The Jim Theis thread

Back in November 2023, I fell down a rabbit hole and wound up doing a ton of research about Jim Theis, author of The Eye of Argon. I collected all that research in a 42-post Mastodon thread. Earlier today, I started thinking about this, and in a moment of clarity, I said, “What is wrong with you?? You did all that research and you put it on social media? What happens if it goes down? All that research is gone!” This was truly a dumb move on my part, and what makes it even dumber is that I wrote the whole thing originally in my Notes app on my phone, and then apparently I must have deleted the note “since the posts are up now,” and so if my Mastodon instance were to go down, the whole thing would be gone.

Look, I was in a flare. That’s my excuse. I was ill and brain wasn’t on.

Anyway, fortunately for me, my Mastodon instance has not gone down, and my instance also doesn’t purge old posts, so I am able to back it up now. Thus, I am mirroring here on my blog for anyone who may be interested in this deep dive into 1970s SFF fandom lore!

(Remember this was a social media thread, so that’s why it’s written the way it is. I’ll cut out the hashtags and post numbers, though.)

---

Recently I listened to the “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” podcast episodes from 2018 about The Eye of Argon. For the uninitiated, EoA is a short fantasy novella in the vein of Conan the Barbarian that was published in the Ozark Science Fiction Association zine, OSFAN, in 1970. The novella is hilariously bad, and thus developed cult status in the SFF community. This is all pretty well documented online. What I want to talk about is its less-documented author, Jim Theis.

For many years, the broader SFF community was relatively convinced that Jim Theis, the credited author of EoA, didn’t exist at all. They made up stories about how he must have actually been satirical, and one dominant theory was that students at a Clarion workshop wrote it as an experiment in deliberately bad fiction. But after decades of theorizing and speculation, Jim Theis’ identity was ultimately discovered: Jim Theis had been a 16-year-old kid.

You will often hear repeated on the internet that “little is known” about Jim Theis. Granted, there’s not a lot online. He passed away before the days of social media, for one thing; for another, none of his family seems to be social media users—his wife appears to still be alive, as are his two sons, but none of them have presences on any social media platform that I could find. But if you dig, you can find enough, and what is available reveals hints of Jim’s character.

(Before getting in too deep, a note on the quotations in this thread: I corrected most of the many, MANY typos in OSFAN for legibility, particularly for people who use screen readers. If I reproduced them as written, screen readers wouldn’t be able to handle it. Attached screenshots show the original versions. All archives of the zine found here.)

First, the facts: James Francis Theis was born in St. Louis County, Missouri, on August 9, 1953 to Lillian Kroupa Theis and Norbert Theis. His middle name, Francis, likely was for his paternal grandfather, Frank Joseph Kroupa, who was born in 1881 in what is now the Czech Republic. Jim was an only child.

By the time he was 16 and a junior at Lindbergh High School, Jim was heavily involved in fandom, and was a member of both the Ozark Science Fiction Association (OSFA) and the Comic Fandom Club, later known as the Graphic Fantasy Collectors of St. Louis (GraFandom or GraFan). The Eye of Argon was published in the August 1970 issue of OSFAN, just a couple weeks after Jim’s 17th birthday. However, this was not Jim’s first appearance in the zine, nor would it be his last.

Perusing the available issues of OSFAN at the FANAC Fan History Project reveals that by March 1970, Jim was an active and established member of OSFA. He is mentioned as being in attendance not only at the club’s meetings, but at all of their quite-frequent parties. He already has a nickname in the club: the Nomad. (When Jim writes this himself, he capitalizes it as NOMAD, which leads me to believe this was a Star Trek reference.)

The majority of the issues of the zine are just recaps of the club’s antics, most of which involve everyone piling into Doc Clark’s broken-down Chevy, dubbed Loki, and attempting to drive to a party, a picnic, or a concert, usually with Loki breaking down along the way. At one point, Jim’s dad, Norbert, is credited as rescuing Loki with a battery jump.

---

Once the group gets wherever they’re going, wild antics tend to ensue, usually in the form of strip poker or drinking games. The writers are quick to note that Jim does not participate, owing to his age, but this seems to be contradicted by a letter printed in the April 1971 issue wherein Al Bakker writes from college to ask about his old drinking buddy Jim, and recounts some of Jim’s hijinks after “imbibing the godly nectars.” Sober or not, Jim seems to have been the life of the party.

