Star Trek: The New Voyages
has a long and somewhat complex history.
It begins with Joan Winston, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Sondra Marshak's Star Trek Lives! (Bantam, 1975). This was not the first published book, available to the general public as a mass market paperback on any newsstand, about Star Trek as a phenomenal show including the fansnote . But it was the first to be all about the fans and how the show had inspired them to make the most of their lives and have hope for the future. Most of the book covers various psychological and cultural "effects" (with Sondra Marshak providing an Objectivist slant), elements of the show that appealed to different types of viewers. There are quotes from the stars, Gene Roddenberry, D. C. Fontana and others.note Joan Winston has an account of the Star Trek conventions she helped to organize, and her visit to the set on the last days of filming. You can read Star Trek Lives for free at the Internet Archive.
One entire chapter was devoted to fan fiction — not Slash Fic, this was in the early days when slash was a controversial underground — describing how fans come to write their own episodes and tales, naming some of the best works and authors, with a few excerpts (they'd wanted to include some stories in their entirety, but it would have made the book too long). Most readers, even those deeply devoted to the show (viewing it in syndicated reruns on local channels), had had no idea fanzines or fan fiction existed — other than possibly writing their own fanworks in private — until they picked up Star Trek Lives! at the drugstore.
Reader response to Star Trek Lives was overwhelming, especially to the fan fiction chapter — "I thought I was alone" — and editor Fred Pohl, up at Bantam Books, realized that the Star Trek phenomenon was by no means dead. If fan fiction was what readers wanted, he was more than happy to sell it to them. He commissioned Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath to select the best stories and process themnote into something he could put out as a trade paperback. Star Trek: The New Voyages came out in 1976, with New Voyages 2 two years later.
Of course, many people besides fan authors contributed to the great letter-writing, petition and protest campaigns that saved the original series and renewed it for a third season; viewers of every gender, age and profession were involved, from kindergarten kids to university presidents. However, Marshak and Culbreath, in describing the fan campaigns, naturally emphasized the participation of amateur authors and editors, and dedicated New Voyages to them. Each of the stories has a foreword by one of the original Star Trek creators.
The stories provide examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight: Connie Faddis' "Snake Pit" for Chapel, where she saves Kirk from being a Human Sacrifice, and Nichelle Nichols' "Surprise!" for Uhura, where she organises the captain a birthday party.
- Bedlam House: The 1950s mental hospital in Shirley Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter" is mostly a hellhole, with only a few compassionate people trying to help this strange man with no memory; the rest are sadistic leering guys who beat him. Unfortunately Truth in Television for too many places.
- Bridal Carry: In an effort to keep him from figuring out Uhura's surprise party in "Surprise!", Spock acts like Kirk has an injury and carries him around, much to Kirk's embarrassment.note
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Shirley Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter" has Kirk tortured by Klingons led by Kor using the titular device to get to the Guardian of Forever. Kirk now has amnesia but experiences massive screaming pain whenever he remembers or speaks his name and rank, reducing him to becoming like a helpless violent child in a 1950s mental hospital until he's saved.
- Companion Cube: Lampshaded in-universe during Ruth Berman and Eleanor Arnason's "The Face on the Barroom Floor", as Captain Pérez notes that Kirk and the Enterprise come in a set "like a hermit crab and its shell". Jennifer Guttridge's "The Winged Dreamers" also has Kirk call the Enterprise a dominating woman in an appreciative way.note
- The Chew Toy: Ruth Berman and Eleanor Arnason's "The Face on the Barroom Floor" has Sulu wondering if Kirk is human after a particularly anal bout of Married to the Job, and boy is he. On a shore leave he's forced to go on, he decides he'll try to unwind, splurges on a gaudy neo-samurai outfit (so doesn't have his uniform), goes to a bar and can't get a free drink with his Pretty Boy smiles but everyone thinks he's a short Brainless Beauty anyway. He inadvertently starts a Bar Brawl, gets knocked out, robbed and arrested, and gets condescended to by authorities telling him that his "captain" will come pick him up in the morning. "But I'm the captain..."
