William E. Shawcross

Fan
Name:	William E. Shawcross
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Fandoms:	science fiction, Darkover
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William E. Shawcross was, among many other things, a science fiction fan and Kirk/Spock and Darkover fan.

He was also former publisher, company president, and long-time managing editor of the magazine, "Sky & Telescope."

Shawcross passed away in 2012.

From a memorial post:

A self-proclaimed graduate of the Darth Vader school of personnel management (the staff was convinced that he graduated summa cum laude), Bill’s often outrageous personality kept editorial meetings anything but predictable. At a time when the company was run more like a family than a corporation, Bill had a rubber chicken and a rubber fish (a red herring) in his desk drawer, ready to be flung at any colleague who gave a half-baked excuse for a missed deadline. (I was a frequent target).

Interview

• On the Double Interview with Bill Shawcross (1987)

Some 1987 Comments About Slash Fanfiction

Some excerpts from On the Double Interview with Bill Shawcross .

What do you like about K/S?

What makes K/S work is that you have seen Kirk and Spock so often that you can actually hear them in your mind. It’s like reading a letter from someone in your family. That’s why Starsky/Hutch and other “/” fandoms don’t work nearly as well for me.

What you’re saying is that K/S isn’t a gay relationship as you know it, but nevertheless is a kind of gay relationship—atypical though it is. What are the differences between K/S and gay literature?

They’re very different. Gay literature has several easily recognizable sub-genres. There is the more literary stuff which is mainstream and campy such as Armistead Maupin’s books. They aren’t particularly gay. There is another kind of gay fiction that the literati look down on that is of the true confession variety.... Then there is gay porn, or one-handed reading. It reveals what people might like to do, but which scares them too much. There’s all sorts of tabooed behavior. K/S is nothing like that. Then there’s the arty stuff that Christopher Street publishes which I can’t read at all. There are a few gay gothics. Most of K/S is like a romance or gothic, but not like the bulk of gay literature. I don’t think K/S is very well served by its erotic scenes. I am not particularly thrilled by Spock’s genitals looking like an inverted set of labia, for example. I don’t understand why such attention is paid to these anatomical variations. What is important is that one penetrates the other in a sexual way. What they do it with, whether it’s tongues or whatever, is not important. Melding of bodies is more like what mean. All other terminology seems to imply force—penetration, invasion. I think K/S is at its most interesting exploring how the relationship came about and the impact it has on Spock and Kirk. I’ve never been able to think of McCoy as a sexual being. He appears mentally and physically fossilized. That’s just a personal prejudice. Yet I am a firm believer that in the case of males, given the right circumstances, any man can be enticed into sex. I think that in K/S, external forces, like evil Klingon commanders, are totally unnecessary for this reason, and can’t lead to a good relationship. It isn’t really something that can be imposed from the outside. That kind of story doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t have a high reality quotient, although it may interesting to read — like porn where people have sex for days on end without let-up. You have to suspend disbelief.

What do you think K/S would be like if it were written and published by men?

If gay men were to write it...well, that’s very interesting. I think the sex would be somewhat different. Males could write in a slightly more realistic frame, but that’s just clinical detail, and is not really that important to K/S. I think it would be much less romantic and much more pitched toward sex. I think it would deal more realistically with the issue of fidelity. Also, for gay males sex is a given. It is not the culmination of a process, but the initiation of a process. Sex would be the cause, rather than the result. This is an interesting topic to explore, but I don’t think I want to write and publish K/S myself.

A Collector of Art

Hannah Shapero's Darkover art - "Young Dyan and the Blind Keeper"

["Young Dyan and the Blind Keeper"] is from the Shawcross Estate... illustrating a scene from a Darkover story by Marion Zimmer Bradley, that was originally commissioned for an Australian fanzine called "Kierestelli", published by Gillian Curtin of Tennyson, South Australia.

It is unknown whether the illustration was ultimately published in the 'zine - the artwork was shown and purchased [by Shawcross?] at DarkoverCon, 1985.

[...]

William E. Shawcross (1934 – 2012), or “Bill,” to those who knew him, was a collector of science fiction art at an important time; the mid 1980s. The 1980s was a time of unparalleled growth and opportunity - a time when publishers were hiring some of the most talented artists to ever enter the field. Those were the days when the best “up and coming” SF illustrators of the day – most of them living in and around New York City - were eager to attract the attentions of the art directors at the major “houses” (Ballantine, Baen, DAW, Tor, Del Rey, and others). They soon discovered that the best attended genre and game conventions on both coasts, especially those like "Boskone" in Boston - within travel distance of the publishers – were the place to do that. Very soon, the art displayed at cons attracted buyers drawn to the imagery, who - like Bill - began acquiring art from the best artists of the day.

Bill's Fanzine Collection?

In Come Together #7 (July 1994):

When I moderated the one slash-related panel at ConFrancisco last year, I met some gay men who are interested in slash. What is probably the largest publicly available collection of slash was donated to the MIT Science Fiction Club Library by a gay man, and there were definitely men in the audience who were interested in the subject.

In Come Together #12 (December 1994): a fan wrote of finding a hidden gem:

I just spent a wonderful three-day weekend at the MIT Science Fiction Club Library going through William Shawcross' collection of slash. To the best of my knowledge this is the largest publicly available collection of media fiction anywhere. There are almost forty boxes overflowing with slash from various fandoms, the majority probably being K/S. He also has apazines, essays, loc zines, lots of Darkover stuff and a lot of British and Australian zines I had never heard of, let alone seen. The students at MIT who run the library were helpful and very interested in seeing that the collection is preserved and accessible, a concern near and dear to my librarian's heart.

In October 2012, Mrs. Potato Head contacted this library and asked for any information they had on media zines. Their response was prompt, friendly, but ultimately discouraging. These zines/material may still be available at this library, but they are not cataloged in any way albeit for a possible, primitive filing system; unless you know what you are specifically looking for, there is no way to explore or verify this library's holdings unless you physically go there.

Added in 2025: Is possible that this collection is MIT Science Fiction Society collection of fanzines?