Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It’s like a living evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer’s reality bouncing off another’s and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation”[1]

“I remained a loner well into my twenties, until I found a group of older women who shared my interest in science fiction. They weren’t wanted in the guys’ sci-fi clubs, so they formed their own! They were all semi-professional and professional writers, and they welcomed me into their circle and mentored me in writing and in life.”[2]

Amateur female storytellers are nothing new. The fairy tales that modern Disney movies take their inspiration from are labeled as ‘Old Wives Tales’ and attributed to fictitious female characters like Mother Goose. Mothers tell stories to children and even Ovid’s Metamorphosis features a group of women telling each other stories while they weave. Fanfiction, also referred to as transformative work, is an extension of that long history. As Rebecca Tushnet has stated, “The beauty of fanfiction is that it’s not commercial. It’s not under control.”[3] This thesis is a study of the historical development of a particular fanfiction community. After the expansion of American television in the post World War II decades, one science fiction series Star Trek beginning in the late 1960s would generate a significant fandom and numerous spin off cultural products in print, television, film, and ultimately the internet.[4] The focus is on one part of that community: female fans connected with the production, consumption, dissemination and archival preservation of fanfiction. This introductory chapter reviews key themes in the scholarship on Star Trek fandom and fanfiction and introduces the primary sources used in this thesis.  

While this project is an examination of fanfiction and fandom and its evolution through the use of Star Trek as a lens, that focus is by no means meant to indicate that the release of Star Trek marked the first time that people formed identifiable groups centered around a piece of media and wrote their own stories set in that media’s world.  Though obviously not the beginning of fandom, Star Trek is, however, a popular enough fandom with a long enough history to show how the culture of fandom changed over time, affected by technology and outside influences. The word “fan” and its usages date from the 1880s and the concept of fandom is commonly traced back to the public reaction to Sherlock Holmes.[5]  According to Betsy Rosenblatt, “the Grand Game began long before there was a popular notion of fandom, and Sherlock Holmes readers began to write pastiche while Conan Doyle was still creating the Canon.”^[6] The “Grand Game” is a term used to describe a practice of fans of Sherlock Holmes where they operate under the assumption that Holmes and Watson were real people and the adventures described the account of Watson. They use this assumption to analyze the text and effectively make a game of exploring details that do not fit from one story to another.^[7] Rosenblatt used “pastiche” as a way to refer to a work of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction that adheres to a particular style reminiscent of the original stories.^[8]  Fan fiction features “canon characters” but may also center around an original character (an OC or a character that is a creation of the writer).[9]

  For the most part, I will use author and web developer Joan Marie Verba’s definition of fan as “a person who is enthusiastic about a particular subject, such as Star Trek or science fiction.”[10] There are a multitude of possible definitions of fanfiction and explanations of why it matters. Francesca Coppa defined fanfiction as “creative material featuring characters that have previously appeared in works whose copyright is held by others.”[11] Coppa selected this definition because it limited the concept to modern works and excluded previous and continuing oral storytelling practices that, while similar to fanfiction, do not share the same separation between creator and fan or professional and professional and amateur.[12]

Coppa’s definition, however, is too restricting for the focus of this thesis. The limitation to characters from copyrighted works excludes a practice in fandom in which a fanfiction writer creates her own characters and places them in the setting of an existing work. For example, a story set in the universe of Star Trek, might feature an original cast of characters on an original ship going on an adventure involving established Star Trek concepts (i.e. Starfleet and Vulcans) but no “canon characters” from the original works). According to Joan Verba, an example of just such a story was placed in the zine, or amateur magazine, Introduction to Star Trek Fanzines as an example of the sort of stories fans tended to write. This zine came out after published books had brought attention to the practice of Star Trek zines, and Verba’s example was “Variations in Green” by Lillian Stewart.[13]  Although I am forced to rely on Verba’s account, as I could not find this story to read it myself, this indicates that such stories were a notable aspect of the community.

For some scholars, fanfiction is simply another aspect of the timeless literary, visual, and dramatic devices of building a new creative work on pre-existing narratives, characters, settings, or symbols. For example, Virgil’s pseudo-sequel to the Iliad, Aeneid, has many of the elements of fanfiction, such as taking the characters of a preexisting work and putting one’s own spin on it.[14]

Erica Haugtvedt, in an essay on Victorian penny presses, took an approach to defining fanfiction that was linked to some of Coppa’s later work, which gave five definitions based on different criteria. These criteria characterized fanfic as existing outside the standard market for literature, transforming other stories and stories owned by others, fitting into the criteria of a given fandom, and/or being about characters instead of the world around them.[15]  Verba took a much simpler approach, stating that fanfiction is “stories written by fans.” This definition, coming from a book written by a primary source in the Star Trek Fandom since its creation, is broad, but effective.[16]  In short, fanfiction is what the writers and readers of it decide that it is, but this thesis will use the most familiar definition of fanfiction as a stories produced by fans of an already existing work using its characters, setting, or ideas.

As the focus of this thesis will be on the production, networks, and preservation of a particular genre of fanfiction, moving beyond basic definitions to other key concepts is important for understanding how fan fiction works. Abigail Derecho characterized fanfiction as archontic or archival, referring to the way that fanfiction openly takes from existing sources and builds upon itself. Archontic has a similar meaning without the negative connotations of words like “taken,” “derivative,” or “stolen” and characterizes fanfiction as building upon, but worth no less as art, than their source materials.[17]

Fanfiction is also communal and constructive. Henry Jenkins began his chapter on fanfiction in Textual Poachers by narrating a meeting of fans working on their own fanfiction projects based on the show Quantum Leap. These writers, despite working on entirely separate projects, work together. Even disregarding the fact that they are all in the same room, they help each other and ask and answer questions. The scene painted is inherently a communal one.[18] 

Beyond working together in the same room and helping where possible, other practices in the production of fanwork could be communal because not everything about a zine was created by a single entity. The publishing of fanzines was an effort shared between the writers who wrote stories and the editors who compiled everything. It was and is common for other fans to read a writer’s draft or final version before it is published, either in a print zine or online, a process now known as beta reading.[19] Even the elements of these stories are constructed communally. This relates to Derecho’s concept of fanfiction as archive, notably that “every addition to an archive alters the entire archive.”[20] Fans who publish their writing add their ideas to the archive and those ideas in turn are adapted by other writers. Effectively, fandom creates its own genres, character interpretations and ideas that other writers draw on.[21] Verba’s commentary on  short anthology Star Trek Fanzines showcases the kinds of stories that fic writers returned to again and again. This included an oc centered story, a story focusing on Spock's parents, a future story, and a “Mary Sue” story. Of these, the Mary Sue is the best example of the impact of this era of fanfiction as it is a concept that has expanded beyond Star Trek. The term “Mary Sue” was coined by Star Trek fic writer Paula Smith, but the character type was common in fanfiction long before she gave it a name. Smith wrote her story “A Trekkie’s Tale” as a satire of stories featuring an original character by the writer who is adored by canon characters, achieves great feats, and is all around extraordinary. The character that Smith created for this satire, Lt. Mary Sue, became the name of a trope that spread.[22]  Effectively, the writer of fanfic is not just contending with the original source material, but taking from the fanfiction that came after the source of the fandom and before the writer’s own new work.[23]

To return briefly to the broader elements of fanfiction as transformation, Michel De Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life the act of reading itself is a form of transformation, of poaching.[24] Every reader of the same framework of writing will come away from it with their own interpretation to the point that each reader had their own construction of the text entirely separate from the intention of the author.[25] Evan Hayles Gledhill expanded upon the work of Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins through an analysis of the predominately female, Romantic era practice of making “commonplace books.”[26] These were texts constructed with information copied from other texts. These books, like fanfiction, were meant to be shared with others, strengthening relationships, and spreading information/ideas in a manner that remained within the domestic (female) sphere of influence.[27] Texts could be copied directly or modified in whatever manner the compiler chose and therefore transformed to meet her needs.[28] Importantly, his work evoked a concept that one of the creators of AO3 relayed to me, that female fans do not read texts in the ways that men want them to.[29] She gave the example through her own subversive reading of The Empire Strikes Back through focusing on the romantic subplot over anything else.[30] Gledhill described this idea and the reaction to it in the following passage:

Women’s unfettered access to culture is clearly considered dangerous to the social order. Women don’t ‘do’ culture right – according to these men - they like the wrong things, they are sentimental, emotional and affective, and passive. If they are to be passive receptor, it is of the right sort of fiction, for they are considered unfit for true cultural and intellectual pursuits. Or they might come to act ‘like’ men, and become active and compete as producers themselves, activities which fan practices highlight.[31]

Female fanfiction writers, especially those of slash, embody this idea perfectly. They have interpretations that go against the grain and, through writing fanfiction, produce stories themselves.

The scholarship of fanfiction has also explored why people write fanfiction or participate in fandom, psychoanalyzing the writers and readers of fic to understand why they dedicate their time in this way. Henry Jenkins has covered this topic well, covering themes like obsession, a linkage to religion, and the belief that those ardently participating in fandom should simply “get a life.”[32] His work examines the motivations of fans and the reaction of the greater whole of society to them.[33] This thesis’s focus, however, will be narrower, less on the greater question of why fic writers devote themselves to their craft, but instead on how that existing community and practice has been changed and shifted by circumstances, as well as how the community operated and developed its own set of practices, its own internal culture.

            One reason this thesis focuses on female fans who wrote fanfiction about Star Trek is because both critical and more popular writers have argued that late twentieth-century fandom is made up of mostly people identified as or identifying as women and that fanfiction writers and readers were predominantly female.[34] Henry Jenkins has argued that fans in “media fandom” (the fandom of television and movies) are most often typically white middle-class women. All of the people in his group of fic writers were women.[35] According to Star Trek Lives!, an important primary source, while the fandom for Star Trek had a relatively equal number of male and female members, the writers of fanfiction were predominantly female.[36] Indeed, the majority of names that Verba included in her history of Star Trek fanfiction cited earlier were feminine.

Much of the research on fandom centers around slash and why heterosexual women have such an interest in it. The term slash refers to stories about a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two male characters.  For some commentators, women choosing to write about these relationships was scrutinized as odd behavior that needed to be unraveled and understood. Explanations ranged from the female writer projecting onto the male character due to inadequate portrayals of female characters to the audience taking the sexuality the male actors showcase for the sake of the audience and translating it into an attraction between the male characters themselves.[37] This psychologizing of slash perhaps takes the idea too deeply. As one slash writer critically responded to the scholarship: “I am sick and tired of being told Why You Write Slash. … I am sick and tired of having other people tell me what I really think and feel—as opposed to what  I think I think and feel…..it’s sexy stories, About sex, and men, and men having sex….. “slash is about having fun.”[38]

   This focus on slash can have the effect of reducing the image of fanfiction to just slash, which does the community a disservice. This one aspect has been latched onto as emblematic of the entire community, but that is not all that fanfiction is. Not surprisingly given their roots in centuries old narratives about heroes and their close friends/confidants, Kirk/Spock or K/S stories are examples of one of the most famous and widely studied slash pairings.[39]In this thesis, as the contents of the fanfiction stories themselves are not at interest, slash will be considered only as an aspect of fanfiction, rather than the most important part.

One explanation for why so many fan fiction writers were female was that they  were responding to media with few female characters. Moreover, despite being roughly half of the population, women were also underrepresented among producers of media.[40]  Thus, this thesis joins other studies of this genre in emphasizing the value inherent in media created by an underrepresented group. Star Trek was unusual because the majority of science fiction at the time was from male writers and aimed at a male audience. Thus, the female professional writers who got their start with Star Trek fanfiction were unique at the time.[41] According to Star Trek Lives!, “one of the most immediately striking things about Star Trek fan fiction…is that most of it is written by women.”[42] This is despite the fact that the actual Star Trek fandom itself was relatively evenly split between male and female, favouring women.[43] The fanfiction writing aspect of the Star Trek community then, was left with its own, distinctly female, identity outside of the general science fiction writing. This, combined with the fact that fanfiction is inherently subversive in other ways, carefully existing in the margins of copyright laws as a form of free trade storytelling makes fanfiction a fascinating tool through which to understand and learn more about fans and fandom.[44]  That said, the focus of this thesis is limited to only a few female creators with less focus on what they created and more on their methods and networks.

