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 magazines, 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.
Among the large number of professionals who have become professionals after spending time in fandom, a great many have maintained active status in fandom throughout their careers by simply continuing their fannish activity, along with their professional careers. A few, such as Wilson Tucker, Ted White, and Robert Bloch, are perhaps more famous in the SF field as fans than as authors, in spite of long and distinguished professional careers. This intimate connection between fan and professional, as we have noted earlier, is one of the significant factors generally unknown to outsiders and so has ordinarily made the SF field difficult or impossible to understand. Fandom is a kind of invisible empire, unless you know how to look at it. Again, I am reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s “undergrounds” in The Crying of Lot 49, mentioned in Chapter 1.
Perhaps the best way for an outsider to approach an understanding of the interaction of fans and professionals in the SF field is to overstate the case and say that the fans are the peers of the writers and editors, and exert steady peer-group pressure on them to conform to the standards and traditions of SF and to raise those standards in particular ways. Even the professional writers who come from the ranks of SF readers, not fandom, are rapidly made aware of fandom and take it into account when thinking about the audience for their works. There are cases of professionals, such as Barry N. Malzberg, who deny any influence from fandom and deplore its standards. Yet even they are conscious of fandom and sensitive to it. Writers who are totally unaware of fandom and publish SF, while they may reach a fair audience, in turn tend to be ignored or ridiculed by fans and have a harder time finding any substantial popularity among the other readers of SF. A writer who has never been a regular science fiction reader is an almost certain failure in the field, though not necessarily to outside critics and readers, for what by now must be obvious reasons.
A present or former fan or not, the SF writer is aware of a palpable and immediate audience. She meets them at conventions, they write her letters, send her fanzines that mention her and her work, respond in a fashion and in significant numbers unknown in any other field of literature. The fans are the SF writer’s friends as well as the core of the SF audience, whose approval indicates wider support among the general readers of SF, whose disapproval is to be risked only with care and, perhaps, at great cost.
Just as a fan is expected to respond to SF, so the writer is expected to respond to the existence of fandom. An SF writer, to gain the support of the fans, is expected to appear at conventions (although not necessarily on the formal program) and interact personally with the fans; he is expected to answer personal correspondence from fans and to participate in some manner in fan publications. As stated above, a pro can confer recognition and fannish ego gratification upon a fan merely by writing a postcard or letter of comment to a fanzine. A professional who creates a benign persona with regard to fandom is assured of widespread and long-term support from the fan community.
Given the foregoing, it is easy to understand that one aspect of the antipathy in fandom to the growing attention that literary critics and academics have been paying to SF in the last decade or so is that such attention from outside the field must interfere with fandom’s demand upon the writers for primary consideration. This is the first substantial challenge to the primacy and authority of fandom in the history of the field. And while this attitude has never to our knowledge been articulated in fandom, the situation has been grave for a number of years now.
Let us pass on, for the moment, to an examination of the negative aspects of fandom. The feuds and conflicts mentioned earlier and described in pompous and grandiloquent fashion in Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm are analyzed in Damon Knight’s review of the work as “European power politics in a hatbox—scaled down, but still a politics of force, deceit and treachery. The same types emerged: the Booster, the Organizer, who frequently became the Wrecker.” (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, p. 162.) Fan politics are often bitter and divisive. In 1939, on the occasion of the first World SF convention in New York, six leaders of the Futurians, a prominent fan club, were refused admittance (including Donald A. Wollheim, C. M. Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl) in a political act that is remembered with rancor to this day. Fan politics is a serious game and the losers sometimes pay inordinately.
To an outsider who sees fandom as nothing more than a time-consuming hobby, there is no more sense in it than collecting back issues of the National Geographic or, worse, nostalgia items. Fan activity is indeed time-consuming, an expense of money and effort for little tangible gain (except for that small percentage of fans who may some day catapult into the ranks of professionals). Furthermore, to an outsider viewing the attendees of an SF convention, it might well appear that to fall among fans is to fall among evil companions.
The first substantial attack on fandom from within the ranks came in the late 1940s, in F. Towner Laney’s huge (130 mimeographed pages) and bitter memoir of his life as an SF fan and how fandom had hurt his chances to be normal and successful: Ah! Sweet Idiocy! (Los Angeles: self-published, 1948). Fandom, as described by Laney, is a hotbed of perverts, ineffectuals, and other worthless creatures, vile companions who distract one from the worthwhile pursuits of career and stable human relationships. The attitude is that fandom as a way of life is dangerous to youth and can destroy the proper and normal perspective of an adult upon the priorities of reality. Like the Snark, it will eat you, but not vanish away.
