THE EYE OF ARGON - or - When A Community Mocks Its Own
This is an expanded and reedited version of a blog post I wrote in 2014 when I was hosting my regular podcast.
I just read
’s latest and was amazed to see, happily, that he and I are thinking along the same lines regarding how we as fans behave from time to time. I was inspired to revisit my The Eye of Argon thoughts when I saw a conversation on Twitter revolving around a certain “Jason” whose group was auditioning Dungeon Masters, an audition process that eventually led “Jason” to shame one of the candidates named “Willow” so badly that she has quit role playing all together.The story has angered a lot of people, but I saw within it the same kind of exclusionary fandom that has haunted my obsessions since time immemorial, dating all the way back to Forrest Ackermann fighting with the Lovecraftian Circle in the pages of an amateur fanzine called The Fantasy Fan. I’ll be writing on both of those events more fully in the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to share my thoughts on “The Worst Fantasy Novel Ever Written” aka The Eye of Argon.
TL;DR?
It isn’t the worst fantasy novel ever written and I kind of like it. It is my The Room of fantasy fiction.
Since I read it for the piece below, I find myself returning to the book once a year for pleasure and not to mock. I enjoy reading the sincere imaginative thoughts of a forthright 16 year old and I find it inspirational. I wish other people did too.
Encountering The Eye of Argon for the First Time
I've long been a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and I've long been a person who is pretentiously opposed to pretense. In a way, I'm like an angry Polyanna who aggressively argues against those who mock the "juvenile" or "popular" things in SF/F. I love "skiffy" and have experienced no greater sense of wonder than reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' writings of John Carter. That's right. I believe that ERB's tales of Barsoom are as imaginative - nay more so - than Iain Bank's Culture novels, and I love those too. I'm the fan who loves both the Dragonlance stories and Malazan Book of the Fallen. I love the genre at its most literary, at its most imaginative, and when it falls into the "written by an overenthusiastic fan" territory.
I'm so positive in my passion about genre fiction and geek culture that I wrote an approving review of I, Frankenstein and have been reminded by my editor at The Robot’s Voice that I need to bare the fangs every now and then because I am usually so enthusiastic.
While it's not for my upcoming Robot’s Voice article, I did find something that really aggravates me. It's how cruel SFF professionals and fandom can be. There are plenty of examples I could pull out of a hat, often dealing with the treatment of female fans as being "fake geek girls." As the father of twin girls who love Pirates, Pokemon, Paladins, and Princesses, I find that whole "controversy" infuriating. That's why I'm not going to write about that topic. It would be very difficult for me to avoid expletives on what has been consistently a G-rated or PG-rated blog.
Instead, I want to focus on how professionals and fandom have treated on particular enthusiast of Sword and Sorcery fiction, Jim Theis the author of The Eye of Argon.
I've been doing nightly out loud readings of The Eye of Argon. I do one chapter, or half chapter as the book has half-chapters as well, per night. I thought it would be fun to do. I heard that the SF/F community had regular readings of this poorly written work of fiction that were the book equivalent of MST3K...and it had been mentioned by the MST3K crew...so I thought it would be fun to do my own midnight readings with my wife.
My takeaway from the experience is that the SF/F community are cruel, judgmental, and full of themselves. I also came to believe that I was part of the problem. By participating in my own personal midnight reading, I was being an SF/F bully.
My sister bought me a the Wildside Press version of the book, which has a long introduction by Lee Weinstein that discusses the search and discovery of the real Jim Theis. There had been some speculation that Theis was not a real person and that Argon had been written by a published author as a joke. Weinstein mentions that the search eventually led to him finding an interview on a local (Los Angeles) radio show/podcast called Hour 25 where Jim stated, "that he was hurt that his story was being mocked and said he would never write anything again."
I'll be honest with you. I initially fluctuated in what I thought about this phenomenon. I thought that either the whole thing is a hoax, or SF/F authors and fandom are cruel. Scratch that. Even if the whole thing had been an elaborate hoax with false scholarship creating a plausible back story of a 16 year old writing the story for OSFAN, SF/F authors and fandom are still cruel.
It didn’t matter that Jim Theis turned out to be a very real person and not a fictional character created as part of SF fandom cosplay, what matters is that the community has spent over 40 years mocking him. I picked up the book intending to become one of those people and it makes me feel terrible. The anger I feel toward myself more than outweighs the joy from any of the small chuckles I experienced during my reading of the work. And I did enjoy reading the book. I would have bought more books by Jim Theis as his writing improved with experience.