Clifford Geertz wrote that “if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.”[45] This principle, if applied to a community instead of a science, is the basis of my project. The “practitioners” are the female fanfiction readers and writers, the “theories or findings” are equivalent to the content of individual stories and the “apologists” are those seeking to justify or explain fandom.  My interest is in the questions of what and how. How did they write? What greater trends formed? How was the community changed by technological development? What does all of that reveal? This usage can be understood further from the following quote from Joan Verba:

Helen Young wrote an essay in which she tried to answer the eternal question as to why Star Trek is so popular…Reporters have asked me this question once or twice as well. After lengthy consideration, I have decided that the question is not only unanswerable, but irrelevant. I do not have any urge to analyze why Star Trek is popular, or why it appeals to me personally. I think of it as recreation, and just enjoy it.[46]

She too was relatively unconcerned about why the creators of the zines she gave a history of made them.[47] Such a question of why is certainly of interest, but also beyond the scope of this current project and the sources available to me.

            In terms of primary sources for this, the options available changed based on the period of time in question. For the early days of Star Trek fandom, I primarily used accounts written and published by women who participated in Star Trek fandom during the 1960s to 1980s. Bjo Trimble, who the actor for Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) once referred to as having written the book on Star Trek, was a prominent fan, or a Big Name Fan (BNF) since the beginning.[48] She published a memoir on her experiences titled On the Good Ship Enterprise: My 15 Years With Star Trek. In it, she provided a valuable first-person account on her thoughts and experiences in the Star Trek fandom. Star Trek Lives! by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston was not strictly a primary account, but it was written by three members of the fandom and spoke at length about fanfiction culture of the time, taking a personal tone. Similarly, Marie Verba’s book on the history of Star Trek zines, Boldly Writing: A Trek Fan and Fanfiction History, 1967-1987, is ostensibly its own history, but serves also as a primary source for my purposes because Verba’s work contained many quotes from other fans contemporary to the periods she wrote about and included her own memories and opinions. For the latter two portions, my sources came primarily from two places. After submitting my proposal and interview questions with the REB board and receiving clearance, I was able to interview two of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works/Archive of Our Own, Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa, who spoke on their experiences with online fandom and fanfiction before they took part in the creation of AO3. Those experiences provide a good foundation for understanding the landscape of online fanfiction before the creation of AO3 from the perspectives of two who helped make that idea a reality. They informed me both of how they found themselves getting involved with fandom and fanfiction, which was incredibly useful in discussing fanfiction and the early internet, and their time starting and working on the OTW/AO3, which provided an essential insider perspective. Interviews were conducted following guidelines and after receiving permission from my subjects to use their names in my work. Both requested a copy of this thesis, which I will endeavor to send as soon as possible. Finally, for the initial ideas for and development of the AO3, I relied upon still-existing/archived posts on social media posts. These provided an opportunity to understand some of the thought process that went into the creation of the archive and gave a sense, though by no means a comprehensive one, of what sort of thoughts and opinions were held within the fandom on the creation of AO3 and the circumstances leading up to it.

            Francesca Coppa teaches English and Film studies at Muhlenberg.[49] An accomplished scholar, she has written several articles related to fandom history such as “A Brief History of Media Fandom” and “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance” which are published in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet.[50] However, in addition to her work in fandom and fanfiction history, she is a valuable speaker on the early days of fanfiction on the internet and the creation of the OTW/AO3, of which she was a founding member.[51] Rebecca Tushnet is a Professor at Harvard, teaching property and advertising law. She also has had a role in the OTW and AO3 since the very beginning. Her main role in the early organization was to help with the legalities of the operation, such as setting up the OTW as a proper nonprofit.[52]

            Finally, it should be noted that out of respect for my sources, I have not sought out the real-life identities of any of the people behind the usernames mentioned in this project and nor have I done the reverse for those whose real name came up in my research. This does not majorly affect my thesis because the vast majority of the sources identified themselves as female, spoke about women in fandom as if they were a part of that specific group, or were identified as female by others in the fandom space.

The following chapter will look at the zines of the Star Trek fandom in the 1960s when it originally aired and trace the history of fanfiction and the community around it. and its adaptation to new technologies and formats. The next chapter will be about the early days of internet fandom and the changes that brought to Star Trek fandom. The thesis concludes with the creation of fanfiction depository Archive of Our Own (AO3), including its founding organization the Organization for Transformative work, and what it meant for the fandom community. As, to my knowledge, an historical account of this subject has never been published, this will be an original contribution to the scholarship on Star Trek fandom.

[1] K. Bannister, “Desert Blooms,” Strange Bedfellows no. 2, August 1993, cited in  Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from The Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows,” in Theorizing Fandom : Fans, Subculture and Identity, eds. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998), 35.

[2] Dee or “Fandom Grandma,” an early fan and fanfic writer of Star Trek, on her tumblr blog (@Spockslash) on November 10, 2017, https://www.tumblr.com/spockslash/167348774939/hi-i-just-found-your-blog-and-i-love-it-its?source=share

[3] Rebecca Tushnet, Professor of intellectual property law and advertising law at Harvard and founding member of the Organization for Transformative Work. From our interview on September 22, 2023.

[4] M. Keith Booker, Star Trek: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), ix–xxiv.

[5] Erica Haugtvedt, “Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms as Transmedia Storytelling,” Transformative Works and Cultures 36 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2049.

^[6] Betsy Rosenblatt, “Sherlock Holmes Fan Fiction,” The Baker Street Journal  62, 4 (2012): 35.

^[7] The Baker Street Irregulars, “The Grand Game Vol. One: 1902–1959,” The Baker Street Irregulars (blog), January 15, 2011, https://bakerstreetirregulars.com/2011/01/15/grand-game-volume-one/; Andrew L. Solberg and Robert S. Katz, “Fandom, Publishing, and Playing the Grand Game,” Transformative Works and Cultures 23 (March 15, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.0825.

^[8] Rosenblatt, 33.

[9] This thesis introduces and explains some of the more specialized and technical terms of fandom and fanfiction as the reader encounters them, but also includes an appended alphabetical glossary.

[10] Joan Marie Verba, Boldly Writing: A Trek Fan and Fanfiction History, 1967-1987, Second Edition (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2003), 238. Verba is both an academic and a well-known Star Trek fan and will be introduced more in the next chapter.

[11] Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet : New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006), 226.

[12] Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet : New Essays,  eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristiine Busse (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland & Co., 2006), 226-27.

[13] Verba, 63.

[14] Natasha Simonova, “Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Case of Sidney’s Arcadia” 11 (2012), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0399.

[15] Erica Haugtvedt, “Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms as Transmedia Storytelling.”

[16] Verba, 238, 1.

[17] Abigail Derecho, “Archontic literature : a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet : New Essays, eds.  Karen Hellekson and Kristiine Busse (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland & Co., 2006), 63-6, 70.

[18] Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers : Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York ; Routledge, 1992),155-57.

[19] Verba, 76, Angelina Karpovich, “Audience as editor : the role of beta readers in online fan fiction communities,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet , 171.

[20] Derecho,70.

[21] Jenkins, 163-64.

[22] Verba 63,48-50.

[23]  Jenkins, 163-4.

[24] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 169–74.

[25] Certeau, 169.

[26] “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure: Nineteenth-Century Literary Fandoms, at the Intersection of Gender and Space,” Goldsmiths, University of London, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.gold.ac.uk/glits-e/back-issues/poaching-in-the-textual-enclosure/.

[27] “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure.”

[28] “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure.”

[29] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023. “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure.”

[30] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[31] “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure.”

[32] William Shatner, “Trekkies,” Saturday Night Live, as quoted in Jenkins, 10.

[33] Jenkins, 10, 163-4.

[34] Cheryl Harris, “Introduction Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, The Hampton Press Communication Series (Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 1998), 7.

[35]  Jenkins, 155-57.

[36]  Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, Star Trek Lives (Bantam Books, 1975), 222-23.

[37]Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from The Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, The Hampton Press Communication Series (Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 1998), 9-11,15-7.

[38]  M. Fae, a slash writer cited in  Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from The Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows,” in Theorizing Fandom, 31.

[39] Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from The Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows,” 10–11.

[40] Derecho, 71.

[41]  Lichtenberg et. al., 223-3.

[42] Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, Star Trek Lives!, First Edition (London: Corgi, 1975), 222.

[43] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, 223.

[44]  Derecho 71-72.

[45] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973), 5.

[46]  Verba, 52-53.

[47] Verba, Boldly Writing, 11.

[48] Bjo Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise: My 15 Years With Star Trek (Norfolk: Walsworth Pub Co, 1983), 172.

[49] Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co., 2006), 281.

[50] Hellekson and Busse, v–vi.

[51] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[52] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

Chapter Text

Fanzines, or zines, are amateur magazines that fans would create about a piece of media containing stories and other content about that media.[1] First created by science fiction fans in the 1930s and 1940s, fanzines are “small self-published magazines, sharing stories, poems, and art about science fiction they loved, which were traded at science fiction conventions.”[2] The term was shortened to “zines” by punks in the 1970s when they “used the concept of the fanzine to share info about their music.”[3] Star Trek fanzines, which are like science fiction fiction fanzines, were purchased through the mail or at conventions, with publishers, taking special care to try to have a new issue out in time for the latter, where they would have the opportunity to make sales in person.[4] These fanzines were the main way fanfiction was shared with other fans in the early part of the fandom. However, although the term ‘fanzine’ is used for zines based around transformative work for another piece of media, the “zine” genre was far more expansive. It began in the 1930s, was popularized in the 1970s by advances in copying technology and included political and other literary or artistic noncommercial small magazines as well.[5]

Star Trek fanzines began with the first television series. The pilot for the first Star Trek series aired on September 8^th, 1966 and producer Gene Roddenberry brought it to the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland in 1966, inspiring the first fanzine.[6] This convention series originated in 1939 when it was created by the World Science Fiction Society.[7] It has been running consistently every year from 1946 onwards. Already active with the convention in the 1950s, science fiction writer Bjo Trimble first encountered Star Trek when the upcoming shows’ costumes were added, last minute, to this convention’s fashion show she was helping to organize.[8] This chapter will follow Verba in focusing on the first two decades of Star Trek fanzines and their networks.

 The original television series only ran for three seasons, but the context of the international space race of the 1960s and the series’ partly Cold War Influenced and partly optimistic vision of the future juxtaposed to the poliltics of the 1960s combined with its progressive portrayal of multiracial unity and women in positions of power to make something truly new and unique.[9] Bjo Trimble, among others, had run a program to save Star Trek from early cancellation and worked with the creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry, to answer Star Trek fan mail and begin a movie souvenir company that sold frames of film and other memorabilia.[10] By time the second Star Trek movie was entering production she was such an important and well known fan that when Paramount Studios was looking for a phaser from the show while making the second film film, they called her![11]

However, while general science fiction fandom was the basis of Star Trek fandom, that did not mean that the relationship between the two groups was particularly close. Written years later, Trimble's memories and perceptions were of moments of condescension, though whether these reflected the views of most science fiction and/or Star Trek fans is impossible to know. However, her status as a BNF (Big Name Fan) heavily involved in Star Trek and science fiction, lends credence to the idea that, at the very least, there was a significant perception that science fiction fans looked down on Star Trek fans.

