Thanks to the good offices of my older brother, Mark "I have a thing for bowties" Oppenheimer, I’ve just published an essay in The New Haven Review of Books, which is Mark’s most recent editorial love child.
My essay in the Review is titled "Until the Dragon Comes: Science fiction fandom and the making of the twenty-first century," and it’s about my one foray into the world of science fiction fandom ("fandom" is the word for the community of people who are more than just readers of the genre; they’re the ones who populate the conventions, write the ‘zines and the slash fiction, etc.). It’s not about masculinity, per se, but it intersects with the topic in all sorts of ways. I write, for instance:
The archetypal story in fantasy literature is of an adolescent boy cast out from his familiar though often hostile surroundings into the world and onto a quest. He meets companions, vanquishes enemies, discovers the truth of his royal/magical/warrior blood, falls in love and becomes a man. Maybe he returns home again, or maybe he discovers his true home—on the throne, in the land of faerie, as part of a mystical brotherhood—and assumes his rightful place there. It’s a simple coming-of-age story, dragons notwithstanding, about the journey of a young man into maturity.
It’s also, of course, an adolescent fantasy (or maybe it’s pre-adolescent, I’m not sure; I’ll have to consult my Freud), which is a lot of what the rest of the essay deals with.
Anyway, it’s worth a read, as are many of the other articles in the Review, and it’s also worth noting that the website is parked, for the moment, at the online home of Brian Slattery, who’s a friend of my brother and the author of the just published "retro-pulp science-fiction-mystery-superhero novel" Spaceman Blues, which I’m about 80 pages into and enjoying immensely.
