1986
From Fan History Wiki
1986 was pretty boring year. Still, things were happening. Traditions already well established continued on. The community began to face more academic scrutiny and a piece of early femmeslash appeared on the scene.
By 1986, fan fiction begins to confirm a move to the digital format, while continuing the long production history of fanzines. In this year Plato Notefile has several fan fiction communities active on it. These communities included Star Trek and Star Wars. Usenet posting on the part of the fan fiction community picks up volume. This medium is here to stay and will begin to play a greater impact on the broader fannish community.
Robotech was on its first run on television, having been dubbed from Japanese into English. This event would signal the start of one of the large anime based fan fiction communities in pre-Internet culture. This community would spawn the creation of Protoculture Addicts. This fanzine would eventually become one of the more important magazines for American based anime fan communities.
This year marked a change in the printing type for fanzines. Prior to this, fanzines had been mimeographed or published using spirit duplicators. New technology allowed for the user of laser printers. One of the first examples of the user of a laser printed fanzine was, according to Verba, the fanzine, Datazine.
The FanQs had a Star Trek mishap. No story won for best Star Trek story and no author won for best Star Trek poet. This was a result of, according to Verba, stories by an author being withdrawn because the story was published in 1984 making it ineligible. This led to changes in how the FanQs eligible stories were nominated. Authors were now required to document the year their story was published. Voters were also told that a vote of No Story meant that they felt no story was worthy of winning for that category that year. In response to the Star Trek FanQ mishap, the Star Trek fan fiction community responded by creating their own reward, the Surak Award. It was conceived of in 1986 and formally awarded in 1987.
Camille Bacon-Smith wrote an article that was published in the New York Times on November 16 of this year. The article was titled “Spock Among Women.” The article discussed women writing fan fiction, why they did it and the type of story telling they did it and the type of story telling they engaged in as fan fiction writers.
An early piece of femmeslash was published this year. It appeared in the Women's List 2. The story was a Star Trek story where Saavik went into pon far and started a relationship with a female Romulan physican. The story was written by Ouida Crozier.
See also:
- Canon released in 1986
- Fan fiction awards given in 1986
- Fanzines published in 1986
- Technology innovations in 1986