After my first encounter with the text, and realizing that Jim Theis was a real person with real feelings and that I had been a jerk to want to relive the ritual mockery. I decided to track down that issue of OSFAN. I initially looked to see if the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside had a copy, but it did not. They had issue 11 thanks to a generous donation by former UCLA librarian Bruce Pelz, but no issue 10. I was eventually able to track down a copy at Fanac.org and am including it here for your perusal. His story starts on page 27, but he has a short zine earlier where you get a glimpse of his 16 year old personality.
According to the Weinstein essay in the Wildside edition, Theis remained an active fan of SF/F for most of his life. Can you imagine what it would be like to attend conventions where there was a midnight event dedicated to mocking you? It would be one thing if Theis embraced that mockery and made it his own, finding some way to leverage it into a positive thing, but that Hour 25 interview seems to imply the opposite. Theis wasn’t able to pull off a Tommy Wiseau or James Nguyen and transform sincere amateurism into beloved cult status. Instead, the mockery killed Theis' desire to become a writer. That's right, the SF/F community's mockery shattered a fan's aspirations. To me, that is the biggest crime that any professional or fan can do. No matter how "bad" a writer is at writing, they are never wrong to aspire to become a published author. They may never become one, but the aspiration should remain.
Yes The Eye of Argon is poorly written, but not much more so than Lin Carter's Thongor stories or Gardner Fox’s Kyrik tales. Unlike Theis, Carter and Fox don't have the excuse that they were 16 when they wrote their books. Unlike Carter, Theis wasn't a brilliant editor. Neither was he a foundational comic book writer and editor like Gardner Fox. But if an editor as brilliant as Carter was can write drivel and still be a vital contributor to the field as a whole, who is to say Theis may not have evolved into something more? I can tell you from experience that there are some sentences in Argon that hint at some talent, if only Theis could set aside his Thesaurus for a moment.
When my wife was in film school, one of her classmates stated that she wanted "to be one of those writers who writes terrible movies" and wanted to know how to do that because it seemed like an easy way to make money. It was a statement filled with pretense and disdain that also lacked an understanding of why and how things are created. I don't think anyone writes with the intention of creating something terrible, baring those things that are done as parody. Instead, most writers are attempting to entertain others and to share their own personal feelings and joys. Jim Theis, like Lin Carter and Gardner Fox, clearly enjoyed his Robert E. Howard stories. Heck, he might even have enjoyed Carter's Thongor stories. It seems that a 16 year old Thies wanted to share his love of those tales with others by creating his own version. What was his reward for exposing himself thus?
He was publicly ridiculed for over 40 years.
For a community to spend 40+ years making a game that amounts to nothing more than "Taking turns mocking one's own" is something for which I have nothing but I have disdain. I'm not saying to end the readings of The Eye of Argon. There is humor to be found in the mixed metaphors and odd misuses of words that Theis clearly didn't understand. But there is also an enthusiasm to the writing, a sincerity, that should be acknowledged. Readings of The Eye of Argon can be humorous and educational experiences, but they should exclude mockery for mockery's sake. Acknowledge the enthusiasm of the author. Point out how his errors are the errors that many new authors make. And remember that the writing in The Eye of Argon is so "bad" that many of the early myths of its origin required that it be written by someone of respected talent.
Jim Theis died 22 years ago at the age of 48, but 10 years ago he acquired a fan. I hope that he can acquire more. He’ll never know that we exist, but he deserves the basic humanity that we should all aspire to give.
Good reminder that behind every creative work is a creative worker who doesn’t deserve ridicule
I look back on my own time in those days with disgust and increasing horror, for the reasons you bring up. By the 1980s, it was practically a competition to dogpile on projects like this, goaded and cheered into punching down because punching up did so to some incredibly thin-skinned people who were only authorities and Names because nobody else wanted the job. (In particular, I’m reminded of a certain big-name editor who had regular midnight readings of stories that arrived in the slush pile, encouraging his audiences to laugh harder and harder at those who couldn’t respond and dared not respond without risking a blacklist in the future. I beat this editor to the punch when, at a big convention in the 1990s, he proceeded to smirk at a table full of writers dependent upon his largesse for publication “As you know, I refer to my penis as ‘Mel Gibson,” and I tossed out “You mean ‘Mel BROOKS’.”)