Pixel Scroll 9/5/19 You Don’t Scroll On Pixelman’s Cape, You Don’t File In The Wind

(1) DID AMAZON CHEAT? The American Booksellers Association is on the warpath: “ABA Condemns Amazon for Breaking ‘Testaments’ Embargo”.

The fallout from Amazon violating Penguin Random House’s September 10 embargo of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood continues to roil the industry.

Late yesterday, the American Booksellers Association released a strongly worded statement condemning Amazon. The ABA disclosed that it had contacted PRH “to express our strong disappointment regarding this flagrant violation of the agreed protocol in releasing this book to the public.”

In a statement released to PW late Thursday morning, Amazon acknowledged it had unintentionally shipped some books ahead of the sale date. “Due to a technical error a small number of customers were inadvertently sent copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments,” the statement said. “We apologize for this error; we value our relationship with authors, agents, and publishers, and regret the difficulties this has caused them and our fellow booksellers.”

Before the broken embargo, the ABA was already working on initiatives that would put pressure on Amazon. In an organization-wide newsletter the ABA sent last week, ABA president Oren Teicher said the group is continuing its ongoing discussions with officials at the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission about looking into whether Amazon is violating antitrust laws. (ABA executives were in Washington, D.C., yesterday, when the news broke about Amazon’s violation of the PRH embargo.)

…The Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, NY, created a digital postcard that it posted on its website and on social media with the heading, “Loyal Customers and Supporters of Independent Bookstores: A Request.” In it, the store said Amazon had shipped pre-orders of The Testaments to customers a week early, in clear violation of the “legally binding” embargo that all retailers had to sign.

The store went to ask customers to “please pre-order your own copy at your local or nearby independent bookstore” or to visit a story “on Tuesday, Sept. 10, the day the book legally is on sale.” The post closed with a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, the bestselling prequel to The Testaments: “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

(2) MEANWHILE IN VIDEOLAND. The question is — “Handmaid’s Tale: Was it right to take the series beyond the book?” Warning for those who click through — Excerpt ends at point where spoilers start.

The second series of the Handmaid’s Tale came to an end on Sunday night.

Writing in iNews, Mark Butler calls the finale “a nail-biting conclusion to the season, with a controversial twist”, but Vanity Fair’s Sonia Saraiya termed the climax “a singularly frustrating end to a season that, despite its high points, often struggled to find its purpose”.

The series went beyond Margaret Atwood’s original novel – with her blessing – but how well did the show do in extending the novel beyond its intended lifecycle and how difficult is it to go beyond the book of an acclaimed author like Atwood?

“The novel ends quite ambiguously,” says Julia Raeside, who has written The Guardian’s episode-by-episode guide to series two of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Speaking to BBC News, she adds: “It’s really interesting when someone takes up the mantle of an unfinished story. If they’ve got something to say about what happens when you repress women for so long, then it’s something I welcome.”

The second series has been criticised by some for its brutal scenes, with some viewers switching off entirely due to what’s been termed by some as “needless torture porn”.

“I think the first couple of episodes were slightly misjudged,” says Raeside, “and I wonder how much brutality Atwood really agreed with.”

(3) GREAT LINES FROM SFF. Discover Sci-Fi is running a poll: “What are the best one-liners from sci-fi books?” There are 13 choices. I’d say about half of them shouldn’t even be under consideration. And it doesn’t include one of my all-time favorites, the line that opens E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman Series –

“Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other.”

I’m writing it in. So there.

(4) GAME HUGO? The Hugo Book Club Blog, in “Game Over”, casts doubt on the qualifications and capability of Worldcon members to choose a winner of a proposed Best Game Hugo. Here are some of the reasons they say the proposal should be rejected:

Ira Alexandre, who has been the driving force in arguing for a Best Game Hugo, has done their research. They looked at the amount of gaming content at Worldcons, examined the burgeoning field of interactive works, and made some significant arguments in favour of the suggested award.

But none of their work addresses the fact that gaming has never been a primary focus of Worldcon. Alexandre’s number-crunching even showed that the amount of gaming-related programming has never exceeded nine per cent of the convention — and is usually much smaller. We would suggest that the majority of Hugo voters are unlikely to have played a wide-enough and diverse-enough range of games and interactive experiences to make adequate nominations in a category dedicated to gaming. 


It’s already difficult enough for Hugo voters to get through a voting package with six works on the shortlist in 15 categories. Games and Interactive Works individually take up to 150 hours to play through – with a short time between the announcement of the shortlist and the voting deadline, it would be difficult to play through, and be able to adequately assess, even one such game.

(5) A CAT BY ANY OTHER NAME. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.]  Not sure if this is newsworthy, but a cheap laugh for others at my own expense is surely a good thing.

One of our rescue cats, Baldur, who we’ve had for about two years, came down very sick and has spent the last week at the vet’s. Recovering well, thankfully, but in the process we discovered something surprising about “him”. Tweeted it here:

In some follow-up tweets, I discussed a possible renaming for our newly-female cat:

Hope the tweets are amusing. I wouldn’t say “amused” for myself, but certainly bemused.

(6) SUPERBRAWL. Alyssa Wong has written all three issues of these Future Fight Firsts comics from Marvel.

