Monthly Archives: April 2012

2012 CUFF Winner

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Debra Yeung is the winner of the 2012 Canadian Unity Fan Fund. She will be CUFF’s delegate to When Words Collide/Canvention in Calgary Aug 10-12.

CUFF Administrator Kent Pollard reports there were 42 selectors this year. The vote totals were: Debra Yeung, 29; Jane Garthson, 12; No Preference, 1.

Yeung scored a first-round majority (70% of those expressing a preference) to avoid a runoff.

Donations from this year’s selectors added $302.48 to the available funds for the delegate’s trip. Pollard plans a financial report later.

The text of the full press release [PDF file] follows the jump.

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Chicon 7 Loses Sagal

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Chicon 7’s Special Guest Peter Sagal has withdrawn from his Worldcon appearance due to conflicting professional commitments.

Peter Sagal is the host of National Public Radio’s weekly news quiz “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me.”

Sagal will be filming a documentary overseas while Chicon 7 takes place. He apologized, saying “I’m heartbroken I won’t be able to attend my first Worldcon since 1980. As it happens, I’ll be in Reykjavik, or some other place less interesting than Chicago. I wish everybody all the best.”

The full press release follows the jump.

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Visible Ray

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Bud Webster’s extraordinary appreciation of R.A. Lafferty — Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works) – for Grantville Gazette is well worth your time. Webster says —

Lafferty wasn’t a science fiction writer, regardless of the section of the bookstore in which his titles may have appeared; rather, he was a mad fantasist, a maker of mythologies, a Wizard of Oddities.

Quite right.

Lafferty’s short story “Slow Tuesday Night” is most memorable to me. The pace of human life has accelerated to such a degree that civilization has split into three shifts, the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops. People, laughably, still have the exact same superficial attitudes towards wealth, celebrity and love.

“Slow Tuesday Night” is available at this link on the Wayback Machine although to get it to load I had to spit in the back and kick it a couple times, which is to say, click on the “Impatient?” link.

Webster looks at many aspects of Ray’s life. None is more troubling than his heavy drinking, painfully evident when he went to conventions. Seeing that myself made it impossible to laugh anymore at the point-of-view character in “Slow Tuesday Night” who claims to put himself to sleep using the “Natural method. And a bottle of red-eye.”

Beam Follow-Up

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Ray Beam at First Fandom Awards in 2000. (Photo by Keith Stokes.)

Curt Phillips adds these words of appreciation for the late Ray Beam:

I’ve just learned of the death of Ray Beam of Kokomo, Indiana on April 8.  Ray was a long time SF fan, a member of First Fandom, a regular at many midwestern conventions including MidWestCon and Pulpcon, and a fixture in old-time Cincinatti Fandom.  I knew him as a very pleasant fellow and enjoyed some great conversations with him about Fandom and old science fiction over the years.

The funeral home’s memorial page for Ray says in part:

Ray Edgar Beam Jr., 79, Kokomo, died at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, April 8, 2012 at St. Joseph Hospital emergency room.  He was born December 24, 1932 in Warren, Ohio, the son of Ray E. and Evelyn (Joseph) Beam Sr.  On September 13, 1975, he married Mary Ann Armfield.

Ray grew up in Plymouth, before moving to Indianapolis to live with his father.  He graduated from Arsenal Tech High School and attended Butler University School of Pharmacy.  He worked at Mallory Metallurgical as a Powder Metallurgist, where he earned many patents.  He was a 50 year member of the Greentown Masonic Lodge F&AM 341.  He was also a member of the Scottish Rite, Shrine Club and Grotto.

He was a life-long science fiction fan.  He won the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Award and the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award. In addition he was former Guest of Honor at several conventions. His favorite outdoor activities included cave exploring and Indy Car Racing.

Ray is survived by his first wife, Susie Rivers of Brownsburg; second wife, Mary Ann Beam of Kokomo; children, John Wesley (Debbie) Beam, Christopher Ray Beam, Wesley Daniel Beam , all of Kokomo, Catherine Turner of Franklin; eight grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren.  He was preceded in death by his parents; infant daughter and elder daughter, Nancy.

Orlando in 2015 Manifesto

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The Orlando in 2015 Worldcon bid committee has posted the Orlando Manifesto, a wide-ranging philosophical discussion of how to run the con and how to grow the community that supports it.

Something I noticed right off the bat is that, like James at Big Dumb Object, the Orlando committee isn’t impressed by the record-setting number of Hugo nominating votes:

About 1000 individuals vote for the awards these days, while Facebook fan communities often have tens of thousands of members.  New fandom simply does not credit, nor have any interest in, an activity that draws such a relatively small number of people.

Unlike James, they are trying to woo voters within the Worldcon community. This kind of shaming rhetoric hardly seems designed to accomplish that goal.

Delusions of Masses

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James at Big Dumb Object wasn’t impressed by the record-setting number of Hugo nominating ballots cast in 2012.

…a thousand ballots for what is supposed to be the premier Science Fiction awards really doesn’t seem like very much to me.

Why get excited that voter participation has increased by more than one-third since 2009 when the total is still insignificant?

James would like to see current information technology used to measure story popularity:

It feels a bit stone-age when you have music sites like Hype Machine or We Are Hunted compiling a real time barometer of music tastes. We should be able to track which stories were the most read, we should be able to analyse every thought on those stories, we should be able to craft that into a coarse grained voting system, we should be able to extrude the real wisdom of the crowds.

If it’s possible, why not? Everyone would like to know.

