The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were presented August 19 at Worldcon 76 in San Jose. The Sidewise Awards recognize excellence in alternate historical fiction.
Nominees Gregory Benford, Brent A. Harris, Alan Smale, Harry Turtledove, and Bryce Zabel, as well as former judge Moshe Feder and founder, judge, and administrator Steven H Silver were in attendance.
Following a thirty-minute discussion of alternate history, Feder announced the winner of the short form award and Silver announced the winner of the Long Form Award.
Short Form
Harry Turtledove, “Zigeuner,” Asimov’s, 9-10/17
Long Form
Bryce Zabel, Once There Was a Way, Diversion Books, 2017
This year’s awards judges were Karen Hellekson, Matt Mitrovich, Jim Rittenhouse, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year. The first awards were announced in summer 1996 and honored works from 1995. The award takes its name from Murray Leinster’s 1934 short story “Sidewise in Time,” in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines.
At the WSFS Business Meeting on Sunday morning (August 19), the results of the 2020 Worldcon Site Selection voting were revealed.
The New Zealand in 2020 bid received 643 votes of the 726 votes cast. There were no other official candidates; however, votes were received for the following:
New Zealand in 2020: 643
Xmas in Boston 2020: 22
Peggy Rae’s House: 3
Xerps: 3
Minneapolis in ’73: 2
Olive Country: 2
Aotearoa in 2020: 1
Bimin Zana, Wakanda: 1
El Fabulosa Bungalow: 1
Glug’s Chalet: 1
Grantville, WV: 1
John Sapienza’s Yard: 1
Marsopolis: 1
Minneapolis in ’74: 1
Slab City: 1
Tonopah NV: 1
None of the Above: 8
Total With Preference: 693
Needed to Elect (Majority): 347
No Preference: 33
Total Votes Cast: 726
CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention, will take place from Wednesday, July 29 through Sunday, August 2, 2020 in Wellington on the North Island of New Zealand. Details for the convention are contained in their Worldcon bid document.
The con chairs will be Norman Cates and Kelly Buehler.
Author Guests of Honour will be Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. Lackey’s first genre publication was in 1985; she is best known for her numerous fantasy series including the Valdemar novels and the Elemental Masters stories. Dixon has collaborated with Lackey on numerous novels, and is also known for his genre artwork, especially his contributions to Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons source books.
NZ Artist Guest of Honour will be Greg Broadmore, a concept designer, artist, writer and sculptor with Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop whose work includes genre films District 9, King Kong, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Fan Guest of Honour will be Rose Mitchell, longtime fan, conrunner, and current President of the Australian Science Fiction Foundation.
Toastmaster will be George R. R. Martin, known for his Song of Ice and Fire saga which has been made into the HBO series Game of Thrones, and for his epic Hugo Loser Parties.
Supporting memberships for the convention will be $75 NZD (approx. $50 USD), and Attending memberships are currently $370 NZD (approx. $247 USD). Site Selection voters are automatically Supporting Members, and may upgrade to Attending for $300 NZD (approx. $200 USD). Kiwi and Silver Fern level Pre-supporters will receive discounts on memberships as well. There will also be special discounted membership levels for Young Adult (born in or after 2000), Child (born in or after 2005), Kid-in-tow (born in or after 2015), and Unwaged (NZ residents only).
Worldcon 76 Chair Kevin Roche used his crafting and electronics skills to build a 1/10th scale model of the San Jose Electric Light tower.
By JJ:
(1) 2018 Hugo Ceremony Video
(the first half hour is a slideshow of author and fan photos; the actual ceremony starts at 0:29:22; the File 770 Best Fanzine Award is at 0:47:45)
By Joe Siclari: What does 1,000 years of fandom look like? At Worldcon 76, FANAC.org tried to find out. The pictorial project, started by Mark Olson, captures photos of fans new and old, each holding a sign with their years of fannish activity. Two photos exceeded 1,000 years (one of which was the Worldcon Chairs photo). In all, the project collected 6,707 years of fandom. Photos from the “1000 Years of Fandom” project are available on FANAC.org.
Those who missed the start of the “1000 Years” can participate by sending us a photo of themselves and their friends holding a card with the number of years they have been in fandom. Send it to [email protected].
Warren Buff and friends, adding to 1,050 years of fandom. Photo by Lisa Hayes.
FANAC’s Fan History Project is dedicated to preserving and making available scans of original photos and publications from 1930 to the present, with a YouTube channel showcasing audio and video. The Fancyclopedia 3 website provides context and a Wikipedia like approach to fan history.
Photos from the project, with a running total at the bottom. Photo by Edie Stern.
By John Hertz: Ctein told me at Worldcon 76 (incidentally, his name is pronounced “k’TINE”) he’d read my note here about his story “Bubble and Squeak” with Davd Gerrold.
