Pixel Scroll 9/10/16 Scroll Long And Pixel

(1) NEW ZEPPELINS FOR OLD. After striking a gusher of controversy with its initial program plans, World Fantasy Con made a large number of changes. Jason Sanford reviewed the new offerings in “World Fantasy tries again with programming”, then concluded:

I wish WFC had started totally from scratch with this year’s program, which they obviously didn’t do. But overall these changes are positive. It appears some of these changes were taken from Guerilla WFC, which put forward a truly innovative WFC program, which is a good sign. I’m also sure Ellen Datlow had a positive effect on the changes, as did everyone in the genre who justifiably ripped apart the previous program.

Update: The new program is now on the official WFC 2016 website. Go there to see the schedule.

(2) THEN, THE BOOK. I have spent many hours poring over Rob Hansen’s British fanhistory in zine and website versions, whether researching a blog post, or simply for the pleasure of learning the stories out of early fandom. Now that material has been polished further and given book publication by Dave Langford’s Ansible Editions. You’ll find a lot of information about the project here.then-cover

THEN was published in September 2016 with a list price of $22.50 (trade paperback) or $36.50 (hardback, discounted by 10% until November 2016). There is also an ebook edition.

Rob Hansen is acknowledged in Brian Aldiss’s autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye as “the historian of fanzines”. Then is Rob’s ground-breaking history of British science fiction fandom from its first stirrings in the early 1930s to 1980 and a little beyond. Originally published in four fanzine-format volumes from 1988 to 1993, this first book edition of Then is now greatly revised, corrected and expanded by more than 20% to give a massive trade paperback – and a simultaneously published hardback – running to 454 pages and nearly 228,000 words. Besides the results of much new research, Then includes over 300 photos of contemporary fans of all eras, dozens of scans of representative fanzine covers selected from each decade, detailed source notes and a full index (not to mention a separate photo index).

This first book edition of Then also has an appreciative introduction by Peter Weston, who writes: “without Rob we would know almost nothing about British fanhistory, whereas thanks to him we know just about everything … It’s a truly amazing thing, and something of a minor miracle that it ever came to be written.” It’s an epic piece of work. What’s more, it’s alive in the current conversation, and consulted by people who care about fanhistory.

(3) WHEN THE SHOW WENT ON. Ars Technica tells “How an over-ambitious Star Trek convention became ‘The Con of Wrath’”.

In 1982, nearly the entire TOS cast gathered for a disastrous four-hour variety show….

Rose also recalled that Koenig essentially acted as the show’s de facto director, given that no one else could seem to be bothered to do it. “None of us had a script, any idea what we were doing for the most part, but we knew that Walter had written some kind of play,” he said. “It was literally that Friday night, Walter comes over to me and he says ‘you’re the main guy, here’s what we’re going to be doing.’ He wrote it out what we’re going to do, cue this cue that. I had no warning whatsoever.”

Koenig ended up simply writing out the lighting and sound cues on a piece of paper and handing it to Rose. “‘We need a house announcer,’ and he writes out on paper and handed it to me!” Rose recalled….

“The amazing thing is that none of the actors walked, they did the entire weekend as it was planned,” Nemecek told us. To this day, he continues to view the whole thing as a modern marvel. After all, he believes that if such a fiasco unfolded today, it would reverberate across the Internet and likely damage the careers of everyone involved. “It really is the most glorious failure. All the actors, the fans, the dealers, and the organizers did something to make this happen.”

 

(4) WORLDCON 76. After San Jose won the rights to host the 2018 Worldcon, they issued Progress Report Zero. In case you haven’t already seen it, you can download it here.

Is San Jose really going with Worldcon 76 as its name? That’s what’s on the PR and its website. I’d be concerned that’s it’s too easily confused with Worldcon 75, the name used by Helsinki.

San Jose also announced Guests of Honor Spider Robinson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Pierre and Sandy Pettinger, and two Ghosts of Honor, Edgar Pangborn and Bob Wilkins.

(5) ONE VIEWER’S RECAP OF RECENT HISTORY. Nathaniel Givens overviews “Science Fiction Awards in an Age of Dragons” at The Loose Cannon.