I have nothing to add to the main point of James’ post — it was his passing thought about the number of Hugo voters that set me to thinking. I wondered if James might be wrong about a thousand Hugo voters being an insignificant fraction of the literary marketplace.

Of course 1,000 is a less-than-trivial number in proportion to the audiences for sf on TV or in film, seen by hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people. No one disputes their audiences are magnitudes greater than the corps of voters which picks the winners of the Hugo Award’s Best Dramatic Long- and Short-Form categories.

But that’s not what James wants to measure. He’s interested in the response to stories – text, in print or digital form.

Checking online I saw a lot of inconclusive discussion about the average print run of a novel (and that leaves aside the even more impenetrable universe of e-book statistics.) Pros blogging about the writing business typically said print books had press runs of 5,000-10,000 copies (unless they were expected to be bestsellers).

As for prozines, when I last checked, the circulation of Analog was less than 30,000.

I can’t say how many tens of thousands of different people make up the marketplace for written sf, but the figures I’m seeing suggest to me that 1,000 Hugo voters is a statistically meaningful sample of the audience for literary sf.

2012 Prix Aurora Nominees

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The 2012 English Professional and the Fan Aurora Award finalists have been announced.

Voting will begin on April 16, 2012. All ballots must be received by July 23, 2012, 11:59pm PDT.

Professional Award Nominations

Best Novel – English
Enter Night by Michael Rowe, ChiZine Publications
Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism by David Nickle, ChiZine Publications
Napier’s Bones by Derryl Murphy, ChiZine Publications
The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet, ChiZine Publications
Technicolor Ultra Mall by Ryan Oakley, EDGE
Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada

Best Short Fiction – English
”The Legend of Gluck” by Marie Bilodeau, When the Hero Comes Home, Dragon Moon Press
“The Needle’s Eye” by Suzanne Church, Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd Did I Live, EDGE
“One Horrible Day” by Randy McCharles, The 2nd Circle, The 10th Circle Project
“Turning It Off” by Susan Forest, Analog, December
“To Live and Die in Gibbontown” by Derek Künsken, Asimov’s, October/November

Best Poem / Song – English
“A Good Catch” by Colleen Anderson, Polu Texni, April
“Ode to the Mongolian Death Worm” by Sandra Kasturi, ChiZine, Supergod Mega-Issue, Volume 47
“Skeleton Leaves” by Helen Marshall, Kelp Queen Press
“Skeleton Woman” by Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps, Fairytale, CD
“Zombie Bees of Winnipeg” by Carolyn Clink, ChiZine, Supergod Mega-Issue, Volume 47

Best Graphic Novel – English
Goblins, webcomic, created by Tarol Hunt
Imagination Manifesto, Book 2 by GMB Chomichuk, James Rewucki and John Toone, Alchemical Press
Weregeek, webcomic, created by Alina Pete

Best Related Work – English
Fairytale, CD by Heather Dale, HeatherDale.com
The First Circle: Volume One of the Tenth Circle Project, edited by Eileen Bell and Ryan McFadden
Neo-Opsis, edited by Karl Johanson
On Spec, published by the Copper Pig Writers’ Society
Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales, edited by Julie Czerneda and Susan MacGregor, EDGE

Best Artist (Professional and Amateur Nominations)
Janice Blaine, “Cat in Space”, Cover art for Neo-Opsis, Issue 20
Costi Gurgu, cover art for Outer Diverse, Starfire
Erik Mohr, cover art for ChiZine Publications
Dan O’Driscoll, “Deep Blue Seven”, cover art for On Spec magazine, Summer issue
Martin Springett, Interior art for The Pattern Scars, ChiZine

Fan/Volunteer Award Nominations

Best Fan Publication
BCSFAzine,edited by Felicity Walker
Bourbon and Eggnog by Eileen Bell, Ryan McFadden, Billie Milholland and Randy McCharles, 10th Circle Project
In Places Between: The Robin Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest book, edited by Reneé Bennett
Sol Rising newsmagazine, edited by Michael Matheson
Space Cadet, edited by R. Graeme Cameron

Best Fan Filk
Stone Dragons (Tom and Sue Jeffers), concert at FilKONtario
Phil Mills, Body of Song-Writing Work including FAWM and 50/90
Cindy Turner, Interfilk concert at OVFF

Best Fan Organizationa
Andrew Gurudata, chair of the Constellation Awards committee
Peter Halasz, administrator of the Sunburst Awards
Helen Marshall and Sandra Kasturi, chairs of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series (Toronto)
Randy McCharles, founder and chair of When Words Collide (Calgary)
Alex von Thorn, chair of SFContario 2 (Toronto)
Rose Wilson, for organizing the Art Show at V-Con (Vancouver)

Best Fan Other
Lloyd Penney, letters of comment
Peter Watts, “Reality: The Ultimate Mythology” lecture, Toronto SpecFic Colloquium
Taral Wayne, Canadian Fanzine Fanac Awards art

James Bacon: C2E2 Outreach Ready

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Outreach at C2E2

By James Bacon: With support from Baen, Tor, Penguin as well as fans from as far afield as Arizona, California and Boston, the Science Fiction Outreach Project had a massive boost from Midwest fans and now has over 5,700 books to give away!

Financial support has been amazing from within fandom and so we are all set up here at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2), for a busy weekend.

Helen Montgomery and Terrence Miltner led the charge with Sondra, Leane, Dave, Geri and myself helping and we even had time to check out the show (and I held a real Captain America shield.)

All books have a bookmark, listing websites of all the amazing supporters and we are hoping for a busy weekend.