Off Cuts
How I discovered Fandom

Articles:

*Rhetorics of Fantasy (extract)

*Out of This World

* What We Mean & How We Are Seen

* Denying the Exoticism of the Other

* How to Give a Conference Paper

* Why the Iraq Crisis is on

* Crowning the King

* How I discovered Fandom

* Did you ask any good questions...

* Popular science for children

* Creativity & Essay Writing


Contact:

farah.sf at gmail dot com

More Farah:

* Intergalactic Playground

* Live Journal

All texts copyright Farah Mendlesohn

 

 

How I discovered Fandom. A talk given to Conversation, LÂngholmen, Sweden, August 2006

I want to start this talk by admitting that to a very large extent, I still haven’t discovered fandom. As a conference organiser, as a critic, but most of all as a historian, I seem to have spent the past ten years of my life always involved in fannish activities, but with only the blurriest idea of what or where fandom is.

To begin with, I didn’t come to science fiction through any route that might have led me to fandom. Mine was a passion born from a suitcase full of books given to me by my Dad’s friend Gordon Leek. I’d been staying with my Dad for a couple of weeks and had run out of books. For a compulsive reader, this was a crisis. Gordon gave me this suitcase of books he had collected to give to charity (in my mind it seems enormous, but it probably wasn’t) and as I started to sort through he said “no, take the lot”. And again the compulsive reader kicked in, and I started to read and carried on reading until I’d read the lot. I think about two thirds of the books were sf and by the end I was hooked. Two writers in particular grabbed my attention, Brian Stableford and Joe Haldeman, and I think that’s significant in lots of ways.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Stableford and Haldeman set me on a path that led to science fiction and to Quakerism (much later, Heinlein would condition my responses to sex, but perhaps the less said about that the better). But both writers wrote (and write) from a position of sceptical outsider. This was a position I’d been occupying either by proxy or in person since I was four
When I was four my mother sent me to the local Jewish primary school. There were lots of practical reasons for this. That we were Jewish had very little to do with it. As my mother was an atheist of the flag waving persuasion, and a militant anti-Zionist to boot, I spent the next six years Not Joining things (there are capital letters in that phrase). I didn’t join the Jewish Girls League, I didn’t join the Saturday morning Cheder class, I didn’t join Camp, and I most definitely didn’t join in the day the Israeli army came to school. Years later when I met an old school friend she expressed shock on realising that I was Jewish.

Of course, the moment I switched to a secular (in inverted commas) state school at the age of 11, being Jewish suddenly became the core of my identity. It was a bit hard for it not to, when the school Assembly sang, “At the Name of Jesus, Every Knee Shall Bow”. But I think it’s important here to note that I didn’t ask for exemption because I was Jewish (although that’s the grounds on which I got permission to read in a classroom for half an hour every day—what a terrible punishment), I asked for exemption from from assembly because It Isn’t True! At the name of Jesus, every knee shan’t bloody well bow.

I moved schools after three months (the above incident was just one reason), and took only two things with me, a love of maths, and a passion for 2000AD which I’d come across at a friends’ house. Naturally, it belonged to her brother and he was much too lordly to condescend to an eleven year old. It remained a secret vice for the next ten years.

So to the new school, and another encounter with being on the periphery: I arrived in February, and all the others came from the same two schools; the uniform had short skirts—mine were the length fashionable at the previous school, ie scandalously long, almost hippy. I had long hair which was also about to become a fashion faux pas. And I was bright. And I liked school work. For the first time ever, I entered a milieu in which being clever was just not done. One or two of the boys could get away with it, but on the whole, smart = snob. It was in this context that I received that suitcase full of books and met the likes of Haldeman and Stableford.

Compared to the American high school stories I hear, my experience was not that bad. Some mild bullying, a general sense of feeling alone, and the strength of homo-social behaviour in British schools (girls and boys just don’t mix socially) left me in a solitary bubble punctuated by some brilliant teachers, and the odd conversation with some of the boys about science, politics and horror fiction. Yes, horror. This was the mid-1980s. Horror was where it was at. Science fiction barely registered, and when it did it was as Space Invaders and Adventure Books, neither of which grabbed me. And friends, I don’t like horror. Of all the genres that attract sf readers it’s the one that baffles me most; its values are so alien to those of science fiction. You always know the trajectory and the Other always remains a stranger. So again, I spent much of my time trying to work out what the rules of my world were. But although I worked them out, I couldn’t quite convince myself that I wanted to follow them.

I’m going to skip ahead rapidly. I grew up in Birmingham, shopped in Andromeda, where no-one ever mentioned conventions to me, went to York to read History, and fell in with Professor Edward James, who also never mentioned conventions to me. As the University sf society was mostly a gaming society, that rather passed me by. I’ve tried gaming. I lack the ability to suspend self-consciousness. Or to put it bluntly, I feel stupid. I also spend the entire time analysing other people’s behaviour rather than the game.