I’d ended “It isn’t news for David Gerrold to publish science fiction. It’s still news for Ctein.”
He said “It isn’t science fiction.”
I turned to Nolly and the rest. “I’ve had two disagreements with Ctein,” I said. “When he wrote Saturn Run with John Sandford, I thought it was Hugo-worthy. He said ‘Naah.’ Now he says ‘Bubble and Squeak’ isn’t science fiction.”
So Ctein said “Now we can never speak again.”
I cried ”That’s three disagreements!”
Ctein cracked up.
Then I suddenly remembered I had to be somewhere else.
(1) BRING ME MY SPEAR OF BURNISHED BRONZE, BRING ME MY CHARIOT OF FILE. Prior to the pacemaker being put in the staff worked hard to convince me to stay in San Jose a week before attempting to drive home. One it was in, the cardiologist cleared me to drive home immediately. That was a surprising, though positive, development.
Not that I really felt ready to drive right away. I stayed in a motel overnight, then got on the road this morning.
Many thanks to David Bratman for his daily hospital visits, and Spike, Michael Ward, and Karen Schaffer for helping get me and my stuff to the Motel 6. Plus Michael and Karen for picking up a nice dinner of Chinese take-out.
Getting ready to leave the hospital — photo by Karen Schaffer.
With all the Bay Area conventions I’ve been to over the years, I’ve done the trip down I-5 many times. The closer I got to LA, the more familiar the roads looked, and the smoother the drive seemed to go. I reached home in about 6 hours.
John King Tarpinian asked me if I’ll have to make a lot of changes to accommodate my newly-implanted device. While there are warnings about various electronics, I’m okay to microwave as long as I’m not staring into the window while it’s nuking the food. Also can’t hover over a running car engine. (Not that I ever do.) Hovering over a blogging laptop — okay. Phone held on the right side is okay — which I already do (pacemaker is on left). Nothing I really have to change in respect to the tech I already use.
And I’m not only grateful for all the comments and good wishes, but for Filers working overtime to turn all this into publishable material. Waste not, want not is on my list of mottos….
Tom Becker wrote:
GlyerBot could have gone rogue after he hacked his pacemaker module, but then he realized he could post pixel scrolls on the entertainment feed of the company satellite.
Iphinome responded:
Part human part machine. If we could get a picture of a cat sleeping on you, you can be Iphinome’s murderbot of the month.
And in other themes…. Cathy said:
I join the others in welcoming our File 770 Cyborg Overlord.
…I asked Alex about his research sources, and much of the material comes from his life experiences and those of his friends. This includes attitudes toward autistic people that he’s seen growing up with his child. He says, “the cultural baggage we drag around we assume is the right way to be.” This gets translated into things like Loxley’s boss telling her how to live, saying “I know a spinster who will police you,” and robbing the vulnerable of their agency. Even looking people in the eye is cultural and not universal.
I asked him also about his research sources for A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe. He said the magic/tech blends were influenced by recent games, and that Cowboy Bebop had influenced some of the action sequence writing. He asked, “what is the worst goofy thing that can go wrong?” That’s the first question he asks, he says, when writing an action sequence. He told us about his podcast, The Gearheart, and said that this novel was a spiritual successor to the podcast, occurring 800 years later. Alex spent a lot of time running D&D there and getting to know the world….
Ms Jemisin is the first black winner of a Hugo award for novels (the redoubtable Samuel Delany won twice for his short stories). Most of her characters are black, though this becomes only gradually apparent, and the system of slavery on her planet is not based on skin colour. Yet science fiction allows her to display some of the fundamental characteristics of any system of slavery, however much her account derives from the particular experience of African Americans. It may be the ultimate ambition of novelists to make characters who are entirely three-dimensional but in practice most of them produce bas-reliefs, where only aspects of their characters spring from the page and much of the background is undifferentiated.
(4) INSIDE THE NUMBERS. Nicholas Whyte’s analysis of the 2018 Hugo voting statistics is full of all kinds of interesting observations: “The 2018 Hugo Awards in detail”. For example:
Declined nomination:
Best Series – The Broken Earth (N.K. Jemisin);
Best Editor Long Form – Liz Gorinsky;
Best Professional Artist – Julie Dillon;
Best Fancast – Tea and Jeopardy
For Best Series, N.K. Jemisin declined for The Broken Earth;
the following were ruled ineligible, due to not having added enough to the series since last year:
The Expanse,
The Craft Sequence,
the October Daye books
And what Whyte said about the Best Fanzine stats I probably wouldn’t have noticed myself!
(5) THANKS TO ALL FILERS. Here’s a link to the Hugo ceremony video. Jo Van Ekeren’s File 770 acceptance speech begins at 48:34.
(7) HECK OBIT. German TV personality and actor Dieter Thomas Heck died yesterday, reports Cora Buhlert.
