10
FANDOM
EVEN AS the controversy raged over the New Wave and the extraliterary claims of the traditional writers were advanced, the outside critical establishment generally kept its customary distance. Every once in a while during those years, an eminence such as Kingsley Amis or Anthony Burgess would lend support and fuel to the revolutionaries, usually with a brickbat or two at the old guard and SF in general. Fortunately, thanks to the loosely organized kingdom of science fiction fans, this ill-concealed disdain never diminished the ability of SF writers to develop their talents and be judged as their work progressed. Through fandom, a unique system for granting and withholding rewards had been created that continues to help science fiction flourish despite the literary world’s unwillingness to become familiar with the goals and standards of SF.
Fandom is the loosely organized realm of the science fiction fans. “Fan” has a special meaning when applied to the science fiction field, where it is not to be taken in the loose sense of aficionado, although that is an original synonym. A science fiction fan is not merely one who consumes or observes, who watches, no matter how worshipfully and attentively, as may be the case with a sports fan or a fan of popular music or a devotee of the works of Agatha Christie. SF fandom is made up of people engaging in one or more of the following activities: participating in local science fiction clubs or discussion groups (including the bulletin boards and discussion groups of the Internet); writing letters to magazines that publish SF; writing letters to other SF fans; attending regional or national SF conventions; collecting SF or related materials; publishing or participating in amateur publications about SF; publishing or participating in publications about SF fandom (not necessarily about science fiction directly).
A person who reads only SF, even if he or she reads a great deal of it, but does not engage in any of these activities is not part of the world of fandom and for the sake of clarity will be referred to as an SF reader rather than a fan. The great majority of SF readers—including most omnivores and chronics—in this strict sense are not fans.
Fans make up only a small part, perhaps 5 percent, of the SF audience. However, they play a central and crucial role in making the SF field what it is. Without fandom, SF might never have established itself as a genre, might well have perished long ago. The activities of fans have kept it alive and vigorous.
Local clubs and discussion groups were promoted by Hugo Gernsback in the late 1920s to focus support of Amazing Stories. They have repeatedly flourished and disappeared throughout the history of the field across the whole English-speaking world, gathering local SF readers together into groups and providing foci for SF-related activities. Even today, many local groups exist, some large and decades-old, some young and transitory—it only takes one fan to start such a group, to gather like-minded locals into a group where one makes “science fiction friends.”
The nuclei of the earliest SF clubs were those readers who wrote letters of commentary to the SF magazines and thus announced their existence and interest. Over the years, letters to the magazines have become and remained one of the centers of fan activity, the traditional form of audience response and communication to magazine SF. And these letters, often published in the extensive letter columns of the magazines themselves, rapidly led to personal correspondence among the letter writers, direct communication between fans.
Fans are often indefatigable letter writers and maintain a number of active exchanges of letters with other fans around the world, many of whom they see in person only once or twice a decade, some of whom they never have met in the flesh. Yet a fan’s correspondents may be among her or his closest and most intimate friends, science fiction friends because they made contact through science fiction, even though SF may literally never be discussed in the letters. Since the 1930s, fans have traveled all over the country, and the world on many occasions, with the sole purpose of seeing some of their SF friends in person. Part of the impetus for early SF conventions came from the opportunity such gatherings provided to meet unseen friends—and enemies too, for the fan community has always been a hotbed of disagreement among factions representing differing attitudes toward SF and toward fandom.
The stories of the early SF conventions that have come down to the present through such fan histories as Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm ([please note the implications of such a title] Atlanta: Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, 1954) and Harry Warner, Jr.’s two volumes, All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969) and A Wealth of Fable (Chicago: Advent, 1992), that are filled with crazy stunts, love affairs, political squabbles, conflict, desperate seriousness, acts of heroism and generosity, all the drama of confronting in the flesh people whose lives are intimately entwined with yours, but whom you rarely see. No other phenomenon of the SF field points toward its unique nature so directly as does the SF convention, where from the beginning fans and professionals mixed and confronted each other and themselves. Conventions today are the most visible SF activity. As was discussed in Chapter 1, conventions have now grown in number and size to the point where attendance is often in the thousands, and there are multiple conventions available to attend in different parts of the U.S. on nearly every weekend of the year; thus convention attendance has become one of the most frequent fan activities, and perhaps the primary conduit of SF readers into fandom nowadays. Convention activities (the personal interactions as well as the program) are a constant subject of discussion in correspondence among fans and in the amateur magazines.
