  I've read that the 2002 Worldcon,
ConJosé, is going to offer an installment plan to help us fans pony up the
registration fee. I'll tell you why that makes me think of Anne Rice's vampires,
but first some background.I was born the day Roosevelt died.
Throughout my childhood, we lived just a couple of blocks from the campus of Illinois
State University in Normal, Illinois, and for several years my parents rented the
spare rooms on the second floor of our big old house to students. One summer in the
mid-1950s, a grad student in entomology left behind a paperback copy of Arthur C.
Clarke's Expedition to Earth anthology. Being a voracious reader, I picked
it up.I was already familiar with science
fiction from Captain Video and movies such as Forbidden Planet. (I
named one of my homing pigeons Walter after seeing that film.) So at the age of 11
or 12, I didn't find Clarke's stories incomprehensible, I found them mesmerizing.
That discarded paperback planted the incurable spore, and I have suffered from
chronic scientifiction affliction ever since.In 1959, I became a home delivery
provider (paperboy) for The Daily Pantagraph, Bloomington, Illinois', esteemed
journal of record. That meant I had disposable income. Each Saturday morning I went
down to the newspaper office, turned in the week's proceeds, and took the profit to
a nearby newsstand. It was one of those old-fashioned places you don't see much
anymore. It had everything -- candy, cigars, curling ribbons of flypaper hanging
from the ceiling, a grumpy old Jewish guy behind the counter. The walls were covered
with magazine racks, the floors crowded with freestanding carousels for paperback
books.Just inside the door was a rack with
all the sf prozines -- Astounding, Amazing, Fantastic,
F&SF, Galaxy, If, even the Columbia twins before they
folded. One Saturday morning, I bought one. The next week, I bought another. After
that, science fiction became a weekly habit. Of course, in those days you could buy
a prozine and an Ace Double for a dollar and get change back.
An ad in one of those prozines or
paperbacks led me to the Science Fiction Book Club. The SFBC performed an invaluable
service in those days by keeping many of the golden oldies in print. All the stories
that had created modern science fiction in the 1930s and `40s had been published in
the pulp magazines, and paperback reprints hadn't picked up much of the slack yet.
If you wanted to read Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space" or van Vogt's "Black
Destroyer," the SFBC was your time machine.And speaking of pulps, I took another
jaunt in time when I bought 50 sf pulp magazines from a New York huckster for $5.
It was the best $5 I ever spent. It took many days to leaf through all those copies
of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Amazing,
Startling Stories, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and others dating from
the late `40s and early `50s. Those magazines were battered and musty, not the kind
of stock offered to collectors, but they were a window into the barely bygone era of
the pulps. Today's neofans have no idea what that Bronze Age of science fiction was
like, but I came along early enough to catch a glimpse.As an avid reader and incipient
collector, I was primed when P. Schuyler Miller reviewed Dick Eney's Fancyclopedia
II in Astounding. It sounded interesting, so I ordered a copy. What a
monumental achievement! A hidden world was revealed, and I acquired a master's
degree in fannish lore.One item of information caught my
particular attention. Fancy informed me that there was a BNF named Bob Tucker
who was a movie projectionist in Bloomington. My mother had been a cashier at the
Irving Theater in Bloomington, and yes, she recalled some such person. I mentioned
this coincidence in a note to Eney, and he must have forwarded the news, because I
soon received a hefty bundle of fanzines, return addressed from the famous P.O.
Box.Tucker didn't stint on the selection.
There was Cry of the Nameless, Yandro, Shangri-l'Affaires,
Science Fiction Times, Fanac, Void, and a dozen other fanzines
of the day that I would recall if you mentioned them. And most of them contained
reviews of other fanzines, which I sent for. When Cry published my letter of
comment and sent me an official Cry Letterhack card, I became, literally, a
card-carrying fan.My early fannish and stfnal career
peaked in 1962, when I attended Chicon III in Chicago. It seemed like everyone was
there (except Harry Warner, of course). If you stood on a chair in the Florentine
Room of the Pick-Congress Hotel, you could spot everyone you had ever heard of, from
the filthiest pros to the biggest BNFs.What's worth noting is that in 1962,
a kid with a paper route could afford to attend a World Science Fiction Convention,
including train ticket, hotel room, banquet, the works. And if you read the prozines
and the leading fanzines, you were familiar with everyone who was significant in
prodom and fandom.The next year I was off to college,
and my engagement with sf involvement waned until, by my senior year, I wasn't buying
every issue of every prozine -- ouch, a gap in the collection! But I bounced back
after graduation, when I began reading for fun again.I attended a second Worldcon thanks
to bizarre good fortune. My first job after college was in St. Louis, and every day
I rode a bus past the Chase Park Plaza Hotel. One day I glanced up to see the 27th
World Science Fiction Convention proclaimed from the hotel's marquee. "Well, that's
convenient," I thought. I rode the bus home, got off, walked back to the hotel, and
registered at the door. How often do the Secret Masters of Fandom schedule a
Worldcon just a quarter mile from where you live?In 1970, I relocated to Chicago and
my fannish career attained its second peak. I subbed to a plethora of fanzines and
actually became an official columnist in Dick Geis' Science Fiction Review
