If you love the Corflu Glitter logo, have they got a deal for you. You can buy the shirt, brandish the button, wear the hat and chug from the mug. There won’t be the slightest doubt which con is your fave. Proceed immediately to the Corflu Glitter store at Café Press.
[Thanks to Arnie Katz for the story.]
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien finished atop of NPR’s Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey. Over 60,000 voters participated. Coming in second and third were Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
The three highest-ranking works by women were Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #20, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, #22, and Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, #33.
Ray Bradbury had four books make the list, the most popular being Fahrenheit 451, #7. The leading Heinlein novel among his three on the list was Stranger in a Strange Land at #17.
And oh, yes, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, #93, ran ahead of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, #97. I’ll have to ask if Jo Walton is willing to go two falls out of three…
What any fan thinks about the Semiprozine Committee’s and Rich Lynch’s proposals to change the fan publishing Hugo rules will inevitably depend on what he or she thought needed to be fixed in the first place.
So I’ll lead into my comments by listing what I believe, with a brief explanation:
Text-based publications should not be grouped with unrelated items for the same reason we don’t lump novels and dramatic presentations into a single category.
I advocate this as a way of creating an enforceable definition of semiprozine.
The current rules define none of these terms. People cannot be sure what is eligible in the fanzine category, which deters participation.
There must be practical means of enforcing any rules. Fandom neither wants nor rewards activist Hugo Administrators.
I. The Committee’s Report: Did the Semiprozine Committee report deliver? Let’s see.
The majority report proposes four changes.
(1) New criteria for semiprozine:
Amend the sections 3.3.12 and 3.3.13, by replacing them with:
3.3.12: Best Semiprozine. Any generally available non-professional publication devoted to science fiction or fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which in the previous calendar year met at least one (1) of the following criteria:
(1) paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication,
(2) was generally available only for paid purchase,
(Cited sections are in the WSFS Constitution.)
The proposed amendment’s most impressive feature is that it discards the antiquated criteria regarding printed copies and advertising space. I’m satisfied the two remaining criteria are the best litmus tests for semiprozines – payment to participants, copies primarily available to purchasers. And these are performance/measurement-based criteria a Hugo Administrator can evaluate from readily-available information.
Interestingly, the Committee’s proposal eliminates the right an editor currently has to move a zine into semiprozine category by declaration. As a result, Langford’s Ansible would be welcomed back to the fanzine category.
The amendment’s main shortcoming is its failure to define “issue” and “the equivalent in other media.” One virtue of Rich Lynch’s proposal (discussed below) is that its terms are defined.
(2) Best Fanzine modified: The Committee has made neutral changes to the Best Fanzine rule to conform it to the revised semiprozine criteria:
3.3.13: Best Fanzine. Any generally available non-professional publication devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which in the previous calendar year met neither of the following criteria:
(1) paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication,
(2) was generally available only for paid purchase,
The old rule excluded anything that qualified as a semiprozine; the new wording serves the same purpose.
Unfortunately, the Committee has done nothing about the eligibility of podcasts and its report explicitly states StarShip Sofa will continue to qualify as a fanzine under its version of the rules.
(3) A definition for “professional publication”: The Committee proposes to put a working definition of “professional publication” back in to the WSFS Constitution. Their intentions are right on target, the rules have been in want of a new definition of “professional” since the old one was erased as a side-effect of other changes.
However, the reason a definition of “professional” is needed is not to keep Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF out of the pastures of fandom. Almost none of the “pro” Hugo categories – for fiction, editing and art – actually includes “professional publication” as a condition of eligibility. Best Professional Artist alone has that requirement.
The real need for defining “professional” is to disqualify ineligible entrants from the semiprozine and fan categories by giving constitutional meaning to the antonym “non-professional publications.”
The Committee’s definition is in this proposal:
Add a new section: 3.Y.Z: A Professional Publication is one which meets at least one of the following two criteria:
(1) it provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or,
(2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.
The proposed language sounds very precise, which is of little help because in practice the rule will depend on voluntary compliance, being impractical to enforce.
Consider: Semiprozines aspire to commercial success, whether or not they depend on it. If lightning strikes, what then? Charlie Brown once told me he depended on winning the Hugo every year to drive Locus’ subscription sales. That leads me to believe no semiprozine publisher will want to give up the market appeal of a succession of Hugo nominations.
In Charlie Brown’s day the print media criteria were sufficient to classify Locus as a semiprozine. Nobody had to ask him for income information to apply this new one-quarter test, which presumably would lead to Locus being reclassified as a prozine. Can you imagine how Charlie would have answered? Business reasons and privacy motives will keep prospective nominees from cooperating with the enforcement of this rule.
(4) The Hammer? The Committee already anticipated my last criticism with its final proposal:
Add to the end of Section 3.9 (Notification and Acceptance):
Additionally, each nominee in the categories of Best Fanzine and Best Semi-Prozine shall be required to confirm that they meet the qualifications of their category.