…one of the problems with this many categories is that there’s no feasible way anyone could read all the nominated works and make an informed vote in every category. This has profound implications.

Traditionally, Worldcon attendees receive electronic copies of the nominated works and have a couple of months to read through them before voting closes. There’s a lot of material (5 novels, 5 novellas, 5 novelettes, and 5 short stories just from the core literary categories), but it’s not an unmanageable amount. It should be fairly routine, then, for a Hugo voter to end up reading works they haven’t read before and maybe even voting for one of those works. In short, the Hugos are designed as deliberative process in which a small cadre of dedicated fans try to come to a consensus about which works deserve recognition. At its worst, this means that the group is susceptible to being hijacked and/or manipulated by cliques and fads (political or otherwise). At its best, it means that we’re talking about a process that at least makes a meaningful attempt to transcend momentary popularity.

The Dragon Awards make no such pretense. There will never be packets of all the novels.15 Even if there were, there wouldn’t be time for people to wade through dozens of novels before voting. Deliberation and consensus are off the table.

(5) TRANSOM TO REOPEN. Strange Horizons has added a new fiction editor and will be re-opening fiction submissions.

We are therefore delighted to announce that Vajra Chandrasekera is joining us as a Fiction Editor, working with Lila Garrott, Catherine Krahe, and An Owomoyela.

If you’ve been reading Strange Horizons recently, there’s a good chance that you recognise Vajra’s name and if you do, I suspect you’re as excited as I am about him joining the magazine’s staff. As a book club participant, occasional reviewer and regular columnist, he has contributed some of the most insightful critical thinking we’ve had the pleasure of publishing in the last year. And as an author—with July’s “Sweet Marrow”, and this week’s “Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes”—he’s contributed two wonderfully elegant and thought-provoking stories. Put another way, by far the biggest downside of him joining the magazine is that we won’t be publishing very much by him for the foreseeable future!

In organisational terms, this should mean that we will be able to re-open to fiction submissions in the near-ish future—although authors, we’ll still need you to bear with us for a few more weeks.

(6) A VERSE OUT OF TIME. Tom Becker shared this masterpiece in a comment.

This is just to say
I have taken
the time machine
I wanted to eat the plums
that were in the icebox
But I didn’t want you to find out

I took them
back a few minutes
then there were
twice as many
That was fun
so I did it again
Forward and back
Four times as many
Eight times
Sixteen times

If you were wondering
why your time machine
is full of plums
that is why
Please have some
for breakfast
I ate as many as I could
You can put the pits
in the pizza boxes

You should know
I saw a shoggoth
Perhaps it was attracted
by the time machine
If so please forgive me
The elder gods
so strange
and so cold

[Thanks to Mark-kitteh, John King Tarpinian and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes  to File 770 contributing editor of the day snowcrash.]

167 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/10/16 Scroll Long And Pixel

  1. Fifth pixel to the left and scroll on ’till midnight.

    (ETA: a more flexible Google sez it’s been done!)

  2. @airboy, I…don’t think the Dragon Awards got off to a great start, whether they’re a popular award (yay, bestsellers!) or a reading guide for entertaining fiction. No one appears to be angry or upset, but I’m probably not the only one wondering what the point was if the eventual winners were going to track VD’s not-a-slate so closely.

    I don’t much care about Alt-History (there are notable exceptions but mostly I get irritated at anachronisms and end up not finishing) but I really was excited at new suggestions for MilSF. One nominee was the first book of a series, the rest were third, fourth, eighth and twelfth. That is a lot of books to read before I get to find out if the third, fourth, eighth and twelfth books of a series are award worthy. So, a second reason to wonder what the point of the award is, at least for me.

  3. @Cally – you cannot vote for a Hugo without paying at least a supporting membership. Nitpicking the cost to vote is not productive.

