quotes from the star trek novels that makes me feel insane. just bonkers yonkers. absolutely hog wild at 10 in the morning. Like they’re really gonna talk about Spock and Jim like this huh
This is mild by star trek novel standards.
OK, wait, I just looked this up and I think it’s this one where Kirk is – well actually I don’t know what happens to Kirk, but some Star Trek shit, you know the kind, Spock has to fix it – and anyway Jim is lying enchanted science-fictionally asleep in some kind of beautiful room surrounded by flowers and …
But nothing could divert [Spock’s] attention from the slow rise and fall of breath in the broad chest, the flicker under the eyelids in the peaceful, dreaming face.
…
‘Sleeping beauty,’ Omne said. ‘You may perform the awakening - in the traditional manner, if you like.’
Ohhh,that one. (Yeah, Star Trek novels are often Like This.)
Is this the work of a secret slash fan who somehow got hired to write these books? Could that be the case for the other books that are Even More Like This? Because come on. How could it not be?
I would not say “secret”.
@dduane got her start writing Star Trek fanfiction, I believe. And then made the jump to Star Trek novels. That was absolutely a thing that happened a pretty fair deal in Trek fandom back then.
I wrote a lot of (never-published) Trek fanfic in my developmental time, yeah. But to snag a gig as a Trek novelist, you had to have pitched to the editors in the first place (assuming they hadn’t first approached you themselves)… and, statistically speaking, the people most likely to pitch were usually professionals who were Trek fans already. In my case, I was tipped over the edge into pitching by having read one Trek novel that struck me as so substandard that I knew I could do better, and I asked my agent to see if the editors would be willing to look at a pitch from me. They were. …And we all know how that turned out.
As for other Trek novelists of the 80s: Some of that group of writers did indeed come out of the published-Trekfic pool. And some of them, more or less inevitably, were slash fans. Unquestionably the editors would have known about this when they hired them. Now, the attitude in the Paramount offices to slash was ambivalent at best, so a writer with such preferences was pretty much obliged to be cagey about how they expressed them. But in some cases, surprisingly slashy prose did manage to slip through the editorial and Paramount-vetting processes.
In later years, when control from the LA Trek offices and Paramount corporate tightened down, such occurrences became first rare, then impossible. But early on… let’s just say there was a little more wiggle room for the judicious expression of subtext, and leave it at that.
