Misunderstood Archaisms

Confronted with yet another stretch of several rainy days in a row, I'm reminded of the passage in the New Testament that illustrates divine impartiality with the statement that God sends rain equally on the just and unjust. We residents of the often waterlogged east coast of North America could be inclined to think the rain falls as a punishment, as in this humorous verse:

"The rain it raineth every day

Upon the just and unjust fella,

But more upon the just because

The unjust hath the just's umbrella."

On the contrary, though, in the arid Middle East of the original quotation rain comes as a welcome gift.

We often hear about people morally "walking the straight and narrow." In the King James version of the Bible, Jesus' remark actually says that on the path to life "strait is the gate and narrow is the way." "Strait" means "tight," as in "straitjacket" (NOT straightjacket). And when you think about it in the context of the original quote, does a straight gate make much sense?

Nowadays the vast majority of educated people probably know Juliet isn't asking about Romeo's location when she says, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" "Wherefore" means "why," a counterpart to "therefore." She's asking him to go by some other name instead of the one given by the family hers has a feud with.

The medieval expression "passing fair" sounds odd to us, like faint praise. Dorothy Parker wrote a sardonic poem on this topic that ends, "If minus D be passing, she is passing fair." Doubtless a brilliant writer such as Parker actually knew "passing" in this phrase is short for "surpassing"; a passing fair lady would have been a stunning beauty.

Mondegreens, misheard song lyrics, fall into a related but separate category. There's the probably apocryphal case of the child who named a teddy bear Gladly after the alleged title character of the hymn "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear." I've often suspected many children, hearing the chorus of a favorite Advent song about the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary, "Most highly favored Lady, gloria," may wonder why Jesus' mother is being called Gloria instead of Mary. Not a song, but church-related: One of our children once asked me whether "salvation" meant "wine." After all, the server offering the chalice at the Communion rail often recites, "The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation." Back to songs, after innumerable exposures to Creedence Clearwater Revival's lyric, "There's a bad moon on the rise," I still can't cure myself of hearing it as "bad moon on the right" (despite the implausibly political implication). WIth the mumbling way they deliver the line, "rise" really sounds like "right" even if I strain my ears.

Creative misinterpretations can be used to good effect in science fiction. For instance, in a STAR TREK episode the Enterprise discovers a planet with the rather silly premise that their societies evolved from a world identical to Cold War-era Earth, right down to the language they misread in their sacred document. (Maybe the Enterprise slipped into a parallel universe and didn't notice?) I once read a story of which I remember nothing except that a distant-future nation was named Tizathee, after their post-apocalyptic interpretation of "My country, Tizathee, sweet land of liberty." And in Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Sime-Gen series, the remains of Ancient highways are called "eyeways," because people assume they're named for the straight view of the landscape they offer.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt.

Dangerous Gifts

The solstice is upon us! There's hope that within a few weeks darkness will stop falling at 5 p.m. Happy winter holidays!

It might seem natural that if people with arcane psychic talents existed, they would dominate the ungifted majority, whether officially or not, overtly or subtly, gently or cruelly. They might constitute a ruling class like the laran-wielding aristocrats of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, an order of official problem-solvers like the Heralds of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, or an autocratic clique like the sociopathic tyrants of the STAR TREK episode "Plato's Stepchildren." More often than not, however, far from holding exalted status, fictional possessors of such talents are regarded with ambiguity or hostility by their societies.

For example, the Slans in A. E. Van Vogt's classic 1946 novel face relentless persecution because of their powers. Fictional vampires surely inspire deeper horror than many other imaginary monsters because of the hypnotic mind control that renders their victims helpless and even unwilling to resist. Zenna Henderson's People, refugees from a distant planet living secretly on Earth, although benign, are often confronted with suspicion or fear when ordinary earthlings discover their powers. In the Sime-Gen series by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah, Gens regard the much less numerous Simes with terror not only because they drain life-energy but because they're suspected of occult abilities such as mind-reading.

Historical romance author Mary Jo Putney recently published the first novel in a new series called "Dangerous Gifts." In this book's slightly altered version of Regency England, psychic powers are known to exist but often viewed negatively. The hero lives happily among a circle of people who share similar gifts, and he works for the Home Office using his abilities for the good of his country. As a child, though, he was brutally rejected by his father because of his wild talents. At the beginning of the story, the gifted heroine is being held prisoner by villains who keep her mind clouded as they plot to use her powers for their nefarious goals. Putney has also written a YA series about an alternate-world Britain where magic is considered a lower-class pursuit, a shameful defect if it shows up in a noble family. The magically endowed heroine's upper-class parents send her to an exclusive but very strict academy that exists to train gifted young people to suppress their powers.

In fiction, miracle workers in general often inspire fear and revulsion rather than awe. Consider Mike, the "Martian" in Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE land. In real life, too, such people sometimes meet violent ends.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Defining Death

I've been reading a book called WHEN THE "DEAD" ROSE IN BRITAIN, by Nicole C. Salomone. After a forty-page overview of the history of medicine in Europe and Britain, the author delves into "premature burial and the misdiagnosis of death," mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the various related topics covered, there's a chapter on European vampire legends, the main reason I bought the book. Over hundreds of years, doctors as well as clergymen and philosophers debated and analyzed in great detail the dividing line between life and death and the criteria for diagnosing death. They distinguished between apparent death (or suspended animation) and absolute death, from which no recovery was possible.

Some physicians explained the essence of aliveness as the "vital spark," rather tautologically defined as the force that maintained life in the body. Later, it was suggested that the vital spark was in fact electricity, a hypothesis seemingly validated by the fact that an electrical current sent through an animal cadaver can make its limbs move. The recognition of the absence of breath and heartbeat as probable but not certain evidence of death inspired development of techniques for resuscitation, some of which produced concrete benefits in reviving victims of drowning and eventually led to CPR as we know it today. Societies for "the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead" were organized. Salomone seems to accept as fact most of the recorded accounts of people misdiagnosed as dead, often prepared for interment and buried or dissected. On the other hand, the lack of specific details in many of those stories (e.g., names and precisely identified locations) leads me to think a lot were what would now be called urban legends. In any case, a widespread belief in and fear of premature burial in the nineteenth century resulted in the invention of numerous models of "safety coffins."

In modern times, medicine and the law have determined that life resides in the brain. Permanent cessation of brain activity -- "brain death" -- equals the demise of the person. Robert Heinlein's very uneven brain-transplant novel, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, includes an extended dialogue on this issue, for me the most interesting scene in the book.

If a person has apparently died and been restored to life, was he or she actually dead during the period of "apparent death"? Are "near-death experiences" genuine glimpses of the afterlife or merely the random firing of nerve impulses? Maybe such people are only "mostly dead," like the hero in THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

If science eventually develops a technique for uploading a person's consciousness into a computer, as often envisioned in speculative fiction, is a person whose body has died with the mind preserved in this way alive or dead?

In the Star Trek universe, given that the transporter disintegrates the transportee into component particles that are reassembled at the destination, do people being teleported survive the experience? Or, as Dr. McCoy speculates, do you die every time you step onto the transporter pad, to be replaced by an exact duplicate? If it's an exact duplicate, though, how could you tell? Your memories and personality seem unimpaired. Furthermore, what about the episodes when a transporter accident creates two of the same person? Does destroying one of them or even merging them together (or splitting a new individual generated from two people by the transporter into his component halves, as debated in one VOYAGER episode) count as murder? In the eighteenth century, when the foolproof way of determining whether someone was alive or dead was to wait until the body started to decompose, the quandary was simple by comparison.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt

SF Terminology Goofs

I've started watching the second season of MY DAD THE BOUNTY HUNTER, a cartoon series on Netflix. Some dialogue passages reminded me of a few of my "pet peeves" concerning language too often found in science fiction print and film stories.

The most annoying and most common: "Intergalactic" for "interstellar." There's no indication in the Netflix series that the characters ever leave this galaxy. Careless writers commit this mistake in far too many works I've read or watched. In J. D. Robb's "In Death" series, "intergalactic" sometimes appears even when "interplanetary" is clearly meant. Maybe those books should be pardoned, however, because they're narrated mainly in the viewpoint of homicide detective Eve Dallas. She seems to take the same attitude toward scientific facts as Sherlock Holmes, who famously says he doesn't know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa and doesn't want his brain cluttered with that knowledge.

The kids in MY DAD THE BOUNTY HUNTER get all excited to discover their mother is not only an alien but an "alien space princess," and she doesn't correct their terminology. Her family lives on a planet. Her parents don't rule a sector of space; they rule part of a planet. She's no more a "space princess" than Queen Elizabeth II was a "space queen." Moreover, there's a tendency for the dialogue to refer to anyone not from Earth as an "alien" even in contexts where that usage makes it sound as if they think of THEMSELVES as aliens.

Although it's not in this series, there's a glaring error I've noticed in some speculative fiction by writers not trained in science, I hope a result of carelessness rather than ignorance, but still: Referring to light-years as a unit of time rather than distance. Even C. S. Lewis does this, in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS.

Not an error, but an example that strikes me as lazy worldbuilding, is the widespread habit of labeling units of currency "credits." Sure, because it's so commonplace, it's immediately recognizable as a convenient shorthand for money. But don't creators of alien societies have any more imagination than that? Or do they think civilizations on other worlds don't have enough imagination to give their monetary units a non-generic name? Nations on Earth have words for their money grounded in tradition, history, and politics; extraterrestrial societies should follow similar patterns.

