Ulrika O’Brien launches BEAM 14 with an editorial that might have gone unnoticed outside the circle of FAAn Award voters if she hadn’t (1) given John Scalzi the KTF treatment and (2) Scalzi hadn’t tweeted a link to the zine to his 165,000 Twitter followers.
…But once a year, like clockwork, the Fan Hugo short list comes out and somehow I can never quite avoid seeing it. When I do see it, I increasingly find a bunch of total strangers who’ve not visibly participated in fandom, and I see red all over again. I will inevitably be told that the failing is in me, that were I to educate myself, I would discover their merit. As often as not, whatever merit is involved, what I actually discover are more neo-pros doing nothing remotely to do with fandom as we know it, or if they do, only in pursuit of making money off us. So thanks, Scalzi. Fuck you. Wait, what now? Why am I still on about John Scalzi’s Fan Writer Hugo, eleven years after the parade? Because it was John Scalzi who finally broke the Fan Hugos, that’s why. And he didn’t do the rest of the Hugos any favors, either, as it turns out….
John Scalzi’s mild answer starts here.
Responses include Camestros Felapton’s “I Guess I’m Talking About John Scalzi Today”.
Taking two steps back and looking at the bigger picture and the actual societal changes occuring in the relevant time period, what do we see? Nothing mysterious and nothing secretly controlled by John Scalzi but rather the increasing and inevitable online nature of fandom, along with generational change. The period of 2000 to 2020, was always going to be one in which fandom would have the kind of generational change that fandom is always having because people get older and people from a younger generation become more influential. To use tired generational-terms, a shift from Baby Boomers to Gen-X with (now) more Millennials (and younger).
The accompanying shift was technological with blogs, blogging networks (particularly Live Journal at one point), social media platforms and commerical pop-culture media sites changing where fan-related discourse was happening. This was a cross-generational change (e.g. GRRM’s Live Journal or how influential Mike Glyer’s File770 fanzine-turned-blog became during the Puppy Debarkle).
Doc Rocket’s tweet is especially interesting for its “no one, really” conclusion —
Alexandra Erin’s thread starts here.
Michi Trota observed:
And Kameron Hurley doesn’t want to be left out –
In fact, seeing people say they’re sorry that Ulrika didn’t cuss them out, too, reminds me of the Watergate days when everyone wanted to be added to Nixon’s enemies list!
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I must confess now. I am personally responsible for preventing Scalzi from destroying the Hugos even more by taking action that kept him from winning the Best Fan Writer award a year earlier at Nippon 2007. I can only imagine how upset Ulrika would be if John had won the award then and not a year later.
How did I do this, you may ask? I neglected to buy a supporting membership for Nippon for me and my SO, thus preventing us from participating in that year’s Hugo voting. If we had, the time space continuum and the Hugos would be further destroyed and John would have one more Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and Dave Langford would have had one less. (John lost to Dave by a single vote that year, 128 to 127). I learned that year that my vote does make a difference and make sure I always participate.
If John did anything to destroy the Hugos (according to the truefans), it was his work to make the Hugo Voter’s Packet happen and thus make it easier for Hugo voters to read and judge the finalists themselves and not rely on the fannish elite’s opinion for those finalists that were difficult to track down.
I just read a short story by an author who I’ve never heard of – it knocked my socks off. I don’t know how long the author’s been writing, or how she came into the field – and it doesn’t matter to me. The quality of the work is what matters. There may be a good reason why this doesn’t apply to fan writing – but it’s not obvious why it’s a problem that someone who came to fandom last year, but who writes fannish material well enough to attract the attention of the voters, should actually win the fanwriter Hugo. The Hugo isn’t for lifetime contribution to fandom (there are other awards for that) – it’s for work done in one year, right?
Lee Whiteside: If John did anything to destroy the Hugos (according to the truefans), it was his work to make the Hugo Voter’s Packet happen and thus make it easier for Hugo voters to read and judge the finalists themselves and not rely on the fannish elite’s opinion for those finalists that were difficult to track down.
That innovation has been, I think, one of the main reasons that participation in the Hugo Awards has risen so dramatically in the last decade (the other being the ease of online nominating and voting).
I don’t know how anyone can claim that John Scalzi is not a true Fan, when he is the one who used his connections and persuasive power to establish something which has been such a boon to Worldcon members and given such a boost to Hugo Award participation.
