Loscon 45 Committee Statement

The Loscon 45 committee has posted a statement on Facebook and asked File 770 to give it a signal boost:

Please be aware that the Loscon committee and LASFS Board are aware of an issue which occurred yesterday during a panel and are conducting a full investigation to ensure that all parties have been heard and then making a final decision based on that investigation. We would request that if anyone believes they have information to approach Ops in the Board Room. We will have an official resolution within 24 hours.

8 thoughts on “Loscon 45 Committee Statement

  1. That was handled well as far as I heard no rumors or nothing about it buzzing around Loscon.

  2. I’ve encountered very dissatisfied vaguebooking from what seem to be both sides of this one. Both sides sound entirely reasonable (but are not actually compatible) 🙂 .

    (But, being sufficiently vague, the things I read may have nothing to do with this incident.)

  3. David Dyer-Bennet: Both sides sound entirely reasonable (but are not actually compatible).

    That’s what I’ve gotten, too. Loscon made an extremely poor programming choice, the entirely predictable and avoidable shitstorm ensued, and each side both is legitimately-aggrieved and behaved rather badly.

  4. I’ve yet to see any specifics about this. I have some guesses about what happened based on a couple of non-specific comments people have made. It seems to have avoided going viral (so far).

  5. For those of us involved with convention programming in general, could somebody please give us a clue what in heck happened?
    (Details of a Programming Fail are very helpful if we wish to avoid repeating the Programming Fail elsewhere.)

  6. Jeff, I wasn’t there, but can offer you my understanding based on the various accounts that I’ve read, if you e-mail me at the address in the Best Editor post linked at the top of File 770.

  7. Gregory Benford’s message to LASFS:

    At the 2018 Loscon there was an incident at a panel where someone took exception to something I said in general—which that someone took to be about a third party, who was not there. Things got heated. I left the room, not wanting to continue. Apparently that someone complained to the convention chairs and they over reacted. The chair has apologized to me and I accepted it gratefully. He and his co-chair were probably trying to do the right thing in these over-heated times. We all are, I trust. I have been attending Loscon since it began, and my first LASFS meeting was in 1963. I respect these enormously.

    People were upset by the way the chairs acted. Many later came up to me to say they were disturbed over it. They were more upset than I was. Since then, I’ve received vastly many emails, calls, Facebook posts, the lot. It’s exhausting. Things are fine with me now. I’m not upset. And I hope people will keep cooler heads in the future.

    I want to especially thank Craig Miller, John Hertz, Matthew Tepper, Harry Turtledove, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, John DeChancie, Gordon van Gelder and Michelle Pincus for their help in dealing with this.

    At risk of being too professorial, I recommend reading

    https://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/

    Gregory Benford

  8. Pingback: Loscon 45 Incident: What Happened, and the Committee’s Update | File 770

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