I don’t know how many science fiction conventions I’ve attended over the years. Say that I’ve averaged four a year since I first started attending cons, and that would add up to something like 130. Which is not a great many by the standards of some fans or even writers, but it seems a great many to me.

My first science fiction convention was around 1972, and was held in my home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was approximately eighteen years of age, and had nothing else to do that weekend, so I went. The science fiction community, while friendly, did not precisely welcome me with open arms, but then eighteen-year-olds are used to not being precisely welcomed anywhere with open arms. So that was all right, and I had a sufficiently good time so that I went the next year, and the year after that, and so on, and now here I am with 130 conventions under my belt.

In memory all the science fiction conventions of my life tend to become compressed into one big, endless convention, a Convention that transcends time and space like some strange superliner out of J.G. Ballard, where anyone you’ve ever met at any convention anywhere can be found, sooner or later, in the bar. You only know where you are when you look outside, and find that it’s Albuquerque, or Los Angeles, or Glasgow, or Gdansk. But the convention itself is a remarkably stable configuration, retaining its same shape and function and ritual, like British expatriates in the Raffles Club in Singapore who raise a pink gin to the Queen every day at four o’clock, commemorating an empire on which the sun has long since set.

But this long, timeless convention exists of course only in memory, and memories are notoriously unreliable . . . and my personal memory is more highly suspect than most. In reality the science fiction community has changed a great deal since my first convention. For those of you who weren’t attending conventions in 1972, or for those of you with memories like mine, let me give you an idea of what my first convention was like.

For one thing, I could be reasonably certain that when I walked into a room full of strangers, everyone I met would have about 150 books in common. We’d all have read the core texts of Verne and Wells, and When Worlds Collide, and Asimov’s I, Robot, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories, Bester’s Demolished Man, Van Vogt’s Slan, The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Dickson’s Tactics of Mistake, Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Zelazny’s Lord of Light, Flowers for Algernon, Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse series, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Judith Merrill’s collection England Swings SF, Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, Glory Road by Heinlein, The Star Beast by Heinlein . . . well, in fact, everything by Heinlein.

Looking back, it seems clear that this is a darn good list. You can’t go very far wrong with most of these books. And the likelihood that everyone I met at my first SF convention shared all these reading experiences in common made it very easy to talk to any strangers I chanced to meet. And furthermore, the people I met were the sort of people who would read the sort of thing that science fiction is, so that made it even easier to find common ground.

I’d like to make two points about this otherwise admirable list.

First, there was no non-print media. In 1972 there was no science fiction on television. None. Zero. If you were lucky you might catch some Twilight Zone reruns late at night, but that was about it. Trek had been canceled years earlier, and I don’t think it was yet being rerun on any kind of regular basis.

There were no VCRs. If you wanted to watch the Twilight Zone reruns, you had to be in front of the television at the hour at which the show was broadcast, or you’d miss it. Because there was no way the average viewer had of preserving Trek when it was first run, Trek lived on only in memory.

In 1972, there was no Hugo award for best film. There were simply no SF movies that anyone considered worthy of a Hugo award. Picture that!

The second point I’d like to make about the list is that, for all its quality, it’s provincial. Practically everything on it originated in North America or England. While there were some translations of French or Russian or Polish SF available, there were no definitive texts, and few reliable translations. Stanislaw Lem, for example, was translated from a French text, which was a translation from German, which was a translation from Polish. Though some of the sense came across to the reader, none of the elements that make Lem special were available to the American reader of 1972.

The list was also provincial in that practically all the authors were male. Although in 1972 authors like Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kate Wilhelm were in the process of making a profound change in the field, probably the only text by a woman that everyone at my first SF convention would have read would have been the Hugo-award-winning Left Hand of Darkness.

And another thing that makes this list provincial is that, to the average American reader of 1972–even to the average well-read reader–practically all these names were the names of strangers. A reader from outside the SF world would have heard of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and he may have known of Clarke from his connection with the film 2001, but knowledge of any of the other names would have been a result of sheer chance.

What separated the world of science fiction from the outside world was Science Fiction Culture.

Science fiction at the time was something like a small village in an isolated mountain valley. It was a comfortable and secure place, because everyone had so much in common, and most people in the village knew each other. The villagers were in general friendly toward outsiders, but often found that they and the outsiders had little in common, because their values were so different.

The village was created, originally in the US, by a group of hardy pioneers who marched into the wilderness to build a community able to realize its own visionary destiny and live free from the shackles of the past.