According to Trimble, “science fiction fandom, established since the early ‘40s, viewed the sudden invasion of Star Trek fans with alarm” and that “it still has trouble accepting the ‘new kids on the block’ from ‘media’ fandom such as ‘Star Trek’. or ‘Star Wars’ buffs.”[12] Trimble explained that the mass popularity of Star Trek led to a rush of new fans that, in contrast to the small trickle of entrants that the science fiction fandom was accustomed to and whose initial excitement of finding other with similar interests could be easily handled, caused waves.[13] This and the expansion of Star Trek fandom explains the first separate Star Trek Convention in 1972: “Star Trek fans were always kind of ‘tolerated’ at the regular science-fiction conventions, and we thought if a couple of hundred of us got together we could talk about Star Trek as much as we liked, with no one to sneer.”[14] Therefore, despite the connections between the two fandoms sharing both a history and some members, there was a notable separation between the two, though the reason for that remains impossible to cement.

Early fanfiction was shared through fanzines and conventions, allowing  fans to communicate with each other and form a community strong enough to keep the show alive, even while miles and miles apart.[15] For example, Some fanzines, called letterzines, like The Halkan Council, published in the mid-1970s  had a primary purpose of providing places where fans could publish letters to communicate better with each other.[16] Before the days of instant communication through the internet, fandom was limited to the slow and often expensive process of printing copies of fanzines and sending them through the mail to subscribers. Even finding out about different fanzines was harder as Verba indicated when she noted that the August 1970 issue of one fanzine was the first to include an advertisement for another fanzine, which was “an essential service since this was the primary way of finding out about fanzines until the first fanzine listings came about.”[17] Such lists of fanzines would be published by the Star Trek Welcommittee.[18] Within five years of the first Star Trek television series and fanzine, Jacqueline Lichtenberg founded the Star Trek Welcommittee, an organization dedicated to welcoming new fans to Star Trek, answering letters/questions, keeping a running list of the various fanzines, and otherwise explaining various aspects of the fandom surrounding Star Trek fandom.^[19] It was inspired by similar organizations that its creator had experience with in general science fiction fandom.^[20] Lichtenberg was a fan who was also known by her popular Kraith series of Spock-centered Star Trek fanfiction.^[21] By the time of the publication of another project Lichtenberg worked on, Star Trek Lives! in 1975, she was a science fiction author, with her book The House of Zeor releasing in 1975 and more to follow later, and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.^[22]

The fanzines created in the two decades after the first Star Trek series not surprisingly changed as new technology transformed how fanfiction was written, shared and read.  For the actual production of fanzines using tools that young, modern readers of fanfiction may be unfamiliar with, Trimble had the following to say about the process of making early science fiction fanzines:

First, when most of us were learning to produce fanzines (amateur publications), we had to learn how to work ancient typewriters, repair even more elderly mimeograph or fluid repro machines, and turn out the best we could with what we had to work with. At that time, the instant offset printshop on the corner was nothing but a dream. Photo-lithography was horribly expensive to be used only if one got such a fantastic piece of fan art that it would be a sin to reproduce it on stencil![23]

Although Trimble goes onto suggest that Star Trek fans did not have to deal with such issues, as professional printing was more common and cheaper, other sources seem to suggest that they did.[24]

            When rhetorically asking why Star Trek fans would bother with all of the work involved in making fanzines, the authors of  Star Trek Lives described that work in racialized language as low skilled  and analogous to one form of unfree labour by asking why they would spend so much time doing “coolie labor like cutting stencils, cranking mimeographs, collating pages, and the like?”[25] Early printing required cranking an actual machine that would either transfer ink to paper through a stencil (mimeograph) or transferring ink from a master copy (spirit duplication/ditto).[26] Verba noted that the very first all-Star Trek zine she could find, Spockanalia from September 1967, “was mimeographed. The first issue was bound by laying the pages onto a wooden board and using a heavy-duty wall stapler. Collators then folded the prongs of the staples back with pliers.”[27]

As time went on his process became easier and less expensive. By the mid-1970s when:

the quick-print shops were common, and offset prices were down so everyone could afford them. One of the first things science fiction fans noticed was that Star Trek fans began turning out beautifully reproduced fanzines all over the place. This, quite naturally, rubbed some of the science fiction “old timers” the wrong way. They could remember the frustration of trying to produce a letter-perfect fanzine, using very outdated methods of reproduction! [28]

            Although the first issue of Star Trek zine T-Negative released in 1970 was still mimeographed with “an offset (professionally printed) cover,”[29] by July 1974, this entire fanzine would be printed offset and with fewer pages to save on cost.[30]

Yet by 1977 some fans were complaining that using offset printing for fanzines led to higher prices than using mimeograph machines.[31] Verba noted, however, that in 1981, at least one fanzine publisher was adamant that was not the case:

Devra Langsam published Masiform D 11 in February. This issue ran 118 pages, and was still mimeographed.[32] In her editorial, Devra observed, ‘Mimeo used to be cheap and fannish. Now it’s not that cheap, comparatively, as quick printer prices drop, and it hardly seems fannish anymore either.’[33]

Verba then explained that the “next issue of Masiform D would be offset and perfect bound.”^[34] By the 1980s, however, “mimeographs, in contrast, became harder and harder to find. Fewer and fewer office supply stores carried mimeo supplies, such as ink, stencils, and special paper. Masiform D 11 (along with Sehlat’s Roar) was one of the last mimeographed fanzines.”[35] In contrast, personal computers became more available in this decade and by its end “desktop publishing software and laser printers would be within reach of many fans.”[36]

As noted above, the cost of fanzines to consumers was also well-noted in texts like Verba’s. There was a notable trend of fanzine prices rising over time. The first issue of the fanzine Interphase, widely popular and known for its high quality, came out in 1975. It included a note from its editor Connie Faddis apologizing to those who planned to purchase the fanzine at a price of $2.25 because, despite her unwillingness to do so, she was forced to raise that price to $2.85, a price that she considered too high did not include the cost of shipping.[37] Despite the increased price, no profit would be made.[38] Star Trek Lives! released in the same year, reported that fanzines could “run to several hundred pages and may cost as much as $5.00 a piece to print.”[39] This illustrates two different price points for fanzines and one editor’s  reluctance to charge prices beyond cost recovery. By 1979, prices had increased further with Michele Arvizu reported that they had risen as high as $10-$15 a fanzine, causing her to worry that fanzines would soon become unobtainable for fans and unpublishable for editors.[40] However, on the previous page Verba noted that the same fan suggested that, since fan artists were charging high prices fan writers should be able to do the same.[41] In the same years, Star Trek convention attendees began to complain that prices were excessive.[42]

The exact reasons for these increased prices are not known for certain. Some, however, have suggested that these high prices were due to Star Trek fans attempting to do something out of the ordinary for fandom. In the words of Bjo Trimble:

Star Trek fans also thought they should try to make a profit off of their endeavors. As one of the all-hallowed and totally illogical early ideas of science fiction fandom, the unspoken ‘rule’ that it was immoral to make a profit off of fellow fans is probably one of the most stupid. This has prevented, through the years, many fans from collection an honest salary for putting on a top notch and very profitable convention.[43]

She suggested that Star Trek fans did this because, unlike the aforementioned long history of science fiction fandom, they lacked a sense of “tradition” to adhere to. Trimble wrote that instead they “hit fandom broadside with very expensive fanzines and conventions that were openly designed to make money for someone.”[44] This idea is particularly important because of the role monetization of fanworks will play in the next century. The question over whether fanfiction should be a source of profit would be closely tied to the creation of AO3. However, the idea of Star Trek fans being willing to go against fan tradition and make a profit was not as ubiquitous as Trimble made it seem. Verba’s work painted this issue as more of a split debate with some in favour of fanzines being permitted to make a profit to varying degrees. See the final section of this project for a deeper exploration of the role monetization of fanfiction would play in the history and culture of fandom with the creation of Fanlib and the resistance to it.

Just as technology and its costs changed the production of Star Trek fanzines, so did the impact of other science fiction fanzines, television series or films. Initially Star Trek fanzines focused solely on Star Trek from their beginning with Spockanalia as the first all Star Trek fanzine published in 1967.[45] The number of fanzines focused only on Star Trek peaked in 1977.[46] There were 431 recorded by the Star Trek Welcommittee’s directory, though there were probably others left unlisted.[47] Yet, “by the end of the year…many fans were planning Star Wars and other ‘media fanzines.’”[48] “Media fanzines” were fanzines that, rather than focusing on one piece of media, like Star Trek, contained material from a variety of fandoms.[49] According to Verba, some who were involved in multiple fandoms enjoyed these fanzines while others, even some of those participating in other fandoms, preferred zines that focused on only one topic.[50] This is not a difficult sentiment to understand as fans had to purchase the zine as a whole rather than each story, so if one wanted to read a specific Star Trek story found in a zine containing mostly Star Wars fanfiction and one was not interested in Star Wars, it would be frustrating to have to pay for stories one would not want to read.

Nonetheless, after 1977 there was a clear trend of Star Trek fanzines adopting this structure. For example, in 1978

Warped Space was beginning to regularly publish stories other than Star Trek. Double issue 31/32, for example, featured Luke Skywalker as the cover subject. In her editorial, Lori Chapek-Carleton warned, “this issue of Warped Space contains a good deal of Star Wars material.” The ads also announced that the fanzine Pegasus was switching from an all-Star Trek format to an all Star Wars format as of its third issue.[51]

Even the lead up to the Star Trek film release did not garner enough attention to prevent this process, with the Star Trek Welcommittee listing fewer (around 400) fanzines in 1979 while including some that were not exclusively Star Trek fanzines.[52] This led to a fan named Dixie Own questioning whether she was the only fan still seeking fanzines that contained only Star Trek stories.[53] According to Verba, this process led to the loss of some of Star Trek fandom’s best writers, leading to a dearth in content of the highest quality that would not be rectified until the internet came about.[54]

            Another aspect of Star Trek fanfiction that proved particularly relevant to the history of fanfiction as a whole was the more sexually explicit content created and its censorship. When describing Star Trek fanfiction, Star Trek Lives! took care to mention that, along with comedy and adventure, fanfiction could feature stories of a sexual nature.[55] Indeed, it was a Star Trek fanzine that first contained a nude centerfold (not surprisingly Mr. Spock) before even magazines like Playgirl.[56] Some Star Trek fanzines like Grup, a shortened form of “Grownup” taken from an episode of the show, were created for the main purpose of publishing the sort of adult material that other fan publishers declined.[57] Not all fans appreciated this content, however. Some claimed that sources like Star Trek Lives! made sexually explicit content seem more prominent in the fandom than it  actually was.[58] Additionally, when the 1977 convention SekWesterCon included and discussed explicit material, some fans were horrified and disgusted, suggesting that those who made such content were not real Star Trek fans and that the content was disgraceful enough to ruin the show and justify the outlawing of fanzines.[59] This content and the reactions to it are important because one of the defining aspects that would drive fandom to push back against the outside corporate monetization of fanfiction was the risk that a business would censor that side of fanfiction to make it more palatable in the context of that time. This was even somewhat an issue of the time with Lucasfilms making it clear that fanzines placing the Star Wars cast in sexual situations would not be tolerated.[60] According to Verba “many Star Wars fans protested, calling such an action ‘censorship,’ while other Star Wars fans, particularly ex-Star Trek fans who left because of K/S fanzines applauded the action.”[61]  While it was controversial, sexual fanfiction was a prominent aspect of the fandom.

