'Nowhere to go but further in' by Paul Graham Raven

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This month’s comes courtesy of Dr Paul Graham Raven, who is oft-quoted in this newsletter. I was very pleased when he offered his thoughts on ‘fandom intensity’. Comments and questions? Let me know, and I’ll include them next week. Now, over to Paul…

I have a hypothesis which explains the difference in intensity that Jared recently noted between fandoms attached to science fiction and/or fantasy franchises and fandoms attached to, for instance, crime fiction. My hypothesis starts from a definition of the distinction that separates those categories: crime fiction is generally primary world fiction, which is to say it’s set in the world that the reader broadly assumes to be their own, while sf/f is generally secondary world fiction, which is to say that it’s set in a world (or even universe) other than the one in which the reader actually lives.

(For the sake of simplicity, I’m leaving aside hybrid genres, such as romantasy or sf crime, which borrow generic forms traditionally attached to primary world settings, and redeploy them in secondary worlds. That said, the theory holds if you assume that hybrid genres are always secondary world fictions; for the purposes of this particular argument, the setting matters more than the plot tropes.)

The simplest statement of the hypothesis might go something like this: a secondary world fandom is more intense because it has a unique thing to bond over (i.e. that imagined secondary world) which is all but impossible to understand, or even to access, as an outsider to the fandom. This barrier to entry becomes more intense the larger the franchise becomes, for much the same reason that the volume of a sphere expands at a faster rate than its surface area.

Let us imagine a n00b (who has read one Discworld book, perhaps) listening in on a table full of Pratchett fans. Our n00b will know few of the characters or events under discussion, but such new-to-them characters and events can be described fairly easily in response to an enquiry, in pretty much the same way as character or event from the Sherlock Holmes franchise might be easily described.

Now, a n00b to either of those fandoms will ask lots of further questions, which will shift their focus from characters and events (or ‘plot’) to a more contextual enquiry, as they try to make sense (and/or a system) of said characters and events. They're trying to piece together and extrapolate the implied world of the stories, based on the parts they've seen so far.

In a primary world franchise like Sherlock Holmes, the canonical works are set in a historical version of the world in which the text—the book, the TV show, or whatever—itself exists. So, while there might be questions (whether asked aloud or kept to oneself) about why these characters talk like this, or why law enforcement or international travel works in this particular way, most of them can be answered with “because Victorian-era London”. 

To be clear, Victorian London is an increasingly distant and inexplicable world for most people alive today, and I'm sure historians would justifiably be keen to point out just how much we misconstrue it—with media properties such as the Holmes franchise, now out of copyright and thus out of control, very much implicated in such misconstruals, if only in part.

Nonetheless, for all but the most ignorant or stubborn of novitiate fans, there is an ontological finality to “because Victorian-era London”. It is an established fact that the original works were set (and, in some cases, written) in that particular timespace, by an author well-acquainted with it; questions about the context in which the stories play out are therefore ably answered this way, which opens the door for our hypothetical n00b to investigate further into said historical timespace (if they are so inclined) via the means of historical documentation and discussions which may not have anything to do with the Holmes franchise.

(Of course, there's a whole genre of history texts written to target exactly this sort of enquirer, which will use the fictional franchise as a key to their contextual interest... but let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be.)

Other primary-world fandoms have similar ontological boundaries—boundaries which abut the world the reader knows, albeit at what may be considerable distance in terms of time and/or space and/or socioeconomic circumstance. For Jane Austen fans, for instance, the equivalent answer might be “because the Napoleonic war”, but all such answers are subsets of a meta-answer which (so I'm given to understand) will be very familiar to anyone who has been the parent of small children: “because that's just how it is/was”. This is an appeal to concrete reality—or at least to a shared socially-constructed reality.

The point being, you could ask a historian of Victorian London—or, in earlier years, someone who experienced it first-hand—those same contextual questions about language or law enforcement as observed in the canonical Holmes texts, and likely get answers which matched fairly well with the implied world of the fictions. To put it another way, those books depict events and characters whose contextual logics would make sense even to those who have not read them; the texts partake of a world which does not depend upon said texts for its existence.

