Soon after the 2021 Hugo Awards finalists were announced, Chris Logan Edwards asked in comments here, “How is ‘George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun’ not a violation of the DisCon III Code of Conduct?” That eye-catching phrase is attached to a Best Related Work finalist whose complete title is “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”, Natalie Luhrs (Pretty Terrible, August 2020).
The specific issue is that DisCon III disseminated this phrase on its website, in press releases, and on YouTube – and in doing so the committee itself (not Natalie Luhrs’ blog publication) violated their own Code of Conduct.
The applicable parts of DisCon III’s Code of Conduct are —
We do not tolerate harassment of convention attendees in any form. Behavior that will be considered harassment includes, but is not limited to…
Comments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave…
We require attendees to follow the CoC in online interactions with the convention (including the volunteer mailings, wiki, and other online facilities), at all convention venues and convention-related social activities.
I sent Edwards’ question to several committee members together with the request, “If your immediate thought is that the Hugo voters can trump your Code of Conduct, please explain why you think that.”
DisCon III’s decision to broadcast this phrase on their own platform means they also are committing to having it repeated over and over again in all their venues. As Elio M. García, Jr. explained in another comment here:
Websites around the world have amplified that a member of the WSFS should fuck off. Every official publication that lists the nomination is telling a member of the WSFS to fuck off. The Hugo Nominees discussion panel will have people talking about how GRRM (and Robert Silverberg) should fuck off. On the night of the ceremonies, the screen, the presenter, the sign language interpreter will be announcing to an audience of hundreds that specific members of the WSFS should fuck off.
(Garcia is webmaster of Westeros, a George R.R. Martin fan site not run by the author.)
Tonight Adam Beaton, the Worldcon’s Outreach Division Head, emailed the committee’s reply to my question:
Our response for publication is, “DisCon III does not publicly comment on potential Code of Conduct matters.”
Have a great day, Mike!
The leadership is going to find out how hard it is to administer a Code of Conduct they are unwilling to publicly account to themselves.
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Lenora Rose: Well, we do have a John C. Wright motto on the front page. There’s no denying that.
@alexvdl
That’s not remotely the answer to my question. That’s just the answer to how people want the argument resolved not what longer term changes they want in WorldCon, fandom and beyond.
Thinking about the answer to my own question I think one answer is that we need to bury John W Campbell properly. We need to bury old racist ‘grandpa’ but we need to remember he was still grandpa to a lot of people. In many ways were are all here because of him. Some will hate him all the more because of that. Because of the harm he did to them and those like them they want to be sure his values don’t persist beyond the grave to harm them even more. They want his legacy rejected to the point of watching his. ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’ line up to spit on his grave. Unfortunately those ‘children’ knew him as a real man and know that humans are never that simple. He was a helping hand that lifted them out of a world that neither valued nor understood people like us. We now know that the same hand was raised against others making the same climb and that is a horrifying knowledge. Despite that, there are people who owe him a deeply personal debt. However great and however many ‘grandpa’s’ sins may have been it is the grandchildren’s duty to see that whatever good he did may be balanced in some small way against those sins. They’ll make mistakes doing that but they aren’t trying to bring back his worldview. Give them the time and space, and if necessary the odd quiet and private word, that they need to get it right.
Lenora Rose: That was me—or at least I am one of the people who said so, and “Puppy-adjacent” is probably a reasonably distinctive phrase. Various people (not all of them confined to twitter, or Luhrs-adjacent) seem to be trying to jam this into a “two sides” framing that really doesn’t fit.
Mike Glyer:
You don’t get enough thanks for running this site. I appreciate all the indispensable work you do to collect and publish news of the sff community, whether controversial or not. You do a tremendous amount of work to try to be fair and clear. letting people’s own words tell the necessary stories.
@World Weary
Thank you for both this part of your comment, and the rest – I completely agree. The very idea of sitting in an auditorium while someone else reads the title as it stands sounds awfully miserable to me, and I would just be someone in the audience. I can only imagine how it would feel for the individual. I think simply calling it by its already extant alternate title, “The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (RageBlog Edition)”, would make me feel more comfortable as an audience member, at least, and solve the vast majority of the issues I have read. That is irrelevant to what can be done, but people have asked what harm is done to anyone aside from GRRM, so I am seconding (thirding?) @World Weary.
