Old Fanzines
------------

I had a bad bout of insomnia earlier this week, so bad in
fact that I called in sick to work the following day, which
is pretty unusual for me. I was, for some reason, completely
wired all night, didn't sleep at all, such that I was a
sorry wreck by morning.

Since I couldn't nap all day (though I did my best), and
couldn't trust myself even to answer email coherently, I had
to find something unimportant yet at least somewhat engaging
to pass the time.  Casting about, I lit upon the stack of
old sf fanzines I had come across earlier in the summer,
while attempting to make smaller the heap of old crap we
keep in a part of the house euphemistically referred to as
"deep storage."  Dating from the late 70s and early 80s, I'd
been surprised to find that I still had them, that they had
somehow escaped both an ill-conceived "put away childish
things" purge in my mid-20s, and my parents' tendency to
clean house at the slightest hint of clutter (they were the
opposite of packrats, whatever that is).

And so I passed a rather pleasant and nostalgic few hours
re-living the world of Edmonton SF fandom of decades past,
reading once more the words of friends and acquaintances of
long ago discussing stuff that mattered to them back
then.  And wow, did the memories come flooding back. It has
been many years since I've given much thought to Westercon
30, Decadent Winnipeg Fandom, or the Committee to Stop
1979.[1]

While such things are meaningful to me (and presumably, a
small and ever-dwindling number of other folks somewhere out
there in the world) that can scarcely be true for whoever is
reading this here in gopherspace, so I won't belabour the
details.  There is one general point that might be of
interest, though I'm not sure how much to make of it.  I was
struck, in my sleep deprived state, by parallels I saw
between the lively print culture that grew up around sf
fandom, in which I was a minor participant in my youth, and
some of the activities I see out here on the smolnet.

And having struggled unsuccessfully for a while now to
articulate those parallels in a convincing way (something
about groups of loosely connected, geographically dispersed
individuals drawn together through a common interest
somewhat at odds with the mainstream[2], building
connections and communities based on that interest, blah,
blah) I'd have to conclude that either my initial insight
was irremediably flawed, or that teasing out meaningful
relationships between marginal net cultures and marginal
print cultures would require a lot more work than I'm
willing to put into it.[3]

But I think I can at least say, that for me part of the
appeal of the smolnet, and gopher in particular, lives
somewhere in those parallels.


Notes
-----

1. IIRC, the argument was 1979 was a dumb number for a year,
so everyone should just skip it and go straight to 1980.
Exactly why 1979 was a dumb number was never addressed; it
was simply a statement of fact and as such required no
explanation.  So as not to get permanently out of sequence,
the year following 1980 would be written as 1980 with a
subscript 2 tacked on, and be pronounced "Nineteen Eighty
Too."  Sure, maybe a bit confusing, but at least we wouldn't
have to date things "1979" for a whole year.

2. It was still, as the saying went, a "proud and lonely
thing to be a fan" in the late 1970s, but maybe just on the
cusp of gaining a foothold on the lower rung of the ladder
of mainstream acceptance, as it were.

3. And of course, it's kind of hard to maintain the
distinction, now that sf fanzine print culture has become
another net culture, like everything else. Anyone unfamiliar
with sf zines can remedy that by visiting a couple of web
sites:

https://www.fanac.org : for the historical materials
https://efanzines.com : for the new stuff

And rec.arts.sf.written is still pretty lively over on
Usenet

Sun Sep 15 16:45:58 PDT 2024