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| Yes, the text is apropos. |
Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, the world was without
form, and void. And then ghughu said the Word, and the Word was Amazing.
Actually,
if the truth be told, Amazing Stories is not the beginning of SF
fandom in North America – indeed, not the beginning of SF publishing:
certainly, Hugo Gernsback’s addition to the pulp market in April, 1926 was
apparently the first periodical specifically dedicated to “scientifiction”
however stories and novels of this sort had been published in pulp format for
decades already.
Arguably, the US market for
primarily literary magazines was first plumbed by Frank Munsey with his
(initially weekly) magazine launched in 1889 that he modestly named after
himself.
The Argosy was added to the news-racks
in 1896. Both these published scientific
romances and fantastic tales of course, but were more general literary
magazines so contained many other types of story as well. Nevertheless, interest was sufficient by the
20
th Century to support the launch of specialized fantastic literature
magazines such as
Thrill Book (1919)
and
Weird Tales (1923). These focused
more on occult and weird fiction of course, but nevertheless also contained
tales that today we would class as SF.
It was in this era that the first
of the many Numbered Fandoms
arose – the beginning that eventually evolved into an entire culture of SFandom. This story is a long one, particularly if one
starts at the beginning, so perhaps I will divide it into parts. In this part,
I will lead us to the end of the First Fandom and lay the foundations of a
theory of Ages that I think illuminates some of the latter history of the
community.
Eofandom (1919 to 1929 – the letter era)
In the beginning was void and
chaos: that is to say, scientific romances and scientifiction were scattered
among a variety of magazines (and of course the occasional dime novel or penny
dreadful). This is not to say there were no fans –
of course there were fans! But the world of fandom was still
fragmentary and of limited interaction. I think though that it’s important to
note that there were nodes of interest congealing, mainly through letter
writing circles such as the one that formed around H.P. Lovecraft. Likewise,
interest in the science and technology of the future was intensifying in the 19-teens
and 1920s: the speculations and predictions of writers such as H.G. Wells and
Jules Verne appeared poised to come true, the economies of developed nations
were bubbling at seemingly breakneck speed, and nearly every year was producing
new, astonishing inventions that could actually be taken advantage of by
ordinary people.
A key feature here is that there
were fairly well respected authors “dabbling” in scientific romances – names
such as Washington Irving, James Ferinmore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, Samuel Clemens, and Herman Melville – producing works we now see as
having “literary merit” at the same time as the “dime novel” and “penny
thriller” formats were beginning to boom in the late 19
th century.
What the ‘Teens and ‘20s really brought was really a combination of the
intensification of industrial and scientific development (truly incredible
discoveries were being made after all, some of which shook thinking society
right down to the foundations of understanding
– remember, this is the era of General Relativity, of Nikola Tesla’s inventions,
of atoms and cosmic rays, of injectable insulin and penicillin – and an
explosion of both economic fertility and mass production, which made for a
strong middle class and plenty of spare cash for cheap luxuries like throw-away
print.
The resulting explosion of pulp was
a Darwinian soup in which publishers experimented with formats and
combinations, bred and mutated and died. The side effect was that there was at
least a whole generation raised with science fictional ideas not just
inhabiting the pages of recreational reading, but occasionally appearing to
become possible if not actually true. Naturally, this sudden blooming led to a
growth of enthusiasm which manifested itself in the letters pages of the more
persistent journals, and from there to the beginnings of correspondence
directly between the fans themselves.
By all accounts, Lovecraft’s circle
of correspondents (who were sometimes included as a result of fan mail from
Lovecraft himself) was just one of a number of circles of this sort – a
particularly interesting letter might lead other readers to write to its author
to argue the matter or to add to it, and so on. Many such circles seem to have
sprung up in the 1920s as the pulp magazines finally started to settle into
what we might call genre lines, and two particular names seem to come up often
in fan histories as having started a habit of monthly letters to professional
magazines, resulting in extensive national networks of correspondents: Forrest
J. Ackerman and Jack Darrow
being two particularly prominent names from the period.
This is what defines what we might
call Eofandom – a sort of pre-fandom, fragmented community of individuals who
just happen to have a similar interest and who are connecting in a haphazard
way through ordinary correspondence.
