Star Trek and FanLib: Not exactly groundbreaking

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

In a long-winded response to the question of what FanLib offers fic writers that they can't get for less hassle elsewhere, Chris Williams said this:

We have many more special fan events coming. You'll see us shortly announce and launch: a fan event with a major media company around one of the most popular fandoms, a collaborative feature film screenplay and movie, a partnership with a major talent management company to identify star writers from the FanLib.com community and create opportunities for them.

Emphasis mine.

My guess is that this is startrek.fanlib.com, some kind of fic "event" as FanLib keeps telling us they've done previously. However, this seems to be just more proof that they're completely out of step with fandom.

This is not new ground for Star Trek. It's the only show I know of that actually welcomed fan-written scripts at any time. (Admittedly, Ron Moore described the bulk of these submissions in rather poor terms, but he was probably right in doing so. We all know that most of the fic in the world is not of stellar quality, so it would stand to reason that a good chunk of these submissions would be less-than-professional.) At any rate, Star Trek and fan involvement is not a new thing. There are some who say that at one time, Paramount actively courted the editors of the big 'zines because those fans were such a huge influence on the community, and it was a way to take the temperature of the fandom, and sometimes direct it. (While I trust my source on this one, you may certainly feel free not to; at this point it's third- or fourth-hand information.)

Speaking as someone who's not into Star Trek in any of its incarnations, it's my understanding that Star Trek is not exactly a seriously active fandom in terms of fic anymore. I have one friend who was in the fandom during the Voyager era in the mid-nineties, when she says it was slowly dying. Another friend has participated in Enterprise fic collaborations, and by the time she stopped, she said it was incredibly frustrating that she and others had put a lot this work into stories that very few people were reading.

So: yes, Star Trek is a Big Deal in fandom – for its history if nothing more – but is it really that big when it comes to fic? Or is this another example of FanLib's preconceived notions about fandom not lining up with reality?

(Please correct me if I'm wrong about the state of Star Trek fandom today; I freely admit that this is not based on extensive research. But the fic I see coming across my own friends list rarely has anything to do with Star Trek, when I do have Star Trek fans on my friends list.)

Comments

[freifraufischer.livejournal.com]

So I'll cop to being Melyanna's friend who was active during the Voyager era and I knew several of the people courted by Paramount during the 1980s movie era. Before the age of the next generation televisions series (small n and g there), the editors of major zines (some of which I subscribed to right before the internet ate such things, and some of which I wrote before the internet ate my urge to spend so much time writing hard copy) were the only way to influence the mass of ultraloyal fans. One has to remember the history of Star Trek and that it was fans and ficing in particular that supported the series from it's cancelation through the early movie era.

My understanding was that most of that ended with the death of The Great Bird, though his widow continued to be active in limited parts of the fandom. I was active in Trek fandom mostly in fics and PBM (note, not PBeM) from around 1991-1997, dropping off right at the end of the shift from paper to internet fandom. At that time Star Trek was still taking spec scripts from fans, but even among active fans the consensus was that most of these were poorly written--a fact backed up by Ron Moore in interviews--and done more as a good will gesture to fans than any real search for scripts.

Now this may have just been the areas of Trek fandom I was in, and it was and still is a massive fandom on many levels but I was directly into fic in that fandom... that as the franchise itself was slowly dying off during the Voyager era, so were most of the big fic focused fandoms. Looking back I think what happened was that you had a combination of reasons. The franchise was growing stale and for the first time at least in the era of television scifi facing real competition from other shows that were much more savy about the internet (beginning with Babylon 5), and the Star Trek fic model that had worked basically continuously for 25 years with many of the same people didn't translate as easily as one might think to the early age of the internet.

Which is basically my long winded way to back Mel up. Star Trek powers that be have always been the exception and not the rule when it comes to how IP holders view fanfic.