The November 1970 issue contains possibly my favorite Jim anecdote: an entire article chronicling the print party for the previous issue, which was held at Sue Watson’s house, aka the Slan Shack. (Slan being slang of the time for a SF fan.) The entire purpose of the article? Documenting that “JIM THEIS VOLUNTARILY, REPEAT, VOLUNTARILY WORKED!” (As the article states, “If you feel like dieing [sic] of shock, how do you think I feel?”)

As you read through the available archives of the OSFAN zine, you start to get a sense about who these people were. They were a boisterous, goofy, outgoing group of nerds, many of them teens, who had a ton of in-jokes. In fact, the majority of the issues were just in-jokes. Every issue had a bit of news about upcoming cons worldwide, some reviews, and then recaps of their own meetings and parties. Every one of those articles was dripping in in-jokes.

Which brings us to The Eye of Argon, published in OSFAN 10. This was a departure for the zine—up to this point, it had published some poetry, but otherwise it was firmly a news zine, not a fiction one. The inclusion of EoA made the August 1970 issue at least three times longer than the typical OSFA zine. It was the first fiction piece they published, but it was a piece written by someone who was well-known within the club.

The Eye of Argon itself is an obvious ripoff of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories from the 1930s. It has been lampooned for decades as being “the worst fiction ever written.” But there are two things that I think people are missing: First of all, a 16-year-old wrote it. Maybe back 30 years ago, it might have seemed unique. But we have the internet now. We have Fanfiction.net now.

The fact of the matter is, we all start out writing crap. That’s how we learn. I know what my writing was like when I was 16. And I know why my writing was the way it was, too—I was parroting what I was reading and watching. And you can see that in Jim’s writing. Because it’s definitely a cross between parroting Howard… and parroting what his friends were writing in OSFAN.

Which brings me to point number 2: He wasn’t the only one in the OSFA writing this way. If you read through the other articles in the zine, you see that everyone’s using goofy purple prose to talk about anything and everything. Part of the reason it’s so hard to parse the in-jokes is BECAUSE everything is dripping in the goofy prose. It took three instances of Loki being mentioned before I realized it was a car and not an animal. The secretary of the club is the Keeper of the Flame. The editor is Ye Ed. There’s an imaginary leprechaun in attendance at every gathering.

In addition to this, nobody ever actually believed EoA was any good—including Jim himself. I don’t know how the other members of OSFA found out he’d written it, whether he mentioned it to them offhand or if they even helped him in the writing of it. But they all, from the beginning, loved it not because it was good, but because it was fun.

So, what about the Jay T. Rikosh Award? One of the curious facts learned by the rediscovery of the lost final page of the story in 2005 (an adventure I’m not getting into here—see sources at the end of the thread for the full story) was that Jim was the winner of this award. Many, including the 372 Pages hosts, assumed that this was supposed to be some kind of prize for excellent writing. It’s… uh… not quite.

---

Jay T. Rikosh is a mysterious figure in the OFSA. Per Roger MacBride Allen in The Scholar’s Ebook Edition of The Eye of Argon (which I totally bought last night to research this rant), no one by the last name of Rikosh has ever existed in the United States. Allen speculated that Rikosh might have been an imaginary person, and he even theorized it might have been Jim Theis himself.

Jay T. Rikosh is absolutely a made-up name—and Rikosh, as one of the OSFAN editors, is listed with a fake address, the only member of the editorial board to do so. But he’s not Jim Theis. In the August 1970 issue, there is an article that explains that Rikosh goes by a pseudonym in fandom and does not want his IRL name or address revealed. It’s written in a joking way, but I suspect he probably was concerned about career implications in a time when fandom was considered odd at best.

So what is the Jay T. Rikosh Award? It was a special award, conceived upon the publication of EoA, to be awarded to club members “For action and manner above and beyond the call of reason and fuggheadedness.” Ron Whittington, himself a later recipient of the award, wrote in the Sep. 1970 issue, “I must admit that Theis’ Eye of Argon novelette gave me a few minutes of great fun the other night. He is well deserving of this month’s JAY T. RIKOSH award and has my vote for this trophy!”