The new QUANTUM LEAP series explains how the leaper sort-of-replaces the past-time individual as a function of "quantum entanglement." That hypothesis deals with subatomic particles, however, and has only the most tenuous resemblance, if any, to what the leaper experiences. But I feel justified in giving the QUANTUM LEAP writers a pass on this point, even if they have no idea what they're talking about. Most likely, even if they do, they don't expect more than a tiny fraction of the audience to know what "quantum entanglement" means; they probably just chose a science-y sounding term. Like the STAR TREK "doubletalk generator," as author David Gerrold calls it (as in, "Captain, that last photon torpedo destroyed the doubletalk generator, and the Enterprise will explode in nineteen minutes!"), the phenomenon might as well be labeled "magic."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Retro Futures

Watching the first few episodes of STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, which takes place during Captain Christopher Pike's command of the Enterprise, started me thinking about the phenomenon of science fiction set in the near future with technology that gets overtaken and surpassed by real-life inventions. "Retrofuturism" brings to mind elevator operators in Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD (a world that relies on reproductive tech far beyond our present capacity) or slide rules coexisting with a lunar settlement in Heinlein's HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL. It's an inescapable hazard of writing about the near future that "cutting edge" can quickly become dated. The TV Tropes site has a page about retrofuturism under the term "Zeerust":

Zeerust

The page includes examples from the Star Trek universe under "Live-Action TV." The best-known one from the original series, of course, is the communicator. To avoid having its communicators look outdated in comparison to real-life cell phones, the prequel series ENTERPRISE had to feature devices more "modern" than those shown chronologically later in-universe.

In the original series, Captain Pike appears after the accident that made him a quadriplegic. According to Wikipedia, he operates his whole-body automated chair by brain waves, a not-implausible distant-future invention, in view of the brain-computer interface devices currently in development. Captain Pike, however, can communicate only by activating Yes or No lights on his wheelchair. In our own time, the late Stephen Hawking used a computer program that allowed him to speak through an artificial voice -- although, toward the end of his life, at the rate of only about one word per minute. Thereafter, as explained on Wikipedia, an "adaptive word predictor" enhanced his ability to communicate. The system developed for him used "predictive software similar to other smartphone keyboards." Therefore, surely by two or three centuries in the future, Captain Pike could have equipment that would enable him to produce full sentences in a completely natural-sounding manner.

As the opposite of retrofuturism or Zeerust, much science fiction displays exaggerated optimism about the futuristic features of the near future. Heinlein, in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, predicted that advanced household robots and commercially available cryogenic "long sleep" would exist in 1970. In the same year, he has the protagonist invent what amounts to an engineering drafting program, something we've had for decades although Heinlein's versions of robotic servants haven't materialized yet. TV Tropes references this phenomenon here:

I Want My Jet Pack

As Yogi Berra is alleged to have said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Meaning of Money

What gives money (or any "moneylike" form of currency) its value? What makes us willing to accept it in exchange for concrete items of value? Cory Doctorow dissects this conundrum in his latest LOCUS column:

Moneylike

After an attempt to define money, he explores its origin. He rejects the familiar hypothesis of its having been invented to solve the cumbersome difficulties of barter, labeling this a "folk-tale." Instead of a "bottom-up" model of the creation of media of exchange, he describes money as a "top-down" system imposed by governments, which required the existence of currency to collect taxes in order to provision their armies. Where, then, does the money itself come from? It's generated by governments, and problems can occur if the state issues either too much or too little of it. Doctorow illustrates and analyzes this model at length in an extended parable. Items other than official currency can be "moneylike," such as gift certificates. Elaborating on the concept of "moneylike" media of exchange, he goes into detail about how cryptocurrency works, especially with reference to internet ransomware.

Robert Heinlein includes a discussion of what constitutes value in STARSHIP TROOPERS, where the narrator's high-school teacher refutes the claim that labor alone creates value. Heinlein's TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE contains an amusing scene in which Lazarus Long, acting as the banker for a frontier planet colony, destroys a batch of paper money, to the horror of the man he's dealing with. Lazarus has to explain that money doesn't consist of a physical thing with objective value, but a consensus reality people agree on. As long as Lazarus keeps a record of the serial numbers from the bills he gets rid of, there's no need to preserve the bills themselves (which pose a theft risk).

In one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the capital city adopts the Golem Standard. What could serve as a better backing for currency than objects that are almost impossible to steal, counterfeit, or destroy (especially since they're sapient and can defend themselves)?

In the Star Trek universe, conflicting information about the future economy appears in the various series. In the original series, Starfleet personnel must get paid somehow, as shown by Uhura's purchase of a tribble in "The Trouble with Tribbles." Outside of Starfleet, the existence of money is confirmed in "Mudd's Women" and the episode in which Spock poses as a Vulcan merchant. Supposedly by the time of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION the ubiquity of replicators has made the Federation a post-scarcity society with no need for money. Yet on the fringes (as in DEEP SPACE NINE) and outside the Federation's borders, as made clear by the Ferengi veneration of profit, money exists. Gold-pressed latinum as a medium of exchange is explained on the premise that it's one of the few substances incapable of being replicated. (We have to assume dilithium crystals must fall into the same category, or else obtaining them wouldn't be such a vital preoccupation in the original series.) It seems reasonable that luxury goods in the form of items not produced by replicators, such as the Picard family's wines, would require a medium of exchange for their sale. Or are we to assume creators of such products make them for the sheer joy of the process and give them away? Regardless of post-scarcity abundance, widespread actions like that would imply a radical change in human nature that we don't witness among the Terrans of the Star Trek universe in any other behavioral category.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Future of Elections

Earlier this week, we voted in the primary election in this state. Thinking about voting reminded me of a story I read many years ago (and don't remember its title or author). This speculative piece on how elections might work in the distant future proposed a unique procedure that could function only with a near-omniscient AI accumulating immense amounts of data.

After analyzing the demographics of the country in depth, the central computer picks a designated voter. This person, chosen as most effectively combining the typical characteristics of all citizens, votes in the national election on behalf of the entire population. The really unsettling twist in the tale is that the "voter" doesn't even literally vote. He (in the story, the chosen representative is a man) answers a battery of questions, if I recall the method correctly. The computer, having collated his responses, determines which candidates and positions he would support.

This method of settling political issues would certainly make things simpler. No more waiting days or potentially weeks for all the ballots to be counted. No contesting of results, since the single aggregate "vote" would settle everything on the spot with no appeal to the AI's decision.

The story's premise seems to have an insurmountable problem, however, regardless of the superhuman intelligence, vast factual knowledge, and fine discrimination of the computer. Given the manifold racial, political, economic, ethnic, and religious diversity of the American people, how could one "typical" citizen stand in for all? An attempt to combine everybody's traits would inevitably involve many direct, irreconcilable contradictions. The AI might be able to come up with one person who satisfactorily represents the majority. When that person's "vote" became official, though, the political rights of minorities (religious, racial, gender, or whatever) would be erased.

A benevolent dictatorship by an all-knowing, perfectly unbiased computer (if we could get around the GIGO principle of its reflecting the biases of its programmers) does sound temptingly efficient at first glance. But I've never read or viewed a story, beyond a speculative snippet such as the one described above, about such a society that ultimately turned out well. Whenever the Enterprise came across a computer-ruled world in the original STAR TREK, Kirk and Spock hastened to overthrow the AI "god" in the name of human free will.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Types of Telepathy

In reading THE SCIENCE OF STAR TREK, by Mark Brake, I'm naturally reminded of Vulcan telepathy (not discussed much if at all in this book, though). I don't recall the scope and nature of Spock's telepathic power being strictly defined in the original series. For complete access to the consciousness of another, Vulcans must perform a mind meld. From the episode with the alien Horta, we know language poses no barrier. Spock comprehends the thoughts of aliens through mind melds even if the other species aren't humanoid. However, he seems to exercise some limited form of telepathy without melding; in one later episode, we witness him silently "making a suggestion" to a humanoid antagonist who's not mentally on guard. The "Empath" episode introduces a young woman whose species, if she's typical, is mute. Rather than truly telepathic, they're empathic, sensing emotions but not thoughts. It seems unlikely that this species could have a technologically advanced culture, with no ability to communicate precise concepts, especially abstract ones.

Some theories of telepathy assume the participants must share a language for mutual understanding. Others postulate a universal mental "language" so that access to someone's thoughts automatically allows total comprehension. The title character of "The Mindworm," C. M. Kornbluth's classic psychic vampire tale, can hear the surface thoughts of everybody near him but can understand them only if the subject is mentally verbalizing in a language he knows (a limitation that proves his undoing when he clashes with Eastern European immigrants who recognize him from their native folklore).

Does a telepath "hear" only what the subject is thinking of at the moment or delve at will into all the contents of the person's mind? If the former, can you mask your secrets by deliberately thinking of something else? The telepath in Spider Robinson's VERY BAD DEATHS, so sensitive to the clamor of other people's minds that he lives as a hermit, picks up only surface thoughts. In Robert Heinlein's TIME FOR THE STARS, the telepathic twins "just talk," communicating silently in much the same way they do aloud. Trying to open themselves totally to each other's minds produces chaotic confusion, like being inside someone else's dream, so they don't bother.

