Was Spock the First Vulcan in Starfleet? (Betteridge's Law Says No, So What Is the Real Question?)

Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

Well, many people say this, including the official Star Trek web site, but if you actually look at the "canon," there's no evidence for it. It's never said on screen, and though it can't be disproven, there's some evidence against it: The USS Intrepid has a crew of four hundred Vulcans, and did they all join after Spock? Would a founding member of the Federation really not send a single student to the Academy in a century? Discovery has provided further evidence against by showing us a Vulcan admiral in the 2250s, when Spock was a lieutenant; if Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, Terral had an exceptional career.

But lots of people are happy to explain that your fanon misconceptions are wrong. I am not going to do that today.

A conversation on the TrekBBS led me to a somewhat more interesting question: why do people think this?

A lot of fanon can be traced back to some kind of semi-official origin, even if it was never said on screen. For example, some people assert that Kirk was the youngest ever captain in Starfleet. This was never stated on screen, but it was part of Kirk's bio in The Making of Star Trek (1968) by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. Lots of random pieces of Star Trek fanon have their roots in speculation by Michael and Denise Okuda, authors of the Star Trek Encyclopedia (1994) and Star Trek Chronology (1993). But as author Chistopher L. Bennett pointed out on that thread, the idea of Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet has no such clear origin: "People always talk about it as if it were a documented fact, part of the unquestioned conventional wisdom of Trek lore. Somewhere, somehow, it must have gotten written down and propagated. The question is, what's the earliest verifiable published statement of the myth?"

Well, there is the kind of question I like to solve!

Of course, there's no clear answer. But with Google Books, the Internet Archive, the Fanlore wiki, and the help of some other TrekBBS posters, this is what I can piece together:

• 1982: William Rotsler's Star Trek II Biographies (the book that gave us "Nyota" as Uhura's first name, not canonized until 2009) calls him "the only Vulcan attending" the Academy and states "that Vulcans were a rarity in Starfleet in his time," implying he is not the first.
  
• 1986: The novel Dreadnought! by Diane Carey calls Spock "the first Vulcan computer expert in Starfleet." 
• 1988: Carey's novel Final Frontier calls Spock "first of his kind in Starfleet"; the novel Memory Prime by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens calls Spock "[f]irst Vulcan through the Academy."
• 1989: The unauthorized reference work The Trek Crew Book by James Van Hise includes a detailed biography of Spock; it seems to indicate that he is the first Vulcan in Starfleet Academy Command School, but not necessarily the Academy itself.
  
• 1994: The first edition of The Star Trek Encyclopedia calls Spock the "first Vulcan to enlist in the Federation Starfleet."
• 1995: The third edition of the Star Trek Concordance calls Spock the first Vulcan in Starfleet, citing it to the episode "Whom Gods Destroy." (This "fact" isn't in the 1969 or 1976 editions.)
  
• 1996: By this point, the "first Vulcan" fact seems to be all over the novels, particularly ones by Diane Carey, but it's worth highlighting that the timeline in the Starfleet Academy middle-grade novels calls Spock "the first Vulcan student" at the Academy. (This timeline is adapted from the Star Trek Chronology, but as far as I can tell, the idea doesn't appear there.) The first of those novels is all about Spock deciding to attend the Academy, and draws on the first-in-Starfleet concept.
  
• 1996: The fanzine Star Born is published, about Spock's Academy days, where he was its first Vulcan student.
  

I think partially what's notable are the omissions. It doesn't appear in books or novels until 1988, which makes me think it wasn't widespread in fandom prior to that. The Internet Archive includes a number of fanworks-- and you would think that fan writers would be all over, "Spock, first Vulcan in Starfleet." But when I search "first Vulcan," what I usually come up with is that he's the first Vulcan/human hybrid. Surely some fan writer in the 1980s would have wrote about how sad it was for Spock to be the only Vulcan at the Academy. Script editor D. C. Fontana is sometime a source of fanon lore, but in fact her 1989 novel Vulcan's Glory has a number of Vulcans on the Enterprise in addition to Spock during the Pike era, so she didn't think he was first in Starfleet either.

The idea doesn't even make it into Star Trek (2009), which seems like the exact kind of place you might expect it, given its emphasis on making everyone involved super-exceptional.

