These romantic undertones between Spock and James T. Kirk were brought to the attention of the office of the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, who made Pocket Books recall the first edition.

Kirk informs Spock that Starfleet intelligence has discovered that the Romulans are attempting to use time travel and are sending more ships to investigate.

Whilst en route, Spock enters pon farr and finds that he is linked to Kirk, but mates with the Romulan Thea to allow it to pass.

[3] 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.

At some point, someone went through the manuscript and marked the pages which Paramount had asked to be removed with the letters "STET",[1] which is a Latin term used by proofreaders to tell the printer to disregard earlier changes.

[1] 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.

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.

[8] 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.

[10] In Elizabeth Woledge's article for Extrapolation, entitled "From Slash to the Mainstream: Female Writers and Gender Blending Men", she describes Killing Time as "erotic but not sexual" and said that Spock and Kirk both "combine masculine and feminine imagery".