for two issues before he underwent one of his cyclical publishing gafiations. I
even attended a couple of local fan gatherings, at George Price's apartment and Mike
Resnick's place out in Libertyville.I also noticed that sf and fandom were
changing. A growing number of fanzines were becoming 'semi-professional'. Worldcons
were drawing attendance in the thousands rather than hundreds, and local and regional
cons began to proliferate. Star Trek generated the first of the major
parallel or sub-fandoms, the beginning of ur-fandom's suburban sprawl. Paperback
publishing boomed, shifting the genre's center of gravity away from the cozy
community of the prozines.This all seemed pretty exciting at
the time. Sf was conquering the world. Sf was commercially successful, and that
made it increasingly acceptable if not respectable. And it was just plain
increasing. For the first time, I couldn't keep up with the effusion of new books
and had to pick and choose what I was going to read.During the 1980s, other interests
consumed more and more of my attention, and from the late `80s to late `90s I
successfully gafiated. I kept reading sf, but selectively (thank you, Jack Vance!),
and I saw the big movies, of course. But I lost touch with fandom and didn't know
how to reconnect until the World Wide Web appeared. The first thing I tried on my
search engine was 'science fiction'.A lot seems to have happened while I
was away. All the trends of the 1970s have sprouted from seedlings into rain
forests. For this displaced 1960 fan, there are too many books, too many authors,
too many awards, too many conventions -- too many fandoms!I thought things might be going too
far in 1966 when they created the Nebula Awards. Now there are probably more awards
presented each year than new sf books published in 1960. And speaking of books, 38
new sf and fantasy novels were published last month, plus anthologies, collections,
reprints, etc.I recently encountered a fan who has
attended 271 conventions (isn't there a German word for the mental sensation composed
in equal parts of admiration and horror?). I scan all these con listings and I don't
recognize most of the guests of honor. This summer our local con had two days of
solid programming -- comics, gaming, anime, SCA and other role-playing activities,
neo-paganism, Star Trek, costuming -- everything but plain old science
fiction.And this brings me to Anne Rice's
most puissant insight about vampires -- they, like the rest of us, are children of
their times. The world in which we spend our youth is 'normal', and everything after
that is increasingly strange and difficult to encompass.As we age, we can remain flexible and
adaptive for quite some time, if we try, but ultimately, the more the world changes,
the more estranged we feel. Humans are lucky enough to be mortal. But for the
vampires, the time comes when the world doesn't make sense anymore, and they succumb
to insanity or self-destruction. The immortal vampires die from future shock.I haven't reached that state yet, but
an installment plan for Worldcon registration fees is just one more reminder that
I'm not in Kansas anymore.Recently, I was bemused to realize
that my favorite part of Locus is the obituary section. Here are people I've
heard of, and each entry is a capsule of sf or fannish history. And best of all, I
get to know how the story ends. I like that. Maybe that's why I like science
fiction. It's a way to consider the future and, ultimately, how it all ends.
Inquiring minds want to know! So in that sense, I guess I'm not like Anne Rice's
old and despairing vampires -- at least, not
yet! - - - - - - - - - -
We expected that many of our readers could identify with David's article, and we
were right. One of them was Sam Long, who wrote: "[David Williams' piece] reminds
me much of my own fannish history, save that I wasn't into pulps as a kid in the
`50s and I didn't meet Tucker until the `70s. I started in SF by watching Tom
Corbett, Space Cadet on TV in the early `50s and went on to movies before I
actually started reading SF in my teens. I do remember, though, one more-or-less SF
children's book that I found in the school library and read in about the third
grade. The title was The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree [1952], and it was
the first of a series of children's books by Louis Slobodkin. I'd like to read (not
necessarily own) it again, just for fun, [but] I note that copies are available via
Amazon.com for from about $20 up to nearly $200. Nostalgia ain't what it used to
be." The future ain't what it used to be,
either -- the true start of the new millennium, 2001, arrived right on time, but
despite futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke's best intentions, manned space flight was
still stuck in earth orbit. Mimosa 27, published in December 2001, was our
"Welcome to the Future" theme issue; contents included an homage by Dave Kyle to Sir
Arthur, Fred Smith's look back at how well science fiction stories from decades past
were able to predict the future, Eve Ackerman's look forward at the future of
publishing, Mike Resnick's description of what would be in his personal time capsule,
as well as other articles by Earl Kemp, Sharon Farber, Robert Madle, Bruce Pelz,
Alexis Gilliland, Steve Lopata, Esther Cole, and Ron Bennett. The cover, a truly
amazing one by Teddy Harvia and Brad Foster, caused Ron Bennett to comment "It's one
of those pieces that will reveal something new and not previously noticed every time
one looks at it." There was also fan history in M27, including an article
that looked back to the decade of the 1960s, two decades prior to the era of personal
computers, at the beginnings of gaming fandom. Here it is again:Mimosa 27 cover by Teddy Harvia and Brad Foster All other illustrations by Charlie Williams |
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