    @Mark
    1] Not sure how much Vox Day drove the awards. The 770 people seem to have the most reaction to John Wright winning. If Vox Day drove the voting in the game categories, Alt-History, and Military SF I would be shocked given the quality of the nominees and the winners. Some of the 770 people seem to think Vox Day is responsible for Dragon voting without a lot of evidence. If this accusation is true, it may be limited to a couple of categories. After all, the Hugo novel winner made it to the list of Dragon Nominees so this was not a situation where it is 100% Vox Day playground based on the available evidence.

    2] Dragons could have been run better, but this was year 1. Hopefully they will improve. Some of the criticisms are valid and others verge on accusations of “wrongfun.”

    3] As far as I can tell, nobody knows how many people voted for the Dragon Awards. I hope they release voting stats. But until the stats are released this is idle speculation.

    4] If DragonCon emails everyone who attended this year and puts it out on their publicity for the 2017 awards that should generate a large number of voters.

    And I would like to remind everyone of something. How many people read a lot for recreation? And how many readers read a lot of SF in any form? Both the Sad Puppies and the 770s read a lot and are passionate about what they read. In the big scheme of things, the arguments between the Sads and the hard core WorldCon supporters are pretty trivial.

  4. It simply comes across as disingenuous to call the Dragon Awards “crowdsourced” on the basis of con attendance rather than actual participant statistics for the award itself. Until the numbers are released, those who have dismissed this year’s award as a VD infected process already have plenty of intuitive reasons to do so…

  5. In the big scheme of things, the arguments between the Sads and the hard core WorldCon supporters are pretty trivial.

    Ahh and this is certainly true. Time for a new hobby?

  6. Airboy:

    “And for the 770s – why get so upset about the Dragon Awards? If somebody comes up with better crowd sourced awards why are you so upset? Hugos are anything but crowd sourced with a tiny voting base and a $40-50 voting fee.”

    I’m not sure what you are saying here everything points to the Dragon Award having a much smaller voting base than the Hugos.

    But hopefully there will be more voters next year. And a bit more logical categories. Alternative history, but no urban fantasy? Really?

  7. @airboy

    It’s true that there no hard evidence but the suspicion that VDs picks were highly influential is based on some reasonable analysis. There was a Reddit thread linked a few days ago where someone unconnected with f770 had looked at the results and gone “yup, VD has done it again” so we’re hardly the only ones.
    I doubt Correia needed anything more than mobilising his own fans to beat out the more popular Butcher, but Cole beating SM Stirling in a popularity contest? Neimeier beating several established horror names?

    I agree that we don’t know the voting numbers. Therefore I think that making a point of describing the Hugo electorate as tiny when it looks quite possible that the Dragons had similar numbers isn’t a great idea.

  8. Today’s Read — The Gap of Time, by Jeanette Winterson (not SFF)

    So, somewhere some genius decided that it’d be a good idea to produce a line of novels based on Shakespeare plays which seem to be, essentially, written by “every author Kyra likes”. I’m picking up the Anne Tyler and Margaret Atwood ones soon, but the first one I got was this Jeanette Winterson version of “A Winter’s Tale”.

    So, how was it? It’s in many ways a fairly straightforward modern-day adaptation of the story. And I’ll admit I spent a lot of the book wondering, “What’s the point of doing a fairly straightforward modern-day adaptation of the story?” Towards the end, though, Winterson starts really delving into what the story is about, and why it’s meaningful, and a lot of the little pieces and hints she’d laid down in the earlier sections come together quite nicely.

    While I wouldn’t rank this among the highest echelons of Winterson’s work (which, admittedly, include two novels which would probably be in my all-time-top-[some number]), it was a worthwhile read and I’ll give it a thumb’s up.

  9. If there had been any amount of horror fans voting outside of Beales slaters, there is no way total unknowns as Neimeier could have won or Finn could have been placed on the ballot.

    This is not a judgement on the quality of their work, only the simple conclusion that there must have bern a very small cliquish crowd to vote for them to get them nominated. Very far outside ordinary horror readers.

  10. I thought it was telling that the one category that VD didn’t have a choice for went to Ms. Marvel which was, in a couple of ways, the anti-VD choice.