While the collecting of SF magazines, books, artwork, and other paraphernalia may be pursued in isolation, it has most often led to communication with fans and other fan activities. In the early days of the field, each issue of every magazine was a rare occurrence, to be treasured and preserved, read by you and your friends. Books containing or devoted to SF were published infrequently, quickly becoming scarce and desirable. As the field grew, specialty book publishers were founded, such as Arkham House, Fantasy Press, and Gnome Press, to publish in permanent form the important authors of the field for the fans who preserved and collected the material. Now there are and have been for years a variety of book dealers, both mail order and those operating specialized open stores, who serve as sources for SF material to read and collect, and as conduits for information about the activities of fans and collectors. Again, one may be a reader and collector without being a fan, but collecting is a characteristic fan activity. The degree of a collector’s involvement with other fans determines whether or not that collector is a fan. A fan is someone knowingly involved in “fandom,” the world of fans.
The publication of amateur magazines devoted to science fiction began in the early 1930s as a means of communication and self-expression beyond letter writing among fans. Newsletters, public letters, magazines of fiction and nonfiction were spawned in significant numbers and formed an enduring bond among fans who participated in these publications. The market for SF was small, and the fan magazines became proving grounds for neophytes and homes for the professionals whose material could not find a niche in the few paying markets. The most ambitious of these magazines did and still do publish a fair percentage of writing of professional quality (these days magazines such as Locus, The New York Review of Science Fiction, or Crank! that publish professionals and pay them are called “semi-prozines”). A fan might establish his identity in the field by producing writing or art for one of these magazines, or indeed by publishing such a magazine; might indeed become well-known nationally or internationally among fans and professionals even today.
On the other hand, a number of magazines that developed at the same time and established a parallel tradition evolved from the habit of personal correspondence (the “fannish” fanzines). This second variety of amateur magazine focuses entirely on the activities of the fans themselves, their daily lives and interactions. Science fiction may be mentioned or not. For the segment of fandom whose primary connection with the SF field is through these amateur magaz
ines, the activity of fandom is an end in itself. Some profess that they no longer read SF at all, although the written matter of the field provided for their original entry into fandom.
Fandom has a history and traditions, a legacy of in-jokes and a specialized vocabulary, politics, mores: a culture. The evolution of fandom from small groups and isolated individuals in the early 1930s to the huge amorphous numbers of the 1990s is marked by enduring names such as Forrest J. Ackerman, Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Sam Moskowitz, Frederik Pohl, Wilson (Bob) Tucker, David Kyle, Julius Schwartz, and others, whose titanic teenage personalities, their idealism, feuds, and jokes, dominated the earliest fan eras—now generally referred to as First Fandom. They waged wars through correspondence, in fanzines and in person, sometimes lived together in what we would now call communes, promulgated philosophies and ideas, disrupted each other’s attempts at organization. They played jokes on one another, the kind that can flourish only when a group is widely dispersed and communicates almost entirely by mail, the kind that teenage boys play (until the 1940s, there just weren’t any women in fandom to speak of). The fans of the 1930s established traditions that have endured to this day. They set the tone.
The activities of the early fans came to define the true fan as opposed to the reader of SF. Their aspirations to the rank of professional and their success at attaining pro status made fandom the “farm team” system of the SF field. Many of the second and later generations of SF writers, for instance Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, and James Blish, came out of fandom. They learned its lingo, its attitudes, traditions, and aspirations.
Fan vocabulary (see Glossary) is filled with words and practices through which individual fans create their own fan personae and by which they communicate with others. It is not really difficult to pick up most of the lingo quickly and to begin to develop a science fiction persona, a fan personality of your very own.
In Chapter 1, I expended some effort describing aspects of SF conventions and analyzing the experience of an attending reader or fan. Now that we are looking more closely at fandom, I should note that there are many levels of involvement in the contemporary event. With the enormous growth in convention attendance after the 1960s, it became an attractive social thing in some cases for a nonreader (sometimes politely called a “fringe fan” rather than a “mundane”) to attend conventions to drink, or smoke dope, and have sex, and pretty much ignore everything else. But the most confusing problem has been the huge influx of neofans into the convention environment without enough more experienced fans to help them to become acculturated. Thus the traditional fannish atmosphere has often been diluted and thinned, if not polluted.
With the near-bankruptcy of the 1983 Worldcon, a crisis point arrived. But several large fan organizations gave money, fund-raising auctions were held at conventions, and enough money to bail out Baltimore was gathered, thus preserving the fiscal reputation of the largest annual convention in the world run entirely by local (and international) volunteer labor. The larger conventions (6,000 and more at Worldcons in the U.S.) have actually resulted in discouraging fans from pursuing the traditional task of further developing one’s science fiction persona by social interaction with other fans, especially with the older and more experienced ones. For goodness sake, it takes all the time of between twenty and a hundred volunteer fans just to run one of the larger local conventions, and hundreds to run the huge annual World Convention. They interact with each other but not with the attendees very much. So as conventions have grown and become a mass and leveled activity, other aspects of fandom have become all the more important for the young fan attempting to establish a fannish identity. One of these is, ironically, con-running. One can gain a fannish reputation as a conrunner, attend Smofcon (Secret Masters of Fandom—Con—a serious con for conrunners), and thus focus one’s fannish life. The most important aspect of fandom, though, is participation in (publishing, reading, writing for or to) the fanzines.
