00:02:33.140One of the themes of this episode is going to be
00:02:35.140Part of why the rhyming between right-wing science fiction fandom and right-wing politicization is so strong is that they both happen online, right?
00:02:45.400Sci-fi fans, whatever else is true for them, found the internet early and took to it with relish.
00:02:50.320Meaning a lot of this stuff, I was shocked by how much of this stuff is just very well documented on the Wayback Machine.
00:02:57.120Which means that in this case, it's not that there were things that I couldn't track down.
00:03:01.440It's that I couldn't track down everything that there is.
00:03:03.420So if there are distortions here, very likely there'll be distortion of omission.
00:03:08.360The fact that I sort of wasn't able to recreate all this and put it in a document that made you not want to murder me.
00:03:16.820So yeah, it's a right-wing fandom episode.
00:03:19.520Not just how this came to be, but sort of the modes of fandom that right-wing culture war stuff draws on or sometimes camouflages as.
00:03:28.240And I think we all sort of know what we mean by right-wing fandom, right?
00:03:31.820People who get upset about, you know, black elves or black stormtroopers, but there's something more than that, right?
00:03:38.840There's some stuff that's just like, and we talked about this with Matt Bernstein about My Leonopolis, there's some of that stuff that's just ginned up by, you know, the likes of Breitbart.com in order to get some clicks and sort of piggyback of people's fan-ish reactions to casting announcements or whatever.
00:03:55.640But there is something behind that too, right? There's a particular kind of fealty that some fans have, or maybe that all fans have, a particular kind of possessiveness, right? Like, I like this object that I'm a fan of more than you do, and if you get it wrong, I'll correct you, and I'll be a little snippy about it, and maybe I'll be a complete asshole about it, right?
00:04:14.540And it's about a particular kind of community that's being invoked when someone says, like, this book was completely mangled in the adaptation, right?0.94
00:04:24.320Or when someone says, there shouldn't be black elves in this.
00:04:28.920There's a little bit of, like, territoriality, right?0.87
00:04:31.640It's like, this belongs to me more than it belongs to, you know, any studio or like IP holder and way more than it belongs to the newer, maybe like darker skinned or more female fans.0.90
00:04:48.700Absolutely. And of course, it's not an accident that this kind of territoriality happens in a context where we see each other reacting to media a lot more than we used to.
00:05:00.000Like, to be a Star Wars fan in 1980 meant you had a very private relationship with that particular IP.
00:05:05.880And you might go to, like, a local comic book or game store and understand how other people reacted to it or related to it.
00:05:12.400But today, you're forced to basically come face-to-face with the fact that many other people are reacting to the same cultural touchstones that you are and are reacting to them differently, right?
00:05:22.500Are finding something else to get excited about, find something else to be invested in, to stand, etc., etc.
00:05:28.540So in talking about this kind of fandom, I want to avoid two things.
00:05:32.000I want to avoid a no-true Scotsman thing where we say that right-wing fandom is insincere, right?
00:05:39.040Matt and you, I think, both made that point in our Milo episode that Milo didn't give a shit about gaming.0.98
00:05:44.580And I think he pointed out all the horrible things he'd said about gamers, right?0.99
00:05:48.240Like, it's like, these losers, and look what they're taking away from you.0.97
00:05:51.360And you're like, you can't—there is that, right?0.92
00:05:53.760Where people sort of try to gin up these kinds of controversies, either having participated in something as children or never having had any contact with it.
00:06:03.220But it's just like, well, it jukes the right people and that's okay.
00:06:06.800I also think that a lot of kind of right-wing, what's often called anti-fandom, I'll talk a little bit more about that later, sort of like hate-watching.
00:06:14.320It's knowledgeable about the properties, but it's ultimately bad as criticism.
00:06:19.220I don't know if you've ever seen this guy on YouTube, The Critical Drinker, who does these, like, anti-woke film reviews.
00:06:28.780And my big beef with him is, like, his analysis of certain TV shows' plots and movie plots, it's not even always wrong.