Introduced in the Marvel Future Fight mobile game, White Fox, Luna Snow, and Crescent & Io recently made their Marvel comic book debut in War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas and now, because you demanded it, all three will have their origin stories revealed in Marvel Future Fight Firsts! Check out these gorgeous covers by In-Hyuck Lee and prepare yourselves for an up close look at these new fan-favorite characters!

Marvel Future Fight Firsts arrives in October in comic shops, on the Marvel Comics App, and on Marvel.com.

FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: WHITE FOX #1

  • Written by ALYSSA WONG
  • Art by KEVIN LIBRANDA
  • Cover by INHYUK LEE

FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: LUNA SNOW #1

  • Written by ALYSSA WONG
  • Art by GANG HYUCK LIM
  • Cover by INHYUK LEE

FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: CRESCENT AND IO

  • Written by ALYSSA WONG
  • Art by JON LAM
  • Cover by INHYUK LEE

(7) POLLY WANNA CONVERSATION? “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang in Nautilus is a short story excerpted from Chiang’s new collection Exhalation.

The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.

But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?

We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?

(8) SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY. Randall Munroe will soon be bringing us How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. His book tour started this week.

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s the world’s least useful self-help book.

It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.

With text, charts, and stick-figure illustrations, How To walks you through useless but entertaining approaches to common problems, using bad advice to explore some of the stranger and more interesting science and technology underlying the world around us.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 5, 1936 Rhae Andrece and Alyce Andrece. They played twin androids in I, Mudd, a classic Trek episode. Both appeared as policewomen in “Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club” on Batman. That’s their only genre other appearance. (Died 2009 and 2005.)
  • Born September 5, 1939 George Lazenby, 80. He is best remembered for being James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Genre wise, he also played Jor-El on Superboy and was a Bond like character named JB in the Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. film. 
  • Born September 5, 1939 Donna Anderson, 80. She was Mary Holmes in On The Beach, based on Neal Shute’s novel. She also appeared in, and I kid you not, Sinderella and the Golden Bra and Werewolves on Wheels
  • Born September 5, 1940 Raquel Welch, 79. Fantastic Voyage was her first genre film though her appearance in One Million Years B.C. with her leather bikini got her more notice. She was charming in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. She has one-offs in BewitchedSabrina the Teenage WitchThe Muppet ShowLois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanHappily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child and Mork & Mindy
  • Born September 5, 1951 Michael Keaton, 68. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! He also has the title roles of Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns. His most recent role is The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming
  • Born September 5, 1964 Stephen Greenhorn, 55. Scriptwriter who has written two episodes for Doctor Who: “The Lazarus Experiment” and “The Doctor’s Daughter”, both Tenth Doctor stories. He also wrote Marchlands, a supernatural series with Doctor Who star Alex Kingston. 
  • Born September 5, 1973 Rose McGowan, 46. Best known as Paige Matthews on Charmed. She played two different roles in the Grindhouse franchise, Cherry Darling in  Planet Terror and Pam in  Death Proof. She was Miss Kitty in Monkeybone, a very weird film indeed.

(10) MYTHBUSTING. The results of test purport to explain “Why phones that secretly listen to us are a myth”.

A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations.

The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts.

Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online.

Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.

(11) IN A SNAP, IT’S GONE. “Trolls cause shutdown of official Jeremy Renner app” – BBC has the story.

Superhero Hawkeye may have helped defeat Thanos – but trolls have proved too tough a foe for him to best.

Actor Jeremy Renner, who plays Marvel’s eagle-eyed hero, has shut down his app after it was hijacked and used to harass people.

Abuse and harassment mushroomed after trolls found a way to impersonate the actor and others on the Jeremy Renner Official app.

Renner apologised for the shutdown in a post explaining what had happened.

Identity crisis

Created in 2017, the app, on which Renner regularly posted exclusive images and content and occasionally messaged users, also operated as a community hub where fans could post their own stories and communicate with each other.

In his explanatory post, Renner blamed “clever individuals” who had found a way to pose as other users.

(12) FRIENDLY (?) NIEGHBORHOOD SPIDER-DRONE. What flies through the air and snares its enemies in webs? CNN has the answer: “China says its drone can hunt like Spiderman”.

               China says it has developed a new hunter drone that can disable other drones — or even small aircraft — by firing a 16-square-meter (172 square feet) web at them.

               “Caught by the web, the hostile drone should lose power and fall to ground,” said a report on the Chinese military’s English-language website.

               Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, the drone can work alone but also can integrate with China’s defense system for small, slow and low-flying targets, according to the report.

The hexacopter drone can also perform surveillance and reconnaissance, it said.

(13) NECRONOMICON. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda gives a con report for Necronomicon, including the panels he enjoyed and the art and books he brought home: “Dispatch from a ‘horror’ convention: It began in a dark, candlelit room .?.?.”

… Because NecronomiCon runs a half dozen simultaneous tracks, you can’t help but miss wonderful-sounding panels and events. On Friday alone I would have liked to have heard “Unsung Authors,” “Pulp History,” “Providence in Weird Fiction,” “Children’s Horror Anthologies of the 1960s and 70s,” and a discussion of the lushly decadent fantasist Tanith Lee, which featured, among others, her bibliographer Allison Rich, science fiction writer and critic Paul Di Filippo and popular Washington author Craig Laurance Gidney.

