Hi! I'd love to hear more about what actually goes on at cons.  Because I've never actually been to one, and it's always a little mystifying hearing about them (especially with all the bizarre, shortened names).

If you'll give an example of a bizarre, shortened name, I'll try to help.

Are you a fan if you just read the stuff and like it, and don't participate in what may be termed fandom?  Or are you just a reader and not a fan?   My friends at work and I fall into the "we read the stuff and like it" category.  My best friend calls me a Gaiman fangirl but I don't think that is exactly what is called fandom.  I wouldn't terribly mind though if it was. 

Arachnejericho, I don't think there's a formal rule, you know. What I do know is that once you start posting comments on sites like this, you're heading down a slippery slope into fandom and no mistake.The original fans were people who connected through the letter columns of SF magazines and started corresponding directly. Letter columns were sort of like comments pages, only slower. 

Alison,

Too true about the slippery slope.

I remember letter columns from elsewheres. Very fun. Comments these days is even more fun.

You know, I read a lot of site comments these days. The younger set in high school have no idea what the world was like before the web. It's actually very amusing. Vive la web.

IMO you're a fan if you self-identify as such.

I agree with TexAnne; I self-identify as a fan, though I've never actually belonged to any fan organization, and only been briefly to one  con, about 15 years ago (I was actually delivering a stuffed animal, not attending).  On the other hand, I've been reading SF and fantasy since I was 7, so there's no way I'm not wired into SF permanently.  Or it into me.

Fandom does not have to be organized to exsist. Where and whenever two or more fans meet an share their interest, fandom appears. Fandom is, imho, the collective acts of fans. Posting comments or participation in discussion is indeed a slippery slope into more fandom. Simply because you get to know people, and as you get to know them you spend more time with them and if you find friends, you want to spend even more time and before you know it you find yourself organizing cons and traveling around just to attend a con in different countries and stuff...

The question of who is a fan, and how and whether that overlaps with the condition of being "in fandom", has consumed forests of duplicator paper and untold trillions of pixels. A few points worth noting:

1. Many people spend years in fandom, attending conventions, writing and self-publishing fan stuff, and doing other fan activity, without ever (in SpeakerToManagers' term -- hi, Bruce!) "belong[ing] to any fan organization."  Indeed, while there are some long-lived organizations in fandom (LASFS, NESFA, the BSFA), by and large fandom is culturally resistant to being organized. Attempts to create umbrella organizations to encompass the whole subculture have repeatedly gone down to ignominious defeat.  Even the World Science Fiction Convention, organized and run by fan volunteers since 1939, has only a tenuous continuity between each year's Worldcon.

2. People who "just read the stuff" but aren't involved in the subculture are entitled to call themselves "fans," according to the plain meaning of the word.  But there is a difference between that and being involved in the subculture.  That difference has little to do with whether one is a member of any organizations.  I've been active in fandom for 33 years and very little of that has been as a member of any organization.

3. These discussions are interesting right up to the point where someone tries to impute any kind of inherent superiority to any version of "being a fan."  I place a high value on being part of a historically-self-aware subculture (rich with the serious and silly lore than subcultures act to preserve) dating back to particular individuals and groups in the 1930s and before.  But it doesn't make me a better person than the person with a basement full of SF paperbacks who never gets into the subculture.

One of the sadder (and sweeter) moments of my life was when I took my aged mother to a Worldcon mumblemumble years ago.  She started reading SF in the 1930s and up to that moment didn't know that there were places where people who liked this sort of thing congregated.  She spent the whole weekend wandering around saying "If I had known about this I would have joined the party decades ago". 

I agree strongly with PNH. I read enormous quantities of SF/F but have rarely been to conventions, and I've never been a member of any fandom organization. I do consider myself a fan, though.

But having said that, there's a difference in kind between the home-readers and the conventioneers, and I think it has to do with the social networks that are created by organizations/conventions. I could be in a subculture by passively consuming fanzines (or blogs), but if I don't know anyone else in the subculture, and no one else in the subculture knows me, then I'm not, well, something.

This is exactly isomorphic to any discussion forum that soon becomes the discussion among a group of friends and leaves the original topic behind. "Core" fandom (or whatever you call it) is the group of friends that met because they liked SF. They still do, but that's not the defining characteristic.

My interest in being a fan goes up in proportion to the frequency with which (some, thankfully few) people try to define others out of fandom, or out of "real" fandom.

It goes sharply down when I start seeing the sense of false exclusivity popping up again - for instance, referring to perfectly normal things, enjoyed by quite a lot of people, as "fannish" - and when I hear someone saying "mundane" it generally red-shifts.

A good beginning, Allison. I endorse everything you say, and that Patrick says as well.

I'm not sure who coined the term "core fandom" (and I'd be interested to know; and the creator of that t-shirt you refer to likewise deserves credit for choosing the self-deprecating image of the well-chewed apple), but before it was promulgated widely, I was trying to convey a similar idea with a comparable coinage, "fandom prime."

The word "prime" was intended to have multiple simultaneous denotations and connotations, but was, ahem, primarily meant to refer to the simple historical fact of primacy, of being here first. (Jeanne Gomoll kindly did me a design for an F' button. I really ought to get around to finally getting them made!)

