 We don't normally publish articles
as long as this next one, but we couldn't resist Yugoslav fan Bruno Ogorelec's window
onto SF in Yugoslavia, past and present. We received it not more than a week before
we moved to Maryland; it's certainly the most unusual going-away present we've
ever gotten.
- - - - - - - -
The history of American mass-market SF
and the fandom thereof -- from Gernsback till today via numerous pulpy begats -- has
been researched in exhaustive detail and seems to be familiar to everyone by now. The
British oldpharts, sharing most of the skiffy/fannish roots with their U.S. cousins,
have documented their own history just as painstakingly. They are much given to
recounting how they started reading SF after bumping into a cornucopia of American
pulp magazines, the lucky bastards. They were apparently imported in bulk (the pulps,
that is, not the lucky bastards) and sold for a pittance to the impressionable
British youngsters. No such luck for me, however, nor indeed for most of the other
Continental Europeans.Our lands have not been blessed with
such manna. Locally brewed science fiction pulps have always been rarer than hen's
milk here, while importing pulp magazines in a foreign language never made much sense,
of course. Even the early sixties (my entry point into fandom) were more or less a
barren desert. You Anglos had it easy. In the English-speaking countries there
existed a mass market for SF, and fandom flourished. It is a market phenomenon, after
all. Nowhere else could you find the skiffy-consuming masses for fandom to spring
from. It made significant inroads into the rest of the Western world only very
recently, with the advent of another mass market: media SF. Before that, non-Anglo
fandom was of necessity a realm of the unusual, of people like me, or worse. It has
always been sparse, its lot unsung and unresearched.A pity, that. Most of us being
oddballs, we could have furnished some lurid fan histories. It takes a peculiar bent
of character to get this much involved in something you share with perhaps three or
four people in your entire country and which is, moreover, virtually unobtainable.In this vein, while we are on the
subject of unusual: a few months ago in Anvil, Skel wrote of an unusual Britfan
beginning -- to wit, getting his first SF book from his mother. It was a response to
Buck Coulson's column in an earlier issue in which Buck had stressed the improbability
of a fan's mother in the fifties having anything to do with anything as disrespectable
as science fiction. Hah! Piffle! If a mother was an improbable source of SF,
what about a grandmother? Or a great-grandmother? Now that is what I would
call improbable.Yes, you guessed it, of course --
therein hangs a tale. A long one; I am congenitally incapable of writing anything
short and succinct:
Great Jumping Grandmothers
A Cautionary Tale of Female Emancipation by Bruno Ogorelec I am a scion of a venerable fannish
family whose passion for SF and fantasy started at about the same time the peace
accords were being hammered out at Versailles, in the aftermath of World War I.
My country, Yugoslavia, had just been put together out of assorted Balkan states,
nations, and territories. My family, in contrast, started going asunder. Did I say
"family"? Hm, for the want of a better word, perhaps. Well, you'll see for
yourself.If I want to begin at the beginning, I
must start with my great-grandmother. She discovered science fiction in 1920. It
wasn't labelled "science fiction", of course, but that's what it was. An awkward
person, my great-grandmother. Wish I could speak of her in a more positive light, her
being the very first fan of us all, etc., but by all accounts she was a difficult
woman; cold, rude, and fiercely independent.She married halfheartedly, only because
the changing social climate had made our comfortable family traditions no longer
acceptable. Till then, my female ancestors never even thought of getting married.
Instead, they occupied a rather peculiar niche in the contemporary order of things.
This will sound weird, I know, and have to brace myself for some incredulity; our
women were all illegitimate daughters of Catholic priests. When they grew up, they in
turn became women-about-church and the priests' concubines -- and eventually bore the
priests' illigetimate children. This is what we had in place of the conventional
family. (In the XIX century, mind you.)
It may seem like a mean existence to
you, but was in fact a pleasant enough life, vastly preferable to the fate of a
peasant's wife, for instance. The priests -- often highly-placed church officials --
took very good care of their women and children, making sure their "families" never
lacked anything. The women never had to toil for subsistence, a rare blessing in an
era in which a woman's toil was a terrible burden indeed. Work around the church was
undemanding and often interesting. Our women were educated far above the norm for
those days, and even had access to the church libraries. Their lives were simple,
easy, enlightened -- and independent, free of many stifling family strictures. No
wonder none of them ever wanted anything better either for themselves or for their
daughters. (For once it was the men who got the rough end of the arrangement. Sons
did not fit into the scene at all, and most of them drifted away and became itinerant
field hands.)It was only my great-grandmother that
broke the tradition, pressured by the increasingly secular society, but according to
the family sources she did it reluctantly and later came to regret her bold move.
