“A life is a secret thing, even between a husband and wife. Your secret life is completely your own, and because it is unknown, will never be mourned. The secret life of each individual goes unhonored through eternity.” — Steve Rasnic Tem, Deadfall Hotel, p 204, ¶ 7, rendered into present tense.
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The Secret Life of Fans leaks into society’s tap-water reservoirs and seeps into mundane lives to infect precious bodily fluids, to distill dangerous waking dreams, and to condense speculative imagination into reality.
Some fear this.
Fans like acting out their enthusiasms. Whether it be a murder party, the Baker Street Irregulars, or the costumes at a science fiction convention, fans love participation in their fantasy of choice.
Books, movies, and video games offer fiction delivery systems addicted to the many genres. Fanzines proliferate in paper and online. Costumes requiring untold hours, effort, and costly material become an outlet for creativity and adoration. Role playing consumes the greatest part of leisure time and spending money. Styles originated by fans emerge into the brighter light of the fashion world. Inspiration and influence washes from fannish tidal pools to color and flavor society’s oceanic whole.
So we see that a secret life can be given wings. It can be released into the wild and find ways to thrive. Murder will out, they say. So, too, the secret life of fans.
Fans, particularly science fiction and fantasy fans, are generally looked down upon by wider society. In part this is due to a stubborn refusal to be ashamed of their enthusiasms. They will not act or dress like corporate adult drones at their parties and conventions. Hawaiian shirts are just a start, as the Costume Procession will demonstrate. Conformists mock fans even as fans flaunt their secret imaginary lives lived with such panache and style.
Languages and religions have even emerged from the secret life of fans.
Escapism, some aver. Fannish fun is dismissed as childish. Speak Elvish or Klingon at a board meeting, cite Scientology, Bokonon, or Jedi precepts during work hours and staying employed will prove a challenge. Groupthink swarms such instances of individualism and puckish humor is not appreciated.
The shame meme spreads to academe, where “mere” genre fiction is actively denounced. Professors of the academic sort of literary endeavor act as if genre fiction is an infection worse than syphilis or republicantism. Some college English departments actively sabotage and oppose science fiction conventions on campus and threaten demerits and bad grades to anyone attending such events.
Were these blue nosed disapprovers to be cracked open like a death star we would find the escapist pustules of religion, ideologies political and financial, and other proofs of the very taint they accuse genre fiction, and by extension genre fans, of spreading.
Oddly, they relegate genre works to children. Are children immune, then, to genre’s cooties? Are such broken-down fairy tales nonsense fit only for uncritical readings? Or is it that only children would fall for such claptrap, in the disapprovers’ view? Is genre not good enough for serious adult minds?
Or are closed minds not good enough to appreciate genre’s scope and depth?
Boring, pedestrian, and merely descriptive, genre defenders sneer at academically approved mainstream or literary writing. How can love affairs and alcoholism stand up to galactic empire building, space-time derring do, and Martian princesses? Fans want to know, and think they do know: Litfic can’t hold a laser pistol to genre work.
“Most of the biggest-grossing, most popular, and most enduring movies of all time are genre-based,” goes the refrain, and it’s true. You can Google it.
This vindicates genre defenders, and genre itself, by demonstrating how eager vast numbers of people are to participate, however vicariously, in those secret lives sparked in fannish heads.
Mere popularity, the academics snort. Mass appeal proves lowest common denominator material. Any work readable by the masses must by definition, they insist, be crass, crude, and driven by commercial considerations. To be grasped by the average reader, it must be unstylish, simplistic, and garish. To hold the interest of the great unwashed, it must be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The academics pit William S. Burroughs against Edgar Rice Burroughs as if the two are mutually exclusive. Read, then, “The Jungle Rot Kid, On the Nod,” by Philip José Farmer, a Tarzan story written like an out-take from Naked Lunch.
Must fiction do a particular thing in a certain way to count as worthwhile?
The secret life of fans says no: If it’s fun to read, that suffices. Diversion, entertainment, and edification are a scale, not separate boxes. They rely as much on reader as what’s written. A story is words, and words reach diverse minds, each able to make valid assessments. The more someone brings to a story, the more one finds in it.
Some read for plot points. “And then, and then, and then what?” Some read for character interaction. “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” Some want to be imbued with a sense of wonder. “And slowly, one by one, the stars were going out.” Or a skin-rippling chill. “And then some idiot turned on the lights.” Some want to touch upon things we cannot fully apprehend with our senses and thoughts. “I’ll wish you into the cornfield.” Some want just the facts. “The cold equations say she must be ejected.” Some want the surreal. “A screaming comes across the sky.”
All can find what they look for, in genre and out. Good writing is good writing regardless of genre considerations. Bad writing is bad writing regardless of academic approval.
The secret life of fans is the life of enjoying variety, opening to wider vistas, and exploring speculations about humanity that go well beyond the quotidian lives we must all live in order to be able to afford a secret life.
A life in, of, and for the mind is all it takes to be free of the suit, tie, and cubical. Read more and prosper.
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“Life, although it only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, so I will defend it.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus, the monster speaking in Ch. 10.
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written as yet another Rat Stew column for Tom Sadler’s APA zine
The Reluctant Famulus, for November 2012’s issue.