Still, along with my friend Robert Knowlton — a Toronto book collector who has read more weird fiction than anyone else alive — I did catch the program devoted to the specialty publisher Arkham House. Its participants included Donald Sidney-Fryer, who in his youth got to know that most poetical of Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. Donaldo, as he likes to be called, generously inscribed my copy of “The Sorcerer Departs,” his memoir of that friendship. Not surprisingly, among the many films shown during the con was Darin Coelho Spring’s superb documentary “Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams.”…

(14) PYTHON RECOVERIES. Not exactly SF but Monty Python does a surreal riff. The BBC in a two part series of just 15 minutes are revealing newly discovered material from the cutting room floor — Monty Python at 50: The Self-Abasement Tapes.

Part one here.

On the 50th anniversary of Python, Michael Palin hunts down lost sketches. This programme contains material never heard before, including the infamous Fat Ignorant Bastards sketch.

(15) DRESS FOR EXCESS. Jezebel claims “The Woman Who Wore a T-Rex Costume to Her Sister’s Wedding Is the Best Person in America”. Photo at the site.

…As chill as many soon-to-be-married couples pretend to be, weddings are all about control. This is why bridesmaids are forced to purchase matching dresses that make them look like bipedal draperies, often to the tune of several hundred dollars. But this wedding season, one woman had the courage to say “no” to wrapping herself in an ill-fitting puff of chiffon for her sister’s nuptials. Instead she went with an outfit she loved, something she knew she’d wear again and again: A T-rex costume….

(16) MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. Live Proms from the Royal Albert Hall, London: London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames in music from Sci-Fi films. On the BBC Sounds website: “Prom 27: The Sound of Space: Sci-Fi Film Music”. You can listen anytime.

A Late Night Prom with a futuristic spin brings together some of the best sci-fi film music. Excerpts from cult soundtracks come together with recent works by Hans Zimmer and Mica Levi. The award winning London Contemporary Orchestra – whose collaborators include Radiohead, Goldfrapp and Steve Reich – perform music from Under the Skin, Interstellar and the recent Netflix series The Innocents, among other titles, as well as from Alien: Covenant, whose soundtrack the LCO recorded.

  • Steven Price: Gravity 
  • Mica Levi: Under the Skin 
  • John Murphy: Sunshine 
  • Wendy Carlos: Tron (Scherzo) 
  • Carly Paradis: The Innocents 
  • Clint Mansell: Moon 
  • Louis and Bebe Barron: Forbidden Planet (Main Titles – Overture) 
  • Jed Kurzel: Alien: Covenant Jòhann Jòhannsson arr. 
  • Anthony Weeden: Arrival (Suite No 1) 
  • Hans Zimmer: Interstellar 

(17) SWEET. The Harvard Gazette calls it “Pancreas on a chip”.

By combining two powerful technologies, scientists are taking diabetes research to a whole new level. In a study led by Harvard University’s Kevin Kit Parker and published in the journal Lab on a Chip on Aug. 29, microfluidics and human, insulin-producing beta cells have been integrated in an islet-on-a-chip. The new device makes it easier for scientists to screen insulin-producing cells before transplanting them into a patient, test insulin-stimulating compounds, and study the fundamental biology of diabetes.

The design of the islet-on-a-chip was inspired by the human pancreas, in which islands of cells (“islets”) receive a continuous stream of information about glucose levels from the bloodstream and adjust their insulin production as needed.

“If we want to cure diabetes, we have to restore a person’s own ability to make and deliver insulin,” explained Douglas Melton, the Xander University Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). “Beta cells, which are made in the pancreas, have the job of measuring sugar and secreting insulin, and normally they do this very well. But in diabetes patients these cells can’t function properly. Now, we can use stem cells to make healthy beta cells for them. But like all transplants, there is a lot involved in making sure that can work safely.”

Before transplanting beta cells into a patient, they must be tested to see whether they are functioning properly. The current method for doing this is based on technology from the 1970s: giving the cells glucose to elicit an insulin response, collecting samples, adding reagents, and taking measurements to see how much insulin is present in each one. The manual process takes so long to run and interpret that many clinicians give up on it altogether.

The new, automated, miniature device gives results in real time, which can speed up clinical decision-making.

(18) BUT IT’S NOT RIGHT. BBC reports “Left-handed DNA found – and it changes brain structure”.

Scientists have found the first genetic instructions hardwired into human DNA that are linked to being left-handed.

The instructions also seem to be heavily involved in the structure and function of the brain – particularly the parts involved in language.

The team at the University of Oxford say left-handed people may have better verbal skills as a result.

But many mysteries remain regarding the connection between brain development and the dominant hand.

(19) HAVING A MELTDOWN. Global Meltdown:My Ice on YouTube explains what happens when the last man on Earth stands on the last piece of ice.

[Thanks to Bruce Arthurs, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

104 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/5/19 You Don’t Scroll On Pixelman’s Cape, You Don’t File In The Wind

  1. (4)
    Could a game be nominated under the Related Work category?

    The problem I have with a Games Hugo is as someone else brought up – the platform issues. I own no consoles – I’m strictly a PC gamer. I’d have no way to evaluate a game that was exclusive to XBOX or Playstation, etc. Also, unless they give out redemption codes for free games in the Readers Packet, it would be much more expensive to evaluate than any other category; It’s not uncommon to see games debut at $59.99.