Before her time, scoffing at a cozy role in life such as hers was rare and pointless;
envy was a much more common reaction. However, with the decline of the feudal system
and the rise of urban democratic society, the church lost much of its clout and
prestige. The cachet of being a prelate's concubine had paled accordingly.
Great-grandma was a proud woman and
didn't want to be scoffed at. She ditched the tradition, married a young railroad
track inspector, and with the considerable family savings opened an inn in the
country. She ran a taut ship, gave good value for money to the inn's patrons, and
prospered. As a wife and mother, however, she was a failure, obviously resenting
having to take care of a household and family on top of her busy inn.
Great-granddad was thus happy to roam the country inspecting the railroad tracks,
returning home for one weekend a month (if that much). His wife of formidable will,
unsettling education, and unpleasant moods had turned out to be more than he could
handle, and it was good to be out of the way most of the time.Little Grandma, his daughter, soon
realized her Daddy hadn't been a fool. She was a teenager then and, though scarcely
involved in any momentous events, could clearly sense that big changes were afoot in
the wide world. She was seriously rethinking her options in life. At home she was
largely ignored as a person, but very much taken into account as a laborer. How
could she fancy being a waitress and kitchen helper in a country inn? She didn't
relish playing second fiddle to her mother's ego, either. As well educated as was the
family custom, she wanted more out of life. A whole new world beckoned her from
outside. So one day she simply packed her modest possessions and left for the Big
City.This is where we come back to science
fiction. Among the first possessions she packed were books. Perhaps a dozen
altogether, the cream of the cream of the family library. Among them were the two
freshest additions and Great-grandma's favorites: The End of the World and
The Last Days of Men by Camille Flammarion. Beautiful books bound in silky
green fabric, with titles embossed in black and gold. I remember them so vividly --
the smooth solid things with intricate ridges of the embossing, cool and pleasant to
touch, not like the modern slick book jackets that turn sticky against your palms.They were all illustrated with superb,
richly lithographs of dark, brooding character, ideally complementing Flammarion's
literary images of decadence before the doom. The one I remember best depicted a rich
man's living room somewhere in Paris. He is reclining on an opulent sofa and watches a
huge flat circular TV screen, wall mounted in a baroque frame, with more levers
sprouting from its base than from a DC-3 control panel. The screen shows a plump
bejeweled belly dancer clad in silk dimi, performing before an audience of beggars and
street urchins somewhere in Baghdad. Another picture, much smaller, more of a
vignette, showed a cluster of badly misshapen flowers, ominous signs of the impending
fall. All pictures had fitting captions, dripping with morals, but they elude me
now.Great grandmother was furious at her
daughter's flight. Amazingly, it was the "theft" of books that incensed her the most.
To her the books were a bit sacred, a link to her rather elevated past, and a token of
her stature in the community. The only other people in the village that read books
were the parish priest and the school teacher. Flammarion's disappearance pained her
most acutely. She clearly loved the fantastic literature, her latest discovery, best
of all. It was a genre much frowned upon by the church then and reading it was thus a
small defiant gesture towards the regrettably abandoned curia. Small, because
Flammarion was a religious moralist at heart. Flaunting him was at best a hedged bet.
(Curiously enough, the church libraries routinely held books that were not
Ideologically Sound, even while railing against them in public. But then, laymen
generally did not have access to them, and the priests must have been considered
immune to their corrosive influence.)Her daughter inherited this appreciation
of the fantastic, but went a step further, embracing "hard" SF as well. For her, free
of any longing for the staid tradition, Jules Verne was the man to watch, writing of
the brave new times and gadgets, and of men with the Right Stuff.
