Life magazine. May 21, 1951.

[gerisullivan]

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!

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(scratching my head) I thought this was neat, but not a MAJOR find-- presumably it's been lurking in the library stacks for years, and was indexed in the Reader's Guide.

But your squee is my egoboo, so thanks!

(We didn't have "squee" in 1951. Wonder where it came from? We did have egoboo. Fandom ran on it. Still does, I guess.)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Here's another fine passage:

Present-day science fiction is as innocent of sex as a betatron; boy sometimes meets girl, but when he does it is only to say hello before catching the next time machine to the Paleozoic era.

The comparison to a betatron just seems so quaint, especially in an era when even our superconducting synchrotron is getting rather long in the tooth.

That Hollywood sidebar: one of the photos is from When Worlds Collide. Here are a lot more, mostly wonderful behind-the-scenes shots: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&sa=1&q=source%3Alife+worlds+collide

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's been there all along, but I think the knowledge of its existence had become one of the many things lost to the collective fannish memory. As the_maenad's comment clearly demonstrates, the fact that the article existed was clearly recorded in at least one famous fanzine that's widely-owned and still recommended, sold, and read. But I don't remember ever hearing of anyone looking for the article or that issue of Life before. When SMOFs talk about media coverage present and past, I've never noticed it mentioned.

That could just be a deficit of my own experience and memory, but it was news to a couple of other likely suspects, too.

Then there's the simple fact that this was LIFE. If there were ever a magazine I'd love to own every issue of, LIFE would be it.

So, yes, I'm still squeeing, and the egoboo is all yours, yours, yours.

Here's the Urban Dictionary definition of squee. Yes, it's much more recent. Squee is much more like goshwowoboyoboy. Egoboo is our manna. May it always feed our souls.

About "squee"

[(Anonymous)]

I remember Miriam Carr-Knight-Lloyd using "squee" back in the early '60s, although she/we spelled it "skwee" -- and one of my two publications for the National APA was titled THE TRANSCENDENTAL SKWEE. Don't recall what if anything that crowd made of the title.

--Robert Lichtman

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'm putting together a slideshow for Conclave about various weird things I have found digging through the Google Life archive.

Searching for Weirdness in the Vaults of Life Magazine: Puppets, Jetpacks, and Ballet on the Moon

Last year Google placed online TWO MILLION images shot by Life magazine photographers. There's something for everyone in this mountain of negatives, from flying cars to behind-the-scenes photos of classic science fiction movies. Bill Higgins conducts a tour of Twentieth Century oddities lurking in the archive.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of it before, that I remember, and I'm glad that I now have. Thanks!