Star Trek, Darkover, Thunderbirds, and Fan Fiction: An Interview With Joan Marie Verba

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Star Trek, Darkover, Thunderbirds, and Fan Fiction: An Interview With Joan Marie Verba
Interviewer:	Henry Jenkins
Interviewee:	Joan Marie Verba
Date(s):	2010
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS, Thunderbirds, Zines, Darkover
External Links:	part 1, Archived version part 2, Archived version
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Joan Marie Verba was interviewed by Henry Jenkins in 2010 for his blog Confessions of an Aca-fan.

Some Excerpts

I have watched Star Trek since it premiered in 1966. I learned about Star Trek fandom when I was a junior in high school, at a district-wide speech competition. During one of the breaks, one of the other participants, Anthony Tollin, was talking about the World Science Fiction Convention, which got my attention. He also spoke about Star Trek, and told me that a local fan, Ruth Berman, published a Star Trek fanzine. He gave me her phone number, and I called for information. That’s how I got started. Her fanzine had notices about other fanzines. I ordered them, and they had notices for still more fanzines. I ordered them. And so on. In 1972, when I was in college, I went to my first convention, the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett were there. (I encountered them alone in an elevator and got their autographs.) In 1973, I joined the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, and Helen Young invited me to join the Star Trek Welcommittee. (I remained in STW until it disbanded in the mid-1990s.) I went to my first World Science Fiction Convention in 1975, and joined the Mythopoeic Society in that year, as well. My primary activities in fandom were centered around fanzines and fan publications. In the age before the Internet, those were our primary means of communication. I was a frequent letter-writer to fan newsletters and letterzines, as well as a regular contributor to Minneapa. I read and commented on fan fiction on a regular basis.

With one or two exceptions, the vast majority of early Star Trek fanzines were published by science fiction fans who had read and/or published science fiction fanzines. (Though by the time Star Trek came along, very few science fiction fanzines published fiction, since there were sufficient professional science fiction magazines for short story writers to submit to. For Star Trek fiction writers, there was little or no opportunity for publication except for fanzines for the large supply of and demand for stories.) Once Star Trek fanzines had been established, readers with no knowledge of science fiction fanzines read Star Trek fanzines and got the idea to publish their own Star Trek fanzines as well.

Gene Roddenberry was supportive of fanzines and fan newsletters, and the support went both ways. He and his assistants would give out information to fanzine editors and publishers and directly to fans at conventions (he had an annual call-in to the August Party convention for several years). [...] After becoming connected with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Harve Bennett regularly communicated with fans, through fan newsletters such as Interstat as well as through convention appearances. He did listen and respond to fan feedback on his productions, and he seemed to keep in mind fan preferences in making the Star Trek movies he produced, though for every movie, there were fans who were satisfied and dissatisfied with the results. Marion Zimmer Bradley actively communicated with Darkover fans. She had an official newsletter that she and her assistants produced and published, as well as an official fanzine. She edited and published Darkover stories contributed by fans, including my stories. [...] GR and HB both knew about fan fiction and occasionally read it. (Interestingly, I discovered two Star Trek fan fiction stories written by MZB in Star Trek fanzines.) MZB actively read Darkover fan fiction sent to her, and published it. (She graciously published my Lady Bruna story, saying she found it interesting even though she said upfront that it was different from her own official Lady Bruna story. I enjoyed her Lady Bruna story; she enjoyed mine.) There was a lot of mutual admiration; when MZB’s health began to deteriorate, she enlisted Darkover fans and anthology writers to continue the Darkover series of novels professionally.

...the Internet has changed the process significantly. When fan fiction was on the page, writers sent stories to the editor of a fanzine, and maybe had a couple of friends read it in addition, before publication. Once it was published, a fan fiction writer sometimes received feedback, and sometimes didn’t. A lot of fan writers before the Internet complained about a lack of response. Of course, the readership base was a lot smaller—limited to the number of fanzines published, which often was in the hundreds at the most. Now a story on the Internet is instantly available for feedback, doesn’t usually go through an editor (though I understand there’s a “beta reader” system), and is potentially available to thousands, if not millions, of readers at a time and extensive commentary is not only possible, but common.

I agree that the desire for “more” is a strong motivation. The original Thunderbirds lasted only one and a half seasons. I felt there were a lot more stories to tell, and a lot of potential that had been left untapped. Writing officially licensed Thunderbirds novels is very satisfying for me as a fan, because I can spend time with the characters that I love and the alternate universe that is Thunderbirds, which I find very attractive. As is the case with Star Trek, Thunderbirds shows a future that I would be happy to live in.