In the space of a few months, it is possible that we might have Hugo-winning authors in our classes. And this could be true for literally hundreds of thousands of classrooms as well as hundreds of thousands of offices worldwide. This spring, fanfiction archive An Archive of Our Own (AO3 — https://archiveofourown.org/) was nominated for a Hugo award in the Related Works category, and it’s a big deal
Okay — let me backtrack:
- Hugo Awards: The Hugo Awards have been presented to outstanding works by the World Science Fiction Society since 1953. The works nominated span across all media types and include not only sci-fi but horror, fantasy or works the members of WorldCon deem appropriate.
- Related Works: This is a catch-all category for works that are largely tangential to the corpus of creative works–past winners have included encyclopedias, compendiums, and critical or literary analysis.
Now, some people will tell you this is NOT a big deal, and their arguments go something like this:
- the nomination and voting processes for the Hugos are incredibly open to fans, not just “experts”
- fanfiction is not “real” writing
- the nomination is as much for the sites organizational apparatus and search mechanism as for the content
Here’s why it is a big deal: the nomination represents a shift — for some people a shift that will still take years to happen in their view, but a shift nevertheless.
One piece of that shift is decidedly cultural–it was only 3 to 6 years ago that the Hugo nomination process was utterly disrupted by the attempts of the right-wing Sad Puppies movement to dominate the nominations. In 2015, at the height of the Gamergate controversy*, the Hugo nomination rules made it possible for the Sad Puppies to impose a full slate of nominees in many categories that were so unpopular or offensive/irritating to the larger body that “No Award” won in the majority of categories. The Hugos made important changes to their process to prevent this domination while still allowing the process to be fan-driven.
So how does the AO3 nomination demonstrate a cultural shift? AO3 is an online archive for user-generated fanfiction. The site was established by the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit dedicated to archiving fanworks, and has been run by the registered users, who are overwhelmingly female. The archive is a play on words from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and was established in part in reaction to the harsh criticism most fanfiction received from the male administrators and members at FanLib. The archive is also regarded as highly LGBTQ-friendly — in short, almost everything the Sad Puppies were opposed to in 21st-century sci-fi/fantasy/horror genres.
Beyond signaling a more inclusive community in WorldCon and the Hugos, however, the nomination of AO3 also represents a growing regard for fanfiction itself. Fanfiction, of course, has long been acceptable so long as it had the right pedigree–if you are John Gardner writing Grendel, Seth Graham-Smith inserting zombies in Pride and Prejudice, or Verdi scoring Macbeth or Falstaff, but if you are EL James developing racy Twilight fanfic, not so much. Many, of course, can draw real distinctions–there is a difference between Margaret Atwood’s Hogarth series entry Hag Seed and an immature and inarticulate retelling of The Tempest, but the importance of fanfiction is often not in the texts written but in the storyworlds built and, even more important, the audiences engaged.