I sat down on the empty stairs overlooking an even emptier lecture hall on the San Diego State campus. From my vantage point near the dais I scanned the seats and rows of empty aisles to see if anyone still lingered after the meeting. Only my very understanding girlfriend was still there. I took a deep breath, held it for a moment and let out a howl of pure joy. I was a civilian again. I was no longer the lord-high master and vice-president of Southern California’s largest, noisiest, and most troublesome science fiction club. S.T.A.R. San Diego was now my past. And it was a past I didn’t care to dwell on. But somehow as I sat there, I couldn’t help think of all the things that had gone on in this stuffy lecture hall in the name of science fiction.

Trek was my holy word. And S.T.A.R. drew me much the way modern religious cults draw young people who need a set of values to hang onto.

S.T.A.R. stood for the Star Trek Association for Revival and it was an organization with branches in Utah, New York, and even Japan. San Diego had the biggest branch of S.T.A.R. (300 members at its peak) and as such most California fans simply referred to our branch as S.T.A.R. The club’s purpose varied, depending on who the officers were that were running the club at the moment. When the San Diego branch was started in October of 1973, its purpose was to meet once a month and write letters, sign petitions and start mail-in campaigns to NBC in hopes that enough pressure would force the network to put the Star Trek serials back into production.

In August of 1977 another mutant wondered how Seven Up and ice would make my car run and so dumped a whole bottle full into my car's gas tank.

Other groups of officers who met later on in the club’s history structured the club more around science fiction in general. They would meet to promote sci-fi in films, on TV, in print or even pulp magazines. The club met every month in what seemed like a mini-costume ball in order to promote their views. They might have a well-known science-fiction author such as Theodore Sturgeon come to speak, or perhaps show a first-rate science fiction film, or better yet, a bootleg episode of one of the better sci-fi TV shows. Sometimes the club would meet just to have fun at a picnic, or go to a screening of the latest sci-fi movie en mass, often with some of the more garish members of the club decked out in bizarre costumes. It was often my job to explain the more peculiar members to the management, something I disliked intensely. How do you explain to the manager of even the Ken theater that your club promotes science fiction the way the California Dairymen’s Association promotes milk?It isn’t easy as you try to explain the Klingons harassing the ushers or the other member done up as a huge, furry, pink Tribble.

Ah yes, Star Trek. Everybody knows about that. The very title conjures up badly edited episodes of the starship Enterprise hulking in orbit, Captain Kirk calling for warp eight and Dr. McCoy reporting the death of yet another crewman. It was a show that people could get excited about. It set down an appealing if sometimes shallow code of ethics and it had a sugar-coated optimism that was a small lift in a dismal world. It was almost complete as a dogma. What wasn’t completed by the TV show was willingly furnished by authors and artists willing to extrapolate on someone else’s work for a quick buck. In other words it had all the trappings of a religion. Its followers were called Trekkies.

I was a Trekkie. Trek was my holy word. And S.T.A.R. drew me much the way modern religious cults draw young people who need a set of values to hang onto. Getting in was hard. Oh, you could be a follower in S.T.A.R., you just couldn’t participate in the internal workings. Jan and her crew saw to that. Jan was S.T.A.R. San Diego’s founder and first president. Being a devout Christian, the high moral tone and lofty philosophies of Star Trek appealed to Jan. That was something many of us could never quite reconcile since science fiction seems to be so anti-religion. Jan, a recent San Diego State graduate in English, founded S.T.A.R. in her living room in the State College area one evening in 1973, moved it to San Diego State campus a year later when it got too large, and kept an iron-fisted control over the club for the next two years. While she was president, you couldn’t cut your way into the top administration with a laser beam. If you wanted any input into club activities that was just too bad. It was her club and if you caused any trouble you would be taken care of.

