Star Trek Fan Research Articles

From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture

Abstract Research on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games. First, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows that it is used to represent Star Trek fandom and wider nerd culture, alongside its use as a greeting. Second, a global news corpus shows the three-finger salute has come to be used as a pro-democracy protest gesture across political and cultural boundaries in South East Asia. These corpus studies show different trajectories for the two gestures, with the three-finger salute escaping the confines of its fictional world, while the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to the media it originated from. We conclude with a reflection on the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of bringing corpus methods to gesture studies.

Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain

Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain Nishani Frazier (bio) Lt. Nyota Uhura, a fictional character performed by actress Nichelle Nichols, is a much beloved figure of the Star Trek universe. MSNBC commentator Jason Johnson features her Ebony Magazine cover in his virtual background. CBS’ All Rise fictional character, Judge Lola Carmichael, furiously rebuked another judge who removed Uhura’s picture from her office. Former President Barack Obama confessed to a youthful crush, and Star Trek fan, Whoopi Goldberg, joined the second iteration, Star Trek: Next Generation, because Nichols characterized for Goldberg a black woman on television who could play someone other than a maid. The attachment to Lt. Uhura epitomizes Black possibility in spite of a subjugated past. Scholars define this interface of imagined Black future and technology as Afro-futurism. While Afro-futurism exists mainly as a cultural field of study, futurism permeates Black daily life, in sometimes dark, problematic ways. Recent works like Coded Bias expose how new technologies, like AI and big data, increase surveillance, reinforce racist notions of Black criminality, and apply discriminatory treatment in Black patient care. Scholarly attention rightfully centers on the negative impact of futuristic machinery, but these technologies can either empower or suppress. Block-chain embodies this tech duality and concomitantly stores within it the key to self-determination, sovereign identity, and community empowerment while divergently acting as an instrument for oppression. How Black Studies adopts blockchain can determine black people’s political, social, cultural, and economic futures. But without the philosophical intervention of Black Studies, blockchain’s potential for people power becomes subjugated to individuals, entities, and institutions insensitive to the issues impacting the black community. [End Page 13] For these reasons, there can be no blockchain without Black Studies, and no Black Studies that can ignore blockchain. Black Futures and Technology Few understand blockchain or the technological processes by which it came to be created. Undeniably, blockchain is a frustrating mixed bag of “smart contracts,” “crypto currency,” “NFTs,” “interoperability,” and other terms that obscure more than reveal. However, technical expertise is not the sole determining factor for engagement with blockchain, nor is Black engagement with futuristic technology antithetical to the Black experience. Many scholars rightfully argue that Afro-futurism can act to insert the cultural, historical Black self into tomorrow. Or, it can assert the future as a site of survival, and in doing so make it a tool of liberation.1 Alternatively, the future can collide into Black people extending real world racist belief systems into digital outcomes that hamper and damage Black freedoms. Scholar Ruha Benjamin examines this issue by merging Critical Race Theory and technology in what she terms “race critical code studies.” Benjamin explains that “technological benevolence” conceives futuristic machinery as an unbiased solution to societal conflict, and yet these efforts to address bias ultimately “end up reinforcing the New Jim Code.”2 The solution is to “demand that tech designers and decision-makers become accountable stewards of technology.”3 Black digital humanists suggest a similar approach, insisting that the presence of blackness can change the landscape of technology.4 Yet these mediations are not enough. The future is a contestation of power, and the fight for power requires our active presence and vigorous implementation of self-determination.5 Within this chaos, Black Studies is best poised to enter the bedeviled crossroads by bridging blockchain’s meaning for Black people and Black people’s import for blockchain. As participatory players, scholars of the Black experience can direct technology for Black people’s emancipation. Blockchain in Black Studies: Sovereignty and People Power Entre into blockchain is much more than a gesture toward blackness in the future. Blockchain has the ability to incorporate community defined concepts of Black identity and peoplehood within computational structures. This is not just an abstract notion. Heir property is one significant area where the Black community can insist that self-determination merges with blockchain in a real-world application that helps preserve Black land. According to ProPublica, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists heir property as the leading impetus for Black involuntary land loss. Black owners distrusted southern courts and circumvented estate probate by allotting ownership interest to each...