This is a fairly traditional thing to do in America: as examples we have the Oneida Colony, in the early nineteenth century, established so that its inhabitants could practice an extraordinarily rigorous brand of sexual freedom; there were the Mormons, who walked across hundreds of miles of desert to build their Temple on the Great Salt Lake; and there is Anaheim, in California, originally a Utopian community established by a group of German religious dissidents, now the home of Mickey Mouse. There were probably hundreds of these little communities. America has always had a high degree of toleration for social experiment, at least on a modest scale.

How our pioneers actually built Science Fiction Village was a little unusual, however–it was an early example of a virtual community, its vision held together not by roads or infrastructure but by what passed in those days for mass media. The pioneers of the Science Fiction Village went to an extraordinary amount of effort to hold their community together. They composed lengthy essays, reviews, minutiae, visionary screeds, political, artistic, and literary manifestos–a really colossal amount of wordage, no small percentage of which was taken up by enormous, earth-shaking feuds between one fan or group of fans and another. All these ephemera were inscribed on paper by machines like the mimeograph or hectograph, machines that required infinite labor on the part of the user before an acceptable copy could be produced. So laborious was the whole process that for the first two decades of the Science Fiction Village, the population was little more than five hundred souls.

Given all the work it took to be a fan in those days, it’s not surprising that efforts were made to make the virtual village a real one, if for no other reason than to save postage and many hours bent over the hectograph. Clubs were formed, communes organized, and eventually conventions were held. Bob Tucker –with what degree of seriousness I will not venture to guess–told everyone to bring him bricks, so that fans could construct a hotel to be a permanent home for the Worldcon. (I hope he at least got a barbecue grille out of it.)

Building things was not out of line for a lot of the early fans, who were attracted to SF by their love of gadgetry in general. Many were the sort of people who built amateur radios, model airplanes or rockets, or who otherwise had a hands-on approach to technology.

While most of the rest of the world was distracted by the Great Depression and the Second World War, the pioneers who founded Science Fiction Village continued to labor with great dedication and amazing persistence at constructing their virtual community, and you have to wonder what it was that drove them.

Hugo Gernsback, who edited the first magazine devoted solely to SF, was perhaps the first to insist that SF was a separate literature, but works of enduring quality in a Gernsback publication were hard to find. For a field to descend in a generation from a founder like H.G. Wells to contributors like Philip Francis Nowlan has to be considered an alarming beginning.

It’s a lucky thing that the readers were the sort of people who were used to building things, because the promise of science fiction was difficult to find, and had in large part to be constructed by the reader, not without a great deal of effort. It’s not, I suspect, that the fans were incapable of telling the difference between H.G. Wells and E.E. Smith, it’s that they saw the difference and decided it didn’t matter. That’s what makes them interesting. What they responded to in SF was a kind of half-demented visionary enthusiasm that skated perilously close to megalomania. Barely literate writers, earning half a cent a word on a good day, were challenging the stars! Writing stories about planets colliding with earth, bathtubs that raced to the stars, klystron tubes the size of the moon! This stuff was stirring! It was epic! It had scope! And, in people like Frank R. Paul and Elliott Dold, SF found illustrators capable of rising to the colossal scale of its fantasies.

These pioneering SF fans tended to be from working-class or rural backgrounds, raised without the opportunities for higher education that came after the Second World War. They were used to doing things for themselves. They were highly intelligent, read widely but without system, had a high regard for facts or for what purported to be facts–they were in fact classic autodidacts. They had no received authority to tell them what was good and what was bad. They decided to define their own standards of good, unhampered by authoritative opinion, of which they were probably unaware and which in any case they would have considered of no more weight than their own.

There was no one even to tell them how unusual this was. The classic mystery, which evolved a generation or so earlier, was created as a form entirely by the writers–it was the writers who decided that they must play fair with the audience, must not solve mysteries via deus ex machina or without offering all the clues to the readers–it was the writers themselves who moved the form forward. Literary fiction, by contrast, has an entire paid critic-class to inform both the writers and the public what is worthy of admiration. What happened with SF was that the writers and readers together collaborated on creating the form. Fans became writers. Many writers were fans. The letter columns of the magazines brimmed with strident opinions regarding the stories, and more opinions were unleashed in the fanzines.

In this wonderfully self-created way, Science Fiction Village was assembled. Along with the fiction, the culture grew more sophisticated along the way, but it retained a proudly self-made quality, standards that it considered unique to itself, and a specialized vocabulary to describe both the texts, the contents of the texts, and the special view of life that was considered particularly scientifictional. Fandom may not necessarily be a way of life, but it’s a definitely a point of view.

And there’s another thing unique to the science fiction point of view. SF fans consider themselves outsiders.

In the US, there’s a large fraternal organization called the Ancient Order of the Mystic Shrine–which was founded, by the way, by Civil War general Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur. The Shriners are composed entirely of men who are thirty-second-degree Freemasons, and who dress up as Arabs, march in parades wearing full costume, and are known for getting spectacularly and publicly drunk, often in large crowds.