The Rikosh Award was a popularity contest in the club. Per the OSFAN December 1970 issue: “Of the local winners thus far… the one thing they have in common is that which earned the award for them. They are popular members of the club that did, created, or acted in a dunderheaded fashion. The award is never given to someone that is disliked or unpopular.” And Jim was the inaugural winner precisely because of all the lulz that EoA brought.

In an OSFAN interview with Jim in the November 1970 issue, Giuseppe Caporale comments that he personally is proud of Jim for being such a good sport about all the teasing everyone gave him over the story.

CAPORALE: I think you should be given a pat on the back for such good sportsmanship. You showed real character.

THEIS: I didn’t know that. I mean, it was easier than showing bad character and inviting trouble.

Throughout the pages of the zine, Jim is absolutely roasted for the story, and yet everyone also is completely delighted by it. In other words, the reaction of the entire SFF community over the decades to come, where parties were made of trying to read it without laughing… this was going on from the very beginning. This is why OSFAN published it in the first place. And Jim knew about this. He was in on the joke.

And the fact that he was in on the joke from the beginning makes some of the caricatures that the internet has tried to paint of him over the ensuing decades ring especially untrue. In particular, the portrayal of him as bitter in the unaired 1984 Hour 25 radio show. But I’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s try to fill in what happened between EoA’s publication and when it became a cultural phenomenon.

In 1971, Jim graduated from Lindbergh High School. After that, he went to college and majored in journalism. I’m not sure where he went to school, but I’m assuming he stayed in the St. Louis area, in part because he was still in St. Louis as an adult, and in part because he was still a member of GraFan as of 1973, when he would have been a sophomore in college. Supposedly, a second Grignr story was published in that club’s zine in that year, but there are no archives of that zine.

In 1972, the OSFA folded, but that same year the St. Louis Science Fiction Society was founded, and many members of the OFSA migrated to that group—including, seemingly, Jim Theis. SLSFS began hosting Archon in 1977, a convention which continues to this day, and Jim was a regular attendee of the event annually.

Meanwhile, EoA was taking on a life of its own. Sometime in the 1970s (probably not long after its publication), scifi author Thomas N. Scortia sent his copy of OSFAN 10 to horror author Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. As previously alluded to, by the time Yarbo received her copy, the last page of the zine was missing, which meant the last page of the story was missing as well.

Yarbo shared EoA with friends of hers from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) at a party, which led to a Locus reviewer who was at the party asking for a copy of it, which led to it being passed around the SFF fandom scene. Soon, EoA was being read aloud at SFF conventions across the country as a sort of party game.

From the 1980s onward, people started searching for Jim Theis, or so the story goes online. But in the hindsight of all the evidence, it soon starts to become apparent that maybe the reason Jim Theis went “undiscovered” for so long is because nobody wanted to hear the “boring” version of the story: That Jim Theis wasn’t an elaborate hoax, but just an ordinary kid from St. Louis.

In 2004, and updated in 2006, Lee Weinstein published a comprehensive article summarizing the search for Jim, which is reprinted in the Scholar’s Ebook Edition. Throughout Weinstein’s narrative, a familiar thread keeps popping up: People “finding” Jim and nobody believing them. For example, someone runs into a woman at a con who says she turned the crank on the mimeograph machine for the issue of OSFAN that included EoA. (Based on the November 1970 issue of OSFAN, this was probably Marsha Allen.) She mentioned that Jim was still active in fandom in St. Louis, but her account was quickly dismissed as hearsay.

The hosts of Hour 25, a Los Angeles-based SFF-related radio talk show, also managed to track him down with seemingly little problem. In 1984, they recorded a phone interview with Jim. This episode never aired, but it still exists, and some on the internet have heard it. To the extent that anyone believed in the existence of this interview, people only seemed interested in using it to portray Jim as someone with sour grapes.

There’s a circular reference on Wikipedia that uses David Langford’s website as a source, but in the linked article, Langford uses Wikipedia as his source. This circular reference states, “Theis is interviewed on the Californian radio talk show Hour 25, which has featured regular readings of The Eye of Argon. He declares himself unhappy that his youthful folly continues to be mocked, and says he’ll never write anything again.”