    @Meredith:

    It’s a running joke of sorts in the community that a gamer’s Steam Library is a bit like the average Filer’s Mount TBR (well, phrased differently, but you know what I mean). Steam Sales are very persuasive!

    Guilty as charged! 🙂

  2. Regarding games and the necessity of buying them, it’s probably worth noting that Let’s Play videos exist which allow you to watch someone else playing them. You don’t get the game experience, but you do get the narrative, and it’s a very popular way of experiencing games.

    I’d also be curious to know how many people play video games vs. how many people read fanzines on a regular basis; there are several very deserving categories that are more niche than, say, short stories.

  3. @Avilyn: This is addressed thoroughly in the report, but video games probably fit best (if not well) currently as Dramatic Presentations.

    For Related Work you’d have to make the case that the game is noteworthy primarily for non-fictional elements (e.g. game mechanics), not its narrative.

    Martin

  4. David Brain on September 6, 2019 at 1:57 pm said:
    (4) I’m one of those who thinks that narrative in video games does clearly need to be rewarded…

    Yes. I agree completely.

    But I do not believe Worldcon attendees // Hugo voters are the right people to do so. There should be an award of this kind, but it should be done at a convention like GenCon, Origins, Essenspiel, or Pax, rather than Worldcon.

    Rob Thornton on September 6, 2019 at 2:00 pm said:
    4) Could videogames be judged by a qualified panel instead of by fan vote? Maybe that would reduce the logistics associated with the award.

    I’d be far more amenable to that.

  5. @ Standback: It puts booksellers, already fighting against Amazon’s juggernaut power, at yet another disadvantage. For a book potentially one of the major fiction sellers of the year. People go to the bookstore and the book is not there not for 4 more days, but they hear it can be acquired now from Amazon. The bookstore loses reputation because Amazon cheated, because most customers, unaware of the background, don’t think of it as Amazon breaking an agreement, they think mostly of the fact the bookstore didn’t fill their craving but Amazon did.

    And, as noted above, if any bookstore broke the embargo the way Amazon did, they could expect to lose access to a lot of other Penguin Random House books, which is a significant threat to their livelihood.

    But the chances PRH will refuse to sell future books to Amazon is pretty much nil, because Amazon controls a significant amount of THEIR livelihood and refusing to sell to Amazon will hurt PRH more than Amazon.

  6. Em: I’ve seen the arguments for getting rid of Best Fanzine, but this is the first time I’ve seen its existence offered as a justification for adding another weakly supported category.

  7. Mike Glyer on September 6, 2019 at 2:30 pm said:
    Em: I’ve seen the arguments for getting rid of Best Fanzine, but this is the first time I’ve seen its existence offered as a justification for adding another weakly supported category.

    Fanzine’s also a category with a weight of history behind it, and that award recognizes a type of work that it would be difficult to find a group of people more qualified to judge.

  8. Hampus Eckerman on September 6, 2019 at 2:51 pm said:
    I’d be happy with removing the Hugo for Graphic Novel.

    From your lips to God’s ears.

  9. Lenora Rose says It puts booksellers, already fighting against Amazon’s juggernaut power, at yet another disadvantage. For a book potentially one of the major fiction sellers of the year. People go to the bookstore and the book is not there not for 4 more days, but they hear it can be acquired now from Amazon. The bookstore loses reputation because Amazon cheated, because most customers, unaware of the background, don’t think of it as Amazon breaking an agreement, they think mostly of the fact the bookstore didn’t fill their craving but Amazon did.

    I strongly disagree. Knowing the buying public at all three of my local bookstores, they ordered the book quite a while ago. They’ll be happy to get the book when it comes and won’t give a tinkers damn that Amazon sold it a few days early.

    Folks who support local bookstores by buying books there on a regular basis aren’t tracking what Amazon does, so this isn’t an issue for them. They’ll all get a call from the bookstore when their book is in and they’ll come get it. That’s what they do.

  10. Hampus Eckerman says I’d be happy with removing the Hugo for Graphic Novel.

    Why so? There’s been some amazing GNs that have won a Hugo such as Ms.Marvel, Volume 1 and Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones. Why this lack of love for this category? I really, really like GNs.

  11. @Goobergunch: It is addressed in the report. I’m not sure the word “thoroughly” really applies, though. I haven’t found anything, for example, explaining how console-exclusive games won’t end up being unfairly discriminated against, simply because of the limited number of nominators who will have access to those games vs. the numbers who will have access to cross-platform games.

    If we were trying to give an award for “best-selling game”, that might not be an issue, but the theory is that we’re trying to award the best-written game. Accidentally excluding large numbers of games for reasons that have nothing to do with their writing doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.

    The author also goes on about how many games are likely to be nominated. That would be fine if the goal were to simply have a lot of nominated games. But the goal is to have the best games nominated, and, again, discriminating (accidentally) against a lot of games for reason that have nothing to do with the writing doesn’t seem like a formula for getting all the best-written games onto the final ballot.

    Personally, I’m still neutral. (Don’t plan to participate, but that’s true of some other categories.) But the arguments raised by HBCB don’t seem unreasonable. Personally, I’d like to see how well SFWA handles it (with their new inclusion of game writers) before WSFS leaps in.