00:06:38.120But this is a guy whose analysis, like, if that were a paper that was submitted to me in a class, I would give a C-2 because it's all plot.
00:06:47.800This is a guy who has a movie channel, a TV channel, that never discusses a shot, that never discusses visual storytelling, that's always like, oh, this is a girl boss, and this is Space Jesus and stuff like that.
00:07:00.880And you're like, okay, that's one way to relate to a work of art.
00:07:04.880Adrian's like, give me a reactionary critique of the form.
00:07:08.420He's like, I want the anti-woke formal intervention.
00:07:14.460Yeah. And so like there is this kind of form of fandom that I feel like can be kind of reductive. Like if you're a film fan, but you can't talk about editing and you can't talk about cinematography, that's kind of a problem, honestly. Whatever. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum.
00:07:28.880But at the same time, I also don't want to say that, like, fandom is itself inherently conservative, right, or inherently reactionary or inherently possessive.
00:07:39.460And it has historically been a place where people who didn't feel themselves were presented in mainstream culture, especially in science fiction and in fantasy literature, sort of could find their niche.
00:07:50.860And, you know, as we always like to say on this pod, let their freak flag fly.
00:07:54.340And I don't want to harsh that for anyone.
00:07:56.500So I'm not going to say that fandom is necessarily conservative, is censorious, or is possessive.
00:08:01.980At the same time, as you were sort of alluding to, these impulses don't come from nowhere, right?
00:08:06.680Like there is something about, I like this more than you do, and I like it more correctly than you do, that can lend itself to that kind of instrumentalization.
00:08:13.560I think we also don't want to hide that.
00:08:15.260So we're talking about sort of reactionary aspects in fandom and about the way fandom has sometimes been yoked to reactionary rhetorics.
00:08:23.540At the same time, I do want to point out, because we just did the Milo episode, I do want to point out that there is a kind of weird Ouroboros thing going on here, right? Where the snake is eating its own tail. Because not only are there certain kinds of fandom that have become instrumental in how right-wing talking points get disseminated to, you know, outsiders, to normies or whatever, but, of course, modern conservatism itself has become more and more fannish, right?
00:08:48.780That's an interesting point. Yeah, there's a lot about, I mean, this is kind of starting to fall apart at this moment in history, but it's a lot about like worshipful cult-like loyalty to Donald Trump.
00:09:00.480And then sort of downstream, there have been a lot of investments in individual figures, be they people like Joe Rogan or people like RFK Jr. or, you know, people like Theo Vaughn, right?
00:09:15.220There are these like charismatic reactionaries around which large parts of the conservative movement sort of orbit.
00:09:22.220Exactly. And sometimes these fandoms are very distinct from sci-fi fandom, but not always.
00:09:27.140One example, we talked with Matt Bernstein about the Ghostbusters remake.
00:09:31.760A lot of people had a lot of opinions about Ghostbusters very suddenly when the Leslie Jones version came out.
00:09:37.080Well, probably some people were genuine Ghostbusters fans from the 80s who had somehow not rewatched it since then or whatever.
00:09:44.560Because I think if you rewatch it, your fandom will diminish a little bit.
00:09:48.200Don't call me, don't email me, don't at me.
00:09:50.900It's going to be worse than when I said that Dolly Parton was a mid-singer.
00:09:54.100Like, we're going to get so many people.
00:10:30.680So there's really these kinds of interlocking forms of fandom, right?
00:10:33.860They activate fan energy, but also they inspire their own fandom.
00:10:38.220And I think, yeah, it's a very interesting kind of connection
00:10:40.940and it really creates this kind of perplexity.
00:10:43.820A few years after Gamergate, the fandom scholar Mel Stanfield asked whether we can, quote, understand reactionary politics by examining them through a lens of fandom, right?
00:10:54.160So Stanfield is saying, yeah, there is something fannish about the way reactionary politics works.
00:11:00.260But of course, reactionary politics also then likes channeling itself through fandom.
00:11:45.240Like, people my age like to make fun of their, like, white bloomer moms for basically existing in a social world made up of, like, Trump anti-fandom, right?