Edgar Governo looked at the fanzine articles collected in the Best of Trek book series, and noted, "There are many, many extrapolative/speculative pieces about Spock's life and Vulcans in general throughout The Best of Trek, but a cursory search hasn't so far revealed any asserting that he was the first Vulcan in Starfleet." TrekBBS poster Daddy Todd adds that "Gerrold doesn’t mention it in WoST [1973's The World of Star Trek]. Neither Asherman’s first edition Compendium [1981] or the 1967 Writer’s Guide make the claim." These are all places I would expect to see a widely quoted piece of fanon lore originate, or at least be cited-- many other ones originate in these texts.

(By contrast, if I search the Internet Archive for references to Kirk being the youngest captain in Starfleet history, another piece of fanon never stated on screen, I get hits in fanzines going back to 1980, and pro novels from the mid-1980s.)

Star Trek: The First Adventure concept art, c. Mar. 1989
(courtesy Memory Alpha)

One of my most noteworthy discoveries is that Spock being the first Vulcan at the Academy was central to the proposed but unmade film Starfleet Academy, also called The First Adventure. This was the brainchild of Harve Bennett and Ralph Winter (both producers on most of the original films); it would have been a prequel "about this young cocky character on a farm who goes to flight school and meets up with the first alien that comes from Vulcan" (Cinefantastique, vol. 22, no. 5, p. 28). A summary of the script at Ain't It Cool News confirms that it calls Spock the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

They came up with the idea while making Star Trek IV, and Bennett and David Loughery got the go-ahead for a script while making Star Trek V; it was pitched as Star Trek VI, but ultimately didn't go anywhere. (Well, until J. J. Abrams came along!) That would mean the script was being written in 1989, or possibly late 1988, right around the same time the Spock-as-first-Vulcan meme begins manifesting. Did discussions of the in-development script leak out into fandom and get picked up by writers? It's a tempting idea, but the timing is wrong, given Final Frontier came out in January 1988. Maybe Loughery and/or Bennett read Final Frontier? It's actually not a focal point of Final Frontier, though, just a small aside by Kirk in free indirect discourse when thinking about Spock.

What is surprising here is how late this concept seems to emerge. If you poke around, you find a lot of people asserting it came out of fandom in the 1970s... but this has as little justification as the idea of Spock being the first does!

I mean, it's not impossible. Maybe it's written down somewhere not digitized and where no one I've asked has looked, or maybe it wasn't written down at all... If someone has a pre-1988 citation for the concept, I would be hyped to see it, but it really does seem like the meme comes out of nowhere in 1988 and cements itself pretty fast, probably thanks to the Encyclopedia.

If this is true, it's an interesting case study in how an idea can take root so quickly that it seems like it's been there all along, when in fact, it hasn't... even if it's an idea you don't believe in!

Federation Standard Becomes Standard

There are things that you just know as a fan of something, things you picked up from fan cultural osmosis: Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, Uhura's first name is Nyota, transwarp drive failed after The Search for Spock, Captain Pike commanded two five-year missions on the Enterprise. I don't know where I picked these things up from, but somehow I knew them.

People call these things fanon: "fan canon." Though given the adjective form of canon is canonical, surely they should call them fanonical... no? Okay.

Fanon is often contradicted, and then people get mad about it. Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet was contradicted by the appearance of T'Pol 110 years earlier on Enterprise, though she only joined Starfleet in season four. But you can squint and argue that she only joined the Earth Starfleet, not the Federation one that came later. But what you should really note is that:

1. No one on the original series ever actually described Spock as the first Vulcan in Starfleet.
2. Circumstantial evidence is against it. In "The Immunity Syndrome," we learn of (though we do not see) the USS Intrepid, a starship with an entirely Vulcan crew, numbering 400. It seems somewhat unlikely that all 400 Vulcans could have joined Starfleet after Spock, especially given at least one would need to be of higher rank.

Sometime, though, fanon is confirmed. Uhura's first name was given as Nyota in a 1982 book, and used in most books since then. However, it was not used on screen until 2009, in the first reboot film!

Recently this happened again, and I was surprised to realize that the thing to become canon was not in fact already canon. Season 2, episode of Star Trek: Discovery, "New Eden," mentions "Federation Standard" as the language the main characters are speaking. Something I did not realize until logging onto the Internet after watching was that it was the first canonical reference to Federation Standard. But I just knew-- had always known-- that the language was called Federation Standard.

A little bit of research, and I'm still not exactly sure where the term came from. It was being used in novels in the 1980s, which is probably how come I assimilated it.

