I sometimes quip that I might be in a minority of one: when I first encountered Star Trek, I thought it was a book series.
It happened sometime in 1983, the year I turned eight. I’d been a precocious reader, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the age of 5. I progressed to standard adult-level reading during that next year; and by a couple of years after that was actually starting to get bored with reading. I could get through an “age appropriate” chapter book in an hour, and through a “teen” level book in an afternoon.
The problem? While my reading ability was well above my chronological age, my social and emotional development were both right in line with it. So was the amount of life experience I’d had at that point. As such, despite the fact that I was hungry for more complicated books, there weren’t that many out there. True “adult” books discussed themes and situations that I didn’t understand — not because I couldn’t read the words, but because I wasn’t yet able to pick up the context.
One afternoon, as I was noodling about being bored, my father was reading M.S. Murdock’s Web of the Romulans and laughing out loud at some points. Intrigued, I asked if I could read it too. Dad thought about it for a moment and decided that it was probably all right for my age. While he finished it, he told me, it would be a good idea for me to go through the Blish Readers he had on our bookshelves.
I did. And I was entranced. To this day I can still remember that the very first episode adaptation I read was “Arena.”
By the time The Search for Spock came out in 1984, I was already a Trek fan. Later that year, cable television came to my community for the first time. My father, who was a bona fide geek (although I didn’t yet realize that) was one of the first adopters, and one of the first shows he hunted up was Star Trek. When he invited me to watch it with him, my reaction was that it was neat to see the books turned into a television show.
Dad just about lost it.
It took him multiple tries before he was able to stop laughing long enough to explain that the show came out in the 1960s, right around the time he and my mother graduated high school and well before they’d met — or I’d even been thought about. Later, when we visited a local Waldenbooks, he pointed me toward the magazine section which had some promotional material for the movie. I snatched it right up, and that was how I learned that there were other fans of the series out there.
Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted when I was twelve, not too long after I’d started the eighth grade. By then, my life had changed considerably. Among other things, my father had become very ill with the condition that eventually killed him. But even when his suffering was at its worst, we were still able to discuss the show.
At twelve, I had already taken my participation in media fandom far past the point where my father had gone. I was also already a fan of a couple of other science fiction franchises, which I’d first encountered while reading magazines such as Starlog; and I made my first serious attempts at fan fiction a year or so later. This pattern continued through the remainder of grade school and as I transitioned into adulthood, which happened at the same time the the World Wide Web was coming into being.
Unfortunately, by the time that happened, my father had already died. He had, however, lived long enough to see his casual media fandom had become a vital, and growing, part of my own life. When I refer to myself as “a second-generation fan,” I do so honestly. It came from him, and he’d passed it down to me before my age was even into the double digits.
To be continued…