Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, the media franchise known as Star Trek is taking a nice victory lap. But perhaps more than any other massive fictional universe, Star Trek’s success is certainly attributed not only to its incredible content, but also to its excellent fans. Call them Trekkies, Trekkers, Star Trek fans, or, as I like to say, “Star Trek people” — the triumph of Star Trek is the triumph of its fans.The idea that Star Trek fans define the franchise as much as the TV shows and films is demonstrably true: Star Trek fans helped keep The Original Series on the air — or at least, visibly, made it clear that fans were willing to organize for a mere TV show, something that was unheard of in 1968. Starting in 1972, the first major Star Trek conventions in New York City outnumbered the comic-cons and literary science fiction conventions of the day by several thousand. In 1976, Star Trek fans convinced President Gerald Ford to rename the first space shuttle “Enterprise” instead of “Constitution.” Later, Nichelle Nichols was so moved by this that she actively worked with NASA to recruit Black and female astronauts into the Space Shuttle program. We’ve not even hit the 1980s, and you can already see that Star Trek fans are a very big deal. This is why it’s hard to talk about trends and themes and terms in fan fiction without tracing them straight back to the fan-forward franchise that did it all first. Here’s how.The Women Who Organized Star Trek Fandom Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Gene Roddenberry in 1975, from Joan Winston’s 1977 book The Making of the Trek Conventions. | Linda Deneroff/Joan Winston/Playboy PressModern-day fan fiction as we know it was largely shaped by a group of dedicated women who were all Star Trek fans. Patient Zero here is Devra Langsam, who, in 1967, created Spockanalia, the first true Star Trek zine, which was co-edited with Sherna Comerford. This zine created the foundation for countless others that followed and also presented one of Trek’s most enduring fanfic concepts: sexual and romantic concepts about Mr. Spock, the famously cold and emotionally detached Vulcan.But why did fans become so fixated on Spock, and thus create an entire world of fanfic? When I spoke to Langsam in 2021, while researching my Star Trek history book, Phasers on Stun!, she felt that fan obsession with Spock was multifaceted. “He was a tremendous lure aside from the fact, I mean, look at this guy. He’s a pretty good-looking guy,” Langsam said. “But he was also a challenge. He’s interesting. I think the fans thought: ‘I could make him melt.’”Joan Winston and Oscar Katz at the 1973 'Star Trek Lives!' convention. Katz was a producer at Desilu Studios during the production of the original Star Trek. | Jeff Maynard/Joan Winston/Playboy PressLangsam wasn’t alone, though; others loved Spock, Capt. Kirk, and the rest of the Enterprise crew. In fact, they loved these characters so much that in the early 1970s, after the cancellation of Star Trek, it was Langsam who helped launch the first conventions. After a gathering at a library in Newark in 1969, Langsam teamed with Elyse Rosenstein, Joyce Yasner, and Joan Winston to launch the first Star Trek Lives! convention held at the Statler Hotel from Jan. 21 to 23, 1972. “Joan used her professional world contacts in the TV news world to make sure the hotel was overflowing,” writer and fan legend Jacqueline Lichtenberg told me in 2021. “She held center stage at any gathering, mostly because she helped others shine.”Lichtenberg was an early and very prolific writer of Trek fanfic, and she has never been afraid to say it: “I’ve often said — and I think it’s still the most important thing we did — we blew the lid on fanfic,” she told StarTrek.com in 2024. “In doing that, in telling the world that they can’t do this to us; they can’t take Star Trek away from us. They can’t cancel us; they have no power over our imagination.”Star Trek Gives Us “Mary Sue” &“Slash”Two Star Trek cosplayers at Space-Con 3 in San Francisco in 1977. | Clay Geerdes/Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWhile cataloguing all early Star Trek zines of the 1970s and 1980s is next to impossible, it can make for some incredible eBay shopping. And if you dig hard enough into the early zines, you can, for yourself, see some foundational ideas that are now inescapable in fanfic. Take the idea of a “Mary Sue,” a character who is a sort of self-insert for the fan, an outsider who can suddenly do everything right and all the regular characters inexplicably love and/or can do no wrong. As Inverse writer