Andrew: it’s not obvious why it’s a problem that someone who came to fandom last year, but who writes fannish material well enough to attract the attention of the voters, should actually win the fanwriter Hugo. The Hugo isn’t for lifetime contribution to fandom (there are other awards for that) – it’s for work done in one year, right?
Very obviously implicit in that piece is the “but I have been doing Fan Writing far longer than any of those people, where’s my Hugo nomination???” subtext.
Reading the tweets last night, I came to my own conclusion about why the reactionaries are so obsessed with Scalzi. It’s because otherwise they’d have to give credit to women and PoC for changing the Hugos. To think that they could engage in such autonomy is unthinkable.
Its the same motivation as when they accuse creators of winning through affirmative action; by saying Scalzi is the center of everything they are actually reassuring themselves that a white man is the one who is truly responsible.
And yet it comes from the same place as those who thought effeminizing Scalzi made him less of a white man, and more of a target.
@Andrew:
Indeed, in a lot of fields it’s very common for someone to have an early eruption of talent in their first few years there that may or may not ever get followed up on, just as it’s common for people to chug along, maybe remarkably, maybe not, and then suddenly blossom much later on. It shouldn’t be any surprise for there to be a fannish writer with the career equivalent of, say, Stanley G. Weinbaum.
Andrew:
Ooh. Would you be willing to name it for us?
@Andy H: Sure. It was “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix Harrow, one of the nominees for best short story.
@JJ:
It’s easy; they just disregard an instruction one of my teachers put on all his exams, failing to make sure their brains are engaged before putting pen or pencil into motion. (Well, yes, in these days it’s just fingers, but that quote was from a looong time ago.)
As someone who also posts under my real name, I think you should avoid patting yourself on the back over it. A lot of people aren’t in a position to post under their name, for many perfectly valid reasons. I was able to do it because I was self-employed as an author and web publisher for 20 years.
Even then, I suffered two incidents of disturbing personal abuse that made me painfully aware of why other people use pseudonyms. And as a white male I’m not getting one-one hundredth of the abuse that others face online.
There’s nothing wrong with people using a pseudonym here and elsewhere. They aren’t “hiding.” They’re being sensible.
(catching up mostly via the comments here and just part of the actual post, well, and lots of amusing reaction tweets; and no, I refuse to give the idiot O’brien my eyeballs beyond that).
OMG is she still not over the fact that he won a Hugo in a fan category? Is she still not over the fact that fan and pro are not a single toggle switch, you’re one or the other, and that’s not actually new with Scalzi anyway? Is she still living in a fantasy world where she is the arbiter of What Is Fan? Talk about a gatekeeper.
She was insufferably rude the various times she sniped at Scalzi on his own blog for winning the damned Hugo. Apparently she hasn’t improved, but is grasping, desperately, for new depths to sink to. There is not enough non-Euclidean space for me to roll my eyes sufficiently in response to her need to get a freaking life. (Plus I said I wouldn’t give my eyeballs. Not my eyeballs!)
But I must say, I just read a ton of replies to Scalzi’s tweet and they are pretty amusing. 😉
BTW WTF is “the KTF treatment”?!
P.S. SERIOUSLY? She’s still obsessed with him? Dude, even Beale’s moved on. (Methinks. On good days, at least, right?)
Kendall, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you post an actual rant. It was lovely. Thank you. 😀
So Andrew I. Porter‘s comment wasn’t a snarky satire? Wrong again …
Kendall: WTF is “the KTF treatment”
It means exactly what you would guess it means.
Andrew I Porter:
“Because nowadays so many people consider themselves fans even if they’ve never heard of Mike Glyer or Mike Glicksohn, Amazing Stories, but have seen all the Star Wars films, and the Lord of the Rings films (but have never heard of Tom Bombadil). People who say “newbie” when the word we used for 50 years was “neofan.”
I had to google who Mike Glicksohn was. Turns out he was some guy from another country who’s been dead for eight years! And whose claim to fame was getting a Hugo for a fanzine I’ve never heard of when I was three years old. Can’t see any reason why I should have known who he was. And have absolutely no idea what he has to do with anyone “considering themselves to be a fan”. I’m quite sure I can dig up some names of Swedish people from 50 years ago that you’ve never heard of.
“And, by the way, I post using my actual name, so can’t comment while hiding behind a screen name.”
