FAN

Fancyclopedia 2, Joe Siclari

A follower, devotee, or admirer of any sport or diversion. In our case the diversion is fantasy in book and magazine form, on film, and on the airwaves. The fan buys, sell, trades, collects, and discusses this stuff. Some of them even read it. Professional editors, like Palmer of old, call all people who read their magazines pretty regularly fans; and indeed the term is so used by the stfnists who merely write letters to the editor and collect prozines.

The fen of fandom have a more restricted meaning in mind. What this meaning is is difficult to say. (If the Greeks had a word for it, they never used that word in public.) Generally one whom we designate as a fan in fandom maintains a correspondence with other fans, and visits them when located in the same area. He may publish or write for a fanzine -- or several of them. He often attends local club meetings, and, finances permitting, conferences or national conventions. This is a matter of degree, and depending on the extent to which a given fan indulges in anything more than local club activity he may be distinguished as an actifan. The comparative emphasis a fan puts on the different kinds of activities determines whether he/she becomes known as a fanzine fan, a club fan, or a convention fan; most fans do some of each, but only a few do enough to avoid being labelled as one subspecies or another.

Introspectives like fans naturally do much speculating on what and why fans are. Earl Kemp's fanzine symposium Why is a Fan? (1962) collected several dozen prominent opinions on the matter. There have been various theories: Gernsback's idea of developing potential scientific genius in his readers; the idea that fans are a separate species, slans or whatever you want to call them, which Degler made ridiculous; that stfanaticism is sublimated sex drive; and that fans are youngsters in blind alleys of life, seeking escape from "the humdrum, workaday world." A theory well received is Norm Stanley's "sense of fantasy," a taste for the imaginative analogous to the sense of humor. Probably a complex of characteristics goes into the fan type. We do, however, show some significant variations from the average in geographical distribution, national extraction, age, sex distribution, intelligence, introversion, and suchlike factors.

Dislike of the common connotations of the word "fan" led to the suggestion of various substitutes for it, such as "stefnist" and "imaginist."