(1) ALTERNATIVE FUTURISM AT UCR. Despite everything else that’s happened to sf studies there, the sun still rose over Riverside this morning and the University of California Riverside announced new events in its continuing Alternative Futurisms Series. The series is funded by a $175,000 Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Authors Daniel José Older and Walter Mosley will speak on Wednesday, Feb. 3, followed on March 3 by a panel of award-winning authors discussing the expectations of science fiction and fantasy produced by Caribbean writers….
“Throughout 2015-2016, the Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms is helping to build bridges amongst the various zones of scholarship and creation in people-of-color futurisms and fantastical narratives,” said Nalo Hopkinson, co-organizer of the yearlong seminar, a professor of creative writing and an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. “Following a successful fall quarter, which included a conference, film screenings and panel discussions, the winter quarter is focusing on creators of people-of-color science fiction and fantasy.”
… “The Sawyer Seminar has brought together faculty, students and the larger community around the important question of imagining a diverse future,” said Milagros Peña, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). “I am proud of CHASS’s continuing commitment to science fiction studies.”
Events scheduled this month and in the spring include:
Thursday, March 3, 3:30 p.m. Interdisciplinary 1113 – Panel discussion on Caribbean science fiction and fantasy. Panelists are: with Karen Lord, an award-winning Barbadian author (“Redemption in Indigo,” “The Best of All Possible Worlds”) and research consultant; Karin Lowachee, an award-winning author (“Warchild,” “Cagebird”) who was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic; Nalo Hopkinson, award-winning author (“Midnight Robber,” “Falling in Love With Hominids”) who was born in Jamaica and teaches creative writing at UCR with a focus on the literatures of the fantastic such as science fiction, fantasy and magical realism; and Tobias Buckell, a best-selling author who grew up in Grenada and whose work (the “Xenowealth” series, “Hurricane Fever”) has been nominated for numerous awards.
Monday, April 11, 4 p.m. (location tbd) – Readings by Ted Chiang, whose work (“Tower of Babylon,” “Exhalation,” “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”) has won numerous awards; and Charles Yu, whose debut novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” was a runner-up for the Campbell Memorial Award.
(2) EARTHSEA OF GREEN. The Kickstarter appeal for Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin raised its target amount of $80,000 on the very first day. A total of $83,268 has been pledged by 1,164 backers as of this writing.
(3) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day’s daily slate revelation was “Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Fan Artist”, with picks Karezoid, rgus, Matthew Callahan, Disse86, and Darkcloud013.
(4) DAY VERSUS DAVIDSON. Vox Day also reacted to Steve Davidson’s attempt to get Andy Weir to repudiate slates: “SJW attempts to block Weir nomination”.
As for why I did not recommend Mr. Weir as Best New Writer last year, it was for a very simple and straightforward reason. I had not read his novel. Unlike so many of the SJWs, I do not recommend novels I have not read, writers whose books I have not read, or artists whose work I have not seen. Those who have not brought their works to my attention have only themselves, and their publishers to blame, if I remain unfamiliar with them. I am but a mere superintelligence, I am not omniscient.
It is perhaps worth noting, again, that I do not care in the least what a writer or an artist happens to think about being recommended; die Gedanken sind frei. People can recuse themselves, publicly repudiate, or virtue-signal, or perform interpretive dance to express the depth of their feelings about Rabid Puppies. It makes no difference to me.
That being said, it appears Marc Miller is not eligible for Best New Writer despite having published his debut novel in 2015. I shall have to revisit that category at a later date.
Although it really doesn’t have any implications for the current discussion, it’s an interesting bit of trivia that Bryan Thomas Schmidt, who was on both the Sad and Rabid slates last year as a short fiction editor, was the person who edited Weir’s novel The Martian.
(5) BIGGER ISSUE. David J. Peterson argues that Puppy drama is overshadowing a really important issue – the lack of a YA Hugo.