You know, I have met several of the people you so condescendingly attack as “hiding”. We have chatted with each others for several years here and have meetups at Worldcons. You though? Never seen you at one of our meetups, so why should your name mean anything more than their nicks do to me?
Really. I know there are people who have been longer into Fandom than me and also more involved. But I do not need someone from another country telling me that he is the one to decide what names, zines or words I should know to be able to consider myself a fan.
You can’t on one hand say “Welcome to fandom” when you on the other hand try to set conditions on who has the right to consider themselves fans.
Kendall, loved your rant!
@JJ & @Hampus Eckerman: ::blush:: I almost didn’t hit post, but then I was like OMFG and, well, there ya go. 😉
@JJ: Thanks for the link re. KTF!
@Andrew I. Porter: As I occasionally say when someone makes foolish comments about real names, etc. I have no way of knowing whether Andrew I. Porter is a real name or an alias! I mean, okay, I should start with something like, “There’s no magical superior moral virtue in posting with your real name,” because seriously, there. is. not.
But come on, Andrew: Typing something into the “name” field on a blog comment form that looks like a real name is not proof of anything! And if it were, so freakin’ what? It’s not a magical talisman that makes your comments more worthy than anyone else’s.
BTW for all you know, every handle here is, in fact, people’s legal names; fun fact, you can change your name to anything – remember Prince, who changed his name to a symbol (then back again, IIRC)?
I have some empathy for Ulrika’s lament for Olde Tyme Fandom. There were some literary styles and some personal performance styles which were possible when so many of the fans knew each other, and largely shared a common group of fannish discussions and technologies, and the quantity of SFF books and magazines was small enough that most people could have a handle on everything. And all of it was sheltered from the outside mundane world.
But a world where I got laughed at for carrying a book of space stories is different from a world where nearly all the top movie properties are genre, or genre-adjacent.
And the internet brings another huge change. About 40 years ago, what distinguished a Fan from an appreciative consumer of SFF was that the Fan did some Activity (fanac) inspired by the SFF entertainment: wrote letters, published a zine, travelled to cons, created artwork — those were the main activities I think.
Before the internet era, all those fannish activities involved some effort. At a minimum, put paper in the typewriter and address the envelope.
Now, though, performing a fan activity can become almost as easy as breathing.
Ken Josenhans: Now, though, performing a fan activity can become almost as easy as breathing.
Oh, absolutely, it can. And for a lot of people, the extent of their fanac is small and superficial.
But there are a lot of fans these days doing just as much hard work at fan activity as ye old time fanzine editors. I did 7 Pixel Scrolls last year, on days where I didn’t have to work my day job. They were fun, and I felt as though I did a really good job, but they were a huge amount of work — and they are something that Mike Glyer does every single day of the year.
Charles Payseur reads all the stories in almost every short fiction venue and posts reviews of them, all year long. James Davis Nicoll did
700260 reviews last year, as well as a bunch of Young People Read Old SFF and Old People Read Young SFF. Cora Buhlert does extensive weekly blog posts of happenings in fandom, thinkpieces, and reviews of independent publishing releases. Camestros Felapton did god knows how many columns and reviews — both frivolous and serious — along with a lot of fan art.This is just a very tiny sampling of the intensive fanac happening on the internet, and I submit that these people are all working just as hard — or harder — as the old-style fanzine editors (some of whom only put out an issue every year or two, or even less frequently than that).
Last year I spent several hundred hours doing the Novellapalooza and the Eligible Best Editor, Series, and Artist posts for Hugo nominators, as well as numerous book reviews. Explain to me how my fannish activity is less significant or “real” than someone who put out several issues of an old-style fanzine — because I would sure love to hear the contortions that go into that.
For Ms. O’Brien to claim that these people aren’t “Real Fans” doing “Real Fanac” smacks of a little fish who’s complaining that the pond has gotten a lot bigger.
Which is just ridiculous. There is room in fandom for all of us, and attempts to label others as “not Real Fans” or “not having had to do real work for their fanac” are just childish and churlish.
JJ, do you not understand? If there isn’t a mimeograph involved then it’s not fandom.
Ken Josenhans:
This idea just feels strange. A pub meet after work between SF-enthusiasts would hardly be called an effort. And well, do people think that a web archive like AO3 writes itself? There’s an enormous amount of work and effort involved. It is just that it is on new technology that didn’t exist before. The effort is not only AFK, the effort is spent on the internet in forums, archiving, making information available, organizing. So less effort? Nah.