After much fuss, fandom in the early fifties seems to have granted many of Laney’s points and, as a corrective, gotten sillier and more fannish—much less of the open political battling in and among clubs has been reported from that time on, only more personal feuds. But is this better? You don’t have to look far into fandom for evidence of childishness, petulance, name-calling, paranoia, and nearsightedness. In fact, without the delineation I have offered of the substantial influence of fandom on the SF field, it would be impossible to see anything beyond self-aggrandizing cliques treating each other badly. The legacy of feuds is in reality a legacy of competition for ego gratification, for success on the only terms recognized by fandom (“egoboo”).
The world of fandom does not so much reject the values of mundane society as it transmutes them into a system of approval and reward—a replacement for the everyday approval and reward systems that have been unavailable otherwise to the SF writer and the fan until the last few years. As I have shown earlier, until quite recently no SF writer could expect from society either social or literary critical approval for practicing his profession, or any substantial money (certainly not enough to equal an average middle-class income). What Laney did not (could not?) recognize is that to enter fandom is to accept its value system as a viable replacement for any other.
Of course such an acceptance can be dangerous to one’s normal life in the real world. This is why so many fans leave fandom by the time they are twenty-one. Unarticulated and, perhaps, unexamined, there exists within the heart and soul of every fan a tension between the values of mundane reality and the values of the world of fandom. The best expression of this tension is in the polar-opposite acronyms coined in 1943 and still current: FIJAGH and FIAWOL (see page 272). The population of fandom is drawn from those who are discontented with reality (a quality, as I remarked earlier, of most bright teenagers). The competitive system of fandom may satisfy them, perhaps should satisfy them, only until they are able to succeed in coping with the quotidian world in terms of gaining approval and money in their chosen careers. To the fans, of course, deserters rapidly become nonpersons in the Orwellian sense—the fannish value system must be preserved. Only those fans whose ideals and interests will not permit them to commit themselves wholly to the values of middle-class life, or whose equipment for survival in the middle-class world is poor, remain in fandom.
But while a person remains in fandom and participates in fan activities, the system allows him to rise to whatever level he can and receive his proper share of approval and reward, his name in print in fanzines, whatever. At a time when approval is not forthcoming in everyday life, this can be soul food. Here is a challenging and serious game in which every participant wins, more or less, each according to his deserts.
And the writers win, too. Consider: There is damn little money and critical approval available to a contemporary poet or novelist or short-story writer—perhaps one in a thousand ever even gets a book published, and then the audience is usually only one’s peers, normally silent because they too are starving for attention and money. In a system such as this, there are not even table scraps for the SF writer—except that fandom exists and offers an alternative, the only alternative in the past, and even today, for most SF writers. Until the eighties, only Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov had outgrown the economic and other boundaries of the SF field and passed beyond the approval or disapproval of fandom into the realms of best-sellerdom. The other possibility now is the legacy of the New Wave—to write works of such transcendent literary quality that critical success outside the SF field is assured (but not money and certainly not the popularity that leads to best-sellerdom). In the long run and for most writers, the approval of fandom is still a safer bet.
Thus, to seek the approval of fandom is of course the most natural thing in the world for a writer or editor who is or was once a fan. And it is a traditional mode for the SF writer, easy to fall into. What is also evident is that fandom may well be substituting one kind of competition for another in the writing community.
It is interesting to examine SF writers in this light. Through wide and long-term contact with the SF writing community, I can testify that some SF writers are openly competitive and some are not, and that there appears to be no direct relationship between fandom and competitiveness. Furthermore, fandom does not generally seem to think of the professionals as competitors vying for their attention and approval but rather as individuals each trying to excel and therefore be worthy. Yet on some level the fans and writers, especially the writers who have emerged from fandom, know that there is just not enough of anything to go around, so these writers go out of their way to attend conventions and win the attention of fandom, and the fan or ex-fan writers who know the ropes and have contacts are certainly best equipped to succeed in this fashion. Perhaps in some cases the personal appeal to fandom may supersede the appeal of the written SF. (This may well have been true with Robert Silverberg in the fifties and sixties, until his ambitious works of the late sixties and early seventies—his popularity in fandom certainly seems to have been based more on his persona than upon the quality of his writing.) Yet on the whole over the years, SF writers seem to have taken to heart fandom’s ideal that each writer should strive to excel in his or her own unique manner and achieve quite individual excellence—you cannot mistake the individual voice of any major SF writer for that of another.
Will the historic relationship between SF and fandom survive the decade of the 1990s? The chances look good at this date. Certain offshoots of fandom, e.g., Star Trek fandom or Darkover fandom, may die out, or their fires burn low as did Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom in the 1970s. Or they may split off entirely from SF, as comic book fandom seems to have done. What will keep SF fandom alive is that it seems sure to stay a part of the phenomenon of the SF field, not subordinate to it (as, for instance, football fans are subordinate to football—they are just the customers). Besides, the dominant literary culture in the U.S. and elsewhere does not seem disposed to embrace SF and preempt fandom’s role as guardian of the qualities of SF.
