10 Times Star Trek Changed The World

In originating fandom as we conceive of it in the contemporary sense, Star Trek popularised the art of fan fiction (stories written by viewers of the show). The first Star Trek fan fiction appeared in the 1967 fanzine Spockanalia which includes poetry, a song 'written by' Spock called 'The Territory of Rigel,' a short, scripted scene 'Spock Shock,' and even in the non-fiction a treatise on the proposed model of the Vulcan heart.

Star Trek fan fiction would continue to proliferate in the zines in the 1970s and 1980s, but it would explode and diversify once it collided with the advent of the Internet. Fan films became easier to produce and to distribute (one even became so big it was recently sued by CBS), and a subgenre called slash fiction found a wider public of readers and writers alike.

Believed to have started in the 1970s with stories based around a gay (sexual) relationship between Kirk and Spock, written as Kirk/Spock (read: Kirk SLASH Spock, hence the name), slash fiction soon branched out into other gay fictional pairings not only from Star Trek but a multitude of other fictional universes.

In the 1990s and 2000s, slash fiction would gain in importance for LGBTQ fans as a way to explore their sexuality, and their appreciation for Star Trek in general, in the context of the mostly heteronormative tropes prevalent on-screen at the time. Slash fiction would make such an impression that it would also become the object of serious academic critique in the then burgeoning field of queer theory.