No, to my mind the real injustice in the Hugo Awards is the lack of a separate award for YA fiction. More than anywhere else, YA is drawing new readers to science-fiction and fantasy. Yes, right now HBO’s Game of Thrones is huge, and it’s based on a very adult series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, but beyond, what else is big—and I mean big big—in SFF? A few series come to mind: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments. I’m sure you can think of others (oh, duh, Twilight, whatever you think of it). All of these are very successful YA series (all by female authors, incidentally), and all of them have been made into movies that range from moderately successful, to wildly, outrageously successful. Generally, though, unless it’s world-shatteringly successful, YA novels don’t stand a chance of being nominated for a Hugo, let alone winning (of all the books listed above, only two were nominated for best novel—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—with the latter winning)….
Writing YA fiction is a different endeavor than writing adult fiction. There are different rules in play; a different audience to consider. It’s a different approach altogether. Different. Not better. Not worse. But different. Think of your favorite YA novel and your favorite adult novel (two that jump to mind immediately for me are Matilda and The Great Gatsby). Can you rank one over the other? I can’t. It’s not because I can’t decide which one is better: It’s because they’re not even playing by the same rules….
And that’s my point with YA and the Hugos. YA is underrepresented, but it’s not because readers are ignoring it or anything like that: It’s because it’s competing in a category it shouldn’t be. Right now, enormous YA works are grabbing new readers by the truckload and essentially delivering them into SFF fandom, but they don’t have a seat at the table. This is an issue that has been raised before, but I think the whole Sad Puppy thing has really shoved it to the side, and that, to me, is a real shame.
(6) SEEKS LOVE. Meantime, James Troughton just cuts to the chase —
Can everyone vote for me so I win a Hugo award ? I promise I'll write more 'n' better 'n' more next year if you do? THANKS. #HugoAwards
— James Troughton (@JRTroughton) February 1, 2016
(7) FINDS LOVE. Congratulations Laura Resnick on the film option offered on one of your romance novels!
The deposit has cleared, which means it’s time to announce: I’ve been offered a film option deal for my romance novel, FALLEN FROM GRACE. This means I’ve licensed the right for a filmmaker to apply for development money from (of all things) the National Film Board in South Africa (where the story would be relocated and the movie made, if it’s made). It’s a multi-stage process and may never get beyond this point (or may never get beyond the next point, “development,” etc.), but I’m still excited. I’ve had an initial approach 2-3 times before about film adaptations (though not for this book), but no one has ever before pursued it beyond the initial “are these rights available?”
(8) BLUE TWO. The New Zealand Herald reports “First Avatar sequel to start shooting in NZ this April”.
The follow-up to the blockbuster hit Avatar will start production in New Zealand this year.
Director James Cameron is set to start filming the first of three Avatar sequels in April, which are scheduled to be released one year after the other.
The first sequel was supposed to come out in cinemas later this year, but delays have forced the release date to the end of 2017.
According to My Entertainment World, the film will start shooting in California’s Manhattan Beach and New Zealand.
The website also reveals the premise for the film, saying “Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) permanently transfers his consciousness to his Na’vi avatar and begins a new life with Princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) after they defeat the human colonisers.”
(9) DRAWERS IN A MANUSCRIPT. M. Harold Page recommends a book about period costumes at Black Gate: “Pulp-era Gumshoes and Queen Victoria’s Underwear: Stitches in Time: The Story of the Clothes We Wear by Lucy Addlington”.
It puts us in the shoes (and unmentionables) of the people we read about — the Pulp-era gumshoes and flappers, the Victorian Steam Punk inventors, the swashbuckling musketeers. They all feel a bit more real when we know how they dress in the morning, how they manage the call of nature, what fashion bloopers they worry about, how their clothes force them to walk or sit.
It also helps us decode some of the nuances. For example, men’s shirts were actually regarded as underwear until well past the Victorian period. If you took off your jacket, you’d immediately don a dressing gown. To be in your shirtsleeves was to be not entirely decent. The color of your shirt reflected your class and… and it’s a rabbit hole of nuance and snobbery. You just have to read it.
(10) X-FILES. If you’re in the market for a spoiler-filled recap of the latest X-Files episode, click Mashable’s “’The X-Files’ Episode 3 was a silly hour of TV that couldn’t have been better”.
