I hardly know where to begin with this. Maybe the problem is that I've never been a joiner. Not because I'm a daring young rebel, a lone wolf, a romantic individual who shuns the herd. I mean, sure, I am all of those things (no, really) but that's not I'm talking about. I don't get team sports. I don't get group activities. At work, I'm much happier working in my office by myself, even if that means I have to do more than I would if I was working with a bunch of people on some group effort. Part of me would like to understand it, and be good at that kind of interaction; it's not some egocentric thing. I just never learned those skills. I'm sure I'll babble about my psychological idiosyncracies at length some other time, so let's just take it as a given and worry about it later. All I'm saying is, maybe that's why fandom gives me hives.

It's terrible that I feel this way, because I am a geek. I've got every episode of Babylon 5 on tape, I have a collection of action figures that's taking over my bookcase, I can identify a Buck Rogers episode after 30 seconds. By all rights, I should be a crusader for fandom. But I loathe it. Maybe because it's a community, and we've established that I'm not good at those. So it could be a matter of personal taste. Personally, I'd rather be drawn and quartered than go to a theater and watch a crowd of theater majors dressed up in latex imitate Rocky Horror. It sure seems to make some people happy, though, and that's fine. I don't appreciate it, but I don't appreciate the World Series, either.

Okay, that's as nice as this is gonna get. I've thrown out the mea culpas and the personal analysis. If anything after this bugs you, pick whichever explanation you like for why the rest of this is dead wrong. You've been warned.

Fandom is evil. Fandom is a parasite that lives off of SF, and at the same time threatens to choke it to death. SF fans are worse than any other fan group because they're organized, and yet they allow the sludge to rise to the top. In fact, they favor it, because, as a group, fandom is more conservative than a GOP convention. Don't start emailing me about how your slash site, and how fandom is so tolerant of different lifestyles. That's not what I'm talking about. And for the love of god, don't bring up Star Trek and IDIC to me unless you want me to go off about how racist Gene Roddenberry's creation is. (Think about it: every race except humans has a set of inborn emotional and intellectual characteristics. Klingons are violent, Vulcans are logical, etc. Tell me that's not racist.) Anyway, that's not what I mean. I mean that as a group, fandom wants the status quo. Give them spaceships, give them time paradoxes, give them any crappy story dressed up with FX, and they gobble it down. And if you don't serve it up fast enough, they'll make their own. Yes, I do mean fanfic. Jesus.

The B5 newsgroup had a fierce debate recently about the merits of fanfic. Why did getting published make something more worthwhile, what was the importance of being "canon," why wasn't this a valid way for new writers to practice their craft. So I was pondering this the other night, and in the end, here's the difference. Fanfic is written out of fannish desires. That's the problem. It's usually based on "I always wanted to see..." or "Wouldn't it be funny if... " scenarios. Fanfic authors are writing what an audience wants to see, rather than on what a writer needs to tell. It's not "I need to tell this story, and these are the characters who will tell it." It's "I like these characters, so I want to write about them." Yes, there are published authors who do the same thing, and for the most part, they, too, are hacks. Sorry, you can't trap me that way.

There are exceptions. I know. There is some good fanfic. Sure. But the people writing good fanfic would be writing good independent stories if there weren't a market for fanfic. There's a market for romance novels, too. Or porn. They're all good ways to support yourself if you're a struggling author. The fact that there are people out there who'll read it doesn't necessarily mean it's a story that must be told (again). And being a good writer doesn't mean you get a free pass to write crap. If it makes you happy, that's fine. If that's the case, you shouldn't care if I think it's crap. You're doing it for yourself, not the recognition. Good for you. I'm not reading it for you, though, and my opinion is that if you are a good writer, you have an obligation to use that skill to give us some new ideas, for the love of all that's holy. This is one of those cases where recycling is bad, okay?

Thanks to the fans' networking skills, fandom is now a base worth marketing to. Which means we're all gonna see more George Lucas, more scraps out of Roddenberry's dumpster, more anything that has a familiar name on it. Go look at the SF rack in your bookstore. Look at all the books that are "part X of the series." Yeah, that's always a problem with genre fiction, but the mystery section doesn't have a separate set of shelves for series books. Quite frequently, the SF section does. More of the same, keep it coming, please. Fans are a guaranteed market for it. Paramount can keep making Trek movies for all eternity, because there's a guaranteed audience. [Okay, it's starting to look as if it is possible to make shows and movies so terrible that even Trek fans won't watch them. Who knew? -- Strega] If they keep the movie under budget, they can guarantee a profit simply because of the morons who'll say, "I heard it sucks, but I have to see it; it's Star Trek."

And these are the people who, presumably, are most interested in change, in new viewpoints, in breaking taboos? Bullshit. Don't tell me how profound The Matrix was. Go read some Phillip K. Dick stories until you understand that "pretty" doesn't equal "intelligent." How many good, genuine SF stories are going unnoticed in theaters because the producers couldn't afford a budget that would impress the kiddies? If you like SF for the ideas, why don't you go looking for some new ones, instead of following the herd to see whatever has the most expensive explosions? If you must spend your time arguing about using models vs. CGI, just admit that you're worried about style, not substance, and stop clogging up the culture with your claims that you care about the genre. Get out of the way, we've got some new ideas to find. Thanks.

I've got one more complaint, then I'm done. Like any tribe, fandom has all sorts of methods for determining one's place in the hierarchy. As with most groups, in the end, it's trivia that determines the king. Who's got blueprints to the spaceship? Who saw the movie the most times? Who can recite the entire screenplay? Who cares? The best thing that could happen to SF would be for new people to become interested in it. New ideas, new perspectives. These are good things. But fandom has created a culture that scares, bewilders, and intimidates outsiders. We've established that I'm pretty geeky, and I'd never go to a convention. Because I'm scared of the sort of people who would be there. I don't want to deal with fanboys drooling over comic books with spandex-clad heroines; I don't want to hear three hunded fans ask, "Who would you cast in the movie?" So imagine how a newbie would feel. Would you laugh at someone who confused Klingons with Romulans? If so, why would anyone dare ask you a question, and try to find out why you like the show/book/movie you're so keen on?

As I mentioned, I've got all kinds of garbage taking up valuable gray matter, and on occasion, I'll trot it out. But I don't expect people to be impressed by it. I'm embarassed by it, frankly, because it speaks of a childhood where I spent far too much time watching TV. I watched Free Enterprise and ended up rocking back and forth, terrified out of my mind, because I knew those people. Arguably, I am those people. I'm just grateful that I saw myself in that movie, and was horrified, instead of pleased, at how familiar it all seemed. Sure, at a certain level, it's the same as people who memorize sports stats. As long as you bear that in mind, that's fine. But don't cop a condescending attitude because I don't know how many Ewoks died on-screen in Jedi. (The correct answer: not enough.) And if you find someone who is impressed because you can shout out the answer to that question without thinking -- run away. Run away and start doing heroin, please, so that you'll be too busy shooting up to buy any more books or movie tickets, and you'll no longer be an influence on my media options.