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NERDS_BEYOND
August 2, 2010
September 20, 2013
OTR
Out in the wilds of the internet archive,
there is-- for perpetuity, one presumes--
an oddly concieved but poorly executed
attempt at a modern radio drama.
It's intended to be a dramatization of the early
days of American Science Fiction, when sublimely
nerdy outcasts stalked the streets of New York,
and began trying to elevate or inflate the
cheap and trashy world of pulp Science Fiction...
LOST_WORLDS_OF_UNKNOWN_TOMORROWS
I've read a number of books
about this era, (but none
of them recently):
All Our Yesterdays
The Futurians I've never read Moskowitz's
In Memory Yet Green "Immortal Storm"... I was
The Way the Future Was probably scared away by some
Richard E. Geis jokes.
"He's been seeming kind
of dull lately."
"I think he's been
drinking Sam
Moskowitz's blood."
This show was largely about the
second rank, I would say, fans trying
to go pro, editing and writing the
more minor publications...
One aspect that's of interest: they try
to talk about the political angles or
the issues of the day, and it plays up
a tension between fascist editors and
young socialist fens. As I remembered it, early
fannish infighting had less
The fans explicitly want to to do with politics and more
treat "science" as a new to do with things like kids
form of religion. Including being miffed at some guy
that trope was a good scheduling a con opposite
thought, though the handling someone else's...
may be a bit overdone here.
But... I suspect this was just
This is the sort of idea my own apolitical nature in my
that young, relatively teens and twenties, filtering
bright (if not wise) kids my memory of what I'd read.
are likely to seize on...
The Futurians, for example,
CULT_OF_REASON were a mixed bag, but
decidedly a lefty group
(hence, "The Galaxy School").
BLACK_MASKS
Certainly the (only recently
deceased Frederick Pohl)
always cared about politics
(a Communist up to '39).
There's a constant parade of
anacronisms that irritated me. I'm old enough to be annoyed by
these gaffes, but still young
There are lines like "Get a enough not to forgive kids for
life!" (that's a bit of making them.
80s/90s slang, and already
getting pretty stale a few
decades later).
Or how about: "I have it
here in my pack". *No one* carried knapsacks in the
30s or 40s. I started doing this in
the mid 60s and the other kids
thought I was being phenomenally
weird. (I carried an old boyscout
model: the ubiquitous cordura day
packs were at least a decade in the
future).
It seemed to me that they were
taking a bit of license with
the numbers of female fans they
had on stage... but reviewing
the wikipedia page on the
Futurians shows 6 of 26 members
were women (many eventually (I didn't realize Judith Merril was
married male members). around back then. She became a major
"new wave" editor in the '60s.)
It seemed weird to me though
that they're not significantly
different from the male fans,
not even in their social
circumstances
The female SF fan often has
an absurd number of romantic
prospects... they can end up
ruling a roost of "slans",
without any trouble.
There's a group on stage that
calls themselves "the Fabulists",
which are clearly something like
the Futurians, but not enough so Why not just *do*
to be interesting. the Futurians?
There's a certain odd dissonance about
all this: they're the Futurians, and
yet they're not the Futurians...
The fascist editor is a *bit* like Campbell, and
yet is not supposed to be him... he's portrayed as
an idiot (a guy who rejected Heinlien, rather than
featuring him as Campbell did).
There's a fan on stage that raves about
Astounding: so why aren't all these guys
desperate to submit stories there?
Why mess around with a *second rate* fascist?
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