But I do think you are right in that the internet making a group much larger and diverse with regards to what media they consume has a huge impact.
Only about 260, I am afraid.
Andrew on June 27, 2019 at 7:43 pm said:
“@Andy H: Sure. It was “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix Harrow, one of the nominees for best short story.”
Oh, I liked that one a lot. I haven’t finished reading everything in that category yet, but so far it’s at the top of the list.
Ken Josenhans, who doesn’t think the countless hours I put into making Worldcon happen each year, or my participation in online fan communities, counts as fanac. Thanks a bunch, buddy.
RE: Harrow’s story. Her forthcoming novel THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY is also quite terrific.
@Ken Josenhans: Before the internet era, all those fannish activities involved some effort… Now, though, performing a fan activity can become almost as easy as breathing.
@JJ Oh, absolutely, it can. And for a lot of people, the extent of their fanac is small and superficial.
To put these two together… if we’re seeing more “small and superficial” fanac, it’s because the effort of printing a fanzine or writing a letter were barriers to participation, not things that made you a fan.
@Ken Josenhans:
Um. Well, maybe, if expressing yourself in public is a frictionless activity. This has not been the lived experience of many women, people of color, queer people, disabled people, people with unpopular religious convictions, and so on. A lot of people have drawn – and still draw – a lot of very unwanted attention from attack-hungry evil jerks simply for saying something about their fannish loves. The spiritual successors of the bullies who’d attack kids like me for being nerdy have gone on to have twisted fun with swatting, getting people fired, filling up people’s mailboxes with rape and death threats, and like that.
If breathing involves anything like that for you, holy cow, I hope you’ve got a good medical team.
@Sophie Jane:
Thank you! I was flailing around in the general direction of this thought but not connecting, and now I can stop that and just go “Yeah! What Sophie Jane said!”, which is much better.
Also, as a general principle, I think it should be easy to do good and fun things. If people want to add complexity, that’s fine – choosing them is a game in itself, and then playing within extra constraints is another. Heck, these are games I play myself. 🙂 But the foundational level of most good things should be easy, so that people can do many good things and reap the rewards of having done so, starting with enjoying the time they spent on them.
I realized after the edit window closed that I wanted to put one of the above thoughts in somewhat more overtly fannish terms. So:
It wasn’t the case in my fanac-heaviest days that pubbing your ish or sending something to someone else’s next disty meant risking the attention of violent reactionary groups with ties to one of the two major political parties in the US.
There. I can put things in grognard language too. 🙂
Yeah! What Sophie Jane said!
@Andrew I. Porter
All the best people do. 🙂
Before the internet era, all those fannish activities involved some effort. At a minimum, put paper in the typewriter and address the envelope.
I helped friends assemble the first issue of their fanzine. (It ran for eight, roughly annually.) That included collating and drilling the holes for the paper brads they used – predrilled paper was much more expensive. It was mimeo except for the pages with the illos, which were done offset on better paper. It took two days for my back to recover from the collating. After that, they could afford real printing for the whole thing. (I don’t think they ever ran even a thousand copies.)
And it doesn’t really count to some people, because it was based on Trek.
@Kendall
I never heard it either, and I didn’t find the link that helpful, so I dug further and learned it stands for “Kill The Fuckers.” (Maybe that was supposed to be obvious.)
@P J Evans
Ah, the days of meeting at Devra Langsam’s home and collating various issues of Spockanalia and Masiform D! I told my father I was going to a collation party, and he thought I was going to a meal. (Well, we did go out to dinner afterwards.) But, yes, they were Trek zines, so we didn’t count in some people’s minds. Of course, it might also have been because our group was comprised predominately (but not entirely) of women.
@Linda Deneroff
That too, probably. (I still have my copies. It was a West Coast zine. But we knew about all y’all. You’d probably recognize the zine name: TOSOP.)
@Andrew I Porter: Here’s what happens when a woman posts online under her own name and gains attention as, say, a gamer, or a technologist, or an atheist, or, and this is absolutely true, an interpreter of the British royal jewelry.
*She gets multiple rape threats.* She may also get death threats. She gets people banding together to TOS her off social media. If she’s really lucky, she only gets sexual innuendo from strangers.