00:11:53.500It's like Evelyn Normilib saying, you know, the blood of the tyrant will water our gardens or whatever.
00:11:58.000And this is a very galvanizing feature.
00:12:02.140If you've ever been on, like, a mid-first date and then discover that you both fucking hate the same thing, it can really turn the evening around.
00:12:09.640Oh, yeah. Huge. Definitely recommend. Yeah. And this can be by engaging sort of with a fictive version of that phenomenon as a hate object, right? Like, I think you see a lot of this about the fixation on the social justice warrior. Like, that person doesn't really exist. It's kind of a caricature, but everyone can sort of bask in the warmth. They can gather around the fireplace furnished by the social justice warrior and can be like, oh, we're all upsetting her so much right now with her blue hair and her Palestine pin and blah, blah, blah, right?
00:12:39.640It's easy to imagine people kind of finding common cause0.67
00:12:43.400or, yeah, rescuing a mid-first date over this caricature.0.98
00:12:47.380So a lot of it is people hating on shit they haven't read,0.98
00:12:50.760but it can also be quite obsessive.0.98
00:12:54.400Like Gray himself, I think he coined this in 2003,
00:12:56.860he was thinking of stuff like hate-watching and hate-reading, I believe,
00:12:59.840where people really spend an awful lot of time
00:13:56.900So as our examples, I think with Leslie Jones and Amber Heard and all that stuff are already making clear,
00:14:04.360gender might have something to do with these dynamics, right?
00:14:08.240But, like, does this also have something to do with childhood?
00:14:11.160Because I'm noticing that a lot of these franchises that we're banding about, Ghostbusters, Aquaman, I think eventually we're going to get to, like, Star Wars, Star Trek, that have been the objects of this kind of thing.
00:14:22.580Like, those are often things people get into when they're kids.
00:14:26.120They tend to be, like, children's entertainment to start with that then, like, retain this emotional investment into adolescence and adulthood.
00:14:33.840Yeah, I think that's true for certain IPs.
00:14:36.240It's definitely also true for comic book fandom.
00:14:38.240But I think that in science fiction fandom, I think that people discover this stuff when they're 13, 14, or they don't really fall in love with it at all.
00:14:48.160So nostalgia is definitely a part of this.
00:14:50.360At the same time, one of the things that I sort of didn't realize until I really researched the history of fandom is that for much of the history we're going to be discussing in this episode, I think fandom was a little bit older.
00:15:02.000And I think their Star Wars is kind of different and comic books are kind of different.
00:15:07.000And part of that has to do with the upfront cost of fandom.
00:15:10.520We both sort of came up in a world of fandom where all that we needed was a modem.
00:15:16.000You know, the early fans had to rely on the mail.
00:15:19.640They had to, like, drive two and a half hours to go to their fan convention.0.83
00:15:23.240Oh, God, I'm imagining, like, women in the olden times writing their, like, fan fiction smut about, I don't know, what is the big one, like, Hermione and Draco, and then, like, bringing it by the Pony Express.0.93
00:15:45.500And I do think that a lot of this did sort of coincide with the mail service and the interstate highway system, basically, that made it easier to go to, like, a convention in Milwaukee or whatever.
00:15:55.940But as a 14-year-old, your parents aren't necessarily going to let you out of the house, right?
00:15:59.760Like, so this was a, I think fan infrastructure, I don't think we have demographic data on this, but just the day-to-day practice of it required a certain disposable income and required a certain degree of mobility and probably it wouldn't hurt to have a driver's license, you know.
00:16:15.800So I think the childishness of this, it's going to enter into the story, but I think it's going to enter into the story with the internet, really.
00:16:22.080Okay, so for a long time in the period we're discussing, fandom communities, like fandom in public, was really the purview of adults, and then it became something where adults and children are participating in simultaneously.
00:16:37.980Yeah, so one of the important things to note here is, I think it's true, I hope every listener can check this for themselves, but I would say that many fandoms, even historically, have been dominated by women.
