Until I went looking for Harry Warner, Jr. on Wikipedia, I never knew that Roger Ebert was an sf fan. From 2004:
Thought Experiments: How Propeller-Heads, BNFs, Sercon Geeks, Newbies, Recovering GAFIAtors, and Kids in the Basements Invented the World Wide Web, All Except for the Delivery System
… [I]t was in the virtual world of science fiction fandom that I started to learn to be a writer and a critic. Virtual, because for a long time I never met any other fans; they lived only in the pages of mimeographed fanzines that arrived at 410 E. Washington St. and were quickly hidden among the hundreds of SF mags in the basement, on metal shelves that cost four books of Green Stamps. “Hidden,” because at first I concealed my interest in fandom from my parents. Fanzines were not offensive in any way–certainly not in a sexual way, which would have been the worst way of all in a family living in the American Catholicism of the 1950s, but I sensed somehow that they were . . . dangerous. Dangerous, because untamed, unofficial, unlicensed. It was the time of beatniks and On the Road, which I also read, and no one who did not grow up in the fifties will be quite able to understand how subversive fandom seemed.Most fanzines had a small circulation of a few hundred, but they created a reality so intriguing and self-referential that, for fans, they were the newspapers of a world. Looking through old issues of Xero, which during its brief glory was one of the best fanzines ever published, I was stunned by how immediate and vivid my reaction was to names not thought about for years: Harry Warner Jr., Mike Deckinger, Guy Terwilliger, Gene DeWeese, Bob Lichtman, bhob Stewart (how evocative that “h” was!), Walt Willis, Bob Tucker, “Ajay” Budrys, Ted White. I met Donald Westlake as an adult (we have been on a couple of cruises together) and he was surprised to find that I was already reading him in Xero. I found established professionals (Harlan Ellison, Donald A. Wollheim, Anthony Boucher, Frederik Pohl, Avram Davidson, James Blish) happy to contribute to a fanzine, indeed plunging passionately into the fray. I confess happily that as I scanned pages and pages of letters of comment (“locs”), my eye instinctively scanned for my own name, as it did forty years ago, and when I found it (Blish dismissing one of my locs), I felt the same flash of recognition, embarrassment and egoboo that I felt then; much muted, to be sure, diluted, but still there. Locs were the currency of payment for fanzine contributors; you wrote, and in the next issue got to read about what you had written. Today I can see my name on a full-page ad for a movie with disinterest, but what Harry Warner or Buck Coulson had to say about me–well, that was important…
I didn’t discover fandom until ten or fifteen years after Ebert, at the point where Star Trek and Star Wars and all the sociological changes of “the Sixties” were about to break the shell of “that rocket-ship-&-raygun kiddie genre from the pulps & the funny pages”. But there was still a feeling that Fandom was its own little global village, a hiding-in-plain-sight parallel universe where hyperverbal dexterity and a near-autistic attention to detail were celebrated instead of punished.
I’d already been to a couple of local (NYC) comic-cons, and one of the first Star Trek gatherings, before getting a ticket to my first real sf convention (Lunacon ’71, IIRC). My dad decided he’d better warn me about Those Fen People:
“Back before you were born [the early 1950s], I was reading an sf magazine in a jazz bar, waiting for the band. Some guy sidled up to me, and over the next few months I ended up visiting fan gatherings at some of their homes. But, to be honest, they weren’t as well-read as the jazz fans, and they could be ruder than the [motorcycle] bikers I hung out with on the weekends…
In fact, some of them weren’t as well-read as the bikers, and even ruder than the jazz fans!”
Open Thread: Tales from the Invisible VillagePost + Comments (141)