I can't believe it's not butter

Slash fiction proliferates on the internet, but it is rare to find it in bookstores. I read these stories on the web because it's hard to find a book in your average suburban bookstore that scratches this particular itch. And yet there are exceptions, where you find books published as straight fiction that seem to have their roots in slash.

The first example that comes to mind is the infamous Star Trek novel "The Price of the Phoenix" by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. I was fairly young when I read this story, but even then I sensed that there was something more going on than met the eye, that there were scenes cut out, and I was pretty darn sure that there was a lot more going on between Captain Kirk and his captor than the authors were telling me about. At that time I didn't know that slash fiction existed, and didn't know that there was a wide body of mimeographed slash being circulated among Star Trek fans. But having read this novel, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Most recently, Carol Berg's debut novel "Transformation" set off my slash detector. Nowhere in the book is there an explicit reference to a homosexual relationship between the prince and the slave who becomes his friend. There aren't even veiled references. And yet so much of the writing felt like a slash novel, it was as if all of the slash scenes had been carefully erased, but you could still see the vague outlines of where they used to be. Not that this is a bad book, in fact I highly enjoyed it. But I can't help wondering if somewhere there is an "author's cut" version that has all the slash scenes restored.

If there was, I would buy it.