ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one area of material fan labor—building and customizing the Starship Enterprise and other "hardware" of the Star Trek universe—mapping the history of this form of production against the larger history of the franchise. It considers the status of material fan studies against two related evolutions of media: the digital turn, and the growth of vast transmedia franchises. By felicitous coincidence, the storyworld of Star Trek has foregrounded two means for mingling digital and material form: the transporter and the holodeck. On the surface, the ready availability of such fantastical objects for download, printing, and modification by users might suggest that digital technologies have ushered in a golden age of fan craft, making it possible for audiences to build, collect, and create materializations of the media they follow, whether in screen-accurate or user-modified form.
