Science Quote by Greg Egan

Egan’s line is a clean little demolition of the flattering myth fans like to tell about themselves: that they’re here for the art, the ideas, the purity of appreciation. “Fandom is about fandom” turns the spotlight away from the object of devotion and onto the mechanism doing the devoting. It’s almost tautological on purpose, the kind of dry, scientist’s compression that reads like a lab result: strip away the narrative, measure the behavior.

The phrase “great big social club” is doing the real work. It recodes fandom as infrastructure, not ideology: a network of belonging, status, and ritual. That framing isn’t an insult so much as a warning about incentives. Social clubs reward visibility, loyalty signaling, and in-group fluency; they punish ambiguity and dissent. Once you hear fandom as a club, the predictable drama makes more sense: the pile-ons, the canon wars, the moralized gatekeeping, the way “community” can harden into bureaucracy.

Contextually, Egan comes out of science fiction’s long-running tension between ideas-as-text and culture-as-ecosystem. SF fandom in particular has historically been intensely organized (cons, fanzines, awards), meaning the social layer is not a side effect but a core feature. The subtext is that what looks like critical engagement is often social navigation: people arguing not just about what a story means, but about who gets to be central in the room where meaning is decided.

It’s a bracing reminder that fandom’s strongest gravitational pull isn’t the work itself. It’s the promise of being seen by people who already speak your language.