Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a 2019 Hugo Finalist. This is, by now, rather old news. There has been discussion on this topic in a few places, notably, over at The Mary Sue and on File 770, but I had a couple thoughts I wanted to add.

I had a conversation one day shortly after finalists were announced with a friend who has recently dived headfirst into fan fiction, both reading and writing quite a lot of it. This friend has been going to science fiction and fantasy conventions for longer than I’ve been as interested in talking about books as I am in reading books. We met at Sasquan, the 2015 WorldCon in Spokane. We regularly talk books, conventions, and author news. He has a fair bit of perspective on these things, is what I’m getting at. And he was rather lukewarm on AO3’s nomination, without being able to fully articulate why.

I’ve thought about this for quite a while, after reading some other reactions around the web, and wanted to throw in my perspective.

First, the description for the Best Related Work Hugo:

“ Awarded to a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year.”

Note, specifically, that it calls out “related to… fandom” in the description. Recent nominees have included various non-fiction books by and about “the greats” from previous eras of speculative fiction, non-fiction books and collections of essays about modern speculative fiction issues, and a couple years of puppy-related nonsense. There have been a few fandom-focused nods (Sarah Gailey’s Women of Harry Potter series, Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, etc.) but by and large, the “fandom” portion of the eligibility has been ignored.

I’ve nominated the /r/Fantasy community under Best Related Work several years running, as I feel pretty strongly that the discussion and interaction there falls squarely into both the “fandom” portion of the description, as well as being almost exclusively non-fiction and discussion-based, and which is substantially modified every week, let alone every year. /r/Fantasy has over 600k subscribers, roughly 30k of whom are active on any given day. Almost half of the subscribers are from outside the United States, and more than half are under 30. While Reddit is a for-profit entity and employs site-wide administrators, all interaction on /r/Fantasy is moderated by a volunteer team of about 25. It represents a sizable portion of current speculative fiction fandom. Discussion there is often featured on other genre sites, and book deals for self-pub authors are happening as a result of some of that discussion.

And that representation pales in comparison to AO3. AO3 boasts over 1.8 million registered users, interacting in over 31,000 fandoms. Those 31,000 fandoms don’t all represent speculative fiction (there are sections about “real people” and “bands”), but it’s overwhelmingly a place where fans are interacting about speculative fiction fandom. Fan fiction is overwhelmingly created by women. AO3 is a nonprofit entity created and run by fans, for fans, with approximately 700 volunteers.

Online fan communities allow diverse groups of fans from all over the world to interact in real-time. Except for not being able to pick up free books and hear authors and panelists talk excitedly about genre, online fan communities act in many ways similar to a convention, for a much, much lower admission cost.

So let’s tie that back to WorldCon, as an institution and an event and the host of the Hugos. I don’t have any official data, and I’m not really even sure that WorldCon as an organization tracks this data, so take it with a grain of salt and an acknowledgement that it’s anecdata. WorldCon has a fairly small membership. My first year attending was 2015’s Sasquan, which had near-record membership: 4,644 attending and another 5706 supporting. Of the folks who attended, the crowds definitely skewed middle-aged or older, so much so that as a millennial I felt distinctly out of place. Certainly attending a con isn’t exactly cheap, and most millennials don’t have much vacation time, but even in San Jose - a much younger, much bigger city - for WorldCon last year, the crowds still felt older than expected. That said, the Hugos have started to be more inclusive of younger fans, with the introduction of the “not a Hugo” Lodestar Award in 2018.

But overall, Best Related Works nominees and winners seem to engage with the speculative fiction of the past. Retrospectives on authors long dead, encyclopedias, etc. are reoccurring themes. Works by or about fandom, while mentioned in the category, are often neglected. I’d like to invite Hugo voters to consider the intent of the award when making nominees and voting for finalists.

“The best work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, published in the prior calendar year and which is either non-fiction or noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text.”

I’ve seen an argument online that a distinction voters are struggling with regarding AO3 is that they believe it is not noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text (all the fan fiction).

I’d argue that the most noteworthy thing about AO3, /r/Fantasy, and other online fan forums, is that they are venues for users to come together and discuss the speculative fiction they love, run by volunteers. To me, the Hugo Awards and WorldCon itself are about bringing fans together around the work we all love. Ultimately, that’s about the purest reason to vote for a Hugo as any I can think of.

Remember to submit your votes for the Hugo Awards by Wednesday 31 July 2019 at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time.