  11. Hampus Eckerman: That’s the most dissonant part of some winners’ celebration of their Dragon Awards. This crowdsourced award is expected to honor the works most loved by a broad section of the public– and is won by several works that manifestly very few have ever heard of, and even fewer read.

  12. you cannot vote for a Hugo without paying at least a supporting membership. Nitpicking the cost to vote is not productive.

    I could not pick up a Diet Coke in the consuite at MidAmeriCon II without paying for an attending membership, either. I could not get the convention’s publications without paying for at least a supporting membership. The “cost” isn’t “the cost to vote” any more than it’s “the cost to pick up a Coke in the consuite” or “the cost to add to my collection of convention program books”.

    It’s not a voting cost. It’s a membership fee in WSFS. ONE of the perks of any level of membership in WSFS is that one can vote for the Hugos. It’s not the only perk, nor even necessarily the biggest. Many, many people don’t care about that perk at all. One of the perks of an Attending membership is that I can pick up a Diet Coke in the consuite. Is that why I sprang for an Attending membership last year? No. But if I use your logic of subsuming all membership benefits into one, clearly I must have spent an extra hundred or so bucks for the right to grab a Diet Coke out of an ice bucket. That’s one expensive Diet Coke, but hey, that’s “logic” for you.

  13. @Cally Ah see but the Diet Coke in Atlanta was literally being drunk in the city of Coca Cola, and must have tasted better as a result. Therefore Dragons!

  14. @airboy:
    Im certainly not upset by the choices. I dont care. I judge any award how much it affects my reading behavior. The first dragon awards went to work I dont care for. Its simple as that.
    I was put off by some of the victory speeches (linked here on file) that were little more than gloating how much better the dragon awards are. Which is a) a sign of a sore winner and b) just ridicilous, since both have different voter bases and different audiences. I dont compare the Hugos with the Publitzers either.

    One of the things they should have done would have been to notify all of the nominees or at least the winners (and they havent, as I noted in the other threads the authors of Pandemic Legacy didnt know the award even ecisted).

  15. Arifel: Alas, I drank that Diet Coke in Kansas City, MO, so while everything was surely up to date, it wasn’t the home of Coke.

  16. @Mark

    <blockquote I did see someone claiming an admin had told them so in email

    Well. “The shadowy cabal support me in email” is certainly a new twist on things.

  17. To expand on Mike’s comments, many people promoted the Dragon Awards as something that would replace the Hugos on the grounds that the Hugos represented the opinions of a self-selected elite–not the views of fans in general. So when the Dragon Awards went to a bunch of novels most people never heard of, and when the results almost exactly matched the slate of works produced by one man (a slate heavily loaded with books he himself published), it’s unreasonable to expect people not to say “that’s the opposite of what you said you were going to do!”

    Regardless of the politics of it, it certainly seems as though Vox Day is gaming the awards (any awards he can influence) to boost sales of the books he publishes. Everything else is a sideshow.

  18. Regarding Worldcon 76: I think this is quite deliberate. Helsinki wasn’t just saying ‘this is our name’ (why would they choose a name just for themselves that was so inconsistent with naming traditions?); they were saying ‘this is the sort of thing that Worldcons ought to be called’. And San Jose is going along with it. The idea is that funny names are confusing to outsiders. After all, static cons just use a permanent name and a number, and it doesn’t confuse anyone.

    (Well, not too much. Actually it does confuse me a bit, because when I see a name like ‘Worldcon 76’ my first instinct is to think it is the Worldcon in 1976. Or possibly 2076.)

    Dragons: If an award aims just to reward popularity, there seems no problem with it going to the eighteenth book of a series; and the way the Dragons are structured – single nomination, single vote, encouraging authors to get their fans out – seems directed to that end. This does mean that the award is less useful as a recommendation, both because recommending people to read the eighteenth work of a series is unhelpful, and because it means that the voters won’t actually have considered the merits of all the candidates and chosen between them. This is not a defect of the Dragons. They do (or would do if they had genuine mass participation) a thing that the Hugos can’t do, while the Hugos do a thing that they can’t do.

  19. airboy on September 11, 2016 at 8:53 am said:

    And for the 770s – why get so upset about the Dragon Awards?