But what will that mean in practice? The rule doesn’t define what prospective nominees will be required to do to confirm eligibility. Does that mean continuing the policy of self-certification with polite “do-you-think-you-are-eligible?” e-mails of the sort this year’s Hugo Administrator sent out? If the plan is to take everybody’s word for it, there’s no need for this rule.
Saul Jaffe’s minority report, appealing for better draftsmanship, is on target. If it is not fairly obvious who is eligible in a category there is a major problem with the Hugo rule, because it will never be cured by enforcement.
II. Rich Lynch’s Amendments
The latest version of Rich Lynch’s proposals I know about are on his LiveJournal:
Proposed WSFS Constitutional Amendments to keep the Fanzine Hugo non-professional and limited to words on paper or video screen.
(Note: strikeouts indicate proposed deletions and underlined text proposed additions.)
3.3.12: Best Semiprozine. Any generally available non-professional periodical publication devoted to science fiction or fantasy which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which in the previous calendar year met at least two (2) one (1) of the following criteria:
(1) had an average press run of at least one thousand (1000) copies per issue,
(2) paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication,
(3) (2) provided at least half the income of any one person,
(4) (3) had at least fifteen percent (15%) of its total space occupied by advertising,
(5) (4) announced itself to be a semiprozine.
Audio and video productions are excluded from this category.3.3.13 Best Fan Audio or Video Production. Any generally available non-professional audio or video production devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has had four (4) or more episodes or podcasts, at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year.
3.3.13 3.3.14: Best Fanzine. Any generally available non-professional periodical publication devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which does not qualify as a semiprozine. Audio and video productions are excluded from this category, as are publications that pay their contributors and/or staff monetarily.
Lynch’s amendments make changes I support. They
Some other features trouble me. His Best Fan Audio or Video Production amendment creates a new category for podcasts, videocasts, etc. – like last year’s winner StarShip Sofa – that would be excluded from the Best Semiprozine and Best Fanzine categories if his changes go through. I think that idea for a new award category should be left to find its own supporters, and not be packaged as though it is a goal of fanzine fans. It rings a false note.
Lynch’s semiprozine definition fails to go far enough, leaving in place outdated print media criteria (average press run), criteria an external observer can’t check (income), or have no practical application for blogs and websites (15% of space occupied by advertising). However, Lynch would argue my last complaint isn’t a problem — he interprets his amendments to rule websites and blogs out of contention in the zine categories.
III. Thinking Out Loud
Rich Lynch has my thanks for advancing the public discussion of these issues with his motions. And they are the only proposals to plainly state that fanzines are text-based and should not be competing with items that resemble dramatic presentations.
While I like several of the Semiprozine Committee’s ideas for changing the semipro and fanzine category definitions, more needs to be done. I’d like to see the “issue” definition problem solved by including Lynch’s chosen word “periodical.” And I would like to focus the zine categories on text by adding Lynch’s phrase “Audio and video productions are excluded from this category” to the Committee’s semiprozine and fanzine rule proposals.
We’ll see how it all plays out next week at the 2011 Business Meeting.
By Randy Byers: This is just a reminder to anyone who is planning to submit a fanzine to WOOF (the Worldcon APA) this year.
Copy count is 69.
I need to know the title and page count of your zine so I can add it to the ToC.
THIS IS A CHANGE SINCE MY LAST ANNOUNCEMENT: If you are mailing your zines to me rather than delivering them (or having them delivered) to the convention, I need to receive them by Monday, August 15th. I had previously said the deadline was the 16th, but it turns out I’m leaving for Reno before mail arrives on Tuesday.
There will be a drop box in the fanzine lounge for anyone who brings their fanzine to the convention. Please drop them off by noon Friday.
Collation will be at noon on Saturday in the fanzine lounge.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions at [email protected].
Cheers,
Randy Byers
2011 OE for WOOF
The Semi-prozine Committee authorized by the 2009 Worldcon Business Meeting has issued its report of recommended changes to the Hugo Award rules.
The committee report follows the jump. The text reproduced here comes from Warren Buff via Andrew Porter.
Porter added a scoffing comment of his own about the fanhistory in the report, likely just a veiled complaint that Locus was mentioned by name while his own classic zine was merely alluded to:
Ah, how I remember those heady days when my Algol/Starship dominated the Hugo Awards (as implied below: ‘ …a few other giant, slick fanzines dominated the Best Fanzine category…’ ). Why, I must have won, how many was it, ten times? Huh, only once you say, in 1974? And that was a tie! How can that be…
Coincidentally, at the 1974 Worldcon I was the one who accepted the Hugo given to Richard Geis, who tied Porter for Best Fanzine that year. O tempora o mores…
A great riff on the unexpected box office success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes — “Hit Happens” — is posted at Grantland.
