Excerpt:

Fans had been active in creating and shaping science fiction since the days of Hugo Gernsback, but Trek was the first big media franchise to engage fans in that way—and the fans reacted in kind by creating media-oriented conventions of their own. “Isaac Asimov remembers casually walking over to the first Star Trek convention in the 1970s, expecting it to be a relatively small affair for maybe a few hundred fans at most,” says Lisa Yaszek, a Georgia Tech professor and author of Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. “But when he got there, he was surprised and delighted to see thousands of fans patiently waiting to get into a venue that, as it turned out, was far too small to accommodate everyone there.”

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