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Chaos, v. 1, issue 1, January 1945

Page 3

Why I Divorced Science Fiction Fandom
by T. Bruce Yerke 

IT WAS ON January 3, 1944, that I officially severed all relations with the LASFS, though I hadn't been in attendance for over a month. It was sometime in June 1944 that I severed relations with what was left of the Outsiders. Since then I have been enjoying the first bit of rational living and thinking that I can recall since the age of fourteen.
In a letter to me sometime in June or July 1944, Francis T. Laney, in a bitter denunciation, said, in essence, that my tremendous explosions in hopping of the LASFS and later the Outsider's Bandwagon were uncalled for. He was correct in his observations, on the surface. Actually, the whole affair was the result of much deeper and complicated causes.
When I left the LASFS, and if I had had any sense at all I should have realised that the game was all over then and disappeared quietly, I left a seven-year environment that had coloured my outlook on life more than I am still capable of perceiving. I joined the LASFS (and thus fandom) the last Thursday of January 1937, at the age of thirteen and nine months. For the next six years I was associated with persons who, I believed, stood for progress, science, high ideals, and exceptionally clear thinking.
The great self-defense of scientifiction fandom scientifictional literature is a pretty set pattern. Fans, we tell ourselves, are really exceptional persons, gifted with broad imaginations, often superior mentalities, and are interested in the world of the future, better social conditions, international language, the "progress" of "science", etc. Because "we" are persons of such unusual abilities for self-expression, and because the stupid world can't understand "us" we publish our own periodicals of self-expression, draw our own pictures...in general, set up a little world of our own, waiting for enlightenment to come to the world--sordid, dreary, and unintelligent--without.

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Why I Divorced Science Fiction Fandom by T. Bruce Yerke IT WAS ON January 3, 1944, that I officially severed all relations with the LASFS, though I hadn't been in attendance for over a month. It was sometime in June 1944 that I severed relations with what was left of the Outsiders. Since then I have been enjoying the first bit of rational living and thinking that I can recall since the age of fourteen. In a letter to me sometime in June or July 1944, Francis T. Laney, in a bitter denunciation, said, in essence, that my tremendous explosions in hopping of the LASFS and later the Outsider's Bandwagon were uncalled for. He was correct in his observations, on the surface. Actually, the whole affair was the result of much deeper and complicated causes. When I left the LASFS, and if I had had any sense at all I should have realised that the game was all over then and disappeared quietly, I left a seven-year environment that had coloured my outlook on life more than I am still capable of perceiving. I joined the LASFS (and thus fandom) the last Thursday of January 1937, at the age of thirteen and nine months. For the next six years I was associated with persons who, I believed, stood for progress, science, high ideals, and exceptionally clear thinking. The great self-defense of scientifiction fandom scientifictional literature is a pretty set pattern. Fans, we tell ourselves, are really exceptional persons, gifted with broad imaginations, often superior mentalities, and are interested in the world of the future, better social conditions, international language, the "progress" of "science", etc. Because "we" are persons of such unusual abilities for self-expression, and because the stupid world can't understand "us" we publish our own periodicals of self-expression, draw our own pictures...in general, set up a little world of our own, waiting for enlightenment to come to the world--sordid, dreary, and unintelligent--without.