Discovering your inner geek
ETHAN GILSDORF PHOTO
The WETA Cave in New Zealand
allows "The Lord of the Rings" fans to
see their favorites, like Gollum.
Ethan Gilsdorf’s life looked pretty sweet: He was a freelance travel journalist based in Paris. But when he found himself obsessed with "Lord of the Rings" figurines, he wondered if he were regressing.
When he moved to Somerville about five years ago, unearthed his old Dungeons & Dragons maps and started hunting orcs in the parking lot, he worried that his teenage fandom would swallow him back up.
Sure, LOTR and Harry Potter had taken over the world, and computer programmers were heroes. But Gilsdorf remembered using fantasy to escape from dealing with his ill, unstable "Momster," who had suffered an aneurysm at a tragically young age. His girlfriend, who was hinting at marriage, thought a 40-year-old man was too old to play with toys.
Rather than hide from the questions, Gilsdorf decided to face them head-on. It would be a quest! The result is the frequent Globe contributor’s first book, "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks."
Outwardly, Gilsdorf explored a range of popular sci-fi diversions. Inwardly, "[I’m] trying to make peace with this part of me," Gilsdorf said recently at the anything-but-nerdy Diva Lounge, wearing a T-shirt from the band Harry and the Potters. (You’ve got to give the guy credit for including ‘70s-era photos in the book.)
He went to a D&D convention honoring the game’s recently deceased creator, Gary Gygax. He donned medieval garb for Pennsic, the Society for Creative Anachronism’s summer campout. He LARPed, he WoWed. Eventually he tromped around New Zealand to see the LOTR movies’ gorgeous scenery.
Through this tour de geek, he realized he was far from alone. Plenty of other men came to conventions to revisit their teenage pastimes. Gygax’s death drew widespread paeans to D&D’s imaginative power. "We all have our obsessions," he said.
Still, a reader can’t help but notice Gilsdorf’s persisting uneasiness, throughout the book, about his inner geek.
"I have some ambivalent feelings," he admitted. "It was very comforting to see people ... who had completely accepted this part of themselves and didn’t care what people thought."
Such as the members of the New England Science Fiction Association, whose Magoun Square clubhouse in Somerville is unknown to all but a few hardy folk. Having long been curious about the fort (which doesn’t appear in "Fantasy Freaks"), this scribe took the opportunity to venture inside.
I found an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 books, videos and DVDs, towered over couches chosen for comfort, not style. The surprisingly homey triple-wide storefront smelled of popcorn and sawdust: they’re expanding.
The club started in 1967 and has owned the building for over 20 years, said president Tony Lewis, 68. They run a 300-plus member lending library, a publishing imprint and Boskone, one of the area’s many fantasy conventions.
(There’s no shortage of sci-fi in Greater Boston. Gilsdorf could’ve written the entire book here, he said, but wanted to appeal to a broader audience; he’s currently finishing a publicity tour of the Midwest.)
Was fantasy dangerously escapist? The graybearded, Hobbit-bellied bunch had no fears.
“Nah,” Lewis said.
Dale Farmer, 47, the club’s procurer ("I buy soda pop") paraphrased C.S. Lewis: "What class is most concerned about escape and opposed to it? Jailers."
If anything, they thought sci-fi had become more widespread, in both visible and quiet ways. With the Internet to connect people, "there’s bazillions of sub-fandoms now," Farmer said. New crazes keep coming up: the Anime Boston convention draws more than 10,000 attendees.
But the niche isn’t as necessary. "Science fiction tropes have sort of subsumed the mainstream," Lewis said. Anyone can read about robots, immortality drugs and paranormal romance without joining a club or searching out fellow-travelers ("Twilight," anyone?).
Gilsdorf himself hasn’t returned to the Dungeon, at least not yet; he was too busy writing and promoting the book to really process the experience, he said. "Fantasy Freaks" ends with him symbolically burying his Lord of the Rings figurines in the cold New Zealand hillside.
It seems sad. "I know exactly where they are, though," he said, to retrieve if he ever needs fellowship.
Ethan Gilsdorf reads Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Boston Book Festival. The NESFA Clubhouse is open most Wednesdays from 6 to 10 p.m.
Contact Danielle at somervillescene@gmail.com.
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks."
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Who needs to "revisit" any of this? Many of us have continued playing and enjoying these things our entire lives. This guy is a shallow fool. The real subject should be how America interprets "adulthood" to mean burying anything interesting about yourself, conforming utterly, and becoming a corporate slave. Remembering that you actually like anything in an individual way thus seems like revelation.
Umm LOTR predated Dungeons & Dragons....by about THIRTY YEARS.
Note from a well-adjusted once and future geek:
You can be a corporate slaver and a non-conforming individualist. You can be a geek and a jock. You can be anything you want to be. Taking on and using the tags of "shallow" or "geek" or "adult" is what conforms people into little groups that can be codified.
We are all individuals regardless of what groups we allow ourselves to conform to. I'd suggest to jk that he or she think about the aggressive paradigm that he or she believes "America's interpretation" to be. To me that sounds like a personal excuse for whatever gripes he/she has.
Either way the subject of the article seems to be just fine. Thanks for the writing, much appreciated. I didn't know about the sci-fi club in Magoun Sq, and I grew up right on top of it apparently.
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