(11) TOO MUCH LAVA. Open Culture today highlighted this eight-minute animation of the destruction of Pompeii from 2013. Well worth the eight minutes.
A good disaster story never fails to fascinate — and, given that it actually happened, the story of Pompeii especially so. Buried and thus frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the ancient Roman town of 11,000 has provided an object of great historical interest ever since its rediscovery in 1599. Baths, houses, tools and other possessions (including plenty of wine bottles), frescoes, graffiti, an ampitheater, an aqueduct, the “Villa of the Mysteries“: Pompeii has it all, as far as the stuff of first-century Roman life goes.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 commenter of the day IanP.]
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That’s all completely true, but if the Hugo voters don’t read “YA”, aren’t the target demographic, and the work he wants considering is work that isn’t “appealing to a large portion of adult readers”, then what exactly would be the point of the award?
Where does the idea that Hugo voters don’t read YA come from? I know many people who regularly attend Worldcon who read a fair amount of YA on a regular basis.
I’ll blog this myself, by and by
Or post it up on some social fence:
Two threads diverged in a scroll, and I
Went for the one with a comment count high,
From whence came the rancor and pestilence.
Chip Hitchcock: I think it will have to be ‘voters decide’. Now, that would cause problems which don’t arise in other cases, because deciding something was YA would actually disqualify it from other awards, as deciding something was science-fictional, or fannish, or related, wouldn’t. But as I understand it, part of the point of making it Not A Hugo is to overcome that problem; on that basis a thing could be eligible for this award and also for the regular Hugo.
(Though that’s another reason why I would prefer a Youth award to a YA award; it’s bad enough policing the border between YA and adult, without having to police the border between YA and children’s as well. The fact that you mention Harry Potter as a prime example of YA is evidence of this; in the UK, at least, it’s actually sold as Older Children’s. Grump, grump.)
So, ah, Mothership Zeta #2 is out, and there is a story in it (alas, not one of the free ones) by one T. Kingfisher called “The Thing With Bob And The Narwhal” that some Filers may recognize the origins of.
You know Bob…Marlene’s boy, not the Reverend.
Personally, I’d like to see actual fan art, in its traditional sense, get one last hurrah at some point.
On the YA Not-a-Hugo thing, I think that we should totally have one. I think that if we played things right, it could even serve as an “entry point” into Hugo voting for younger fans, which is something that we’re doing a bad job of encouraging.
Also on the note of encouraging young people to get involved, I’ve noticed that Worldcon committees are still doing a bad job of making known the fact that if you have children under 16 who want to vote for the Hugos can get them a Young Adult membership with voting rights…
Yes, but Beale has a mailing list of idiots.
He could tell people to register for Worldcon while registration was open, and publish his slate later
“Where does the idea that Hugo voters don’t read YA come from? ”
From the article linked, which uses as one of its main arguments that the reason YA books aren’t winning Best Novel is because Hugo voters aren’t reading them and aren’t the target audience.
I don’t know if that’s actually the case — I suspect it isn’t — but it’s the argument that was used in that piece, and what I was responding to.
I’m certainly not saying that there are no good arguments for a YA Hugo, just that that piece didn’t present them, and in fact presented arguments which seem to me arguments *against* the proposal it was trying to advance.
Aren’t most WSFS members Americans? And aren’t about 27% of Americans unhinged? So of, say, 1600 members, it would be reasonable to expect 400 to be wingnuts. I don’t see a solution for that.
(Actually, that 27% only counts the right wing head cases. How many moonbats are running around in the US is unclear, but I feel confident there has to be at least a dozen)
I seem to recall Beale bragging about his mailing list at the time. We have no proof whatsoever those were all longtime existing WSFS members, and a lot of evidence most of ’em weren’t.
Part of me is suspects that a significant portion of Day’s “mailing list” are filthy EssJayDubya’s looking for a cheap source of entertainment.
Another part of me is convinced that this is so.