00:16:48.540And yet, when I think I say the word fan, let alone science fiction fan, probably most of us are going to picture a white dude, right?
00:16:57.460Like the comic book guy from The Simpsons, basically.0.62
00:17:11.980And his disdain usually, right, to refer back to your age point, is directed at Milhouse and Barth.
00:17:17.300Like, these kids are not appreciating comic books quite the same way he is.
00:17:21.900And, like, I think that's kind of the central joke of this figure, that really probably he should get out of this space and let the kids do it.
00:17:28.940But that instead he's like, you don't appreciate, you know, radioactive man quite the way that I do.
00:17:34.940So we'll be drawing a lot on fan studies in this episode.
00:17:38.020But in talking about reactionary fandom, I do want to move away from this idea that, like, fan studies for a long time came from people who were in the fandom themselves and often were pretty positive towards it.
00:17:50.380And I think we can't say that fandom is beautiful.
00:17:52.940Like, this is about bad fans, let's be clear.
00:17:55.020This is about a bad way of relating, I think, to media.
00:17:58.600At the same time, we're also not going to say that fandom is necessarily ugly or somehow terrible.
00:18:04.160Well, and part of why I think we have to be careful not to say that is because, of course, fandom both has often come under attack, right?
00:18:11.940As like a bad way to spend your time, as a bad way to relate to literature, right?
00:18:15.660Like a lot of authors dislike their fans.
00:18:17.600A lot of science fiction writers are very ambivalent about sci-fi fandom.0.99
00:18:21.820Like for every good interaction, they have one that is like, this fucking sucked.0.54
00:18:24.720And, of course, in a weird further twist, sci-fi fans have often understood themselves to be victims of the kind of people who would talk about them, such as ourselves.0.98
00:18:35.860There was this slogan in the 1940s called, fans are slans.
00:18:52.180You're like, it's right behind me in my bookshelf.
00:18:54.720It is by a guy named A.E. Van Voigt, for those of you wanting to purchase it from Amazon, which is about highly evolved superhumans who are on account of being smarter and mind-readier than the mundane, you know, the muggles, hunted by the totalitarian government of future Earth.0.94
00:19:15.460Ah, so a besieged but superior minority.0.99
00:22:34.180Like make people work a little bit.0.99
00:22:35.560But anyway, so Vox Dave was this fixture in the sci-fi community and would post sort of this typical edgelord shit, you know, women can't think, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, on various blogs and science fiction discussion groups throughout the early 2000s.0.84
00:22:51.040And it gets to the point that some science fiction writers are like, hey, this guy sits on awards juries.0.99
00:22:56.780Like, does it seem weird that he's just like saying misogynistic and racist shit out there?0.99
00:24:33.760Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm sure it's great.
00:24:35.720But at the same time, again, like, I read a fair amount of science fiction, but I will reach for something if it says, like, Hugo or Nebula, I would say.
00:24:42.100Otherwise, I'm like, I'm happy for you with this award, but it's not going to, my buying decision is not being influenced right now.
00:24:48.540So Correa and Day sort of kick off this whole round of discourse about the Hugos and in particular the nomination process, which sort of draws on fans to actually nominate these books, but especially on other writers, right?
00:25:05.080There are some years where some writers really get a ton of nominations.
00:25:08.980There's a little bit of herding going on, clearly.1.00
00:25:11.320But it quickly devolves into like racist and sexist shit, right?0.99
00:25:14.500Like, they seem to be only upset with someone getting more than one nomination if they use they-them pronouns or if they're non-binary or if they're a woman or, you know.1.00
00:25:25.120It's got to be affirmative action or woke unfairness unless the winner is always a white guy.
00:25:34.860So like the success of these non-white, non-male, non-straight, whatever people becomes almost a conspiracy against their genre or it becomes evidence that there's like a sign of groupthink.0.85
00:25:50.560But when they get it, then everything's fine.
00:25:53.120It's like how Trump is like the only elections that are rigged are the ones that I don't win.
00:25:57.220You know, it's like the mechanisms of unfairness magically disappear whenever something I like gets a sort of recognition.