In the first two decades of fandom, more than ten thousand fanzines rolled from the fan presses, from single issue postcards to well-printed little magazines. It has been estimated that there were never more than 500 fans in fandom in the 1930s, 1,000 in the 1940s, perhaps 5,000 in the world (2,000 in the U.S.) by 1959. No generally available bibliographic work beyond 1950 has been published because the number of fanzines has increased virtually beyond tabulation. It is rumored that Bruce Pelz, a prominent fan and librarian, is keeping track, though.
Simply attempting to describe fanzines as a class is difficult given the numbers and diversity. Certain general observations do apply: A fanzine is a mimeographed amateur magazine (yes, most are now offset or xeroxed, but mimeo is traditional) typed onto stencils by the editor and publisher, with help from fan friends, written by the editor and friends, with regular features such as an editorial essay, one or more other essays, one or more pieces of amateur fiction, illustrations and cartoons, reviews of books, magazines, other SF materials, and a letter column in which the best letter received since the last issue are printed. Not infrequently, the letter column absorbs a major portion of the issue.
The entire contents of a fanzine may be devoted to a narrow focus such as Star Trek or the Darkover stories of Marion Zimmer Bradley, or to a broader but still restricted area such as SF by or concerning feminists, sword-and-sorcery fiction, film SF, or SF comics. A fanzine may be devoted to a general mix, often including science fiction–related topics, fannish topics (such as a convention report), and topics not directly related to either (music, movies, politics, nostalgia, personal travels, etc.). No fanzine that did not aspire to professional status has ever had a circulation much over a thousand copies, and most of the early famous fanzines had circulations of 100 to 600 and are now treasured items in fannish collections. With very few exceptions, all the great fanzines of the past have been general interest mixtures, given unique ambience by the strong personality of the editor(s). A successful fan editor creates a new gestalt personality through effective assemblage of the parts of his or her fanzine. The most influential people in fandom at any given moment are its better fan editors.
On the other hand, the superstars of fandom are the humorists, the great fan writers such as Robert Bloch, Bob Tucker, Bob Shaw, Terry Carr, Walt Willis, and others whose work has appeared in hundreds of fanzines over the de as William Rotsler, Arthur T cades. (I include, of course, the fan cartoonists such hompson [A Tom], Tim Kirk, Bjo Trimble, Steve Stiles, Lee Hoffman, Stu Shiffman, Alexis Gilliland, and others.) A fan editor’s success at attracting material from the great humorists is a sure mark of approach to the Parnassus of fandom. As is, of course, attracting material from the big name professional SF writers of the era (specifically including letters of comment on issues—these announce that you are good enough and important enough to attract their attention).
In recent years, a number of leading fanzines have escalated out of fandom into the ranks of professional or semi-pro magazines, whose subscription lists and ads may contribute significantly to the support of the editor/publisher. They have circulations in the low thousands and are often sold in bookstores. Titles such as Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, Crank!, Science Fiction Eye, and The New York Review of Science Fiction are printed, not mimeographed, contain a high proportion of material written by professionals, and are all valuable contributions to the SF field, read alike by readers of SF and fans. But they are not in the traditional sense fanzines, although some often appeared on the ballot for best fanzine awards—a source of concern to fans throughout the late 70s and early 80s and which led to the establishment of a new category of “semiprofessional” in the Hugo Awards in 1984. It is obvious upon comparison that the editorial tone and rejection of fannish vocabulary in these magazines denotes an intention to reach an audience of SF readers and professionals, a larger audience of course than fandom. These publications are still the most influential medium today for the transmission of fan opinions and attitudes to the wide audience
of SF readers and should not be ignored by someone attempting to understand the SF field. It is just that the personae projected through these magazines are leveled and generalized.
What motivates the fan, the point of fan activity, is the construction, finishing, and exhibiting of a fan persona through collecting, convention appearances, and writings, and other active contributions to the publishing of fanzines. What makes the development of this persona possible is the fact that fandom is a microcosm, a private, limited world with its own rules and mores, small enough so that some sense of belonging is within the reach of every fan who wants to be a part of it.
The population of fandom at a given moment reflects quite well the demographics of the population of the larger SF audience. Because the pressures of daily life (especially the economic demands) are less on people under the age of twenty-one, the majority of fans have been young adults—teenagers used to be common and are now unusual in fandom, except on the Internet, where they abound. Yet since a mature and experienced body of older fans and a corpus of past fanzines exist, the traditions of fandom remain strong.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 19