    You may be confusing discussion with being upset. Compare and contrast with how much people here discussed things like PIN delays for Hugo nominations and how much people discussed how Hugo voting should be conducted etc etc.

  20. VD’s domination of the Dragons can be exaggerated. One book, one film and two games managed to beat the slate; other things (Sandman and Game of Thrones, at least) would probably have done so if VD had not cunningly backed them. So clearly there were organic voters. But the fact that VD managed to get awards for three little-known books suggests that they were not that many.

  21. I suspect that the popularity of Terry Pratchett and The Martian resulted in the voting figures for those categories being high enough to swamp VD’s cohorts (possibly the two gaming categories as well, but that’s not a field I know about). Another reason for wanting to see the numbers.

  22. @peter J
    Yes, at least the Boardgame award was the most popular (the game being the no 1 at Boardgamegeek, the most important site). VDs choice was a little known game in comparision. And a less well regatded as well, it would have been a major surprise if that would have won.

  23. @Cassy B. : For more calendrical goodness, “The Battle of Candle Arc”, a short story set in the hexarchate, is in Conservation of Shadows. And if you like flashfic, Yoon Ha’s Patreon offers one monthly.

    And I too am awaiting the sequel, Cheris fangirl that I am. (It’s so bad my iPad’s spellchecker now recognizes “calendrical” and “hexarchate”.)

  24. I check to see if I can pre-order Raven Stratagem about once a week. 9fG knocked my socks out of the solar system.

  25. @AndrewM “This does mean that the award is less useful as a recommendation, both because recommending people to read the eighteenth work of a series is unhelpful, and because it means that the voters won’t actually have considered the merits of all the candidates and chosen between them. This is not a defect of the Dragons. They do (or would do if they had genuine mass participation) a thing that the Hugos can’t do, while the Hugos do a thing that they can’t do.”

    I looked at the Dragon Nominations as identifying things that I may not have read in categories that I know a lot about. I look at the Dragon Winners as useful in areas where I seldom read – like Horror. But different readers, different tastes, and different values placed on awards.

  26. I was glad that two people picked up #5 on his bizarre statement that “The Water That Falls On Yoj From Nowhere” was not SF or fantasy.

    Re the Dragon Awards: for various reasons I didn’t do it and won’t get around to it myself, but it would be interesting for someone to check out shortlists and winners in each category vis a vis their GoodReads and LibraryThing levels of ownership, as I have done with other awards over the years. It would demonstrate if any of the Dragon winners got the award despite relatively low public profile, at least among those who record their libraries online.

  27. Is San Jose really going with Worldcon 76 as its name? That’s what’s on the PR and its website. I’d be concerned that’s it’s too easily confused with Worldcon 75, the name used by Helsinki.

    Yes. And I encourage future Worldcons to follow suit with Worldcon 77, 78, etc. I think Worldcons have been doing themselves a disservice by creating identities focused on their own individual names. You end up with a lot of people (even on their own committees!) not even realizing (or even caring) that it’s the World Science Fiction Convention. I had people contacting the 2002 Worldcon in early 2003 asking how they could buy their memberships to ConJosé 2003, because they didn’t realize it was a Worldcon and assumed it was a new ongoing San Jose SF/F convention.

    Westercon did itself a similar disservice but has, IMO, recovered some of its momentum in the past few years.

    lurkertype on September 10, 2016 at 10:34 pm said:

    Not keen on the number either. Too confusing. They ought to at least use “ConJose” (which was the bid name….

    Not true. The bid’s name was “San Jose in 2018.” And if you mean “ConJosé 2” to follow on from the 2002 Worldcon, note that the Bay Area tradition has been that all five past Bay Area Worldcons, including those run by the same parent organization, have had different names. (The 1993, 2002, and 2018 Worldcons are all run by the same parent non-profit corporation.)

    Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on September 11, 2016 at 5:14 am said:

    Yeah, I can see why Worldcon 75 went with that name

    Why do think?

    but I don’t get why you’d go with 76.

