idea. We branch off from TOS’s “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”. Spock and Kirk have to come back to the planet after responding to another emergency (which took a couple weeks) to finish investigating the site and to prepare the equipment there for collection by a salvage team. But the threat posed by machinery that can make perfect, programmable android duplicates of people is such that only security-cleared command personnel are authorized to undertake this survey–thus the restricted team. This is the sort of post-episode clean-up work Star Fleet almost must do, and which episodes rarely show–it’s a good interaction with the way this world works.

Kirk thinks a bit about the degree to which the robots we see in the episode are sentient, and is uncomfortable with dismissing their personhood. Then they discover that Kirk IS a perfect life-transfer robot duplicate, and his actual body has been rotting in ice caves for a couple weeks, and isn’t recoverable. They freak out a bit over whether Kirk IS Kirk in a meaningful way, and decide he is.

A hard SFF story might have more thoroughly problematized the degree to which you can just *say* that Kirk is himself and everything’s fine, even with telepathy involved. But then there’s a sort of cul de sac to those questions too? So identity isn’t stable and transferable, and shreds and changes. Ok? …? That’s–something we’ve explored extensively in literature, and like, an element of a story, not a story in and of itself. Idk, I always think excessive anxiety about one cogent and eternal personhood is a TS Elliotish dudeissue that bothers people who aren’t in any way marginalized. Women, for example, always already know they are divided, situational, contingent. They have never had the luxury of deceiving themselves on that point. So a great deal of ‘or did I just blow your MIND?!’ on the ‘am I REALLY ME?!’ question is a bit *eyeroll*. At least this story, unlike some SFF equivalents, isn’t exorbitantly proud of itself for this plot device. Though also–why raise the existential questions!flag if you’re not going to really fly it?