I have often wondered how she managed
to buy books. She came to Zagreb with a small cardboard suitcase, little money, and
fewer prospects for a sound and gainful employment. Luck was with her, though. She
soon found a job as a printer's assistant in the big Tipografija printing
plant which specialized in all kinds of office forms for the government, banks,
insurance companies, etc. It was hard work and paid little, while the books were
frightfully expensive. Common fold hardly ever read real books -- but then, Grandma
had always considered herself a cut above common, inheriting from her mother also a
dose of haughtiness. Ordinary literate people found their reading pleasure in, well,
pulps. Not SF, I hasten to say, but historical romances and novels of intrigue.
They were more basic than American pulps, insofar as they didn't have proper covers
and weren't even bound or cut. The big printer sheet (46" x 33") was simply folded
over four times to give 32 uncut pages. An illustration and a title were printed in
the corner destined to end up as the front page, and that was it. You would cut the
pages yourself, most often with a kitchen knife, and perhaps sew the pages together at
a fold with a sewing needle and some thread. I don't think staples existed then. If
there were any around they must have been out of common folk's reach.
While Grandma did prefer (and buy)
books, the pulps were certainly not below notice in her household. They were purchased
regularly, read carefully, and then bound together in volumes. She befriended some
guys in the printing shop bindery, bribed them with beer and smiles and got proper
hard bindings done. As the Tipografija works only did office supplies and thus
only had relevant binding materials, Granny's bookshelf looked suspiciously like an
office file cabinet, with rows of what looked like stiff cardboard file dossiers, dark
gray with a pattern of dark green swirls, edged with black cloth and labelled along the
spine. The labels were blank, though, and once you took a "file dossier" down from the
shelf you saw the illustrated front page of the pulp romance neatly cut, glued, and
pressed onto the front side. Rather like those fake-bookshelf cocktail cabinets, only
in reverse.But below the bound pulps were shelves
of real books. A surprising number of them were fantasy or science fiction,
considering how few had been published here at all by that time. The French had a
notable presence, far bigger than they would manage (or merit) nowadays. Jules Verne
led the pack, naturally, but his lead would have been even greater had Grandma ever
learned the Cyrillic alphabet. Several interesting SF books had been published in
Belgrade in Cyrillic, among them the first SF book ever published in these parts:
Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1873 (only six years
after the Turkish army had retreated from Belgrade, freeing it after 450 years of
Ottoman occupation!).
Of Wells there was only The Invisible
Man; surprising in view of Granny's strong Socialist leanings. It was a 1914
edition with no illustrations, which was quite unusual for the time. Perhaps the
illustrator found drawing an invisible hero too much of a challenge? The only other
English title, as far as I can remember, was Bellamy's Looking Backward... No
E.A. Poe, who was virtually unknown here till the fifties for some unfathomable
reason. No Stapledon, either. But then, Olaf Stapledon still hasn't been published
here at all...Despite long hours and miserly pay,
Grandma did manage to buy and read books and indulge in some other soul-satisfying
activities, like singing. In her time off she sang in the trade union choir, and
there she met my grandfather, her husband. He sang in the Print & Graphic Trades
Union Choir despite being a panel beater. The contemporary repertory apparently put
a heavy emphasis on lyrical tenors and Grandpa, a carouser of some repute, was also
reputed to have a voice of a macho nightingale. The PGTU choirmaster had lured him
away from the Machinist's Union Choir offering him God knows what, but most
probably the chance to sing with girls (the MU Choir was, not surprisingly,
all male). Grandpa took the opportunity with both hands. In the new crowd he soon
found a good companion in my grandmother, who also liked singing, wine, and merry
company, and they got happily married.But they did not live happily ever
after, alas. A sad note intrudes here. Grandma soon lost her job. She was very