  12. @Xfitr: Sorry for being unclear — my comment was limited solely to the question of what categories games are currently eligible in.

    (I broadly agree with your comment although I think it is possible that we get notably idiosyncratic results (see this year’s Nebula shortlist) as well.)

    Martin

  13. The GN nominations have led me to read (and enjoy) stuff I would probably never have encountered, so I’m grateful for its existence.

  14. Cat Eldridge on September 6, 2019 at 3:54 pm said:
    Hampus Eckerman says I’d be happy with removing the Hugo for Graphic Novel.

    Why so? There’s been some amazing GNs that have won a Hugo such as Ms.Marvel, Volume 1 and Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones. Why this lack of love for this category? I really, really like GNs.

    Well … did Girl Genius deserve three Hugos in a row? Remember that one of those years (2009 for the 2010 awards) was the year that saw the publication of Beasts of Burden, Asterios Polyp, Ed Brubaker’s high water mark on Captain America, the graphic novel Urgent Request by Gene Luen Yang, the comic book Chew … The list goes on. And that year? The Hugo ballot had none of those, but found room for Schlock Mercenary.

    I’m not saying there isn’t good stuff on the ballot (The first volume of Ms. Marvel is great!), but Hugo voters miss a lot of really key works, and keep nominating subsequent volumes of the same stuff year in, year out.

    Did the sixth nomination for a volume of Saga lead you to read something new? Did the third nomination for Paper Girls? Did the third win for Monstress help you find that?

    And yet Astro City (one of the definitive series of the past 20 years) has never garnered a single nomination. That’s unreasonable.

    When I worked on the Encyclopedia of the Marvel Universe (only in a minor capacity), some of the less charitable people I worked with literally used the Hugo for Best Graphic Story as a punchline.

  15. @Jon Meltzer
    You’re right: that’s a very memorable line! (Why do I suspect that he wrote the entire novel just so he could use that line?)

  16. Every pixel in the room was scrolling at me. (Tori Amos).

    A pixel came up to me and said “I’d like to scroll your mind with wrong files that appeal to you, though I am not unkind.” (They Might Be Giants)

    Pixel gave the short scroll his dancing master had filed—the one used “when in doubt of another’s station.” (Dune)

    The pixel scrolled on a slight rise just on the edge of the file. (HHGTTG)

    I think the Dune one is best, but the others might be worth throwing in.

  17. Must admit, as good as Monstress is, I looked at the third win in a row and back at the history of nominating volume after volume of the same comics and went hmmmm a little. I wouldn’t necessarily want Graphic Story gone, since it doesn’t create a massive burden on voters, but it would be nice to see people put a bit more effort into reading more widely for nominations. (She says, hypocritically, as someone who had to sacrifice having a weekly pull list after she stopped working and therefore doesn’t often nominate much of anything in the category.)

    @Avilyn

    The /played percentage of a gamer’s Steam Library is between them and their computer. 😀

  18. 1) Amazon is certainly not pure as the driven snow, but I wonder if there’s a possibility the early deliveries might be the fault of the companies/services that deliver their packages rather than Amazon itself? In order to get books to customers on release day, they presumably have to give said books to the delivery services several days in advance, at which point they’re out of Amazon’s hands, right?

    4) I don’t play many video games, but I do play a lot of board/card games, and I’ve been a TTRPG player for about 15 years. I wouldn’t be averse to a Hugo for games.

  19. @Nina
    Amazon certainly knows how much time it takes to deliver to a lot of places. If they’re delivering a week early, it’s because they shipped at least a week early.

  20. I wrote:

    “The GN nominations have led me to read (and enjoy) stuff I would probably never have encountered, so I’m grateful for its existence.”

    I do admit that I haven’t been particularly good at searching out new things to read (and thus just using the short list as a list of suggested reading). I had been out of the habit of voting for the Hugos for a few years, but 2015 brought me back, so the Hugo short list got me into reading Monstress and Miss Marvel (yeah!)

  21. @Rob Thornton: I do not think that the title of “Hugo Winner” should be attached to an award decided by a panel; the point of the Hugos is that they’re decided by consumers rather than creators, let alone specialists.

    @Nina / @P J Evans: a couple of days might be overestimating shipping time; a week is unlikely to be. Note also that Amazon has warehouses all over the US; even if these books weren’t actually delivered by contractors (the backstory from this link says “mail”, but that may be a generic), my bet is that there are stacks of the title in multiple places to reduce time on the road.

  22. @Martin
    Thanks for the info; I’m still a relative Hugo newbie, so learning a lot from the discussions here.

    @Xfitr – ooh, good point about nominating for the Games category. I confess I was only thinking about how to evaluate them for voting purposes.

    @Nina – in many places, Amazon is handling the shipping themselves these days. It rare anymore for us to see things come via USPS, UPS, or FedEx. They definitely know how long it takes to get an item to your door.

  23. Rob Thornton: Could videogames be judged by a qualified panel instead of by fan vote? Maybe that would reduce the logistics associated with the award.

    That is exactly why a Video or Interactive Game category is not well-suited to the Hugos. If it needs a qualified panel to come up with a shortlist of revolutionary, groundbreaking works — and it does — then it’s not a good candidate for the Hugos.

