Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
PARIS: It has to do with biology. JANEWAY: What? PARIS: Biology. JANEWAY: What kind of biology? PARIS: Salamander biology. JANEWAY: You mean the biology of Salamanders?
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody
Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.
[ID: A collection of tags that read:
#THAT was the plot?? #and they wanted us to believe the guy didnt have sex with the unemotional guy?
#star trek is so so gay
#ive seen some posts. but i did not realize it was….. that gay.
#only halfway through did i realise that this was star trek #i thought at first op was watching some freaky ass gay scifi and i was fully prepared to try find it #but lo and behold #ive already watched the damn show
#star trek #are they… you know… 💁🏿♀️
(In caps) #what #star trek invented fuck or die?????
#what the fuck is going on in star trek
#i have no idea what happens in star trek but uhm. #this is a little (long string of ellipses followed by semicolons)
#they didnt… they wouldnt… #you cannot be serious is that how all the startrek slash started? #spock went into heat???
#i would need to be lobotomized for my own health
#what the fuck is star trek about. End ID]
Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.
So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.
…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.
Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.
And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.
And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.
holy shit neil gaiman is here everyone stay cool
Neil Gaiman? In MY star trek shit post? it’s more likely than you think.
so my grandma died recently, and my parents have been dealing with the quantities of Stuff accumulated over the course of her and my grandpa’s lives, which could be interesting on its own as a family matter, but, well, grandpa was a science fiction writer, and they knew a lot of science fiction writers, which means a lot of the stuff is classic sci-fi and fantasy. books, artwork, that kind of thing. what i had not realized, but perhaps should have predicted, was that knowing a lot of science fiction writers in the ‘60s meant that they knew people who had written for this one TV show in the ‘60s that some science fiction writers worked on, and these people liked to share stuff.
what i’m saying is that i have now held in my hands one of the original, physical scripts for the star trek episode “amok time”.
it was like holding a piece of history. my own hands, carefully cradling the origin of sex pollen and fuck or die. a work whose influence went far behind what the writer could have expected–sacred, almost, in its way. who knows how much spawned from this episode? how much fanfiction would never have existed were it not for this holy text? indeed, the very concept of slash itself? an artifact, a priceless relic, sitting on my parents’ couch.
i haven’t seen the entirety of the episode itself, so i don’t know if there are any real differences between the script and what was aired, but i had to skim it anyway–and i did find something that is perhaps worth mentioning, whether or not this actually counts as canon. but hey, hard to get more canon than an Actual Official Script, right?
VULCANS BLUSH YELLOW, BITCHES, IT’S CANON
also, this:
thanks for specifying “karate-type”, theodore sturgeon. coulda gotten confusing, that.
anyway, it was a deeply surreal experience and i’m pretty sure the script is getting donated someplace with a lot of the other stuff, but man, my grandparents were cool
ok, now I need to know who the OP’s grandparents were, and how many degrees of separation we have (I was not around in Those Days but I worked with many people who were)
poul and karen anderson! if you know other people from those days then i would not at all be surprised if the degrees of separation were few.
…your grandparents were Poul and Karen Anderson?
Holy shit, you’re descended from goddamn SF fandom royalty.
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody
Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.
[ID: A collection of tags that read:
#THAT was the plot?? #and they wanted us to believe the guy didnt have sex with the unemotional guy?
#star trek is so so gay
#ive seen some posts. but i did not realize it was….. that gay.
#only halfway through did i realise that this was star trek #i thought at first op was watching some freaky ass gay scifi and i was fully prepared to try find it #but lo and behold #ive already watched the damn show
#star trek #are they… you know… 💁🏿♀️
(In caps) #what #star trek invented fuck or die?????
#what the fuck is going on in star trek
#i have no idea what happens in star trek but uhm. #this is a little (long string of ellipses followed by semicolons)
#they didnt… they wouldnt… #you cannot be serious is that how all the startrek slash started? #spock went into heat???
#i would need to be lobotomized for my own health
#what the fuck is star trek about. End ID]
Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.
So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.
…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.
Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.
And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.
And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
