Sci-Fi Club Expanding Its Universe : 53-Year-Old Society Helps Put Authors in Orbit

Wielding her meat-tenderizer gavel, “Czarina” Casey Bernay pounds the room to order. The weekly meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society is in session.

Bernay, the club’s president, mediates the hotly debated topic of “pun fines.” Members are fined 25 cents for any pun uttered during a meeting.

“As Czarina, I’m going to trash all this parliamentary and order stuff,” Bernay tells the 130 in attendance. “We’re going to have pun fines when I feel like it! Anything else? No? Good!

“LASFS is the oldest, largest, continuously meeting science fiction club in this world,” Bernay said, putting aside her tenderizer after the meeting. Chartered as an educational and literary institution, the 53-year-old society promotes science fiction and sponsors LosCon, an annual convention for science fiction fans.

The society settled into its current two-building clubhouse in North Hollywood in 1976 after meeting in more than a dozen places since it was founded in 1934. According to early members, a riotous ambiance has been a common thread throughout the meetings. Forrest J. Ackerman, a founder of the society who has served as literary agent for more than 200 science fiction authors, said he published Ray Bradbury’s first short story in 1938.

“It’s a wonder that he survived because we were all ready to strangle him,” Ackerman said of Bradbury’s attendance at meetings.

Bradbury’s Pranks

“He was such an obnoxious youth--which he would be the first to admit. He was loud and boisterous and liked to do a W.C. Fields act and Hitler imitations. He would pull all sorts of pranks.”

Ackerman said meetings still provide a “stimulating atmosphere.”

Taking a stroll through the society’s Burbank Boulevard clubhouse is like roaming through a Ray Bradbury novel. Larry Niven, a best-selling science fiction author and LASFS member, said he sometimes plucks characters for his novels from those in attendance.

“There are a lot of bright people there that might get involved in the stories I’m writing,” Niven said. “There are a number of brilliant and crazy minds there.”

Niven and his writing partner, Jerry Pournelle, are authors of five best sellers, among them “Lucifer’s Hammer” and “Footfall.”

Niven said he used a stray comment from a LASFS member when writing “The Smoke Ring,” a best seller set in a “free-fall environment” that surrounds a neutron star.

“Someone suggested artificial wings for the people in The Smoke Ring,” Niven said. “And I used it.”

Besides Niven and Pournelle, LASFS members include authors Robert A. Heinlein and Steve Barnes.

Today, with men on the moon, space probes and a film industry that revels in science fiction, members turn out for meetings in greater numbers--and in greater variety. They arrive draped in cloaks, Renaissance attire or the day’s business suit and Trekkie sideburns.

LASFS members are divided into many subgroups.

Computer Games

A computer group meets regularly to swap programs and play games like “Rogue” and “Shanghai,” in which the object is to “get out alive--eventually,” according to a player.

Another core group views movies straight off Pee Wee Herman’s top-10 wish list--”The League of Frightened Men,” “Devil Girl from Mars” and “Radar Men from the Moon.”

Others meet to discuss common interests that include writing, bridge, tai chi, Japanese animation, medieval and 19th-Century costuming, space exploration, comic-book collecting and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

Joe Zeff is an avid Dungeons & Dragons fan and a regular at Friday evening game sessions held at the clubhouse. He said the game pits a player’s skills against the “Dungeon Master,” who sits behind a screen rolling assorted polyhedron dice, dictating what imaginary adventures players will take.

“When they’re strong enough, the magic-users can cause lightning bolts that are 20 feet in diameter,” Zeff said, pushing back his navy-blue sailor cap as he described an imaginary character from the game. “That’s 33,000 cubic feet. That’s a lot. Just WHOOOMP! and there’s this huge ball of fire out of nowhere, and it lasts about one segment.” (One segment equals six seconds.)

Other members often browse through stacks of rare titles at “Ninth Nebula,” a small comic book shop next to the club.

Richie Rich, Batman, Spiderman and Adam Strange peer out from the walls of the shop screaming, “Only a moment left to avert a collision between Earth and my adopted Planet Rann!” and “All space is yours to roam at will and serve Galactus once again!”

Bernay said the society offers “an air of acceptance” for its diverse membership. “I really believe if an alien with purple skin and eye stalks would walk in and sit down, someone would ask him, ‘Hi, how did you hear about us?’

“All barriers fall away. You’re accepted as a human being here--or an entity--I don’t want to offend intergalactic members.”

Bernay said outsiders believe science fiction clubs provide a refuge for those feeling ostracized because of their deep interests in the subject. “I would say our social skills are still dragging a bit,” she said. “There is a different social structure. It takes a little bit of getting used to.”

Science fiction fans now come in “all shapes, sizes and beliefs,” Ackerman said. “It’s like a kaleidoscope. The glue that binds us all together is a vivid imagination.”

Ackerman, now being seen in the movie, “Amazon Women on the Moon,” said he was the “resident crazy in high school.”

“In the beginning we were like people on a desert and we were looking for a drop of water,” Ackerman said of the dearth of science fiction literature in the ‘30s and ‘40s. “Today there’s more than any human being could possibly encompass. We’ve gone from famine to feast.”

Science fiction books now make up about 12% of all mass market titles, according to booksellers.

Lydia Marano, owner of Dangerous Visions, a popular science fiction and fantasy bookstore in Sherman Oaks, agreed that there is no longer a typical profile of a science fiction fan. She also said more women now shop at her store and attend science fiction conventions in greater numbers.

“Fans don’t look any special way,” Marano said. “They’re not these guys with slide rules in their back pockets. Most of my customers are professional people. THey’re either in college or college graduates.”

Walter Daugherty, a LASFS member who joined the society shortly after Ackerman, remembers being shunned because of his interest in science fiction.

“When I was a kid hopping street cars in L.A. with a science fiction magazine tucked under my arm, I had to hide the cover,” Daugherty said. “They actually thought you were crazy--crazy enough to believe in rockets flying around the Earth. No one believed it those days except for the very few.

“We just wanted to get together with people who believed the same things we did. If you could find another person interested in the same subject, you could have a fellow buddy.”