    Because it’s the 76th World Science Fiction Convention. Would you have preferred “Worldcon 2018?”

    Individual names for each Worldcon is probably better for people who are already Worldcon regulars, but not for people who are unfamiliar with Worldcon. If you really need to differentiate them, call them “Worldcon 75 Helsinki” and “Worldcon 76 San José.”

    How many of you questioning this decision have sat behind a table promoting a Worldcon trying to explain to people who have never attended a Worldcon that [Insert Local Worldcon Name] was actually the World Science Fiction Convention?

    I’ve also noticed that emphasis on the local Worldcon name sometimes tends to affect the local committee and make them unwilling or uninterested in cooperating with their predecessor/successor, e.g. “I’m not working on Worldcon; this is [LocalNameCon]!” I further noticed that the MACII logo, visible on banners all over downtown KC, so de-emphasized “World Science Fiction Convention” that you could barely see it. Furthermore, local media coverage emphasized that the MidAmericon had returned to Kansas City for the first time in 40 years without even mentioning Worldcon at all! This is not good for Worldcon as an ongoing event. It would be as if the Rio Games that just ended never even mentioned the word “Olympics” except incidentally and as an afterthought.

    I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve attended many SF/F conventions that were in the form of “ConName N” where N was the Nth iteration, not YYYY, where YYYY was the year number. Personally, I think that emphasizing that this is the 76th Worldcon is a good thing. Worldcon is not a _new_ event that just started up a year or two ago. The way we’ve named and marketed WSFS’s annual convention makes it hard to show that. Let’s try something new, so that perhaps people will start recognizing the name every year, like they do other ongoing events.

  28. @ airboy: Unless there’s a documented way to prevent ballot-box stuffing using sockpuppet e-mails, it can’t legitimately be described as “crowd-sourced”. I would be delighted if DragonCon started seriously promoting this award to its members and limited voting to said members; that could indeed become a very useful award. This year’s version… wasn’t.

    @ Hampus: Ah, but urban fantasy has girl cooties all over it!

    @ Andrew: And some cons use a static name and a year, which IMO is even better.

    @ Kevin: I don’t disagree, but I have to say I’m glad this movement didn’t start to happen until after the Millennium PhilCon. 🙂

    I’m not Paul, but I had the impression that Helsinki was using “Worldcon 75” to celebrate it being the 75th year of Worldcon; that’s a moderately important milestone. And yes, I would absolutely prefer “Worldcon 2018” over “Worldcon 76”. I’d also be okay with “Worldcon 76 2018”.

  29. Kevin Standlee: Obviously San Jose can pick a name that pleases the committee. I’m personally horrified by the vision of this machine-stamped name and numbering sequence becoming the convention’s brand.

    They try to do that with numbering Super Bowls with Roman numerals — perhaps the most-watched event on TV in any given year — and unless they’re talking about “this year’s Super Bowl” really nobody knows which one they’re talking about until they state which teams were in the game, and the year. What fails for the Super Bowl isn’t going to work better for the Worldcon.

    I don’t like Worldcon 2018 either, but that avoids the problems of Worldcon Somenumber where you can’t tell which year anybody is talking about without looking it up.

    The collection of anecdotes offered in the attempt to show this is a problem that must be solved by uniform branding is also weak, and they can be viewed more than one way. The person who thinks ConJose is part of an annual series of local cons is projecting that assumption onto the event — there being no annual series, its not the name that’s the problem but the person’s leaping to a conclusion.

  30. “Worldcon 76 2018” looks like my home phone number. I can see the point about a consistent format, but how about “Worldcon [number] [venue]“? Or even “Worldcon [number] [venue] [funky_individual_name]“? Best of both worlds… except it might be overly long….

