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Chaos, v. 1, issue 1, January 1945
Page 4
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Herewith I set down a few principles which I found the hard way. Maybe they serve as a guide-post for others who won't have to wait seven years to spot them: 1. A bright boy is still a pretty sad cookie if he's so sensitive he can't get around int he world of hard knocks. Intelligence is either your asset or your liability, depending on how you adjust it to the world about you. More than one prominent local LASFS fan has told me that he was afraid to face the world of reality, that he'd rather stay in his little dream world. If you don't want to end up a neuro-psychotic, turn around and and walk into the thing you're afraid of. It might as well make you or break you now as ten years from now. 2. Telling about the world of the future doesn't bring it, nor does it help prepare you for it! The world of the future is built out of the mess of today, not indirectly but directly, sewer by sewer. The fewer self-sealed intellects we have today, the more chance we have of having the racial sanity for "tomorrow". 3. There is no literary future for scientifiction fan mags. If you think you are going to make a substantial contribution to the world's literature, get the hell out of the mimeograph market. I used to kid myself too. If you want to pulp hack, OK, but that is hardly writing. If you believe you ought to rank Hemingway, Dos Passos, Proust, Farrell, or any author ancient or modern, study until you're good enough to say something better than has been said. I'm not that good yet, and so I'm shutting up. 4. Science fiction fans are not the most intelligent intelligent persons. They are much smarter than lots of people the intelligences that don't go on the rocks of mediocrity have nothing to do with stf piddle-paddle. For every "smart" fan there's dozens of smarter college, professional, and business people, who can talk with better authority on the subjects "fans" imagine they are experts on. 5. Don't look out at the world through the dungpile of fan literature and doctrines; better look at the dung-pile form the outside, and see how shallow & bigoted it is. You are not the misjudged, sensitive, artistic persons who should have been born in a Wellsian world of the future. You are quite properly judged even by ordinary people as crack-pots. By persons versed in the fields of socialogy, psychiatry, literature, and music, you are shallow persons indeed, and very myopic. For years I had to excuse my association with fandom, to persons whose friendship I valued, as an association with "amateur writers", "authors", etc. 6. Those of you who regard fantasy as a seriously literary pursuit also have to watch out. Do not overate the importance of fantasy in the legitimate literary field. Van Wyck Brooks, Van Doren, Van [[word is very faded but ends with "on"]], Hogben, Woolcott, Wilson, Fadiman, Bibbs. . .all of the established literary critics, will deal with a fantasy book quite fairly when it comes along, but they don't go overboard, and I hardly think that all critics and writers for two hundred years have been wrong in not believing fantasy the best form of literary expression. Enough, I'll shut up. What am I doing? I'm having the time of my life. Not that I don't have to believe that my time is wasted if I don't dip into the fan world, I can accomplish many things I always lacked the leisure to do. Like a visiter from another, slightly hazy, blurry planet, I'm having to relearn my entischeme of values on a non-scientifictional basis. I'm oultivating friends that used to neglect because of my wasted days and weeks in scientifiction; reading books that I used to imagine dry and utterly ancient, and finding them full of pertinent advice for nowand a century or more from now. Now, some bright boy will drag out a lot of frothy Yerke writings, earnest crud, calling for fans to be sensible that he discovered the answer, if there is one, it doesn't lie in fandom, or anywheres near it. So, regarding all former Yerke writ. Come out of the manure pile -- the air is fine here. 30
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Herewith I set down a few principles which I found the hard way. Maybe they serve as a guide-post for others who won't have to wait seven years to spot them: 1. A bright boy is still a pretty sad cookie if he's so sensitive he can't get around int he world of hard knocks. Intelligence is either your asset or your liability, depending on how you adjust it to the world about you. More than one prominent local LASFS fan has told me that he was afraid to face the world of reality, that he'd rather stay in his little dream world. If you don't want to end up a neuro-psychotic, turn around and and walk into the thing you're afraid of. It might as well make you or break you now as ten years from now. 2. Telling about the world of the future doesn't bring it, nor does it help prepare you for it! The world of the future is built out of the mess of today, not indirectly but directly, sewer by sewer. The fewer self-sealed intellects we have today, the more chance we have of having the racial sanity for "tomorrow". 3. There is no literary future for scientifiction fan mags. If you think you are going to make a substantial contribution to the world's literature, get the hell out of the mimeograph market. I used to kid myself too. If you want to pulp hack, OK, but that is hardly writing. If you believe you ought to rank Hemingway, Dos Passos, Proust, Farrell, or any author ancient or modern, study until you're good enough to say something better than has been said. I'm not that good yet, and so I'm shutting up. 4. Science fiction fans are not the most intelligent intelligent persons. They are much smarter than lots of people the intelligences that don't go on the rocks of mediocrity have nothing to do with stf piddle-paddle. For every "smart" fan there's dozens of smarter college, professional, and business people, who can talk with better authority on the subjects "fans" imagine they are experts on. 5. Don't look out at the world through the dungpile of fan literature and doctrines; better look at the dung-pile form the outside, and see how shallow & bigoted it is. You are not the misjudged, sensitive, artistic persons who should have been born in a Wellsian world of the future. You are quite properly judged even by ordinary people as crack-pots. By persons versed in the fields of socialogy, psychiatry, literature, and music, you are shallow persons indeed, and very myopic. For years I had to excuse my association with fandom, to persons whose friendship I valued, as an association with "amateur writers", "authors", etc. 6. Those of you who regard fantasy as a seriously literary pursuit also have to watch out. Do not overate the importance of fantasy in the legitimate literary field. Van Wyck Brooks, Van Doren, Van [[word is very faded but ends with "on"]], Hogben, Woolcott, Wilson, Fadiman, Bibbs. . .all of the established literary critics, will deal with a fantasy book quite fairly when it comes along, but they don't go overboard, and I hardly think that all critics and writers for two hundred years have been wrong in not believing fantasy the best form of literary expression. Enough, I'll shut up. What am I doing? I'm having the time of my life. Not that I don't have to believe that my time is wasted if I don't dip into the fan world, I can accomplish many things I always lacked the leisure to do. Like a visiter from another, slightly hazy, blurry planet, I'm having to relearn my entischeme of values on a non-scientifictional basis. I'm oultivating friends that used to neglect because of my wasted days and weeks in scientifiction; reading books that I used to imagine dry and utterly ancient, and finding them full of pertinent advice for nowand a century or more from now. Now, some bright boy will drag out a lot of frothy Yerke writings, earnest crud, calling for fans to be sensible that he discovered the answer, if there is one, it doesn't lie in fandom, or anywheres near it. So, regarding all former Yerke writ. Come out of the manure pile -- the air is fine here. 30
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