Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction (fiction concerning characters or settings originally created by others) that portrays sexual or romantic relationships between two characters of the same sex. The term takes its name from the use of the "/" slash used to separate the names of the paired characters, as distinct from the "&" ampersand conventionally used to separate the names of characters in friendship fiction (which portrays characters in non-sexual relationships). Slash fiction is written primarily by women and targeted to a female audience.

Kirk/Spock, also commonly referred to as "K/S" and based on characters from the 1966-1969 television series "Star Trek", was the first prominent slash pairing to appear in English-language fan fiction. Indeed, the term "slash" derives from the expression "Kirk slash Spock". The first K/S stories appear to have been written in England in the late 1960s and privately circulated. The earliest datable story, "The Ring of Shoshern", was written in 1968, but was not published until 1987. The first K/S story to be published is Diane Marchant's "A Fragment out of Time", which appeared in the fanzine Grup #3 in 1974. Romance in general, and this pairing in particular, was not initially popular, and while stories continued to be written and privately circulated, it was not until June 1976 that Gerry Downes' Alternative: Epilog to Orion, the second published piece of K/S and first stand-alone K/S zine, appeared. Thereafter, K/S fiction became increasingly popular, and by 2002 more than 500 K/S zines had been published. The first attributed K/S story to be published on the internet, Killashandra's "Turning Point", was posted to the Usenet group alt.startrek.creative in January 1996. The SciFi Channel's decision to rerun the "Star Trek" television series in the late 1990s fueled an explosion of K/S fiction on the internet, which peaked in 2000 at nearly 900 story posts. Although the number of Usenet story posts has declined considerably since 2000, K/S remains a large component of on-line fan fiction.

Sources:

"Kirk/Spock", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk/Spock (accessed 1/22/2007)

Jenna Sinclair, K/S Zine Database, http://www.beyonddreamspress.com/database.htm (accessed 3/23/2007).

Jenna Sinclair, A Short History of Early K/S, http://www.beyonddreamspress.com/history.htm (accessed 3/23/2007).