People keep attributing one person’s statements to everyone else in this thread, so to be clear: I have absolutely zero issues with the word fuck. If this title read “Natalie Luhrs Can Fuck Off into the Sun” then I would still find this to be abhorrent, as it forces the con and the presenters to express such a sentiment. I am not defending the 2020 ceremony. I am not saying that criticism is not valid of nomination.
And I am not part of the ‘old guard’ nor someone who frequents File 770 – I’m a fairly new, young, queer member who first attended in San Jose, and this seemed to be the place where I could discuss this with those who knew what the CoC entailed. It is quite frustrating to see people on Twitter lump any criticism of the title as being tone policing against a woman (I am one and we can say fuck and get angry all we want). It is not the use of the word fuck that I take issue issue with, nor is it the criticism of the ceremony, which again, I took issue with. I purely think that it is fucked up to make a presenter (and the con) insult someone by name in the title.
@Ingvar: Thanks for the clarification. I should have said the con needs to publish the original ballot somewhere, but there are no rules on how they publicize it on their website/videos. Anyway Kevin Standlee has gone over this in detail.
@Ash
This very thing is why I thought Jeannette Ng was so classless with her speech of a couple of years ago. Members of the family of John Campbell were invited to the convention — what was their reaction to the speech? It was nekulturny, regardless of its intrinsic value.
That doesn’t appear to be a viable option. Luhrs has said she isn’t withdrawing it, and won’t change the name.
Do you think that the admins should override her will and the will of the people that nominated her because of your (and others like you) feelings on the matter?
If Campbell didn’t want people to call him a fascist in works on the ballot and in acceptance speeches, perhaps he shouldn’t have been a fascist?
If the members of his family didn’t know he was a fascist, then it might have been a shitty way to find out about grampa, but shrugs
You very much appear to value tact and decorum over dealing with the myriad of harms that people you respect have done/are doing.
alexvdl: Do you think the Worldcon should have a Code of Conduct? If so, why?
@Mike Gleyer
Yes. To protect people with less power from being victimized and allow the Con to more easily get rid of people need to be removed for benefit of the con or its members.
@Cat Sittingstill
Just the comments on this website have been hard enough to keep up with, so I can’t speak to the larger world number of opinions. What I’ve observed on this website is two main opinions.
The title is fine the way it is.
The committee should have used the already existing alternate tile.
There has been a lot of different reasons why people feel one way or the other. I see no reason to attribute to anyone opinions they have not themselves stated.
@alexvdl, I think it would be inappropriate to arbitrarily force a name change, but the blog post always had two titles from the very beginning. I believe that it is appropriate to use the alternate title. I would also include the entire original text and links to the original blog in the packet. This would have allowed for Nathalie Luhrs to have enjoyed her nomination without this hullabaloo. I think using the alternate title would have ruffled a few feathers but not brought on the firestorm we have now. She may have been momentarily disappointed by that choice but I believe it would have protected her more than it would protect GRRM, and it wouldn’t put some innocent third party in the position of having to tell GRRM to fuck off on her behalf in front of hundreds of people.
Reading a title is not a person telling GRRM to fuck off any more than reading Rachel Bloom’s nomination was someone asking Ray Bradbury to fuck them.
@alexvdl: You want acceptable targets to be excluded from DisCon — and presumably every con’s — CoC.
Everyone’s fine with acceptable targets, until they become one.
Either a CoC protects everyone, regardless of their ethnicity/sex/sexuality/ social/economic status, or it’s pointless.
@alexvdl — I didn’t dispute the content of Ng’s speech. But the particular circumstances in which she made her point were, like I said, classless. If she felt so strongly about Campbell, the honorable thing to do would have been decline the award, saying “I’m honored by the sentiment, but I think JWC was a fascist and can’t accept an award which is named after him.”
@alexvdl
I don’t think that! I think that there isn’t a clear answer and that there are valid opinions on both sides. Mine is that it does seem to be against the CoC, but how that works with the rules for the Hugo’s is unclear to me.
Yes, Rachel Bloom had Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury – the complaint is not the swear, it is the sentiment (go away vs. fuck me), so it really doesn’t seem relevant, particularly since the subject of the title liked the song.
There was nothing dishonorable about challenging the namesake of the award in an acceptance speech, a time and place where winners often have been bold and thought provoking.
By calling into question whether winning a “Campbell” was an honor, she inspired a name change that was supported across fandom at lightning speed.
You’re complaining about one of the most laudable things that has happened during a Hugo ceremony in years.
bill:
.
Blocking everyone who are against fascism from receiving an award is a very stupid idea. Better then to use the speech to disavow fascism.