On the other hand, some fictional telepaths can rummage through people's minds and quickly learn everything about the subject's past and present. Trying to conceal anything from a psychic with this power by simply thinking of pink elephants would be futile.

Here's a big question that I've never seen addressed, except implicitly in the STAR TREK "Empath" episode: Would a completely telepathic species have a language at all? It seems to me that they wouldn't have a reason to evolve it naturally. On the other hand, for any kind of advanced civilization to develop, surely they would have to invent language sooner or later. They would need a system of writing in order to keep records. They would need a way to communicate at long distance. Even if they got along without speech, surely written language would be a prerequisite for complex societies and any but the most rudimentary technology. It wouldn't evolve naturally, however. Geniuses among them would have to create it, as cultures on Earth invented mathematical notation. A first-contact premise of interstellar explorers from Earth meeting extraterrestrials whose only form of language is written, to whom audible speech is an alien concept, would make an exciting, challenging story.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Folklore 101

At this year's ICFA, I heard a paper by folklore scholar Jeana Jorgensen and was so impressed that I immediately ordered her book FOLKLORE 101. This isn't a book OF folklore, but an introduction to the study of folklore. Jorgensen explains her field in a breezy, colloquial style but also includes an extensive bibliography of books for further, deeper exploration, should readers be so inclined. She defines folklore as "informally transmitted traditional culture." It's shared and passed on outside of official, institutional structures. Thus, while an established religion isn't folkloric, folk religion does exist, e.g., wearing saints' medals for protection or burying a statue in the yard to ensure a quick sale of one's house. Variation and flexibility characterize folklore, whereas an institutional product such as a printed novel by a known author has a fixed form (unless the author or film director releases a revised official version). Tradition need not stretch back centuries or even years to be "traditional." Moreover, the "folk" don't mean just people in preindustrial eras or present-day tribal societies. Folk groups can include hobby clubs, coworkers in an office, people serving in a branch of the military, online virtual communities, even the members of a single family—any group that shares a common culture. It surprised me to read about "personal narratives" as a folklore category. Did you know the retelling of an anecdote about your wedding day constitutes folklore within your family's tradition? Coincidentally, earlier this week I read an article about the top ten stories from their own lives people tell over and over. (Frustratingly, the article didn't list the ten topics.) Older people don't repeat stories mainly because they're forgetful; they do it because those anecdotes hold vital meanings they want to pass on to the younger generations. Just as we all speak prose, we all belong to folk groups and practice folklore.

I ordinarily think of folklore mainly in terms of verbal culture, such as songs, tales, legends, and anecdotes. Proverbs, jokes, and slang also fall into that general area. As Jorgensen's book explains, however, folklore includes many more categories, e.g., foodways, rituals, superstitions, arts and crafts, dance, holiday customs, folk medicine, internet memes, and various other human activities.

Is fan fiction folklore? Yes, although her book mentions it only once, in passing. It's produced informally, outside official, commercial structures. It exhibits variation and is communicated within a folk community. The fanfic community has its own traditions and dialect, e.g., the invention of the term "slash" for same-sex romance between fictional characters. Filk music is certainly folklore. Songs can be set to either composers' original tunes or existing music. The latter can consist of either parody or serious rewriting. The videos made by some fans by combining clips from movies or TV shows would also count as folklore, although they don't come into Jorgensen's book. So material originally produced by official, institutional, and/or commercial sources can become appropriated by folk culture, subject to variation and traditional transmission.

When does a commercial product created by a known artist become folkloric? How old does it have to be? Does it have to be in the public domain? Woody Guthrie's song "This Land Is Your Land" is probably thought of by many Americans as a folk song. Guthrie himself encouraged others to add verses. Nineteenth-century composer Stephen Foster's "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" was parodied by Bugs Bunny, a commercial song being "filked" by a commercial animated character. Similarly, the tune of the Civil War song "Aura Lea" was used by Elvis Presley for "Love Me Tender." There's a filk song about the Apollo 13 near-disaster sung to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Despite Jorgensen's lucid explanations, I'm still a little fuzzy on the boundaries of "folk" transmission and variation. To cite a shift in the other direction, Jean Lorrah wrote a collection of Star Trek fanfic stories called the "Night of the Twin Moons" series—folkloric variation on a commercial popular culture product. However, her professional Star Trek novels THE VULCAN ACADEMY MURDERS and THE IDIC EPIDEMIC clearly belong to the same fictional universe as her fanfic, although with "the serial numbers filed off," as the saying goes. And the origin of the commercial bestseller FIFTY SHADES OF GREY as thinly veiled TWILIGHT fanfic is well known.

The richly diverse nuances of folk creations in the overall category of songs and stories can be endlessly fascinating.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Joys of Derivative Works

I've just finished rereading THE HOLLOW PLACES, by T. Kingfisher, inspired by Algernon Blackwood's classic tale of cosmic horror, "The Willows." Her earlier book THE TWISTED ONES is a modern-day follow-up to Arthur Machen's deeply unsettling "The White People." I consider THE TWISTED ONES one of the best horror novels I've read in many a year, not excluding Stephen King's recent works. Readers don't have to know the classic stories to enjoy these two novels, but familiarity with their sources enhances the experience. Another recent read, THE HUMMING ROOM, by Ellen Potter, retells THE SECRET GARDEN on an island in the St. Lawrence River in the present day, with other variations. Again, it could stand alone with no knowledge of its model required.

On the other end of the sliding scale of derivative works we find oddities such as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, which embellishes the classic novel but makes few significant changes other than the insertion of zombies. This type of playing with texts enjoyed a fad after the success of that book. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS (by a different author) is more transformative, as are LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES and LITTLE VAMPIRE WOMEN (each being exactly what it sounds like). WUTHERING BITES adheres pretty closely to WUTHERING HEIGHTS while taking the obvious step of making Heathcliff a vampire; in the original he's even referred to as one, metaphorically.

Most spinoffs from previous works, of course, are far more transformative to varying degrees. PRIDE AND PROMETHEUS, by John Kessel, introduces Mary Bennet, the bookish sister in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, to Victor Frankenstein and his creature. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE also inspired a mystery series, at least one portrayal of Darcy as a vampire, and a non-fantastic exploration of Mary's life, THE OTHER BENNET SISTER, by Janice Hadlow. Sequels, prequels, retellings, and side stories to fill gaps in the originals have been written for many classic works. For instance, there's a novel revealing where Heathcliff went during his absence from Wuthering Heights and how he made his fortune. FIVE CHILDREN ON THE WESTERN FRONT is a follow-up to E. Nesbit's FIVE CHILDREN AND IT (and its two sequels) set during World War I. THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA creates a backstory for the mad wife in JANE EYRE. SCARLETT offers an authorized sequel to GONE WITH THE WIND, while THE WIND DONE GONE and RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE tell stories parallel to GWTW from viewpoints very different from Scarlett's. John Gardner's GRENDEL gives a voice to the monster in BEOWULF, while Maria Dahvana Headley's THE MERE WIFE translates that epic into contemporary terms. Readers can enjoy the latter without knowing BEOWULF, but they'd need some acquaintance with the original to appreciate GRENDEL. In the decades since DRACULA fell into the public domain, innumerable such books have been published, including two starring Renfield (that I know of) and two novels on the backstories of Dracula's brides by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (a third was planned but never published). Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan have enjoyed similar treatment. Marion Zimmer Bradley's MISTS OF AVALON is only one of countless retellings and revisions of the Arthurian legendarium.

Critics who look down on such fiction as "unoriginal" have tenuous ground to stand on. The plots of most of Shakespeare's plays weren't original with him, but were based on history, legend, or prior literary works. "Originality" in the modern sense wasn't highly valued in the realm of literature until relatively recently. Authors who did invent their own stories were likely to make up fabricated sources for them to give them a veneer of respectable antiquity.

One major distinguishing feature of fan fiction is that the reader needs familiarity with the source material to appreciate original stories derived from it; that's true of some professionally published derivative works but by no means all (Kingfisher's horror novels, for example). Why is fan fiction disdained when it does the same kinds of things as the commercially published fiction mentioned above? I've read stories in the universes of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, FOREVER KNIGHT, and STAR TREK that I consider equal or superior to any of the aired episodes. The only consistent reason for the higher respect granted to the non-fanfic works seems to be their commercial status—which goes along with their legal status, but fanfic based on public domain sources doesn't typically get respect outside its own community, either.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Interview with Anthony Darnell on Star Trek Lives! 45th Anniversary

Interview with 

Anthony Darnell

on 

Star Trek Lives! 45th Anniversary

Here are 3 versions of an interview Jean Lorrah and I did with a professional (very professional skilled) journalist who placed this with https://startrek.com for the 45th Anniversary of the Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES!

Also note I did an interview with Larry Nemecek for his Podcast STAR TREK FILES, and posted about that here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/10/interview-with-larry-nemecek-on-star.html

Podcast: Trek Files Podcast covering similar material
https://www.facebook.com/TheTrekFiles/posts/1545927938914781

Here's a link to listings of those podcasts - you can listen to without Facebook.

http://thetrekfiles.trekfm.libsynpro.com/website

Now here is the text of the interview with Anthony Darnell -- which was done by email.  I wrote my replies to his questions, and Jean Lorrah wrote her replies. I don't have copies of her full replies.  Together we way-way over-wrote the word limit for an article, so Anthony had to edit it, then turn it in, and it got retitled, resubtitled and touched up a bit.