@Snowcrash: Tran Nguyen, Sam Burley, and Antonio Caparo have all sold pro work in the past; I’ve found 2015 sales for Caparo, the others not yet found, but I bet they have them. As for Xiao Ran, he does concept art for film & game companies — is that pro? I think so.
Although only about 10% of SFWAn voted for Vox Day, so maybe estimates of the US crazification factor are high.
I wanted to add but missed the edit window that yes, Rob Ford’s career suggests the Canadian crazification factor is non-zero.
Yes, but Beale has a mailing list of idiots.
And the fact that we know this is an indication that despite his protestations otherwise, Beale desperately cares about what other people think of him. He craves attention, and as a result, broadcasts even feeble “accomplishments” like having a mailing list to the world.
RuddyMarsupial: Dare one hope that the redoubtable T Kingfisher will have another story collection out sometime in the near future? Or even the far future?
(1) ALTERNATIVE FUTURISM AT UCR. Hey, Karen Lord is going to be at UCR, which is ~3hrs away! On a workday. Hey, boss! I am taking a little vacation time…
Considering I’ve been trying to find out which convention she’ll be appearing at next so I can gush at her about Best of All Possible Worlds (and Galaxy Game), a vacation day and a tank of gas is much cheaper.
Anyone else planning to go?
So far my two candidates for Fan Artist are Jason Porath, creator of Rejected Princesses, and Christopher Jones who has done art for CONvergence for ages: here are his 2015 GOH badges.
@RedWombat
What evidence would that be? It defies belief that he secretly asked people to join and no one leaked it. Why would he bother? He’s not ashamed of what he’s doing.
@redwombat
I was reading Mothership Zeta on the train this morning, in fact. My review of your story is: three badly-stifled chuckles, and two embarrassingly-loud guffaws that got me funny looks.
It’s a good issue, even better than the first one.
Well, a lot of them had no idea how the whole process worked, for one thing–how many cries of “I had no idea you could join for 40$?” did we hear? (Which is also said amongst non-Pups, obviously–I said it myself in years past–but not a thing that would be said by long-time members.)
It’s not something we’re going to be able to prove conclusively, but I have seeeeerious doubts that somehow Day tapped into a previously unknown vein of people who hate the Hugos and want to burn it down …by participating year after year.
My guess is that he was getting nominations primarily from people who had joined specifically to vote for his novella thingy the year before, plus people on his mailing list who he asked to join in advance of nominations. And I, for one, am pretty comfortable saying people who joined to vote specifically for Day are not some kind of long-established wedge within Worldcon fandom.
@Andrew M.
Agreed! Worldcon members are a subset of genre fans and I haven’t necessarily found indications that any of the proposed additions to the awards are great interests of that subset. If there’s a groundswell in favor, changes will happen.
It is a truth universally recognised that magazines containing works by T Kingfisher must be purchased without delay; for those on the English side of the pond it is on sale at Amazon UK for a very reasonable £2.10. I have not read Mothership Zeta 2 # as yet because I have pleurisy and it really does hurt when I laugh; I am going into hospital for IV antibiotics when they have a bed free, and I am saving it as a treat for when laughter is no longer a high-risk activity.
I too recall Beale wittering on about his mailing list; colour me exceedingly sceptical about claims that the minions were pre-existing SF fans who were simply unfortunate in never having read any of the books other fans have been arguing about since the dawn of time.
And congratulations to Laura; there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, but at least it’s in the cup…
ETA
I forgot to say how pleased I am that ‘A Darker Shade of Magic’ is getting some recognition. Sadly, when you edit the italic and other options aren’t available, just in case Rev Bob sees this.
@Follow-up to myself after timer elapsed–I’d be interested to see the number comparison between votes for Vox’s novella at Loncon 3 and slate nomination numbers, actually, if some clever number cruncher wants to poke that…
@Cally – Definitely, although the date keeps getting pushed back because I want to do a collection with all the short stories in it, and I keep selling the damn things (ow, my diamond shoes are too tight!) and then the publisher gets six months to a year of exclusivity on that story, so I have to wait again. And I like to have a new longer story to anchor a collection like that, just so people have some reason to buy the anthology, which is why I originally wrote Tomato Thief, but then Apex was like “Hey, anybody got a novelette?” and there it went.