First on the list of things that went right was a decision to dump the trailer featuring male lead James Franco, who alienated critics with his work as host of the Oscars, and cut another showing the movie’s real star:
Fox’s marketing department recalibrated, shifting the focus to the movie’s digital apes. In the weeks leading up to Rise’s release, motion-capture actor Andy Serkis — who “plays” the movie’s main ape via CGI but never appears on-screen in physical form – hit the publicity trailer alone.
And to insure Hollywood’s publicity mill paid attention they also launched an over-the-top campaign asking voters to make Serkis an Oscar nominee.
This was a bold move if you consider the poor track record other motion-capture movies, but it was rewarded:
“I wonder how the success of Apes makes Robert Zemeckis feel,” says the producer, “after his endless series of motion-capture disasters — Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, Mars Needs Moms — lost millions and led to the shuttering of his studio.”
Grantland’s authors also give a hat tip to Roger Ebert’s review of the granddaddy of the genre, Planet of the Apes (1968), which begins humorously:
My highly reliable public opinion sampling system, consisting entirely of taking the word of taxi drivers for everything, leads me to the conclusion that “Planet of the Apes” is one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated movies…
More voters than ever before cast ballots in the 2011 Hugo Awards. Renovation’s 2100 votes broke a 31-year-old record (1980, 1788 votes).
Members in 33 countries participated, and 46.1% of Renovation’s overall membership.
Earlier this year the con broke the record for nominating ballots received, 1006.
Renovation has also announced Marina Gelineau is the winner of the Hugo base design contest.
I believe this is her website, which displays an award-winning work in glass “Mobilis in Mobile” inspired by Jules Verne. She is also the subject of this article in France Today.
Mobilis in Mobile
Kevin Standlee and Mur Lafferty will cover the Hugo Ceremony via Twitter again this year.
It occurs to me that Kevin, who has long fancied performing in a version of 1776 based on the Worldcon Business Meeting, should also set a scene at the Hugos where he can join in the duet singing these new lyrics to the tune of “Egg”:
All:
We’re typing up a tweet, tweet, tweet
As each Hugo’s handed out
We’re typing up a tweet, tweet, tweet
As each rocket leaves the nest of this
Conventional incubator
A few weeks ago I wrote enviously about fans at the Florida Supercon who’d get to see the new feature film based on Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth.
Well I’m green no more — the movie has just been added to the Renovation Film Festival. According to the pocket program Radio Free Albemuth will be shown Saturday at 10:00 p.m. in the Tuscany Ballroom of the Peppermill Hotel immediately following the Hugo Ceremony. It couldn’t be any easier for me to find.
Variety reviewed the movie favorably on August 2 saying,
this well-performed paranoia piece about a music exec rebelling against the state after receiving messages from an alien intelligence should connect strongly with Dick’s fanbase and attract upscale auds seeking sci-fi with political and philosophical substance.
Here are 11 developments of interest to fans.
(1) “Oh, it’s great to be a genius of course, but keep that old horse before the cart….” Let’s hear it for the Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen:
Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.
The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.
Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.
Here’s a transcript of the call: “Hello, desk sergeant? I’m ready to be arrested. I’ll be standing out front with my hands extended waiting for the cuffs….”
(2) Even if they never publish another paper book the conserving of exquisite rare books will go on forever. The Washington Post reports a summer gathering of people devoted to this work:
Here is a book about handwriting by Palatino, a 16th-century calligrapher for whom a font is named. And here, a folio of Shakespeare’s plays that sold for one English pound in 1632. And here, an exquisitely illustrated, calfskin-bound Horace collection that bankrupted its publisher in 1733. Welcome to Rare Book School, summer camp for bibliophiles. Tucked in the basement of the cavernous main library at the University of Virginia, the school is an annual five-week homage to the printed page. Or is it an elegy?
The modern book, a bunch of sheets bound together within a cover, has endured for two millennia, surviving the Dark Ages, radio, television and the moving picture. But now it is threatened by an electronic version of itself. The e-book is projected to outsell the printed book by 2015, according to Publishers Weekly magazine. Borders bookstores have begun liquidation sales. Google intends to scan all the world’s books by the end of the decade.