- Date Rape Averted: "The Procrustean Petard" by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath is borderline BDSM where the crew inadvertently goes through a sex change machine. The genderswapped Kirk, now a small, attractive and physically weak woman, meets Klingon captain Kang alone as they've agreed; everyone knows what's going to happen, Kirk goes anyway, and he's saved from rape by Bones (also female) and Spock (who's gotten an extra Y chromosome instead).
- Distressed Dude: Kirk has a bad time throughout both editions, mind-sifted and trapped in an asylum during Shirley Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter", groped and a Human Sacrifice in Connie Faddis' "Snake Pit", caged to see how he would react during Jennifer Guttridge's "In the Maze", and having to be saved from rape in Marshak and Culbreath's "The Procrustean Petard".
- Easily Forgiven: Kirk in canon has a habit for it anyway, but it's still fairly galling in "The Procrustean Petard" when Kang tries to rape him as "poetic justice", and they're friendly later in a bar.
- Eating the Eye Candy: In Nichelle Nichols' "Surprise!", Uhura has sneaked into Kirk's cabin to leave gifts and runs into Kirk coming out of the shower, and barely keeps her composure, especially when he flirts with her to try and figure out what's going on.
- Extra Y, Extra Violent: In "The Procrustean Petard", the Enterprise crew is gender-flipped by an alien device which doesn't know how to deal with Half-Human Hybrid Mr. Spock, so it makes him XYY instead, making him see his two now female friends as weak and useless.
- Foreshadowing: Nichelle Nichols in "Surprise!" wrote of Kirk as concerned that he's getting old a few years before The Motion Picture put him in a full-blown mid-life-crisis.
- Forgotten Birthday: The plot of "Surprise!" has Kirk disappointed thinking everyone’s forgot his birthday, when really Uhura and the others are running around trying to organise a surprise party.
- Florence Nightingale Effect: Shirley Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter" has the one kind nurse, Jan, convinced that she loves Kirk. She means well, but Bones and Spock point out two things 1) Kirk is really not in any position to consent, having been tortured into regression, and 2) kisses aside, it's a pitying mother kind of love, which she admits to, and Spock mind melds with her to take away her worry about Kirk, while allowing her to remember him and reassured that these are his friends who can heal him and take him back to where he belongs.
- Hand Gagging: The unedited version of Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter" (which was just called "Mind-Sifter") had one of the sadistic orderlies (who keep calling Kirk pretty) clamp his hand over Kirk's nose and mouth ostensibly to stop him screaming, but also because he's the favourite punching bag.
- Hypocritical Humor: In Berman and Arnason's "The Face on the Barroom Floor", Kirk uses one of his "Prince Charming" smiles to try and get free drinks, but gets annoyed when everyone from then on acts like he's a useless pretty boy.
- Implied Rape: In Connie Faddis' "Snake Pit", a "moon-faced, overweight woman" gropes Kirk while he and Chapel are tied up, and makes not explained but obvious suggestions to the rest of her species who laugh about it, and when she tries to do it a second time, he kicks her away, getting a beatdown for it.
- Karmic Rape: In "The Procrustean Petard", Marshak and Culbreath seem to think that the genderswapped Kirk on some level is asking for it, Kang trying it and saying Starfleet would laugh at him when they heard the news, and Bones (also a woman) saying he can't carry on being captain, or all men they meet would either condescend to him or assault him, just because he's now an extremely attractive female.
- Kinky Spanking: In Nichelle's story "Surprise!", Kirk threatens Uhura with spanking a few times for giving him the runaround, and he's not against the idea of getting a birthday spank himself, especially if it comes from Spock.
- Love Is a Weakness: In "Surprise!", Nichelle sums up Spock's Conflicting Loyalty between his Vulcan decorum and Kirk pretty well, calling it not as secure as he'd like when it comes to this particular human.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Phyllida in Marcia Ericson's "The Enchanted Pool" gives the appearance of being this. She's actually a Starfleet officer in Garden Garments, claiming to be a Nature Spirit and using mythic, coded language to tell Spock who she really is and what's been happening, because the area is under surveillance. He spectacularly fails to get it.