Dais Johnston pointed out in our recent feature on “The 60 Most Important Star Trek Stories of All Time,” the first time the term “Mary Sue” came to be was with a character named — you guessed it — “Mary Sue” in the 1973 satirical story titled “A Trekkie’s Tale,” written by Paula Smith and published in the zine. A sort of mocking of the preponderance of Mary Sues in other fanfic, this fic not only named the phenomenon, but gave it a self-aware, critical eye.Arguably Star Trek’s biggest contribution to fanfic is the term “slash.” This now common genre of fan fiction focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex — from Heated Rivalry to a library’s worth of content about Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. The original pairing of Kirk/Spock laid the foundation for slash fic — and it was a lot deeper than just sexual imagery. In fact, the erotic stuff is rarer than you might think, while the addition of subtle — and not so subtle — layers of romantic ideas seems to be the point. Lichtenberg’s “Kraith” universe of fanfic stories, which were first published in the zine T-Negative, were not explicitly Kirk/Spock, but rather an alternate continuity that began with Spock looking for a wife. Others collaborated with Lichtenberg on the Kraith universe, including Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston. In Winston’s Kraith story, “The Maze,” Kirk was spanked by Spock.Joan Winston on the set of Star Trek, with Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. Winston worked in TV publicity and visited the set of Trek during the filming of the final episode, “Turnabout Intruder.” She documented her experience in a personal essay published in the 1975 book Star Trek Lives! | Joan Winston/StarTrek.comAs racy or hot and heavy things got in the zines, either with Kirk/Spock action or with Spock just doing sexy things in general, many of these writers eventually went on to publish their own canonical Star Trek fiction, which was authorized by Paramount.There are several examples of Star Trek fanfic writers making it big with legit, authorized Trek novels, including Sonni Cooper and Della Van Hise; the biggest parallel with modern fanfic writers like Ali Hazelwood is probably Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s 1977 official Trek novel, The Price of the Phoenix, which was based on their self-published fanfic Never Mourn Black Omne.Meanwhile, fic writer Van Hise’s Killing Time (1985) dipped into her slash expertise by having Kirk become Spock’s supplicant, in a way. And, while rumors about Killing Time’s first print run containing scenes in which Spock’s bodily fluids are described are false, the author did reveal to me that back in 2017 Paramount did ask publisher Simon and Schuster to change certain passages that described the “warmth” of Spock’s hand with a bit too much eroticism. This is why there are, infamously, more than one version of this 1985 book out there on the second-hand market.Book covers for Killing Time, The Price of the Phoenix, and Black Fire, all officially authorized Star Trek novels, penned by authors who started off as fanfic writers. | Simon and Schuster/Batnam BooksVan Hise felt the real legacy of Killing Time wasn’t the sexy stuff, but instead, the idea that in an alternate universe, Spock outranked Kirk, which was, in a sense, the exact premise for the 2009 reboot film from J.J. Abrams. Indeed, in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, when Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) pops into an empty seat between Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) on a shuttle, Spock is visibly jealous.Shades of Kirk/Spock continue in the fandom and in the franchise to this day. Paul Wesley’s Kirk and Ethan Peck’s Spock are closer than ever on the prequel series Strange New Worlds. Earlier this year, Wesley joked about how fans are still focused on this pairing. “People are always talking about Spock and Kirk and how they have these looks,” he told Inverse earlier this year. “I've been on YouTube, and people cut together clips from Shatner and Nimoy and their love for one another. It’s very funny. It’s classic.”At first glance, the boldly going adventures of Star Trek have nothing in common with the hot-and-heavy text and subtext of something like Heated Rivalry. And yet, whether fanfic writers today know it or not, everything they do today was probably done first by intrepid space explorers wearing color-coded velour.Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds all stream on Paramount+.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -