Worldcon Open Comments

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I’m still on the sidelines but improving. Meantime I thought it a good idea to create a space to leave comments on MidAmameriCon this week for those who are checking here.

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480 thoughts on “Worldcon Open Comments”

  1. Ray Bradbury winner for both best fanzine and best fan writer of 1941 retros.

  2. Woohoo! That 8% pineapple beer that I drank several sips of has gone straight to my head. Love is real! I love you all! Thanks Hampus for organizing a mighty File 770 gathering! We colonized two additional tables in the name of our Filer empire, we all drank new and unfamiliar liquids, and we raised them in a toast to our absent host. Awesome party!

  8. Yeah Fantasia!

    The radio commercials between the award presentations are fantastic.

  18. So wonderful, Van Vogts granddaughter picked up the award, giddy with pride. ^^

  19. So adorable that a Van Vogt was there!

    Looks like things I voted for won. Wanna see what came second to “Pinocchio” which IMO should not have been in that category.

  21. Re: “strong admin”
    Cheryl Morgan talked about this recently and Kevin Standlee’s comments are also worth reading. IMO, 3SV is closer to the spirit of the Hugo Awards than any other anti-slate measure proposed to date. Though it makes more work for the admins (though maybe not as much as feared), that it moves the responsibility of selecting the Hugo finalists to the collective WSFS membership is a massive plus for me.

    The “strong admin” solution gives additional powers to The Administrator, and while that might work for other awards, the WSFS has historically been very reluctant to delegate its authority. I just don’t see a “strong admin” proposal getting through a WSFS Business meeting.

  23. Congrats Fantasia! (does that even make sense at this late date? o_O )

    Thanks to everyone for pics, descriptions and reports. Kudos to those involved in the Business Meeting. We are with you in spirit and vicariously.

    Glad to see Mike able to post some, too.

  24. Sorry I missed the File 770 meetup, but I was attending Fran Wilde’s food game show panel. I did run into Kurt Busiek and go by the very lovely File 770 park today.

  25. Was thinking of we should have some meet directly after the Hugos on saturday? Lots of new data to discuss. ^^

  26. Obviously I need to follow this comment set too.

    For those still interested in this morning’s (Thursday’s) business meeting, I posted in the Business meeting thread.

    I’d love to get together with fellow Filers again. Or, you know, if you folks wanted to come to the filking…

  27. Also for interested Filers I have a concert at 4:30 on Friday (room 2505A) and one of my songs will be the one cubist and I wrote for EPH.

  28. JJ on August 18, 2016 at 6:52 am said:

    This also likely means that Kevin Standlee will be unable to post segments of the meeting video as it is in progress, and will likely have to wait until he returns to his hotel after the meeting to do so.

    SFSFC (parent of the San Jose in 2018 Worldcon bid) sponsored a wi-fi dedicated IP address for uploading the WSFS video, which provides me with a 2 mbps up/down connection. It’s not great, but it works, and the low-resolution video files are specifically so that they can handle less-than-optimal internet speeds.

    Jeff R. on August 18, 2016 at 12:04 pm said:

    What’s Defining North America about? What places stand to change Worldcon continents if it passes?

    There have been contentions that a NASFiC could be in western Iceland because it’s on the North American plate.

    (For that matter, if there was a Worldcon Hawaii, would there be a NASFIC bid that year? Is that the issue being contended?)

    Probably. It’s an unintended consequence of removing the former “zone” definitions we used to use for Worldcon site selection.

    Jeff R. on August 18, 2016 at 3:45 pm said:

    (Re: North America Definition) Interesting. I approve of getting rid of the ambiguity, but would sort of favor the current definition over the proposed one in practice, especially if we create an entirely hypothetical but nonetheless longstanding tradition that in the case of each hypothetical Hawaii Worldcon the NASFIC has to go in a different North American country (Which is to say almost certainly Canada, but possibly somewhere in the Caribbean or Mexico I suppose.)