The true source of info about this interview is Susan Stepney, who posted her chronicle of learning about the interview and listening to it herself on her website. She was alerted to the existence of the interview by an emailer whose name is redacted. The emailer knew the interview was genuine because they had knowledge of the show, and they appear to be the source of the sour grapes quotation. However, they do not indicate that they’ve heard the interview, only that they know it exists. The version Stepney relays after personally listening to the interview is a lot more neutral; not that he “will never write again,” but simply that he’s not writing fiction anymore, since he’s now a journalist. She also notes that, as of 1984, he was still involved in fandom, and based on her recounting, he generally seemed pretty amiable about the situation, even offering to help find the missing last page.

Something that comes up again and again in Weinstein’s recounting of the search for Theis is the number of times people would come out of the woodwork outright saying they knew Jim and that he was still in fandom, but routinely be dismissed. Really, it wasn’t until Weinstein actually sat down to look for him—without preconceived notions about who he might really be—that anyone really seemed invested in actually finding the real Jim Theis.

Unfortunately, when Weinstein finally “found” Jim, it was too late. Jim Theis died on March 26, 2002, apparently of heart disease. (His family requested donations to the American Heart Association in his obituary, below.) His death was announced at the 2002 Archon. A friend of Weinstein happened to be in attendance, and he let him know that the subject of his research had passed.

His obituary names Jim as a beloved husband, father, son, son-in-law, brother-in-law and cousin. But, importantly, it also names him as a “friend of many”. Anecdotes in Weinstein’s article indicate that he attended Archon annually from its inception, and he even participated in the joking readings of EoA that had swept the SFF scene over the decades. Jim had been a popular member of fandom in his teens, and he remained that throughout his life.

What strikes me the most is that the same people who say “little is known” about Jim Theis are the people who spent 30 years denying his existence in the first place. They built up a cult around his character, theorizing who he could be, even imagining that he was a satirical non-existant person created by a highly “establishment” writing workshop. More importantly, they dismissed the people who appeared over the years who said they knew Jim personally.

They didn’t want Jim to be an ordinary kid from the Ozarks. They especially didn’t want Jim to be a popular, well-liked, normal guy, one who remained active in fandom throughout his life. Lee Weinstein marvels in his essay at how Jim’s identity could have gone unrealized for 30 years when he was traveling in the same circles as the people looking for him. The answer is simple—they weren’t looking for the real Jim.

I will leave you with a quote from Jim about his thoughts on OSFA, from the interview with Giuseppe Caporale (in OSFAN 13): “Mostly, [members of OSFA] want to enjoy being with people of the same tastes: Science Fiction. They don’t have to convince each other they are SF fans; they belong to the club because it fills their need to belong.” I think Jim Theis really did belong.

There’s more detail to the story that other people have expounded on previously, and I don’t want to retread old ground, if only because this thread is already long enough.

You can glean most of it from the pages on David Langford’s website: https://ansible.uk/misc/eyeargon-intro.html

If you want a deep dive, you can’t go wrong with the Scholar’s Edition: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/48288

And, of course, the OSFAN archives: https://fanac.org/fanzines/OSFAn/index.html

Bonus: Much remark has been made of the fact that until 2005, every available copy of OSFAN 10 was missing the last page or even the last two pages. Allen comments that the stapling job of OFSAN was clearly subpar; unbeknownst to Allen (since the other issues of OSFAN were unavailable at the time of his writing), per the Dec. 1970 issue, JIM WAS THE ONE WHO STAPLED THE EOA ISSUE. The missing page was his own doing.

---

So there’s the thread, preserved for posterity. One thing I am frustrated with myself about in terms of not backing this up sooner is that because of various quirks of federation, the replies on Mastodon are not loading for me anymore. There were some replies back when I posted this that offered more context about the fandom’s search for Jim in the 80s and 90s, from people who were there at the time, and I can’t remember for the life of me what they said. I can see there are replies to the thread, but can no longer view them. So if you’re someone who commented on this thread way back when I first posted it on Mastodon, and you come across this blog post, please weigh in in the comments! I know there was some extra info out there, I just can’t remember what it was.

---

Anyway, this is definitely something different, but I hope you all enjoyed it! I loved learning about Jim and his friends through the OSFAN archives and I hope that they will be remembered.