(Which honestly is good for the story–more people will read Tomato Thief than ever read Boar and Apples, I expect, but not so good for my self-pub schedule.)
I’ve got enough stories built up that I may be able to put together something next year, though, if I can just get another new novella written…
I would avoid contain as well. It feeds into the narrative that the SP/RP are some dissenting faction against a larger organization. They are fed by this idea that there is another side for them to rail against and mobilize their followers, as opposed to a cluster of individuals who disagree with them for a wide spectrum of reason.
Just because someone is a fan of sci-fi like me doesn’t automatically make us kin. I’ve never been big on the idea of fandom as family, because it reinforces the same kind of tribal response from some people and leads to nonsense like a con-man like Beale or Correia demanding apologies for individual behaviour from people with no other tie to it.
@Gregg Hullander.
One thing that fuels my view of the puppies as a bunch of resentful man children is a certain amount of self knowledge of who I have been while getting to where I am now. I say this because, as a nerd, you may have a sent of experiences that were negative, socially, growing up. The problem that creates is that the attitudes those breed often don’t go away.
Science fiction getting more expansive, more accepting, and more diverse can come across as a threat of you have that defensiveness, and only relax it around a certain set parameters of fellow sufferers. If you are hearing “Sci fi si getting more diverse” as “the jocks and pretty people are coming to beat me again”, you will feel threat.
And there is a thriving industry of presenting oneself as a savior to those who feel threatened. Correa’s fortress mentality, and Beale’s white supremacy will appeal to those who see anyone not the right kind of white nerd as a jock coming to get them. Wright’s bombast enobles their paranoia.
We can have a fortress mentality and weird condecension towards the “normals,” because sff is our club that we get, as opposed to the one called “sport”. As long as it’s brittle, the Puppies have their audience. And I say contain, because persuasion against deep conviction is hard – look at how many people believe what Trump says.
I went and answered my own question–160 first place votes for Vox’s novelette at Loncon3.
Now, let’s be generous and say there were probably a few people who thought that Vox’s story was the best thing they ever read. Different strokes for different folks. For ease of math, let’s say it was…oh, 10%. (I think I’m being generous, frankly.)
That still leaves us with like 140-odd people who could have joined because Vox told them to, who would still have nominating rights come Sad Puppy 3. Which, since the slate power is estimated to have been–what, 200 voters?–is way over halfway there. Give ’em the extra nudge from people in the Get Correia A Hugo camp and Beale’s mailing list, and I just don’t see any reason to think this was a wedge of existing malcontents within the Worldcon community.
Ooh, can I have a go?
* thinks *
Less than one?
Stevie,
I hope your recovery is speedy.
Random question for writers in the group: Does anyone else avoid protagonist names ending in “s” purely so they can avoid the awkward possessive construction? Like for example you’d avoid the name Linus so you wouldn’t have to keep saying, “Linus’ blanket” every time you wanted to mention it.
I can sympathize with several sides of the YA Hugo discussion. But in the end I have to fall in the “slippery slope” camp. In my perception, YA SFF is not an entirely different “thing” from “SFF novels”, it’s a a particular nebulous collection of themes and reading protocols that has coalesced into a label via the interplay between readers, authors, and market forces.
I don’t buy the argument that YA SFF has an entirely different readership than the one nominating and voting for Best Novel. I know a lot of people who love “adult” SFF who also love books labeled/marketed as YA.
There are a lot of different flavors within the SFF tent. Not all of them will end up on the Hugo shortlist or winner’s circle. Certainly not in any given year. That’s a simple logistical observation. Possibly not for extended periods of time, if the flavor in question is less appreciated than enough other flavors.