From the Editor: The Next Generation

Sorry, Star Trek fans, the TV series is not the topic of interest here. Instead, the starting of the fourth decade of Interface calls for not only looking back, but also looking forward. I looked back in the Spring 2022 editorial, with a sneak peek of the future of an all-digital Interface. I am happy to note that the print-on-demand option has already been a big hit for those with the continued desire for a tactile reading experience, not to mention the best-looking covers for displays on coffee tables worldwide. Now is the time to look forward and start involving the next generation of members across all the activities of the Society.

Bringing the News from Ghent to Axanar: Fan Works and Copyright after Deckmyn and Subsequent Developments

Fan works offer a lens through which to view the complex future of copyright law. Recent years have seen an explosion in academic interest in fan works, for reasons including the ongoing crisis in copyright law, changes in the way we consume copyrighted content, and increasing interest in fandom itself. Scholarship on fan works has continued to explore the key questions of fair use, parody, and First Amendment protection that allow fan works to exist yet fail to clearly delineate the boundaries of the legal twilight zone in which they reside and thrive. It has also continued to address the intersection between fanfic and gender and what this says about the gendered nature of intellectual property law. Much has also been written about the future of copyright in general, and of fan works in particular, often looking at fan works from new perspectives, including law and economics and the closely related vexing problem, for content owners, of how to address possible infringement without alienating the fanbase. This article looks at recent developments relating to fanfic first by looking at the historical context and current state of fan works, and next by looking at story elements and the ways in which they are and are not protected by copyright. The article devotes special attention to the related issues of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation, looking at Own Voices stories and street murals as a means of reclaiming a right to cultural property appropriated by others. The article then looks at the shrinking space for online fan works, with a look at two fairly recent decisions dealing with works based on existing popular culture franchises. One, Paramount Pictures Corp. v. Axanar Productions, deals with true fan art (a Star Trek fan film), while the other, Deckmyn v. Vandersteen, deals with hate speech masquerading as fan art. Ultimately the article concludes that there is both good and bad news for fans in the current situation. The good news is that the formerly frustratingly nebulous legal status of fan works is increasingly coming to be understood by fan work creators, courts, and content owners. The bad news is that the balance of powers in copyright generally, is increasingly shifting to large content owners.

“My Compliments to your Dressmaker”: The Past and Future of Wearable Tech

389 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE “My Compliments to your Dressmaker”: The Past and Future of Wearable Tech “Do you think you can gather more information with your eyes than I can with my sensors?” —Dr. Miranda Jones, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Star Trek 60 Although Diana Muldaur gives a commanding performance as Dr. Miranda Jones, the telepathic ambassador to the dread Medusan emissary in the fifth episode of the third season of the original Star Trek, she is not the star of the show. The real luminary of the 60th episode is not human at all, nor Romulan or Vulcan, for that matter. It is the dress that Dr. Jones wears for the duration: a shimmering, lightly woven, jewel-studded confection (see fig. 1 and 2, below). Not even the terrible lighting of the starship Enterprise can dull its effervescence, and not even Captain Kirk’s unwanted amorous advances can diminish its decidedly feminine power. The dress has presence, has agency (more on which in a moment), so it is no surprise that since its debut in the popular imagination in 1968, the garment has also starred in a variety of museum exhibitions devoted to Star Trek fandom, costuming history, and textile appreciation, in venues as storied as the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum (Mills). Indeed, Dr. Miranda Jones’s bedazzling dress exemplifies how science fiction both integrates and expands upon the fashion of its time. In the context of the episode’s original release (October 1968), it is interesting to compare the cover model of the 1 November 1968 issue of Vogue, Françoise Rubartelli, who is bedecked in jewels from the bustline up (fig. 3, below). The description of her Pierre Cardin ensemble could be used to describe Miranda Jones’s gown: “embroidered in a rainbow of dazzle from neck to waist—jewel-bright pailletes, silvery sequins, and bits of mirror ... brilliance carried up to the chin” (“Embroidered” 3). So also could the description of serpentine jewels that snake up the forearm of Veruschka on the cover of the 15 November issue (fig. 4, below): “dazzled here by the accessory of the hour” (“Dazzled” 3) or the silver-toned costume that Lauren Hutton wears on the cover of the December issue that same year (fig. 5, 390 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) below): “a feast of dazzle for the Christmas eye” (“Feast” 3). Correlation is not causation, of course; and it is in any case less important to identify which of these costumes precedes the others than to observe that all seem to reach out, like the sensitive, tentacled, and bedazzled feelers of an alien being, to an as-yet undefined future. We see the same anticipatory impulse in a variety of popular fashion lines today: the music videos that accompany Lady Gaga’s Chromatica (2020), for example, are as lushly colored and enticing as any M-class planet Captain Kirk and crew might have measured with their tricorders and also depict enough exquisitely tailored, form-fitting costumes to make Barbarella blush—or, given Barbarella’s breath-heavy victory over the sexual excesses of the “Excessive Machine,” perhaps Duran Duran would be the one blushing. (Fun fact: “Barbarella” is the name of a shade of lipstick by Nars Cosmetics.) Speaking of that Jane Fonda film released in October 1968, a recent story in Town and Country—“How 1970s Comic Books and Barbarella Inspired Van Cleef & Arpels’ New High Jewelry Collection”—features a diamond- and sapphire-studded lapis lazuli necklace in the shape of a diadem that one can easily imagine encircling Barbarella’s neck (Volandes). A recent line of jewelry from Chanel—“Constellation Astrale”—similarly riffs upon the celestial imagery so common in science fiction: with its sparkling gold stars, the necklace might adorn the décolletage of Wonder Woman herself. All these sumptuous objects share the sparkle of that Star Trek dress. What remains fascinating about Miranda Jones’s, however, is not the graceful symmetry of its weblike structure or the lavish appearance of its many sparkling nodes. This futuristic frock continues to delight because it is not, in the end, merely beautiful or decorative. No fashionable object is...

