The Decline and Fall of Fandom and the Hugo Awards

Lately, I’ve taken a serious interest in family history. A huge amount of records have gone online in the past decade, making it far easier to trace your ancestors. Before that, my father was able to trace the Vasicek line to the Czech lands (places with cool names like Frenštát, Vratimov, Trojanovice, Staříč, etc), but that was as far as he could go. Just a couple of years ago, however, my sister found the parish records for that region. They’re mostly all scanned and online, and they go back as far as the late 15th century to the start of the Hapsburgs. The pieces are all there—all we have to do is put them together.

Needless to say, this has got me really excited. It also made me wonder: how far back is it possible go? According to my sister, who is also a certified genealogist, the European records start to get really sketchy around the 7th or 8th century. Only the royal lines go back that far, and since they were all trying to connect themselves to mythical figures and Biblical characters, the records are not very reliable.

So I went to Wikipedia to look up the period of Late Antiquity leading up to the 7th century, and soon became completely absorbed in it. This is the period when the Roman Empire collapsed, leaving Europe in a hot mess. The Vandals, Franks, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, and Saxons were running around all over the place, sometimes fighting for the Romans, sometimes fighting against them, constantly fighting each other, and migrating clear across the continent in their search for new homelands.

As clear as I can make it out, this is how it basically went down:

There once was a tribe on the Italian penninsula that built a city called Rome. Through innovations in engineering, warfare, governance, and philosophy, they conquered virtually all of the known world and built a mighty empire. Rome became legendary as the center of it all.

Over time, however, the Romans became decadent and corrupt. The empire slowly began to disintegrate and fall apart, though great pains were taken to preserve the appearance that all was well. By the end of the third century, it had effectively split into two halves: the eastern empire and the western empire. This division fell roughly along cultural lines: the Greco-Roman culture in the east, and the Latin-Roman culture in the west.

Around this time, a barbarian tribe (or alliance of tribes) appeared on the northeastern frontiers of the empire. Known as the Huns, these barbarians launched an invasion of Europe that completely shuffled the deck. They only briefly threatened the Romans, but had a much larger impact on the barbarian tribes of Europe, displacing them from their homelands and forcing them to seek a new home. This launched what is known as the migration period.

There were a lot of barbarian tribes seeking a new homeland: the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and the Vandals. With the Huns at their backs, they invaded the Roman Empire, which was the weaker of the two.

…except “invade” isn’t quite the right word. Many of these tribes became allies or foederati of the Romans (often after defeating them). Even some Hunnic tribes were absorbed into the empire in this way, and were often employed as mercenaries to fight against the Frankish, Gothic, and Vandal tribes that hadn’t allied with Rome. The salient point is that Rome had become weak, and thus had to make concessions to these barbarians who were starting to flood the empire.

At the end of the fourth century, a tribe of Visigoths that had settled in the eastern empire became upset with the way that the Romans were treating them. After being starved, taxed, and treated as sub-human, they took up arms under a leader named Alaric the First. They were unable to make much headway against the eastern empire, so instead they went west and invaded the Italian penninsula.

Over the course of the next two decades, the western empire vacillated between accomodating them, backstabbing them, and declaring outright war. This was mostly due to internal power struggles that had little to do with the Visigoths. Even though Alaric threatened the heart of the western empire and laid seige to Rome three times, they treated him with outright contempt, blatantly violating previous agreements and going so far as to ambush him under a flag of truce.

In 408, the internal power struggle eliminated the faction that was willing to accomodate the Visigoths. Shortly thereafter, Alaric decided that he’d had enough and marched on Rome. In 410, he sacked the city, shocking the civilized world.

Up until that point, Rome was considered sacrosanct. Sure, the barbarians were overrunning the frontiers and threatening vast swaths of the empire, but Rome was the cultural and spiritual center of the world. How could it possibly fall? But it did, and following the sack in 455 at the hands of the Vandals, the Roman Empire never regained its former glory.

Reading up on this history at the same time as the 2015 Hugo Awards played out has made me notice a bunch of similarities between the two events. Obviously, the decline and fall of Rome is not a perfect analogy for the decline and fall of the Hugo Awards, but there are some very interesting parallels.

The Hugo Awards were founded in the 1950s, back when SF&F fandom was a tiny community of geeks on the fringes of society, and not taken seriously by anyone in the cultural mainstream. Over the next several decades, the geeks took over the world, dominating the popular culture with things like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, etc.

But somewhere along the way, this happened:

Fandom (with a capital F) became decadent and corrupt as the Truefen jealously guarded their turf, creating all sorts of weird Hugo categories (“related work”? “short-form” editor vs. “long-form” editor?) and pushing back against the mainstreaming of the SF&F field. As a result, Worldcon went from the premier SF&F convention to a second-tier convention that falls well short of Dragoncon, Gencon, San Diego Comic Con, Salt Lake Comic Con and Fan Ex, etc, all of which are 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than Worldcon now. The once-prestigious Hugos were now decided by mere hundreds of votes.

Around this time, a tribe (or alliance of tribes) of cultural Marxists began to invade the cultural space. Also known as Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), they began to dominate multiple forms of media, pushing out many of the more conservative readers and viewers who resisted. Fandom (with a capital F) gradually embraced them, using them as mercenaries in their internal power struggles.

By this time, Fandom had split into two broad divisions: Baen and Tor. Baen books were more about action & adventure, while Tor books were more about social issues (though of course there was some overlap). These two houses dominated the field, but it was the Tor side of Fandom that had more ownership in the Hugos than the Baen side.

The SF&F fans who had been displaced by the SJW invasion formed the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. To Fandom, however, they were all just “wrongfans”—essentially, barbarians. And it wouldn’t exactly be right to say that the puppies “invaded” Fandom, because many of them were already there or were willing to coexist and make alliances. Others, of course, were not.

Vox Day entered the scene as one of the disgruntled puppies who had had enough of Fandom. The Tor side was far more susceptible to his machinations, responding to him in knee-jerk fashion at every turn, so he went after them. In 2015, he sacked the Hugos, causing “no award” to sweep five categories (and place in eight more).

To an impartial observer, Vox Day was the only clear victor of the 2015 Hugo Awards. How else can you explain all the “no awards”? His stated goal was never to win the Hugos, it was to destroy them, and he accomplished that spectacularly. When an esteemed professional such as Toni Weisskopf loses to “no award” purely out of guilt by association (on a ballot decided by less than 6,000 total votes, no less), how can anyone possibly take the Hugos seriously anymore? What was once considered the most prestigious award in the SF&F field has now proven to be a narrow, exlusivist club of politically like-minded elitists.

Fandom (capital F) accomplished many wonderful things back in the days before SF&F entered the mainstream. In a very real sense, they conquered the world. But by doggedly trying to hold on to their turf and refusing to let others play with their toys, especially those who see the world differently than them, they are declining. Like the sack of Rome in 410, the sack of the Hugo Awards in 2015 was a watershed moment that demonstrated just how much the old order had decayed.

Can the Hugo Awards be saved? I seriously doubt it. The “truefans” will jealously clutch it to their chests until they die, and with the graying of fandom, that will probably be accomplished fairly soon. But just as the Renaissance rose from the long-cold ashes of the Roman Empire, so too I hope that something good will eventually come out of all of this. Because really, there is a place in fandom (lower-case f) for everyone, and that has never changed.