This conversation is starting to remind me of one I frequently have with Te, wherein she has difficulty imagining the frequency with which I have to deal with profoundly stupid and ignorant people ("Stonehenge... they built that in like the 1700s, right?" "Counterintuitive? Is that a word?" "Frogs and bugs are classified as animals? Really?" "But what's half of two?!" -- I sincerely wish I was making any of those up) and I have difficulty understanding how she manages to avoid such people. We live within 100 miles of one another in the metro NYC area, so it's not a matter of me being stranded in Hickland.
I've been involved in science fiction fandom to varying degrees for about 25 years, like I said. Whether the other fans in question were more into television series, novels, or equally fannish for both, my experience is that people with the kind of racist arrogance redhawk displays are not only uncommon but shunned by the community when they do turn up. I'm not suggesting by any means that your negative experiences didn't happen or weren't hurtful. What I am saying is that I know from personal experience that there are many science fiction fans with whom you could discuss matters of race and ethnicity (and gender and more) -- in the real world or as applied in fictional futures or other alternate settings -- without being marginalised or offended. I think both you and they would gain something by the conversations.
Hm. In rereading the above paragraph, I noticed again that I'd left out science-fiction *film* fans, and considered adding that designation in... and in trying to figure out why that felt wrong, I realised that fans of science-fiction films tend to fall into two very different groups: fans of science fiction (books and/or television series) who also appreciate some films enough to be fannish about them but avoid or are outright disgusted by most of what passes for science-fiction cinema; and fans of Hollywood science fiction (often primarily or exclusively of the Star Wars franchise which isn't properly science fiction at all but "space opera") who may occasionally watch science-fiction television series, rarely if ever read any science-fiction novels or short stories which aren't tie-ins to a franchise, and tend to hate more highbrow sci-fi films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth. I'm wondering now how many of the "fans" you've encountered fall into that latter category -- not all of them, obviously, redhawk has done some reading and managed to stay improbably wrong-minded -- but that's a whole other demographic than I was thinking of, and much closer to the larger demographic of people who aren't science fiction fans at all.
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timeasmymeasure
part 1: the fans
Date: 2004-12-20 07:40 am (UTC)This conversation is starting to remind me of one I frequently have with Te, wherein she has difficulty imagining the frequency with which I have to deal with profoundly stupid and ignorant people ("Stonehenge... they built that in like the 1700s, right?" "Counterintuitive? Is that a word?" "Frogs and bugs are classified as animals? Really?" "But what's half of two?!" -- I sincerely wish I was making any of those up) and I have difficulty understanding how she manages to avoid such people. We live within 100 miles of one another in the metro NYC area, so it's not a matter of me being stranded in Hickland.
I've been involved in science fiction fandom to varying degrees for about 25 years, like I said. Whether the other fans in question were more into television series, novels, or equally fannish for both, my experience is that people with the kind of racist arrogance redhawk displays are not only uncommon but shunned by the community when they do turn up. I'm not suggesting by any means that your negative experiences didn't happen or weren't hurtful. What I am saying is that I know from personal experience that there are many science fiction fans with whom you could discuss matters of race and ethnicity (and gender and more) -- in the real world or as applied in fictional futures or other alternate settings -- without being marginalised or offended. I think both you and they would gain something by the conversations.
Hm. In rereading the above paragraph, I noticed again that I'd left out science-fiction *film* fans, and considered adding that designation in... and in trying to figure out why that felt wrong, I realised that fans of science-fiction films tend to fall into two very different groups: fans of science fiction (books and/or television series) who also appreciate some films enough to be fannish about them but avoid or are outright disgusted by most of what passes for science-fiction cinema; and fans of Hollywood science fiction (often primarily or exclusively of the Star Wars franchise which isn't properly science fiction at all but "space opera") who may occasionally watch science-fiction television series, rarely if ever read any science-fiction novels or short stories which aren't tie-ins to a franchise, and tend to hate more highbrow sci-fi films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth. I'm wondering now how many of the "fans" you've encountered fall into that latter category -- not all of them, obviously, redhawk has done some reading and managed to stay improbably wrong-minded -- but that's a whole other demographic than I was thinking of, and much closer to the larger demographic of people who aren't science fiction fans at all.