‘I'm a doctor, not a teacher’: the roles and responsibilities of paediatricians in relation to education

Medicine and teaching are intrinsically linked. Traditionally, medical education was an apprenticeship model, where practical experience superseded book learning and the student/teacher relationship was paramount.1 2 In recent years there...

Film Review: Star Trek: The Early Years

Even though most of us were not even born when the Star Trek original TV series run, during the late 1970s, but I’m sure most college students must be familiar with Star Trek reruns and the Star Trek movie trilogy. In my initial formative years, I have been a Star Trek fan, calling myself a Trekkie and showcasing my knowledge about Star Trek movies at every social gathering. So, when I heard that Star Trek was bound to return with director J.J. Abrams, I got really excited about it, but I was unsure if the revision of Trek would resemble the original series. Finally, Star Trek (Paramount Pictures) retuned in 2009 with a prequel – The Early Years, that wasn’t destined to match the heights of its original franchise but nevertheless the young actors in the movie have managed to put up a brave show.

(Un)Conventional Voyages?—Star Trek: The Cruise and the Themed Cruise Experience

(Un)Conventional Voyages?—<i>Star Trek: The Cruise</i> and the Themed Cruise Experience

Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures

Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures

The Art of Nitpicking

Star Trek fans enjoy nitpicking over trivia from the popular TV series. One example comes from the episode called This Side of Paradise, first broadcast on March 2, 1967, in which Spock and Leila Kalomi, an old friend, are searching for spores. Leila comments: “It's not much further.” 1 Farrand P. The Nitpicker's Guide for Classic Trekkers. Dell Publishing, New York, NY1994: 96 Google Scholar According to The Nitpicker's Guide for Classic Trekkers, the correct remark should have been: “It's not much farther.” Although the adverbs “further” and “farther” are often used interchangeably, farther tends to be used to describe physical distance while further means to a greater extent.

Fan film on the final frontier: Axanar Productions and the limits of fair use in the digital age

In an analysis of the copyright case Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions Inc. and Alec Peters (2016), which centers on a high-budget Star Trek fan film, I consider how the case frames digital-age media fandom's challenges to the law, and concomitantly, how the case frames the law's challenges to media fandom. Even while legal action of this kind does not dampen participatory culture on the whole, it raises questions about the legal definition of a fan and the limits of fair use doctrine, and it delineates the changing relationships between media industries and fans. Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions reveals the tension between the gift-giving ethos of fandom and online crowdfunding as a type of gift; it also reveals the negative industrial and legal reactions to fan filmmaking and crowdfunding as threats to the way film has traditionally been constituted. I analyze Axanar's use of Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, the introduction of Paramount/CBS's restrictive fan film guidelines, and finally, the rejected fair use argument proposed by the defense. I take up the rejected fair use argument by situating it alongside the case history of appropriation art in order to consider another way to argue for fan films as transformative works.

