Small Worlds

I'm working on a secret project, so Saturday i went to a miniatures show in Cherry Hill. And what's that all about? Dollhouses, basically, and dollhouse accessories. There were things there would make even the most hardened non-collector feel a twinge of desire -- such as the detailed miniature, shown above, of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

But there were also things that would confirm you in your opinion that here was an opportunity to spend far too much money. Such as a $350 cut crystal bowl, small enough to balance on a fingertip. It was exquisitely crafted, of course. But buying enough crystal to make your miniature china cabinet look respectable would cost you several thousand dollars. And then there'd be the rest of the room and house to furnish.

"There's your desk!" I said to Marianne, knowing she'd always wanted a nicely complicated rolltop.

"For that money," she replied, eying the price tag, "I could buy a real one."

What struck me most strongly, though, was that these people were engaged in creating small, imaginary worlds -- fantasies, if you will -- and yet there was almost no overlap with the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. No Baba Yaga chicken legged dollhouse or Moominhouse or 1950s Moon Base or Lothlorien elven tree-house . . . There wasn't even any overlap with the the ship-model building community, though the commonality would seem obvious.

My son is a shrewd social observer, so I asked him about this phenomenon. "When a sub-culture is shrinking, the boundaries are patrolled more rigorously and the purity of the core defended more passionately," he said, adding that the sub-cultures shrink when the avenues to bring young people in disappear. Model trains are a good example of this, because children aren't given train sets anymore. Nor, apparently, doll houses.

Which explained why almost everyone at the show was old. It wasn't just that so much of what was for sale was pricey -- there were lots of small and cunning creations without reach of a modest pocketbook. It was that this small world was steadily growing smaller.

I asked about comic books, which you used to be able to buy in every drugstore and (remember these?) magazine kiosk. "There are still two routes into them," he said, "the movies and Saturday morning cartoons."

I didn't ask about genre fantasy, which I already knew was safe for the moment. Fandom may be getting grayer and less welcoming to the young, but there are still lots of ways for young readers to discover fantasy and science fiction. Still, it was a sobering reminder of what could easily happen . . . a dystopian future in which the readers grow steadily older and fewer and the books become increasingly more like themselves, predictable and stereotypical. It confirmed me in my resolve to write some very, very strange fiction.