So here are my unedited replies to Anthony's questions.  What I wrote is prefaced with my initials, JL.  When he's addressing me, he writes Jacqueline. When both me and Jean Lorrah, he put's BOTH.

This is raw text.  Study how these polished items get published.  Try to get over thinking you have to write PERFECTLY to write at all.

-------Anthony Darnell and Jacqueline Lichtenberg----

Trek Files Podcast covering similar material
https://www.facebook.com/TheTrekFiles/posts/1545927938914781

From Anthony Darnell:

I’m going to pitch StarTrek.com to see if they’d be willing to accept the interview. If not, it’ll have a home on Phantastiqa.

I’m looking forward to reading your responses!

BOTH
Thank you both for taking the time to answer a few questions. I want to start off by asking you what it was like to see Star Trek for the very first time. Do you remember how it made you feel and what you thought? Do you happen to remember what episode you saw first?

JL: No, at that time titles were not prominent identifiers. I have told this story many times, and no doubt with different details.

When the Chicago Worldcon debut was announced, I was on my way out of the USA for a year abroad. I really didn't expect it to be much. As an active member of SF Fandom, I heard a lot. Eventually, (as I had moved many times leaving forwarding addresses), Bjo Trimble's "Save Star Trek" campaign announcement reached me.  Knowing Bjo for many years, I KNEW Star Trek had turned into something significant, so I wrote Paramont telling them to be sure to keep it on the air until I got back.

Meanwhile, I had married (still married to the same guy!), and was replanning my life around his family in New York.  We got back in early April, and his Aunt put us up, and invited the whole family (a lot of people) to a living room reception for us.  They all came, younger people sitting on the floor but they gave me a chair!  Conversation flowed, until someone pulled out a TV Guide (paper magazine) to see "what's on" -- handed it around, and it came to me, and flipped open to STAR TREK.  "Oh, can we watch that?"

They were so polite, they said sure and turned it on. Bored them all to tears, so conversation flowed while I tried to discern what the show was about.

Then came a final scene, the only scene I remember, a shot of Spock in profile which had been avoided throughout the show until then.

I ended up in the middle of the room, pointing at the screen, and shouting at the top of my lungs, HE'S NOT HUMAN!!!

They just stared at me silently.

Throughout the ensuing decades, even the publication of STAR TREK LIVES! not to mention my own original Science Fiction, they remained close, warm, friendly, family to depend on.  Didn't treat me as too strange to associate with.

So, no, I've no idea to this day exactly which episode I saw first except to look it up by air date.  I never really "saw" it until reruns, which were cut to shreds.

Have since rewatched complete DVD and Streaming sets of ST:ToS, of course, but I actually don't remember either the first episode I saw or the mumbled replies to questions I provided my brand new in-laws.




JACQUELINE
I read that you knew Bjo Trimble—who ran the infamous letter writing campaign that saved Star Trek—from your time living in the San Francisco Bay area in the 60s. If I understand correctly, she asked you to write a letter for the campaign while you were living abroad, but you hadn’t actually seen the show yet. Is that right? Can you tell us a little about the story there? Do you remember what you wrote in your letter?

JL via the N3F (National Fantasy Fan Federation which still exists, founded by damon knight), I got the generic mail-out Bjo sent.  In snail mail days, you sent out a few pieces of paper and asked 'zines to reprint and people to pass it on, somewhat like an old fashioned phone-tree. But I knew Bjo and the Fandom crowd and trusted their judgment which was spot-on, as we see today.



JACQUELINE
I’m fascinated by early Star Trek fandom and how it blossomed into what we have today. This year is the 45th anniversary of Star Trek Lives! Essentially, it’s a guide for fans highlighting how they can connect with each other and get involved. You were one of three writers on this book, along with Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston. Can you tell me about the genesis of the book and why you thought it was important to get it out there?

JL:  STAR TREK LIVES! was an idea I had. Having been an active science fiction fan since 7th grade, I knew what was happening inside Science Fiction fandom was a newspaper story.  Fandom had never - ever - been an "item" of interest to mundanes, to the media in any form. It just wasn't "important" in the world.  Suddenly it was!

I saw how Bjo's work hit "dry tinder" inside fandom, and I saw how that conflagration ignited some rather moist tinder in the mundane world ("mundane" being jargon for anything not in science fiction fandom; somewhat like muggle).

I saw the reception of this TV Series hitting other people the way it had hit me in that embarrassing living room moment.

It was only a spark, but a vastly significant Event in the entire span of Human History (thousands of years).

On rewrite, much of my "language" in STAR TREK LIVES! about that significance got edited out as "hyperbole" -- but you see, it wasn't hyperbole.  Today, people acknowledge that, but don't always see the Events of today as directly connected to being embarrassed before new in-laws, or the advent of non-human bridge crew on a human captained ship (on TV of all unimportant places).

TV Series in general were looked "down" on - fantasy as a genre was talking animals for kids, something you out-grew like believing in the Easter Bunny. Science Fiction was even more childish, idiotic, unimportant and certainly not for adults.  Adults had to be focused on reality, and everyone KNEW you can't go to the Moon.

TV was filled with Westerns (still a big favorite of mine), but everyone knew the "Wild West" depicted on TV never existed. It was Hollywood glorifying the ugliness of reality, but it was TV so what could you expect?

After cancellation, when fanzine readers and writers vowed, "They can't do that to us!" And, "If they won't do it, we'll do it ourselves!" I knew I had a newspaper story.

This was the fandom I had grown up with (book readers) doing what fans always did - stand on our own feet, walk to a different drummer.  It was an attitude from one world brought to bear on a different world.  And that different world grabbed it and ran with it.

It's not defiance.  It's, "Okay, do what you want. I'm doing this other thing."

Spock's appearance on TV -- so very out of context of TV shows in general - was the actual moment the world changed, the paradigm shifted under our feet.  I wasn't the only one who noticed.  Spockanalia coined the phrase, "Spock Shock" which is taken to be purely sexual, but it's never been all that pure.  It was the use of TV as a medium to depict a non-human crew member - just a working stiff doing a job on a crew of humans -- ON TV!

TV is a mass-market medium.  Science Fiction was never, ever, considered mass-market.  Changing the mass of the market for science fiction opened the door to the space program --it got slammed shut, taken up by other countries, and now is open again.

Meanwhile, computers, the internet, the web, Web 2.0, the browser, all this communication power has been likened to the the printing press as a fulcrum of change in society.

We are living in "interesting times" - and it all started with Gene Roddenberry growing up on Radio adventure series and then selling "Wagon Train To The Stars" - as a Western in Space.

Roddenberry sold "science fiction" as a genre as not about the future, but about the past.  But he snuck in my vision of humanity's future, as he said at so many conventions and speaking dates -- "When we are wise ..." humans will behave very differently.

He presented humanity with yet another tool for becoming wise -- video-media science fiction.



BOTH
How do you think Star Trek Lives! shaped modern fandom?

JL: I've often said, and I think it's still the most important thing we did -- we blew the lid on fanfic.

In doing that - in telling the world that "they can't do this to us" -- "they" can't take Star Trek away from us -- "they" can't cancel us -- "they" have no power over our imagination -- we opened the door and tore down walls for several generations to come to the gymnasium of the imagination and share visions, articulate emotional wisdom, and become strong enough to "make it so" in everyday reality.

The "message" or theme of STAR TREK LIVES! was simply, "You are not alone."

So many Star Trek fans were trapped in families that just couldn't see the vistas this TV show opened, and these people thought they were ALONE in their understanding of the importance of this TV show.

You see, it was the MEDIUM that was the MESSAGE -- this material had been done much better in books and SF magazines.  In fact, though STAR TREK (ST:ToS) was the first Science Fiction on TV, it was really BAD Science Fiction by comparison to novels we had all read and discussed.

There is the major shift from SF fandom of the past to ST fandom of the present.  SF fanzines almost never contained fiction.  They were discussions, articles, like blogs containing bits of personal life, the struggle of an SF reader to live among mundanes.  That struggle is wondrously well captured in modern day's Harry Potter among the muggles.

One point we tried to include in STAR TREK LIVES! but ended up in Sondra Marshak's VOYAGER series of fanfic worthy of professional publication was that TV depiction of Science Fiction was wholly inadequate for SF readers.  Therefore, ST fans improved on aired-Trek as they created much more solid Science Fiction out of it.

ST fanfic is better Trek than aired-Trek.

But that is true because, "You are not alone!" and "They can't do this to us!" and "Science Fiction is not escapist fantasy."

Those are very deep, philosophical points, obscure matters most people don't want to deal with.  But hand a person a Walkman or a Smartphone, and stand back before you get bowled over by swift change in humanity's direction.

So STAR TREK LIVES! blew the lid on fanfic, brought thousands more into it, fostered genfic (generic fanfic - fanfic dedicated to other TV Series (Man From U.N.C.L.E., STARSKY AND HUTCH, and now Harry Potter and everything in between).

Most people can't see that this is the most important event in human history since the agricultural revolution, but it truly is.

Agriculture let us feed the human body, team up in cities for defense, protect our less physically able so they could create, invent, innovate, manufacture and speculate.