Slavery: an Excerpt from “The God of the Bible Was an Important Outlet to African Americans During Slavery and Segregation: Freedom Itself Was Important to Americans Because Slavery and Life Are in Contrast”

This paper is an excerpt, a chapter, of a much longer work called, “The God of the Bible was an important outlet to African Americans during slavery and segregation: Freedom itself was important to Americans because slavery and life are in contrast.” In this section, I attempt to define slavery and some of the cultural impacts of the Bible’s definition. I also reference the experience of slaves with respect to Christianity’s theological opinions pertaining to American and world slavery. This is done through an analysis of the Bible and researchers who have commented on the subjects involved with servitude. The earliest essayist I reference is Cugoano; he published his ideas in 1787. This is done to show the evolution of the myth of the Bible’s definition of slavery. In this paper, I counter false interpretations of Biblical slavery and servitude. The term “STF” is used to represent the Star Trek Fan, referencing cultural atheism promoted by sources of propaganda from popular media. I attempt to redirect the conversation from cultural myths to historical arguments.

Female-centered fan fiction as homoaffection in fan communities

In the scholarship of fan studies, a lot has been said about why female fan communities enjoy writing about male characters and relationships in fan fiction. In contrast, there has been a dearth of research into female fan communities that are centered around female characters and their relationships with each other. Here I examine the heretofore unnamed female-centered fan fiction genre of homoaffection fic through a close reading of examples chosen from the Star Trek fandom. I show how this fan fictional genre reworks the masculine narratives of the television series and movies in order to define female experience and demonstrate the way in which this in turn creates female communities in both the world of the fic and our own world.

Forecasting the Future: Challenges and Opportunities in Developmental Communication Disorders.

When I am not reading Seminars in Speech and Language to keep up with the ever widening and deepening research that supports our practice as speech-language pathologists, my favorite reading genre is science fiction. Not the postapocalyptic or World War Z kind, but the kinder, gentler, hopeful kind that made many of us older people Star Trek fans in the 1960s—the notion that although problems would always confront us, new, exciting, and hopeful solutions would emerge to guarantee a good outcome. Perhaps fittingly, given our profession, some solutions were not even high tech.

Fandom’s new frontier: Star Trek in the concert hall

Abstract Star Trek’s fan group stands out as one of the oldest and most prominent within ‘nerd culture’, in both popular media and fan studies scholarship. The franchise has a long history of fan participation via fanzines, fan fiction, cosplay and conventions. Fan participation and consumption of Trek-related music has an equally extensive history. This article examines new ways in which music and Star Trek fandom intersect by focusing on the concert movies Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage and Star Trek Movie Live. In these events, live musicians, typically an orchestra, performed a score in synchronization with projected visuals from a pre-existing movie or television show. The comparison of the events’ different approaches to format and marketing inform different means of fan musical engagement with Star Trek. Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage attracted older ‘hard core’ fans by harnessing nostalgia in service of the production. Alternatively, Star Trek Movie Live opened up the doors of fandom to include not only Trekkers, but also other fandom subcultures and the general public. Ultimately, both events represent opportunities for the expansion of the classical music repertoire and the broadening of audiences.

Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (review)

