The Open Doors committee of the OTW is proud to announce that we are now hosting two early Star Trek novels by Jane Land: Kista (1986) and Demeter (1987). These can be found on our Open Doors special collections page and are available for download as .pdfs.
Kista (1986), a novel about Christine Chapel, was described by the author as, “an attempt to rescue one of Star Trek’s female characters from an artificially-imposed case of foolishness.” In it, Chapel still loves Spock, but their developing romance is allowed to be complex, with Chapel being more of a rounded person than she was allowed to be onscreen (as well as finally becoming a doctor!)
Demeter (1987; sequel to Kista ). As Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch wrote in Science fiction audiences: watching Doctor Who and Star Trek: “If Kista focuses on the shifting feelings of Spock and Chapel, its sequel Demeter places their relationship within a larger social context, dealing more directly with how women are treated within the Federation.” The plot “concerns the threat a group of intergalactic drug-runners pose to Demeter, a feminist space colony, a world where women have lived without any contact with men for several generations.” Uhura also plays a large role in this novel, commanding the all female mission to Demeter; Robin Reid has argued for the importance of this novel “within the context of second wave feminism, specifically: the creation of the 1970s feminist utopias (which often featured a lesbian separatist culture, sometimes though not always on a separate planet!)” (Reid, “‘A Room of Our Own:’ Women Writing Women in Fan and Slash Fiction,” ICFA 2009.)
Our thanks to Dr. Robin Reid for organizing the preservation of these works.
Visit the Special Collections page of the Open Doors project today!