Article re: obsessional fannishness

[pegkerr]

From Arts and Letters Daily:

The geek shall inherit the earth. Well, let us hope not. The truth is that most sci fi and fantasy fans are infantile, escapist people, as shallow as they are socially inept... more

.Well, isn't that . . . acerbic. And from someone who counts himself (herself?) a fantasy fan, too. (See, e.g., the author’s defense of Tolkien--which admittedly doesn’t particularly plow any new ground at all.) However, it does touch upon something I’ve been thinking about myself lately, about the difficulty of managing (and perhaps dubious usefulness) of some of my obsessional jags.

Comments?

Comments

[fireriven.livejournal.com]

From that article:

Fiction in these genres can be a terrific tool for exploring ideas, but it cannot satisfy the human urge to find meaning in life and to aspire to a better world. That can only come through confronting the questions that we face in the here and now.

Except that it is by dreaming, by the act of imagination and creation that we advance ourselves and create a better world. Think of what wouldn't exist if we didn't dream the world as other than it is!

I think her (his?) arguments are highly unrealistic and ignore the existence of microcosms in all aspects of life.

I could pick it apart further, but I won't. I've made my main point.

musing...

[shusu.livejournal.com]

Yes. Otaku.

Admittedly the first Google hit, but a pretty good run-down of a parallel phenomenon that started some time before the West's.

Predisposition? Social conditioning? Existent traits aggravated? Or traits encouraged? *shrugs* I couldn't say. Everything in moderation, I guess, including fanaticism?

Two things which may or may not be useful:
For no reason I could pinpoint, I was uncomfortable at one of Lois Bujold's book-signings. Not that I was alienated by the company (and not Lois of course, she was just great), but that I thought "I used to be like these people, and I'm not anymore." Sense of loss. Even culture shock, after not being involved in SF for a few years. But also I was no longer as focused on the same things. Still not sure what to make of that.

Terry Pratchett's excellent quote about escapism:
Back in the sixties and seventies 'escapism' was frowned on -- 'escapist literature' was definitely a derogatory term. I think people have come round a bit now and know that escaping is fine provided you're escaping to rather than from.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the article's writer should think harder about Sturgeon's Law. Many interests provoke obsessiveness that swallow people up to the point of nudging them out of the "real world". Because of its knack for modeling aspects of interaction, I think sf has better potential than most for tipping its fans' attention back towards the social concerns cited at the article's end.

Also, lots of fans (including me) use sf deliberately for escapism, but I don't see that conlang adherents or monster truck aficionados or anyone else are somehow escaping *less* from reality while spending quality time with their respective hobbies.

[cheshyre]

The writer makes many points, so it's hard to know which to address or which may be troubling you. There are many avenues of escapism and avoidance; SF/Fantasy may be a more obvious one, but is hardly the only or most common.
I'll also point out that many SF/F fen I know are politically active, so SF/F is hardly preventing people from taking action to actually resolve the current crop of problems, regardless of how they entertain themselves. [I was psyched to see voter registration tables at Arisia, and the freebie table at Boskone had flyers from several candidates.]

One aspect of the essay, however, reminded me of a panel I attended at MilPhil on why the YA fiction market has shifted so dramatically from SF to fantasy. Grabbing from Evelyn Leeper's summary:

And one more audience member said that children used to feel a lot more empowered and less restricted. There was a feeling that they could go to the junkyard and get the parts to build a robot submarine, whereas now they can't even go to the corner store without an adult escort. The reason that fantasy is popular is that it is about average children who get pulled into situations regardless of the real-life restrictions on them, while science fiction tends to be about geniuses with whom most readers can't identify.

[blackholly.livejournal.com]

I think that as society becomes more global and there is less of a sense of local neighborhoods or towns as microcosms, people are going to increasingly create their own microcosms based on interests. Then, people are going to increasinly try and rule their microcosms (or at least acquire some level of status therein).

Hence, geekly obsession.

[pameladean]

The truth is, most of the people you meet on the street are infantile, escapist people, socially inept, etc. They just escape in widely-accepted ways, and are infantile in widely-accepted ways. The idea that most people, generally, are grown-ups or informed about the world around them is just laughable. I'm not blaming them; most people have a lot to cope with. But in my experience, geeks are far more aware of reality than non-geeks.

Pamela

[fairmer.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. I'm reminded of (one of the myriad reasons) why my mom moved away from the tiny town of her childhood: she couldn't stand the thought that I would experience no more of a cultural life than drinking beer and snowmobiling.

She's never said that she doesn't understand all the aspects of cultural life I picked up instead (I think she was planning on museums and symphonies, and yes, I do those things, too), but she doesn't. And yet, we're both quite glad that that our lives are not limited to beer and snowmobiling.

The family she left behind in this town doesn't get it at all, however.

Missing the point

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

What this writer has done is missed the point monumentally. My dad-in-law, Tom Purdom, wrote "A Reduction in Arms" quite a while ago, about the nuclear arms race, and both that book and his "The Barons of Behavior," about the government attempting to control the populace through drugs, are on GOVERNMENT reading lists concerning their respective subjects. In other words, sometimes SF is considered to be educational, even speculative science fiction, and things can be learned through their reading that cannot be learned through a foray into Danielle Steel-esque drama and angst. (I don't ever seem to see people criticizing the readers of that stuff and how the world will end if they don't stop it NOW.)

Many, many of the things that William Gibson has written about were types of technology that did not exist (he's also something of a Luddite, ironically), but some of the geeks who read his work basically responded by saying, "Neat! Let's try to make that!" A lot of our current technology has been inspired by SF in this manner.

This person may not think it's a good thing for the geeks to inherit the earth, but a wake-up call may be in order, for they already have.

Their king is called Bill Gates.

[aryllian]

I don't understand why the author is posing this as an either-or proposition. Either people are interested in Middle Earth, fantasy, etc, or people are interested in the "here and now".

In my experience, being interested in one thing often interacts in complex and interesting ways with other things. Thus, the more one is interested in, the more one finds new things to be interested in, and the more parallels one finds in unexpected places.

Fantasy is not wholly unconnected from everything else. It's based on reality, and often the interesting thing is its departure from reality. You have to understand reality to fully appreciate the gaps. And that kind of mental stretching is, I would think, almost the opposite of stagnation.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand her underlying assumption. She seems worried that SF fans cut themselves off from the real world, which is not something I see happening.

Does she not see the non-fans who cut themselves off from the real world with their escapist obsession over celebrities and Reality TV?