@rcade
A. We disagree.
B. “You’re complaining about . . .”. No, I’m empathizing with JWC’s family, in the context of World Weary and Ash’s statements that being called out in public when you have no realistic choice other than to suck it up and smile is a crappy place to be.
Regardless of the merits of the content Ng’s speech, or the (you say) good things that resulted, the way she did it had to have embarrassed JWC’s family. And it was highly offensive to many people who, while aware of JWC’s faults, still think that honoring his founding-father role in SF is appropriate. And it wasn’t necessary. She could have made the same points, just as effectively, by the means I suggested.
Ng and Luhrs are two examples of what seems to be a growing trend that it is not enough to have a contrary opinion — you should express it in a way that says “F you” to anyone who disagrees. That’s not good.
I have to thank you, then, for saying it despite the row it has raised. I’ve spent some time reading responses and thinking through my own feelings on the subject, and having that odd and horrible “everyone is right” emotion about it.
I do not believe my opinion will add anything useful to the conversation, but I still want to thank you, Mike, for bringing this topic forward so it could be properly examined and discussed. I also want to thank everyone who has so thoughtfully responded. It has been enlightening reading that forced me to examine some of my own preconceived notions and glib thoughts.
@bill
There is no way it would have been as effective if she declined the nomination & the award. The reason for the speed of the change is precisely because of the fact that as the winner, she had a platform which allowed her to make the case (rightly so) that an award should not honor/be named after a fascist, and because of the platform, it garnered a lot of attention and discussion. If she had written a blog post after declining the nomination, can you honestly say it would have been picked up and sparked so wide a conversation?
There was some discussion earlier in the thread about “punching up” versus “punching down.” Now that Luhrs’ work has been made a finalist by 31 to 74 people, GRRM is taking a punch from all of fandom.
See, here’s a good example of something I changed my mind about. My immediate reaction to Ng’s acceptance speech was outrage, and checking off some of the same boxes Bill is pushing here. I’ve learned from experience, however, that the sense of outrage means I have an emotional investment in the outcome, and I should think that through — the mere reaction doesn’t mean the other person is wrong.
And in fact, listening to Ada Palmer’s remarks ahead of Ng’s award my very thought was, “There’s some points the old guard won’t have any trouble shrugging off.” Ng’s explosion — very different. It didn’t just upset me, it made me think about what I wanted to defend, and decide, no, not only wasn’t Campbell defensible, I had known these things about him for 50 years, and what was I thinking? His death in the early Seventies may have made it easier to selectively remember his contribution to the Golden Age, because he wasn’t around committing new gaffes. I came away convinced Ng’s approach was the only way real change could happen. Not only that, but it had been a courageous choice.
A Short Treatise on Dangerous Canidae
While everyone is familiar with the dangerous canid known as the Sad and/or Rabid Puppy (Canis familiaris v. luctificus or v. hydrophobicus), which can be seen over here at the right of our display, it has come to our attention that some people are less aware of, and therefore more vulnerable to, attacks from the lesser-known dangerous canid known as the Winterfox (Vulpes fuliginosus Sridankaewis). While not as deadly as the Puppy, the Winterfox variety of canid – seen over here at the left of our display – also has a very painful bite and should be avoided and actively discouraged from remaining near human settlements.
Unlike the Puppy, the Winterfox is a cannibal – it is known to primarily attack members of its own species or other closely-related species that attempt to be friendly to it. The Winterfox is an extremely easily provoked animal, and a single minor wrong move may cause a formerly “friendly” Winterfox to launch a savage venomous attack at its target, and to “call out” to others of its kind to assist in the kill. The Winterfoxen will, with shocking speed, form into a group and pile on to the target, attempting to destroy it with thousands of small nasty bites, similar to the way the piranha of the Amazon (Pygocentrus nattereri) can take down prey very much larger than they are through sheer force of numbers.
While in the past Winterfoxen could usually be found in Blogostan, today they are much more easily spotted in Twitlandia, where they congregate in large numbers. Anyone considering a visit to Twitlandia is advised to avoid approaching any Winterfoxen they might see, and if approached by one, to remain extremely still until the Winterfox scents some other prey and moves away. Fortunately, Winterfoxen typically have very limited attention spans, so even a large pack is likely to run off to harry some other unfortunate victim in short order.
Under NO circumstances should Winterfoxen ever be fed! Just like the Puppy, the Winterfox, once fed, will continue to return to the place where it had its last meal, and it will bring many others of its kind with it, and then, like the Puppy, will become a recurring and worsening problem over time. Many preventable injuries, and possibly even deaths, may result.
