Exploring Strange Old Fics 2025

For the third year in a row, I’m hosting a Dragon Con panel titled “Exploring Strange Old Fics.”  The goal is to look back on some of the early fanworks that have entered the broader cultural consciousness, influenced canon, and even launched careers.  They’re not necessarily “strange” – and the intent is certainly not the make fun – that’s just how you formulate a Trek-related panel title.  But, I do ask for volunteers from the audience to read aloud excerpts from several of these works, as if I’m teaching a terribly pretentious Shakespeare 101 class.

This year, I thought it might be nice to create a list of the works I’m highlighting, with links out to the full text or additional information.  Keep in mind, this is a “Mature” panel, meaning it’s for ages 18 and up only.  That doesn’t mean that every fanwork is also rated as such, but several are.  So, here goes:

Mentioned by not read during the panel were “Between Friends” by Gayle Feyrer and “Genetic Drift” (or) “Grades of Shay” by Russell E. Billings, Robert W. Miracle, Elizabeth Hildebrand, and David E. Brooks, Jr., with help from Scott Marusak.

If you’d like to do your own explorations of strange, old fics, I highly recommend Joan Marie Verba’s book Boldly Writing, and also spending a lot of time poking around Fanlore.org.  If you’re looking for the stories themselves, The FANAC Fan History Project has a large archive of scanned fanzines, and Trekiverse has a large archive of the stories posted on ASC and ASCEM in the early internet days.

But, wait!  What did we read in previous years?  I got you:

Read responsibly!