I hear the same things from non-cis people, from people of color, and in general from anybody who isn’t a white guy.
I’ll keep my (not hard to doxx if you’re determined) pseud, thanks.
@PJ Adams – OMG! I remember and still have my copies of your zine. (And all the others I bought back in the day.)
Hampus and Kendall: “I have no way of knowing whether Andrew I. Porter is a real name or an alias!”
Google me. Look up my Wikipedia page
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_I._Porter ). Ask Mike Glyer who I am, whether or not I’m real. Click on the photo to the left. What do you see?
You also prove my point that people now have no idea about the history of the field. So they don’t know that I won Hugos for fanzine and Semi-prozine, that I’ve got membership badges older than they are.
You’re standing on the shoulders of giants, but you like to wear those hobnail boots although they hurt the people you’re standing on who came before you.
As it happens, I’m posting under the same name I’ve been using for fannish stuff (including zines, cons, and rec.arts.sf.fandom) for a long time, because I want old friends and acquaintances to be able to find me. So far, so good,
The seventh or eighth time the argument about “real names” came around on rassef, I pointed out that, over and over, people were coming into the newsgroup and criticizing Aahz, Avedon Carol, and sometimes Patrick Nielsen Hayden for posting under their legal names. People who would assume that “Sarah Jane Olsen” was of course using her legal name, apparently assumed that if a name looked weird to them, it must be a pseudonym.
This was a couple of years after the arrest of one of the fugitive Weathermen, who had spent a couple of decades hiding in plain sight in suburbia, identifying herself as Sarah Jane Olsen, which was not her “real” name and which she picked because it would be inconspicuous. (She did more research than “Ford Prefect.”)
@Linda Deneroff
Not my zine – I paid for the copies after the first. (I was the one drilling the holes for that first ish, actually. My father ran up a little vise for doing it the same way every time. That and letting me a power-drill with a bit he didn’t object to having to sharpen afterward.) I have some other zines from back then, also.
Fandom is fun. (FIAWOL!)
Andrew Porter, I knew those things, and I still think you’re being insufferably rude. Maybe try actually listening to what people are saying?
Andrew I. Porter:
Why are you asking me to google you? I’m sure you exist, just as the other people here behind names and nicks exist. You are just a random person on the net. No more, no less.
And your point is kind of moronic. Saying that people “have no idea about the history of the field” because they do not recognize the name of a person who wrote a zine 50 years ago, makes you sound both childish and petulant.
You bore me. Go and brag to someone else about how giantic and relevant you are.
Andrew, I remember you from the 1984 nominations that came in on pages from your zine.
Greg Hullender: I didn’t find the link that helpful,
The page to which I linked very explicitly states the meaning of KTF. I don’t know how much more helpful it needs to be than that.
I also missed the explanation of the acronym at my first read, as it wasn’t in the text, but hidden in a table next to it. The letter was a bit smaller so I had skipped reading that part on my phone
@Hampus Eckerman: I missed the acronym too, for the same reason – thanks.
@Andrew I. Porter– You are having a hissy fit because a fan in another country, on the other side of the ocean, in a country where no, the primary language is not English, doesn’t know who you are, quite a few years after the time of your greatest relevance and impact on fandom generally has faded significantly.
It’s not a good look. Get over it.
JJ’s link covers what KTF means these days. KTF reviews were in vogue in British fanzines for a little while in the Seventies, marked by an effusion of colorful verbiage, contempt for the subject, and the expectation that the readers would find this performance entertaining. All traits of Ulrika’s approach to Scalzi in BEAM.
Andrew I. Porter: You also prove my point that people now have no idea about the history of the field. So they don’t know that I won Hugos for fanzine and Semi-prozine, that I’ve got membership badges older than they are.
I’m well aware of a lot of your contributions to fandom.
And yet whenever I see your name attached to a comment, I don’t think “Oh, there’s that guy who’s done so much for fandom”.
I think “oh god, what horrible thing has that jerk said now?”
You seem to expect your past good fannish contributions to be a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card for any sort of bad fannish behavior in which you want to engage — and you’ve engaged in a lot of bad behavior here at File 770 and at James Davis Nicoll’s blog in the last few years.
As I said before, you might want to consider whether “pompous, badly-behaved jerk with a greatly-overestimated opinion of his own importance” is really the legacy you want to leave for yourself in fandom.