One main argument for a YA Hugo category seems to be, “even truly excellent and award-worthy specimens of Flavor X have never made it onto the Hugo shortlist, therefore people must silently be categorically excluding them from their own mental model of ‘Hugo worthy’, and therefore in order to recognize these Hugo-worthy books they need their own category.” (I’m not trying to set this up as a strawman — I’m trying to synthesize a position from what I’ve read.) My response to that position (and only that position) is that there are a lot of identifiable/labeled flavors of SFF whose best works have never made it to the Hugo short lists. Sometimes this may be because people’s mental models of the category exclude them. But more often I suspect it’s because the set of people who love those particular flavors is numerically smaller in the nomination/voting pool than the sets of people who love other particular flavors. (With the understanding that these sets are vastly overlapping.)
And in the case of YA, we have solid proof that it’s not the case that the Hugo nominating/voting pool categorically excludes YA, because a YA book has won the award. Many SFF flavors that include excellent books have never had a representative there. If YA deserves its own category on the basis that YA books rarely make the general short-list, couldn’t this same argument be made about a lot of other identifiable SFF flavors?
There’s only one Best Novel Hugo every year. It can’t possibly recognize all the worthy books out there, or represent all the worthy flavors of SFF. This is why it’s a good and wonderful thing that we have an abundance of SFF awards that approach the question of worth from different angles and looking at different sets of flavors. It doesn’t make life fair–there are flavors of SFF that will be marginal in every possible award-pool they might be considered in, and that therefore may never have a fair chance at recognition for their inherent worth. But given that the Hugo Awards are de facto structured by length, it strikes me as increasing the unfairness (in one way of looking at it) by singling out one flavor for recognition and not others.
I’m idly wondering aloud how many people who voted for a RP/SP slate work did so not because they supported Puppy positions, but because they felt that they must vote for something? Or had qualms about voting No Award? Surely that would have accounted for at least a few of the votes they received.
This overlaps the YA discussion just a teence, but I was wondering if anyone had considered Victoria Aveyard for the Campbell. It is her first year of eligibility, yes? And THE RED QUEEN has gotten some notice…
@RedWombat
Excellent! That neatly matches the 165 who nominated him for Best Editor (both kinds).
The rest of the puppy nominations were much less disciplined, as you’d expect from real fans. So I think the real truth might be that Vox had a hard-core of 165 supporters who really weren’t fans at all. He then got some number of fans to join his effort at least in part–perhaps 150 to 200.
That sound about right?
I’d be interested to see the number comparison between votes for Vox’s novella at Loncon 3 and slate nomination numbers, actually, if some clever number cruncher wants to poke that…
Beale’s novelette received 161 votes in the first pass through in the 2014 Hugos. After “No Award” was eliminated, the story received another 7 votes, bringing the total up to 168.
In the 2015 Hugo nominations, the Rabid Puppy nominees who made the final ballot who were not also Sad Puppies were:
The Plural of Helen of Troy – 172 nominations
Pale Realms of Shade – 145 nominations
The Parliament of Birds and Beasts – 151 nominations
Turncoat – 162 nominations
Game of Thrones: The Mountain and the Viper – 141 nominations
Beale (Short Form Editor) – 162 nominations
Beale (Long Form Editor) – 166 nominations
Black Gate – 119 nominations
Rolf Nelson – 143 nominations
Looking at these numbers, it certainly seems possible that many of the people who voted for the Rabid Puppy slate in 2015 were people who had signed up to vote for Beale’s novelette in 2014.
Or it means he just bought himself a whole bunch of supporting memberships under assumed names. The one constant thing about this guy is that he cheats. Why do people just assume the Hugo votes for him are somehow any more legit than everything else he’s ever done? He has a lot of money and an axe to grind (and a publishing house to promote). He loves using sockpuppets, and is on a personal quest to prove that the rules don’t apply to him. The Internet makes fraud easier to accomplish than ever before—that 1989 incident with the consecutively-ordered money orders, for example, wouldn’t have been so easily discoverable in the Internet age. And again, this guy supposedly has a lot of money. Given that literally all we ever see him do is try to game the system, it seems insane to me that people just assume he’s somehow not using the former to do the latter here.
I mean, maybe those votes came from actual people? I have no hard proof either way. But I don’t understand why it’s assumed that these votes came from actual people, given that Beale clearly has the resources and inclination to try to game this.