    I think that a game category would turn out just the way the Graphic Story has turned out: recognizing only massively-popular works and missing the smaller, revolutionary and groundbreaking works. I would like to see the Graphic Story category removed because of that. I don’t think that its finalists have really added to the conversation on groundbreaking SFF stories.

    I want to see entries like Duncan Jones’ Moon in the Hugo categories.

  24. @Avilyn
    Amazon Prime is delivered, certainly. I don’t buy via Prime, only buy from the Large South American River when I can’t get it elsewhere, and get it at a mailbox place, so I can’t speak to non-Prime stuff.
    (When I was visiting my sister last month, we went around behind her local mall – it’s inside a ring-road with no stops, and not doing well as a result – and a section of their lot was full of white Amazon vans.)

  25. OlavRokne asks Well … did Girl Genius deserve three Hugos in a row? Remember that one of those years (2009 for the 2010 awards) was the year that saw the publication of Beasts of Burden, Asterios Polyp, Ed Brubaker’s high water mark on Captain America, the graphic novel Urgent Request by Gene Luen Yang, the comic book Chew … The list goes on. And that year? The Hugo ballot had none of those, but found room for Schlock Mercenary.

    That’s entirely up to your fellow Hugo voters. They obviously thought it was the most deserving GN of the lot. That’s no reason to get rid of the category. And for the record, all three volumes of Girl Genius were most excellent

  26. (3) “Fit hit the Shan”. You can add a line to the collection via a faint box. But I wouldn’t add this one — the line is not Zelazny’s. It is in print well before “Lord of Light”.

  27. @Em: when the USP of gaming is its interactivity, I find it difficult to justify Let’s Play or Twitch streams of games precisely because they are not interactive. I don’t think you would really get a sense of Astral Chain unless and until you have a joy-con in your hands because even the control setup of this particular game is part of the experience. Even for extremely narrative-driven games like Fire Emblem there’s so much else going on in and around it that it would be difficult to get a real sense of how it plays from watching someone else play it.

  28. JJ on September 6, 2019 at 7:20 pm said:

    I think that a game category would turn out just the way the Graphic Story has turned out: recognizing only massively-popular works and missing the smaller, revolutionary and groundbreaking works. I would like to see the Graphic Story category removed because of that. I don’t think that its finalists have really added to the conversation on groundbreaking SFF stories.

    I want to see entries like Duncan Jones’ Moon in the Hugo categories.

    I agree so wholeheartedly with every word J.J. has said here.

  29. Graphic Story has the advantage of being a relatively light voter workload; few finalists have been particularly long. I would love to see a grassroots fannish effort to diversify the finalist pool, though, and that method has certainly worked for other categories and other goals in the past, from what I’ve heard.

    One of the Dragon Awards game nominees was the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, Battle for Azeroth. If anything like that – an MMORPG/Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – turned up on the Hugo ballot… Lets just say that it could, by itself, eat up every single hour most people allot to preparing to vote and they’d still not have seen a decent chunk of it. Game could easily be like Series but even worse, and Series is more than bad enough.

    I know people will argue that you don’t need to read/watch/research/whatever everything in a category to vote in it, and I agree that there are special circumstances where that’s the case – when you’re familiar with a finalist’s prior work and would rather poke yourself in the eye than put yourself through another word, for example, amongst other things – but in general I think that’s a bad culture to cultivate.

    The value of the Hugos is partly that hundreds or thousands (depending on the year) of fans get together and select the work they can agree on the most. That value is weakened, very badly, if too many fans start selecting the works they were already most familiar with because they didn’t have time to get to the rest. I don’t believe it’s truly suited to selecting the best work, but instead the best selling work, or perhaps the best work that happens to be by someone who has previously crossed the Hugo radar.

    We’ve criticised the Dragons – rightly, in my opinion – for having such a short voting period that no-one could read all the finalists before voting. I would hate to see that replicated through sheer voter overload in the Hugo Awards, which we’re skirting already* with 5/6** and Best Series***, and as such I would strongly disagree with the introduction of a Game category at this point in time, even as a gamer myself. It would be too expensive, too inaccessible both logistically (consoles; operating systems; even needing a table top group) and in terms of disability****, and take too much time.

    The Hugos don’t need to have an award for everything, but most importantly, the Hugos can’t have an award for everything. Not without diminishing itself and crushing voting fans under the load.

    Perhaps we’ve even crossed it.

    ** I want to keep 5/6, I think it has value, but the increased workload is a thing.

    *** Which also has value, but oh boy is it an epic amount of work. Possibly more than all of the other fiction categories combined, depending on the year.

    **** There are whole charities dedicated specifically to finding clever set-ups to allow disabled gamers to play. That doesn’t say good things about native accessibility in the industry.

  30. Meredith: I know people will argue that you don’t need to read/watch/research/whatever everything in a category to vote in it… but in general I think that’s a bad culture to cultivate.

    I think that all the points you’ve made are really valid, but to me this is the biggest one: before we ever get to the voting part, and the arguments about ways in which non-gamers can get themselves knowledgeable about the finalists, we have to worry about how many people will actually be nominating, and what they will be nominating.