What I wonder, though, is if the writers of Discovery actually knew what they were doing when they used the term. Did they know they were "canonizing" a long-standing piece of fanon at long last? Or did writers Vaun Wilmott and Sean Cochran think, like me, that the term already was canon, and thus inadvertently made it so?

Truth and Nontruth in Star Trek: Not All of It's Real, But All the Good Bits I Can Remember Are

Periodically, threads turn up on the kind of websites I frequent that ask, "What Star Trek books / Doctor Who audio dramas / Star Wars comics do you consider part of your personal canon?" Or, worse, "head-canon," a word which is just ugly.

Head-cannon: D'harhan from Star Wars.

I don't usually participate in these discussions, because I don't think I think of canon that way. Now, I'm not saying I'm one of those holier-than-thou pedants who turns up to canon discussions to say, "Well, actually, the term 'personal canon' is an oxymoron because the word 'canon' implies an authority making the decision blah blah blah."* No, I just think that the question describes something more rigid than the way I actually think about these things. I don't go, "Well, Prime Directive, that's in the personal canon, but Enterprise: The First Adventure is right out. And because Prime Directive is referenced by Traitor Winds, then Traitor Winds must also be in, but Enterprise: The First Adventure is a semi-prequel to The Entropy Effect, and so by the transitive property of canon, that's disqualified. Destiny is in, but only scenes beginning on odd-numbered stardates. And so on."

No, I think that the way we decide what's "real" and what's not "real" in the context of a fictional universe is much more flexible than that.† Let's move from these weird hypotheticals I've been using and get specific.

Star Trek is the universe I've probably spent the most time in (though it's not quite my First Fandom). I don't know exactly when I read my first Star Trek book, but I think it must have been around the fifth grade or so. As a result there are a number of things I accept as "true" for the Star Trek universe because I read them as books when I was a kid, and thus they were absorbed into my conception of the universe itself. Never mind that the books aren't "canon," that didn't cross my mind, and it still doesn't most of the time.

Rather, there are just "facts" that I know to be true in the context of Star Trek. Take Greg Bear's 1984 novel Corona. I actually don't really remember much about it, but what I do remember is that-- in an aside-- it's mentioned that the Klingons, the Romulans, and an alien race original to the novel, the Kshatriyans, share a common ancestor. Well, given Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcans, that means the Vulcans must be part of that equation too. For me, this is just a basic assumption of the Star Trek universe, it comes up without me consciously deciding, "Aha, Corona is designated 'HEAD CANON, PART OF'."

Jeri Taylor, executive producer of Voyager, wrote an excellent novel called Mosaic, about how Kathryn Janeway came up the ranks of Starfleet, from a young cadet to a tyro science officer to a commander. It would be impossible for me to think of the character of Captain Janeway and not imagine that book's events as her history. It always has been. Why pretend she has no history when she has this one?

Back in the day, Kate Mulgrew would read you the story herself-- on two whole cassettes!

Do you know there's a book (actually a whole series of 'em) co-written by William Shatner where the Borg and the Romulans team up to bring Captain Kirk back to life? Now, Captain Kirk is still dead in my head canon, but the first one, The Return, has some of the coolest stuff that has ever been written about the Borg. In my Star Trek, the Borg totally combine eight cubes to make one even bigger cube, assimilate dogs to turn them into guard drones, and pause to run a diagnostic if you ask, "Are you defective?"

This is kind of like the supercube described in The Return, except I don't think there's the clear delineation between constituent cubes. The Return posits that all Borg cubes are made up of smaller cubes, hence why they all have so many redundant systems. This image is from a videogame, I think.

Or, even before I got to Time's Enemy in my Deep Space Nine rewatch/reread, I had it in the back of my head that Jem'Hadar always spoke the languages of their enemies in front of their enemies so that no one could learn their codes. This is actually superseded by on-screen dialogue in a later episode, but I don't care, because the idea given in Time's Enemy is too good to discard.

For me, these stories aren't canon, and they aren't not canon, either. They're just part and parcel of the large, weird tapestry we call Star Trek, and they inform how I think it works on a fundamental level. Even if the canon goes on to contradict them (as it already has in some cases), I will likely always believe these facts to be true. Inasmuch as any aspect of Star Trek is true.

Which is to say completely true.

* Or, if you want to be even more obnoxious, you can point out that properly "canon" is a noun: books aren't canon, they're canonical.
† Unless you're hired by a rights-holder to write some fiction set in that universe, but as that hasn't happened to me in five years, I don't really worry about it.