reaction was so prevalent that I want to emphasize that none of these seven philosophies is desirable in undiluted form.
It is natural for fanzine fans to have literary ambitions. Anyone whose goal is writing, editing or illustrating science fiction or fantasy can see fandom's career-advancement potential. That doesn't necessarily make Professionalism that fan's primary motivation.
Extreme Professionalism and, especially, Commercialism, get ugly. Some would be authors see fans and fandom as nothing more than enabling mechanisms. They hardly deserve to be called fans. It is important not to confuse such blatant and cynical users with fans who want to create science fiction.
Commercialism, actively opposed by Trufannishness and to an extent Insurgentism, is an understandable motive. Almost everyone prefers to work at something they like, and turning a hobby into a career is one way to achieve this aim.
These attitudes are rarely found in their pure state. Humans aren't that single-minded. The most sercon acolyte sometimes dances the insurgent fandango, and the ultra-fannish author of this article occasionally mentions electronic or literary science fiction.
These components help shape a fan's activity preferences. Each fan blends two or more of them, and it's not unusual for sercon, trufannish, insurgent and Communicationist impulses to coexist inside one skull. The varying proportions of these elements give a fan their signature interests and attitudes.
No one philosophy accurately describes an individual fan's motivations for fanac. Fans may call Ted White an insurgent and Sam Moskowitz a sercon fan, but these are shorthand generalities. On closer inspection, both exhibit behavior outside the scope of their respective labels.
Ted White is the greatest Insurgent of his generation -- check his Habakkuk fanzine review column -- but he is also a Communicationist, as his contributions to public and private apas and Blat! attest. His Trufannish spirit is obvious in his great love of fanhistory, affection for fanmythologizing and penchant for reprints. No one can say that Ted hasn't written about science fiction -- and let's not forget his extensive work, chronicled in fanzines, in the field of plant eugenics and practical botany. Scientism isn't totally dead!
Sam Moskowitz is steeped in science fiction -- his monumental output for Fantasy Commentator stamps him as still one of the most prolific Sercon fans. SaM has also written faan fiction (Trufannishness), debated significant issues with other fans like Wolheim (Communicationism), become an anthologist |
(Professionalism) and spoken out as a fannish moralist (Insurgentism). These are not the works of an undiluted Sercon fan.
The sevenfold path -- Sercon, Scientism, Communicationism, Professionalism, Commercialism, Trufannishness and Insurgentism -- can't pin down a fan, either, not exactly. It does paint a truer, better-rounded picture. Can you reasonably expect more from something you're reading in a fanzine?
The picture remains unfinished, because I'm only tracking major fanzine fan ideologies. There may be lesser ones, unmentioned here, that would fill in some of the fine detail. Perhaps it will work like the Table of Elements, as fans discover previously undetected philosophies and add them to the diagram.
Another reason is that there's more to a fan than philosophy. Intelligence, perceptiveness, wisdom, empathy and many other qualities modify the various fan philosophies so that two fans with the same ideological profile might be very different kinds of people. In other words, my theory is fine as long as you don't push it past its limits. It is not a method for pigeonholing fans into a set of categories; it's just a tool that can add some information to observation and other analysis.
Fan History Revisited
What is true of individual fans is even more applicable to fanzine fandom as a whole. A snapshot of fanzine fandom at any point in time shows these philosophies in action. The currents run through our subculture's entire history. Their ebb and flow, and occasional clashes, have significantly affected
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