    There is no requirement that NASFIC be held in a different country in the plausible case of a Worldcon in Hawaii. (Hawaii did place second in a field of four in the 1993 site selection voting, ahead of bids from Zagreb and Phoenix, and losing to San Francisco.) I think we really want to close off this loophole before it becomes a real issue.

  29. There have been contentions that a NASFiC could be in western Iceland because it’s on the North American plate

    And this is actually a problem? Are there that many places to hold a convention in western Iceland?

  30. I would totally go to a WorldCon in western Iceland.

    @Harold Rjyevik (spelt wrong, on phone) is on the west of the island, so there’s more chance there than the east where hardly anyone lives.

  32. Of course, Robert Heinlein could never win a Hugo Award these days.

    Has he been trying to get ‘–All Us Zombies–‘ on this year’s ballot again?

  33. Well, I only got two out of eleven in the Retros (JWC in best editor and Batman in graphic novel). Most of the fiction winners were third or fourth on my ballot. This absolutely, definitely, indisputably, without a doubt, proves that the Sekrit Kabal is at work in the Retro Hugos.

  34. Obviously EPH is not actually supposed to be about diversity, but if it actually turns out to have a negative impact on diversity, that’s surely a relevant consideration?

    Now, I don’t think the figures we have currently are enough to show that it does. But I can imagine circumstances in which it might – if, say, people who vote in a more clumped way (not by conspiracy but by convergence on excellence) are more likely to vote for women and minority candidates – and that would have to be taken into account.

  35. If we define continents by plates, California is not in North America, so a Worldcon in San Jose would trigger a Nasfic. I think we have to accept that ‘continents’ are cultural entities, into which political factors enter.

  36. RetroHugos: Campbell was obvious, Bradbury was always a likely winner, so, I guess, was Batman. (Yes, later reputation enters into it. That’s unavoidable.) And Fantasia, and I suppose Pinocchio.

    I’m glad that Heinlein can still win a Hugo, though those were not the works of his I voted for, but I am rather surprised by ‘Robbie’ – I would definitely have predicted that one for ‘Requiem’ (though I voted for the Borges). Were people trying to spread their votes out, to give representation to more SF greats? (All three of the ‘Big Three’ as alleged by John C. Wright: plus Bradbury. Where is Clarke? Clearly the SF establishment is prejudiced against Clarke!)

    Novel: I really had no idea what would happen there. The Golden Age clearly got going in a big way between 1938 and 1940, but I don’t think it had entirely reached novels; genre SF was still mostly a short fiction thing. But while last time round I thought the two non-genre works were way in front of the others, this time it was harder to call – I still preferred The Ill-Made Knight and Kallocain , but they weren’t outstanding as The Sword in the Stone and Out of the Silent Planet were. But Slan is not the one I would have gone for: I do wonder if it was helped by the symbolic significance it later acquired (which I don’t actually see in the story itself, though some do).

  37. Soon Lee:

    IMO, 3SV is closer to the spirit of the Hugo Awards than any other anti-slate measure proposed to date.

    I just don’t think it’s powerful enough to be an adequate solution. If you are presented with a list and told you can vote some things down, there seem to be three options:
    a. Vote down everything that is on a slate. But this allows slaters to use the ‘poisoned cup’ strategy.
    b. Vote down what you genuinely think is unworthy. But to do that you have to read it all, which you can’t do in the time allowed.
    c. Vote down only what is abusive. This is possible, and would alleviate one aspect of the problem, but would not solve the more general problem of domination by slates.

  38. If Wikipedia and ISFDB are to be beleived then 1940 was a fairly thin year for Arthur C. Clarke. As a radar engineer he may have had other things to worry about.

    The only thing I find is “At the Mountains of Murkiness” which sounds interesting but perhaps not award worthy.