active in the PGTU, helped organize a big strike in the late twenties and got sacked
in the Tipografija owners' reprisals. For two years the Trade Union Strike
Fund paid her a weekly allowance, but with the onset of the Great Depression their
coffers dried up. By that time, the daughters had arrived, three of them in quick
succession, the one in the middle being my mother. Grandpa fell ill, suddenly. A
stomach cancer was diagnosed; very soon he withered away and died.But the women in my family have
titanium-alloy backbones. They know not defeat.The legend has it that one day, as
Grandpa lay ill on a cot in the kitchen -- to be at Grandma's hand in case he needed
anything -- the taxman came to the door to collect long-overdue taxes. He'd come armed
with a court order empowering him to seize moveable property in case the tax debt could
not be collected in cash or financial paper. Grandma herself used to recount the
thunderous encounter with some relish, cackling gleefully. When the appeals failed to
soften the taxman's resolve, she went over to the woodshed and returned with a huge
axe, a mean four-foot mother she could barely raise with both hands, and offered to
split his skull if he dared to cross the threshold. The funny and mysterious thing is
that, after beating a hasty retreat, he never came back, ever. Grandma has always
maintained that she never paid those back taxes, and that nobody has ever tried to
collect them again.If she was capable of putting the fear
of God into the Municipal Revenue Services, she certainly wasn't going to be fazed by
life's minor knocks, so she somehow raised her three daughters single-handedly,
despite the highly irregular income, and by my mother's words, she did it with flair
and in style. The girls were fine-mannered and always well-dressed. Grandma had even
offered them good education, but all three stopped after high school and found jobs
instead.For some reason only my mother inherited
the literary interests of her idiosyncratic mother and grandmother, but that was
enough to keep the tradition. When she married and went to live with my father, she
started a SF library of her own and now has a sizeable collection, including, I think,
all SF books published in the Croatian/Serbian language after the war. She has always
felt that by embracing science fiction, she took over a family trust that had been
kept and nurtured over the generations. She still has this sense of mission, almost,
and could never really understand her sisters' total lack of interest. How could
anyone fail to see the innate conceptual beauty of science fiction was beyond
her powers of comprehension.This is the environment I grew up in,
you see.Funnily enough, the tradition has always
been handed down from mother to daughter, no men in my family ever having the slightest
interest in SF. Great-granddad never read anything at all, excepting the Agramer
Tagblatt, the leading Zagreb German-language daily paper in its day. Grandfather,
in turn, respected his wife's tastes but preferred the French classics and,
surprisingly, Grandma's bound pulp romances. My father, a physicist of international
repute, hates science fiction.So there it was -- the beginning of the
sixties, the Hula Hoop craze had already subsided, Rock'n'Roll had started its
conquest of the Balkans, and there was still no female offspring in sight to take the
tradition over. Bene Gesserit were getting worried. Was the work and dedication of
generations destined to turn into dust, with no one to carry the torch? Grandma,
distracted by life's calamities, had managed to instill the True Faith in just one of
her three daughters and that one, perversely, bore her a grandson, not a
granddaughter. Useless. You couldn't make a man into a Truthsayer. Family history
had by that time proved conclusively that men simply did not take to science fiction.
The other two daughters did have female offspring but the young girls couldn't be
bothered to peruse the comics, much less read the weightier stuff like Heinlein's
juveniles or Isaac Asimov. To all appearances it was a dead end.But appearances can be deceiving, you
know.It was a fine summer day in Zagreb.
Mother was cooking dinner, her son destroying the last of the cherry pie, browsing
through some old issues of Savremena Tehnika (a kind of local Popular
Mechanics), and all was well with the world."Mom!" the boy called out. "How does a
mountain open?""What?""How does a mountain open?""Hm. Well, it doesn't, usually.""Yes, it does. It says so here.