I strongly urge anyone who supports E Pluribus Hugo to attend both the Preliminary Business Meeting and whichever other day of the Business Meeting EPH is going to be voted on.
As pointed out above, ratification of EPH is *not* assured and if WSFS members want it to pass, we’re going to have to show up and vote in person.
James Davis Nicoll is giving you serious side-eye.
Emma on February 3, 2016 at 11:05 am said:
It would take a lot of effort to sock puppet multiple memberships to nominate and vote undetected. Since someone in the past did just that (not puppy-related), WorldCons do keep an eye on that. I doubt Sasquan saw evidence of such a thing.
Beale wasn’t even on the public membership list last year. Though he may have asked for his membership to be made private, I wonder if he bought even one membership.
I agree with RedWombat that many of the Sads and most of the Rabids are not regular WSFS members. I suspect they joined, and lots of them joined individually, just to burn it all down.
Such a sad pathetic waste of money.
@Greg Hullender: Wellll…I get a little twitchy about saying that they “weren’t really fans at all.” They’re probably fans of all kinds of things, and I’m not here to police the legitimacy of other people’s fanhood. I think that just plays into the victim narratives–“They’re saying we’re not REAL fans!” And VD for all his flaws has been a writer, and there are clearly people who are into that. Being a fan of VD’s writing is as legitimate as being a fan of anyone else, as long as one isn’t being a dick about it.
Say rather that they’re VD supporters who mostly likely got involved in Worldcon specifically to support his agenda, rather than having a pre-existing involvement in the Hugos.
…that’s convoluted, so there’s probably a better way to phrase it.
(And there’s nothing inherently wrong with joining to support a specific author–people have joined to support my work!–but I hope to god they voted for a lot of other stuff too.)
BigelowT
The Red Queen
Well, I certainly noticed it, and wrote a fairly lengthy post noting that it seemed her publishers thought she would be successful, but underestimated just how popular it would be. The second novel is coming out in hardback, which pushes the price up quite a bit, and there are various odds and ends as e-texts to capitalise on the popularity of the novel.
I think a Campbell nomination would be very reasonable; she has created a remarkable world which stands out from the crowd. She also passes the Stevie Test: do I remember the plot and characters a few weeks/months after reading the book? The Greatcoat books failed that test, but Victoria Aveyard succeeded.
Soon Lee
Thank you. So do I.
@John Seavy:
Well, I can give a linguist’s answer if not a writer’s. The form “Linus’s” is correct, Although the spelling “Linus'” does have some custom to back it up, “Linus’s” is also correct and I prefer it for the following reason: There are two suffixes in English that have the form -s, the plural and the possessive. That one of them is written with an apostrophe is irrelevant; they sound the same and they are identical from a linguistic point of view. So when a word has both suffixes at the same time, they collapse to a single one pronounced /z/ and written, by convention, (e)s’. So we have “the dog”, “the dog’s collar”, “the dogs”, “the dogs’ collars”. You can convince yourself that these forms are correct by saying them out loud; you will see that “the dogs’ collars” has exactly one /z/ sound following dog, and is written with one s, no matter where the apostrophe is. Now, when a word ends in s, we simply attach the suffix to it: “buses”, “bus’s”. Again, say “the bus’s engine” out loud to see that it has a /z/ sound following the /s/; “bus’ engine” suggests only one s to be pronounced, which would not be right. Take your “Linus” example (thinking of multiple Linus dolls on a shelf). “Linus”, “Linus’s blanket”, “the Linuses”, “the Linuses’ blankets”.
I hope this helps! I agree that it might be reasonable to avoid names ending in s so as not to have to deal with this issue!
File 770 is doing a good job of publicizing awards that are specific to subgenres, subthemes, and sub-audiences of SFF: anthropomorphic (Ursa Major), romance (Galaxy), libertarian (Prometheus), etc. etc. Maybe the solution to under-recognition is not to add more categories to the Hugos to capitalize on their reputation, but to work more on building reputation for smaller awards.
