Susan Hill
| Fan | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Susan Hill |
| Alias(es): | |
| Type: | |
| Fandoms: | Blake's 7, Professionals |
| Communities: | Lysator |
| Other: | |
| URL: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Susan Hill is a fan whose first fandom was Blake's 7 which she discovered the late 1980s.
She also was a frequent attendee at MediaWest hosting the Virgule-L mailing list party for several years.
In 2009 she donated a large portion of her Blake's 7 fanzine collection to the Fanzine Archives and a collection was established in her name.
Journey to Fandom: 1993
I've read science fiction and fantasy for many years but never had much interest in the fan aspects. My husband took it into his head to write a fantasy novel about 15 years ago. When we were looking around for publishers a friend who was at the time married to a game designer brought over a couple of issues of Locus. The novel was rejected, as it should have been, but I subscribed to Locus to keep track of what my favorite authors were producing.
The accounts of cons seemed to be in-group smooze sessions and not easy to break into or exactly what I was interested in anyway. I ignored them. Media fandom appeared to consist of ST and DW fans; neither interested me, and the only local fans on public display were some very adolescent males into DW.
Then I came upon B7. I even remember the date. It was New Year's Eve 1989. Bill was out gigging and I was hiding from the revelry. I watched The Red Shoes; a production of Carmina Burana, and then 'Bounty', a fairly early episode came on the screen. I kept watching. I watched again the next week, and continued. Fairly soon I had of full-blown case of B7 mania, and I started trying to figure out how I would see the episodes I missed, and how to get copies of those I had not taped. I knew someone had to have campaigned to have B7 shown on WILL, but I was hesitant to make my search public. It's a little hard to remember just why, but I think it was a variant of 'You're too old for this' and the fear that strange adolescents would show up at my house to talk about how cool everything was, or discuss special effects.
I decided to apply research methods to my problem, and checked various indexes, only to find nothing. Next I turned to periodicals. I surveyed the magazine racks and bought a copy of Starlog. There I found some dealer ads that mentioned Blakes 7, and sent for catalogs. Among other things I bought some old Horizon newsletters from 1987-88. This is now 1990. Here I found some real address. I bought envelopes and a lot of stamps and started writing letters. I bought zines, read the advertisements and bought others. I wrote LOCs for some zines and subscribed to newsletters. Meanwhile; B7 was repeated, and I got cable to be able to get clear tapes.
I was connected to zines, but not really to people. Some of the people I bought zines from were friendly, but too busy to really take on a new person. I always tried to personalize me business letters a bit, but I was still just a reader. Conventions were mostly far away and intimidating, and hard to get to. The B7 only conventions had ceased, and I was not sure how much B7 I would find at general cons. Also, I don't drive... and transportation difficulties got in the way.
In 1992 I ran an ad in The Neutral Arbiter, a B7 letterzine that has since ceased, looking for some out-of-print zines. A very kind woman replied, offering to lend me her copies. She turned out to be older, and a librarian, so we had things in common. We've exchanged letter ever since, and I'll be meeting her at MediaWest when we share a room. This was my first long-term fannish connection. At about the same time I found that a couple of work colleagues were fans, when their names appeared in the MediaWest 11 progress report. I had become a supporting member to check it out. I was into B7, they were not, but at least local, sane people were around.
I was reading slash zines along with everything else, but was careful about mentioning it, since slash appeared to be a really big controversy in B7 circles. I was finding the more and more I often liked the slash zines best because they had more interesting character development.
I have subscribed to SF-Lover's Digest for a couple of years, and the B7 mailing list was announced there. I subscribed immediately. After a month or so SAndy posted a carefully worded essay on story types in B7, including slash. I wrote to congratulate her on the post, and she invited me to join this list. Here I found all sorts of slashfen, including Sharon, who lives in the same town. She invited me to join her group, which includes those two work colleagues. Here I am, after a long, convoluted path.
For me, media fandom was not easy to find or to connect to. I admittedly was a bit diffident about approaching people locally, but I don't think the DW fans would have helped me much, and I probably would have been embarrassed and reacted badly. I think I made a steady search, and would have connected eventually without this list, but it certainly speeded things up. [1]
Journey to Fandom: 2011
I furtively bought a fan magazine - don't remember which one - and studied the advertisements. I found Blake's 7 zines listed, and sent for them at once. Some were mysteriously described as slash. I also occurred to me that these magazines might discuss the show in some way so I searched magazine indexes and found that one of our local public libraries might have the last few years. There I came upon articles, and advertisements for buying specific back issues. I wrote away for those with B7 in them. Mail began arriving, including zines. The zines had ads from which more could be purchased, at less cost that what I'd been paying commercial dealers. ...
I discovered what slash meant, and found it fit very well into the relationship I was seeing between Blake and Avon. Great times, but I still had no one to share it with. The timing gets uncertain here; I discovered a lot of things in 1990-1992. The zines introduced me to a B7 apa; it might have been The Neutral Arbiter, or that might have come later. I found and subscribed to two British B7 newsletters with more sources for zines, British this time. Money poured out, mail poured in....
Net access was very limited at this time; most people got it through a university, as a student or employee. My library finally saw fit to give staff Bitnet accounts, and I found my way to the Blakes 7 alt. science fiction group run by Calle D. on a Swedish university server. There was a lot of detailed discussion there, and a classic slash-anti-slash argument. A Slash Defense document was created there ...it's an early, although certainly not the earliest, example of dealing with the slash argument with gen-only fans. I must have seemed slash-friendly, because sherrold was looking for slash fans with net access for her Virgule mailing list and asked me to join it. This was the best fannish thing that could have happened to me, because there I met a local long-term fan whose office was just 3 buildings down the quad from mine. Through her and the other local fans I met I got to MediaWestCon, ZebraCon, the Pros lending library, and met a number of people who enriched the 1990s for me, and some I still know today. [2]