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A Further-Opened Eye
Nov. 16th, 2023 06:16 pmA few days ago, I happened on a pointer to someone who’d made a deep dive into that legendarily off-kilter fantasy story The Eye of Argon. By going through the other available-online issues of the fanzine where the story had appeared, she’d got a better sense of its author Jim Theis. I knew Theis had been sixteen years old when he’d written The Eye of Argon, and having kept some of the stuff I wrote when I was sixteen I’m quite willing to be forgiving. It also happened that Theis seemed to get along well with the rest of the fans chronicled in the “zines,” where I’d been writing pretty much for my own private satisfaction.
With all of this, though, I am conscious of how I’d first come across The Eye of Argon myself, via the now more than twenty-five-year-old MSTing by Adam Cadre. So far as I can tell Cadre didn’t know how old Jim Theis had been, which can add a certain sense of nastiness to the “riffing” for all of the thoughts over the years, from people other than me too, about that MSTing being a possible diving-in point to that different sort of fanwork. It’s at least different than having reached an unfortunate ambiguity about “condemnation of professional works” in the later years of the heyday of MSTings, anyway. The deep dive itself mentioned having been inspired by the more recent “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” take on The Eye of Argon, which had been a bit more aware of Theis’s situation.
With all of this, though, I am conscious of how I’d first come across The Eye of Argon myself, via the now more than twenty-five-year-old MSTing by Adam Cadre. So far as I can tell Cadre didn’t know how old Jim Theis had been, which can add a certain sense of nastiness to the “riffing” for all of the thoughts over the years, from people other than me too, about that MSTing being a possible diving-in point to that different sort of fanwork. It’s at least different than having reached an unfortunate ambiguity about “condemnation of professional works” in the later years of the heyday of MSTings, anyway. The deep dive itself mentioned having been inspired by the more recent “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” take on The Eye of Argon, which had been a bit more aware of Theis’s situation.