How a Christian could be so spiteful I never quite figured out, but I did come to realize that Jan was the most amoral person I had ever met. She felt she could never be wrong because of her religion and she had a doublethink circuit that protected her from guilt. If you got on her bad side she could make a few phone calls and have the rest of the club treating you like a leper. Jan set the tone for the club. Government by gossip and innuendo. The gossip and small-town style of meddling in others’ business earned the club its nickname. The Peyton Place of Outer Space.

The gossip was usually of the ‘‘Have you stopped beating your wife?” type. Jan always seemed to use the telephone to do her dirty work. S.T.A.R. used the telephone the way Buck Rogers used his disintegrator pistol. In the time it took a member to snap off a seven-digit number, the fortunes of a rival club member could be totally destroyed. Rumor mongering was tuned to a fine and lethal art. I hated the phone. It was an instrument of torture. Some member was always calling me up, accusing me of rigging elections, dipping into the club treasury, or telling me what someone else had said about me. It seemed I had no private life as long as I was a club officer. I finally realized that if you’re insignificant in the real world, you find a club like S.T.A.R. and make trouble for the other members. It gave you a feeling of power you couldn’t find out there in the real world.

People like myself just happened to be the most obvious targets. The misfits, or mutants as I liked to call them, gave me many problems. I thought back to my battles with the mutants. There was Jack the avenging angel, a psychology major from Mesa, the one who accused me and my president, Paula, of rigging an election to get into club office. Jack was one of those nervous, insecure types who couldn't quite cut it in the real world. He thought he was super Space Detective Perry Rhodan and he thought he smelled foul play when the club publications officer hadn’t gotten out notice of the September, 1977 elections quite on time.

So Jack demanded a recall. And if S.T.A.R. had an avenging angel, it also had a devil bent on vengeance. Her name was Carrie and she pushed Jack’s buttons. She was brilliant, but so typical of so many science-fiction fans. She couldn’t handle the real world, the straights as she called them. She had a large following in the club and was bent on vengeance against me. I had rejected her and she wasn’t used to that. Men groveled at her feet. She had a nice body and always wore skimpy science-fiction costumes to show it off. She didn’t understand how any man could reject her. By now the club president, Paula, not exactly the most durable individual, got fed up and left the running of the club to me, its vice-president. I didn’t want it. There I was in October, 1976 at S.T.A.R.’s annual masquerade costume ball held in SDSU’s Casa Real, with Jack up front putting on a skit about me thinly disguised as a skit about Space: 1999.

“It’s time for a change at the top. Better leadership. Remove Commander Koenig! New government now!” Jack and his skit members chanted. To this day Jack doesn’t realize he has several of my friends to thank for saving his life. As master of ceremonies I was decked out in a tuxedo complete with walking stick.

“Where are you going?” one of my friends shouted as I lunged toward the stage Jack and his minions were standing on.

“I’m going to see if that cretin can be given a sufficiently large dose of reality if I wrap this walking stick around his head! ” I yelled back, brandishing the stick like an ancient rapier to keep them away. Someone pulled the stick from my hands and grabbed me.

“What do you want to go to jail for? If you beat up that wimp the judge will throw the book at you for being cruel to the handicapped. Calm down. I’ll keep the stick,” my friend said. And I had to admit he was right. I did toy briefly with the idea of wrapping the microphone cord around Jack’s neck but then there would be nothing to announce the costume competition winners with. My friends were right, Jack's revolution came to nought. But I had lost my president and the respect of many of the members as well. And I lost a good set of radial tires. Some malcon tent decided to see if I could levitate my car home after he took a switchblade to my Michelins.

In August of 1977 another mutant wondered how Seven Up and ice would make my car run and so dumped a whole bottle full into my car's gas tank while we were at S.T.A.R. ’s annual picnic at El Monte Park. Over the next few months my car donated more of its accessories to mutants’ toy boxes. But they would have to find someone else to pick on for I was ready to retire.