Star Trek let us feed the human imagination, create the internet, the web, the browser, web 2.0, e-commerce, and today video-fanfic-Star Trek episodes, some of which have original actors, and writers engaged.

And now we have Zoom.

If you haven't read Asimov's CAVES OF STEEL and THE NAKED SUN -- hurry up and read them, along with Alvin Toffler's non-fiction FUTURE SHOCK.  Put this all together and make us a TV Streaming Series about "When Humanity is Wise."



BOTH
Do you remember the first convention you went to? What was that experience like?

I think you mean STAR TREK convention, not first convention. Science Fiction had a mature, happening every weekend, con circuit culminating in Worldcon (which at that time was held only in the USA).

Technically, the first Star Trek con was a backyard BBQ with a few dozen people involved.

I wasn't at that one, but knew the people involved.

I was at the first Star Trek Con held in New York City at a hotel, and the story of that con is told by Joan Winston both in her short chapter in STAR TREK LIVES! and in her book,

The Making of the Trek Conventions: Or, How to Throw a Party for 12,000 of Your Most Intimate Friends Hardcover – January 1, 1977

It was at the first Con that I accosted Gene Roddenberry in a hallway, told him about STAR TREK LIVES! and asked if he'd write a forward to it if I could sell it.  He said yes and gave me his home phone number. Eventually, I called and said the publisher bought it and would he do the intro -- he sent it to me right away.

What I remember most about those first few cons is how crowded it was.  More people always showed up than the con committee planned on. SF cons were not packed like that!

JEAN
I’m from Frankfort, KY, and I know you were living in western Kentucky in the early 70s. It was tough for me to connect with fellow fans in the 90s, so I can only imagine how it was in the pre-internet age. How did you learn about the broader world of Star Trek fandom? Why did you want to get involved?





BOTH
I love Joan Winston’s chapter on visiting the set of the original series and attending the final cast party. It’s more than 50 years later, and I’m even jealous reading about that! Did you have any personal connections with the original series cast? Are there any stand out moments that you remember?

I didn't know any of the cast and crew before the cons -- after a few years of several cons a year at which I was included with the Guests, hanging out in the Green Room or Guest Lounge, behind security lines, doing autographing, etc. I got to know most of them, and some of them remembered me from year to year.

In 1976, Joan Winston and I took a road trip together.  We had roomed together at a bunch of cons (SF and ST), and sometimes I'd pick her up at her Manhattan apartment to drive her to a con (and back). So that year Robert Heinlein was GoH at Worldcon in Kansas City, and Joanie and I planned a big summer tour for STAR TREK LIVES! (a 1975 title that went 8 printings, totally unexpected by the publisher).

I had dedicated my first novel, HOUSE OF ZEOR (a footnote in STAR TREK LIVES! as an example of proof of my understanding of Spock) to Heinlein, so I particularly wanted to give him an autographed copy of it.

He had a deal going with the Con - give blood at the bloodmobile, get a pin for your badge, stand in line and get his autograph.  He'd autograph only for donors.

I did that and stood in line, and instead of asking for his autograph, I gave him mine in a copy of my book.  He later read the book, called me, and we had a nice chat (As I was in the SFWA directory, he had my number.)

So, on this 1976 trip, I had done a few Cons before I met Joanie at another in Iowa, then we rented a car, drove to Kansas City, did Worldcon, flew to LA, rented a car and visited Paramount Studios, GR's office (where I found a copy of Kraith Collected on a coffee table, well dog-eared).

The best part of visiting the set on that trip happened in a nearby restaurant. We were sitting at a table, when the waiter brought over a bottle of champaign that we had not ordered, and classically, pointed across the restaurant to Gene and some VIPs having lunch, "Complements of that gentleman."  I still have the label.




BOTH
It seems like many of the people involved in and leading the fan movement in the late 60s and early 70s were women. Why do you think that is? Do you think it was important for women to take the lead in the area of fandom?

(see more on women under the Kraith question)

This is what most people don't understand about fandom.

The word fandom comes from "fanatic" and "kingdom" -- and essentially designates a place that has no physical location.

Science Fiction fandom existed entirely on paper by snail mail, and at cons which might be the same weekend every year but rarely in the same hotel, or same city -- but the PEOPLE were the same.

Anyone, literally anyone, a grammar school age kid even, could start a fanzine, and even win a Hugo for it.  Anyone could start a con, and it would be reviewed and reported on in dozens 'zines.

Today, this amorphous but well-defined association of people exists online and spreads across countries.  But then it was on-paper and rarely by telephone.

Anyone can do anything.  You don't need permission. You don't need to be selected or elected or anointed.

It is hard to grasp in a world so stratified as we are today, but humans function just fine without leaders.

That only works if everyone leads themselves and does a good job of it.

Science Fiction fans did that, and somehow Star Trek fans learned it.

So Star Trek fandom started out with no leaders.

Nobody followed anybody.  People just did whatever they saw needed doing, that they could do, and sometimes just did what they couldn't do because who cares if it's impossible - that just takes a little longer.

Today, though, the influx of mundane thinking has given the impression that we're followers.

In fandom there were no followers, and no leaders.  The structure of the social template was based entirely on vision, ambition, imagination, resources, individuality and ability, but mostly on attitude. People don't just do all they can, then quit - they get the job done, then pick up another job.

If fans had waited for a leader, we wouldn't have the internet or the web or e-books, or e-commerce, or the revived American space lift vehicles, Moon colony plans, etc.

Today, they often lump this attitude in with entrepreneurship, and in a way that is it.  The point is you don't need followers to do something nobody else has imagined.  No sane person would follow you, anyway - so just do it.



BOTH
In Star Trek Lives!, you talk about the Tailored Effect of Star Trek for television—the Spock Charisma Effect, the Optimism Effect, and the Goal Effect. From what I understand, these guiding principles went on to influence your mutual work on the Sime-Gen series. Can you explain these principles and how it influenced your work together?

JL: as I mentioned previously, House of Zeor was specifically designed and written for Spock fans, as I understood what captivated us about the Spock character.

Being connected into the SF fandom network and the ST fandom network (mostly the same people at the time), I put out an offer to sell HOUSE OF ZEOR (hardcover) on a money back guarantee to Spock fans - if you don't like it, send it back and I'll give you your money back.  I bought a couple boxes of books from the publisher and sold 60 copies - never had one returned.

To me, that indicates there's substance to the Spock Effect concept - to the entire concept of "effects" in an ensemble TV anthology series.

The TV Series had so much going against it, including the anthology format (watch in random order and it still makes sense? Really?)  But the anthology format was the most popular among local stations for reruns, so they were forced to go with that.

Making the best of it, knowing the Science Fiction audience was way too tiny to support a TV Series (even cheap-made like Trek), they went with the ensemble cast and created Characters who "spoke" to different audiences.  This is the template of the "family show."

What they didn't expect was that it appealed to women as strongly as to men -- and it was the technical science stuff that grabbed the women.

HOUSE OF ZEOR (and the pre-existing universe I built the novel from) was specifically designed to be science fiction for the jaded palate.  And it presented the argument that women are just as well endowed with imagination as men are.  It was designed to be different, and to spur the imagination in the same way the Spock character had energized so many fans.

When Jean Lorrah was gifted with a copy (I'm sure she'll tell that story) of HOUSE OF ZEOR, she wrote a review of it for a fanzine, which eventually turned up on my desk. I wrote her and asked for permission to reprint the review in the fanzine that had suddenly sprung up around HOUSE OF ZEOR.  She agreed - and we have it somewhere.

Here's the thing that glued us together.  She lambasted the awkward structural bits in my first novel -- which was so transparently a FIRST novel, but grasped what I was doing.

When we "printed" (I think it was hand-cranked mimeo then) her review, she of course got the standard contributor's copy - so she did what any fan does.  She wrote a story for the NEXT issue, so she could get another contributor's copy and read what others were writing.

At a ST Con later, she brought me an outline for another story, just like Star Trek fanfic delving into areas I had not planned for the published books to cover. I read it, and said, "Send me an outline and 3 chapters and I'll see if Doubleday will buy it."  We sold it to hardcover and it became FIRST CHANNEL.

Jean Lorrah started with Sime~Gen fanfic after she had been writing ST fanfic, and actually selling professionally before that.  But because she's such a good writer, and because she grasped the OTHER half of what I was doing with Sime~Gen (I write Simes; she writes Gens), I just had to get FIRST CHANNEL published on the main line.

The STAR TREK franchise is owned by other people - so there's a limit to what we (fans) can do with it.  I created Sime~Gen to be where I could do those things I couldn't do with Trek.

I couldn't take one of Jean's NTM fanzines to Roddenberry and get a TV Series made out of it.

I could take Jean's Sime~Gen fan story to a mainstream hardcover publisher and get a book published and in libraries and bookstores across the world.

The thesis behind all this - Star Trek ignited creativity and drew fans together to collaborate on extending those stories.  WHY DID THAT HAPPEN?  I have a notion of why that happened. To take that idea from hypothesis to theory, there has to be an experiment designed to demonstrate, "When we do this, that happens."

House of Zeor was my experiment, my proof that I understood why Star Trek ignited creativity in such a diverse audience.

I think it worked.

The Spock fans who didn't return the expensive hardcover copies show that.

The 5 or 6 fanzines that sprang up full of Sime~Gen fanfic show that.