So that’s about twenty years in which I spent a lot of the time as an outsider watching the behaviour of others and assembling “behavioural rules” to try and explain what I was seeing. Reading first History and then Peace Studies only reinforced this tendency as increasingly I had become fascinated by group dynamics. My MA thesis was on Quaker relief workers and I was pretty sure I wanted to work on sf literature as a community dynamic for my PhD. I was fascinated by the early magazines. That took me back to York, back into association with Edward James, and this time, he introduced me to conventions.

My first convention was Mexicon in Scarborough in 1993, a sercon in which people sat around and talked about books. I don’t remember any concept of fan culture at all. I didn’t attend the 1994 Eastercon and I don’t think I attended the 1995 Eastercon, but I did go to the 1995 Worldcon and the 1996 convention of which I remember very little (I think it was in the Radisson), but Alison Scott, of Plokta, cornered me in a corridor and talked me into joining the Science Fiction Foundation.

This is where it all started to go Wrong. You aren’t supposed to join sf from the top. It’s different if you are an sf writer; you go to a convention having published a book or a story and you are supposed to be the centre of attention. You might never publish again (some writers have produced just one, utterly perfect, book or story) but you are what science fiction is about and it’s right and proper that you should find yourself on panels and bought drinks and generally just listened to.

The rest of us mortals are supposed to start as gophers, write some fanzine articles, graduate to reviewing and then to low level convention work and eventually onto convention committees and onto other things, etc. etc.

That’s not what happened to me. 1996 is only my first Eastercon remember. Worldcon had passed in a blur and the only incident I remember is the look on Pete Weston’s face when I corrected a detail about a story from the 1930s.

Alison’s invitation was frank nepotism. By this time I was typing for the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation, but far more important, I was living with Edward James, which meant I could be guaranteed to turn up. The SFF had just concluded the contracts for the move of the library to Liverpool and was exhausted, willingness to turn up really was a highly sought after asset.

What Alison didn’t know was that I had a Track Record. With all that outsiderness and scepticism, came that awful, horrible, terrible tendency to think, “I could do better than that” which I’m damn sure I got in part from those Haldeman and Stableford and Heinlein heroes, who all did think that. And then I’d do it. At the age of 17 I’d become chair of the Communist choir I’d joined at the age of 12-the next youngest member was about 40. I’d directed a cast of 150 in a Gilbert & Sullivan show at University despite knowing nothing about the canon, and gone on to start a feminist magazine. Once I joined the Committee of the Science Fiction Foundation, it took me precisely twelve months to get fed up of monthly meetings at which we’d discuss the date of the next meeting. This happens to organisations that have just done Something Big, it isn’t a criticism of the people who were there. So we had an overhaul and at the end of another twelve months I was chair of the Science Fiction Foundation. And we only met once every six months. And we began to move towards the journal/conference/book publishing profile we now have. Next year, we are going to run our first masterclass in science fiction criticism (details will be on the web site from the end of September).[edit: the masterclass is in its second year. Details from http://www.sf-foundation.org. Applications welcome for 2009.]

Nothing much more happened fannishly in 1996 although I did become assistant editor of Foundation. This was a fancier name for typist. We still typed up papers then. I also had formal permission to nag the editor. In 1997 I attended the Liverpool Convention still a bit baffled by it all, except that I’d rashly commented at an academic conference the previous year (Luton I think) that it would be fun to run a conference on Babylon 5. That was held in York in December 1997. We got a mention in the US edition of TV Guide and I discovered something really important.

I don’t find event organising stressful. I rather dread wondering if anyone will turn up, but I don’t actually find organising events the kind of headache everyone tells you it will be. I don’t really know why. But I think it may have something to do with the outsiderness: organising things gives me something to distract me from the stress of being on the inside. If I’m organising something, I have a role, a set of clear rules to what I’m doing. It’s like the pleasure of wearing a corset: you can relax because something else is doing all the complicated work of keeping everything upright.

Then, in 1998 Paul Kincaid asked me to be on a panel about sf and history with two writers I’d never read: Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod. Ok, I know that seems impossible but I was writing my PhD thesis, only for long and complicated reasons it wasn’t on sf, but on Quaker relief work and the Spanish Civil War, and I had only just completed so I was a bit out of the loop on modern sf.