- Manly Men Can Hunt: Played with in Doris Beetem's "The Hunting". The mok farr is a coming-of-age ritual for Vulcans, involving a mind meld to understand the ferocity of the beast, to better understand the savagery of the Vulcan nature.
- Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty: Kirk in the original series has no problem knowing he's a Pretty Boy and using it as a tactic, but in "The Procrustean Petard", he gets angry because as his whole crew has been through the sex change machine, they find that every genderswap has overlapping traits (Bones is considered handsome and a little weary even as a woman; Uhura is now a powerful man, with the same calm courage she's always had), and being a short, curvy, beautiful woman means...
- Mind Rape: Maiewski's "The Mind Sifter" is not subtle with parallels to actual assault, with Kirk getting drugged and kidnapped on an (implicitly coerced) date during a shore leave when he was alone, tortured by Kor with the device to the point that his own name and rank is a trigger to nightmarish agony so that he's kept helpless, and ends up in a Bedlam House in the 1950s with, save for one kind nurse, sadist orderlies who torture him, call him a pet and snark at him for being a Pretty Boy.
- The Napoleon: In a nod to Shatner being whiny on the Trek set about his height, Kirk gets pissed about being considered "little".
- Primal Fear: In "The Mind Sifter", Kirk's kidnapping is unsettlingly realistic for a Trek story, roofied on a date and passing out in the taxi.
- Revenge by Proxy: Chekov had tried to rape Kang's wife in "Day of the Dove", so as well as just for the humiliation factor, Kang wants to rape Kirk as "poetic justice".
- Slash Fic: To varying degrees, modern readers will see most stories (with the exception of "The Enchanted Pool") as obviously Kirk/Spock, enough to notice but of course not too explicit. Not every author whose work was published in New Voyages was a slasher. Maiewski and Berman certainly were not. Nichelle Nichols wrote "Surprise!" with broad hints that Uhura was the one who was intimate with Spock: the slash-type elements were added by Marshak and Culbreath. Connie Faddis didn't even believe in slash and wrote an experimental novella, None There Embrace, illustrating exactly why the old "Spock goes into pon farr and there's only men around" bullshit would not work.
- Straw Vulcan: Claire Gabriel's "Ni Var" has Spock split into his human half and Vulcan half, throwing his friends for a loop when the latter doesn't even want to banter with Bones.
- Testosterone Poisoning: Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath just looooved this trope. As he's the strongest male on the ship, Spock gains another y chromosome, making him see his two now female friends as weak and useless. When he goes back through the sex change machine, he gets another one! (This was based on the now-discredited idea that extra y chromosomes cause aggressive, sexually dominant "supermales". It doesn't.)
- Trauma Button: In Claire Gabriel's "Ni Var", Kirk is shown children of mixed parentage (Andorian and Fornax) originally a single child who has been separated by a machine into two. He immediately feels ill, remembering "The Enemy Within" and how badly that went, not just for himself but others. The child's father used the report on the splitting of "Crewman X" in his research to separate his son, giving him a chance at health and sanity. The father later uses the same machine to split Spock into his Terran and Vulcan sides, and this is where the story really starts. Kirk finds out and feels even worse, still in denial about having a darker side and feeling useless over not being able to help.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: To Kirk's annoyance, in "Surprise!", nobody else on the ship seems to be bothered that Spock is carrying him in his arms.
- What the Hell, Hero?: In Claire Gabriel's "Ni Var", Bones hits below the belt (he wants Spock in for a physical, and only Spock and Kirk know Spock is split into his human and Vulcan half), assuming Kirk is trying to pull rank, and brings up "A Private Little War", asking if Kirk wants to play god again.
- You Should Have Died Instead: In Juanita Coulson's "Intersection Point",note a mission destroys a man's mind, and his girlfriend has a breakdown at Spock, clawing at him and screaming he should have gone instead.