Jan wasn't done with the club, however. She had come out of suspended animation to make sure that the club never again fell into the hands of an infidel such as myself. After catching Jan in many stories that were somewhat less than true, I decided my club couldn’t fall back into her hands. Even though I may have been bothered with the club, it’s hard to abandon a club you’ve labored for over two years. I just couldn’t see letting Jan put in her handpicked candidate and once again running the club by gossip and innuendo. I helped a young woman named Bethy become the president of S.T.A.R. Bethy was just what the club needed. She was energetic, enthusiastic and abrasive when the task called for it. Bethy didn’t care for taking crap off anyone. But Jan disliked Bethy for reasons of her own and now dislikes me even more. Jan has a saying she quotes often, “Don’t get mad, get even.” I’m still waiting with interest to see what Jan has up her sleeve. It ought to be worthy of Darth Vader himself.

I thought about some of the other people I had met. There was Brad Wehrmacht, furnisher of exotic firearms. He was always coming up to me, whipping an unusual firearm out from under his jacket and asking, “Wanna see my Pope-killer? You could drop the old pontiff right in the middle of a mass and no one would even hear it go off! ’ ’ I wasn’t quite sure what Brad was going to be doing in a few years, but I’m sure either the CIA or the Gambino family could use his services. And then I thought about my old friend Dicky Heilbaum. His favorite activity was building replicas of the hardware seen in sci-fi movies. Rayguns, radios, rocketships, Dicky built them all. He had a voice like an air raid siren winding down. Dicky was so exacting, as so many sci-fi fans seem to be, that if there was a goof in the way the movie prop was built, Dicky copied it faithfully. Broken parts, dented spaceship hulls, sloppily applied paint, Dicky copied it so it would be exact. I started to think about some of the other people and decided I would sort them out later when I wrote a book about science-fiction fans.

I thought about the types of people in general who had joined S.T.A.R. Most of the members were the kind who had IQs of 170. There were the individuals who simply thought science fiction was a taste of the future. Then there were those people who were looking for a good, temporary fantasy to take the edge off a boring, indifferent world. And then there were the misfits or the mutants as I called them. They retreated into make-believe and stayed there because they found it so difficult to deal with the real world. And some of the mutants were pretty good politicians. With their constant demands for change in the club or more democracy, or just meddling in my private life they could keep the club in an uproar.

I thought about how science fiction was changing. Star Wars had just hit the scene and Star Trek was being quickly forgotten. More happened in the first five minutes of Star Wars than happened in all three years Star Trek ran on television. It was becoming fashionable to like science fiction and more fans came out of the closet as R2D2 and C-3PO became household words. Darth Vader showed up in almost as many political cartoons as Jimmy Carter. Star Wars was great fun and I loved it, but there was just something about popularizing science fiction for the masses. It lost something much the same way owning a Volkswagen loses much of its charm when everyone on the street buys one. Where sci-fi fans had once been unique, now there were even science-fiction exploitation movies, like Invasion of the Saucers and Laserbolt. It was definitely time to leave.

I bowed out of S.T.A.R. this last January and left it to the younger and stronger. S.T.A.R. no longer stands for the Star Trek Association for Revival. They changed it to just STAR and it stands for nothing. It’s a catchy name for a science-fiction club. Though members are now mostly junior high and early high school students instead of college students, the fun is back and to a large extent the credit goes to Bethy. The members themselves should take a bow. They show a willingness to pitch in and help. Jan and her followers have started a new club and have taken much of the pettiness with them. The new club. Infinity One, is torn by the same old pettiness, jealousies, and phone calls that STAR use’d to have. And it seems only right, for few of them were able to grow wiser, only older. Jan and her crew still try to get in STAR’S way occasionally; the Theodore Sturgeon lecture was interrupted by a bomb scare, for example. But they can do little damage and change even less. The real changes are coming from the outside world. Science fiction is blossoming, some of it is good and some of it is just awful. But at least now there is a choice for those who enjoy the genre.