Episode 159 -- Science Fiction Fandom, Part 1

Adrian Daub (0:00)

We're gonna start with some sad puppies.

Moira Donegan (0:02)

What do you mean, sad puppies?

Adrian Daub (0:04)

So, I'm gonna bore you with some of the insidiest baseball that this podcast has ever introduced.

Moira Donegan (0:11)

This is the freak shit. This is what our listeners come to In Bed With The Right for. The like, minute details of a subcultural fight from several decades ago, is that what we're getting at here?

Adrian Daub (0:21)

Yes.

Moira Donegan (0:22)

Hell fucking yeah, yes.

Adrian Daub (0:29)

Hello, I'm Adrian Daub.

Moira Donegan (0:30)

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Adrian Daub (0:32)

And whether we like it or not, we're In Bed With The Right.

Moira Donegan (0:37)

So, Adrian, today we're doing something kind of different. We're looking at a big phenomenon, but one that is pretty, I think, special and near and dear to you personally, and we're talking about sci-fi fandom.

Adrian Daub (0:51)

That's right. Something that I'm guessing is not near and that dear to your heart, if I can be so presumptuous.

Moira Donegan (0:58)

Well, I have not been this kind of freak, but this is something that you really grew up in. You were a science fiction and fantasy reader, and it's something that I think was really formative for you. And I've seen you over the past kind of years, I grapple with the changing political valence of this cultural signifier and the changing dynamics within these subcultures. And it feels like it's got to have been kind of a trip. So I'm really excited to hear about your thoughts on this.

Adrian Daub (1:29)

Yeah. So one of the things that you get into when you think about fandom is to get into sort of a no true Scotsman territory, which is to say, I consider myself a bit of a sci-fi nerd, a bit of a fantasy nerd. You know I have my weekly Dungeons and Dragons game and all that. That being said, I am still very much on the outer edges of what is possible, which is to say two things. One is, please don't be mad at me, dear listeners, if you know more about this than I do. This is me sort of pulling together things I've observed and interacted with and kind of reconstructed over the years. But there are parts of the story that are new to me that I honestly had no clue about and that I honestly hadn't cared that much about.

I think my path through Science Fiction has been maybe a little bit idiosyncratic compared to some other folks. The other thing that I want to do is thank one of my D&D players, in fact, Matt Hayward, who was kind enough to read through my 13 pages of notes and be like, yeah, that's not quite right, here's not how I remember this, and found some very good sources as well for some of this stuff. One of the themes of this episode is going to be part of why the rhyming between science fiction fandom and right-wing politicization is so strong is that they both happen online, right? Sci-fi fans, whatever else is true for them, found the Internet early and took to it with relish. Meaning a lot of this stuff, I was shocked by how much of this stuff is just very well documented on the way back machine, which means that in this case, it's not that there were things that I couldn't track down, is that I couldn't track down everything that there is. So if there are distortions here, very likely they'll be distortion of a mission. The 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, and so this is where we are. So yeah, it's a right-wing fandom episode, not 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. And I think we all sort of know what we mean by right-wing fandom, people who get upset about black elves or black stormtroopers.

But there's something more than that, right? There's some stuff that's just like, and we talked about this with Matt Bernstein about Milo Yiannopoulos, there's some of that stuff that's just ginned up by the likes of breitbart.com in order to get some clicks and sort of piggyback of people's fanish reactions to casting announcements or whatever.

But 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? And 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? Or when someone says, there shouldn't be black elves in this.