Listen: 'When it looked as if our flying machine would crash straight into the
mountainside, the huge rock face simply split apart. The entire mountain opened along
a vertical seam. Full speed ahead, we flew through the opening and into a giant
brightly-lit cavern cut into the rock. Already the mountain was closing back behind
us like a clamshell, cutting us off from the red desert and orange sky. We were inside
Mars!'"Mom dropped her pots and pans in shock,
her face blanched. She couldn't believe her ears. With the tympans pounding Richard
Strauss' "Zarathustra" in her mind she ran over to the boy and looked at the magazine
in his hands. Aye, there it was, verily, the third installment of Among the
Martians, a short novel by Hugo Gernsback.A curious sound escaped her lips,
neither a shout nor a whisper. To the boy it sounded like a name, a man's name in some
strange and exotic language: Kwisatz Haderach! But it could have been just a
sneeze.At any rate, the boy took to science
fiction like a duck to the water, to the disbelief of the women. He thrived on the
skiffy diet, growing and growing in stature and fannishness over the years, finally
to become me as I am today, a worthy successor to the science fiction witch
coven. Unexpectedly, I even found the place that no Truthsayer could see into. It
was said that "... a man would come one day and find ... his inward eye, and that he
would look where Truthsayers before him couldn't."I found that place in the English
language.Before me, no one in the family ever
learned English; German and Hungarian were our foreign languages of choice. All
foreign science fiction we read had been translated. Roughly a third of it was
Russian, another third French, and the rest Angloamerican. The others were truly
rare. The rarest of all were the Yugoslav authors, a mere dozen or so. It was a fine,
if limited, choice. To an American fan it would be quite unfamiliar, the Russian part
in particular. More's the pity.I liked the Russian stuff pretty much
most of the time. Alexander Belyayev used to be a favorite, the grand old man of
Russian SF, bound to the wheelchair by polio and compensating for the sedentary
destiny in a spectacular manner, inventing very lifelike and convincing heroes:
amphibious men, flying men, and mad scientists. To me, the fondest of his creations,
however, is a certain young lady from "The Head of Professor Dowell", written in the
late forties. The said professor had an unusual dream: to salvage from crash victims
what body parts were in viable condition, and recycle them. Out of the remains of two
or three deaders he would cobble together one live one, reducing thereby the traffic
fatalities tally by thirty to fifty percent -- a noble aim in the forties, surely.
Totally impractical now, of course, what with the current cost of malpractice
insurance and all. Anyway, he kept the heads potted, somewhat like petunias, in the
basement lab and fed them hydroponically. One head used to belong to a lovely, shy,
fragile blonde. Very conveniently, along comes a delectable corpse of a hot-blooded
bar singer, shot through the forehead by a jealous lover. The voluptuous body is mated
to the elfin head, and the results are hilarious as the worldly body clashes with a
shy and innocent mind. A good book.Modern Angloamerican science fiction
was represented by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and hardly anyone
else. The others appeared haphazardly, by accident more than by design. We had no
reason to suppose that Angloamerican SF was more plentiful than French SF. It was
more exciting, true, but contemporary Russian SF often matched it in excitement and
was usually better written. Of the Americans we knew, only Bradbury could write but
his SF was wooly and poetic, which was counted against him. Way back then we still
expected science fiction to have some hair on its chest.
Ahem. Where was I? Ah, yes; the
English language. I learned it as a lark, mostly. Some of my friends collected
stamps, the others made model aeroplanes, and I collected feelthy peekchers and studied
English. Frankly, it wasn't of much practical use to me. The English language, I
mean. Rock lyrics have always been unintelligible, even to the native English
speakers. Movies were (and still are, thank God) subtitled. What else was there?Well, in time I found the British
motoring magazines. Ah, the Autocar, for example! The patrician among the
peasants. I didn't understand much at first, but it doesn't take you too long to
learn such pearly perfect syntagms 'The Double Overhead Camshaft' or 'Desmodromic
Valve Actuation'. Pure poetry in steel and Valvoline. Gradually I soaked up enough
of a vocabulary to read and understand most of the articles. I even learned that you
didn't say "bonnet" or "boot" to an American, but "hood" and "trunk" instead, and
that the tyres and tires were one and the same thing.
And then, inevitably, I bumped into
science fiction.By the mid-sixties I had read virtually
every single SF book available in Croatian/Serbian and was down to the misfiles --
you know, the books with promising but misleading titles (like Jack London's Moon
Valley) or non-SF books by SF authors. Logic said that there must have been some
misfiles in the opposite direction as well, science fiction that did not look like
science fiction. I started fine-combing the entire stock of a big public library to
find them, and Bingo! found one in the very first try. It was From Lucianus to
Lunik by Darko Suvin, filed -- not entirely unexpectedly -- under "Literary
Theory". It actually was literary theory, a hefty volume explaining science fiction,
that they snubbed it out of prejudice, not out of knowledge. So, to illustrate the
points he made, he had included a dozen SF stories in a kind of appendix. I opened
the book at the appendix and was hooked from the start. In the first entry even the
author's name dripped with the sense of wonder -- Cordwainer Smith! The story was
"Scanners Live in Vain" and it hit me like a sledgehammer.The book's theoretical part was no less
fascinating. It traced the history of fantastic literature all the way back to the
ancients, and analyzed its content to show the reasons for its enduring importance
in the human culture. Somehow I have always felt science fiction to be more important
than its surface showed, but could never quite frame the right arguments. All of a
sudden there was that professor in Zagreb who understood.He opened my eyes in yet another
respect, teaching me that somewhere out there, there existed an incredibly vast
mountain of science fiction in English, of which I had never even dreamt. That all the
SF I had read till then was but an anthill compared to the Himalayas. My mother also
read Suvin's book and was nonplussed. She liked the stories a lot (Heinlein's "Misfit"
being her favorite) but hated the idea of thousands of such stories, out of reach
because of the language barrier. She felt betrayed.I felt feverish. God, could it be
true?From the age of five I'd been a member
of the library and yet I never climbed the short flight of stairs leading to the first
floor. There was no reason to -- it held the foreign language books. But now...
