Thoughts on The Price of the Phoenix

As someone who didn't really get into fanfiction in earnest until I was already an adult in the age of Ao3, I'm always fascinated to learn more about what the fandom experience was like for earlier generations. Before the modern internet (and especially the efforts of the Organization for Transformative Works) made it easy to find all kinds of fanfic at the click of the mouse, how did people who had creative ideas about new adventures for their favourite characters share their work with others who might be interested in it? How did they know if anyone else was out there who felt the same way about how those two looked at each other in that one episode? How did they find each other?

For Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak, the answer to that last question was apparently at the 1973 "Vul-Con" convention in New Orleans. That meeting would spark a creative partnership that went on to have a lasting influence on Star Trek fandom (or at least, the side of the fandom with strong feelings about the relationship between Kirk and Spock) through such works as Star Trek: The New Voyages, The Prometheus Design, and the book I'm here to talk about today, The Price of the Phoenix. These are traditionally published books I'm talking about, by the way! You may think that the idea of turning your fanfiction into a published novel is a recent trend popularized by serial-number-filers like E.L. James and Cassandra Clare, but you'd be wrong. Visionaries like Myrna Culbreath, Sondra Marshak, and Della Van Hise were doing it already in the 70s and 80s, and they were leaving those serial numbers on. They just went to the companies that owned the intellectual property they were basing their works on and asked if they'd like to publish it, and sometimes, the rights holders said "sure." (Or maybe "sure, but tone down a bit of that gay subtext, hey we said tone it down.") These women were absolute trailblazers, and nobody was doing it like them.

My interest in the novel The Price of the Phoenix specifically comes from the references to it I kept seeing within the lovely community surrounding the convention KiScon. Not that any of what people were talking about came close to giving me an idea of the actual plot of this novel, though—more like it raised enough intriguing questions to make me want to experience finding it out for myself firsthand. The final tipping point came from someone sharing a screenshot of this social media post (which will have to go partially unattributed because I refuse to go on twitter to track down the original):

a social media screenshot (transcribed below)

Click to expand for image transcription

A social media screenshot. One person has shared a picture of some dialogue in the book, with the comment "Star Trek books are so wild" and a crying emoji. The dialogue in the book reads as follows:

'Jim?' he called, 'James.' It was a name he never used.
Kirk's head lifted. 'Yes?'
'I am going to mark you now. It will be my way back to you, for I think that he will keep you from me.'
'Keep me?' Cheeks moving to swallow. Jaw firming. 'Mark me, Spock?'

Finally, another person has commented on the post, "only just realized this was not a conversation they were having while Jim was giving Spock a BJ."

The obvious question this raises is, of course, hang on, if you're telling me they're not describing a blowjob here, then what in the hell is going on? I commented, "I really need to read this book," and almost instantly, someone messaged me to offer to give me their extra copy. This was someone who already owned one copy of The Price of the Phoenix, and had then bought a second one because it had shippier cover art, and was thus willing to mail their first copy internationally just to share it with another fan. That's the level of devotion we're talking about here—I love Kirk/Spock shippers. Knowing virtually nothing about this internet stranger besides a few details about their taste in literary erotica, I happily gave them my full legal deadname and home address. A few weeks later I was the proud owner of both The Price of the Phoenix and its sequel The Fate of the Phoenix, and could find out for myself what exactly Captain Kirk is doing with his mouth in that excerpt, if not the obvious.

So, first thing's first—what is The Price of the Phoenix actually about? Well, it starts in media res, with Captain Kirk having already died (don't worry, he gets better), and his body being beamed back up to the Enterprise. As he watches the sad procession, Dr. McCoy thinks not of his own grief at the loss of his friend, but only of his concern for how Spock will handle losing "the only man he had ever permitted really to reach into his self-imposed prison of Vulcan restraint and to touch his naked soul" (3). This is already so gay I can't believe they got away with it, and I'm on page 3.

We learn that Kirk's death was orchestrated by a mysterious figure named Omne. Seeking to test the Federation's commitment to their beloved Prime Directive, Omne manipulated Kirk into a situation where he would inevitably rush in and interfere with events on an alien planet to save a stranger's life, at the cost of his own. The next step in Omne's plan is to invite Spock back down to his planet, where he shows him that he's used technology beyond the Federation's wildest dreams to resurrect a perfect replica of Kirk, with complete memory of everything that happened before his death. He considers this replica to be his property, and offers to trade the Kirk clone to Spock at the cost of Spock publicly denouncing the Federation (the eponymous price of the phoenix). If Spock refuses, Omne also has another potential buyer in mind—the unnamed Romulan commander from "The Enterprise Incident," who still doesn't get a name any point in this book, and who wants Kirk to help the Romulan empire colonize all of space and/or to just be her personal sex slave. She's an icon and I love her.

