💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jdd › posts › 20220430_esfcas-1.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 13:58:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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... aka, the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Art Society
<2022-04-30>
Back in the mid-1970s, I was a mopey teenager who read a lot of science fiction. It was a somewhat different world back then. There was a lot more stigma attached to being an SF geek, and a certain amount of persecution from one's middle school peers kind of went with the territory. "It is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan", as the saying went.
My situation changed somewhat in the spring of '77. I'd heard about some sort of SF related event at the local university and decided to check it out. It wasn't quite an SF convention, but it had some of the trappings: a dealer room selling comics and sf paperbacks, an author reading or two, and a room showing vaguely SF-related short films in constant rotation (that was where I first saw "La Faim", disturbing enough that I remember it to this day [1]). More importantly, and unusually for me, I met some people there, including this friendly guy, Robert, who was enthusiastically recruiting for the local science fiction club. For the first time in quite a while I felt like I was among kindred spirits, and of course I signed up.
The club met at the university on Thursday evenings, and most of the members were university students. I was a few years younger so couldn't fully participate in all the club's activities, missing out on such things as pub nights and a legendary road trip to Westercon 30 in Vancouver. But to their credit, the group was as welcoming as they could possibly be, given the age difference. I took it for granted at the time, but in retrospect it seems remarkable. I suspect many of them had also been consigned to outsider status in their teenage years, and had no wish to inflict it on anyone else. Whatever the reason, I am grateful for their kindness.
SF Fandom is a bit hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it firsthand, and any explanation I can provide is very, very out of date. I'm sure it has changed a lot in the 40-odd years since I was involved, thanks to changing demographics, mainstream acceptance of the genre, and the Internet.
A shared interest in SF (and fantasy, and comic books) was what brought the group together, but after a while other interests came to predominate. SF became more like a sort of cultural background radiation - always present, but not always noticeable. In retrospect, most of the group's activities were about making social connections: with local fans obviously, but also with other fans and clubs regionally, nationally and even internationally. Apart from club meetings there were parties, and movie nights, and several club members even shared housing for a while, and a few paired off into various relationships and marriages. There were a variety of writing and publishing efforts: fanzines, newsletters, and APAs [2] issued forth in great abundance. And there were conventions, or "cons" in the parlance. Much effort, money and time was spent organizing, travelling to, and attending SF Conventions, which as far as I could tell were essentially really big parties with sparsely-attended panels, and well-attended social events, held at a hotel rather than someone's house.
It turned out that I had stumbled into what would become for a time one of the most successful and active groups of SF fans in North America (for which I claim no credit whatsoever.) It was such a hotbed that, for a while, sf fans from other cities even moved to Edmonton to be where the action was. Which if you've ever visited Edmonton might strain the bounds of credulity, but it's true.
Now, it's not my purpose here to re-tell the story of the club's rise and fall; that has already been told elsewhere [3] and I'm not the best person to tell it anyhow. I stopped going to meetings after a couple of years, in part because by that time the club had split up into various factions (one of which I continued to socialize with in other venues), but mostly I think due to the lack of date-able women in my age bracket. The high school theatre club seemed more promising in that regard.
No, I'm writing about ESFCAS because I've been thinking about it lately, in the context of some of the social (and personal) dynamics I'm seeing in gemini space. I've realized that this very early experience in group dynamics gave me a lens through which, rightly or wrongly, I continue to view such things decades later.
The next installment will attempt to sort out my thinking on this a bit more coherently.
[3] Garth Spencer. If you're not enjoying yourself, that's not my problem. OPUNTIA #5, 1991
ESFCAS was published on 2022-04-30