00:26:08.660And then to make matters worse, Vox Dei then gets kicked out of the FWA because of some super racist comments about a member, namely N.K. Jemisin.
00:26:18.460Wonderful writer, a much better writer.
00:26:21.000And so then it becomes like, oh, well, are we excluding too much of fandom, right?
00:26:25.140And so for a while, it's the paradox you just pointed to, right?
00:26:28.180Like, right-wing authors feel like, you know, SJW authors are getting nominated en masse by lefty internet dwellers.
00:26:35.060In one case, with the writer Saladin Ahmed, also a very good writer,
00:26:38.600they sort of allege that it's just because he has a non-European name that people, like, were so woke that they were like, oh, Saladin Ahmed, I gotta vote for this guy.
00:26:46.500In fairness, that name sounds hard as hell.
00:28:07.660There are these just, like, right-wing fandom forums that you can use to organize a mass voting campaign.
00:28:14.120And this sort of gets the argument going in earnest, right?
00:28:18.100On the one hand, there are science fiction writers and fans who are getting very concerned.
00:28:22.600It's like, well, is this the end of the Hugos, right?
00:28:24.900If, like, this is all capable of being manipulated, does that mean we can trust Hugo nominee or Hugo winner, blah, blah, blah, right?
00:28:33.340On the other hand, there's this argument from the right that says, like, well, this is necessary to sort of unskew the polls or unskew our fandom.
00:28:41.240Publisher Tony Weiskopf, who we'll get back to in a bit, says, for instance, that, quote,
00:28:46.840award lists only maintain their legitimacy so long as they, in fact, accurately reflect the field.
00:28:52.520So if a large part of the field feels that its interests are not being served, and they do, the award itself is compromised.
00:30:14.540Yeah, so this is right before Milo comes on at Breitbart, but Breitbart is really becoming what it was in the 2016 election cycle.
00:30:23.600So they're very invested in this kind of culture war stuff.
00:30:25.860Exactly. This is when the sort of authoritarian left is oppressing us and telling us what to think, and we bravely are saying racist shit to stick it to them, was like at its apogee, I would say.0.99
00:30:39.720The whole saga, which starts off in 2013 and continues more or less until 2018, is too long and convoluted to recount, but just some highlights.0.96
00:30:49.760So a lot of sci-fi fans worry that basically the Hugos might die from this if a bunch of right-wing slop gets nominated.0.89
00:30:56.720Some authors, including some political conservatives, remove their work from consideration, saying, like, I don't want to be nominated like this.1.00
00:31:03.380Like, if you like my book, that's great, but I'm not going to be there just to piss off, you know, some queer people.0.99
00:31:09.800One person who does not withdraw is Chuck Tingle. Do you know Chuck Tingle?1.00
00:31:33.440Yes, and Chuck Tingle reflects on his Hugo Award nomination with what is perhaps the only true work of art to come out of the entire kerfuffle.
00:32:39.020is exactly how you sneak your way into this group.
00:32:42.680Yeah, it's using, like, the ideals and professed principles
00:32:45.820of, like, nice liberals to undermine the conditions
00:32:49.260of those nice liberals' existence, right?
00:32:52.260Yeah, and we should say we have some numbers on this, right?
00:32:54.600Like, the sad puppies and the rabbit puppies
00:32:56.800have people that they nominate for, you know,
00:32:59.920running, actually, the Science Fiction Writers of America,
00:33:02.760and they get crushed, like, 95% to 5%.
00:33:06.520These people are a tiny minority, but they're trying to marshal this spirit of inclusivity against the broader fan base.
00:33:15.540So if I'm right, the sad puppies sort of affair seems like one of these recent turning points over the past couple decades of moments when fandom gets hijacked for or like inverted into right wing ends.
00:33:32.440But does this have a longer history before that?
00:33:34.760It does, yeah. And I mean, I think it's worth delving into the history of science fiction fandom in general, because it's both interesting and it has these kinds of polarities and or tensions kind of from the beginning. Do you know where science fiction fandom originated?
