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Bixelstrasse:
The SF Fan Community of 1940s Los AngelesRob Hansen (editor)
ISBN 978-1-913451-82-0
Rob Hansen has compiled this history of the 1940s Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society from contemporary fanzine accounts, so – as in Homefront: Fandom in the UK 1939-1945 – the story emerges from the participants’ own words. Besides such famous or notorious fans as Forrest J Ackerman, Charles Burbee, Claude Degler, Francis Towner Laney, “Morojo” and “Tigrina”, we meet several well-remembered professionals including Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Harryhausen, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Fritz Lang, Fritz Leiber and A.E. van Vogt.
Fans appearing in the cover photo taken at the 1941 LASFS Xmas Party are as follows. Rear: Helen Finn, Dorothy Finn, Eleanor O’Brien, Morojo, Art Joquel, Ed Chamberlain, Gerald Miller, Henry Hasse. Front: Paul Freehafer, Peggy Finn, Walt Daugherty, Forry Ackerman, Norwin Johnson. Sign over door reads SHOTTLE BOP. See also the 1940s LASFS Gallery at Rob Hansen’s site.
First published as an Ansible Editions ebook for the TAFF site on 29 November 2021 at 193,000 words. Slightly expanded on 12 December 2021 with a previously undiscovered fragment, and again on 5 October 2022 with another: now over 196,000 words.
By popular request a printed paperback edition is also available as of April 2022: click here for more.
From Rob Hansen’s Foreword
The Bixel Street era of LASFS has fascinated me since I first read about it in Harry Warner Jr’s All Our Yesterdays. Yes, there have been other occasions on which fans have shared premises in varying degrees, but to have a community of fans centred around a clubroom and living in nearby rooming houses on the same street gave rise to all-week, around-the-clock fanning of a sort not seen before or since. [...]
This set-up, the whole “fannish village” they established, was immensely appealing to me in my twenties (though seeing so much of each other inevitably exacerbated personality clashes, of course). Add in the large numbers of fans from around the country who passed through Los Angeles thanks to the war, many of them processed via the Induction Center at nearby Fort MacArthur before being sent off to fight, and you have something unique in the history of fandom, a saga featuring fans and pros, communists and homosexuals, madmen and mystics, Hollywood stars and spies.
Within the confines of mundane South Bixel Street lay the Bixelstrasse, a name that describes the tight cluster of dwellings on that street that housed its fannish community....
