#first fandom

For everyone of us fanfiction author's on tumblr or on other platforms there is this ONE fandom that got us into writing fanfiction.

For me, that has been One Direction, after a horrible attempt at a Harry Potter Fanfic at the age of 13.

Thanks to them, my stories finally found a home and changed my life forever. I've spent years writing fanfics about them, working on my writing skills, story telling and made many friends along the way, who I might not have made without them.

On this blog, it's obvious I don't write 1D fanfictions anymore but it still remains how it all started.

A few years ago, I would have sworn up and down my first real fandom was Star Trek.

It makes sense. After all, I overcame my dyslexia and learned to read so I could read my mother's Star Trek novels. Pocket Books was churning them out back in the day, and i wanted to read them. She'd read me bits of a few of them, and I wanted more.

I loved watching the show - though that was mostly re-runs.

So, sitting on the floor at the foot of Mom & Dad's water bed, trading correctly read sentences for M&Ms, my mother and I battled. Fought. Yelled. Screamed. Cried. I didn't want to (until I did) and she knew I had to. Once we started using a Star Trek novel, I got much better, much faster.

The first book I ever read was The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, and it's a book I own many copies of for sentimental purposes.

The first thing I remember writing was in elementary school, and it was a Star Trek story. My uncle let me read his old fanzines. I was on Star Trek BBSes. I had a notebook of Star Trek stories and notes and ideas.

Whelp.

I could do a whole post that's nothing but headgear worn by Hugo Gernsback. He created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, primarily as an advertisement for his radio parts company for electronic enthusiasts. This is why the line between science fiction fan and science/radio enthusiast was extremely blurry. Most early scifi fans of the First Fandom (anyone active in scifi prior to 1939) were also technical tinkerers.

More than that, Gernsback created the first letters page, where people wrote in their comments, and encouraged people to write to each other and become friends, which started off the first known generation of Fandom in the US, First Fandom. The first convention, Worldcon in 1939, started by the connections made in the letters pages of this magazine. In other words, "geek culture" as we know it today started off because this one man in 1928 wanted to sell radio parts to weirdos.

Here's one of his isolator device, which was designed to encourage productivity.

It's one of those very Silcon Valley ideas in that, in theory, it might increase productivity but completely misses the point of what it is to be a human being. People don't want to drink soylent protein drinks in lieu of eating good old ham and eggs in the morning (most people find Jetsons style nutrition in pill form to be hideous) and people certainly don't want to wear diving bells to get work done.