Update 4:30 pm 12/16/15: Keen eyed fans have noted that the “Igli” question confused Igli with another character – Yngvi. My bad. Despite numerous run throughs, I failed to notice this mistake. Please treat the question as if the name were Yngvi.
This survey represents nothing more than having a fun time with the many and varied things surrounding, if not part of, the science fiction community.
Community. Not Fandom. Because some don’t believe Fandom is a subculture, and some think Fandom (whatever they may mean by that) ain’t all that much and because some may mean something entirely different from what others mean when they say Fandom.
The questions were generated as I reviewed my own Fanhistory, comprised of both personal experience and acquired knowledge. It’s meant to be an exploration of the many different things of which the fannish community is comprised. But by no means all. A thousand question survey would not come close to covering the field. So I’ve restricted myself to a mere 100.
I refer to the survey as an exploration because the intent is more about encouraging survey takers to look into the history and culture and mores and sheer craziness the questions touch on, than it is about getting the answers right or demonstrating your mastery of the subject.
If even one question causes a fan to scratch their head and resort to Google, I’ll consider this exercise a success.
And on that score: please be honest with the survey and with yourself. Don’t use the internet or that copy of Harry Warner’s All Our Yesterdays sitting on the corner of your desk to help you figure out what the right answer is. You might get tripped up in the process because sometimes there isn’t a right answer. There may be an optimal answer, one requiring a little fannish logic to unravel, but in the end, sometimes “I don’t know” may be the correct answer. Which is your clue to do a little exploration of your own. Fannish culture is a rich and varied one, filled with many weird and wonderful geeky, nerdy things that have proven, through the evolutionary process of history, to be of interest and value to fans.
Your experience of fandom may be entirely different from my own (on some level it is). My biases are more than likely reflected to some degree or other in some of the questions. But that shouldn’t give you pause. Instead, it should give you food for thought, an opportunity for comparison and dialogue.
Mostly though, it should be informative, nostalgic, intriguing and fun.
At an indeterminate time in the future, we’ll close the survey and offer up a guide to the questions, the answers that I consider to be most appropriate and the reason(s) why. Which will give all of us another opportunity to dig deep into fannish history, the culture and the stuff we all love so dearly.
https://stevedavidson2014.polldaddy.com/s/fan-unfan-mundane-1
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