00:33:53.440I mean, it's totally fine that you don't. I would have been kind of, I would have been like, oh no, if you did.
00:33:57.880I mean, you would have to, like, define the genre and the origins of the genre, which I would think of as, like, I don't know, Jules Verne, maybe even, or, like, older than that.
00:34:06.160But, like, then you'd have to find those people's original, like, gatherings together out of their love for the material.
00:34:16.080Yeah, it's when Jules Verne was told by someone that, like, Voyage to the Center of the Earth was not as good as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
00:35:07.460And I'm sure it was partly a marketing gimmick, right?
00:35:10.180Like it means like the poor guy doesn't have to answer every letter, but the excitement
00:35:15.240about the product and about the works remains out there, right?
00:35:18.980So it's a pretty genius move, but it was very unusual.
00:35:21.880Which means that from the very beginning, the fandom communicates amongst itself.
00:35:25.840That is sort of what makes science fiction fandom what it is.
00:35:28.820It's not a fandom that sort of comes top down from the corporation, even though the corporation may do things to encourage its growth.
00:35:37.120But in the end, what defines it sort of in the 1930s, when he starts these fan groups, the idea is to network people who love your output, your publications amongst themselves so that they can sort of take it from there.
00:35:49.440And the publisher does little more than facilitate these people finding each other.
00:35:53.080Wait, this is a side note, but one of the reasons I fucking really hate J.K. Rowling, aside from her being like a bigot, etc., is that she doesn't respect this dynamic.0.91
00:36:03.140She's always trying to intervene in the organic communities that formed up around her work and among fans and be like, no, no, no, no, no, Dumbledore was gay.
00:36:13.040I said so. And like these extra canonical interventions that carried her authorial authority, but also sort of like undercut this very dynamic that's being fostered by Hugo Gernsback in this original instance, right? It's like, oh, no, no, no. Like, they do that. The readers do that. The fans do that. The author, the publisher, they just kind of step back and let it happen.
00:36:38.920Yeah, I mean, there'll be exceptions to that.
00:36:41.080Like, ever since there have been science fiction fans, there have been science fiction authors who get mad at them and do then write to them, you're wrong.
00:36:47.620Like, unfortunately, J.K. Rowling is the latest in a long line of these.
00:36:52.100The idea that what makes fandom special is precisely independent of the people actually producing the work is very, very central to this, right?
00:37:01.740These fans don't just write to each other sort of like one-off letters, but create newsletters, right?
00:37:36.240I mean, it also strikes me as the science fiction fandom has some things in common with the World's Fair, like emerging technologies, fantasies and hopes for the future, fears about the future.
00:37:49.540And then also like bringing together people of different backgrounds, cultures, classes, regions around that project of like imagining a different kind of world.
00:38:00.540Exactly. That's right. Like fandom was primarily literary pursuit, right?
00:38:04.740Like people loved literature, but yeah, they saw themselves in dialogue with actual technological progress, which already raises the question, well, what about social progress to go along with that technological progress?
00:38:16.340And that's already where we get first schisms within fandom, right?
00:38:20.700There are fans, it's the 1930s, right?
00:38:23.560There are fans who are like, well, and when we're all on a spaceship, obviously we'll be all communists.
00:38:27.880And then there are others who are like, wait, what?
00:38:29.200Others are like, no, the spaceship will be racially segregated.
00:38:33.840So, like, politics sort of starts trickling in.
00:38:37.000And from the very beginning, there are lots of purges and factional disputes within fandom and fan groups.
00:38:43.860Sometimes that's about the business of writing and publishing science fiction, but it's also often about politics.
00:38:49.820What kind of factional disputes are we talking—I mean, like, I just did an episode with Friends of the Pod, Matt Bernstein and Kat Tenbarge, on Matt's podcast, A Bit Fruity, about the COVID-conscious lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts.0.79
00:39:05.480And one of the points that Kat made there was just, like, every single subculture is internally messy.0.87
00:39:13.000She was like, there's no small group of people who are all interested in the same thing, who are not going to have an impossibly petty power struggle around something.
