We won the culture war decades ago, but now there's no place to hide. This used to be a refuge for those of us who didn't like the real world very much, had a hard time dealing with people, and preferred to escape into the fairylands of the past, the future...anywhere but here, any time but now.

It was easier before we won. We could go off in a corner with a book and be gone for a while. We could find others of our kind and have parties to talk about the books, and the handful of movies made from the books. And if there were some other people who were kind of...out there...and did things like drugs, and polyamory, and paganism, well, that was their thing, and who were we to judge, anyway? We wanted to be accepted in fairyland, we wanted to be in a different tribe than the mundanes who laughed at us and our silly books. We were the few, the proud, the tribesmen of fandom.

Then the tide began to turn. It started with the Trekkies. They flooded into our conventions, speaking a different dialect, not knowing either the old songs or the old stories, being completely unaware of the maps of fairyland we all knew pretty much by heart. After them came the Star Wars fans, and the Buffy fans, and pretty soon it was all over. It was the mundanes who were the minority now.

But there's nowhere to hide now. All the new people brought the problems of the outside world with them. And we're back where we started. Looking for somewhere to hide.

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