A Sidelight On The Paul Is Dead Rumors

Once upon a time quite a while before Paul watched John sing Come And Go With me at the Woolton church fete, one of the things that some teens, primarily the boys who would now be the computer geeks, the skinny ones with glasses, the round ones that didn’t play sports and the intelligent girls that weren’t pretty enough to excuse their brains, read Weird and Amazing, science fiction magazines full of short stories and novelettes (for which the authors were paid 1-cent a word). These magazines had a Letter to the Editor column every issue and a lot of readers did write letters discussing the stories, the science in them, or lack of it, and so on. In the course of time these fans cut the magazine out of the loop and started writing directly to each other. This was all pen and paper, occasionally typewriter but not often because in those days it was the rare boy who would be seen typing) and the U.S. Post Office and 3-cent stamps. These fans became more then simply people who read all the 25-cent SciFi books they could afford, like me; they got really involved in the stories, in the ‘universes’ created by the authors and more then anything else, in the communication with other fans.

One bright lad had access to both a typewriter, he hid in the basement so nobody would catch him using it, and a mimeograph machine (a primitive attempt to invent a photocopier) and it occurred to him that it would be a lot easier to write to all his friends at once instead of having to write the same things over and over to each of them and he invented the APAZine (Amateur Press Association Magazine, though the organization, if there actually was one, came later) or a “Fanzine”. Think of them as something between a maillist and a cooperative blog. They carried stories as well as discussions, arguments and a certain amount of personal stuff. They even began to distribute, if to very small audiences, the sort of shared universe stories we see so much of today like the many Star Trek and Star Wars novels.

Out of the fanzines grew the SciFi conventions (Yes, there really is a point to this, stay with me); gatherings of people who read SciFi of course but particularly a chance for all these people who knew each other by mail but had never met. Every convention, of course, features at least one real author of a published book or if that was too expensive, perhaps an illustrator. However, the fans themselves in many ways became the “stars” of these conventions including those who wore wonderful costumes, those who wrote particularly good stories (some of these graduated to authors), or excelled in punning or baiting or downright attacking the other fans. These people became something really wonderful; they were Big Name Fans. Some BNFs got big enough to be invited to conventions as celebrity guests even.

Was with many things that involve people and a lack of oversight, there was a certain amount of plagiarism, character assassination and what we now know as flaming as well as an occasional hoax or joke. One day one of these brilliant but irritating people invented “pseuicide”; a simple hoax perpetrated by sending a letter to a fanzine conveying the sad news that dear old Fan XYZ, whom we all know and love, has sadly passed away (or tragically killed or whatever happened to come to mind). The rumor spread fast since every subscriber got more then one fanzine and editors of fanzines often traded issues with each other. In the way of human communication, Fan XYZ’s letter advising all his friends and enemies that the news of his death was highly exaggerated never got to all of the people who read the news of his supposed death.

Is all this sounding just a bit familiar?

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