For those with a strong stomach, a detailed account of a recent (but fortunately non-fatal) Winterfoxen attack can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4.
Twitter is where reasonable people go to be unreasonable.
The claim Campbell’s descendant was in the crowd was made by Ahrvid Engholm in his Code of Conduct complaint and gets repeated everywhere even though Engholm admitted he didn’t know if it was actually true. He just said it was “reported”:
I did some digging and found out Hammond wasn’t there. In this Facebook post where he shared a news story about the award’s renaming, he commented, “I couldn’t make the Hugo ceremony we were at the Cliffs of Moher. Probably a good thing I missed it. I didn’t find out till the after party at the Guinness storehouse.”
Even if Hammond had been there, Campbell had been dead for 48 years when Ng used her speech to sharply (and accurately) criticize him for fascist beliefs. To insist that decorum requires no rebuke a half-century after his death — because his descendants might be around — is to shield him forever.
Campbell’s long past caring. The new writers we celebrate with the award aren’t. They had a big stake in whether his name was an honor or an embarrassment. You should put a higher priority on them. Being forever known for the “Campbell” had become cringe. Ng did a service to every nominee and winner who will follow her.
Daniel Goldsmith: “JJ: The title itself is a Code-of-Conduct violation.” No. It is not. I am tired of seeing this restated continually.
Hi Daniel! I notice that you deliberately elided my full statement so that you could contradict just an excerpt of it. The fact that you felt it necessary to do that indicates to me that you knew you couldn’t legitimately contradict my actual statement.
Here’s what I actually said:
The title itself is a Code-of-Conduct violation, when it’s worded as an abusive personal attack against a Worldcon member and is being published and broadcast all over by the seated Worldcon’s committee.
Daniel Goldsmith: The title of the work existed long before the DisCon CoC was decided. It isn’t something invented to troll the organisation, the membership at large or in fact anyone at all.
No, but the nomination of it certainly is – which is what I’ve been pointing out all along.
Christian Brunschen: I am not ‘advocating’ – I am simply noting that is is reasonable.
Understandable? Yes. Reasonable? No. There is a difference.
Understandable is adults behaving badly because they’re upset.
Reasonable is adults behaving like good human beings.
Christian Brunschen: I find it highly disappointing whenever someone wants to hold the recipient of a negative experience, when they are complaining about that negative experience, to a higher standard than the person who caused the negative experience in the first place.
Who has done that?
Christian Brunschen: Sort out the person who caused the negative experience in the first place, since you evidently weren’t successful in holding them to the standard to which they should be held, instead of trying to hold others to, not even the same standard, but a higher one than you failed to uphold.
I’m not the one who failed to hold GRRM to a standard, but I’m certainly one of the people who has very vocally, publicly, and repeatedly hauled him up for his execrable behavior. What else, exactly, do you think I should have to do in order to have the right to legitimately criticize the people who fucked over this year’s Hugo ballot?
Kee: It makes it clear that calling out the problem behavior is considered much worse than the actual problem behavior.
Who has made that clear? Where?
Kee: a whole bunch of people claiming the controversy is the strongly worded critique of bad behavior rather than the bad behavior.
That isn’t what people are claiming. The controversy is people deliberately putting a work with an abusive personal attack for a title onto the Hugo ballot.
Kee: Seeing a whole bunch of people crying something close to “but calling X racist is the real racism”
No one is doing that. You’re making strawman arguments.
Kee: Calling the nomination of a criticism of bad behavior “cruel” and not the cruel behavior it called out… is distasteful.
Are you posting here without actually reading the comments first? Have you not seen how many people here have called out GRRM’s appalling behavior, in very strident terms?
Ash: I think simply calling it by its already extant alternate title, “The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (RageBlog Edition)”, would make me feel more comfortable as an audience member, at least, and solve the vast majority of the issues I have read..
alexvdl: That doesn’t appear to be a viable option. Luhrs has said she isn’t withdrawing it, and won’t change the name.
Of course it’s a viable option. The Hugo Admins and DisCon III have the ability to report the list of finalists in the way they judge appropriate, and it’s certainly within their remit to publish and broadcast an alternate title instead of an abusive personal attack.
alexvdl: Do you think that the admins should override her will and the will of the people that nominated her because of your (and others like you) feelings on the matter?