Jean Lorrah (a Vulcan fan more than just a Spock fan - rich, glorious Sarek stories!) casually, impulsively writing the missing pieces of Sime~Gen as fanfic, just one disciplined rewrite from professionally salable, demonstrates that.

And now we've added Mary Lou Mendum, a fanfic writer we have turned professional by selling her Sime~Gen fanfic to our publisher, also shows that.

We also have a professionally published anthology of Sime~Gen short works by 13 Sime~Gen fanfic writers.

Way back when, they thought Science Fiction could be of interest only to teenage boys into Chess, Math, and maybe geology. I thought they were wrong, but what does a 7th grade girl know about anything?

Today, 3 women, a Ph.D. in English, a Ph.D. in Plant Genetics, and a Chemist write science fiction together.

And we're all Star Trek fans.

We all like Star Trek for different reasons. We all like Sime~Gen for different reasons.  That happened because of the Tailored Effect -- Two people looking at the same object see different things but they are both correct.

EXAMPLE GRAPHIC ATTACHED.



JACQUELINE
From what I can tell, your short story “Spock’s Affirmation” was one of the first (if not the first) short story published in a Star Trek fanzine using the characters from the show. This eventually evolved into the Kraith stories—I understand that it’s a shared universe with multiple writers contributing—but can you tell me a little about that series and why you were inspired to start it? Was this type of fan fiction common at that time?

JL: SPOCK'S AFFIRMATION is probably novella length, and was written because earlier issues of T-Negative had intriguing fiction.

Spockanalia and T-Negative were two of the first ST zines, and had opposing editorial policies.  Spockanalia was the home for those adhering strictly to facts established on-the-air, strictly to canon. T-Negative was the home for wild imagination, inspiration, and explanations involving made-up ideas that blended well with aired-Trek episodes.

I contributed an article to Spocklanalia, not my first fanzine writing, mostly because I wanted a contributor's copy, but also because I was inspired by the style and quality of the writing in the first issues.  Keep in mind, Spockanalia was intended to be a "one-shot" -- being the ONLY zine by that name, ever. Issue #2 was a surprise to the whole editorial crew.

Likewise, when I heard (on the grapevine) about T-Negative I had to see what Ruth Berman was up to, and then I wanted more editions.

Meanwhile -- there's always a meanwhile in fandom -- I was taking a course in commercial fiction writing.  There were homework assignments, and dreary ones at that.

So instead of following directions, I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the homework, and sent the homework assignments to T-Negative for a free copy.

I was practicing ways to convey what it is about Star Trek that energizes so much creativity among the kind of people who don't follow leaders and don't lead followers, but aren't loners.  I was practicing for Sime~Gen, even though I'd already started selling Sime~Gen professionally.

That ambition to practice turned into Kraith.

I loved fanfic, so I sent a Kraith story to every fanzine I heard of, and got lots of free copies.

At one of the Star Trek cons in NYC, I was sitting in the audience where Isaac Asimov was introducing Gene Roddenberry when someone behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Are you Jacqueline Lichtenberg?"

Conversation ensued about the Kraith stories which were at that time scattered among a lot of Star Trek zines.  How can I get a copy of all of them?  The women behind me whispered, and after Roddenberry spoke, Kraith Collected was born.

They eventually went to offset printing doing over a thousand copies at a time.

This is a good example of fandom in action. There are no leaders. There are no followers.  Only do-ers.  You want something? Do it.

If you read my Kraith stories in order,
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/
you will have an entire writing course under your belt -- each story exemplifying a single technique over all others.

Hence one could claim they are "badly written" -- because to get a story just so, you have to balance all the techniques.

However, the creative notions of Vulcan culture that I cast into Kraith sparked 50 other creative people to contribute to this Star Trek Alternate Universe.

I was proving my Tailored Effect notion - that I do understand why Star Trek spawned fanzines and fanfic when no other TV Series ever had, and why Star Trek was the most important development since the agricultural revolution.

Keep in mind that at the time I was writing Kraith and researching fandom for Star Trek Lives! (which I thought of as a single newspaper article), there was an American effort to reach orbit (but the notion of a space station was idiotic because it's impossible), but nobody could conceptualize the Internet!

Kraith was a rehearsal for Sime~Gen - and I was writing them all simultaneously with Star Trek Lives!


JEAN
Jean, you’ve written several Star Trek fiction books—Metamorphosis, Survivors, and the The IDIC Epidemic, to name a few—how did you make that leap? Did you approach those publishers with your ideas? Or did they approach you first?

JEAN
Did you write any fan fiction before penning Star Trek stories professionally?

BOTH
What do you think about modern day Comic-Cons? Are you happy with the way that they’ve grown, or do you wish they’d gone a different direction?

JL: Oh, I'm happy with the way they've grown. The torch has been passed to the visual/audio media, and the Superhero story - the story of an individual, starkly different from all others, dedicated to making things better for people who aren't so very similar to themselves. These are stories to inspire us all to abandon the idea that once we've done all we can, we are finished doing even if the task is not complete.

These are stories about exceeding the design specifications of the body, mind and soul, and about choosing tasks that improve the world.

The superhero is the Science Fiction hero.

And don't forget Gaming - video-style as well as table-top, Sime~Gen is beloved by gamers.

BOTH
What advice would you give to someone attending a Star Trek convention for the first time?

Well, you're not a superhero.  You have physical limits, needing food, sleep, processing time. Don't be greedy. Decide which of the 10 conventions running simultaneously in the hotel that you're going to attend, and ignore the others.  Get to them next time, but focus on the programming track, the people, and the parties relevant to what you're doing now.

Collect flyers from the freebie table to investigate later. Be sure to buy a membership to the next edition of the con (cheaper now than at the door).


Thanks again!

------end quote of Anthony Darnell and Jacqueline Lichtenberg ------

NOTE: Anthony Darnell may post his submitted version with both Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg answers on his own site, Phantastiqa .  So that's a 4th intermediate version to study.

Here is the version he edited down including Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg answers to fit the specs for startrek.com

-------------quote edited version ----------
Living Star Trek: How Female Fans Breathed New Life into the Franchise
by Anthony Darnell

How did Star Trek survive?

I’ve always been fascinated by early Star Trek fandom. From Bjo Trimble’s infamous “Save Star Trek” campaign to the first major convention in 1972, fandom perpetuated and saved Star Trek from sinking into relative obscurity.

In the late 60s and early 70s, however, many Star Trek fans were isolated. This may be hard to comprehend in the internet age, but there was a time when Star Trek fans didn’t know that other fans existed.

Even for someone like me, who grew up in a small town in Kentucky during the 90s, it was hard to find and connect with fellow fans.

So, how did these early Trekkies do it?

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Star Trek Lives! Essentially, it was a how-to book, covering everything from conventions and clubs to zines and fanfic. It was hugely popular and had eight printings by Bantam Books between 1975 and 1979.

One of the writers of this book, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, created The Star Trek Welcommittee—with the blessing of Gene Roddenberry—in order to help newcomers connect. Lichtenberg also wrote “Spock’s Affirmation,” which is one of the first (if not the first) short stories written for a fanzine based on characters from the show. (Eventually, this would develop into) THE FIRST OF the Kraith stories—a fan-created Star Trek storyline with multiple writers contributing through zines.

In the mid-70s, Lichtenberg INVITED JEAN LORRAH TO COLLABORATE ON THE THIRD NOVEL IN THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL SERIES (began working with Jean Lorrah on the sci-fi book series Sime~Gen, (which was partly inspired by) AT A STAR TREK CONVENTION.  ( their mutual love for Star Trek.)

Lorrah was also an early fan who contributed to fanzines and (even) wrote a full-length fanfic novel (Night of the Twin Moons), before making the leap to writing for Star Trek professionally with books like Survivors, Metamorphosis, and The IDIC Epidemic.

I recently reached out to both Lichtenberg and Lorrah to see if they would answer a few questions about early Star Trek fandom, how women primarily led that movement, and how it has shaped modern-day fandom and Comic-Cons.

Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. I’m fascinated by early Star Trek fandom and how it blossomed into what we have today. How do you think Star Trek Lives! shaped modern fandom?

LORRAH: It showed people all over the U.S. who loved the show that they were not alone—that there were organized fans, and that they could join them. It was just an interesting read for many people, but for the double-dyed fans it opened a world of connections to like-minded people at a time when such books still were found in libraries, so every copy reached many readers. For the first time [it] showed them how to find one another.

LICHTENBERG: I've often said—and I think it's still the most important thing we did—we blew the lid on fanfic.

In doing that, in telling the world that they can't do this to us; they can't take Star Trek away from us; they can't cancel us; they have no power over our imagination; we tore down walls for several generations to come to the gymnasium of the imagination WHERE WE (and) share visions, articulate emotional wisdom, and become strong enough to "make it so" in everyday reality.

The "message," or theme, of Star Trek Lives! was simply, "You are not alone."

Do you remember the first Star Trek convention you went to? What was that experience like?

LICHTENBERG: Technically, the first Star Trek con was a backyard BBQ with a few dozen people involved. I wasn't at that one, but knew the people involved.

I was at the first Star Trek con held in New York City at a hotel, and the story of that con is told by Joan Winston both in her short chapter in Star Trek Lives! and in her book The Making of the Trek Conventions: Or, How to Throw a Party for 12,000 of Your Most Intimate Friends.

