26: Clara Dropkicks a Borg

Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast

Star Trek and Fan Fiction.

Star Trek fans have always been more dedicated than most, organizing large-scale letter-writing campaigns to save their favorite show, perfecting elaborate costumes so they can impersonate individual characters, and even mastering entirely fictional languages. But for some fans, simply enjoying Star Trek as audience members is not enough—they want to be co-creators of the stories that keep their beloved franchise alive.

In this episode of Primitive Culture, hosts Clara Cook and Tony Black consider the phenomenon of fan fiction, from its origins with the 'Slash' movement of the 1970s through to the present day, when the internet has made thousands of fan-written works, some of them novel-length or more, available to fellow enthusiasts around the world. Along the way, they consider the thorny question of what counts as canon, tropes such as the much-derided 'Mary Sue', and talk in depth about Tony's own fan fiction script series, Star Trek: Premonition.

Chapters Intro (00:00:00) A history of Star Trek fanfic (00:07:00) Slash (00:14:20) Fanfic websites (00:18:15) Star Trek: Premonition (00:28:40) Licensed works (00:45:00) Mary Sues (01:00:05) Final thoughts (01:10:00)

Hosts Clara Cook and Tony Black Production Tony Black (Editor) C Bryan Jones (Executive Producer) Matthew Rushing (Executive Producer) Ken Tripp (Executive Producer) Norman C. Lao (Associate Producer) Amy Nelson (Associate Producer) Richard Marquez (Production Manager) Brandon-Shea Mutala (Patreon Manager)