In narratological terms, then, these texts (i.e. Holmes books or movies or whatever) contain stories and narratives (e.g. accounts of investigations that hinge upon dogs not barking when one might expect them to) which in turn imply a world (or, more strictly, a fabula). That implied world is—modulo certain acts of creative license, plus the scientific and social misprisions of its era of production—a known quantity, a documented and real timespace accessible through multiple channels of enquiry. In other words, you can learn about the London of Sherlock Holmes without reading more Sherlock Holmes.

Returning to our table of Pratchett fans, things play out slightly differently. Rather than reaching moments of epistemological closure and comfort via the touchstone of history, the questions of the n00b will instead encounter moments of WTF and sensawunda. Rather than “because Victorian-era London”, for instance, they'll reach “because Death is a person”, or “because the Discworld is not only flat, but supported by four cardinal elephants stood on the back of a giant turtle”. Further questions (which will likely be of the general form “wait, what, why?!”) will only result in further revelations which demand further explanations. There is no point at which “that's just how it is/was” can work quite as it does for the Holmes novitiate, namely as an appeal to a reality which is shared beyond the borders of the franchise and its fandom. 

To the contrary: with Pratchett’s world (or Tolkien’s, or the world of Sailor Moon, or whatever world it might be) ontological questions can only be answered by reference to sources within the franchise and/or fandom. More simply, you can’t learn more about Discworld without reading more Discworld, or engaging with secondary literatures or fandom discourses which are, in essence, an extension of it.

I hypothesise, then, that it is exactly this sense of being party to an arcane (and, if not exactly secret, then certainly obscure) imaginary ontology—of being party to a secondary world, if only at the distance necessarily sustained by its representation in various media—that pushes such fandoms to a greater intensity of collective activity, engagement and obsession than those of primary-world franchises. If you want to know more, there is nowhere to go but further in.

(The reader of reasonable intuition, and perhaps of experience with the social dynamics of knowledge and status, will likely also see that this may well also be why secondary-world fandoms tend to be far more savage and fractious, particularly but not exclusively with regard to questions regarding canonicity. Comparisons to religious sectarianism could stand accused of being both lazy and invidious, but presumably not by any honest person with any experience of fandom. Don’t @ me.)

Another way to come at this question is through the idea of curation. Fictional worlds, primary and secondary, are built—but they are also maintained. This could be said to be true of the primary worlds of pop stars and soap operas just as much as of fictional detectives. The work of Taylor Swift implies a world, for example, of which Swift herself is the central organisational (and narratological) axis; that world is ‘our’ world, in a sense, but it is Swift’s world in another. But it is not exclusively hers; it belongs to, and is built and maintained (and sometimes fought over) by her fandom.

This is why my good friend and fellow theorist Jay Springett argues that we should consider worlds to be the definitive medium of the C21st, and that the job of managing and curating them—a role to which he assigns the wonderfully science-fiction-fantasy label of “worldrunner”—is a new form of artistic practice, to which the original worldbuilder may not be suited by either skill or temperament.

Returning to my own domain of interest, it also tells us something about the competing visions of futurity that proliferate in popular culture. Human futures are primary worlds, in that they abut temporally with the ‘real’ world, but they are also secondary worlds in that, because they do not (yet) exist, they can only be accessed through the works of their creators, curators, and fans.

What happens when the vision of the person (or organisation) that created a future no longer aligns with the vision of some or all of its ‘fans’? Well, you might end up with what fandoms sometimes call a canon war—but which the rest of us might recognise under the broader but just as accurate label of politics.

Dr. Paul Graham Raven is a writer, researcher and critical futures consultant, whose work is concerned with how the stories we tell about times to come can shape the lives we end up living. Paul is also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, a collaborator with designers and artists, and an artist in his own right. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and too many books. 

Professional stuff can be found at paulgrahamraven.com. You can follow his futures work at his online research journal, Worldbuilding Agency; or you can wade into the turbid ramblings of his two-decades-vintage personal blog at Velcro City Tourist Board.