Before AO3: The World of Kirk/Spock Zines
Printed fan fiction gave writers space to imagine a relationship the television series did not depict.
Kirk/Spock, often shortened to K/S, refers to fan works that imagine a romantic or sexual relationship between Star Trek characters James T. Kirk and Spock.
These works were circulating in print long before readers could search a large online fan-fiction archive such as Archive of Our Own, usually called AO3.
Understanding the zines helps explain why fan fiction is more than an online activity.
What the slash means
The mark between the characters' names identifies the pairing. “Slash fiction” became a name for a wider field of fan writing about same-sex relationships.
The pairing does not tell you how explicit a story is. A romance and a sexually explicit story can involve the same characters while offering very different reading experiences. Nor does the pairing tell you the writer's gender or sexuality.
Natalie Wang's study of early online Star Trek discussions explains the terminology and documents disagreements about the relationship between queer subject matter and explicit content.
The printed record
The Texas A&M collection catalogue lists Thrust: An Exploration of the Kirk/Spock Relationship, edited by C.A. Frisbie and published by Pulsar Press in 1978. It also records issues of T'hy'la from the 1980s and 1990s.
These entries establish named publications, editors and dates. They show a continuing publishing practice, rather than a single isolated story.
They also reveal work that an online search result can hide: assembling an issue, arranging its contents, producing copies and keeping a publication available through later printings.
Writing about the future from the present
A story set in the future still comes from a writer living in a particular time.
Researcher April S. Callis examined almost 6,000 pages of K/S fiction written between 1978 and 2014. Her study in Transformative Works and Cultures considers how the stories reflect changing assumptions about sexuality and relationships.
This is one reason scholars read fan fiction as cultural evidence. The question is not only what happens to the characters. It is also what the writer treats as ordinary, difficult, forbidden or possible.
Moving online did not remove every boundary
Wang's research describes online arguments about which stories belonged in shared spaces, how to label them and who should moderate discussion.
The change in medium made new kinds of circulation possible, but writers still needed communities with workable expectations. Decisions about audience, privacy and distribution did not disappear when paper became a screen.
When reading an older zine, keep that original audience in mind. A work shared within a particular fan community was not necessarily written with unlimited online circulation in view.
Read next: Why Libraries Collect Zines.