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

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Hey, Enterprise fandom weighing in here, a bit late. I run the archive for it, the Warp 5 Complex (http://fiction.entstcommunity.org/).

It's a pretty small fandom, and I know more about the slash than the het, but since the show went off the air, we've pretty much been in stasis, with some new stuff being written, but it's not on fire, like SGA or SPN. We got a new infusion of German fans when the show began airing in Germany, and we just got a new infusion of American fans when SciFi picked the show up. Several people still write actively in it, and submissions are sent to the fic archive pretty regularly. ENT fandom doesn't have a big presence on LJ. It's mostly still through newsgroups. I created a couple communities in case people wanted to move over, but they don't see a lot of action.

We ran two virtual seasons, with feedback continuing to gradually diminish, but site hits indicate that we got lots of readers who didn't leave comments. I see this more as a netiquette thing, with people not really knowing much about fandom coming in and reading, and failing to leave comments because they didn't know that they should. A third season, VS7, may or may not occur, depending on the whim of those who run it (ahem!) and their capacity for the pain that goes with it.

From the lists I'm on that are linked to the really big all-ST archive, TOS is still a really big fandom, VOY next, then DS9, and finally ENT, with ENT really, really trailing behind. But as a whole, ST is still out there, but perhaps with less of a LJ presence, which is concealing how big it is.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Amen, Kylie. May I add numbers? Over 4000 stories for ENT on the Warp 5 Complex alone, over a six year period. And those are just the ones that ran on the Yahoo groups IIRC.

Small fandom, yes. Excellent writing? You bet yer ass. Few kerfluffles, we coexist for the most part, and 'drivel' as labeled above or not, we're here. Period. Get over it.

Trek as a whole is quiet at the moment. But JJ Abrams is making the next movie, so there's still interest on the outside. And not making the move to the early age of the internet? Trekiverse (http://www.trekiverse.org) has well over ten thousand archived fics from alt.startrek.creative, spanning fifteen years of fic writing. And I'll guarantee you not one was written with an 'lol, R&R, 1st story plz reed!' motivation.

Anyway, as to FanLib, they've mentioned several times they were doing something with Startrek.com, which sadly is so unconnected to anything fannish imho that they are running ads for CBS shows on their website. Considering they are OWNED by CBS, and that Les Moonves runs CBS Corporation, and his brother Jon Moonves is the legal counsel for FanLib (oy, talk about incestuous business relationships ooo, bunny! No, wait *sporks*)... well, red flags are waving all over the place.

Yeah. Goodness of their heart, that organization. To the tune of $3 million.

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Over 4000 stories for ENT on the Warp 5 Complex alone, over a six year period. And those are just the ones that ran on the Yahoo groups IIRC.

No, we did a bunch of acquisitions to get the het and gen. reedfem was pretty instrumental in a lot of that. I agree that the slash is from the list.

We also occasionally troll ff.net, and I watch ASCML to invite the few ENT authors I haven't heard of to post to W5C. We're at 3903 stories right now; we had more than 4000 at the old archive, before we moved to the new software, but some were duplicates, and some were multiparters that are now in one easy-to-read chaptered document. That's just under 4000 stories in the years since the show aired in 2002. Contrast this with Wraithbait, in the SGA fandom, which has 5332 stories since the show aired in 2004. However, we also don't have the total crap that goes with a huge fandom, which is nice, and yes, the writing is on the whole very good.

When I rec'd ENT fic for [Unknown site tag], I checked all the links of the old commentary and of the previously rec'd stories. All the fic archives except for two were DEAD, including the biggest het archive (Linguistics Database (http://judy.jteers.net/lingdata/fanfiction/), which took all the fic down during a URL name change and has been under construction since 3/2006). Of the rec'd stories, more than a third were broken links. I commented on those recs with new links and the authors updated a lot of them next time they rec'd. I invited LD to W5C but the person who ran it did not want to do that.

In short, old fandom = broken links and missing fic.

Re. FanLib, I figured they had to have some kind of relationship with The Man if they were offering up their little goodies. ST has little understanding of its fans, and FanLib has little understanding of the people it's attempting to exploit for gain. The only good that's going to come out of this is the discussion, and the awareness among fangirls that the content they generate may be perceived as valuable.

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Unknown LJ tag = crack_van; I can't remember how to code a community.