Content Rating in Trek Novels

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Actually, there are two different versions of Killing Time. The "slash" version made it into print, evidently by mistake, even after the "non-slash" version had been the one to receive editorial approval. I understand that there was a recall notice, but it wasn't sent to individual readers, just to bookstores, and so probably anybody who got theirs before the recall got the highly-collectible "slash" version. I've verified that mine is the "slash" version, and it's still very mild, compared to what, I'm told, is depicted in a typical "K/S" fanzine (or even compared with some of what I remember from Marshak & Culbreath's "Phoenix" novels).

David Gerrold also dropped an "f-bomb" in a nonfiction work, The Trouble with Tribbles, a chronicle of how that episode made it into television, in a passage explaining how he ended up making tribbles "bi-sexual, reproducing at will." Speaking of David Gerrold, I read his non-Trek novel, When HARLIE Was One, for a book report in high school, and it has very explicit sex scenes (not to mention drug use scenes, including depiction of joints being a commercial product, with brand names like "Highmaster").

 

[Christopher]

Mind you, there's a book from the 80's that I haven't read called Killing Time, that's been flagged as a slash fiction that somehow got through the process to get published (that's not what I personally believe, because I haven't read it, but it is what others have said). I skim a copy for purchase, to see if it was the first edition that retained content that was subsequently cut in later editions. I wonder what rating Killing Time merits, does that one still fall into the PG-13 category?

There was nothing remotely graphic in Killing Time, just some vaguely slashy insinuations about Kirk and Spock. There are countless modern Trek novels that depict LGBT characters and relationships far more overtly and matter-of-factly. It's just that the book was published in less enlightened, more bigoted times, when even hinting at the existence of homosexuality was still seen as risque or perverted.

And hbquikcomjamesl is right -- there's much slashier and more risque stuff in the Phoenix novels, even a scene that's implicitly an attempted oral rape of Kirk by the male villain. Apparently the reason KT got changed and those didn't was because some upset reader wrote a letter to Gene Roddenberry and he intervened. I guess either he didn't get letters about the Phoenix novels, or by the time he did, it was too late to have them changed.

(By the way, hbquikcom -- is the letter at the end of your user name a lower-case L or an upper-case i? This font makes it impossible to tell.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It's a lower-case "L."

Up until maybe a couple of years ago, my ISP was the Huntington Beach franchise of Quik Internet. When I signed up with them, I used my employer's user-ID convention of first-name-last-initial, ans so I was "jamesl," for "James Lampert," and an email address based on that user-ID, with a domain of "hb.quik.com," which eventually changed to "hbquik.com" From the beginning, when I needed a globally-unique user-ID for a board, or an ecommerce site, other than my email address, I simply strung everything together, domain first.

When the Quik parent company went belly-up, not that long ago, at least one franchise (the Huntington Beach franchise) kept plugging along, but they couldn't provide dial-up (I don't have broadband at home, and at least until such time as Net Neutrality is no longer subject to which way the political winds are blowing, I don't WANT it at home), and they couldn't provide web site hosting, so I went hunting for a new ISP. I ended up with Toast, and went with my initials, all caps, for my user-ID. But in honor of my years with Quik (and in appreciation for the sysop keeping my Quik email address active), I still continue to use the "hbquikcomjamesl" user-ID anywhere I need a globally unique user-ID that's not my email address.

James H. H. Lampert
*****
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion thread.)

Hmm. I don't recall anything specifically involving forced fellatio in either "Phoenix" novel, but then again, it's been a few years, and there's too much good TrekLit around for me to re-read Marshak & Culbreath. The most memorable thing I found about the "Phoenix" novels was that they were so damned confusing, they made the intentionally-confusing parts of How Much for Just the Planet seem as easy to understand as a first-grade textbook. At least I think John Ford was trying to be confusing in the scenes to which I refer (all the skulking around, with multiple characters pretending to be some sort of cat-burglar, right before the big finish), while Marshak and Culbreath weren't.

Speaking of sexually explicit, it's kind of hard to beat Cogswell & Spano's Spock: Messiah. Especially when the prudish but curious Ensign Sara George plugs herself into the mind of a nymphomanic prostitute, finds herself unable to control the result, and plugs Spock into the mind of a fanatical cult-leader. When the influence of her "dop" was blocked, Ensign George related that she and Spock, as soon as they were alone on the planet, "took off [their] clothes, and made love . . .like . . . rutting cats." And that was only the first sexy part of the story.

 

[Kor]

... including depiction of joints being a commercial product, with brand names like "Highmaster").

That was quite prescient of him (at least for certain geographical locales).

Kor

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yes. As I recall, the other leading brand mentioned was "Acapulco Gold," presumably named after the cultivar. And Gerrold wasn't the only writer depicting it as a brand name.