LORRAH: I'm pretty sure my first convention was a SequesterCon, a midwestern convention with no media guests, where creative fans sold their zines and artwork and Trek-themed crafts to one another and held panels about every imaginable aspect of Trek.

LICHTENBERG: It was at the first con that I accosted Gene Roddenberry in a hallway, told him about Star Trek Lives!, and asked if he'd write a forward to it if I could sell it. He said yes and gave me his home phone number. Eventually, I called and said the publisher bought it and would he do the intro. He sent it to me right away.


LORRAH: We were such nerds, and primarily female. There have always been men in Trekfandom, but to be in this inner creative fandom they had to understand that women ran the show. That was not a rule—it simply was that way, as in zine fandom women outnumbered men by about ten to one.

I had been purchasing zines individually, [and] seeing ads in the ones I got hold of that let me find another one or two. But I went home from that convention with as many zines as I could fit into my luggage. The next year I came back with a complete draft of The Night of the Twin Moons. It was my kind of con—where fans came to talk to one another, not to crowd into auditoriums and corridors to hear and get autographs from actors.

It seems like many of the people involved in and leading the fan movement in the late 60s and early 70s were women. Why do you think that is? Do you think it was important for women to take the lead in the area of fandom?

LORRAH: Absolutely! Within Trekfandom, women were the creators they were rarely allowed to be elsewhere. Women created Trekfandom, which eventually morphed into media fandom. It was our little world, with no need to ask permission of men to do what we did there. Heck, we were Amazons on our own little island! And media fandom to this day is a female-dominated world.

LICHTENBERG: This is what most people don't understand about fandom. The word fandom comes from "fanatic" and "kingdom." [It] essentially designates a place that has no physical location.

Science Fiction fandom existed entirely on paper by snail mail and at cons. [The cons] might be the same weekend every year but rarely in the same hotel, or same city—but the people were the same. Anyone, literally anyone, a grammar school-age kid even, could start a fanzine, and even win a Hugo Award for it. Anyone could start a con, and it would be reviewed and reported on in dozens of zines.

Today, this amorphous, but well-defined, association of people exists online and spreads across countries. But [back] then it was on-paper and rarely by telephone.

Anyone can do anything. You don't need permission. You don't need to be selected or elected or anointed.

I love Joan Winston’s chapter about visiting the set of the original series and attending the final cast party. It’s more than 50 years later and I’m even jealous reading about that! Did you have any personal connections with the original series cast? Are there any stand-out moments that you remember?

LICHTENBERG: I didn't know any of the cast and crew before the cons. After a few years of several cons a year, at which I was included with the guests, hanging out in the green room or guest lounge, behind security lines, doing autographing, etc. I got to know most of them, and some of them remembered me from year to year.

LORRAH: Con going over the years, eventually as a guest myself with my pro Trek novels, I met George Takei, Walter Koenig, Major Barrett, and Mark Lenard. The latter, it turned out, had been asked to autograph so many of my Sarek and Amanda zines through the years that he had finally read them. He told me, "I was a little bit afraid to meet you!" Later, after he got over talking with the woman who had sexualized his character, he confessed that my stories had influenced his later portrayals of Sarek in the films.

LICHTENBERG: In 1976, Joan Winston and I took a road trip together. We had roomed together at a bunch of cons, and sometimes I'd pick her up at her Manhattan apartment to drive her to a con and back. So that year Robert Heinlein was guest of honor at Worldcon in Kansas City, and Joanie and I planned a big summer tour for Star Trek Lives!

I had dedicated my first novel, House of Zeor, to Heinlein, so I particularly wanted to give him an autographed copy of it. He had a deal going with the con: give blood at the bloodmobile, get a pin for your badge, stand in line, and get his autograph. He'd autograph only for donors.

I did that and stood in line, and instead of asking for his autograph, I gave him mine in a copy of my book. He later read the book, called me, and we had a nice chat. I was in the Science Fiction Writers of America directory, [so] he had my number.

On this 1976 trip, I had done a few cons before [where] I met Joanie at another [con] in Iowa, then we rented a car, drove to Kansas City, did Worldcon, flew to LA, rented a car, and visited Paramount Studios and Gene Roddenbery's office (where I found a copy of Kraith Collected on a coffee table, well dog-eared).

The best part of visiting the set on that trip happened in a nearby restaurant. We were sitting at a table when the waiter brought over a bottle of Champaign that we had not ordered. Classically, [the waiter] pointed across the restaurant to Gene and some VIPs having lunch, [and said], "Complements of that gentleman." I still have the label.

From what I can tell, “Spock’s Affirmation” was one of the first (if not the first) short stories published in a Star Trek fanzine based on characters from the show. This eventually evolved into the Kraith stories. I understand that it’s a shared universe with multiple writers contributing, but can you tell me a little about that series and why you were inspired to start it? Was this type of fan fiction common at that time?

LICHTENBERG: “Spock’s Affirmation” is probably novella length and was written because earlier issues of T-Negative had intriguing fiction.

Spockanalia and T-Negative were two of the first Star Trek zines and had opposing editorial policies. Spockanalia was the home for those adhering strictly to facts established on the air—strictly to canon. T-Negative was the home for wild imagination, inspiration, and explanations involving made-up ideas that blended well with aired-Trek episodes.

I contributed an article to Spocklanalia, not my first fanzine writing, mostly because I wanted a contributor's copy, but also because I was inspired by the style and quality of the writing in the first issues. Keep in mind, Spockanalia was intended to be a "one-shot"—being the only zine by that name, ever. Issue #2 was a surprise to the whole editorial crew.

Meanwhile—there's always a meanwhile in fandom—I was taking a course in commercial fiction writing. There were homework assignments, and dreary ones at that. So instead of following directions, I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the homework and sent the homework assignments to T-Negative for a free copy.

I was practicing ways to convey what it is about Star Trek that energizes so much creativity among the kind of people who don't follow leaders and don't lead followers, but [also] aren't loners. I was practicing for Sime~Gen, even though I'd already started selling Sime~Gen professionally. That ambition to practice turned into Kraith.

Jean, you’ve written several professional Star Trek fiction books. How did you make that leap? Did you approach those publishers with your ideas? Or did they approach you first?

LORRAH: At the time I first had ideas for pro Trek novels, they would only look at agented work from established science fiction writers. So once I had those credentials, my agent submitted the ideas. I didn't write the whole books until they were contracted, because by then I was writing steadily in both Sime~Gen and my own Savage Empire series and didn't have time to write what would have turned into fanfic if rejected.

I wrote the prospectus for Survivors while Tasha Yar was still a continuing character, and it was rejected because they did not want to establish that much background on a continuing character. A week after Tasha died on screen, Paramount contacted my agent and greenlighted the book!

What do you think about modern day Comic-Cons? Are you happy with the way that they’ve grown, or do you wish they’d gone a different direction?

LICHTENBERG: I'm happy with the way they've grown. The torch has been passed to the visual/audio media and the Superhero story—the story of an individual, starkly different from all others, dedicated to making things better for people who aren't so very similar to themselves. These are stories to inspire us to abandon the idea that, once we've done all we can, we are finished doing, even if the task is not complete.

These are stories about exceeding the design specifications of the body, mind, and soul, and about choosing tasks that improve the world. The superhero is the science fiction hero.

What advice would you give to someone attending a Star Trek convention for the first time?

LORRAH: Meet and befriend other fans with your specific interests, and friend one another online. I would tell a zine fan to see if there is a convention-within-the -convention of like-minded creative types. To find them, go to the dealer's room and see if anyone is selling zines, new or used. Strike up a conversation and see if you get invited to private parties. But hey—we all know you're not going to meet any zine fans. We are a dying breed.

LICHTENBERG: We are not a dying breed! We have moved to Comic-Con and online sites like FanFiction.net.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

---------- end quote edited down version with both Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg -------

And here is a link to what startrek.com posted

https://www.startrek.com/news/living-star-trek-how-two-women-breathed-new-life-into-the-franchise

For a lesson in journalistic writing, read and compare all 3 versions, or even 4.  Learn how what you read in a professional publication is what the writer wrote.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Interview with Larry Nemecek on STAR TREK LIVES!

Interview with Larry Nemecek

on 

STAR TREK LIVES! 

I was interviewed on this podcast episode by phone in June, 2020, and is about how my Bantam paperback original about Star Trek fans came to be.

https://www.facebook.com/TheTrekFiles/posts/1545927938914781

It is short, and there is another short episode coming.  You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, and I would suppose other phones, too.  It's called THE TREK FILES.

There is a text (by email) interview with Anthony Darnell also done in June, 2020, for StarTrek.com.  I will note them on this blog as information comes available.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Verisimilitude VS Reality - Part 4 - Story Arc and the Fiction Delivery System

Verisimilitude VS Reality

Part 4

Story Arc and the Fiction Delivery System 

Previous parts in the Verisimilitude VS Reality series are:

Part 1
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

Part 2 Master Theme Structure, The Camera, Nesting Plots and Stories
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

Part 3 - The Game, The Stakes, The Template
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html

And now Verisimilitude used to create the dynamics of the Story Arc and what that has to do with what I term, The Fiction Delivery System (parallel to the Healthcare Delivery System).

Recently, I was a guest on a podcast by The Roddenberry Star Trek podcasts, titled The Trek Files.