I don’t quite remember the panel: I remember bright light (I think this was large windows in a very dark room in Manchester and not an epiphany), and I remember a sense of utter panic. I remember really erudite comments from my fellow panellists. But what I remember most is the sudden change of status. At the next convention I found myself on more panels than I could cope with (I cut back, I don’t do more than four panels at any convention now). I found myself asked to write, and I came across Vector, the magazine of the British Science Fiction Foundation which was alive with a conversation I hadn’t met before. I don’t think I met Andrew Butler through Vector (of which he was the editor)—we’d also met as academics—but Vector strengthened the relationship and he joined the SFF. We went on to organise two conferences together and also to edit a couple of books. I discovered I really, really liked editing. Which was useful. I became Features editor of Foundation. This generated another “outside on the borders role”. What a Features editor does is hussle for papers. You sit in conferences not so much engaging with the papers but thinking “could that be shaped up into a written article”? When the paper comes in, again, the reading approach is “how can this be improved?” It’s not quite “I can do this better”, but neither is it the kind of engagement of “normal” reading. I can’t honestly recommend a better type of work though if you really want to learn how to write.

By 1999, thanks to the conferences, the editing, and Paul Kincaid, people wanted me to do talks and be on panels. In 2001 I became editor of Foundation (my usual comment on this was that I had the most essential qualification: the ability to write rejection letters without a qualm), and a couple of years after that I was a last minute panellist on children’s fiction at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, from which I found myself propelled into the position of the Head of the Children’s Literature Division. I’m afraid the Impulse to Organize (more capital letters) took over then, which is why I’m now running the programme for the conference and wondering what the hell I was thinking. [Edit: not any more, that's now someone else’s job.] The impulse to “do things better” affected not my organisational role (ICFA is a pretty well run conference) but my writing. Because I was head of the Children’s Literature Division, I started reading up on science fiction for children, only to discover there was almost nothing to read. The critical material would have filled a maximum of three books, and no one actually knew how much fiction there was. So that’s what I’m doing right now. [Edit: if you are reading this on-line, it’s because I finished the book.]

Conferences are very different to conventions. The dynamic is very different. One of the major differences is that conferences attract specialists—sometimes so special that you wonder how they can all talk to each other—but conventions attract generalists, or synthesists. And this leads on to one of the most important ways in which I met fandom, through the fanzines. As I got better known, people started handing me their fanzines.

I have no idea how I missed fanzine culture up to this point.

Fanzines are fascinating: the dynamics between fanzines, the rivalry—friendly and not so friendly—but most of all the way they represent the fuzzy set of science fiction culture. And we are back to the role of observer again, my odd tendency to want to sit and analyse group dynamics and work out the rules. In the work I’m doing on sf for children, the issue of who and what an sf fan is has become rather important, and I’ve been playing with the idea of the “sf-nal” personality. Although there are specific topics you might finger as being part of sf culture—a fondness for cats and small electronic objects that go “meep”—those are all context dependent. Much, much more significant is something else that I think functions like water for a fish—ie most of us are too immersed to notice—and that is the intense and voracious interest in anything. Last week I had to fill in a survey for New Scientist to indicate which of about thirty topics I was interested in. I think I declined two of them. I suspect I’m typical.

I’m an academic. I went into academia—into history in particular—because I wanted license to be interested in anything and everything. And I discovered parochialism. I discovered people who spent their entire lives writing about one ten year period of banking history, a friend who declared that the book recommended to her on German seventeenth century female prophets was irrelevant because she was writing on English female seventeenth century prophets. I’ve had academics in the sf world tell me that they don’t read male writers, or that they “don’t do” children’s fiction, or that they don’t read science papers because it isn’t relevant to sf criticism (no, I’m not kidding). I just can’t imagine this kind of comment at a science fiction convention.

The fandom I discovered was voracious and enthusiastic. It is, as we are so often told by outsiders, childish. But one definition of adulthood is the closing in of possibilities, children have a sense of awe and wonder, and learning is what life is about. Childishness—or childlikeness—is a precious and essential component of the species. If I can be said to have “discovered” fandom, it’s this fandom I met, and this fandom that I feel like a member of.

Because ironically, it’s being part of this fandom that can leave me feeling like an outsider still, and I think I rather like being an outsider, as long as it’s a welcome one. The thing is, for all my reputation for talking, I’d much rather listen. There are so many interesting things to listen to, so many interesting people in the world. And the best way of listening to them is to get all the people I find interesting together, and listen to them discuss things with each other. And dinner tables just aren’t big enough. Which is really the short-short version of how I ended up organising conferences and conventions without ever, really, having done any of the things you are supposed to do beforehand.

I still don’t know if I’m a fan. Many of my friends are Big Name fans (we’re all growing older, stay around longer and it may be inevitable). I’ve organised an Eastercon. I even edit a (sort of) fanzine—you can get Foundation in return for an article. At academic conventions, I’m one of the people with links to the fan community (and one of the people who thinks it actually matters what authors think of your work). Yet somehow, I’m never counted as a fan. I’ve met fandom. I like it. But I am much more interested in providing venues for it, observing it, collecting it, writing about it, than I am in actually being it. Unless all of that makes me a fan anyway.