I think that DisCon III and the Hugo Admins should override what she and the nominators want and use the alternate title, because otherwise they’ll be publishing and broadcasting an abusive personal attack.
If the author and the nominators aren’t fine with that, then what it really says is that what’s important to them is the abusive personal attack in the title, and not the content of the actual essay itself.
Maytree: A Short Treatise on Dangerous Canidae
Yes, it’s sad but entirely predictable that the Requires Hate apologists and sockpuppets have once again crawled out of the woodwork to try to take advantage of this controversy to ret-con her years of harassment and abuse. 😐
JJ says Are you posting here without actually reading the comments first? Have you not seen how many people here have called out GRRM’s appalling behavior, in very strident terms?
I’ve condemned GRRM’s appalling behavior many, many times. And now I’m equally strident in saying that this title is absolutely unnecessary. It serves no purpose what-so-ever and should not be used. If another swear word was used in a nominated title, say the B word, against a female writer, would the Hugo administration take the same stance? I think not. It is this selective use of the rules that I’m condemning them for.
@StefanB.
As we all know, Hugo reading is a lot of work. Most people focus on the fiction categories first and check out Best Related Work and the fan categories, when they get around to it.
The problem with Best Related Work is that it has become a grab bag of different things, ranging from short blog posts via documentaries and virtual cons to non-fiction books. A lot of people have read Natalie Luhrs’ post because of the controversy or because of the title or because they originally read it back in August 2020. Quite a few people have probably also watched a few panels at FIYAHCON or CoNZealand Fringe. However, quite a few Hugo voters will never get around to reading Lynell George’s book about Octavia Butler or Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf translation. And when it comes to voting, they’ll remember that angry blog post and how they agreed with Natalie Luhrs or were outraged on her behalf and will vote for it. If they’re read Lynell George’s book or the Beowulf translation, they might well have decided that those works have more merit than a single angry blogpost. But they never read them.
In 2019, the non-fiction book “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction” by Alec Nevala-Lee was on the Best Related Work ballot, which made the same point that Jeannette Ng made on stage during the ceremony, but on more than 300 pages, with quotes, etc… And Alec Nevala-Lee’s book not only lost to AO3, it finished dead last. because a lot of Hugo voters never even bothered to read it.
No, I don’t. That’s a thing that you made up. /adds to the strawman counter
She should’ve given up an incredibly prestigious award that could increase her marketability and ability to put food on her table because some dead dude was a fascist? She should have let Campbell continue to victimize people?
Hard pass.
It’s sorta telling that you sympathize with a single dude that wasn’t even at the ceremony, instead of the hundreds of people that Campbell personally insulted, and the millions that his fascist ideology looked down on.
Right. I didn’t say anything about the swear. I said that a presenter reading the title “Fuck me, Ray Bradbury” didn’t mean that the presenter was asking for Ray Bradbury to fuck them, anymore than Dr. Malka Older was telling George R.R. Martin to fuck off into the sun when she read the title of Luhrs’s post during the nomination ceremony.
She talks about it in this thread. https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1382980787692310531?s=20
@rcade , @Hampus Eckerman, @avilyn, @Mike Glyer: +1 to your comments on “Ng shouldn’t have accepted the award”
rolls eyes George is not taking a punch. He is facing criticism for his punching fandom in the face with his behavior.
Nah, it says that they wanted to be afforded the same privileges as any other nominee, i.e. that their work is referred to by the name that they gave it.
Well, shoot, if you made up a scenario, decided how the admins would respond to it, and then condemned them for it, does anyone else even need to be part of this fantasy scenario?
@Cora Buhlert
Yep, and for this reason I don’t find it as easy as some here do to dismiss the possibility, probability, that this will win. Hugo voters of the past few years have demonstrated they are going to nominate and vote for the easiest-access material — just see the short story ballot for the slate of freely available Uncanny/Tor stories (and nary a whisper from the likes of F&SF or Asimov’s, etc.), or the
Tor.comnovella ballot.So for those (like me) who don’t want it to win, No Award it because many people will be unlikely to even bother with Beowulf or A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, and ranking it at all will boost it.
And yet, I don’t even know what I would want to vote for in this year’s BRW category because it’s such a mess of apples and oranges. I didn’t attend any conventions, fringe or otherwise, BRW is a really weird place for translations to end up (I am still very much on the “we need a Best Translated Work” wagon), and we’re not guaranteed to get access to Beowulf or AHoE,AHoS in the Hugo voter packet.