Reviewed by: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens Sarah Annes Brown Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds.). Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. Classical Presences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 380. $35.00 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-19–022833–0. The fourteen essays which this volume comprises explore different intersections between two fields that might at first seem worlds apart. However, there is a long tradition of harking back to the classical past when speculating about humanity’s possible future. Explorations both backwards and forwards in time are, in their different ways, speculative journeys to an “undiscovered country” (7): “The strangeness of images of the ancient past is marked by the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of futures imagined in modern SF” (18). Frankenstein, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” is a locus classicus of this synergy between the classics and SF. An equally apt illustration is Mary Shelley’s less well known novel, The Last Man: the frame narrative, set in Shelley’s present, documents the chance discovery of a cache of Sibylline documents from the distant past which reveal mankind’s future extinction in the twenty-first century. The volume opens with four essays on “SF’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn” before addressing more recent examples of classical presences in television, film, and literary science fiction. Whereas some contributors focus on SF texts whose debt to classical culture is unmissable, others track looser ties between these two traditions, and demonstrate how each may become an illuminating lens through which to view the other. Rebecca Raphael and Brett M. Rogers offer thought-provoking discussions of shifts in the way hybridity and post-human identity have been conceptualized. George Kovacs proposes an irresistible parallel between myth-making in the classical world and Star Trek’s later myth-building. In both cases the “mythology” [End Page 131] first develops organically, before being refined in a more self-conscious age; Hellenistic sophisticates and avid Star Trek fans alike are fully aware of the divergences, contradictions, and subtexts within their traditions (203). Sometimes, where a more direct link is claimed between a SF text and a classical source, the argument seems more tenuous. Although he has interesting things to say about both works, some of the connections Joel P. Christensen identifies between Dune and the Iliad are a little generic. Erik Grayson draws suggestive parallels between the fall of Rome and the post-apocalyptic America of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz but seems to be clutching at straws in some of his attempts to tease significance out of Miller’s classicizing names. Jesse Weiner’s evidence for identifying Lucretius as a key intertext for Frankenstein is strained in places. He makes a better case, however, for the presence of Lucan’s necromantic witch Erichtho in the novel, a parallel that amplifies the monstrosity of Frankenstein himself. Although it rests on just three quotations from the Aeneid, Benjamin Eldon Stevens’ essay on Journey to the Center of the Earth presents a meticulously argued case for seeing Verne’s narrator, Axel, as a “rewritten epic hero” (91) whose own katabasis offers not a prophetic glimpse of his people’s future (as granted to Aeneas), but a scientific revelation of humanity’s past through the living fossils who dwell in the underworld. The monstrous proto-human who shepherds mastodons is a figurative father figure who replaces the ghostly presence of Anchises. There are many other highlights in this consistently stimulating collection. Tony Keen makes a thoroughly convincing case for Lucian as a significant influence on H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Marian Makins demonstrates how Panem, the dystopian society of The Hunger Games, synthesizes elements from both the historical Rome and “misrepresentations” of Rome in American popular culture in order to create “a carefully constructed hybrid reconfiguration that implicates aspects of contemporary society” (304). Gaël Grobéty offers a crisply argued analysis of how Dan Simmons, in Ilium and Olympos, both restages Homeric epiphanies and demystifies them, replacing awe at divine intervention with wonder at human ingenuity. Inevitably, any reader who already has an interest in both classical traditions and science fiction will...

Final and future frontiers

In hepatology, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), not outer space, is the final frontier (sorry, Star Trek fans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6R3MiAv9ac), given its extremely heterogeneous molecular pathogenesis, dismal prognosis and limited treatment options [1]. Treatment of this neoplasm remains a huge unmet need with no major successes imminent, in contrast to the recent transformative progress in HCV antivirals, and the heightened prospects for antifibrotic therapies. Two articles, by Perra et al.

Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix

Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix

Mediation of fandom in Karin Giphart's "Maak me blij"

The plot of the Dutch novel Maak me blij (Make me happy) (2005) by Karin Giphart draws from the culture of online fan communities. It describes the life of a lesbian in her late 20s, Ziggy, who has a terminally ill mother. Ziggy is an active fan who writes and reads femmeslash fan fiction—that is, lesbian interpretations of characters from mainstream series such as Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). By providing through Ziggy a personal view of fan communities and the genres that flourish there, Maak me blij connects the romantic motives of original lesbian fiction with its underground sister, fan fiction. The novel draws from various source texts and illustrates how fans interpret texts within a wider literary landscape. I use the concept of intermediality to analyze how Maak me blij mediates different types of original fiction (lesbian romances, science fiction) and fan fiction (femmeslash, Star Trek fan fiction) to establish new views on fandom and its construction of gender and intimacy. These motives are not only apparent within the text itself but also within the character of Ziggy as a fan writer with her own original alien characters.

Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding

This paper argues that the practices and aesthetics of vidding were structured by the relationship of Star Trek’s female fans to that particular televisual text. Star Trek fandom was the crucible within which vidding developed because Star Trek’s narrative impelled female fans to take on two positions often framed as contradictory in mainstream culture: the desiring body, and the controlling voice of technology. To make a vid, to edit footage to subtext-revealing music, is to unite these positions: to put technology at the service of desire. Although the conflict between desire and control was particularly thematized in Star Trek, most famously through the divided character of Spock, the practices of vidding are now applied to other visual texts. This essay examines the early history of vidding and demonstrates, through the close reading of particular vids made for Star Trek and Quantum Leap, how vidding heals the wounds created by the displacement and fragmentation of women on television.