File 770’s Twenty Most-Read Posts of the Year

Posted on December 31, 2020 by Mike Glyer

“2020 Hugo Awards” got more traffic than any other post this year, although not because people wanted to know who won the Hugos. George R.R. Martin left a comment on that post alternately explaining, defending, and apologizing for his choices as toastmaster of CoNZealand’s much-criticized Hugo Awards ceremony, a quote that was widely-linked by mainstream reports about the uproar. Many of those same articles also linked to GRRM’s old post answering criticism of his efforts to host Dublin 2019’s Hugo Losers Party, pulling it up the list right behind his 2020 comment.

The second top story is Andrew Porter’s obituary for Elyse Rosenstein, which went viral as fans across the spectrum realized you could point to the very person who had the idea for the original Star Trek convention.

And so here are the year’s 20 most-read posts according to Google Analytics.

Best Professional Artist Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Posted on December 31, 2020 by JJ

By JJ: To assist Hugo nominators, this post provides information on the artists and designers of more than 800 works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2020.

These credits have been accumulated over the course of the year from dust jackets, Acknowledgments sections and copyright pages in works, cover reveal blog posts, and other sources on the internet. This year, Filers Martin Pyne and Karen B. also collected this information, and though we had a lot of overlap, their extra entries have greatly increased the information we are able to provide you. My profound thanks go to Martin and Karen for all of their hard work.

You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here (I will be continuing to update this as I get more information).

In this post I will display up to 8 images of artworks for each artist for whom I have identified 3 or more works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2020. Clicking on the thumbnail will open a full-screen version of each work; where I could find a version of the work without titles, that is the image which is linked.

Please note carefully the eligibility criteria according to the WSFS Constitution:

Professional Artist

3.3.12: Best Professional Artist. An illustrator whose work has appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy during the previous calendar year.

3.2.11: 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.

3.10.2: In the Best Professional Artist category, the acceptance should include citations of at least three (3) works first published in the eligible year.

Under the current rules, artwork for semiprozines and fanzines is not eligible in this category. You can check whether a publication is a prozine or a semiprozine in this directory (the semiprozine list is at the top of the page, and the prozine directory is at the bottom).

Please be sure to check the spreadsheet first; but then, if you are able to confirm credits missing 2020-original works and the names of their artists from Acknowledgments sections, copyright pages, or by contacting authors and/or artists, go ahead and add them in comments, and I will get them included in the spreadsheet, and if the artist is credited with at least 3 works, in this post. If you have questions or corrections, please add those also. Please note that works may or may not be added to the list at my discretion.

PLEASE DON’T ADD GUESSES.

Artists, Authors, Editors and Publishers are welcome to post in comments here, or to send their lists to jjfile770 [at] gmail [dot] com.

(warning: this post is heavily image-intensive, and will probably not work well on mobile devices: flee now, or prepare to meet your doom extremely slow page download)

Only those bying stoute of heyrte and riche in bandwydthe shouldst click hither to proce’d…

NetGalley Member Login Data
Compromised

Posted on December 23, 2020 by JJ

On December 23, 2020, the advance book review site NetGalley sent a message to its members informing them that the NetGalley login data for members had been compromised:

Notification of Data Security Incident – December 23, 2020

Dear NetGalley Member,

It is with great regret that we inform you that on Monday, December 21, 2020 NetGalley was the victim of a data security incident. What initially seemed like a simple defacement of our homepage has, with further investigation, resulted in the unauthorized and unlawful access to a backup file of the NetGalley database.

It is with an abundance of caution that we wanted to let you know this incident may have exposed some of the information you have shared with NetGalley.

The backup file that was impacted contained your Profile information, which includes your login name and password, name and email address. Also, if supplied by you, your mailing address, birthday, company name, and Kindle email address. We currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility. We expect that you may have many additional questions – below are the questions we would have if we received this email.

I’ve had a NetGalley account for 6 years. On December 21, I received a notification from Google that someone had attempted to access one of my Gmail accounts using my password. Fortunately, I had 2-factor identification enabled on that account, which meant that any login attempt from a new device would require me to confirm with a 6-digit verification code sent to my cellphone. Apparently, after no verification code was entered within a certain period of time, Google had decided that it was an incident of a compromised password, and I was prompted to change that password immediately.

I wracked my brain for any other websites where I might be using that e-mail address/password combination, and came up with only one. I immediately changed my password on that site, and enabled 2-factor authentication on a couple of other different Gmail accounts, but I was mystified as to how my password had been obtained. Then 45 minutes ago I received this e-mail notification from NetGalley – and realized that I had forgotten that I was using that same login combination on that site, too.