In regards to ConZealand Fringe, anyway, Nerds of a Feather has been publishing transcripts of the various panels. Which is not the same as attending a panel, live or virtually, but it is something
I read some of the Twitter threads, and my main takeaway is that I was quite mistaken about people’s standards of civility. Their argument is essentially “the ends justify the means”.
JJ on April 16, 2021 at 5:39 pm said:
Indeed – but I think your’e wrong about where that difference lies.
The unhappy caninines were understandable but unreasonable.
The essay in response to GRRM’s disrespectful and, frankly, shameful hosting of the Hugo awards is perfectly reasonable, including the fact that it shows the damage he did and the strong anger that he engendered by his behaviour – and yes, including the title.
No – ‘reasonable’ is a much lower bar than ‘good’.
And interestingly enough, precisely that “but your response is not reasonable” is often levied against people on the receiving on the end of abuse, when they finally can no longer “be quiet and accept the abuse” and keep a polite facade on things, and instead show their pain, their anger, and raise their voice even a little bit – they are told that surely people would listen to their complaints if only they raised them in a reasonable, respectful manner … completely ignoring that the problem includes the fact that people are not listening when the abuse recipients have raised such things in a more “reasonable” manner.
This use of “reasonable” to try to silence complaints is extremely common, though it is often couched in different terms – complaining women are called “hysterical”, people of color are lumped into a racist “angry black person” stereotype – even when their complaints are perfectly accurate.
All of those are really examples of demanding that the complaining person raise their complaint “correctly” or “be reasonable” or “civil” or “polite” – but which generally means “raise it only in such a way that we can pretend to care but actually ignore it”.
Even when those complaints, and the way in which they are raised, are in fact actually perfectly reasonable – as is the case here: both the essay calling out GRRM’s behaviour and how it is being raised by voting the essay onto the Hugo ballot are perfectly reasonable.
Also compare this with Jeanette Ng’s Astounding acceptance speech. There are people who felt that it was “unreasonable” of her to “hijack” the acceptance speech to make a statement about Campbell (whose name was still on the award at the time) – but on the contrary, I found, and find, it perfectly reasonable to raise the issue in her acceptance speech – especially because it was perfectly on topic to talk about the award in the context of the award.
And it is much the same here.
GRRM’s misbehaviour happened within the Hugo awards. The immediate response, the essay, was perfectly reasonable, including the title, because he honestly deserved exactly that kind of pushback against his choices and behaviour in the presentation. And re-raising the issue in the context of the very next available Hugo awards is again still perfectly reasonable. It’s not ‘nice’ perhaps, but it is perfectly reasonable.
You are. GRRM was being disrespectful and very much neither ‘nice’ nor ‘good’ and absolutely not ‘perfect’. Yet you are demanding that others refrain from criticism against GRRM unless that criticism passes a much higher bar than GRRM’s presentation did in the first place.
You are perfectly allowed to criticise people – but in this case, you’re wrong about some of the specifics of your criticism.
The people who voted the essay onto the Hugo ballot have not “fucked over” anything – all of this still flows from what GRRM did. GRRM ‘fucked over’ a large swathe of fans, authors, Hugo finalists! And nothing in the push-back, nothing that the people who voted the essay onto the ballot have done is unreasonable.
Again, it may not be ‘perfect’ or ‘good’, but it is eminently reasonable – and it may even be necessary for something like the criticism against GRRM’s behaviour to be a bit loud and unexpected so that it becomes impossible to ignore; much like Jeannette Ng’s Astounding acceptance speech became impossible to ignore, and finally led to an actual change regarding Campbell.
Christian Brunschen: The people who voted the essay onto the Hugo ballot have not “fucked over” anything
Of course they have. You can make your justifications as to why you think it was okay that they did this – but you do not get to negate the effect that their actions have had on others, or pretend that those effects do not exist.
You refer to “the recipient of a negative experience”. Well, I’m “the recipient of a negative experience”. I had only gotten halfway through the 2020 Hugo Ceremony, when I got too upset and had to turn it off. I only ended up watching the rest of the ceremony later, after I had calmed down, in the When the Toastmaster Talks Less version.
Then I was the recipient of yet another “negative experience,” when this year’s Hugo Awards ballot was announced with an abusive personal attack as the title of one of the entries – in a year when, after 3 years of absolute shit, I was looking for a little joy which they destroyed with their petty act of revenge.
So why are my feelings irrelevant? Why are the feelings of the people who nominated the work with the abusive personal attack as the title prioritized, while mine are dismissed as invalid? Why are their feelings the only ones which are important here?
