Camille Bacon-Smith

I ordered this out of curiosity and [livejournal.com profile] brown_betty’s review, and all I can say is that she is much more charitable than I am! I did not like the lack of setup for the tormented half-demon private investigator and his sort-of demon relatives, because I could not enjoy the manpain without caring about the man, and I found the chapter introductions about the characteristics of daemons and spheres and higher powers to be laughable (that spelling ought to give you an show more idea). The characters seemed to run around doing rituals and having sex and dreaming nightmares that were reality on another plane of existence and I was just bewildered about why or why I should care. There’s a difference between starting in media res and starting with the emotional dial UP TO ELEVEN, and that difference was not respected here. show less

Despite the controversy in the fan community surrounding this book--particulary among fans who feel that Bacon-Smith selectively edited and even distorted their words--I have to say that her observed experiences in fandom tallied with my own more often than not. Especially at the time of her writing, there were very few sympathetic treatments of the fan community, and even fewer studies where the author had anything more than a cursory knowledge of fandom.

Fandom has changed a great deal show more since Bacon-Smith published this book. Fan fiction, and especially slash fiction, is no longer an underground secret. The internet has opened up the world of fandom to anyone with a computer and a phone line, and even the super-secret circuit archive she wrote about is now available online to anyone who cares to look for it. This book is, I think, an important record of media fandom at the time of its writing, and shows fans and fandom churning on without the spotlight of internet scrutiny turned on them. show less

As someone who spent fifteen years reading and collecting fan-fiction, this book was a gem and a delight..
Reread Very similar in structure and content to Textual Poachers. Also published in 1992 and therefore contains no information on the X-Files Internet fandom phenomenon. This one was also full of underlining from my previous reading and again I underlined a bit more. I only had three fandoms X-Files, Starsky & Hutch and The Professionals. I have read some Star Trek and like TP, this book show more is mainly about Trek fandom. Excellent source book about a subject with few well researched histories. I did a little research recently about which fandoms have the most posted stories. Currently, there are only two archives and none of these four fandoms is represented in the top 30 or 40. I remember all of those archives on Geocities, Tripod, Angel etc. that vanished with stories. All of those personal websites and host websites that disappeared overnight. I have on my computer 7000 X-Files stories...every one Mulder/Krycek and I know I don't have every one ever written. That totally excludes all the Mulder/Scully shipper fic, all the Mulder/Skinner, all the noromo, all the het fic, all the case fic, all the canon fic. 90% of all X-Files fic has not been transferred. I have 6000 Pros stories on my computer...there are 2700 on A03. So much has been lost but the phenomenon continues and is still growing. ( show less

Good -- if dated, now -- exploration of the specialized communities that have developed around Science Fiction -- fandom, conventions, history -- and the forces shaping and changing them through the late '90s.

The SF/F fandom communities are different from other kinds of fandom in that while very based in literature,they have other expressions through TV, movies, games, comics, and music. Fans have a lot of direct contact and influence on the writers and producers -- fans become the writers show more and producers. This unusual symbiosis has created a unique social entity. Bacon-Smith explores, among other things, how various trends and movements in SF writing changed the communities, and how they responded to an increasing population of women, of LGBT members, and to computer and Goth-influenced youth.

I very much wish that Bacon-Smith would write an update of this book, as this one explored the very beginning of the effect the Internet had on the SF community, and now, some 12 years later, those changes are even more significant, plus new groups have entered the SF fold. show less