            Another key theme of Star Trek fanfiction was the plotline of Captain Kirk and First Officer Mr. Spock in a romantic or sexual relationship, known as the Kirk/Spock (K/S) phenomenon. From the first example published in 1974, some in the fandom agreed that they were together, and others believed that the two were merely friends.[62] Some fans even seemed concerned that the publication of K/S, or “slash,” stories would lead to Paramount Studios cracking down on fanzines out of distaste for the implication.[63]

            Before the end of the period of fanzine history discussed in this chapter, the archival impulse to save, maintain, and protect fanfiction stories had already become an element of fanfiction writing culture. However, while the impulse for such preservation existed, it was not necessarily particularly successful or useful. According to Verba’s account, by 1974 there were already fans attempting to form an archive of Star Trek fanfiction.[64] Sharon Ferraro, a fan involved in both writing and publishing Star Trek fanzines and organizing con, proposed an archvie for Star Trek fan content, which she called Memory Alpha.[65] According to Ferraro, “the goal of MA…is to collect, catalog, and microfilm as much of the fan-produced literature as we can get out hot little hands on.”[66] As for how, she then proposed to preserve all issues as microfiche. According to Verba, she also announced in October that “Memory Alpha, the ST fan literature archive…has been accepted by the National Air and Space Museum.”[67] Unfortunately, this attempt did not last. According to Verba, “this archive was a fine concept, but I have no information about it after the mid-1970s. Perhaps, somewhere in the Smithsonian one may find a stack of fanzines, dating from 1967-1974, gathering dust in a corner somewhere.”[68] Fans have been attempting to protect and preserve their work and writing since the early days of fanfiction. As the next chapter will show, the methods they used would be changed and altered even more by the technologies based on computers and the development of the internet.

[1] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 3–4.

[2] “A Short History Of Zines,” School Library Journal 69, no. 3 (March 2023): 44.

[3] “A Short History Of Zines.”

[4] Verba, Boldly Writing, 39; “A Short History Of Zines.”

[5] Teresa Nowakowski, “How Zines Brought Power to Those on the Margins of Culture,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed April 11, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brooklyn-museum-explores-how-zines-offered-a-voice-to-those-outside-mainstream-culture-180983351/.

[6] Verba, Boldly Writing, 14.

[7] “The World Science Fiction Society,” The World Science Fiction Society, accessed April 11, 2024, https://www.wsfs.org/; “About Worldcon,” Worldcon (blog), January 24, 2016, https://www.worldcon.org/about-worldcon/.

[8] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 1, 13–16, 172.

[9] Booker, Star Trek, xi–xxiv.

[10] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 2, 26, 39–40.

[11] Trimble, 262-5.

[12] Trimble, 2–3, 63.

[13] Trimble, 63.

[14] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 52.

[15] Verba, Boldly Writing, 8–9.

[16] Verba, 54.

[17] Verba, 22.

[18] Verba, 101.

[19] Verba, 38–8, 43, 50–51; Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 25.

[20] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 25; Verba, Boldly Writing, 38–39, 43.

[21] Verba, Boldly Writing, 22.

[22] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 275; Verba, Boldly Writing, 50.

[23] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 63.

[24] Trimble, 63.

[25] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 222.

[26] Verba, Boldly Writing, 56, 63, 159; “Duplicating Machine,” Britannica Kids, accessed April 5, 2024, https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/duplicating-machine/274083.

[27] Verba, Boldly Writing, 14, 25.

[28] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 63.

[29] Verba, Boldly Writing, 22.

[30] Verba, 56.

[31] Verba, 105.

[32] Verba, 158.

[33] Devra Langsam, Masiform D 11, as quoted in Verba, 158.

[34] Verba, 158.

[35] Verba, 159.

[36] Verba, 159.

[37] Verba, 78.

[38] Verba, 78.

[39] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 10.

[40] Verba, Boldly Writing, 132.

[41] Verba, 131.

[42] Verba, 80.

[43] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 63.

[44] Trimble, 64.

[45] Verba, Boldly Writing, 14, 25.

[46] Verba, 101.

[47] Verba, 101.

[48] Verba, 101.

[49] Verba, 98.

[50] Verba, 98.

[51] Verba, 125.

[52] Verba, 128.

[53] Verba, 132.

[54] Verba, 87–88.

[55] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 221–22.

[56] Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, 10.

[57] Verba, Boldly Writing, 40; Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, Star Trek Lives!, 251.

[58] Verba, Boldly Writing, 69.

[59] Verba, 111–13.

[60] Verba, 153.

[61] Verba, 153.

[62] Verba, 59, 69–70, 90, 123–24.

[63] Verba, 124.

[64] Verba, 52.

[65] “Sharon Ferraro - Fanlore,” accessed April 9, 2024, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sharon_Ferraro; Verba, Boldly Writing, 52.

[66] Sharon Ferraro, “A Piece of the Action,” 1974, as quoted in Verba, Boldly Writing, 52.

[67] Sharon Ferraro, 1974, as quoted in Verba, 52.

[68] Sharon Ferraro, “A Piece of the Action,” 1974, as quoted in Verba, 52.

Chapter Text

Marie Verba ended her history of Star Trek zines in 1987, commenting on the movement away from the primary technologies, spirit duplicators and mimeographs that drove the production and distribution of fanzines up to that point.[1] Her history ends by looking forward to the changes that technology and all of its advancements would bring to the fanfiction community.[2] The fans of the 21st century turned to desktop publishing systems to put “out fanzines and newsletters with sophisticated text and graphics.”[3] Effectively,  higher quality work could be produced much more easily. However, Verba directed most of her commentary in her conclusion on the connection between the development of fandom to another development from computing technology the internet.[4]

As this is a history of a specific aspect of internet culture and not the internet itself, I have not included a lengthy discussion of history of technology or the technolohy itself. However, as this history is dependent on the early internet and its structure, I have created a brief explanation based on the book Inventing the Internet by Janet Abbate that I urge interested readers to consult. According to Abbate the transformation of the computer from merely a device for computation to a tool for communication took place over a period from the 1960s to the 1960s.[5] An essential part of that transformation were networks that connected different computers, ending the need to carry data physically, specifically, the internet.[6] It was created by the United States Military that connected a limited number of computers, but eventually became the vast, nearly ubiquitous presence it is today.[7] The internet remained a relative unknown in the 1980s as the technology still tied to the United States Government and their defense programs.[8] It was then made available to computer science researchers at institutions outside of the military, loosening their control of it.[9] Eventually, as personal computers became more available, there was an increased need to connect them, particularly at universities, through Local Access Networks (LAN) which led to students getting access to the internet when those networks were added to it.[10] The internet would continue to expand and develop, becoming more widespread and easier to use over time until it became what it is today.[11] Once again, I ask readers to refer to Abbate’s book for more detailed information.

Returning to Verba, with this “greatest revolution in fandom and fan publishing,” the internet ultimately replaced the physical fanzine, with many fans having “never read a paper fanzine, and express(ing) no desire to, preferring the instant access and instant feedback of online publishing.”[12] Essentially, the paper fanzine has fallen out of favour for the convenience of the internet.[13] Using the first person accounts of Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet as a base, this chapter describes and analyzes Star Trek fandom from the 1990s to the creation of AO3. Coppa entered fandom when she was around eleven or twelve in the 1980s in the midst of a period of important sci-fi films such as The Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.[14] Her first experience with fanfiction came in the same decade after being inspired by a friend who would act out stories with her Star Wars action figures:

I never acted out stories with action figures, but I really took to the idea of writing fanfiction and we soon had a group going where we would write a story collectively, in turns: I would write a chapter, then mail it to one of my friends, who would continue it and then send it on to another friend, etc. By the time I got it back to me, 3-4 friends later, there was a lot of new story to read and then I got to add on and continue the story. So in many ways it was the best of both reading and writing fanfiction.[15]

This sort of collective story reliant on hard documents and paper is reminiscent of the Star Trek zines that were also, effectively, a collection of work by a variety of writers in one place that had to be mailed to each individually, simply on a smaller scale.,

Coppa discovered online fanfiction and rediscovered the world of fandom during her time in graduate school in 1992-1993, by which time the internet had become more easily available to students. She found online fanfiction in a variety of places, such as alt.Star Trek.tv (further explained below) and listvers, and described the experience of that discovery as being akin to coming home.[16] This portrays a sense of continuity and continued community in the experience of online fanfiction.

 Her story also revealed an interesting aspect of the early online fanfiction community, the archival impulse that would come to play a major part in the formation, and name, of AO3. Coppa explained that she eventually took on the role of archivist and befriended members of other fandoms who did the same.[17] As the internet originated in in governmental and academic institutions, not surprisingly:

In the early days of the internet, you had to be at a university or in the government or in tech to be on the internet. This had a lot of consequences, but one of the big ones is that a huge proportion of early fandom folk were librarians. The archiving and organizing impulse in fandom is hellishly strong, and not only were there early fandom archives and archivists, but I know of several fans who--then and now--download and print all the stories they care about. Because they don't trust that the internet will last![18]

This illustrates the early desire to preserve founded partially on the sort of person in fandom with access to the internet.  Effectively, because the early internet was so limited people who were drawn to online fanfiction were the sort who were perhaps more prone to preserve the stories (in this particular case, graduate students and librarians).[19]

Although Verba noted an increasing rarity of physical zines after the advent of online fanfiction, the transition was far from immediate and clean. Even when Coppa first experienced fanfiction on the internet, fandom was still in what she considered the “zine era.”[20] Although the internet's greater accessibility would eventually allow it to become the dominant method of publishing and consuming fanfiction, some thought that because anyone with access to the internet could post fanfiction those stories were not screened.[21] Paper Zines had been edited, leading to the belief that stories in zines were of much higher quality than their online counterparts.[22] The evolution of fanfiction in reaction to technology was far from linear. The community, while taking advantage of new technologies, was far from unified.

Many fans were initially resistant to the idea of online fanfiction, preferring edited zines, and there was an early sense of elitism linked to fans who attended events in person being seen as “bigger fans” than those who only participated online.[23] As both Coppa and Tushnet commented on, computers and the internet were held back by the fact that it took time for the internet to be available to more than just those working with universities or government.[24] Additionally, there are matters of cost to consider. While purchasing a zine would allow you to gain a collection of stories for a single fee (or via a subscription), online fanfiction required both a computer to access it with and a subscription to an internet provider.[25] There is also the matter of computer competency to consider.[26] Effectively, participation in online fandom, especially if one wanted to take on a level of leadership through the maintenance of mailing lists or archives, required a fan to have the knowledge and skill to build and develop various online resources at most and learn to operate a computer, send, and receive messages at minimum.[27] Therefore, considering the relative rarity of computers and the internet in comparison to modern society, where everyone has a computer in their pocket, it is obvious that the movement of fanfiction online was held back by a number of barriers.

Tushnet’s account resembled Coppa’s but with some differences. She, too discovered fanfiction as a child in the 1980s but through physical zines at conventions.[28] However, Tushnet did not start writing fanfiction until she was in law school, around 1996 or 1997, and a friend directed her to the early internet where she could find stories based around the television show The X Files.[29] She started writing her own fanfiction because she believed she could write stories just as good as those she was reading and “would not be making the field worse.”[30] This belief, that many artistic creators over time have shared, would have been more confident and less of a risk with the relative ease of publishing fanfiction online (i.e no financial cost and no need physically to mail a piece). The internet made access to writing and reading fanfiction easier, especially as the internet became more and more prevalent in ordinary households.

Tushnet also revealed another fascinating aspect of fanfiction on the internet before the creation of AO3. The segmentation of science fiction fanfiction that had begun in earlier decade, was more clearly visible and more easily charted. Though fans could and were involved in multiple fandoms, individual spaces were separate. First, she belonged to mailing lists, news groups, and archives (such as the Gossamer Archive) centered around individual fandoms like The X Files.[31] For Tushnet, the later technologies of the world wide web and blogging changed this. Tushnet explained that she did not really interact “with fandom in general until I got on Live Journal, where you sort of got lots of people from different fandoms mixing and mingling.”[32]  This was, in some ways, a return to the broader science fiction conventions of the past in a now virtual form. Recall that, as discussed in Chapter 2, Star Trek zines exclusively contained Star Trek content at first before other science fiction series, such as Star Wars, became included.[33] This means that the internet led to a return in some capacity to single-fandom content.