@RedWombat:
<3 <3 <3 😀
You said something the other day that really resonated with me: Fear of finishing the novel in progress and having to figure out what one’s life is about now that it’s no longer about finishing the novel. That perfectly expresses how I feel once I’ve finally finished and submitted the short story in progress, and why it’s so hard to get back into the work-a-day routine after said finish-and-submit. (I am not yet up to novel-length levels of angst.) Thank you for encapsulating it so aptly.
(And may your diamond shoes be ever the right fit. 😀 )
Everything Beale does takes a lot of effort. And what evidence would there possibly be? Unless you do everything by mail, or start putting down some really unlikely membership names, the only immediately-obvious hard evidence would be in the results. In the past, my understanding is that the first sign of fraud was in the results: a bunch of people voted for something the administrators had never heard of, or a book by a guy who started a religion, etc. That triggered the investigation. And often the proof found was of the sort that, in the internet era, would not exist. That Beale got nominated in the first place would have been a red flag in past years, but the Puppy campaigns were publicized, so further investigation probably wasn’t viewed as being warranted. And the administrators seem pretty overworked as it is, so I can’t imagine they’re bothering to check bank information and addresses. Certainly there’s no way they’re actually verifying identities. (I might be wrong there! Do the administrators have strict policies in place to prevent this sort of fraud?)
I don’t know. I just find it unlikely in the extreme that Beale just so happened to have 160+ blog followers that all had forty dollars to spare to Do His Will. To downvote something on Goodreads? To harass someone on Twitter? Absolutely. But not to actually pay a not-insignificant amount of money just to benefit Beale. And since Beale supposedly has robust financial resources . . . when someone with money and a history of cheating starts getting something that would be easy to get through money and cheating, I just think it would behoove people to wonder if maybe money and cheating were, in fact, involved. (At the very least, to wonder if perhaps Beale was purchasing memberships for others and then directing their votes.)
Red Wombat wrote:
(*snaffle*) Oh, ah, sorry, did I interrupt you? You were saying something about Marlene’s boy?
Stevie wrote:
Oh Stevie I’m so sorry. Been there done that; lost 2 1/2 weeks of school. I hope you feel better soon!
I suspect “Day” did persuade others to join, rather than paying himself. He seems like the kind of person who would take extra pride in getting gullible idiots to spend money to benefit him. It would fit with his dark lord pretensions.
@TYP: “Looks like his recommendation for fan art are Tits & The Grim, Dark, Manliness of Manly Men.”
Thanks to the way that wrapped on my screen, I now demand a buddy cop movie titled “Tits & the Grim.”
Emma –
Well, you’d need different credit cards for the memberships. And different IP addresses for the voting. Preferably not all from Northern Italy.
While it is completely legitimate for many people to buy memberships on the same card and then vote via the same IP (families, room mates, etc) doing that for hundreds undetected is a chore. I think the Occam’s Razor explanation is that Beale persuaded a lot of other people to buy memberships, nominate and vote.
@ Emma
The other thing I would expect would give such an attempt away would be (I think they call it) IP addresses. A lot of votes from the same IP address is either a lot of people using the same computer or one person voting under many names. A household might reasonably have three or even four people voting but not a hundred and sixty-five or even ten. I think there are ways to spoof this, but it adds to the difficulty of the exploit.
The other issue is that 165 x 40 is $6,600, which also adds to the difficulty of the exploit. (Though it does warm the cockles of my black little heart to imagine Beale’s expression if he spent that much money to come in below No Award.)
No, I think Beale persuaded people to join for the purpose of nominating / voting for him.
@Ultragotha
I hadn’t even thought of the payment issue: good point. More than a handful of memberships bought on the same card or from the same address would also be a red flag, I expect.
@ Red Wombat and Greg Hullender: I wouldn’t say the dead elk are not real fans, but I would bet that they are primarily fans of Beale, and while some of them probably also enjoy other SFF now and then, I would expect that in the absence of Beale most of them wouldn’t bother nominating.
Confirmed.
The Golden Duck Awards are given for SFF picture books, middle grade, and YA books: http://www.goldenduckawards.org/