  31. @Nicholas Whyte

    LT copies owned (with a bit of commentary where appropriate)

    Horror

    Honor At Stake – Declan Finn – 4 copies
    Alice – Christina Henry – 212 copies
    An Unattractive Vampire – Jim McDoniel – 19 copies (none tagged Horror)
    Souldancer – Brian Niemeier – 1 copy
    Chapelwood – Cherie Priest – 78 copies
    Disappearance at Devil’s Rock – Paul Tremblay – 80 copies

    SF

    The Life Engineered, J-F. Dubeau – 8 copies
    Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon – 17 copies
    Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie – 658 copies
    Agent of the Imperium, Marc Miller – 4 copies
    Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson – 471 copies
    Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, John C. Wright – 3 copies

    Fantasy Novel

    Asteroid Made of Dragons, G. Derek Adams – 9 copies
    Blood Hound, James Osiris Baldwin – 3 copies
    The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Jim Butcher – 505 copies
    Son of the Black Sword, Larry Correia – 56 copies
    Changeling’s Island, Dave Freer – 5 copies
    The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin – 537 copies
    Grave Measures, R.R. Virdi – 0 copies (5 copies of Grave Beginnings the first book in the series)

    Apocalyptic Novel

    Ctrl Alt Revolt!, Nick Cole – 14 copies
    Chasing Freedom, Marina Fontaine – 0 copies (and nothing by the author)
    Dark Age, Felix O. Hartmann – 4 copies
    The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin – 537 copies
    The Desert and the Blade, S.M. Stirling – 41 copies
    A Time to Die, Mark Wandrey – 0 copies

    Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel

    Blood in the Water, Taylor Anderson – 7 copies
    Chains of Command, Marko Kloos – 29 copies
    Wrath of an Angry God, Gibson Michaels – 0 copies (and nothing by this author)
    Allies and Enemies: Fallen, Amy J. Murphy – 8 copies
    The End of All Things, John Scalzi – 318 copies
    Hell’s Foundations Quiver, David Weber – 95 copies
    The Price of Valor, Django Wexler – 59 copies

    Alternate History Novel

    Germanica, Robert Conroy – 12 copies
    1635: A Parcel of Rogues, Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis – 25 copies
    1636: The Cardinal Virtues, Eric Flint & Walter H. Hunt – 42 copies
    Deadlands: Ghostwalkers, Jonathan Maberry – 21 copies
    League of Dragons, Naomi Novik – 138 copies
    Bombs Away: The Hot War, Harry Turtledove – 40 copies

    Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

    Six of Crows, Leigh Bardugo – 750 copies
    Changeling’s Island, Dave Freer – 5 copies
    Steeplejack, A.J. Hartley – 31 copies
    Trix and the Faerie Queen, Alethea Kontis – 6 copies
    The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett – 688 copies
    Carry On, Rainbow Rowell – 822 copies
    Calamity, Brandon Sanderson – 282 copies
    Updraft, Fran Wilde – 127 copies

  32. ““Worldcon 76 2018” looks like my home phone number.”

    Lets go for Worldcon 124C41+. Can’t dial that one yet.

  33. Following up to my survey of LT copies owned, I looked at a few in Goodreads and for some of the nominees there are far more ‘ratings’ there, however for others there are still a depressing dearth of people expressing ownership (only 15 for Marina Fontaine’s novel).

  34. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve attended many SF/F conventions that were in the form of “ConName N” where N was the Nth iteration, not YYYY, where YYYY was the year number.”

    And virtually everyone of those conventions that I’ve attended have been in the same city, run by the same people.

    Worldcons are neither of those. Each of them has a different flavor, thanks to the different groups running them and their different locations. It’s far easier for me to remember what and where “ConJose” and “Magicon” were than it will be for me to remember where “Worldcon 75” and “Worldcon 76” are. (Or even trying to remember if I have a member to a particular iteration of a long series of identically–named conventions.)

    It was a disappointment that Worldcon 75 didn’t pick a distinctive name, but I can understand wanting to celebrate the 75th Worldcon.

    “Worldcon 76” doesn’t make any sense at all to me, and it’s a real shame that Worldcons are losing some of their cultural history.

  35. andyl: That’s a great bit of research.

    I’m not surprised to see Rainbow Rowell’s number in YA — she’s probably my daughter’s favorite writer. And she is an incredible writer in any case.

