1983
From Fan History Wiki
1983 was a resurgence year for Star Trek fanzines. It was also a year of demand outstripping the supply. It was a year of shorter stories. There would be a number of important conventions this year and various awards would be given by the fan community to celebrate their members writing and contributions to the community.
Media West III, held from May 27 to May 30, was, according to Verba, the premiere fanzine fan fiction convention of the year. The categories for FanQs this year included Star Trek, Star Wars, Starsky and Hutch, Doctor Who and Other. Other awards were beginning to be created. Interstat, a popular fanzine which had been publishing for a number of years, ran their TrekStar awards.
While Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, released in 1999, would signal a much larger trend of fan fiction before the release of a media, this type of thing happened in this year with the release of Star Trek’s third movie. At least two fanzines were released prior to the release of the movie based on the speculation as to its content. The powers that be, namely Harve Bennett, were following what was going on in the world of fanzines. They would sometimes send letters and notes to fanzine contributors and editors, thanking them for their support. This practice was still going on in 1983.
The fanzine community dealt with the issue that demand for materials was higher than the number of zines being published in terms of new material and quantity of zines being published. There did not seem to be any solution as the costs of publishing was going up. Added to this, while a number of media based fandoms had stories coming out in professionally written novels, there was a backlash against this material on the part fen because they generally felt it was inferior to the fan fiction being distributed.
Many of the stories running this year were short, shorter than they had in previous years. Some stories in a number of fan fiction communities were a page or less in length. There were a number of zines which contained full novel length stories. These stories would be published as stand alone zines but these numbers were in lesser proportion than other fanzines. Most fanzines in this period seemed to average between eighty and one hundred pages. They generally contained four or more stories. They also included fanart. Some of the primarily fan fiction containing zines also contained submissions like poetry and fanart.
See also:
- Canon released in 1983
- Fan fiction awards given in 1983
- Fanzines published in 1983
- Technology innovations in 1983
- Terminology originating in 1983