Suddenly I put two and two together and ran all the way to the library, three or
four miles, the tram seeing far too slow and roundabout for my purpose.I will state publicly here that my
collision, head on, with the rows upon rows of science fiction paperbacks on the
library shelves stands as one of the two distinct pinnacles of excitement in all my
37 years of life. (The other was a fresh spring day a year or so earlier, when a
stunningly beautiful Jewish girl I tutored in geography invited me to get more
physical in my approach to learning. Sweet Jesus, what delights that girl had in
store!)But I was talking of science fiction,
wasn't I? I spent the entire afternoon in the library and was forcibly evicted at the
closing time, with two books chosen after hours of painful deliberation clutched in my
hands. One was Galaxies Like Grains of Dust by Brian Aldiss, and the other
The Reefs of Space, the first book of the Starchild trilogy by Fred Pohl and
Jack Williamson. Despite a very shaky command of English, I read them right through
at once, one through the night and the other next morning, every single word of them.
I would have read the bar codes, even, if they had been invented by then.Thus started the final stage in my
transformation into a fan. One to two books a day for months and months on end, with
unceasing fervor and dedication. My great-grandmother must have smiled on me
benevolently from the Great Worldcon in the Sky where she went after giving up on the
mundane world at the age of 90. Grandmother did smile benevolently, even though
she apparently disbelieved the existence of so much SF in the world. Her disbelief was
abetted by the weird covers of my paperbacks; nothing that lurid could have been
serious, in her opinion. Mother did not smile benevolently; she was piqued. Only when
a flurry of small press publishers appeared here in the eighties and started flooding
the market with translated Angloamerican SF, did she forgive me for having the gall to
look where she could not.I didn't care much about anyone's
opinion then. I read and read and read, trying to catch up on the thirty years of
American and British science fiction production that had passed me by. If I could, I
would have taken the books intravenously, or soaked them up through the skin; reading
was so damn slow. I'd have absorbed them whole, together with the bookworms.
In time, with enough bookworms ingested and accumulated, I'd have turned into a
bookworm myself, a giant obese Shai-Hulud of bookdom, burrowing deep down under the
library and bookstore basements, coming out in a geyser of bricks, parquet, and
hardcovers only to devour the latest skiffy releases.
What saved me was supply-side economics.
It delivered a shock that brought me to my senses, kept me out of the claws of
depravity, and let me be just another ordinary fan. Namely, the book business went
soft in the early seventies and the foreign book bookstore a couple of blocks away
from my library decided to meet the challenge aggressively. They tried catering for a
wider clientele, especially in the paperback section of the store, and to that purpose
added several new genre lines to their usual choice of romances, gothics, and skiffy.
One of the new choices, to my amazement, was pornography. Overnight there was a whole
new section of shelving devoted to the Olympia Press "Traveller's Companion" line of
books, with color-coded covers. Green covers for "regular" sex, yellows for the gays,
pink for the kinks, etc. Some of the stuff was very good, too, exciting and
beautifully written.Hm. I cannot say I turned from a SF fan
into a pornophile. No, I have always approved of explicit sex, in art and out of it,
and still do. And I never stopped reading science fiction. It is just that suddenly
there was a timely reminder of other things in life. Slowly I brought the reading pace
down to normal, the fever receded, and I stopped bearing Ghu's witness before the
world. Science fiction became Just A Goddam Hobby then, and has remained that ever
since. All illustrations by Teddy Harvia |
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