All Our Yesterdays

Author: Harry, Jr. Warner

One of the unique features of science fiction has been the growth of a subculture around the genre known as science fiction fandom. Fandom first started to form around the letter columns of the early magazines, but it quickly became a lively culture in its own right, publishing its own amateur magazines and getting together at conventions. A host of major writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Robert Silverberg and many more have emerged from fandom; and it was the bibliographers and critics within fandom who provided the bedrock for the current critical and academic study of the genre. In other words, no serious assessment of science fiction can afford to ignore fandom. A number of studies of fandom have appeared over the years, but the first and still the best is Harry Warner's history of fandom in the 1940s, All Our Yesterdays. Because the history of fandom in these vital years as it was just beginning to take shape is also the history of the sf magazines and of science fiction itself. A second book by Warner, A Wealth of Fable, takes the story on through the 1950s. You really cannot begin to understand how science fiction developed during the golden age of the 1940s and 50s without understanding the fandom that underpinned it every step of the way. This is how the science fiction we all know, the stories of Asimov and Clarke, of Ellison and Silverberg, came about.