Many, though not all, of the chronics and omnivores who make up the wider SF audience are aware of fandom and choose not to become fans. They hear the siren call, perhaps attend a convention or two, but are able to bind themselves to the masts of their daily lives. We have described the SF world earlier as a world which sees itself as being outside the mundane boundaries of contemporary space and time, a world of readers who have attained a new and distanced perspective on the past, present, and future. Well, fandom is the nucleus of the SF world, the center of activity out of which radiate the beams that illuminate the SF world.
Fandom, when examined only as activities, appears to be simply an aggregation of variously eccentric hobbies. But we have seen that it is actually a whole subculture with underlying unities and coherence, of primary significance to an understanding of the SF field.
It’s fun, too. Let us not forget that SF is exciting and entertaining escape reading and fandom is similarly an escape from an unrewarding reality into a world of fun and games. The traditions of fandom allow for release of pent-up energies, for outbursts of egregious personal behavior and exhibitionism frowned upon in daily life and, conversely, for normal personal interaction with people whose daily life is bizarre or abnormal in some way (I remember meeting at conventions everything from doctors and attorneys to pornographic filmmakers—and their stars). If you are a professional librarian and feel the desire to walk around wearing a cape, sword, and G-string, go to a convention, where, according to custom, no one will notice unless to compliment you on your originality. I once accompanied a prominent Boston SF editor new to the field to her first SF convention several years back. At the “meet-the-professionals” cocktail party on Friday evening (which was combined for efficiency with the convention masquerade contest), she expressed some wonder and discomfort at the presence of two attractive women whose costumes consisted of elaborate headdresses and makeup—they were otherwise nude. In a room containing several hundred people, no one seemed to be making a fuss over the two, who walked casually and calmly through the crowd, allowing photographs and accepting admiration. This is not, I explained, a remarkable or uncommon occurrence at a masquerade in SF, although it would certainly not be acceptable at the normal professionals’ party. After several years, the editor’s jaw was still, I believe, somewhat dropped.
Fun and games, and keeping cool in the face of anyone else’s fun and games, are the social rules for convention attendance and for fan activity. I have seen a hundred fans sit and sing till dawn in hotel lobbies, fans in sleeping bags catching naps under tables at parties (day or night), fans wandering in drunken gaggles through motel corridors at 5 A.M. seeking the last open party, fans in deep and serious conversation with a favorite author, fans by the hundreds stripping and jumping in a hotel pool at midnight while members of the convention committee coolly explain to the hotel security officers that this is just a little swimming party and will be supervised. Within very liberal bounds, anything can happen at a science fiction convention—which is part of the fun.
The people you play with are an essential facet of your social life. The sense of community within the SF field, especially among fans and professionals, is founded upon years of the social life of conventions and other fan gatherings, large and small. The fans and professionals eat together; drink together; play together (sleep together, exclude one another, criticize one another); act in some ways as an enormous extended family, complete with poor relations, rebellious children, and dim-witted second cousins.
What fandom has done on a social and cultural level for or to the writers in the SF field is to provide them with a paradigm of the life of the writer quite different from the two major paradigms available to all other writers outside SF: the life of the artist (working in isolation from the marketplace to achieve art; supported by the academy, by grants, by awards, perhaps by the admiration of peers) and the life of the commercial writer (after an apprenticeship, writing books and stories or articles primarily for money for big publishers according to the dictates of the marketplace, sometimes actually achieving enough fame to qualify for mention in People magazine). Fandom has achieved a redefinition of success and reward for most SF writers.
The life of the SF writer is a life of continual socializing and communication with a rather large audience of loyal and vocal readers together with the majority of other writers working in the field. The response of these people to a writer’s work is always in the forefront of his consciousness and may even be the controlling factor in his writing. He feels that he belongs to the same community as all the others, no matter what the personal or professional or aesthetic differences. Most SF writers develop personae in the field identifying them with one of the two mainstream life-style types, but these personae are not (with few exceptions) recognized outside the field and so these writers are actually living the life of SF writers according to the paradigm fandom has established, until or unless they reject the field entirely (as, for instance, Kurt Vonnegut did in the late 1950s). The SF life-style may be the keystone holding the SF field in place and separating it from other genres of contemporary writing.
But the life-style is also restrictive and not to the taste of some writers. Many SF writers, including John D. MacDonald, Richard McKenna, and Donald E. Westlake, abandoned SF entirely in favor of the success of the commercial writer. (No one I know has yet abandoned SF to live the artist’s life, since you can have all the disadvantages of an artist’s life and still remain an SF writer—although perhaps one might say that a majority of the New Wave writers of the sixties did in fact attempt the life of the artist seriously for a time.)
Fandom, then, is at the center of a discussion of SF, without which all else flies apart. Fandom is what makes for SF a world of difference.