Image: Roger Murmann
When I was eight, I was already reading at an adult level in terms of vocabulary and surface comprehension. However, I wasn’t yet an adult, and it showed; I only had a pre-teen’s understanding of romantic relationships and complex emotional reactions. My parents were glad I was reading at such a high level and wanted to encourage that, but they saw no need to encourage any unnecessary or inappropriate precociousness.
There are books aimed at pre-teens, but I found them all so simple as to be boring, and I already started asking my parents for adult-level books. One afternoon, my father handed me James Blish’s Star Trek Reader I. “You might like these,” he said.
I still remember that the very first episode novelization I read was the one for “Arena.” I devoured the entire book across two or three days, and when I realized that my parents had additional Star Trek Readers on their bookshelves, I read those, too. Not too long afterward, my father accidentally left out a copy of Melinda M. Snodgrass’ The Tears of the Singers, and I read that too. I was a little too young to understand everything that happened in the book, or that any comments in it might be controversial. (I do as an adult.) But I did understand the main plotline, and I absolutely adored reading it.
This was in 1983. By the time The Search for Spock came out in 1984, I was already a fan. But it wasn’t until about a year after that, when cable television first became available in the area where I lived, that I realized the whole thing had started out as a television series; one of the new cable channels showed re-runs. Before then, I’d thought that the movies were simply a continuation of the original stories I’d found in books. (After all, The Search for Spock had been advertised as, “the final voyage of the starship Enterprise.”)
To this day I actually enjoy encountering Trek through books a bit more than I do through live-action (or animated) series. I’ve seen the entire original series at this point, as well as all of the movies except for one (Into Darkness) and about 85% of the follow-up television series’ episodes, including the original 1970s animated series. The storytelling is generally very good — the bad episodes have generally been outliers — and I care about the characters, but the visuals almost always disappoint me. My own imagination is far more vivid than the technical limitations that have been present throughout the decades.
It was through Star Trek that I discovered fandom, first via the comic books (which had reader letters in them!) and then via magazines like Starlog. By the time I started reading the latter, it had already expanded past Star Trek into other science fiction television series. I was curious enough to try reading and watching them too, and that was how the list of my fandoms began expanding. It never quite stopped after that.
However, due to a combination of my age and my family’s finances, I didn’t attend a convention for the first time until Toronto Trek 2000, when I was twenty-five. By then, I was already fairly active in online fandoms and had been involved in other in-person fandom activities such as my high school’s Star Trek club. I had even written a little bit of fan fiction and shared it online by then, although not much.
Sometime around 2002 or 2003, I discovered that fandom — and fan fiction — wasn’t limited to science fiction series, but it wasn’t until the first time I saw Castle in 2011 that I began to get involved in non-sci-fi fandoms. Unfortunately, Castle fandom was also where I first experienced how toxic fandoms can be; even so, I was pretty disappointed when the fandom imploded in 2016. (It’s still there, but it’s not at all like it was when the show was actually airing.)
I was in my early forties at that point, and had become dismayed at the toxicity of popular fandoms; I wasn’t anxious to repeat my Castle experience. That was when I started getting more into smaller, post-cancellation fandoms. Over the next few years, my interest coalesced around shows such as Earth 2 (from 1995) and Star Trek: Enterprise (from 2001). When Star Trek: Discovery aired in 2018, I became involved in its fandom right away, but it quickly started becoming toxic in ways I’d encountered before. When the writing on that show also took a nose-dive, I was done with it, and, I decided, with “current” fandoms in general.
That’s not to say that I’m unwilling to consider fandom for a show that’s still airing or a series that’s still being written. It just means I’m going to think twice and investigate the fandom thoroughly before getting involved. It also means I’m content to stay where I am in terms of fandom; right now I’m mostly writing, and involved in the fandoms, for Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Earth 2. I’m also in the process of revisiting, rewriting and extending my old Castle series (which, as of Season 5, is now an alternate universe), but I’m not involved in the fandom itself anymore.
In 2019, I got married, and by doing so I gained new step-children. One evening, during dinner, I used the expression, “beam me up, Scotty,” and the kids asked what I was talking about. Will and I were stunned and ran through a couple other phrases and expressions that entered the common vocabulary as a result of Star Trek (such as “live long and prosper”). They didn’t recognize those either.
That was when we decided to start showing them Star Trek (now via Paramount Plus); our stated purpose was helping them understand cultural references, but neither he nor I pretend that’s the only reason; we’re both fans although I’m far more involved in fandom than he is. The kids have gotten just as hooked as I was — we have since cycled through the other series as well as a few others such as Babylon 5 — and readily accepted it when I pointed out that this actually makes them third-generation fans since I myself “inherited” interest in the show from my father. It’s one of the few legacies I’ve given them, and it’s something that I’m not at all disappointed at having passed down.
In a twist of irony, the year I started down this journey of fandom was also the year that Scarecrow and Mrs. King, which is my most recent new fandom and where I’m currently most active, initially premiered. To be sure, that’s coincidental, but the juxtaposition is something that has given me cause for reflection more than once. Fandom has changed my entire life, and now I’ve passed that down to the next generation who will hopefully, in turn, pass it down to the one following them.
And it all happened simply because my father gave me a book when I was eight.