He was mainly known for hosting music and game shows, but he was also an actor and had a memorable SF role as the game show host in “Das Millionenspiel”, a 1970 adaptation of a Robert Sheckley story. And since I couldn’t find an English language obituary for him anywhere, I wrote one myself.
(10) AFTER ACTION REPORT. Joe Sherry tells how he appreciates the value of a fanzine’s community, like the one they have at Nerds of a Feather: “Thoughts on the 2018 Hugo Awards”.
Being a finalist for the Hugo Award means that Nerds of a Feather is a part of the history of science fiction and fantasy fandom. I treasure that. I’m fairly sure I also speak for both Vance and The G when I say that. It is an amazing feeling to receive that notification and we’re grateful for it.
I said this privately to our writers, but I would like to say it publicly as well. The reason we even had an opportunity for a Hugo is not because of the work Vance, G, and I are doing behind the scenes. It’s because of the high quality of the work our writers are putting out every day. It’s the cumulative power of the book reviews and essays and special projects and interviews and none of that happens without these fantastic writers. We may not have won the Hugo Award, but we are absolutely confident that we deserved to be at that table, that the work our writers are doing is as good as anything on that ballot for Fanzine. The name on the ballot might say “The G, Vance Kotrla, Joe Sherry”, but it is that full list of contributors, past and present that have built the reputation we have and the every day excellence they deliver that allowed us to even have a chance. They’re the best.
(11) SPACE CATS. Steve Davidson announced in comments there is a call out to help many, many SJW credentials living at the Arecibo radio telescope site in Puerto Rico – “Arecibo Observatory’s Space Cats Need Your Help!”
The Arecibo Observatory has long been known for its felines, and it has become an increasingly popular cat hangout ever since the hurricane hit last year, Flaviane Venditti, a researcher at the observatory, told Space.com. “After the hurricane, many people left the island and, in the process, left their animals behind,” Venditti said. “We can see that based on how people-friendly some of the cats are. They might have come to the observatory to shelter during the storm.”
(12) THEY’RE QUACKERS. [Item by Mike Kennedy]. What do you get when both The Joker and Daffy Duck show up in the same continuum? SYFY Wire says “Comics and cartoons collide in sneak peek at DC’s The Joker/Daffy Duck crossover”. The fertile (or fevered) minds at DC are cooking up not just The Joker/Daffy Duck one-shot, but also Catwoman/Sylvester and Tweety, Harley Quinn/Gossamer, and Lex Luthor/Porky Pig. These follow-up previous Warner Bros. or Hanna-Barbera crossovers with DC superheroes titles like Black Lightning/Hong Kong Phooey, Batman/Elmer Fudd, The Flash/Speed Buggy, Martian Manhunter/Marvin the Martian, Aquaman/Jabber Jaw, and Jonah Hex/Yosemite Sam.
The SYFY Wire article has a 6-page preview of The Joker/Daffy Duck Special #1, “which finds Daffy visiting Gotham City to tour the ACME headquarters, only to discover that the building has been abandoned and taken over by the infamous Clown Prince of Crime.”
(13) IRON FIST. Trailer for Marvel’s Iron Fist: Season 2
It’s not a weapon to be held. It’s a weapon to be used. Season 2 of Marvel’s Iron Fist debuts exclusively on Netflix September 7, 2018.
[Thanks to Rich Lynch, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Rick Moen, Steve Davidson, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
My pacemaker procedure has been a success — making me a new member of Club Cyborg (as Neil Clarke called it in comments). I will be discharged from the hospital today. Will I do a Scroll today? We’ll all find out later! Thanks to everyone for their good wishes.
(1) WHAT’S UP DOC? They’re going to put heart pacemaker in me this afternoon. I’ve been able to get online for a little while before prepping. Will be back soon as I can.
Add your own items in the comments if you find something wonderful!
N.K. Jemisin winning her third consecutive Best Novel Hugo is an extraordinary achievement. It’s something that’s never happened in that category before, and required a perfect conjunction of eligible novels, quality, and popularity. — In fact, I haven’t found another Hugo fiction category where it’s happened.
Prior to Jemisin’s hat trick, the most dominant run was Lois McMaster Bujold’s non-consecutive threesome, winning the Best Novel Hugo in 1991 and 1992, with a third in 1995.
There’s so much quality competition that winning consecutive fiction Hugos is far from easy. Harlan Ellison should be noted for claiming the Best Short Story category Hugos of 1966, 1968 and 1969. He joins many other two-in-a-row winners. I didn’t spot any more three-in-a-row streaks (let me know if I missed some!)
However, in other Hugo categories there have been many runs of consecutive wins throughout the history of the award.
