Fandom and the Borders of Reality

During my obsession with Star Trek, I cultivated an interest in astronomy and space travel, but it was frustrating. Here and now, launching a space shuttle is a huge and slow affair, with a train of cars following the shuttle as it creeps out to the launch pad, and the cloud of fire at liftoff shows how exasperatingly wasteful the propulsion is. The interior of a space station is cramped and confusing, like a submarine without floors. The astrophysics course I took was almost solely about nuclear reactions in stars, not really about the universe, nebulae, quasars, exoplanets. The only part of it that involved anything even remotely reminiscent of Star Trek was a lecture about supernovas by a postgraduate whose e-mail address started with "jim@astro". I was quite disappointed, my love for nuclear reactions notwithstanding.

Approaching from the other direction, Star Trek's science and technology are cardboard. Attempts at finding out more about warp drive or tachyon particles slam you up against that patchily camouflaged brick wall of reality. I find this less disturbing in TOS, because it's not trying as hard as TNG to construct a coherent, believable world - something that might well be impossible.

One of the lovely things about Age of Sail fandoms, therefore, is their smooth borders to reality. The characters in the novels of C S Forester and Patrick O'Brian are fictional, but their world is real and continues outside those pages: in other books, in museums, and in the world as we know it, since it's the product of its history. There's technobabble in Master & Commander and Hornblower just as there is in Star Trek, but on sailing ships, the technobabble makes sense; it's not smoke and mirrors. The ropes and pulleys each do something very specific and instrumental rather than being there for atmosphere like the buttons, lights, and levers aboard the Enterprise. I'm surprised by how much that means to me. I can go to the library and find books on masts and rigging, or crucial naval actions in the early 19th century, or the social situation aboard the ships of the Royal Navy around the year 1800, and it's ALL REAL. Or rather, was all real (because thankfully, times have changed). O'Brian sometimes retells historical events in his novels, with his characters playing minor parts, and both O'Brian and Forester let their characters come aboard ships that actually existed; there really was a Captain Edward Pellew in command of the Indefatigable, although there was never a Mr. Midshipman Hornblower under him, and the Shannon really did challenge the Chesapeake in the year 1813 (the event has its own Wikipedia entry), but without Jack Aubrey aboard. Sometimes I come across contemporary portraits of people I had thought of as fictional. It's great.

I was thinking of this as I walked along the row of wet thirty-pound cannon on the upper deck of the Jylland the other week. To some extent it was like visiting a reconstruction of the bridge of the Enterprise: the ship is in dry dock and various steel-mesh staircases and even a lift have been installed to facilitate for visitors, there was scaffolding up the foremast and green exit signs glowing on the dimly lit gun deck. The masts were bare; they probably store the sails somewhere dry in winter. In the waist, the sides were some six feet high, but through the gunports I could see the gift shop and the café; from the quarterdeck, the parking space and the surrounding town. The ship is little more than a backdrop, in some ways, and much of it is reconstructed rather than preserved - the Jylland spent decades as a decaying hull under a tarpaulin. Still, what is there is real in the sense that it's historically accurate and would work if you tried it. There's no styrofoam or balsa wood or plastic; everything you touch is hemp and iron, oak and tar, and it all fits together and makes sense. It's a very special kind of fandom-related joy.