The First Fandom (1929-1939 – the fanzine
era)
Now,
the Mists of Time obviously can’t last
forever, and eventually it was inevitable that something would have to happen.
It happened in the early 1930s. Or rather, two things happened.
The first
thing that appears to have happened is this: the expansion of transportation
options in the United States led to the ability of fans to travel to visit the
people they had been corresponding with.
Naturally, this sort of
travel would be best carried out in such a way as to meet several people at
once – leading to the revelation that there were
others nearby who had shared enthusiasms. As they say, if you get
two Americans with a shared interest together they form a club – the networks
began to coalesce into actual clubs. The second thing is a related matter: the
printed fan magazine.
No longer
content to communicate solely via correspondence circles, and finally beginning
to organize in a more formal way, fans who had access – either through
financial resources of their “club” membership or by virtue of a close
relationship with a printer – began to develop their own member
publications. Now, instead of poring
over an ever-increasing and changing range of often genre-spanning serials to
see and respond to letters, or painstakingly writing letters – sometimes with
several duplicates – to be delivered directly to correspondents’ eyes alone,
fans at the center of social clusters could compile the news, discussions, and
arguments into a familiar form: typeset magazines such as The Time Traveller,
Science Fiction Digest, Brass Tacker and others. The communities that began to
coalesce around these publications are significant for what comes next.
Now, a
key element of the First Fandom – and probably its seminal moment
- was probably the
establishment of the Science Fiction League, which began life under the pen of
Hugo Gernsback on the pages of the February 1934 issue of
Wonder Stories.
Gernsback
was of course an incredible entrepreneur of the popular science and
“scientifiction” enthusiasm of the 1920s, and had launched (and mourned the
death of) a number of magazines. In this
context, Gernsback was an experienced player, having established the American
Radio League (which started life as the Wireless League) in 1909. He had originally formed the organization as
a means to defend the amateur radio community from oppressive legislation
but no doubt also realized
the marketing and promotional value of this sort of organization. Beginning
life with known writers and community notables such as Forrest Ackerman, Jack
Darrow (that name again!), Edmond Hamilton, P. Schuyler Miller and others the
organization proved popular and soon had chapters in the US, UK and Australia.
This, I
believe is the defining feature of the First Fandom: this is a kind of Cambrian
explosion marked by the emergence of coherent communities from the previous
casual correspondence circles, and the rise of “official” fan organizations,
and it is these dinosaur-like entities that feature so heavily in early fan
history.
Here, however,
both Speer and Katz urge the reader to see some kind of transition. Speer
suggests that in the period between the sale of
Wonder Stories in 1936
and the first Worldcon in
1939 there was a period of transition and conflict which lies between the
“true” First Fandom and the Second Fandom. Katz on the other hand repudiates
the idea of an interregnum and instead points to the shift in fan publications
as the marker for a change in Era. I both agree and disagree with both.
I choose
to use Speer’s Numbered Fandom nomenclature - along with the idea of an
“interregnum” as he puts it, and I agree with Katz that publications are a
useful marker for the character of the community at the time, but I think he
puts too much stock in the idea of “focal point” magazines, which I think
obscures some of the social complexity which is evident in the early
narratives. And I’m fairly sure that social dynamics is a major part of this
story, which of course gets reflected
in the kind of communication fans are using.
With
that, let’s go back to the idea of fan correspondence:
As you
might guess, the coalescence of fans into groups and the revelation that these
groups were connected to one another in a network led naturally to the desire
to communicate. Typewriters had of course become much cheaper with the
development of the classic Underwood #5
but typing and retyping
the same letter multiple times – even with carbon paper
- was a chore that surely
even the most ardent fan correspondent dreaded. But the industrial advances of
the 20s had also brought about a revolution in the price of duplication devices
such as hectographs and mimeographs. Mimeographs and their solvent stencil
process were the superior option of course – thus their survival until quite
recent times – but hectographs were cheaper and with the invention of the
updated Ditto process in 1925 they could be used reliably for up to 100 copies.
