A “deep fake” digital manipulation by a Star Trek fan of frames from the original television series to show the characters of Kirk (played by actor William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) kissing.
11 May 2022
Fan fiction is a work of literature written by an admirer using the characters and setting of an existing, professionally written work or series of works. Fan fiction is most often found in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. The compound dates to the 1930s.
The earliest known appearance, that I’m aware of, is in an advertisement appearing in the 6 August 1938 issue of the fan magazine Science Fiction Collector:
The second issue of SCIENCE ADVENTURE STORIES out soon! 64 pages of good fan fiction. Only 15¢ a copy, four issues for 60¢. Soon to go bi-monthly.
The clipping fanfic appears some thirty years later. It appears twice in the 2 December 1968 issue of the fan magazine Beabohema. The first is in a review of other recently published fan zines. In this passage, Ned Brooks is the editor of one of those other fan magazines:
Dean Koontz wants to make science fiction respectable...ho hum. Directly after that, Ned Brooks advocates spitting in people’s eyes...violent, isn’t he? Snicker. Fanfic. And he’s got four covers...not hero, tho.
And the second appears in a letter a fan wrote to Beabohema:
"The Minatory Mimosa" hit a sour note with me, perhaps because so many other zines are doing satires, aprodies (parodies in English) and funny pieces on the interesting theory that a short humorous thing is easier to do than a short, serious thing. Corn, maybe, is easy to write, but true humor takes talent, REAL talent.
Of course, so does a short-short serious piece, or any sort of ultra-short writing. This places the editor in position of having to decide whether or not to accept corn, serialize, or maybe drop fanfic altogether. MY worthless opinion is that a magazine that comes out maybe four times a year is no place to put a serial, and most zines have budgets that are too skimpy to allow fifty-odd pages of story, aside from the charges of favoritism that would result if one author got so much space.
One particular sub-genre of fan fiction is that of slash fiction, in which the characters who appear in the canonical stories are depicted as having a sexual, especially homosexual, relationship. The slash comes from the labeling of the two characters’ names, separated by a slash. The prototypical slash fiction is Kirk/Spock, or K/S, fiction referring to the characters in the original Star Trek television series.
The genre dates to at least 1977, when it is referred to the August issue of Obsc’zine:
I am not trying to attack a Kirk/Spock sexual relationship in general.
And the K/S abbreviation appears the next year, in the May 1978 issue of the zine Scuttlebutt:
It’s heavy on the K/S relationship, and will delight K/S fans.
And the use of the word slash to denote this sub-genre more generally appears by 1984, when it is used in the January issue of fanzine Not Tonight, Spock!:
Recommended Book List […] to include gay books, other slash zines, or media zines with good K/S stories.
(And if you haven’t already, be sure check out the wonderful Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, created and edited by Jesse Sheidlower. It’s a treasure trove of words and phrases like these ones.)
Sources:
Advertisement. Science Fiction Collector, 4.3, August 1938. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
Sheidlower, Jesse. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 2022, s.v. fan fiction, n., fanfic, n., slash, n., K/S, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions September 2004, s.v. fan, n.2; draft additions June 2003, s.v. slash, n.; third edition, September 2003, s.v. K/S, n.
Strang, Patrick. “Cum Bloatus” (Letter). Beabohema, issue 2, December 1968, 48. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
“Ten Mags to Doomsday.” Beabohema, issue 2, December 1968, 36. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
Image credit: Shadows and Flame, 2015. The original, unmanipulated images are from Star Trek, by Desilu Productions and Paramount Television. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.