00:39:22.500And that made me want to have low-stakes gossip from other people's subcultures to, like, enjoy.
00:39:29.760Is there anything, like, particularly good from sci-fi from this era?
00:39:32.740I think that Gernsback actually expelled some people from the science fiction league.
00:39:40.380That purge appears to have been because people felt that Gernsback owed them royalties and kept disrupting meetings of these fan groups to be like, where's our fucking money, man?
00:45:52.780I don't think they have that data at all.
00:45:54.340But it's an interesting chart to look at, and I can put it in the show notes, because one of the features of reactionary attacks against the civil rights movement is all about institutions that start having quantitatively more people in them, think universities, and then they diversify a tiny bit, and it either occasions this reactionary response or at least gives the reactionary response something to point to, right?
00:46:22.280And the idea of, like, oh, all these newbies, right, compared to us old-timers, like, very quickly sort of takes on a demographic edge on top of just, like, being a statement of fact.
00:46:33.500Like, I was here in 1961 and you weren't.
00:46:35.940It's like, oh, now all these new people, all these newcomers are here, right?
00:47:34.160But, like, I was very excited when I spotted my favorite YouTube game reviewer at Gen Con once.
00:47:39.820And, like, the internet makes it possible to behave fanishly around just about anything.
00:47:44.800And it makes it possible to watch other people band together over a particular work or canon in ways that look very different from the way other groups excited about the same work might behave.
00:47:58.100And of course, it also brings in just a lot more people.
00:48:01.100And it therefore hypercharges the feeling that now the wrong people are sort of taking hold of fandom.
00:48:06.500And I should say that this probably pertains above all, like this is true for many fandoms, I would guess.
00:48:11.360I didn't check on all of them, but science fiction fandom is extremely cutting edge in tech.
00:48:18.940And it's networked to an unusual degree, and it loves new information technologies, as one should when the future and its technologies are one's passion, right?
00:48:30.180Just this week, I saw a thread on Blue Sky about a squabble about AI and ableism.
00:48:37.600But it appeared to be that an editor had used a fan organization subreddit to direct people to her private Discord server, where she then pushed people to cut ties with certain writers on Patreon.
00:49:01.060Angèle Christine, our colleague here at Stanford, sometimes talks about platform drama.1.00
00:49:05.480This is like classic fucking platform drama.0.95
00:49:08.200You know, here are screenshots from her private Discord server, right?0.98
00:49:13.780And it's like, wow, you know, it's just a fandom that is deeply networked, but also has a lot of private spaces or spaces of different degrees of publicity and privacy, if you will.
00:49:23.840And that sort of, I think, has hypercharged this kind of sense of like, oh, now they're letting everyone in and we need our spaces of retreat, places that we don't share with the riffraff, with the hoi polloi.
00:49:36.500At the same time, we should say, as science fiction fandom explodes, science fiction literature explodes, right?
00:49:43.880At the beginning, when Hugo Gernsback is encouraging the formation of these science fiction societies, like, the science fiction magazines, I think, sold, like, 5,000 to 10,000 copies.
00:49:56.500But, like, at some point, I think, in the 1980s, like, the New York Times bestseller list, you would find, like, several fantasy or sci-fi novels on there.
00:50:04.780There was a time when, like, the Dragonlance novels, right, D&D tie-ins, like, were New York Times bestsellers.
00:50:10.500There's a massive amount of interest, readers, and also money just flowing into this.
00:50:16.460And of course, as a publisher, you want to encourage all kinds of fandom.
00:50:20.300Like, you don't care as long as someone buys that book.
00:50:22.420Like, that's how I feel about my own book.
00:50:23.860I don't care if you use it for weird sex practices.
00:50:27.900If you want to hate-read Adrian's book, just make sure you buy a physical copy.
00:50:32.980Yeah, if anyone from Heritage is listening, I hear your big book room needs 4,000 of my books.
00:50:40.500But at the same time, a burgeoning fandom activates what we might call the narcissism of small differences.