Christian Brunschen: you are demanding that others refrain from criticism against GRRM unless that criticism passes a much higher bar than GRRM’s presentation did in the first place
I have done no such thing. I don’t think anyone in this thread has been a harsher critic of GRRM than I have, and I have not demanded that anyone refrain from criticism of him.
@Avilyn
@Mike Glyer
You both may be right. But other familiar literary awards like the Tiptree and Laura Ingalls Wilder awards changed their names without such ungraciousness from recipients, as (further from the literary field) did the ALA’s Melvin Dewey Medal, South Carolina’s Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts, the NYC Fire Dept.’s James Gordon Bennett Medal, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Flexner Award, and the Boy Scouts of America’s William T. Hornaday Award. MLB has removed Kennesaw Mountain Landis’s name from the NL and AL MVP awards, and the Baseball Hall of Fame has changed the name of the Spink Award for baseball writing. All of these awards were renamed because of racist/sexist attitudes held by the previous namesakes. Clearly society is actively reexamining how the names of awards should be used to honor people. I’d think the SF community would not be in the rear guard of such a reexamination, and I fully expect it would have done so with respect to Campbell no matter what Ng said. (And I don’t think that SF is finished — I’m surprised that no one has seriously examined Gernsback’s attitudes beyond his tightfistedness with money. As an editor and publisher, he made racist, sexist, anti-semitic and homophobic choices over the length of his career.)
And the wheels were already turning to rename the Campbell Award. Trevor Quachri has said that he realized the name needed to change when he read an early draft of Nevala-Lee’s book.
So maybe Ng’s speech was critical to what happened. But I seriously doubt it.
@rcade
John Campbell Hammond wasn’t just “reported” to be at the convention, he picked up a retro-Hugo award on behalf of his grandfather on the previous Thursday night. Even if he did happen to be sightseeing when Ng made her speech, he and his daughter were fellow members of the convention, and Ng cannot have made her speech without the expectation that it would have been personally embarrassing and unwelcoming to them. She trashed a fellow awardee as a person, rather than calling out his actions, without regard to how it would affect his family and friends.
@alexvdl
I’m saying that if principle is important, then yes, giving up the plaque is the right thing to do – history will still record the honor. And if you are saying that it’s okay to be complicit in an award named after a fascist when there’s money involved, then you aren’t doing yourself or her any favors.
Where did I sympathize with Campbell? (see: strawman) I’ve been very clear that my sympathy lies with those who respected him for the important role he held in the development of SF, and with his family and friends who attended the convention. They came to enjoy a ceremony which honored new writers in JWC’s name, and which was to have honored JWC. Instead, Ng dropped a turd in the punchbowl.
@Kalin
Since reader packets became a thing, has anyone won a Hugo who did not make their work available for free to voters? Is doing so now a necessary step on the path to winning?
Because a few people have mentioned the availability of Headley’s Beowulf online, there’s an audio version available here:
https://grandjournal.net/bro-this-is-the-beowulf-weve-been-waiting-for
That doesn’t include her excellent introduction, although excerpt linked from the File 770 post on where to find nominees online for free contains most of the introduction.
Doug: Because a few people have mentioned the availability of Headley’s Beowulf online, there’s an audio version available here
Wow, what a great resource, Doug! And look at that line-up of readers!
Thanks so much for posting that. I’ve linked to it in the Where To Find The 2021 Hugo Award Finalists For Free Online post.
John Campbell was a fascist. That turd was already in the SF/F punch bowl.
Ng pointed at the turd in the punch bowl in front of God and Fandom, and said “we should stop drinking this punch.”
You seem to think Fandom should just ladle their drinks from the other side of the bowl.
bill disclaims Instead, Ng dropped a turd in the punchbowl.
No, she stated rather that the emperor had no clothes. Campbell was a rather nasty man whose politics should have been called to account long before she made her most necessary Speech.
They don’t need sympathy. No one is stopping them from continuing to feel that way about him.
Neither John W. Campbell nor anyone else deserves honor, deference and respect because of what they meant to other people at other times. Honor isn’t a perpetual entitlement.
Calling it the Campbell said to the world “we value John W. Campbell today.” All Jeannette Ng did was compel the Worldcon community to answer the question “do we really?” Our answer was a resounding “hell no.”