Not too far into the narrative, we also get the twist that the original Kirk has been alive this entire time, the body we saw earlier being some other replica or something. So not only does Spock have to try to rescue both Kirks from Omne's massive mazelike mad science facility, but the two Kirks are probably going to have an identity crisis on their hands by the time they get out of there. Also, this is all taking place on a Wild West planet, with most characters running around in cowboy boots and jeans with six-shooters on their hips. The exception to that is the Kirk clone (who eventually gets named "James" to distinguish him from Jim), who spends a lot of the plot naked or almost naked. One of the lines of the book that made me laugh the most was a comment about the underwear he has on beneath a revealing robe only providing "moral support" (39).

Omne is an especially interesting villain, because his penchant for using mysterious powers to test the Federation and just generally fuck around with people reminds me a lot of The Next Generation's recurring antagonist Q. But this book was published in 1977, predating The Motion Picture, let alone TNG. It's likely Culbreath and Marshak were inspired by the proto-Q character Trelane in the TOS episode "The Squire of Gothos," and Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana were probably revisiting the ideas first explored with Trelane when they created Q for the TNG pilot. Still, I want to believe that Omne and this book just might have had some influence on more mainstream "alpha" canon. Maybe Fontana read it—she seems like she was really cool.

And speaking of the word "alpha," boy does everyone in this book like to talk about how much of an "alpha male" Omne is at all times. And by that, they seem to basically mean he's some kind of daddy dom, and I'm not even kidding. There's a scene where he beats the shit out of Kirk, and then completely undresses him to ~~do aftercare~~ treat his wounds, while lecturing him about how now he has to acknowledge Omne as master (80-82). Knowing from the non-fiction book Star Trek Lives! that Marshak was also a big fan of Ayn Rand, I think there's some interesting analysis that could be done tying this specific flavour of horniness, as well as Omne's generally individualist philosophy, to that particular influence. But I have hundreds of other books on my reading list before I'll ever get bored enough to reread The Fountainhead, so stay tuned for that in 20 years maybe.

Anyway, what's more important than how horny this book is about Omne is how deeply horny all the interactions are between Kirk and Spock. First of all, "James" the Kirk clone is also naked during that earlier exchange about "marking" him, and they're having that conversation via mind meld, about "a special kind of mind-link" (29) that Spock is going to create to keep them connected long-distance. (And fans of the idea that Vulcan soulmates are telepathically connected at all times rejoiced.) There's also no other context to explain why the narration focuses so much on the movements of James's cheeks and jaw, so I'm left to imagine that maybe that bit of suggestive description is just supposed to imply some kind of mind-blowjob after all. It certainly wouldn't be the only time this book implies something sexual and/or romantic is going on with Kirk and Spock—to name just a couple more examples, Omne calls James "Sleeping Beauty" and asks if Spock would like to wake him "in the traditional manner" (21), and when James does briefly kiss the Romulan commander a little while after that, he then tells her that if she wants anything more than that, she'd have to "take that up with Spock first" (42). It's so clearly a book written by shippers that I can't imagine any mainstream media franchise allowing it to exist in traditionally published form today—I think it was only able to slip under the radar because it was written in a time when the existence of "slash" fanfic wasn't broadly known about outside of the niche communities dedicated to it.

And that's what makes it so fun to read as someone interested in fandom history. It's really interesting to me how directly comparable it is to the fanfiction that's still being written today, nearly half a century after its publication. If I picked a random novel-length fic on Ao3 to read right now, it would likely be a very similar experience, in both its positive and negative qualities. There are aspects to Marshak and Culbreath's writing that can feel a bit amateurish at times. The details of the plot can be a little hard to follow, and they have some strange stylistic quirks that are occasionally distracting (most notably their—habit—of depicting the—halting—way Star Trek TOS characters sometimes speak with—constant—dashes in the dialogue—like—this.) But these flaws are easy to overlook for a reader who appreciates the way the story is clearly crafted with love—with attention to the details of canon, devotion to the characters, and an obvious passion for exploring those characters' relationships to each other. It may not be the kind of story a more casual Star Trek fan would be interested in, but those who are as emotionally invested in the Kirk/Spock relationship as these writers clearly were will no doubt find the joy they took in creating this story infectious. Personally, it left me wanting more, and I'm looking forward to reading the continuation of the story in The Fate of the Phoenix, as well as continuing my general studies of Star Trek fandom history.