00:50:46.660And in many cases, those differences then become politicized.
00:50:50.260I'll give you the example that Tor Books started in the 1980s by Tom Doherty, which is still probably one of the great science fiction imprints.
00:50:57.580You'll have seen it if you've ever been to a Barnes & Noble.
00:51:00.360When he started it, he brought Jim Bain along with him.
00:51:04.040Three years later, Bain had the opportunity to start his own imprint, Bain Books.
00:51:08.140and he wanted to distinguish it from Tor.
00:51:11.660And so he decided to specialize in hard science fiction,
00:51:15.180military science fiction, and stuff like that.
00:51:17.420I couldn't find contemporary accounts of this split.
00:51:21.460But the two publishers were friends and frequent collaborators
00:51:24.680and it seems Bain Book's focus was kind of more about filling a niche
00:51:28.600that Bain thought Tor was not filling than a political disagreement.
00:51:33.040But, of course, the difference then became politicized, right?
00:51:36.220If you think about it, hard science fiction.
00:51:38.140Military science fiction. Already, you're imagining a particular kind of science fiction fan, right?
00:51:44.780Who's super excited about space marines blasting aliens, as opposed to one who's interested in, like, thinking about, what about a planet where there is no gender, right?
00:51:54.500Like, you're picturing two different kinds of fans, right?
00:51:57.740And it became politicized, this difference, largely through the internet, right?
00:52:02.580Bain was a very early adopter of the internet.
00:52:05.100He ran an active BBS, which was then run by the author Jerry Purnell, who some people may have heard of, who was a huge right-winger.
00:52:13.520Still alive, I believe, and is a huge right-winger.
00:52:16.020Meaning Bain suddenly had under their wing this very active fan community that also happened to be super right-wing.
00:53:20.180But it's like, I don't think this group set out
00:53:22.060to like build this far right juggernaut.
00:53:24.800But it almost, like, by picking a particular topic for their own books to focus on, by encouraging like-minded individuals to hang out on the same BBS, they're like, oh, wait, did we just create Parler on our own website?
00:53:39.500I don't know how to read the move from Parler to, you know, Bains Bar or whatever it's called.
00:53:45.260On the one hand, you could say, like, oh, maybe that's where, like, these right-wing fans were hanging out in the first place.
00:53:50.440Or it could also be kind of parasitic.
00:53:52.960Like, a lot of times right-wingers sort of infiltrate these spaces to use, hey, you love this book and look what the SJWs are doing to it, to kind of especially get young people inducted into sort of right-wing thought, right?
00:54:06.280This was a lot of what the alt-right did.0.99
00:54:08.400Like, don't you hate this kind of woke bullshit, blah, blah, blah?1.00
00:54:11.480Well, check out my white supremacist blog or my QAnon shit, right?1.00
00:54:16.020So there is some of that, where people are sort of floating along with the stream in order to sort of siphon off folks for their other causes.0.99
00:54:24.120But there also very clearly was a community on Parler that just loved military science fiction and hated Democrats and now found themselves on the Baines Bar forum and were like, yeah, fuck it, let's let it rip here.
00:54:38.620But that gets us to a segment that I would like to call the reactionary canon.
00:54:42.640Because in the end, like, yes, there is something opportunistic about the way these people kind of fixate on certain properties.
00:54:50.360At the same time, I would not say that, like, every right-wing sci-fi fan or anti-woke movie reviewer or whatever is not genuine in their appreciation of the work state champion.
00:56:06.340It's also a great place to connect with like-minded individuals, to let us know how you felt about episodes and about the way we approach a particular topic.
00:56:14.740With something like science fiction fandom in particular, I'm guessing that some of you know a lot more than either Maura or myself.
00:56:20.660So, sound off in the comments. We'd love to hear from you as we plunge ahead on this journey into gendered fandom and how it can go wrong.
00:56:30.560See you next time on In Bed With The Right.
00:56:31.840in bed with the right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com
00:56:39.100our episodes are produced and edited by mark yoshizumi and katie lao our title music is by katie lao