Copying
letters to one another is of course a fine fannish thing to do, but recall that
these (mostly teenaged and early 20s) fans were building on a tradition that
grew out of the egoboo that comes from seeing one’s letter between the covers
of a favourite magazine: it was inevitable that basement newsrags would be
born, and so the first fan circulars – true fanzines – came to be “printed”
to supplement the
semi-pro magazines that were being printed by Conrad Ruppert and others with
access to printing equipment at reasonable rates. Some of the more active and enthusiastic fan
groups developed their own publishing organs, some of which appear to have been
really quite elaborate and even acquired subscribers from the British fan
community. (again, a testament to the extended correspondence networks that had
been building). Gradually, the cost (and effort) of producing real-live
high-quality fan magazines like FM grew too much, particularly with the 1930s
being a poor time to market small-run magazines of such specialized
interest. Subscription petered off and
the field thinned.
Not that
others failed to try to fill the void: efforts like Science Fiction World, The
Planeteer and others were tried but each and every one seemed to flare and die
– here the newly emerging hectograph and occasional mimeograph publications
started to take up the slack. With Fantasy Magazine in particular out of the
way, every fan could aspire to be an editor and see some kind of success in the
hobby, but by all accounts the majority of the early hectograph efforts
struggled – and failed – to achieve the kind of quality fandom had come to
expect.
Still,
when Morris Dollens began to send out his Science Fiction Collector publication
(which was initially filled with fiction by Dollens, then expanded its scope as
popularity increased) with an effort at higher production quality, if not
content (which Speer reports as being spotty) a higher standard was set and the
field improved.
And this is where the seeds of the end of the
First Fandom are to be found – but this, perhaps, is merely the fertile soil.
To understand more deeply, we need to go back in time once more.
Once upon
a time,
in the Spring of 1928 to
be precise – only 2 years after the launch of
Amazing Stories – the organization that might well have been the
first organized fanclub was formed: the Science Correspondence Club, which
later changed its name to International Scientific Society in a letter by the
founder Walter Dennis and various executives published in
Astounding Stories of Super-Science,
and later to the International Scientific Association, or ISA
.
The ISA
predated the SFL of course, but it was also an organization of a slightly
different character – while Gernsback’s group was welcoming to science
enthusiasts, it was after all primarily an organ aimed at promoting interest in
science fiction (and indeed, the cynical might assume it was intended to
promote interest in Gernsback’s magazine). ISA on the other hand was explicit
in its aim to bring together the amateur science community and science fiction,
with the understanding that an interest in scientifiction would naturally lead
to an interest in science and ideally to a career in science.
It was
this grand vision which seems to have spelled the end of the First Fandom, through
the conflict that began in the latter half of the 30s, and came to a head in
1939.
As
previously mentioned, the early 30s saw the rise of a dizzying number of fan
societies of various levels of formality. Among the more formal clubs were
organizations like ISA and SFL, and of course that hoary old chestnut The
Scienceers.
ISA was surely the strongest of the field at the time, and as the earlier fan
society it’s unsurprising to find that the first “conventions” were essentially
ISA affairs – the first, of course, was not so much a convention as a picnic
that somehow got out of hand and ended with a dozen or so NY-ISA members
heading to Philadelphia in 1936 to meet with fans there, but the next two
affairs could more reasonably be called conventions and surely led to the first
Worldcon ever in 1939.
This is
where things get a bit messy.
The
fanzine and fan magazine realms had already seen their share of strife, from
silliness like the Staple Wars
all the way to the
conflict between Gernsback and The Planeteers over payment for the use of space
at the Museum of Natural History that led to the club fracturing.
The
beginnings of serious conflict began in 1934, however, with Wollheim’s
accusation that Gernsback had been publishing stories from young authors in
Wonder Stories and not paying them.
This led
to great rancour as Wollheim took to criticising
Wonder in every respect in any venue to which he had access.
As a stalwart member of ISA, Wollheim and his fellows-at-arms were no doubt
both snide and ruthless in their criticisms, and once the truth came out that
the deeper reason for hostility was Gernsback’s failure to pay battle lines
began to be drawn between the ISA and the SFL.
It doesn’t appear that “dual citizenship” was by any means impossible, even in
this era of conflict, nor is it entirely clear what effect Wollheim’s
propaganda campaign against Gernsback really had, but it is true that Gernsback
sold
Wonder Stories in 1936
One venue in which Wollheim was
able to voice his displeasure with little risk of editorially enforced
moderation was the fanzine circuit. As mentioned, some of those early fanzines
(by which I mean the hecto- or mimeographed publications) were of…ah…uncertain
quality. However, they were produced by fans in small quantities and mailed or
otherwise shared about, allowing communication to a larger audience than mere
letters, and served to supplement what could reasonably be expected to reach
publication in the print pro-zines.