The Shriners, it should be noted, consider themselves normal–a part of mainstream American life. American science fiction fans, who by and large are much less eccentric than the Shriners, for some reason consider themselves outside the American norm. It’s an important part of their self-image, and it has considerable impact on the way the inhabitants of Science Fiction Village interact with those outside their community.

So this was the community I entered in 1972: intelligent, self-reliant, confident in its own judgments and traditions. SF had gained increasing acceptance in the outside world, though SF Village was largely indifferent to this. The population of Science Fiction Village consisted of thousands of people by now, most of them well educated, and their views on SF and the world ranged through a wide spectrum, though they were all agreed that technology drove the engine of social change.

There were a few common blind spots, however. It’s a truism that of all the thousands of stories of the first Moon landing, none considered that it would be covered live on television. Like most truisms, this truism isn’t precisely true–there was at least one story that featured live television, but still this omission is pretty odd, and points to SF’s strange, insistent reliance on old media, specifically the written word. Perhaps it was a result of all those hours spent over a mimeograph machine, but no one in SF Village seemed to appreciate the oncoming power of global communications. Of all the stories of the future, I can think of none that pointed out that the future would be covered live, to the whole planet, on five hundred channels of TV. Strange, because it was primitive visual mass media that created Science Fiction’s virtual village, and modern mass media that would eventually threaten to overwhelm it. Stranger still, because such orgiastic worldwide media fests as the death of Princess Diana or the O.J. Simpson trial would have been natural material for the sharp SF satirists of the 1950s, people like Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth.

It was the advance of technology itself that provided the greatest threat to Science Fiction Village. Briefly, technology and history both evolved in wildly different ways from the ways SF had assumed. If few SF stories assumed the presence of television on the Moon, none at all predicted that we would make several successful voyages to the Moon, then stop going. SF assumed giant mainframe computers, in industrial or government settings, that controlled entire cities, not millions of diverse, networked computers on the desks of ordinary people. Science fiction assumed coldly calculating world tyrannies, not social democracies whose population was force-fed millions of hours of media programming intended to turn them into avid consumers. SF envisioned a world civilization and culture strikingly like that of contemporary North America, or a Cold War that stretched into the indefinite future. None of these things happened, or are likely to happen.

But they are still the stuff of science fiction. Technology has out-evolved the literature that was supposed to provide its readers with a means of grappling with technology.

SF’s chief response to this dilemma has been to ignore it, and to go on writing the sort of stories that remain traditional. I regularly read books–new books–in which the futuristic technology described is already obsolete in terms of what we can do now or know we’ll be able to do in the near future. (By the way, I do not exempt myself from this critique: I remember sending a completed manuscript to the publisher even while I realized to my sorrow that my descriptions of the technology therein, and the setting in which the action took place, was soooo sadly twentieth century.)

There is a large amount of nostalgia that has begun to permeate Science Fiction Culture. Both readers and writers are longing for the futures they knew when young. In order to be able to retell the old kinds of stories, we’ve seen writers use all manner of gimmicks. Arbitrary galactic holocausts that somehow bring about the rise of feudalism–traditional galactic emperors, and their courts of stellar dukes and counts, are so much more sexy, and wicked, than our own evil emperor Bill Gates. There’s a boom in alternate-history fiction, in which the past can be rearranged in order to provide a more comfortable present. And some writers simply write stories that are about old stories, like "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly, which is a Hugo-winning riff on "The Cold Equations," or Allen Steele’s "The Death of Captain Future," which is a deeply nasty tale of what happens to you if you grow up reading too much Edmond Hamilton. All this recursiveness is pretty odd for a form of literature that prides itself on celebrating the new.

But that’s all minor compared to the principal threat to Science Fiction Village, which comes from the mass media with which traditional SF has the least sympathy or understanding–movies and television. Visual media eats SF–it eats SF by the truckload–and what it regurgitates is not always pretty.

And speaking of Edmond Hamilton, we find him regurgitated pretty well in Star Wars, which succeeds in bringing to the screen forms of SF that have been pretty well dead for fifty years.

It’s the success of Star Trek, however, that is particularly menacing. Understand that it’s very difficult to create a weekly television series–you have to write and shoot and edit very very fast, and you devour anything that will help you do it. That’s okay, though–ideas are free, you can’t copyright them.

But Trek is being broadcast, somewhere, every single hour of every day. And the last Star Wars movie had more viewers on its opening weekend than have ever read a science fiction novel. All of which means that many more people are getting their first exposure to science fiction via TV and film than through books.

