ABSTRACT
Amateur fanzines devoted to commentary and original fiction involving the Star Trek mythos began to appear by the start of the programme’s second season with Spockanalia (1967), ST-Phile (1968), T-Negative (1969), Deck 6 (1969) and Eridani Triad (1970) being noteworthy early examples. By 1973, the Star Trek Welcommittee listed eighty-eight different Star Trek fanzines in circulation; these numbers increased dramatically with the influx of new fans in response to the programme’s syndication and the feature films. In 1980, the peak of their activity, Star Trek fans produced 406 amateur publications.3 Star Trek has since been joined by other television programmes (Blake’s 7, The Professionals, Starsky and Hutch, The Man From UNCLE, Star Wars, etc.) within the underground literature of media fandom, yet it continues to be a major focus for fan publication. Fanzines, sometimes hand-typed, photocopied and stapled, other times offset printed and commercially bound, are distributed through the mail and sold at conventions, building upon traditions established within literary science fiction fandom as early as the 1920s. Fanzines publish both non-fiction essays speculating on technical or sociological aspects of the programme world, and fiction which elaborates on the characters and situations proposed by the primary text. Often, this fiction pushes the Star Trek mythos in directions quite different from those conceived by the original textual producers.
