Life magazine. May 21, 1951.

beamjockey richly deserves an award for what may well be the Fanhistorical Find of the Decade:

Through the Interstellar Looking Glass, a long, very fannish article by Winthrop Sargeant. It appeared in the May 21, 1951 issue of Life magazine.

I've only skimmed over it myself, going OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG all the way. Screen images captured; Joe Siclari called. He hadn't heard of it before either. Sargeant's article starts on page 127 and goes on, a column at a time, through pages 130, 132-134, 137-138, and finally finishing on page 140.

There's a 2-page image spread sidebar titled "The Fad is Made for Hollywood" with the subtitle "Movies seize on it to pack outer space with some weird tourists."

It may well be the very best coverage of science fiction and fandom that I've ever seen in the media. A few of the terms, such as "fanference" are unfamiliar, but a quick check of Jack Speer's Fancyclopedia shows they'd been in use for most of a decade if not longer. The information I already knew appears rock solid and well-explained. Yes, I expect we'll find the sort of minor glitches present in any published report as other fans and fanhistorians join me in reading it in depth, but at least some of those glitches will be in our own knowledge understanding rather than in Sargeant's article itself.

I'm especially fond of these two timeless quotes:

"Science fiction is now avidly devoured over most of the civilized world."

And

"The science-fiction reader--whether he is an "insurgent," a fan or a simple space opera enthusiast--is apt to maintain that science fiction is not fantasy at all. He will point out that we are living in a very strange world where the most bizarre hypotheses are being proved right practically every day."

Go forth. Read. Enjoy.

I'm certainly going to!