Best Graphic Story:
(3) Girl Genius, written by Kaja Foglio & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio (2009-2011)
Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form
(3) Doctor Who (2006-2008)
(3) Doctor Who (2010-2012)
Best Dramatic Presentation
(3) The Twilight Zone (1960-1962)
Best Professional Editor
(7) Gardner Dozois (1995-2001)
(6) Gardner Dozois (1988-1993)
(5) Ben Bova (1973-1977)
(3) Edward L. Ferman (1981-1983)
Best Professional Magazine
(4) Astounding, John W. Campbell, Jr. ed. (1953-1957)
(4) F&SF, Edward L. Ferman, ed. (1969-1972)
(3) If, Frederik Pohl, ed. (1966-1968)
(3) F&SF, var. editors (1958-1960)
Best Professional Artist
(7) Michael Whelan (1980-1986)
(5) Frank Kelly Freas (1972-1976)
(4) Bob Eggleton (1996-1999)
(4) Frank Kelly Freas (1955-1959)
(3) Ed Emshwiller (1960-1962)
(3) Jack Gaughan (1967-1969)
Best Semiprozine
(9) Locus (1984-1992)
(9) Locus (1996-2004)
(3) Locus (2006-2008)
(3) Uncanny (2016-2018)
Best Fanzine
(4) Locus, Charles N. Brown ed (1980-1983)
(3) Mimosa, Dick & Nicki Lynch, eds. (1992-1994)
Best Fan Writer
(19) Dave Langford (1989-2007)
(4) Richard E. Geis (1975-1978)
Best Fan Artist
(3) Brad W, Foster (1987-1989)
(3) Alexis Gilliand (1983-1985)
(3) Tim Kirk (1972-1974)
Conclusion: It all proves what Phil Foglio said in 1978 when withdrawing from the Best Fan Artist Hugo after his second straight win — “As hard as it is to win one of these, it’s even harder to stop.” As you can see, once fans decide they love a creator (or work) they keep right on loving them for a good long while.
Update 08/23/18: Management apologizes for its inability to count, and has corrected David Langford’s run total to 19. Update 08/25/18: Added The Twilight Zone’s three-peat.
A tentative membership count (subject to clean up after the convention) of warm bodies on site for Worldcon 76 is 5,440 individual human beings who attended the convention at some time during the five days of the event. There are a bunch of other numbers I have, but I’m waiting for the post-con clean up before reporting them to the WSFS Formulation of Long List Entries (FOLLE) committee.
(2) PLANE SPEAKING. How did Cat Rambo convince TSA to let her on the plane after she lost her wallet and ID’s? She showed them this – her Walter Day trading card.
I made it through security and the ID that persuaded them was my sf writer trading card! pic.twitter.com/PTxPnaQKa8
The two best panels I attended at Worldcon 76 were both relatively sparsely attended, perhaps because they lacked famous names at the table. Instead, the panelists were young writers unfamiliar to me, representing a variety of ethnicities and gender/sexual identities. They were as articulate and interesting as any more famous names would have been, probably more so. The topics were intriguing, which is why I was there….
Details at the link.
(4) MOBIS AT CONVENTIONS. Seanan McGuire complimented Worldcon 76 on the number of mobis they arranged. She passionately argues for accepting them in convention space here.
We had a Worldcon! It was lots of fun! Lots of people came, from all over the world, and had a good time! I am super proud of San Jose for throwing an awesome, inclusive banger of a party! All these things are true.
Martin Morse Wooster adds, “The Orioles’s Game of Thrones promotion was one with pitcher Kevin Gausman riding a dragon. Mr. Gausman was unable to be present for his bobblehead, due to his employment by the Atlanta Braves…”
(7) AS OTHERS SEE THEM. At Poore House, Cormac’s “Hate Speech: Perceptions and Responses in the SCA” models the reasons for different levels of obliviousness, denial, engagement, and hate in connection with a Society of Creative Anachronism coronation where the king and queen wore swastika patterned garments.
…Interactions
Each of these three groups have connections to the others, and discussions quickly became heated. Team Trust felt attacked by Team Vigilance when the latter accused the organization of institutional racism, and they grew frustrated by Team Familiarity’s refusal to recognize the dangers of public perception. Team Familiarity felt that Team Trust’s outrage was driven by ignorance of historical design, and that Team Vigilance was fueling the controversy due to unfounded oversensitivity. And Team Vigilance saw Team Trust as complicit for turning a blind eye to the warning signs, and they hold Team Familiarity guilty of normalizing and defending the display of hate symbols.
Some in each group became so frustrated that they walked away from the discussion, and from the organization. Members of Team Trust felt disillusioned at what the Dream had become, and stopped showing up. Members of Team Familiarity retreated to their research, and looked for more historically accurate organizations with whom to spend their time. And members of Team Vigilance turned their energies to letting as many people as possible know that there were white supremacists in the SCA, including reporting us to the Southern Poverty Law Center….
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Mark Hepworth, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, rcade, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