    To me, the fact that the Dramatic Presentation Long Form consistently features popular blockbusters rather than groundbreaking works is an indication that it’s a failure. Honestly, how many of the finalists in the last 10 years could be considered revolutionary or groundbreaking? How many of the 14 or so superhero movie finalists in the last decade are actually anything special, in comparison to most superhero movies?

    Why would we want to turn around and add yet another category where the results are going to be like that?

  31. The citation of World of Warcraft also makes me agree further with KasaObake’s point regarding the insufficiency of Let’s Plays as a substitute for actually playing the game.

    I quit playing WoW after Wrath of the Litch King, but before then, in addition to multiple hours a week raiding both 10-player and 25-player instances, I was putting in quite a bit of time doing organizational guild-officer stuff — planning strategies for the next bosses we were hoping to tackle, figuring out expected raid attendance, etc. The exchange for the time investment was the joy of getting to take on difficult challenges as a team and win. I’m still a little sad that a lot of my guild achievement records of then have been lost to the sands of time and dead hard drives.

    But It’s not a coincidence I really only got back into reading for fun after I quit because I just didn’t have time to stay up on much other than the latest Butcher and Pratchett. And watching some other guild take down a raid boss — while useful for preparation — isn’t nearly the same feeling as taking it down yourself. I have no real interest in playing WoW Classic but my one temptation would be facing the bosses in Naxx-40 that I never got to face back in the day, and that’s not a temptation eased by watching them on YouTube.

    The Hugos don’t need to have an award for everything, but most importantly, the Hugos can’t have an award for everything. Not without diminishing itself and crushing voting fans under the load.

    Yeah, after all of the Fanzine discussion this year I worry that adding more categories could particularly harm the fan categories in terms of voter drop-off.

    Martin

  32. If Best Professional Artist could remain viable after with 4 individuals winning over half of the 62 awards given so far, including nearly a third of the total being won in consecutive wins of 4 or more by the same individual, then I think Best Graphic Story can survive three wins in a row by Monstress.

    (My entry into fandom and Hugo-awareness was during the period when the award was “Best Professional Michael Whelan” for 10/12 years.)

  33. Heather, the problem isn’t really Monstress winning 3 times. It’s that the category finalists are for the most part just really popular works, but not really a lot of new, revolutionary, and groundbreaking works. And as I said, the Graphic Story category isn’t the only one where that is a big problem.

  34. I’d be against a game Hugo. There are better organizations to give that. And I am still against Best Series. It’s just too big a burden. I certainly wouldn’t object to losing some of the other categories, but those are the big two for me.

  35. “Why so? There’s been some amazing GNs that have won a Hugo such as Ms.Marvel, Volume 1 and Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones. Why this lack of love for this category? I really, really like GNs.”

    Girl Genius is a great comic, but the best in the world for volume 8, 9 and 10? All of them? Saga is a fantastic comic, but top 5 in the world for Volume 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9? All of them? Monstress the best in the world for Volune 1, 2 and 3? All?

    Hugo for best Graphic Story always gives me an impression of Hugo voters reading just a few (good) comics and voting for them year after year. Never really trying to find what’s new on the market, but sticking to the well-known.

  36. Goobergunch on September 6, 2019 at 7:56 pm said:
    None of the works mentioned by Olav Rokne even made that year’s longlist (page 20).

    I hadn’t looked at the longest previously, and was just thinking of a few of the best comics that year. Honestly, that longlist is actually embarrassing to look at. There’s some truly Puppies-level WTF in there.

    Hampus Eckerman on September 6, 2019 at 11:19 pm said:
    Hugo for best Graphic Story always gives me an impression of Hugo voters reading just a few (good) comics and voting for them year after year. Never really trying to find what’s new on the market, but sticking to the well-known.

    Exactly. And we’re often followers, rather than leaders in discovering those well-known works.

  37. I also do not think Let’s Play videos would work. Why on earth would the average non-gamer want to spend time watching someone else play a game? Why would that be fun for them?

    @JJ

    I don’t feel entirely comfortable predicting what would or wouldn’t make it onto a ballot (Bandersnatch surprised me on the Nebulas list, and not in a good way – it looked like not-gamers looking for something to nominate and vote for to me) but certainly the past Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story ballots are suggestive of what might get nominated. And, really, if there’s anything in gaming which doesn’t need additional attention it’s AAA* games. Or endless expansions of old favourites. (Does anyone want to see World of Warcraft on the ballot every year? Because I for one do not. And it makes substantial additions and changes all the time. It would be eligible.)

    That being said, even if the Hugo voterbase collectively solemnly swore to seek out new and interesting games during nomination season, the logistics would still be a nightmare. It would still be too expensive, it would still be too time consuming, it would still be inaccessible. I just can’t see a way to make it work without heavily restricting eligibility somehow, which I think would go down like a lead balloon given that the Hugos have historically been very permissive and left things up to the nominators. Plus, at that point, not really “Best Game” so much as “Best Game within these narrow requirements”. Not great.

    *The gaming equivalent of a blockbuster film, pronounced “triple a”.

  38. OlavRokne says Exactly. And we’re often followers, rather than leaders in discovering those well-known works.

    So be a leader. What graphic novels that aren’t well-known do you think are currently worthy of being considered for a Hugo Award?