  36. Mike Glyer on September 11, 2016 at 10:41 am said:

    Hampus Eckerman: That’s the most dissonant part of some winners’ celebration of their Dragon Awards. This crowdsourced award is expected to honor the works most loved by a broad section of the public– and is won by several works that manifestly very few have ever heard of, and even fewer read.

    I think for awards in general, a mix of the famous and not-so famous is a positive feature. I note some blogs have spun the Dragon awards’ mix of nominees in that way.

    It is also a positive feature of how the Hugos are structured – with different types of works that create different kinds of competition between relative newcomers and established names.

    However, structurally The Dragons don’t look like they will deliver this positive feature consistently. The results this year occurred for reasons [as discussed] and not because of the way the awards are structured.

  37. John Lorentz:

    While we’re at it, let’s also rename the Science Fiction Achievement Awards every year, with a new name that has something to do with the local city. After all, we need more local color, right?

    I was deeply disappointed that one could only barely tell that this year’s Worldcon was the World Science Fiction Convention by the way it was promoted and displayed at the facility. Oh, it was obviously MidAmeriCon II, but everything else was lost in the clutter.

    Personally, whether we call it Worldcon NN or Worldcon YYYY isn’t as important to me as calling it Worldcon first. I think it comes down to whether it’s more important to market ourselves only to people who have already attended a bunch of Worldcons (i.e. the people who “If you hold it, they will come”) or those people who have never attended one and don’t know what it is. I want people who find Worldcon to want to go to more Worldcons (as I did), not go looking for MidAmeriCon 3 in Kansas City in 2017 and wondering what happened to it, shrugging, and never coming back

  38. @John Arkansawyer: Thanks for the link to the Rebecca Cambell story, which has elbowed its way straight onto my Hugo longlist.

  39. I can see the benefits of using the word Worldcon first, but I agree that using the iteration number will make it difficult over time to remember which is which. I like some of the alternatives suggested. Soon Lee’s “Worldcon San Jose 2018” works for me.

  40. @Lee
    That WAS my impression .Worldcon 75 picked that name for the anniversary purposes, and wouldn’t have done it if they had gotten the bid a couple years earlier. They’d not have gone with “Worldcon 73”. I suppose asking the Worldcon 75 people would make it crystal clear.

  41. While we’re at it, let’s also rename the Science Fiction Achievement Awards every year, with a new name that has something to do with the local city. After all, we need more local color, right?

    Kevin,

    Your habit of immediately introducing absurd strawman arguments is not helpful to carrying on a meaningful conversation, so I won’t bother to continue. Obviously, you feel that whatever I had to say was meaningless unless I agreed with you.

  42. I was a strong proponent of calling the Helsinki Worldcon Worldcon 75 (I was on the commitee that made that decision) and am very happy to see the San Jose Worldcon follow suit.

    I think many people want to refering to Worldcon by their city name or their year. It’s the Chicago Worldcon, or the Kansas City Worldcon, or the Helsinki Worldcon. There are a ton of GeneriCons, but only one Worldcon. (As far as SF is concerned)

    I’d definitely be ok with something else following the ‘Worldcon XX:’ – for example, ‘Worldcon 74: MidAmeriCon 2’ or something similar. But I think leading with the Worldcon and the number of Worldcons gives continuity, branding, and prestige.

    This is a pattern that I hope continues.

  43. @princejvstin: Worldcon 75 was a good first time to start it for anniversary purposes, but I would have supported that naming structure if it has been Worldcon 73, and was very pleased when San Jose continued it for Worldcon 76.

  44. @John Lorentz,

    Kevin Standlee’s argument is on point: the award doesn’t get a local name every year, why should the con itself? After all, the con already has a name: Worldcon. That should really be front and center; that is, after all, the main thing that distinguishes this it from other cons, which are often given local names – largely because their location is what distinguishes them from other cons.

    Local names are useful to distinguish them, but those can be added after: “Worldcon 79 aka FancyLocalNameCon ” perhaps?

    I for one would not be at all averse to such a general naming scheme: that the con’s name is always “Worldcon ” followed by some optional con-specific bits.

    A bit of order + a bit of chaos in combination. Sounds good to me.

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