Yvette Harley

Fan
Name:	Yvette Harley
Alias(es):
Type:	letter writer, fan club organizer
Fandoms:	Star Trek
Communities:
Other:
URL:
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Yvette Harley was a South Carolina Star Trek fan. She helped run COLTS (Club of Lonely Trekkers), a Star Trek correspondence club. She also was a member of The United Federation of Trekkers, a Star Trek fan club founded in 1980 by Eric L. Watts in Columbia, South Carolina. A self-described French war bride, Yvette's 1970s letter to the editor was published in Walter Irwin's anthology The Best of Trek. She died on February 5, 1994 and was buried with her Star Trek communicator pin and a small replica of the Starship Enterprise. One of her long-time friends requested that a short memorial be published in The Clipper Trade Ship.

There’s no words to tell you what your magazine has done for me. I’m stuck here in South Carolina in a small town where most people are very narrow-minded, I work in a plant and I've yet to find a Trekkie (by the way, trekkie is my license plate) so I never have a chance to talk to some

other Trekkies and your magazine gives me that, with the “Roundtable".

1 would love to go to a con, but so far they have all been too far away from where I live for me to afford it. Maybe if there were to be one in Columbia, S.C., or Augusta, Ga. (I live in between the two towns), I could afford it.

I'm a French war bride of twenty-seven years, and I'm now fifty years old; so if my English or spelling is not correct, please excuse my ignorance.

Now, I want to know why everybody calls all those horrible monster stories ST. Where is the science? I hate them, I like to be entertained, not frightened to death. Space science fiction is my bag. I’m giving you my two cents worth about Space: 1999: I enjoy the books a lot better than the TV shows.

Could you tell me why Mr. Gene Roddenberry insists on having Paramount Studios do Star Trek II? After the way they acted in 1968, I would think he’d try somewhere else. Surely the other studios are not blind, deaf, and dumb? They should realize, with all the popularity Star Trek still enjoys, that there must be a gold mine if they knew how to exploit it. It should be soon, because unfortunately we’re all getting old and so are the actors, and in a few years even the best makeup won’t help.

For your magazine, I have a few ideas that might help.

For instance, why not ask your readers to rate all of the seventy-nine episodes of ST and give you and all of us an idea of the most popular on down to the least?

Also, why not have a serial novel? Maybe some of the oldies-but-goodies, or some that fans could write?

I have an SF collection of paperback books of about 400. My most favorites are Doc E. E. Smith (the Lensman series and Skylarks ). I also have all 105 books of Perry Rhodan. (By the way, they try to say that P.R. is better than ST. That’s not true.) I also have Cap Kennedy, the Avenger, most of the Doc Savage series, and Space: 1999.

I don’t have to say that I have all of Star Trek by James Blish and all of the ST Logs series.

Since I see that you have fans from six to sixty-five, it would be nice to have a book review, where you could suggest the right kind of books for young readers, teenagers, etc. Since you are so busy and can’t possibly read all the books, I suggest you ask your readers.

For instance, I thought that all of the Kenneth Robeson books are good for the young set. So are The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery, The Rolling Stones — David Starr by Isaac Asimov, etc.

But the three Rack books by Laurence James and the four Hook books by Eully Zetford are a little more spicy and should be read by grown-ups first.

I watch ST twice a day every week, and I never get tired of them, I love most of them; the only one I don’t like at all is "The Way to Eden,” Maybe it’s because I’m too old for the kind of thinking of those young people.

One more thing I want to tell you about me, I have made my den into a Star Trek museum. I have all the models I could find, and also the toys. Would you believe my children have given me ST toys for Xmas? No, I'm not in my second childhood, I never got out of my first one.

I'm sorry to have written such a long letter, but like I said, I don’t have any Trekkies around me except for my daughter, and I’m training my four-year-old grandson to be- come a Trekkie, so forgive me.

It just occurred to me that sometime if you run short on your publications, you could ask your fans for pictures of their displays of ST and show them in your mag. It could give other fans some ideas. Not mine, of course, for I don’t have the money or the room to do it in a big way.