Development
The original manuscript of Killing Time included Kirk/Spock based slash fiction overtones. Author Della van Hise had previously written slash fan fiction about the two characters. When that manuscript was sent by Pocket Books for approval by Paramount Studios, the pages with the slash fiction were marked to be edited out of the eventual novel. It was returned, but at the time Pocket Books were between editors as Mimi Panich had just left, and her replacement Karen Haas had not yet arrived. At some point, someone went through the manuscript and marked the pages which Paramount had asked to be removed with the letters "STET", which is a Latin term used by proofreaders to tell the printer to disregard earlier changes.
Pocket Books published 250,000 copies of Killing Time in the first print run. After the publishing, Gene Roddenberry's assistant, Richard Arnold, received a letter from a reader stating that the book was suggesting a romantic link between Kirk and Spock. This was passed to Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, who reportedly "became livid". Following his complaints to Pocket Books, the first print run of the novel was recalled and destroyed. Pocket Books had already shipped between 100,000 to 150,000 copies of the book to retailers. When the news broke, fans began purchasing the novels before they could be removed from the shelves as the first edition was expected to become a collector's item. Van Hise later said of that version of the novel, "If someone went looking for 'questionable material', in Killing Time, they could find it... Just as beauty is in supposedly in the mind of the beholder, so is questionable material." More than fifty changes were made to the novel before it was republished as a second edition.
Following the issues with the publishing of Killing Time, there was increased oversight by Roddenberry's staff regarding the novels published by Pocket Books. This was delegated to Arnold, and would later cause confusion for Pocket Books as comments would be sent back and it was sometimes unclear whether they were from Roddenberry or Arnold. These comments rejected plot developments in the novels where they were stepping out of the bounds set by the television series. Rumours subsequently spread that there was an alternative version of the manuscript with more explicit Kirk/Spock slash details, something that Van Hise later denied.
Read more about this topic: Killing Time (Star Trek Novel)
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