Welcome to the “Section 2-Star Trek and Philip K. Dick” virtual tours of the Zines to the Future! Exhibit.
Full of fanart and fanfic, Star Trek zines brought a new level of engagement to fandom. Series creator Gene Roddenberry gave copies of zines to his writers so they would understand fan culture; actors like Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, wrote for the zines; and Trek zines invented slash fiction, a major kind of fanfic. Star Trek fans famously coordinated a successful letter-writing campaign to Paramount Pictures, saving the show from cancellation after its first season.
Yandro is not a Star Trek zine, but rather a major zine in mid-20th century sf, and where we left off in our first video on early sf zines. But out of Yandro’s pages comes a trail-blazing essay/review, “The Roddenberry Maneuver,” by Juanita Coulson and Kay Anderson, representing the first zine writing focused on Star Trek, at that time a new TV show with a growing following.
Spockanalia is the very first all-Star Trek fanzine, done when the series was still in its first season on NBC. Edited by Devra Michele Langsam and Sherna Comerford. Spockanalia is also considered the first ever “media fanzine,” a new kind of sf zine that grows immensely large fandoms beyond literary sf and across multiple media platforms, the kind of fandoms that power now large-scale cultural events like ComicCon or WonderCon, and can be seen in the wide-spread Star Wars (1977) fandom, now part of Disney’s culturally dominant brand, or, indeed, the continued flourishing of Star Trek fandom in numerous new “Star Trek Universe” streaming shows on the air today….
Here is the second issue of the second Star Trek fanzine, ST-Phile. (It’s first issue was in January, 1968.) The editors are Kay Anderson and Juanita Coulson--the authors of that first essay to take Trek seriously in the pages of Yandro. Issues of this influential zine are extremely rare.
Star Trek zines are notable not only for being the first “media zines” but for having predominately female editors and a presumed female readership in what had been up to this point a male dominated genre (soon to be radically transformed by 1970s feminism).
The fun being had above in making the ultimate emotionally-unavailable male, the stoic Vulcan Mr. Spock, into a pin up figure playfully indicates the emergence of new points of view in sf itself.
(left) Contents, ST-Phile No. 2 (November, 1968)
Another early Star Trek zine from when the show was still on the air, The Hailing Signal is out of Massachusetts. The editor is Phil Jachem, and the zine is associated with a club first called The Enterprise Star Trek Club but that underwent a name change after merging with a Lost in Space fan club. Jachem’s Star Trek zine outlived the club itself.
An international science fiction zine, published by the Zoryany Shlyah, or “Star Trek”, Science Fiction Club, in Kiev, Ukraine. The editors are Alexander Vasilkovsky and Boris Sidyuk.
The zine’s name, Chernobylization, and its striking cover art clearly illustrate the enormous impact the Chernobyl disaster had on the region. The existence of the zine also speaks to the global reach of Star Trek by the 1990s.
The Club claimed to be the first English-language fan group in the USSR (which dissolved in 1991), and their zine included articles on the efforts of sf fans to obtain books from major authors like Philip K. Dick, attend conventions, and publish their own work, all while dealing with Soviet bureaucracy and its aftermath.
The Zoryany Shlyah's search for Philip K. Dick books leads us straight into our next mini-tour on Philip K. Dick zines. At his death in 1982, PKD was much admired in fandom, but his works were out of print and he might have been headed toward obscurity. The ten-year-run of a remarkable zine, The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, set out to change all that. This International Star Trek zine shows that something had changed for Roddenberry's show but in PKD's literary legacy: he had become a writer to seek out around the world by the early 90s. Head into our next section, "Philip K. Dick" zines, and check out how it happened.
Never underestimate a zine!