| SEVEN |
POACHING THE UNIVERSE: SCIENCE FICTION FANDOM |
Science fiction is a genre that produces and promotes some of the most serious and long-term fan devotion to come out of the ‘entertainment’ media. Corporate and global merchandising, conventions and conferences, official and unofficial websites and chatrooms, memorabilia, collectibles, and personal shrines and temples of devotion, bare witness to the fact that the media machines sell fandom to world audiences. Audiences – people of all classes, races and sexual preferences across the globe – find something deeply meaningful and necessary (to the maintenance of their everyday lives) in the sci-fi text. Sci-fi fans pay homage to individual films, books and magazines, to whole film, TV and literary franchises, to auteurs and authors, to box-office and ‘marginal’ stars, to cult flops and to rarely seen or read sci-fi texts. Sci-fi devotees name their children after their favourite sci-fi characters, get married (and divorced) in sci-fi costume, and will re-enact episodes or key scenes in real life and digital scenarios. Sci-fi aficionados will argue and contest relentlessly about the allegorical or metaphorical meaning of a sci-fi text(s), will recant dialogue from one/any episode (in a franchise of hundreds), or will be able to trace the lineage of a distant race or the origins of inter-galactic war in the time it takes to ask the question. Sci-fi fans will build models, websites, chatrooms and organise gatherings of fans to secure the continuing appreciation of their favourite sci-fi text. Sci-fi fans will also appropriate the meaning of sci-fi texts, inflecting, challenging and re-writing what might be considered the dominant reading. Sci-fi fans are, as a consequence, amazing people because they are simultaneous consumers and producers of cultural meaning in dynamic and empowered exchanges and articulations. One can argue, in fact, that science fiction doesn’t have real ‘meaning’ until it is consumed and appropriated and adopted and adored by the science fiction fan community.
Science fiction draws the fan in because it is so openly polysemic and textually excessive in its imaginings: and it is this polysemy and richness in exploration of futuristic and possible themes and ideas that produces an instantaneous extra-textual dialogue with its audiences. Through time travel and the time-loop paradox, through invention and exploration, through special effect and spectacle, and through myth and allegory the science fiction text literally calls for the work of deconstruction and reconstruction to be carried out by the sci-fi viewer/reader as they watch/read, and in the communication and conversation spaces and places that follow reception. Science fiction is not meant to be left in the theatre or ‘reading’ room, but is meant to be enjoyed and examined again and again in other leisure and social contexts.
Henry Jenkins III adopts this empowering notion of fan as ‘textual poacher’, taking on what he considers to be reductionist models of audience behaviour that have sought to label (Star Trek) fans as mindless dupes. Jenkins argues that ‘fans reclaim works that others regard as worthless and trashy, finding them a rewarding source of popular capital. Like rebellious children, fans refuse to read by the rules imposed on them … For fans, reading becomes a type of play responsive only to its own loosely structured rules and generating its own types of pleasure’. Jenkins examines the way ‘women who write fiction based in the Star Trek universe … force the primary text to accommodate alternative interests … in order to make it a better producer of personal meanings and pleasures’.
John Tulloch examines the way the fans of Doctor Who assert their ‘power to gloss, and to write the aesthetic history of the show – dividing its twenty-five years into a series of ‘golden ages’ and ‘all-time lows’’. This textual power occurs in a context where real transformative power – such as the power to affect production changes on the show or motivate non-fans to watch more regularly, is largely absent. Society fans are ‘situated as a privileged group with few powers – a powerless elite with little control over the floating voter on one side, the producers of the show on the other’. Tulloch, then, establishes a series of constraints on the fans’ ability to seize or hold power over the outcome of a sci-fi text.
Will Brooker, in contrast, examines the way the fan reception of a postmodern text such as Star Wars can be ‘part of a progressive narrative of change’. Re-released and newly marketed at the time the essay was originally written, Brooker examines the way the textures of nostalgia and the suggested fascistic politics within the film fuel the fan culture’s response, appreciation and appropriation of its meaning(s) across a range of media sites and cultural contexts. For this Reader, Brooker also supplies a ‘new’ introduction outlining developments within fan culture, the Star Wars franchise, and recent political transformations in Britain and America, since the essay was written.
Kurt Lancaster examines what he argues to be are the highly creative online ‘fanfic’ responses to Babylon 5. By writing fan fiction and publishing web pages ‘fans immerse themselves in the Babylon 5 universe … on their own terms outside the original creator’s authorial presence’. Performing as ‘textual nomads staking individual authorial claims’ fans write their own characters and give narrative events new inflections and outcomes. By producing these new texts online and circulating them in cyberspace fans avoid ‘the dominant social structure’s conventional route for circulating creative production’.