            Fanfiction’s move from the physical to the digital also had another major effect that would one day become important as a reason for the creation of the AO3 and OTW. Despite its convenience, the internet has a certain impermanence that fanfiction readers and writers are remarkably aware of.[34] Archive of Our Own user Versaphile, for instance, reported in her article in the OTW journal Transformative Works and Cultures that “a printed zine from the 1970s may last longer than a story published online in the last six months.”[35] Although a physical zine may have a limited amount of copies, as a small set amount was printed, in comparison to a fanfiction published online on a blog, which could theoretically be read by a thousand different people all at once, the physical could be much more reliably counted upon to withstand the test of time and be read years after its initial publication date.[36] In many cases, fanfiction posted on the internet can be easily deleted or removed, making it inaccessible.[37] Versaphile proposed that this destruction or removal of fanfiction could be seen as a blow to fandom as a whole, considering the loss of history it entails.[38] She went so far as to write “for those who seek to read and be read, to build on and be inspired by the collective history of fannish creativity, there is nothing so vital to authorial fandom's survival as the archive.”[39]

Coppa explained that because the internet was so closely tied to universities when it was first becoming available, many early fans that went online were librarians, connecting them to the need to archive, a need she described as “hellishly strong.”[40] Even Tushnet, who explained that she did not see an archival impulse of any particular strength in The X Files fandom, admitted to downloading some fanfiction “in case [she] want[s] to revisit them.”[41] That need to preserve fanfiction would contribute to the creation of AO3, but would also explain why many of the ways people shared fanfiction online at first would prove inadequate.

Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, the internet came to be the dominant place to find fanfiction. Coppa said, “as the internet expanded, online fic was so much more accessible, not to mention faster!”[42] Those elements of online fandom, the accessibility and speed played a large role in why online fanfiction became so prevalent. With the internet, instead of waiting for letters to be sent and printed in zines to communicate with other fans or receive stories, a fan could have instant, or near instant access to both other fans and fanfiction.[43] Moreover, email and other internet based forms of communications are quick but asynchronous, as although one does not need to be online at the exact same moment as the recipient, two people online at the same time could have a conversation in a shorter stretch of time or even in real time.[44] This made fan discussion of ideas and the collaborative aspects of fanfiction writing  occur on a much quicker and responsive timeline, making participation far easier.[45]

In addition to making communication and coordination easier, the internet enabled the participation of fans from a wider geographical area. Although different regions and types of communities gained access to the internet at unequal rates and levels, the internet effectively extended the reach of fandom. Furthermore, the internet enabled those in different time zones to communicate and access fan content. Rather than dealing with the time and expense of sending a physical zine to a faraway place, fanfiction can be sent to the most distant locations virtually.[46] Effectively, the internet allowed for members of the same fandom, and therefore readers and writers of fanfiction, to connect internationally.[47]

Furthermore, the interconnectivity of the internet had other benefits. For example, allowing for better communication between people allows for media that would have been completely obscure otherwise to attract enough attention online to form a fandom.[48] Effectively, by letting people communicate at a distance and publicly post about the things they enjoy, the internet can foster the creation of new fandoms.[49] Additionally, the internet allows for smaller fandoms that would otherwise fade away after failing to drum up enough funds and interest in zines to continue producing and reading fanfiction for their chosen fandom by eliminating the upfront costs associated with producing physical zine.[50] Therefore, smaller, niche fandoms can flourish by using the tools provided by the internet. Each of these factors logically only increased in effect as use of the internet became more and more widespread.

A variety of methods were used to publish fanfiction in this period. Primarily, there were the mailing lists, fandom specific archives, Usenet groups, and edited access wide pages, and finally user participant-oriented blogs such as Live Journal pages. Each of these methods were used at different points and for different reasons.

The Fanlore wiki describes Usenet newsgroups as “one of the oldest internet discussion tools for computer networks.”^[51] Originating in the 1980s, Usenet allows for posts in an email-like manner to be sent from the poster to all of the other members of the groups.^[52] Groups were sorted by topic and it was therefore easy for a fan to find groups talking about the media they enjoyed.^[53] Coppa mentioned an example of a Star Trek group called “alt.Star Trek.tv” in her interview and Johnson wrote about another called “alt.startrek.creative,” indicating that Star Trek fandom was active on these groups.[54]

However, when it comes to disseminating fanfiction, there were issues with Usenet groups. For one, the messages within these groups were not designed to be searched and retrieved at a later date. In fact, a majority of messages sent using Usenet have a deliberate lifespan of days to weeks and have only limited searchability.^[55] Therefore, Usenet groups were useful, but simply not designed for the long-term retention of data.^[56] It was from Usenet groups than many of the stories on online archive, discussed below, originated as archivists in the group searched them for stories marked by the writers as being open to being archived.^[57]

Starting in the late 1990s, mailing lists became a popular method for communicating with other fans.[58] Although mailing lists were only popular for four years, they were prominent enough to merit discussion in multiple sources.[59] Mailing lists were groups of fans, usually private and requiring that membership be approved beforehand, centered around a specific fandom or even an even more granular topic within a fandom.[60] They were meant to have a narrow focus with discussion centered around their given topic with little exception.[61] This separation is linked tightly to the distance Tushnet described feeling from other fandoms.[62] Although not initially intended for hosting fanfiction, these groups eventually came to be used for that purpose.[63]

Mailing lists did have a few key problems when it came to maintaining fandom connections. Despite their privacy, mailing lists were prone to interference from outside forces. The companies that hosted these mailing lists, such as eGroups or ONElist, were ultimately free to do as they wished with their products. They could be bought, sold, or even merged. This made them quite volatile as, according to Versaphile, “each merger and rename resulted in broken links and data loss.”[64] Therefore, the fanfiction shared, stored, and linked to within these mailing lists were subject to corporate whims. Additionally, should a private mailing list be abandoned, leaving no one to allow entry to new members, then no one new would ever be able to access the stories.[65] Even when a private mailing list was operating properly, the very nature of that privacy could cause issues. For instance, it kept the knowledge and ideas discussed within these lists away from other fans.[66] It also proved to be a hassle to fans who wanted to share the stories from these groups as those they shared them with would have no choice but “to join groups simply to read a single story.”[67] This is not even including the very real possibility that the creator of a list might simply decide to delete it one day, taking all of the content contained within it as well. It was because of these issues that the mailing list method of sharing and reading fanfiction was only in favour for a short amount of time, with more useful innovations drawing attention.[68]

            Rebecca Tushnet provides an example of the use of fandom-specific archives:  She referred to an The X-Files fanfiction website as the “Gossamer Archive” and believed it was still online.[69] Further research indicated that the website, actually titled The Gossamer Project, was indeed still accessible, though the most recent activity occurred all the way back in September of 2012.[70] This archive and archives like it for other fandoms, including the Star Trek archive Trekiverse were, for the most part, created during the 1990s.[71] However, some, like the now defunct K/S archive which began in 2005, came about later.[72] These archives operated by volunteers who would “collect and format these stories, file them, and preserve them for viewing.”[73] Fanfiction stories found their way onto these archives in a few ways. A fic author could reach out to the archive directly with their piece to be archived or they could simply include a header on their story when they posted elsewhere marking it as being available to archive.[74] According to Tushnet, “Gossamer started sort of automatically importing it, unless you didn't want that to happen. And then it would be on the Gossamer Archive, which was a very simple text archive.”[75] Effectively, this refers to the archivist(s) working on The Gossamer Project website seeking out those previously mentioned stories marked as being open to being archived. The Gossamer Project itself, as Tushnet indicated, is essentially a collection of links, lists and webpages containing the text of fanfiction with only one image on the front page.[76]

            These archives had a few advantages. Tushnet indicated in her interview that “having gossamer was fantastic because it meant not having to search the newsgroups anymore. Or, you know, God forbid, your own email. And so it seemed like a really good public service.” As such, these archives were meant to gather all of the stories about a specific piece of media and keep them all in one place where they could be easily preserved, searched, and accessed.[77] However, though these archives were meant to unify a single fandom’s work, cases like the K/S Fanfiction Archive indicate there were at least a few cases where parts of the fanfiction writing community would splinter off into their own even more specific archives for their own reasons (such as with K/S writers wishing to avoid restrictions on adult content on the poor quality of adult content friendly archives).[78]

            However, there were downsides to these archives as well. According to Versaphile, archives could be difficult to navigate and often had minimal categorization and ineffective searching functions.[79] My exploration of The Gossamer Project, for example, suggests a usage of a form of what Shannon Fay Johnson calls “free tagging” where an author of a fic describes their fic using keywords/agreed upon language that a reader can then search for.[80] This system is flawed because it relies entirely  on the author’s own interpretation of their work and what is noteworthy about it and can fluctuate depending on how writers use the language.[81]

            Additionally, with these archives there is a very real risk that they could simply disappear one day and take all of the stories preserved there with it. As they are run by volunteers, it only takes a few key members leaving a given fandom or otherwise ending their work on an archive for the entire structure to collapse, something that smaller archives were especially prone to.[82] Tushnet explained it as follows; “there's a persistent problem where you know, someone stops maintaining a resource [and] the resource goes away.”[83]  Therefore, although these archives were meant to preserve fanfiction, they could prove to be just as ephemeral as other methods.

            Fanfiction.net, created in 1998, deserves a special mention as a fanfiction archive before AO3 that attempted to bring fanfiction for a multitude of fandoms together in one place. It allows for users to post their own stories, but has only a basic search function (i.e. searches for words in the title and description across all media on the site, not allowing users to narrow their searches, such as by fandom, until they have already been given the results) and only lets its users filter by broad categories such as genre, time updated/posted, length, language, and age rating with only options for four characters and two pairings.[84] This makes it difficult to search for stories about things like specific situations or concepts (i.e. alternate universe where the characters of a fantasy or science fiction series run a modern day coffee shop).[85]

            This all indicates an aspect of online fandom that is important to understand to comprehend the full breadth of the community. Although Usenet groups, mailing lists, fandom specific archives, and Live Journal pages were created at different points and used in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons, this by no means meant to indicate a timeline where one method fell out of use as another became popular. That certainly did happen, as in the case of mailing lists which, according to Versaphile were effectively abandoned enmasse in favour of Livejournal in 2001, but that experience was not universal.[86] An example of this is how Usenet groups and web archives were used in tandem.[87] Additionally, despite the popularity of AO3, web archives like fanfiction.net, which is still receives new content, and The Gossamer archive are still accessible.

As previously mentioned, Livejournal (LJ) was a platform used in fandom that essentially replaced the use of mailing lists with the transition first to the visual world wide web and then to the interactive Web 2.0.[88] As indicated by Tushnet’s comment on her own experience with Livejournal, that joining it marked the moment where she “connected with fandom in general” and was “where you sort of got lots of people from different fandoms mixing and mingling,” the movement to Livejournal represented a shift in the culture online fandom.[89] According to Louisa Stein “LJ offers a space for a user to post her own diary entries and, if she chooses to post her journal publicly or semipublicaly, to engage in conversation with her readers by using the comments function. Journals appear in chronological order of posting on one’s friend list.”[90]

As opposed to other methods used for sharing fanfiction, which were divided by topic, such as by fandom or ship, Livejournal is centered around people.[91] Due to its system of user made pages and “friending,” Livejournal is extensively customizable.[92] Users can decide who they follow and what posts they read by friending authors and joining specific groups.[93] However, since Livejournal is based around people rather than topics, there was an intermixing between fandoms. Even communities, which were groups meant for posts centered around a specific topic, were often repositories for links back to a given poster's journal. The interactions between different fandoms Tushnet spoke of came from the fact that many fans on LiveJournal posted about multiple fandoms. Therefore, if a fan was looking for another fan’s content on a shared fandom, they would inevitably encounter that fan’s writings on other fandoms she was interested in.[94] Therefore, Livejournal allowed for a sort of intermixing of fandoms as discussion and fic for one were stored in the same place as content for another.[95] This leads to a greater sense of interconnectedness among fans of various things and, for example, a Star Trek fan who has never seen a single episode of The X Files would learn more about it than they ever intended from looking at the Livejournal of someone who was a fan of both.[96] Livejournal also aided in the development of fan communities by developing a culture where a writer could share their works in progress or ideas and get feedback from other fans that they could use in writing the story.[97]

Despite this, Livejournal did have issues as well. It also used the free tagging system discussed previously and therefore relied upon the adherence to a code of language rather than an official system, which limited the ability of fans to find stories relating to ideas or concepts without established language.[98] The entries are also notoriously hard to locate in addition to the need for that language as many journals are private, as an aspect of the customization that many fans enjoyed, and often Livejournal entries fail to show up on web browser searches.[99]

Modern fanfiction began its journey as a series of physical zines that were passed around through the mail and discovered through conventions and word of mouth. The fanfiction writers of the past used the technologies available to them to the fullest, making use of ditto machines and then offset printing. Their use of the internet starting from when it was first beginning to become available marks a continuation of a noteworthy trend of fans utilizing the technology and methods of communication around them to its fullest extent.[100] According to Henry Jenkins, “the Web provides a powerful new distribution channel for amateur cultural production.”[101] Effectively, the new technologies and possibilities created new opportunities for fans to connect across large distances, in new ways, and by increasingly available means. There is an inherent ease of discovering fandom that comes with the internet. With public archives and open/public groups, it becomes far easier for fans to stumble upon fanworks while looking for information on a piece of media online than in the days of physical zines.