(3) A hat tip to the KaCSFFS blogger who asked and answered how the makers of Captain America depicted Chris Evans as both the 4F weakling Steve Rogers and the muscular superhero, and how they made actors sharing a scene with him “appear to be looking into the eyes of the wimpy Rogers, if he was being played by the tall Evans.” The Wikipedia explains:
“Most of the shots were done by an L.A. company called LOLA that specializes in digital ‘plastic surgery’. The technique involved shrinking Chris in all dimensions. We shot each skinny Steve scene at least four times; once like a normal scene with Chris and his fellow actors in the scene, once with Chris alone in front of a green screen so his element could be reduced digitally, again with everyone in the scene but with chris absent so that the shrunken Steve could be re-inserted into the scene, and finally with a body double mimicking Chris’s actions, in case the second technique were required. When Chris had to interact with other characters in the scene, we had to either lower Chris or raise the other actors on apple boxes or elevated walkways to make skinny Steve shorter in comparison. For close-ups, Chris’ fellow actors had to look at marks on his chin that represented where his eyes would be after the shrinking process, and Chris had to look at marks on the tops of the actor’s head to represent their eyes. . . . The second technique involved grafting Chris’s head onto the body double. This technique was used mostly when Chris was sitting or lying down, or when a minimum of physical acting was required.”
(4) The broker’s online listing for a New York apartment is tailored to appeal to very rich fans (if there are any such):
This apartment is simply surreal, with a Jules Verne meets Tim Burton sensibility. This home is an incredible journey starting as you walk through the front door, which has been remodeled to resemble a submarine. The distinctive features within the home, from the pulleys and antique pipes, to the miniature planes and huge old wooden casts, have been individually hand-picked and are mired with history.
The Chef’s kitchen is equipped with high-end appliances and impeccable finishes abound to compliment this one-of-a-kind apartment, from antique wrenches and tools designed as cabinet handles to the inescapable technicolored zeppelin that suspends across 32-feet of the apartments ceiling.
Inescapable indeed! For fans of the neon steampunk aesthetic—and after seeing these listing pics, we might count ourselves among them—the apartment is asking $1.75 million.
(5) The interview with William Shatner in the Globe and Mail includes the inevitable question, and the subject’s typically wry answer:
Would you ever consider retirement?
I don’t even know what that means. What does that mean? I stop and go twiddle my thumbs somewhere? Maybe they could film me twiddling my thumbs.
(6) Rainn Wilson from The Office and the forthcoming Super talks about SF and Norwescon in a post on the LA Times “Hero Complex” blog.
Note that Rainn’s father, Robert Wilson, wrote SF — Tentacles of Dawn (1978) and the short story “Vandals of the Void” for Planet Stories (1945).
(7) The BBC News Magazine looks at the input SF artists have had to real spacecraft and speculates how that will play out in the future:
More and more, the aim of companies, such as Boeing, will be to entice consumers to pay for space travel. Just as airlines have done, they will have to appeal to potential passengers – and investors – in order to establish their brands against the competition.
“An enterprising company seeking to attract government and private passengers might achieve success by offering them spaceships that resembled the unique visions of Chris Foss,” says science fiction academic Dr Gary Westfahl.
(8) Will simple text e-readers or multimedia apps win out? The Globe and Mail found a major SF writer willing to pooh-pooh the chances of more elaborate readers:
“I think the notion we can entice people into reading by having soundtracks or little animations is a category error,” British fantasy novelist Chine Miéville said in a recent interview. “I just don’t think that’s why people who want to read want to read. You’re not going to persuade them on that basis.”
That may explain why relatively simple, black-and-white e-readers remain so popular despite competition from glitzier tablets. Like books themselves – and manifestly unlike the Internet-inflected apps – they promise long periods of undisturbed immersion in fully realized other worlds. Rather than changing books by adding more stuff to them, they optimize books by stripping out everything but the essential shapes of black letters on a white background
(9) Brad Foster will draw the certificates for first-place finishers in the 2012 Fan Activity Achievement Awards, to be presented at Corflu Glitter:
“Brad did an outstanding job on the FAAN Award certificates for Corflu Quire and Corflu Silver,” notes Chairman Joyce Katz. “We’re delighted to have him execute the 2012 FAAn Awards certificates.”
(10) William Gurstelle, author of The Practical Pyromaniac has a contest going to create a Clerihew (a type of doggerel poem) about a scientist. Example:
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
And lived in the odium
Of inventing sodium.
(11) Newcity Lit thinks that Ray Bradbury’s old hometown could use a little refurbishing in its article “Something Waukegan This Way Comes: Finding Ray Bradbury’s Boyhood Muse”:
A Midwestern Proust, Bradbury re-imagined Waukegan as Green Town, Illinois, in several works—most famously in “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “Dandelion Wine.” Per Bradbury, Waukegan was a charming rural burg of the twenties, rife with sun-dappled fields and pies cooling on windowsills, which happened to be visited by serial killers and evil carny demons. Waukegan may well have been sun-dappled, etc. when Mr. Bradbury was growing up, but today’s reality is grim. The Autumn People may have succeeded, leaving semi-industrial, depressed Waukegan—location of three superfund clean-up sites—in their wake. It’s not a happy place, though it’s obvious some people are trying to revive the poor thing.
[Thanks for these links go out to David Klaus, Andrew Porter, Steven H Silver, Arnie Katz, John King Tarpinian, James Hay and John Mansfield.]