Eddie: A Message from the Real World

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Title:	Eddie: A Message from the Real World
Creator:
Date(s):	September or October 1979
Medium:	print
Fandom:	all fandoms, but an emphasis on Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Topic:
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Eddie: A Message from the Real World is an essay by Lisa Golladay in Purple and Orange? #3.

The essay addressed the August 1979 widely-publicized suicide of a fifteen-year old boy who had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. His parents cited the cancellation of Battlestar Galactica as the reason for their son's despondency.

A similar essay is WARNING: The Surgeon General has determined that fandom can be hazardous to your health..

Some Excerpts

You've met Eddie. He was probably the brightest kid in class -- and therefore, as always, the loneliest. "The psychiatrist said he was just kind of bored with life, that there was nothing here for him to excel in. There was no real challenge here on this Earth," said Eddie's father. So Eddie rejected mundane Earth as it rejected him, and lived where heroes wrestle with the stars and where an intelligent, sensitive young human can live without pain.

Some refugees enlist on the ENTERPRISE, some join the Rebellion; Eddie selected the GALACTICA. His room housed the necessary paraphernalia to isolate him from the outside world: tape recordings, posters, models of his Colonial heroes, their equipment, and their foes. When the outsiders cancelled BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, it only proved what Eddie already knew, so he rejected his home planet a second, terrible time.

As I said, you've met Eddie. Maybe you've seen him in the mirror. So many of us who call ourselves science fiction fans share Eddie's desperate flight. The "mundanes" ruin everything. We're smarter than they are, damnit. We're better. We know more. We care more. They're just stupid, unimaginative blobs of inertia, and they'll never accomplish a damn thing, and the universe is going to hell because of their plain, simple, incomprehensible blindness!

The GALACTICA is not in outer space. She lives here on Earth with the people who created her. Everything we escape to, including our own imaginations, is part of Earth and is just as real as English Composition and network cancellations. Of course there is room for Eddie and his fantasies; how else could they have existed long enough for us to mourn their departure?

This would be a good time to start preaching. Where, I might ask, would the world be if everyone with Eddie's gifts abandoned this planet? How could the world progress without the leadership of those people it has the most trouble accommodating? What about Einstein and others like him?

But those questions are asked continuously, and their answers are as obvious as the full moon on a clear night. We have to face the real world, because we are the real world. Pain and frustration wait there in ambush, but so too does everything else. Answer instead these questions:

Who, knowing the dangers, will stand vigil on this shining planet — our shining planet — and wait for Eddie's heroes to achieve their quest? Who will champion the heroes — and the intelligent, sensitive young humans — who are already here? And who will those heroes be?

You, there. Isn't this challenge enough?