off on a tangent
Jul. 8th, 2008 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoI'm sure I've brought up before (possibly not in the LJ, though) the notion that fandom has become part of the cultural mainstream, or perhaps vice versa. Turns out I'm not the first fellow to come up with that notion; it was actually popularized by the late Thomas Disch. As Jim Henley wrote:
Never cared much for Disch's work, myself; most of it (with the exception of "The Brave Little Toaster") struck me as pretty annoying epater les bourgeois iconoclasm, fairly typical of the New Wave. YMMV. Still, it's comforting to know that somebody else had the same take on the culture as I did.
Years later, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of was one of the first, if not the first, nonfiction works to declare what gunshy geeks had mostly been too self-conscious to notice: science fiction won. The world was ours. We had become mainstream culture. It’s a commonplace truth now, but Dreams came out before truck companies based commercials on Worlds of Warcraft and the NFL used Lord of the Rings motifs to promote playoff games. The book was by no means triumphalist, because Disch knew that we were Slans with feet of clay.
Never cared much for Disch's work, myself; most of it (with the exception of "The Brave Little Toaster") struck me as pretty annoying epater les bourgeois iconoclasm, fairly typical of the New Wave. YMMV. Still, it's comforting to know that somebody else had the same take on the culture as I did.
