Subject: *Pops out from behind a trash can*
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Posted on: 2019-10-02 15:50:00 UTC

I'm honestly not sure. I know there was definitely a subculture there, and I feel like Trek may have actually ended up appealing to that group (although I have no actual evidence for that). The subculture part is provable: Someone had to pay for all those copies of Astounding, didn't they? ^^

Used to actually play for a monthly issue of Analog... but enough about me!

What is worth remembering is that Star Trek was not an immediate smash hit. It certainly wasn't mainstream. It barely even made it to a third season. Nobody was watching until the reruns started to air.

Okay, Martin Luther King was watching. But most of the country was not.

Anyways, the bit about Babbage Engines did make me think about the PPC as a nexus for a moment.

See, when usually spend time thinking of a PPC as a nexus, it's as a nexus between worlds of fiction -- a place where a dragonrider and a Space Marine can be on even terms (is shameless self-promotion that bad if you're at least honest about it? ^
^). The thing is, especially in the pre-internet era, the PPC would also be a nexus for World 1 nerd-dom. There would be (and still are) World 1 agents who were recruited out of radically different cultures from each other, from opposite corners of fandom. Which is interesting in and of itself, especially from the international perspective -- I mean, if you think Japan's cultural scene is an isolated ecosystem now, it's waaay more open than it used to be. This was a band of fans who were not only being introduced to strange, novel, imported western works but also Japanese works, many of which are still obscure here in the west today. Just go cameo-hunting in Daicon IV if you don't believe me. And Japan isn't the international country with its own fandom scene by a long shot...

But all of this is hampered by the fact that I know nothing about international communities. It's still interesting...

Where was I going with this? Ah, nevermind, it probably wasn't important...

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