The latest SMOF News (Volume 3, issue 30) discusses the post-pandemic decline of in-person fan-run science fiction conventions, with Outlantacon being the latest casualty. It’s a situation I’m familiar with, since I’ve negotiated hotel contracts for several filk conventions and more recently couldn’t find a suitable hotel at a reasonable cost for NEFilk. Two factors make up the problem: rising hotel costs and decreased attendance.

Fan-run cons have always worked on the periphery of more lucrative events, such as weddings and gatherings of large organizations. To get space, we have to find a weekend that the other customers don’t want or fill up the space that they aren’t using. COVID killed a lot of hotels, and the ones that are still around want to make up for a couple of years of lost revenue. This means fewer discount deals. If we paid rates comparable to the big customers, we’d have to charge a membership rate of a couple of hundred dollars for a weekend con.

The other problem is that fannish interest in in-person gatherings has only weakly bounced back. A lot of people have found that getting together on Zoom satisfies them and doesn’t require paying for travel and a hotel room. But there’s another issue: Much of fandom is highly averse to the risks associated with face-to-face human contact. The SMOF news article quotes Outlantacon’s statement:

But our group of fans have always been progressive, loving, careful group of people and as the restrictions of covid ended many found themselves more adapted to the new world of staying at home, streaming television and movies, and not straining their immune systems by putting themselves in crowds resulting in two years of OutlantaCon seeing a significant decrease in attendance. Perhaps in future our crowd will return to conventions and the world of in-person fandom but until that time we cannot afford to continue with decreasing attendance.

Most people have returned to something close to their old habits of going to parties, conventions, talks, concerts, and so on. Whether they’ve gotten vaccinated or not, they consider the risk acceptable. Less so with fans.

One reason is concerns with long COVID. Reports of “brain fog” as a long-term effect especially worry some people I know. Most fans are geeks, proud of their intelligence and strongly disliking the prospect of anything that would make them think less clearly.

Another factor is that being strongly COVID-adverse is a badge of honor among progressives. As Outlantacon notes, fans tend toward the “progressive” left and associate that tendency with being loving and careful. Being afraid of face-to-face encounters makes them feel not just sensible but virtuous.

I’m an officer of a filk music club which has had meetings like clockwork every month for years, with just a few cancellations due to weather. Nearly all of them since the spring of 2020 have been online. The last meeting with in-person attendance was last September. Conditions for attendance, which were set by the host, included being vaccinated and being masked even while singing and getting two COVID tests (home tests allowed) before the meeting. More people attended online than in person. I won’t speculate on how many of those who stayed away thought it wasn’t enough protection and how many thought it was overkill, but I was in the latter category. We haven’t even talked about an in-person meeting since then.

Being introverted, I don’t find this too bothersome. A lot of fans are introverted; people who read a lot spend less time being social, and the awkwardness of fans in social situations is legendary. Ursula LeGuin wrote, “Distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better, is perhaps the essential gesture of SF. It is by distancing that SF achieves aesthetic joy, tragic tension, and moral cogency.” She wasn’t talking about physical distancing, but maybe what she said applies in that sense too.

COVID won’t go extinct in this century, and some of the factors affecting fan gatherings are economic or technological, so the shift will persist a long time. There certainly are advantages to online meetings. Aside from the convenience of attending from home, I get to see people on the West Coast and in Europe whom I’d rarely see otherwise. But nothing replaces seeing friends in person. This is fandom’s new world, for better or worse.