The only time I ever depicted drug use in any of my own fiction was in a short story titled, "Voluntary Compliance," the first of my "First Contact Corps" stories, depicting a First Contact specialist covertly investigating a hard-Libertarian society, in which the local version of a public library is a for-profit enterprise charging admission, and in which almost any recreational drug is legal. The only one I depict in any detail is called "Gliff" (anybody who's taken certain standardized tests around the time I took them ought to recognize the name as a placeholder word used in those tests), and we find out -- right at the end of the story -- that it's a suppository. (The short story workshop class I was taking a the time had a tradition of an "end-of-semester party"; I dummied-up a box of Gliff, for the party, purely as a sight-gag. Complete with a Surgeon General's Warning: "Habitual use of Gliff can cause diarrhea. Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence of Gliff. Pregnant women should avoid using Gliff.".)

 

[Christopher]

It's a lower-case "L."

Thanks.

Hmm. I don't recall anything specifically involving forced fellatio in either "Phoenix" novel, but then again, it's been a few years, and there's too much good TrekLit around for me to re-read Marshak & Culbreath.

It's very implicit, of course, or they never could've gotten away with it. I never recognized it myself until I was older and revisiting the book.

Spoiler: trigger warning, just in case

There's a scene where Omne forces Kirk (or maybe "James," his clone of Kirk) to his knees in front of him and tries to force his head down while Kirk resists desperately, and the subtext is, well, that forcing Kirk to his knees is just the first step in what he plans to do. Though Kirk gets away somehow before it gets to that point. I think maybe he head-butts Omne in the crotch?

Speaking of sexually explicit, it's kind of hard to beat Cogswell & Spano's Spock: Messiah. Especially when the prudish but curious Ensign Sara George plugs herself into the mind of a nymphomanic prostitute, finds herself unable to control the result, and plugs Spock into the mind of a fanatical cult-leader. When the influence of her "dop" was blocked, Ensign George related that she and Spock, as soon as they were alone on the planet, "took off [their] clothes, and made love . . .like . . . rutting cats." And that was only the first sexy part of the story.

Oh, yes, that book made quite the impression on me in my adolescence. The sentence "Sara's arms unfurled to reveal jutting breasts..." is seared into my memory.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Oh, yes, that book made quite the impression on me in my adolescence. The sentence "Sara's arms unfurled to reveal jutting breasts..." is seared into my memory.

I was 14 at the time it came out. And I read it when it first came out.

 

[donners22]

The New Frontier books have some graphic violence, particularly the later ones, but no worse than the likes of RA Salvatore's work which is aimed at a teen audience.

The only Trek book which made me really uncomfortable was Warped. That's the only book I've ever thrown out (mostly because I thought it was terrible rather than graphic content).

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It's been a long time since Warped came out, and Memory Beta doesn't say a whole lot about it, other than that it's DS9 (which I already knew), that it involved some religious cult, and that it involved some rogue insanity-inducing holosuite technology.

A word about content rating in general:

Content rating, as we know it, originated with the MPAA's ratings system, in 1968. From 1930 until 1968, Hollywood lived and died by a self-censorship code officially called the Production Code, but was universally referred to as the "Hays Code." (At least one classic Warner Bros. cartoon, A Tale of Two Kitties [featuring Babbit and Catstello and introducing the yet-unnamed Tweety], poked fun at it, with the exchange, "Gimmie the bird! Gimmie the bird!" "If da Hays Office would only let me, I'd give him the boid all right!") But by 1968, the Studio System had completely broken down, independent producers -- who weren't signatory to the Code, and didn't feel bound by it -- were running the show, and motion pictures were feeling increased competition from television. And then-new MPAA President Jack Valenti, morally opposed to censorship, was looking for an excuse to replace the Hays Code with something more flexible. And he came up with a simple system of ratings: producers would voluntarily submit their films to a ratings board whose members all had to be parents, and they would give it a rating: "G" - General Audiences; "M" - Mature Audiences; Parental Discretion Advised; "R" - Restricted; and the non-trademarked "X" - No one under 16 admitted. At the time, the expectation was that the ratings would be used only as intended -- as a guide to parents -- and that producers would generally seek the least-restrictive ratings, but wouldn't engineer their films for any specific ratings. They also assumed that the "X" rating would be free from any connotations of why children would not be admitted.

Unfortunately, "M" was confusing: many people thought it was between "R" and "X," rather than between "G" and "R"; this led to its being replaced, first with "GP" (1970 and 1971), then finally with "PG." Worse, the producers of low-budget films targeted at children gave the "G" rating (a rating applied to Planet of the Apes, 2001, True Grit, and the 1968 Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet) a bad name (at least one 1970s sitcom, Maude, if I remember right, had a child complaining about only being allowed to see "dumb movies rated G for kids"), while pornographers took the non-trademarked "X" (a rating applied to A Clockwork Orange, and the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy) as something to brag about, with the result that by the late 1970s, producers would aim for "PG," inserting foul language just to avoid the "G," and going to extaordinary lengths to avoid the "R." This, along with the Rating Board's steadfast refusal to give specifics of why a given film got a given rating came to a head with films like Gremlins, and resulted in the PG-13 rating.