  39. (Quick note that if anyone does have awesome Graphic Story recs, please also drop them into this year’s recs thread! Organised readers of this year and last minute panic reading nominators of spring next year will thank you!)

  40. “So be a leader. What graphic novels that aren’t well-known do you think are currently worthy of being considered for a Hugo Award?”

    Depending on your mileage, all these are worth looking into. I will be nominating Arale myself. But I’m still at the start of my Hugo reading, got 10 volumes delivered today.

    Arale, Tristan Roulot And Denis Rodier
    Samurai 8: Hachimaruden, by Kishimoto Masashi
    Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san, by Shingo Honda
    Middlewest, by Skottie Young

  41. Cat Eldridge on September 7, 2019 at 7:28 am said:
    So be a leader. What graphic novels that aren’t well-known do you think are currently worthy of being considered for a Hugo Award?

    I blog about this every year.

    Off the top of my head, Blackbird might be my top pick. Mister Miracle is legitimately great. Christopher Sebela’s Crowded is really great SF in the form of a comic. I’d love to see Daniel Warren Johnson get recognized for Extremity (think Miazaki doing Mad Max, while playing with ideas around art and identity. It’s real good.)

    I suspect that Invisible Kingdom will get a Hugo nod, since G. Willow Wilson’s on the Worldcon radar. It deserves to be on there, thought I think there’s a few more deserving.

  42. Cat Eldridge on September 7, 2019 at
    So be a leader.

    Fundamentally though, no matter what Hampus or I say, and no matter what gets published, next year’s ballot will have Saga and Monstress (which is only an ok story, but is overhyped because of the great art), Shuri (because of the Black Panther stans) and Paper Girls volume whatever. It’s kind of pathetic how predictable it is.

  43. @Meredith

    Why on earth would the average non-gamer want to spend time watching someone else play a game? Why would that be fun for them?

    And yet my son will happily spend hours watching videos of people playing games.

    People like what they like.

  44. Since the big difference between a graphic story and a text story is the art, I’m quite comfortable with a graphic story being popular “because of the great art”. I find Monstress breathtaking despite the problem that the story (and especially the body horror aspects) isn’t really in my usual line.

    I don’t seek out graphic stories to read because they don’t fit well into my reading rhythms. So often I’ll read the finalists, having only nominated maybe one or two titles. (I think the only two graphic stories in recent years that I went out and snatched up on word of mouth as opposed to being on the ballot were Nimona and that really fun Ada Lovelace thing whose title I forget at the moment.)

    If I wanted to research a broad swathe of what people consider the best in graphics, I’d look at the Eisner finalist lists. Just as if I wanted to get a broad sense of what’s interesting on the big screen I’d…well, ok, I’m not sure that the Oscar finalist lists are actually that broad-based. The form-specific Hugos can only ever tell us “what are the most popular items in this form across a broad-based set of SFF fans. Even the text-fiction categories are limited in just how useful they are for bringing attention to unusual, experimental, or small-target works. But the thing is: there are entire award systems for graphic stories. There are entire award systems for games. There are entire award systems for long and short form drama. There are entire award systems for podcasts. The Hugos don’t have to try to do the equivalent for each of those. They already exist. That doesn’t mean that there’s no point to having a “SFF fans’ favorite X” award in a category that is also recognized by those other larger systems.

    I am swayed a bit by “are enough SFF fans interested enough in this category to nominate?” (As reflected by the total number of different items nominated, more than by the number of nominations needed to make the ballot.) For that, I think the convention-specific special categories are a useful way to test the waters.

  45. I think that a game category would turn out just the way the Graphic Story has turned out: recognizing only massively-popular works and missing the smaller, revolutionary and groundbreaking works.

    Yes! Same for the Hugos for movies and TV episodes.

    The Hugo is known for written works. Its there where he built his reputation. Movies, and games is just “and here is other stuff we like” . A “gaming Hugo” wouldnt point anyone to new works – especially if video and boardgames are grouped together – and I doubt it would get much recognitiion in the industry.
    If there is a game with exceptional good writing it could always be included somewhere (related work maybe?), but thats an edge case.

  46. The Hugos are supposed to be about the Best! Not “the most quirky” or “the most outrageous” or “the most original” or “the most off-the-beaten-path”. Valuing those things over quality are what produced the worst excesses of the New Wave–and I say this as someone who was and is a fan of the New Wave.

    But, in fact, the Hugos have always skewed towards the popular-and-good, and tended to ignore the obscure-but-still-great. Not just in the DP and GN categories–though the tendency may be more pronounced there. It’s part of the character of the Hugos, and I don’t think we can really change it at this point, and I’m not sure we want to change it. It’s kind of what people expect from the Hugos at this point.

    I genuinely think that part of the key to the success of the Hugos has been finding (accidentally stumbling across) a balancing point between the crass plebeian appeal of a People’s Choice Awards and the arrogant snobbery of an Academy Awards. And I think this is why the Hugos are more influential that the Nebulas. We’re plebs, but we’re snobby plebs! A self-selected group of more-than-usually-dedicated fans, who aspire to greatness, but still have our feet planted firmly back in the muck with the rest of the fans. 🙂

    (How, or if, this ties back into the idea of a Game Hugo, I’m not sure. I’m just tossing it out there. I remain 100% undecided about the new category.)

Comments are closed.