The quality of these fanzines was
increasing through the mid-30s, and as noted Dollens’
Science Fiction Collector set a high bar from its launch in 1936.
Other such fanzines worked to reach a similar level, and unsurprisingly the
fans who were most enthusiastically writing for and participating in the better
ones were ultimately moved to form the first SFandom Amateur Printing
Association,
FAPA in 1937.
FAPA charged membership dues of
$0.50, which entitled the 50 members to receive a packet containing copies of
the other members hectographed fanzines. It is significant, I think, that the
organizers of FAPA were Wollheim and John Michel, who were also at the center
of the increasingly political ISA.
ISA was begun, as I have said, as
an organ dedicated to bringing the amateur science folks together with the SF
fans, believing that the two fed from one another and led invariably to if not
careers in science but a scientific adult outlook. Given this, and given the
political climate of the 1930s, it was perhaps inevitable that some members of
the ISA would become political.
At the time, the economic situation
in the United States was still hard and the SF pulps were foundering – the sale
of Wonder was one thing, but
Gernsback’s effort was by no means the only publication suffering from
declining subscription. Interest in fandom was declining as well, as the first
generation of enthusiastic fans grew up and moved on to whatever was needed to
pay their way as adults. There remained
a core of enthusiasts of course, and increasingly there was a split in the
community:
On the one side were those who had
been active in the Lovecraft Circle and similar Weird Tales oriented SF – people who were science fiction fans
because of the fantastic elements and the adventure. These were perhaps the
scientific romanticists, more in league with the science fiction of Burroughs
and Shelley and Doyle.
On the other side were those who
saw scientifiction as deriving inevitably from
science – they might enjoy things like Flash Gordon, but they were more
interested in the speculations of Wells and Verne. Their adventures too might be adventurous,
but they expected them to be extrapolations from the amazing discoveries being
announced all the time, a serious effort to see or at least inspire the future.
The ISA was, obviously, in the
latter camp – but even this camp was not immune to fracture, and the break came
in the summer of 1937.
Active in the hectograph scene,
Wollheim and Michel (and also Fred Pohl) had also begun to get embroiled in a
variety of leftist movements in the New York area, including the Young
Communist League. Wollheim, it should be
said, was a relatively rapid convert – by Speer’s account he had been vocal in
his support for a Republican candidate for president in the summer of 1936, but
by the end of the year he was a communist. A rapid transition indeed! These three men, along with Robert Lowndes,
became vocal advocates of the cause of the future: the goal of a scientific
socialist world state, which of course they argued would be a utopia.
At about the same time, another
prominent member of the ISA, William Sykora, was president of the club but on
the verge of going off to school and pursuing that logical aim of ISA
membership: a career in science. Consumed by increasingly sober concerns, the
elderly Sykora (he was, after all, in his 20s – the eldest of the players, we
should remember) allowed himself to become emotional in his letter of
resignation from the office of president of the NY-ISA and blasted the younger
members for their obsession with friviolity and distraction from the
“Gernsbackian ideal” of the advancement of science through SF fandom.
This, along with the political rift
between Wollheim’s side and Sykora’s led to a series of intense battles fought
out not only in the pages of fanzines and magazine letter sections, but also in
person through the emerging convention scene.
So intense was the enmity after the
break-down of the ISA over 1937 (leading ultimately to the formation of the
Futurians from the ashes in 1938 – mainly fellow-travellers of Wollheim and
Michel, at least in theory) that Wollheim, Michel and others worked to get
Sykora ejected from the New York SFL
and led intense political campaigns that strained the atmosphere of the first
real conventions in 1938 and 1939. Sykora, Sam Moskowitz, and James Taurasi
(together known as the Triumvirs, in opposition to Wollheim’s Quadrumvir) for
their part were central to the organization of these two conventions – and
advocates for serious, apolitical fandom. It was true that they felt SF (or
rather stf) was a vehicle for the advancement of science, but they not only saw
no need for a political agenda but actively opposed the communist utopia being
pushed by the other side.