Each of the methods used to publish fanfiction online before the creation and popularity of AO3 had their own qualities that drew fanfiction writers to them. Some, like Usenet and email groups, allowed for fans to find stories related to a specific fandom/part of a fandom. Others, such as Livejournal, allowed for better communication with other fans. However, each had their own downsides, ranging from simply not being designed to house fanfiction, to being liable to vanish at any moment, to lacking robust enough tagging and filtering systems to handle the load of a fandom’s needs. When The Archive of Our Own was created in 2007, some of its major features and the philosophy behind its creation would attempt to remedy those issues. Therefore, it was created from a technological and cultural landscape that was vastly different from the zine culture described in the previous section. It would come as a reaction to and result of the developments caused by this move of fanfiction to the online sphere.

[1] Verba, 221.

[2] Verba, 221.

[3] Verba, 221.

[4] Verba, 221.

[5] Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), 1.

[6] Abbate, Inventing the Internet.

[7] Abbate, 1–2.

[8] Abbate, 181.

[9] Abbate, 184–85.

[10] Abbate, 186–87.

[11] Abbate, 213–20.

[12] Verba, Boldly Writing, 221.

[13] Verba, 221.

[14] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[15] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[16] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[17] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[18] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[19] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[20] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[21] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[22] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[23] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023;

Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, The Hampton Press Communication Series (Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 1998), 139.

[24] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[25] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 140. Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[26] Andrea MacDonald, 141; Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,” in Fan FIction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co., 2006), 173–74.

[27] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 141; Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,” 173–74.

[28] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[29] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[30] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[31] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[32] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[33] Verba, Boldly Writing, 101.

[34] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[35] “Versaphile - Fanlore,” accessed April 11, 2024, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Versaphile; - Versaphile, “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History,” Transformative Works and Cultures 6 (March 15, 2011), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

[36] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[37] Versaphile.

[38] Versaphile.

[39] Versaphile.

[40] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[41] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[42] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[43] Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,” 174.

[44] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 142–43.

[45] Stevie Leigh, “Fan Fiction as a Valuable Literacy Practice,” Transformative Works and Cultures 34 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1961; Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 142–43; Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,” 174.

[46] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 142–43; Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,” 174.

[47] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[48] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 141.

[49] Andrea MacDonald, 141.

[50] Andrea MacDonald, 141.

[51] “Usenet - Fanlore,” accessed April 12, 2024, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Usenet.

[52] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library”; Nancy K. Baym, “Talking About Soaps: Communicative Practices in a Computer-Mediated Fan Culture,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, The Hampton Press Communication Series (Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 1998), 113.

[53] Nancy K. Baym, “Talking About Soaps: Communicative Practices in a Computer-Mediated Fan Culture,” 113; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models,” Transformative Works and Cultures 17 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578.

[54] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023;

Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[55] Shannon Fay Johnson; Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[56] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[57] Versaphile.

[58] Versaphile.

[59] Versaphile.

[60] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 143; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models”; Lucy Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse,” Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2008.049.

[61] Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.”

[62] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models”; Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.”

[63] Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse”; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[64] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[65] Versaphile.

[66] Andrea MacDonald, “Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication,” 143.

[67] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[68] Versaphile.

[69] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[70] “The Gossamer Project,” accessed April 12, 2024, http://fluky.gossamer.org/.

[71] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[72] “The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive - Fanlore,” accessed March 15, 2024, https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Kirk/Spock_Fanfiction_Archive.

[73] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[74] Versaphile.

[75] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[76] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023; “The Gossamer Project.”

[77] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023; Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[78] “The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive - Fanlore.”

[79] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[80] “The Gossamer Project”; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[81] Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[82] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[83] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[84] “FanFiction,” accessed April 12, 2024, https://www.fanfiction.net/; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[85] “FanFiction”; Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[86] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[87] Versaphile.

[88] Versaphile.

[89] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[90] Louisa Stein, “‘This Dratted Thing’: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co., 2006), 250.

[91] Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.”

[92] Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[93] Versaphile.           

[94] Busker, “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.”

[95] Busker.

[96] Busker.

[97] Louisa Stein, “‘This Dratted Thing’: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media,” 250.

[98] Shannon Fay Johnson, “Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models.”

[99] Shannon Fay Johnson; Versaphile, “Silence in the Library.”

[100] Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry,” in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York University Press, 2012), 135, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mta-ebooks/detail.action?docID=865738.

[101] Jenkins, 135–36.

Chapter Text

The whole "free" culture of fan fiction just absolutely does it for me in a way no commercial enterprise seems to do. I'm there on my own time, creating solely for pleasure, sharing, communicating, leaving profit motive behind. And I find that simple fact immensely stimulating and joyful. As long as it doesn't infringe my ability to do this, I don't at all care what other entities do about it, except for being of the opinion that the new fanlib thing may cause us a lot of problems.[1]

Every time I see big shiny celebrations of fan culture that completely ignore 40 years of women's creative work, I want to not only let my freak flag fly, but march up and down the streets with it -- and then something else (lately fanlib, but it's far from the first) reminds me that getting out there without doing it on our own terms is only a small part of the battle. It seems like a fan-culture site that gets our culture while really making the most of the internet as it is now (as opposed to publicizing fan work just for the sake of ad dollars or eyeball-share or whatthehellever)... oh, yes.[2]

             As noted in the previous chapter, many of the various methods for sharing fanfiction online had issues that the Archive of Our Own would attempt to avoid in its own structure, for example, longevity, searchability, and being created with fanfiction in mind. One website in particular, Fanlib, inspired so much criticism and controversy that it was the key inspiration for the founders of the ‘Archive’ to create better alternatives.[3] In complete contrast to every other method of sharing fanfiction, from zines to LiveJournal, Fanlib was not built by the fans themselves, for the purposes of sharing their passion with each other, but instead created for profit in a corporate setting.[4] Created in May of 2007 by a group of three men with such professions as former Yahoo CEO and entertainment lawyer using three million dollars, it stood stark against the preexisting fanfiction culture, which, from the very beginning, seemed defined by its earnest and amateur qualities.[5]

Another prominent issue that fans had with Fanlib reflected the demography of Star Trek fanfiction writers discussed in previous chapters. Moreover, Coppa has argued that, generally, male fans master the source material (i.e. knowing everything about it) while female fans, who tend to read against the grain of the source material (she gave the example of enjoying the second Star Wars movie predominately for its romantic subplot).[6] Coppa believes that women are still mostly excluded from the controlling positions in the entertainment industry, leaving them to focus their storytelling in the transformative medium that is fanfiction.[7] The attempt to monetize fan fiction by the all-male board of Fanlib and founders who were also outsiders in the Star Trek fanfiction community seemed like the incursion of men looking to exploit female labour for their own gain.[8]

However, quite apart from the male dominance of Fanlib, attempting to make a profit off of fanfiction at all was already contentious as noted by Bjo Trimble. Some fans in the zine era already felt that fans should be allowed to make money off their work while others disagreed (see chapter 2).[9] According to Karen Hellekson, fandom is built around a gift economy where things like fanfiction are offered for free as “gifts” and payment is the exchange of similar “gifts” that require effort (i.e a vid or the creation of an archive) or are objects (i.e. like chocolates).[10] Money is a rarity except in the form of donations to an archive to help in mitigating operating costs, not as “payment” for a good or service per se, but another form of gift.[11] This calls back to the standard practice of zine publishers and con organizers charging only so much as to cover their costs to avoid making a profit, though this was not quite universal.[12] Although it seems to be merely a method of avoiding the risk of lawsuits by skirting around requirements that copyright owners “retain exclusive rights to make money from their property” by avoiding profiting on their own work on the surface, there is more to it than that.[13] This economy of gifts that are, for the most part, of little value to an outsider form the building blocks of community and sociability in fandom and each fans role in it.[14] Hellekson characterized this idea as associated especially with women. A not for profit or low profit margin economic activity “permits women agency that they lack under traditional patriarchal models. They construct a new, gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts for its cohesion with no currency and little meaning outside the economy, and that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male).”[15] Similarly, Abigail De Kosnik has noted that “the authors of fan fiction, who are predominately women, have never, as a group, sought payment for their labor.”[16] Even though Virginia Woolf’s famous quote about a woman needing “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” was also about money to pay for domestic service and childcare, Kozick used the quote to help her argue that, as the case of Fanlib shows, fanfiction writers will need to monetize on their own terms to prevent outsiders from profiting from them.[17]  Others, however, argued for maintaining the tradition of free access, and the Archive of Our Own would use the same Virginia Woolf quote  to inspire its title and which seeks to preserve and protect fanfiction created and creating out of passion ‘for free.’[18]

This image of Fanlib as an incursive group out to make money from an existing community is illustrated by the Bloomsberg BusinessWeek Magazine’s article entitled “Putting the Fans to Work.”[19] Not only does the very title carry implications of exploitation, but the article also commented on those efforts more directly. Written from an outside perspective of fanfiction, the article claimed that the majority of fanfiction is off-putting to those not involved with it.[20] According to this piece, Fanlib, in addition to being an archive, had also teamed up with the producers of a show called The L Word to organize a contest in which fans could submit scripts for the chance to win prizes.[21] The main point of this contest appears to have been to use the fans as free advertising and to increase the attention on the show.[22] The lines from the article best representing Fanlib and its goals were: “the genius of Fanlib is realizing that fans can be happy just being recognized. The prizes don't have to rival those of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? And Showtime is quick to note that…there's no guarantee that the winning scenes will ever be produced.”[23] This article, ostensibly in favour of the Fanlib site, in fact perfectly laid out why fans would be against it. Fanlib was not truly about fans, fanfiction, or even the source material, but about money and how fans could be persuaded to work for them esscentially for free.

Although Fanlib had claimed it was “dedicated to promoting and celebrating fan creativity” and that their “mission [was] to bring fan fiction out of the shadows and into the limelight.”[24] Fans, or at least a very public group of fans, disagreed. For instance, the LiveJournal post that would eventually lead to the creation of AO3 and the OTW received several comments directly related to Fanlib and their thoughts on it. Included at the beginning of this chapter were two comments by Stungunbilly and Gchick. The former focused on the importance of the nonprofit nature of fandom to them and their enjoyment and the latter on annoyance that they felt as a result of Fanlib attempting to encroach upon their female space.[25] Aesvir held the same sentiment as Gchick, believing that men taking over a place women made for themselves was despicable.[26] Xenacryst also spoke on their upset with FanLib explaining that what upset them was that it came from “outside of the community” and believed that those in fandom were capable of coming up with something internally.[27] Corrinna_5 said that they did not believe that fandom “claim[ing] its own space in the face of this onslaught” would not necessarily stop outside corporations from attempting to monetize fanfiction, but that the idea was worth it regardless.[28]

            These comments, though they cannot truly be taken as representative of the entire fanfiction writing community, do give a fascinating view into the mindsets of the members of that community who were drawn to the concept of an archive of their own. The authors were outraged at the idea of a group of outsiders, corporate men at that, co-opting a female space for their own gain. Furthermore, the authors believed in their own ability to take on the challenge of making their own mark on the internet, and resisted the attempt to monetize their work at all.

