[penguicon-general] Fannish Material To Read

[Matt Arnold]

On 12/17/06, Wolfger <wolfger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/17/06, Matt Arnold <matt.mattarn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There is no such thing as a core experience for anyone in the fannish
> > community
>
> Case in point: Matt didn't mention Star Wars or Star Trek, which many
> would consider staples of fandom. I think the only way to get a real
> feel for fandom is to go to a "regular" (meaning, one that is not half
> Open Source) con and just absorb the experience. Regardless of how
> many books I've read or movies I've seen, I never really had a clue
> what fandom was until I went to a con.

You're right, fandom is about attending cons, pure and simple. There
is not likely to be a core-experience movie you could watch or novel
you could read that would tell you what "filk" means.

As Eric Raymond might put it, what we're talking about here is a
radial category. Go here:
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sf-history.html
and do a Find on that page for "radial". Fandom as a whole is a radial
category, so we can call attending a live shadowcast of Rocky (with
people who will shout at it) as one of the core experiences of fandom,
even though there are some of us who would never do it and are none
the less True Fen.

For movies of cultural reference, I recommend Monty Python And The
Holy Grail, Clerks, The Princess Bride, Ghost In The Shell, and Rocky
Horror.

Also, ST and SW aren't just media. I know there are a lot of Star Trek
and Star Wars franchise novels out there, some of which I read when I
was a teen and college student. But no one volume of them can be
recommended as a core experience.

-Matt