  40. c. Vote down only what is abusive

    I’d settle for that. To be fair, at least four of the works on Best Novel were fully justified. While I think we generally didn’t like SevenEves, no-one’s faulting it for not having big SFnal ideas.
    Ultimately we have to hope that puberty hits and Teddy finds other things to excite him and his acolytes. If their power to abuse is mitigated then it’s more likely they’ll get bored.

  41. Speaking of EPH, what happened to Brian Z? Did he finally get banned for something, or did he have to go because his planet needed him?

  43. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius didn’t win. That was my only rooting interest in the entire Hugos this year. I am disappoint. Clearly the SJWs had it in for the proto-libertarian Borgés, so they threw the award that was rightfully his to Heinlein instead.

  45. @Andrew

    I’m glad that Heinlein can still win a Hugo, though those were not the works of his I voted for, but I am rather surprised by ‘Robbie’ – I would definitely have predicted that one for ‘Requiem’ (though I voted for the Borges). Were people trying to spread their votes out, to give representation to more SF greats? (All three of the ‘Big Three’ as alleged by John C. Wright: plus Bradbury. Where is Clarke? Clearly the SF establishment is prejudiced against Clarke!)

    I found “Requiem” was the weakest entry in the short story category and the weakest of the Heinleins along with the one about the nuclear power stations. “Robbie” was an early Asimov, but it’s his earliest robot story and also so memorable that I had no problems remembering plot details 25 years after first reading it. The two Brackett stories probably split the vote and Borges was always an outsider.

    The two Heinlein wins in novella and novelette are well deserved, even though I don’t particularly care for “If this goes on…” Slan hasn’t held up all that well IMO, but it was enormously important for the history of the genre, so it’s a deserving winner. I’m also happy Van Vogt’s granddaughter was there to accept the award. Still angry though that Edmund Hamilton’s Captain Future didn’t even get a Hugo nomination, since in a roundabout way (via the late 1970s anime adaptation) this was one of the works that inspired my love for SF.

    I’m a bit sad that a not very good early Batman beat Flash Gordon at its peak, because the quality difference between early Batman and Flash Gordon is so huge it’s ridiculous. I’m also sad Margaret Brundage didn’t win, especially since she was fading out of the pulps by the early 1940s, though Virgil Finlay is a very deserving winner.

  46. Doctor Science asked:

    Cheryl Morgan refers to a conflict over whether her Emerald City fanzine should have gotten the Hugo. What was that about?

    When electronic fanzines started to be a thing, there was a debate over whether non-paper publications should qualify as zines. (Plenty of zines had developed electronic editions in addition to their paper ones by then, but Emerald City was the first really popular one to be Internet-only.)

  47. Hey, there’s a DC in 2024 Worldcon bid! Run by pretty much the same people as DC in 2017. I for one am all in favor of a DC Worldcon in an election year, as it means no danger of the Worldcon being stepped on by a party nominating convention in the same city.

    (This comes close to happening much more often than you would expect by chance. Just looking at the last few elections, Worldcon was in the same city as the DNC in 2004 and 2008 (and in fact lost some of its contracted space in 2008 due to the resulting shuffle), and for 2016, Kansas City survived to the semi-final round of selection for the RNC.

    The people trying to bring the RNC to KC pointed out that it had been 40 years since the RNC was last held there. Guess what else was last held in KC in 1976…)

  48. Yep, Brian Z got banned.

    Thanks. I had noticed his absence, but missed the reason. With a little googling, I see that apparently he suffered death by irony.

  49. Was there some murmering about another UK Worldcon in 2024? Which obciously would be more use to me, but perhaps a bit too close to the suggested 2023 in France.

  50. Clearly the SJWs had it in for the proto-libertarian Borgés, so they threw the award that was rightfully his to Heinlein instead.

    Except actually Asimov got it.

    (The 1940 version of ‘Tlon’ does raise dinosaur-like questions about whether it is really SF – the bit about Tlon breaking through into our world, which makes it clearly so, was added in 1947. I didn’t mind, but some might.)

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