            In addition to the general resistance to the very concept of Fanlib, some alarm came from the sites policies’.  On May 14 2007, LiveJournal user AngiePen reported on her experiences with Fanlib’s terms and conditions. Their report used quotes from the terms of service, confirmed to be accurate through studying an archived snapshot of the page, to argue that their policy allows them to edit or remove an author’s fanfiction for any reason and publish and sell an author’s work in an anthology so they choose while still leaving them responsible should there be any copyright holders looking to sue.[29] The post concluded with one simple sentence that seems to perfectly summarize the issue fans had with Fanlib. That is; “it's perfectly clear -- they get the bucks and we get the lawsuits.”[30] Given all these issues, it is no wonder, then, that Fanlib met with considerable opposition and quickly shut down in 2008.[31]

Coppa and Tushnet also spoke on Fanlib and its effect on the community and role in triggering the creation of the OTW/AO3 during our interviews.[32] Tushnet expressed a degree of upset at the concept of uninvolved men making money off of fanfiction and the need to take matters into their own hands when relating Fanlib to the creation of the AO3.[33] She noted that “We should just really have a place where we could go.”[34] Coppa articulated this at length. Firstly, she established that, while FanLib certainly was an aspect of the inspiration for the archive, it was hardly the only cause: “Others have written about FanLib, and yes, they were a part of it, but there were a lot of strangers in town and they were pretty overt about wanting to make money on our art, our fiction, and our conversations, which they saw as ‘content.’”[35] Furthermore, she indicated that the real problem with outside efforts to monetize fanfiction was that:

that none of these venture capitalist types knew anything about--let alone cared about-- fandom (or about women, writing, fair use, or any of the things we cared about. They were just coming in for a buck. So it was really an insult to injury situation: not only did they want to exploit us, but they were also totally uninterested in actually doing anything that would help us or protect us. We were seeing this with LiveJournal, which exploded because of fandom, but then fandom made the business types nervous: too female, too gay, too erotic, etc.[36]

Fanfiction was unattractive to businesses, even if they had been popularized by fandom because it was far from sanitized or corporate. Finally, she emphasized the realization that, if fanfiction was going to have a champion, then that champion was going to have to come from withing. She told me that “I remember that we were worried about it and talking about it all the time, and I feel like there was a moment in my circle when we were like--wait, what if we are the heroes we are waiting for?”[37]

The story she recounted, though resistant to placing full blame on Fanlib, echoes other accounts discussed earlier. It is a story of a group of mainly female writers finding themselves encroached upon by outsiders seeking to make money from them without understanding or caring about the culture and those involved in it.[38] She also expressed the fact that fanfiction can be far too unconventional or nonconformist for mainstream media and business.[39] Logically, this fact could only lead to abandonment of resources and archives made by the mainstream, and the previous section went into depth about the consequences of such abandonments, or the censorship of fanfiction to fit in with a sanitized corporate ideal. Either way, the message was clear. If the fanfiction community was going to gain a stronger foothold, it would need to do it itself. Relate this to the discussion of the work Certeau and Gledhill from Chapter 1. If each reader’s version of a text is their own and female fans tend to read against the grain, then a singular outside, male influence would be unlikely to be capable of creating a site that would encompass all that female fans would want it to be.[40] It would have to be a grassroots movement.

The first public instance of the concept of the Archive of Our Own, including its name, can be traced back to a LiveJournal post by user astolat on May 17th 2007. The post is fittingly titled “An Archive of One’s Own.” After a brief introduction directing readers to resources explaining how fanfiction is legal, she gave her pitch for the site that would become AO3. She started her post with a similar point to one made by Coppa, the Fanlib only cared about fanfiction for the money it could make from them:

That said, the people behind fanlib…don't actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don't have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don't even have a single woman on their board. They're creating a lawsuit-bait site while being bad potential defendants, and they deserve to be chased out being pelted with rocks.[41]

After decrying Fanlib and its attempts to monetize the community from the outside, she further emphasized the point that Coppa made in refusing to name Fanlib as the sole spark for the AO3, that if it were not Fanlib, then it would be someone else unless the fans themselves took action:

But even if they were, which I doubt is going to happen, because hey, they have people and money, we're still left with this problem: we are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see an opportunity. And they are going to end up creating the front doors that new fanfic writers walk through, unless we stand up and build our OWN front door.[42]

It was at that point that she started laying out her plan:

We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.[43]

Following this, she listed various features that she felt the archive would need and some that she personally wanted before continuing on with her explanation. She started the search for volunteers, believing tha they could work together to create something designed for them:

 I would help as any/all of an advisor, a fundraiser, a promoter, and I would archive my own stuff there. I would even take on coding parts; I just can't take on project management.

But I know we have project managers in our community -- and coders and designers -- can't we do this? Seriously -- we can come up with a site that would be miles better and more attractive to fanfic writers/readers than anything else out there, guys, because we actually USE the stuff.[44]

            Containing elements of all of the attitudes discussed so far, Astolat’s proposal for a comprehensive archive built by the community for the community puts to words a clear mission. Her proposal emphasizes the strength of the fanfiction writing community and, truly, embodies the passionate, do it yourself spirit that has defined fanfiction since its beginning.

Fittingly, then, her post attracted a great deal of attention from fellow fans. In addition to the comments containing opinions on Fanlib already explained above, it received a substantial number of comments offering everything from monetary support  to programming skills to promises to put their fanfiction the archive when it went live to offering advice on where to start.

Many of the features Astolat listed as “necessary” would become foundational principles of the archive that would come to be called AO3. Particularly, this included the idea that the archive needed to be fan run, that fans should have control over their own stories, that the site should be searchable, that every type of story conceivable, even those that make people uncomfortable, should be allowed, and, finally, that the archive should be funded solely by donations.[45]

However, not every reaction to the idea was totally positive. Some of the comments pointed out a series of potential issues with the idea. Artaxtastra, for example, voiced concerns about copyright.[46] Belmanoir, similarly, suggested that lawyers should be contacted in order to protect against that.[47] Stewardess mentioned that one potential issue comes from who would own the website as, if a single person owned it they could leave and thereby cause the same problems experienced by mailing list users in as described in a previous section, suggesting a group of some sort be given ownership instead.[48] Multiple commenters stated that they worried that it would prove impossible to run an archive as potentially large as the one proposed on donations alone. Cmshaw and Synecdohic, for example, spoke at length about potential issues with funding, stating that running a site on donations alone would not work and another funding model like advertisements or paid subscriptions, though those ideas had their own problems, would be required to make the operation feasible.[49]

It should be noted that some of those worries would be solved or prove unfounded. The issue of ownership of the site were solved by the creation of the OTW to run AO3 which, Tushnet told me, was done for the purpose of ensuring that even if an individual left, the organization could keep going and the archive would not be lost.[50] The worries about the archive going underfunded unless it abandoned the donation only model and used subscriptions or advertisements would prove unfounded. To the point that, as demonstrated by figures 2 and 3, how quickly and easily AO3 would meet and exceed its funding goals in comparison to more traditional websites like wikipedia would become a running joke amongst its users.

            Despite this debate over possible issues, the concept of the archive proved popular enough for Astolat to make another post three days later on May 20, 2007 asserting that “and yes, I am going to try and put something together” and making an official call for volunteers.[51] This then directly led to the start of The Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Work.

            Both of the women interviewed for this project, Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet, were heavily involved in the early days of the archive and provided valuable insight on this period in the history of fanfiction. Coppa had been drawn into the project because she was an archivist with connections to other archivists and Big Name Fans (BNF’s) and Tushnet was friends with Astolat.[52] Coppa described some of the early efforts to find and organize volunteers. She explained the process of getting people together to actually make the archive in the following statement:

Naomi Novik was a programmer (before she was a novelist, she was doing a PhD in Computer Science and coding video games), I had academic/communications experience, Rebecca Tushnet was a fair use lawyer, Susan Gibel was a JD with a ton of nonprofit administration experience, Misha Tepper was a front end software specialist, etc. And so we came together and began to hash out what became the OTW and the AO3, and also the other OTW projects: e.g. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, editors of Fanfiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet, became the first editors of Transformative Works and Cultures, our open source fan studies journal, etc.[53]

According to Coppa, AO3/OTW was built by a group of fans volunteering their various skills to forge a solid base for the archive that would stand the test of time, even though it required a significant amount of manpower (or fanpower) investment early on.[54] It speaks to an incredible amount of dedication and passion.

Once the idea had been floated, we put out a call for those Willing To Serve--this was a form that asked for volunteers but then also asked the volunteer to tell us what kind of interests or experience they had. While Naomi was setting up the tech end, and Rebecca and Susan were filing the nonprofit company paperwork and writing up the mission statements etc., I was organizing the folks who were Willing To Serve into what would become our first committees. I'd have to check but there were maybe 80-something folks in that first version of the org, including Accessibility, Design, & Technology (ADT, who built the archive--and note that Accessibility was always first in the name there; this is why the site is usable on mobile 16 years later when the iPhone wasn't even out yet in 2007!).[55]

However, despite the fact that the AO3/OTW was built by a group of volunteers, that by no means indicated that it was done haphazardly or without careful planning. In fact, the entire operation was carefully planned and designed to last with various committees to handle every aspect of the AO3/OTW. It had all the markings of a professional operation, such as:

Communications, PR, Journal, Fanlore, Open Doors (for archive imports), Development & Membership, Elections, Abuse, Legal, and other committees. Each committee had a chair, though in those days, the chair was often on the board and sort of represented/headed that group. And work began on all the projects--though I remember, because I was head of Communications at that time, that people were demanding, "Where is the Archive?" like three months later. And I had to explain that we were still doing the paperwork for the OTW, the nonprofit company that would oversee all of this--because we needed a real legal and financial structure if we were going to raise and spend money on the scale that we anticipated.[56]

Effectively, there was a specific effort to create something solid and dependable, something that could achieve its goals because it had the legitimacy to act at the scale needed. Despite the extra challenges that these, there was still enough of a push for the archive that “work on the AO3 began almost immediately and actually we developed very quickly--and from a totally blank page. The software was developed entirely from scratch and (to answer your question about why it's so well used) it was built by fans for fans with features that we ourselves as fans wanted!”[57]

Additionally, in our interview, Coppa returned to the recurring theme of not for profit versus monetized projects and the important that held, explaining that “because we're not for profit, we make no money, I think fandom knew we were committed to sticking around and supporting their work overtime and against any legal or technical challenge.”[58] In essence, Coppa characterized the efforts of the OTW as diametrically opposed to that of Fanlib. They wanted to make money from the fanfiction community, while the OTW wanted to support it.Importantly, she also spoke on her experiences with using her real name as part of her role with the OTW and the way fanfiction slowly became more and more acceptable over time using the AO3 as both an example and a potential cause. She said that:

I remember being afraid of being "exposed" for my involvement in fandom, so it was a risk for those of us who used our real names to form the first board of the OTW. I got a contract for my book, The Fanfiction Reader, in maybe 2012, and I remember reassuring the fanfiction contributors to that book that I would protect them from being outed, and I kept no paper connecting people's real names to their pseuds. By 2018, when the AO3 won the Hugo, I had students who had AO3 accounts, and that year, my college wrote an article celebrating me and archive and the Hugo--so that's a pretty good timeline of the rapid mainstreaming of fic!”[59]

The Hugo Awards, which are presented at Worldcon and voted on by the organization’s members, are a series of awards for work in science fiction and include categories such as best fanzine and best professional artist.[60] Other than that, the Hugo she mentioned refers to the 2019 Hugo Awards where AO3 won the Best Related Work Category, proving its significance even beyond the relatively insular world of fandom.[61] I would also like to note that her explanation of the reluctance she felt for sharing her real identity in relation to fandom and fanfiction exemplifies why I, as explained in Chapter 1, purposefully avoided seeking out the real names/people behind the usernames I encountered and vice versa.