This is a problem for written SF, simply because every time an episode of Trek is broadcast, it’s an enormous hour-long advertisement for Trek fiction, which like other media fiction is crowding real SF off the shelves. But that’s not the subject of my essay–complaints about visual-media fiction would sound too much like whining. I want to talk about what’s happening to Science Fiction Culture.

There are two reasons why the success of television and movie SF is a problem for Science Fiction Culture. Firstly, as Marshall McLuhan observed, television flattens the affect of everything it broadcasts: everything ends up having the same degree of urgency. Trek is delivered with the same impact as the death of Princess Diana, or the genocides in Sudan, or the commercials for laxatives and denture adhesives that bring you the news program about the killings in Sudan. (By the way, this uniformity of affect is even greater on the World Wide Web: which presents with equal solemnity bulletins from the White House, ads for new science fiction novels, discursions on Pyramid Power, my own personal web page <www.walterjonwilliams.net>, and lengthy rants from some person who believes that the government has implanted a microchip in his left buttock that enabled their black helicopters to follow him wherever he goes, until of course he foiled them by adopting tinfoil underwear.)

In addition to this flattening of affect, electronic media brings science fiction to its audience free of Science Fiction Culture, the history and view of science fiction laboriously hammered out over the last sixty or seventy years, created originally by dedicated fanatics wading up to their knees in gelatinous hectograph fluids. Science Fiction Culture places the work in its context, relates it to other work, to traditional themes in science fiction, to the contributions of individual editors and magazines. All this is necessarily absent from visual SF, which–also necessarily–looks on SF as a grab-bag full of ideas useful to put Scott Bakula in jeopardy again this week.

The result is that visual media SF is–as far as Science Fiction Culture is concerned–virtually content-free. Curiously enough, this disassociation of science fiction from its roots, along with media’s flattening of affect, has spawned a distinct new branch of literature, one in which SF ideas are treated–out of their original context–as pop culture elements more or less equivalent to other pop culture elements likewise gathered from media. Bruce Sterling has labeled this literature "slipstream." A true inhabitant of Science Fiction Village would disdain a work that featured both SF elements and UFOs, because through the kind of consensus by which Science Fiction Culture was hammered out, UFOs are deemed too irrational for real SF (unlike time travel and faster-than-light ships, apparently). But a Slipsteam novelist like David Foster Wallace or Ted Mooney, both unaware of and uninterested in the dictates of SF Culture, would think nothing of throwing in SF tropes alongside UFOs, Yetis, angelic visitations from Princess Diana, along with laxative ads, denture adhesives, and other emanations from the world of the popular tabloids. All this matter comes through the same distribution channel, namely television, and is all equally prey to the cunning postmodern novelist.

So where does all this leave Science Fiction Village? Oddly enough, just about where I first encountered it almost thirty years ago. The inhabitants of Science Fiction Village are very good at ignoring things that don’t interest them. But still, Science Fiction Village now has some large, new neighbors.

Imagine, if you will, the original pious immigrant inhabitants of Anaheim, now looking over their shoulder at the huge edifice of Disneyland looming over their orange groves. So the inhabitants of Science Fiction Village must regard Visual Media City, the glittering district of skyscrapers and lights and fame that looms over their homes, a place much wealthier and better known than Science Fiction Village. Yet–strangely–the inhabitants of Visual Media City regularly swarm into Science Fiction Village in order to plunder the village of its contents, sometimes paying extremely well, usually paying nothing at all.

Around Science Fiction Village orbit other satellites. There’s Creative Anachronist Castle, Live-Action-Role-Playing-Land, Game City, The Multi-User Dungeon, and even a quaint mock-English village where people meet to engage in the types of dances enjoyed by the English gentry two hundred years ago. (What any of this has to do with science fiction is anyone’s guess, but everyone’s having a good time, so why the hell not?)

Science Fiction Village, though larger and more diverse, still maintains the same standards and prejudices I recall from 1972. Unfortunately, we no longer all have the same one hundred fifty books in common. SF is a huge field by now, and even diligent readers can’t keep up with all of it–plus, of course, most of the classics of the field are very sadly out of print and unavailable. But still, everyone remains the sort of person who would read the sort of thing that science fiction is, so I still feel at home when I attend conventions. Plus, I sometimes encounter people who have actually read my books, and that’s a rare and cherished treat.

The concords and standards so laboriously hammered out by generations of fans and writers are still in place. Science Fiction Culture is still what it was in the beginning, the product of a small group of enthusiasts who do it for the love of the thing. (If an author gave a damn for money, he or she would be over in Visual Media City, dancing megabuck tunes with the Rat.) The village is still provincial, it’s still proud of its pioneer heritage, and it’s still ignored or misunderstood by the rest of the world.

But damned if I care.

Science Fiction Culture is still my culture, and I’m sticking with it.