These two groups seem to have
formed the hard nuclei of viciously opposed factions. It was probably inevitable that after
Wollheim read Michel’s manifesto
demanding that SFandom commit to the scientific socialist agenda (and assuming
that any fan who thought would immediately agree that it was a brilliant goal)
the two factions would clash and throw off sparks wherever they were in
contact. The next year was filled with fanzine broadsides and manifestoes, mainly
between Wollheim and Mozkowitz, and by the time of the first Worldcon in 1939,
later dubbed Nycon, the conflict was in full boil. Sykora and Moskowitz barred
Wollheim and others from the event, for fear they would make another scene by
standing on soap boxes (not literally).
This, I
think, marks the dissolution of the First Fandom. Speer naturally disagrees – I
suppose that is to be expected, considering his own place in the events of the
era – seeing the rise and fall of the ISA (and similar organizations) as
central to the nature of Fandom. Arnie Katz of course disagrees as well, seeing
three Eras in the span I have labelled the First Fandom – there is a logic to
this of course, as Katz is relying on the fanzine as a focal point to his eras,
and because he bases his Era system on the idea of periods in which there is a
consensus in fandom.
But the
logic I am using is a little different:
I don’t
think that a consensus is necessary to identify an era of fandom, but what is important is that the community is
growing and at peace. You’ll notice that
this is the theme through my history here of my First Fandom – through Eofandom
there is a blooming of the hobby, interest is growing, connections are
building, and at the beginning of the First Fandom fans are coalescing into more
or less formal groups. Fanzines and the like are an organ by which this is
being achieved, but more than anything the technological development of cheap,
accessible printing was simply a driver of the process – this along with
convenient postal services and expanding transportation made it possible to
make the transition from faceless letter-writing to publication circles and
real life meetings.
This,
then, is what I think is the central character of a Fandom: the essential
nature of the community, how it grows and how it interacts, not any particular
consensus.
However,
there remains the question of how a Fandom ends and this again is a point at
which I diverge from Katz and cleave a little more closely to Speer. The common
thread in the early Fandom from both their narratives is this – that it ended,
more or less, with the vicious political conflict between Wollheim et al and
Moskowitz et al. It’s significant, I
think, that while many fans seem to have picked sides, the voices detectable in
the publications that have survived seem a small minority of fandom as a whole.
The disagreement may have been wider, but the determination to fight over it was not.
True, as
Speer notes World War 2 began and surely news of the war was a dampening force.
Likewise, though Katz disagrees with Speer’s assessment that the war era was a
“transition” with no clear character he agrees that the war was a major focus.
For that matter, I agree as well. But the question remains: why mark the end of
the First Fandom (or if you like the Hectograph Era) in 1939?
I am
concentrating on the relationships,
on the health of the fan community
and its growth. As such, I think that the most reasonable explanation for this
agreement that the age must end in 1939 is this:
The Wollheim/Moskowitz feud and the
intense politics that underlay it were exhausting to the run-of-the-mill fan.
People were tired of the conflict. On the one hand, it must have seemed
terribly frivolous to argue about the “purpose” of science fiction in the face
of events across the Atlantic, and on the other hand the world was rapidly
becoming a fraught enough place – those who had enough of strife would have preferred
not to be bothered. No doubt, this led
to something of a withdrawal from fan society in order to avoid the constant
feud. On top of this, recall that much
of fandom in this era was very young – enthusiastic teens
- but they were growing older, and with adulthood came other responsibilities.
Even those who went on to work in science fiction as writers and publishers
drifted away from the seething fan community simply because they no longer had
time. In other words:
The end of this age is marked by
gafiating fans.
This is the three point theory I
will proceed with:
1.
A Fandom is an era of fan activity beyond simply
enjoying SF – organization and society.
2.
A Fandom is marked by a period of growth and relative
peace, regardless of the factions.
3.
A Fandom ends when conflict intensifies and resulting gafia
causes a decline in fandom.
I will be disagreed with, but at
the end of it I’m writing this history of Fandoms for myself, as a project to
organize what I am presently reading, not for anyone else. Those who disagree
are free to ignore me.
And with that, a warning:
It will be evident from the nature
of this post that there is more to come. Not an encyclopedia, not immediately,
but there is more.