Every episode features a Guest talking about one of the Archived documents in the Trek Files which they post a link to on their Facebook page so you can read, then listen to the Q&A.

https://www.facebook.com/TheTrekFiles/

You can subscribe on the Apple podcast store by searching for The Trek Files.  See Larry Nemecek's name and you know you're in the right place.

In the three short segments we recorded (audio-only), it was impossible to cover all the connecting links to how the impact of ST:ToS affected the way consumers find and obtain fictional entertainment they want.  Not just science fiction, or Romance, but all fiction and non-fiction distributed retail.

Eventually, ST:ToS eventually changed how "news" is distributed wholesale, as well -- "wholesale" being the News Services, AP, Reuters, etc. which used to be out of reach of the individual consumer, but now publish directly to individuals online.  When news wholesalers hit the individual retail consumer, they had to change the format and content of their reporting.

Same thing happened on various levels in the Fiction Publishing Industry -- and (with advent of Streaming) similar forces are disrupting video-format fiction distribution.

This disruption was one main topic I wanted to touch on during the podcast, but didn't have a chance to get it in.

Because of the change sparked by the original Star Trek and its fan-response, the current streaming TV offerings and self-published e-books, are substantially different from what they probably would have been had Star Trek not connected to Science Fiction fans.

It is difficult to see the connecting links, and we won't be able to reveal the chain of "because line" to this Event Sequence that has propagated through the decades.

Most readers of this will be able to figure it out, once convinced the links are there to find.  Researching the connections is like preparing to write a Regency Romance.

Many of the details would not interest casual listeners to The Trek Files podcast, but readers of this blog might find the view of Reality something they can use to build a Science Fiction Romance world.

As we've been discussing Verisimilitude in various series of posts because it is relevant to crafting a novel that draws readers into a world.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

Now we return to Verisimilitude by looking at how our everyday world has changed from the impact of Star Trek in the 1960's.  Fictional worlds change, too.  Replicate that sense of "a changing world" for your Characters and the reader won't need expository lumps of explanation.

Worldbuilding, to have verisimilitude, has to be depicted as an Arc - like Story Arc and Character Arc and Plot Arc, the world behind the Characters you create has to change.

But change in a fictional world has to seem to be an "arc" to the reader.  The reader has to see (without being told) the connections of cause/effect between what the Protagonist does and what goes on because of her actions.

In real life, we rarely have enough information to discern those connections. Life often seems random and meaningless.  It may seem that way to your Protagonist, too, but the reader has to be able to understand what the Protagonist can't (yet), and then watch the Protagonist gain an understanding, even if it is a misunderstanding.

How your fictional world changes, and how that change also changes your Characters -- and how your Characters change their world -- depends on your Theme.

Romance has the master theme of Love Conquers All.  Science Fiction generally has a master theme of Science Conquers All.  Put them together, you've got a winner!

To have Verisimilitude, a novel has to show, not tell, how the World responds to the Characters, and how the Characters respond to their world.

Our world really does interact with us, but mostly we just don't see it.  "She's her own worst enemy," is a widely used theme.  Everyone knows someone like that.  It is especially  noticeable to those who are their own worst enemy.

The Tennis Match paradigm mentioned in Part 3 of this series, indicates how the fictional world integrates the real world's dynamics into the craft techniques.  The reader watches as the ball is volleyed back and forth between two Players or Viewpoint Characters.

"The Ball" represents "the initiative" -- or the action that advances the plot, the decision that alters the direction of events.  In the real world, no one person makes all the decisions. Everyone makes some decisions, even if to implement someone else's decisions. But some decisions change the world in a more obvious fashion once implemented.

You find the BEGINNING of your novel by finding the point in the Protagonist's life where she is making such a decision, or implementing it. The HEA ending happens when the results of implementing that decision (I'll marry you) are fully manifest.  In real life, most of us only get one such decision point to live through - survive it, (possibly a 10 year period), and it is smooth sailing ever after, either "up" or "down" or "level" in life.

Some decisions never get implemented.  The Character making such decisions is NOT the "Main Character" - not the character whose story you are telling.  You can't start Chapter One with that Character.  Such a Character re-acts instead of acting.

In our everyday world, we had one Situation before Star Trek: The Original Series, and another very different world that emerged during the 3-5 years after cancellation.

Pre-ST: nothing any viewer of any TV Series, no matter how erudite, vocal, or geekishly dedicated, could say anything in a letter (on paper) to the production's owners that would influence any decision the owners imposed on the Producer (whom they hired to package the show).  Fan opinion didn't matter.

Post-ST: Fan suggestions to enlarge content, add deeper texture, feature certain Characters, and fix plot-holes influenced the decisions of Producers staking their careers on multi-million dollar projects.

They learned (possibly from my book, Star Trek Lives!)

that being wildly enthusiastic, determined, and opinionated about a piece of fiction didn't imply inherent stupidity.

As a result, not only did Trek films incorporate items found in fanfic, but the commercials aired during ST (and other TV shows, too) became less condescending.

Producers and Traditional Publishing Editors learned to pay attention to what the end-user of their products (viewers, readers, audience) had to say about the product.

I call this change the establishing of a "feedback loop" -- it is the essence of good conversation, of increasing efficiency by successive approximations, of functioning in a chaotic reality.  Feedback, like "road feel" while driving a car, lets decisions target problems before they become problems.

We still have a real world where the business model of TV and even paper publishing requires the end-user to be "the product" not "the customer."

In TV that runs on advertising, it's obvious. In Streaming that runs on fees of subscribers, it isn't quite so obvious because you think you're paying for what you watch.  In fact, others are paying for what you watch, because these video stories are so expensive to make.  Thus what others prefer is what you have to choose from.  The mass-audience is the product -- those willing to chip in.

In book publishing, the publisher's actual customer is the distributor. That was a warehouse and trucking operation which would accept a certain number of copies of some but not all the titles a publisher put out in a month.  Then came book-chain stores which dominated, and developed their own distribution -- direct purchase from publisher.

The publishers started using computers to track sales of given titles, and editors had to guess (stab in the dark) why one title sold and another didn't.

In both TV and books, as well as in theater released movies, there was no direct feedback line from the end-user to the original commercializing producer to indicate WHY viewers or readers like this or that item.

Star Trek changed that because Gene Roddenberry took the Star Trek pilot to the Worldcon in Chicago and dropped it into the dry-tinder of Science Fiction fandom.  Typically, cons were not attended by "the general public" (as later Trek cons were).  Everyone there knew everyone else, if not directly then by a friend of a friend.  It was a tight-knit community.  Among them were connections to thousands and thousands of equally erudite, skilled, enthusiastic fans who couldn't make it that year.

Fans knew how to communicate and organize, but never before had anything much to say about a TV Series.

Before it's first air date, Star Trek was eagerly anticipated by many thousands, assiduously sharpening their critical faculties ready to tear the thing apart.  Turned out, being a TV show, it wasn't hard to rip the science to shreds, but it was FUN.

Star Trek was the first real science fiction on TV.  

Paramount, the owner-producer of the show, thought the letters (on paper) they were getting were the usual "fan" letters, from people who couldn't tell fiction from reality and didn't understand actors aren't the characters they play.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth, but it took years for the massive, experienced, production company nestled among yes-men of Hollywood to figure out that THESE people weren't the sort lost in a fantasy world, but rather science students, managers, professionals or professionals-to-be.  THESE people were out to make the world shown on STAR TREK into a reality.

And they did.

Students at two Universities connected two of the giant computers used in those days (with less computing power than your phone has today) to play a Star Trek game they invented.

In Europe, the idea of connecting universities and their libraries caught fire, and a way to access all that information became necessary.  Thus "the browser" was invented to read all the disparate sorts of code in use and present words you could read.

A kid dropped out of college and founded Microsoft.

There were many other such companies and computers designed around different architecture.  Microsoft and computers designed for Windows (descended from Microsoft's OS, which became Presentation Manager, which became Windows), plus Apple are all that's significantly left standing.

Unix, the university system, and its descendent Linux, now dominated by Red-hot Linux, are on the giant computer side.

A new architect, (client-server) has taken over and produced "The Cloud" while commercial applications of all this are erupting in every direction.

They wanted to play a game based on a TV show (one too few people watched).  Why should Hollywood or Manhattan Publishing giants listen to fans?

They learned.  They now listen - don't always do wise things, but they notice.

There is the beginning of the feedback loop necessary to get a society to function as a civilization.

That loop took shape decades before Star Trek -- in Science Fiction Fandom where all the writers were just fans who happened to write, and would sell to magazines and book publishers - then paperback mass market publishers.

One whole publishing house, DAW, was founded by Donald Wollheim to publish ONLY science fiction.  It still exists as an imprint under the leadership of his daughter.

Star Trek blew the lid on Science Fiction -- popularized it -- leading many into professional science fields who might not have been interested without that rocket fuel for the imagination.

We had N.A.S.A. and now we have SpaceX making orbital shuttles a commercial venture.  And there are others, and they have vision -- colonies in space, on the Moon, on Mars.  Self driving cars are the precursor to self-driving space ships.

All because of some people who were believed to be the sort who can't tell the difference between Fantasy and Reality.

Doesn't that describe the opinion some hold about Romance fans?

Give your novel's world an Arc like our real world's Arc and inspire your readers to make it so.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg