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

[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.