Dry Ice Factory

Today as I walked to work fuguing on the fanzine articles I've written about a certain someone (or someone certain, as the initials might have it), I happened by a process of free association to think about a joke I made in one of them about telepathic starfishes. I remembered that the joke was derived from something in Piers Anthony's science fiction novel, Macroscope, and thus I was reminded that Macroscope was -- horrors! -- a favorite of mine in high school. This, in turn, reminded me that the book was recommended to me by Reid, who was my best friend, off and on, during the period I lived in Salem, Oregon after my family moved back from Yap in the summer of 1970 until I started attending the University of Oregon in Eugene in the autumn of 1978. Perhaps because this train of memory arrived from a fannish starting point, it suddenly occurred to me that Reid and I did a lot of proto-fannish things together, although we certainly didn't know it at the time.

In a lot of ways, Reid was much more of a typical proto-fan than I was. He got into electronics at a very early age and knew how to build circuits. He learned how to program in Basic on the PDP-11 (or was it a PDP-12?) that our high school had, and he showed me how to play the Star Trek game on it, with the little star map printed out one move at a time on the scrolling paper. He got a Commodore 64 when it came out, although it appears that was much later, and all of this led to work in inventory databases and then system administration without his having gotten a college degree. He was also a big gamer and invented his own science fictional board games. He tried to get me interested, but I never liked games much. I collected comics instead.

He was an avid reader of science fiction, as I was, and we both loved Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tolkien. Indeed, we shoplifted their books as a team, which was of course all Reid's idea, ahem. (Well, that's what I told my parents when we got caught.) We used to create trivia quizzes for each other based on the books, with twenty to forty questions hand-written on lined school paper attempting to stump the other on arcane details of Barsoom and Pellucidar and Middle Earth. We both wrote pastiches of their work and of others, too. I think I may still have the Burroughs pastiche that I wrote in which Reid and I were ourselves transported to Barsoom, which I submitted to my favorite high school teacher, AK. (We really called him that, because we thought he was so cool.) He taught French as well as literature, and his droll remark about my story, written in red ink at the end of the hand-written manuscript, was, "Tu me blagues." As I recall this translated as, "You're kidding me." Oh, the scorn of the mundanes! He didn't think much of my Lovecraft pastiche either, as I recall, but I still loved him, and deservedly so. Reid and I both loved Macroscope, which is where this post began, and in Chemistry class we passed the time playing the pencil and paper game called sprouts that was described therein. That's almost enough to redeem Piers Anthony, isn't it? He gave at least two bright kids a topological game to hone their wits on. Not that it did me much good topologically.

Well, this reminiscence could head into some interesting personal territory from here, but that would be deep waters that I don't have time for at the moment. The main thing that struck me this morning was how much my life Before Fandom was already practice for it, at least in restrospect. (Part of the interesting personal territory would be why it didn't work out that way for Reid.) I'm a bit fuzzy on some of my proto-fannish history before I met carl at the University of Oregon and was introduced to fandom through him. I'm pretty sure I had discovered Dick Geis' Science Fiction Review before that (where amongst other things I read LOCs from my anonymous housemate, whom I later met through carl), but I'm not completely sure. It seems to me I had run into Elton T. Elliott before that too, because he also lived in Salem. Maybe I'd heard about him because of his contributions to SFR. If he contributed to SFR, that is.

Reid and I remained close throughout my college years, but we gradually drifted apart after I moved to Seattle. Last time we exchanged e-mail, years ago now, it didn't seem we had much in common anymore, except the past. But we were bright kids together, and we had tried to write a Tolkienesque/Moorcockish fantasy rock opera (my lyrics and his music) called Vilion Lastelf. (Still have the stuttering drafts of that around here somewhere too.) We didn't have the chops -- or at least I didn't -- but we were our own tiny fandom before we knew it, jamming good with Weird and Gilly and The Spiders From Mars.