That needn't, indeed, shouldn't imply a claim of superiority, by the way.

The part of fandom I believe myself and feel myself to belong to is the part with its roots in the 30s and a direct, un-branching line of descent from there. I arrived in time (about 1970) to meet many of the founding fans of that era, and their younger friends, and thus I have no doubt that they and everyone I consider to be in Fandom Prime were and are involved in the same shared thing, the original stefnal 'cosa nostra,' to interpret that Italian term literally.

In the 38 years I've been around and watching, I've had the interesting experience of being present at the creation of daughter fandoms, and branch fandoms, and gotten to watch them bud off and flourish and eventually outstrip us in size and public visibility. That used to bother me a little, but I've come to realize that was just childish on my part. The proliferation was actually a healthy thing and it was inevitable, barring the disappearance of SF/fantasy itself.

How hypocritical it would be to claim to be a fan of the Literature of Change, and then complain when the winds of change swirled through our own community!

What I prefer to focus on now is that from a 1930s perspective we are living in the Messianic Age. I'm not referring to the fact that we all have computers and lasers in our houses, or that we're in the process of acquiring large flat video screens for our walls. I'm talking about the ongoing miracle of a whole world that understands and even loves the tropes of SF and fantasy, the very signs and symbols that once brought us only mockery.

The genres of the fantastic dominate the mass media and are appreciated by the broad public in a way that the fragile, scattered, tiny community of fans in the '30s would never have dared to dream. It may have been stuck with an ugly dynastic name, but Sci-Fi is the King of all Media.

That being the case, fandom (prime, core, and otherwise) can never be the same and will never again serve the same purposes. But if we are true to ourselves, it won't matter.

People who haven't connected to the Tree of Fandom, that thing that Moshe talks about rooted in Gernsback's lettercolumns, of course use the general rather than the specialized meaning of the term "fan", and consider themselves fans.

Since they are using a perfectly normal English meaning of the word, I don't want to tell them they're *not* fans; it'll piss them off, and really we have no right to expropriate a common word for our private use.

But that leaves me with no succinct word for "being involved in fandom". Oh well.

I find it useful, in discussion, to make the distinction between people connected to that historical entity we call fandom, and those who are not. It's not a value judgement -- heaven knows there are plenty of unpleasant, even boring, people in fandom! And plenty of fascinating, pleasant people outside it.

Anything fans do around SF is fanac in a sense, and people with no connection to historic fandom who find each other and start doing fanac are in a perfectly reasonable and meaningful sense fans -- and yet they're still not connected to the historic tree of fandom. That probably won't last long -- such "loose" clusters tend to find fandom and connect.

Glad to see a regular blogger here has taken this topic. I'll stick around and see how it goes.

(You're the Allison Scott I met at Minicon some years ago, I presume; two fans of that name with a Plokta connection is a bit much to accept. You were showing some interesting digital stereo photography on your laptop, and I still haven't followed up with doing any of my own. Hi!)

One of the things I like best about sf fandom is that while sf is our filter, bringing us all together in the first place, it isn't necessarily our focus -- that becomes our friendships and shared experiences.

MKK

A let-ter? I understand it's a bit like an e-mail, but slower, and you have to pay to send it?

I'm uncomfortable calling myself a SF fan because, while I'm an avid lifelong reader, I've never been to a con or been active in the community. If I belong to any community, it's comix/zines, and that only peripherally.

So: I warm my hands at the fire of fandom, and gaze at the coals.

I'm uncomfortable calling myself a SF fan because, while I'm an avid lifelong reader, I've never been to a con or been active in the community.

Careful, posting comments here is dangerously close to community involvement.... :-)

(In fact, it clearly *is* community involvement; you're reaching out to others in fandom.)

Nothing wrong, of course, with being a reader not involved with fandom, either. Many people who love reading SF decide they're not that interested in fandom (and many more never find out one way or the other).

Hello dd-b! Yes, we met at Minicon, which was the convention where I tested the principle of Unlimited Free Beer, well, thoroughly. You couldn't do that here. And although it's true that visiting Brits have never drunk Minicon out of beer, you've never had more than half a dozen of us at once either.

One L in Alison, though. Might as well start straight.

While something about science fiction seems to trigger the creation of fandom, it seems to be something inherent in human nature.

I would hazard to say that you can see the same behavior in fans of wrestling, motorcycles, cars and many other hobbies.

Fundamentally then being a member of fandom has nothing to do with SF itself and everything to do with wanting to connect with people who have similar interests or to actively participate in the thing which you enjoy.

The larger group of passive consumers (or those who just aren't terribly sociable)simply don't bother.

Fandom then(as it relates to SF) is not terribly reflective of those who like SF as a whole. It is its own beast.

One L in Alison, though.

Eep! Sorry!

I'm saddled with an extra letter problem myself (though mine it least falls at the end, where it has the least possible impact on alphabetization).

dd-b, I don't have a picture yet. May I trim my face out of one of yours?

And, er, fandom. Well, I think it's a lot easier to get into active fandom now because it happens by posting and reading here and at Making Light and a good selection of other blogs and LJs. I think a lot of people sort of slide in accidently.

Apparently just objecting to the term "sci fi" is enough to be labelled a hardcore fan. Among other things.