Okay, JJ, you keep insisting that tangible harms were committed by 2 – 5% of the entire polity of WorldCon because they nominated a work you don’t like. What, exactly, is the obviously outstanding Best Related Work that got kept off the ballot and why do you think it should be there? Because that would be a real, tangible harm, not some nebulous “fucking over hundreds of people” because you don’t like a single nominated work.
For myself, I bought a supporting membership this year not to vote for any work in particular, but because I want to nominate a number of things next year, some of which might make the ballot, some of which probably won’t — and if they don’t, I won’t feel myself ill-used by the nomination process. Nor will I feel the need to construct elaborate conspiracy theories about people scheming to make political statements with their nominations, nor will I impugn the character of people whose tastes differ from my own — though I’m honestly continuously astonished that, living as we are in a new Golden Age of science fiction, fantasy and horror podcasts, how few of them get Hugo nods.
All I know and can say about this, again as someone who is pretty new to this fandom, is that I think only 3 Best Related Work nominations are going on my ballot above No Award (Bronycon (which was super interesting and well-done for someone who has no knowledge of this world), Beowolf (which I have never read, but picked up a copy of this translation yesterday and am excited to check it out), and the Butler book). And if that’s all I can do, that’s all I will do. But I really don’t like the full Luhrs blog title and think it is disrepectful to the Hugo awards as a whole. As a bystander and new-ish Hugo voter, it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth Which is not my trying to ignore the issues the blog post brings up, which are valid. And, again, it is just the title I have a problem with, people can nominate whatever they want or think is worthy.
@Nagaina: I won’t presume to speak for JJ, but I’d rather see this.
It’s about dealing with harm committed against a 2021 Hugo finalist, who is neither safely dead nor successful enough to disregard as a human being. It’s beautifully written and empathetic to most everyone I can see in it. It’s a Good Example. I’d like more of them.
@Christian Brunschen
Of course that’s true but you’ve used some literary slight of hand here. There was no “abuse” from George in the first place. I’ve seen people accuse him of being disrespectful but I haven’t seen anyone accuse him of abuse.
As people have repeated over and over again he has already received an extensive kicking over the ceremony, often from the people here that you are arguing against. You won get over it!
There’s no courage in attacking him now. It’s more like the English noble in the Wars of the Roses who kept his cavalry on the hill overlooking the battle in order to lead a ‘gallant’ charge once it was clear who had won.
What some of us are disgusted by is someone now figuratively hacking at the remaining body and desecrating it when there is no conceivable remaining benefit from such behaviour.
The article has been nominated in a category that has become one for works of critical scholarship. It’s this a work of critical scholarship? For those who haven’t read it we can wait for a moment. It clearly isn’t. If we are honest it is totally obvious what it is.
It’s a work of harassment.
Did it’s nominators nominate it as a work of scholarship? Does anyone think that is even remotely possible?
They nominated it as an act of harassment.
From there all the questions about applicability of the CoC arise naturally.
To be fair while I think it is important to be brutally honest about what is actually happening let’s continue to try to look at things more honestly and try to understand what genuine motivations there are on the opposing side. I do think that from the point of view of the author this is all justified. She isn’t lying about anything. She genuinely believes that George is a malevolent influence on fandom who must be driven out. ing contrastI believe that George is the model of what an SF Fan and Pro should be, with the odd human lapse.
Outside these obviously inaccurate mental models somewhere is the real person with their own strengths, faults and vulnerabilities. Justice or praise for the imagined version can easily be harassment or unearned deification for the real one.
The real George isn’t remotely any kind of uniquely evil monster and, in fairness, neither is the author of the article.
Unfortunately, despite our protestations, all of us absolutely love acts of harassment. Our brains are hard wired to give us a rush of stimulating drugs when we see it. Our tortured souls find relief when we carry it out against those we think are torturing us. Put that together with a cause we see as just and, from both sides, we can easily find ourselves in current all too common internet feuds.
Growing up in a small village I know how hugely damaging this can be. That’s one reason I go apeshit when I see it. i also know it’s something that is addictive in ways far beyond heroin, even to me.
The author obviously felt that she was being abused by what happened at the Hugo ceremony. I don’t think that’s true but I accept it is true for her. Writing something vitriolic may give some momentary relief for that which we may understand and even be sympathetic to. That doesn’t make it a good thing and it is no act of friendship to the author to pretend that it is.
This isn’t a situation that anybody is going to win. It’s damaging for George it’s damaging for the author and it’s damaging for the Hugos. It obviously arises from real feelings of hurt and injustice but we need to find a way to break this damaging cycle.