            Tushnet, registered the Organization for Transformative Works with the government so that it could legally operate as a nonprofit, which would help to ensure that those who donated could receive tax benefits, that the organization would have a clear legal structure, and that it would be taken seriously.[62] She also explained that it was her who began the development of the AO3 terms of service.[63] Additionally, she emphasized the sheer amount of work needed to create the archive with everything from server space to people with technical skills being required. However, she also emphasized that most of the talent needed was already within the community.[64]

            Both Tushnet and Coppa agreed that one of the main purposes of the archive is to preserve fanfiction.[65] Tushnet commented that this was one of the reasons that the archive was created alongside the non-profit OTW so that the archive could be consistently maintained without relying on the continued efforts of a small group of people.[66] She also explained that a similar view that fandom needing to support and preserve itself led to the creations of other resources surrounding the OTW/AO3 such as Fanlore, the online encyclopedia, and The Journal For Transformative Works, the academic journal connected to the Organization for Transformative Work.[67] In addition, unlike Fanlib that seemed prepared to leave the fic writers high and dry in case of a lawsuit, the OTW proved willing to protect the interests of fans when in 2008 it managed to win an exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act anti circumvention rules that protected viddings fans (vidding being a form of transformative work where clips of a piece of media are altered and rearranged to make a new artwork) from laws against ripping content from DVDs.[68] Despite intense resistance from copyright holders, this set a precedent that fanwork is fair use and therefore legal. Tushnet described the AO3 as a home for fanworks and fan where material could be saved and protected, claiming that if there was nowhere else for fans, “at least there is a place for you here.”[69]

            As indicated by more comments on Astolat’s post, the need to preserve fanfiction was strong, strong enough to be one of the driving forces behind the AO3 to this day. Angelofsnow commented that:

I wish some site would try to preserve more fic, but one of the problems is authors need to volunteer their work for archival. I can't imagine people would be happy if we load their stories to an archive without their permission. If we're able to get permission by some method, then I think it's a good feature to include in the new archive.

Save the fic! There's a lot of good stories being lost.[70]

Dr_jekyl also spoke out about preserving the works of dead archives and fandoms:

[In] regards to fan history and creating an archive that will be the be-all and end-all of fanfiction archives, something I haven't seen brought up is the question of 'lost' fanfic and dead fandoms. There is a lot of great work out there that isn't really archived at all - it's lost in the depths of usenet, on the pages of zines or only viewable by getting lucky on the wayback machine because the authors' sites are now defunct.

Likewise, there are fandoms out there with few to no people still actively participating in them, where the established bodies of work are slowly being lost through disuse and disinterest. Few fandoms are lucky enough to have something like the alt.startrek.creative archives, where for 15 years work has been continuously captured and preserved for posterity.

Would it be worth the time and effort it would require to reach out and try to collect and preserve at least some of this work that will otherwise be lost?It is clear to see that the impetus for preserving fanfiction history and the stories themselves, always an aspect of fanfiction history, was strong in the OTW/AO3 from the start.[71]

Although Archive of Our Own was not built solely around Star Trek, both of the founders I interviewed mentioned it at some point in our interviews, signifying its enduring importance to Fandom.[72] AO3 and the OTW, too, have done their part to preserve Star Trek fic. In 2021 the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project, which is under the OTW umbrella and responsible for facilitating moving the contents outdated archives that are closing or at risk onto AO3 where they can be maintained and preserved by their carefully built foundation, began importing fanfiction from The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive.[73] According to the announcement: “The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive was built on the eFiction software platform, which hasn't been updated since 2005. In its current version, it is no longer supportable, nor supported by the developer, and is subject to constant security attacks. The archive moderator felt that the Archive of Our Own offered the best path forward to preserve these works.”[74] Therefore, while old links to that treasure trove of slash fanfiction now no longer work, the spirit of what it was and a significant portion of what it contained lives on.

[1] Stungunbilly, May 17th, 2007 07:38 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat, “An Archive of One’s Own,” LiveJournal, Astolat’s LiveJournal (blog), May 17, 2007, https://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html.

[2] Gchick, May 17, 2007 06:38 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[3] Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 117.

[4] Abigail De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 119.

[5] Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 117; Verba, Boldly Writing, 14.

[6] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[7] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[8] Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 117–18; De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” 119.

[9] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 63–64; Verba, Boldly Writing, 105, 131-2.

[10] Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 114–15.

[11] Hellekson, 115.

[12] Trimble, On the Good Ship Enterprise, 63–64; Verba, Boldly Writing, 78.

[13] Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 114.

[14] Hellekson, 114–17.

[15] Hellekson, 116.

[16] De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” 118.

[17] De Kosnik, 118–22.

[18] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023;

De Kosnik, 122.

[19] Jon Fine, “Putting the Fans to Work: BusinessWeek,” BusinessWeek, no. 3975 (March 13, 2006): 26–26.

[20] Fine.

[21] Fine.

[22] Fine.

[23] Fine.

[24] “FanLib.Com - About Us - Introduction,” May 20, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070520061139/http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=about_us.html.

[25] Stungunbilly, May 17th, 2007 07:38 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat, “An Archive of One’s Own.”; Gchick, May 17, 2007 06:38 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[26] Aesvir, May 17 2007 07:22 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat, “An Archive of One’s Own.”

[27] Xenacryst, May 17th, 2007 11:00 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[28] Corinna_5, May 17th, 2007 07:37 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[29] AngiePen, “Browsing the FanLib TOS,” LiveJournal, AngiePen’s LiveJournal (blog), accessed April 12, 2024, https://angiepen.livejournal.com/38593.html; “FanLib.Com - Terms of Service,” May 2, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070502211853/http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do.

[30] AngiePen, “Browsing the FanLib TOS.”

[31] De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” 119.

[32] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023; Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[33] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[34] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[35] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[36] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023

[37] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[38] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[39] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[40] Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 169–74; “Poaching in the Textual Enclosure.”

[41] Astolat, “An Archive of One’s Own.”

[42] Astolat.

[43] Astolat.

[44] Astolat.

[45] Astolat.

[46] Artaxtastra, May 17th, 2007 06:40 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[47] Belmanoir, May 17 2007 08:32 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[48] Stewardess, May 17th, 2007 10:35 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[49] Cmshaw, May 17th, 2007 09:50 pm (UTC), comment on Astolat.; Synecdohic, May 18th, 2007 04:23 am (UTC), comment on Astolat.

[50] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[51] Astolat, “Archive: Update and First Call for Volunteers: Astolat — LiveJournal,” LiveJournal, Astolat’s LiveJournal (blog), May 20, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20210124131539/https://astolat.livejournal.com/151260.html.

[52] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023; Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[53] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[54] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[55] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[56] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[57] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[58] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[59] Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[60] “Introduction,” The Hugo Award (blog), July 18, 2007, https://www.thehugoawards.org/about/; “Hugo Award Categories,” The Hugo Award (blog), July 19, 2007, https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-categories/.

[61] Aja Romano, “4.7 Million Fanfics Are Now Hugo Winners, Thanks to the Archive of Our Own,” Vox, April 11, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/4/11/18292419/archive-of-our-own-wins-hugo-award-best-related-work.

[62] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[63] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[64] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[65] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023; Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[66] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[67] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[68] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[69] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023.

[70] Angelofsnow, May. 19th, 2007 06:34 am (UTC), comment on Astolat, “An Archive of One’s Own.”

[71] Dr_Jekyl, May 19th, 2007 05:05 am (UTC),  comment on Astolat.

[72] Rebecca Tushnet, video interview by author, September 22, 2023;  Francesca Coppa, email interview by author, October 17-20, 2023.

[73] “The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive Is Moving to the AO3 | Archive of Our Own,” accessed April 13, 2024, https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/19993.

[74] “The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive Is Moving to the AO3 | Archive of Our Own.”

Chapter Text

The history of fanfiction is a long one. Even limiting that history to only that of Star Trek, there has still been more than half a century of fanzines, websites, blogs and archives to discover. In that history, we see a community of predominantly women, though men were perhaps involved, it is the women who left an intentional legacy, spread across vast distances but connected by a love of Star Trek and a desire to read and write more stories related to that world. It is a community that has or whose leaders/leading writers have sought to archive itself, to preserve itself, from nearly its inception. Always aware of its own susceptibility to copyright law and outside control, fan writers had a keen eye for preservation. From gathering fanzines to archive as microfilm, as was a preservation method discussed in the Chapter 2, to building an entire, web-based archive from the ground up to collect stories that risked being lost to closed websites and missing links, the fanfiction writing community sees value in their stories and own internal culture, value and a need to be preserved so that the fans of the future can appreciate the stories of the past.

The threads that began in the Star Trek zine era can be followed to the creation of the AO3/OTW. The role of women as the main writers of fanfiction connects to the way AO3 was suggested, designed, and created by women. The debate over whether Star Trek zines should be allowed to make money would be paralleled by the debate behind the creation of the AO3, inspired by the attempt of a corporation to take over their own fannish space for financial gain. The worries over censorship of explicit material led to the Archive of Our Own’s steadfast policy of accepting all to avoid just that. They all come together to form a fascinating web, a living tapestry of a community that is still being updated to this very day.

More than an interesting case of a community and its practices shifting, but remaining recognizable, with changes in the technology used to forge and maintain it over time, this fanfiction history shows a fascinating tale of amateur writers earnestly pursuing their art for, in most cases, little gain other than the enjoyment of themselves and those around them. Demonstrating the depths of human passion, they worked with cultivated skill not just to create and enjoy their art, but to ensure that those who came after them would be able to do the same. Just as Star Trek fanzines served as vital resource for fans communicating across distances, the AO3 too, serves a vital role in protecting and preserving that world.

Glossary of Fandom related Terms Relevant to This Thesis and its Sources. Note that individual fandoms may have additional terms that are specific to them.

Canon: refers to events, characters, ideas, places, etc. that are directly included in a work or said to be true about the work by the creator. The inverse is noncanon.

Fanfiction: often shortened to fanfic or just fic, a fanfiction a story written using the characters, setting, or ideas of an already existing work by those that are fans of it.

Fandom: the community of fans surrounding a given piece of media.

Fanon: Refers to ideas, characters, places, etc that were not included in a given work (canon), but have been widely accepted by the fans to be true.

Fanzine: a sort of amateur magazine printed by fans for fans.

Headcanon: ideas or theories that a person has about a work that can be heavily or loosely based on canon. A popular headcanon can become fanon.

OC (Original Character): A fanfiction writer’s own character inserted into the canon of the story. They can be central to the story, placed in to fill a role that can’t be played by an existing character, or an audience or author insert meant for wish fulfillment and projecting onto.

OTP (One True Pairing): Refers to a ship (see ship definition) that is the favourite of the speaker, either their favourite in a given fandom or across all fandoms.

PWP (Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot): A term used to refer to fanfics that have little to no focus on story and instead focus on sexual content.

Ship: a set of characters that the speaker enjoys seeing in a relationship. Ships are often divided into different categories (m/m, f/f, m/f, meaning male/male, female/female, male/female) and can be canon (together in the fiction itself) or noncanon.

Slash: refers to a ship or content relating to a ship between male characters. It is related to the practice of placing a / symbol in between character’s name when referring to their ship (i.e. Kirk/Spock).

Bibliography

“A Short History Of Zines.” School Library Journal 69, no. 3 (March 2023): 44.

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.

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