If you are a NetGalley member, you need to go change your password there now. If you discover that you are unable to do so, the notification message linked above contains information on how to contact them to resolve the problem. And if you have any logins at any other websites using the same e-mail address/password combination as your NetGalley account, you will need to go change that login information immediately.

I also encourage you to consider enabling 2-factor authentication on any websites which enable that capability. It saved me from a great deal of grief here, and is well worth the extra effort. And I know that it’s a huge pain to have to use different passwords for different sites (as I mostly do these days), but it’s something you can do to protect yourself further.

If you have used NetGalley to obtain works from the Hugo Voter Packet, you will be affected by this.

Best Editor Short Form Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Posted on December 20, 2020 by JJ

By JJ: To assist Hugo nominators, listed below are the editors of more than 1,000 short form works published for the first time in 2020.

Note that all of the works labeled “novella”, “novelette”, and “short story” are eligible in the corresponding Hugo fiction categories. If a work is not labeled, or it is labeled “short fiction”, its length has yet to be determined. Collections and Anthologies are not eligible for nomination as whole works, but the original pieces of fiction they contain are each eligible in the appropriate length category. Poetry and nonfiction are not eligible.

Note that the Short Form Editors listed below may, or may not, be eligible — that is, have the equivalent of at least 4 anthologies and/or magazine issues in their career, with at least 1 of them published in 2020. If I know for sure that an editor has the equivalent of at least 4 eligible works, they are labeled as “eligibility verified”.

These credits have been accumulated from Acknowledgments sections and copyright pages in works, eligibility posts, short fiction venue mastheads, the ISFDB, and other sources on the internet.

You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here (I will be continuing to update this as short fiction venues post elibibility lists and I get more information).

Feel free to add missing 2020-original works and the name of their editors in the comments, and I will get them included in the main post. Self-published works may or may not be added to the list at my discretion.

PLEASE DON’T ADD GUESSES.

If you are able to confirm credits from Acknowledgments sections, copyright pages, or by contacting authors and/or editors, then go ahead and add them in comments. If you have questions or corrections, please add those also.

Authors, Editors, and Publishers are welcome to post in comments here, or to send their eligibility lists to jjfile770 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Some of the magazines listed below are Prozines and are not eligible in the Hugo Semiprozine category. For a list of Semiprozines vs. Prozines, see Semiprozine.org.

Short Form Editors

3.3.10: Best Editor Short Form. The editor of at least four (4) anthologies, collections or magazine issues (or their equivalent in other media) primarily devoted to science fiction and / or fantasy, at least one of which was published in the previous calendar year.

Continue reading →

Best Editor Long Form Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Posted on December 18, 2020 by JJ

By JJ: To assist Hugo nominators, listed below are the editors of long form (novel-length) works published for the first time in 2020.

Note that all of these works, unless they are labeled “nonfiction”, are eligible in the Best Novel category.

These credits have been accumulated over the course of the year from dust jackets, Acknowledgments sections and copyright pages in works, as well as other sources on the internet. This year, Filers Martin Pyne and Karen B. also collected this information, and though we had a lot of overlap, their extra entries have greatly increased the information we are able to provide you. My profound thanks go to Martin and Karen for all of their hard work.

You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here. Thus far we have more than 300 Long Form Editor credits (I will be continuing to update this as I get more information).

PLEASE DON’T ADD GUESSES.

Authors, Editors, and Publishers are welcome to post in comments here, or to send their lists to jjfile770 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Long Form Editors

3.3.11: Best Editor Long Form. The editor of at least four (4) novel-length works primarily devoted to science fiction and / or fantasy published in the previous calendar year that do not qualify as works under 3.3.10.

(Note that the Long Form Editors listed below may, or may not, be eligible — that is, have 4 qualifying works published in 2020. Editors whose eligibility has been confirmed are listed first.)

Continue reading →

Two New Pages

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Mike Glyer

While looking for something in issues of Marty Cantor’s Holier Than Thou at Fanac.org, I came across several columns I wrote for him. I’ve added as “pages” two of them that Filers might find entertaining.

”And In The Darkness Bind Them” tells what I saw standing in line outside a Westwood theater waiting to see Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings in its 1979 first run. Dr. Seuss wishes he was there!
“Riverboat Gambler” gives readers a front-row seat in a LASFS den of iniquity as three experienced hearts players, including the near-legendary Lon Atkins, lightly fleece a newcomer with delusions of adequacy, young Mike Glyer.

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Category Archives: Editorial Notes

File 770’s Twenty Most-Read Posts of the Year

Best Professional Artist Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Professional Artist

NetGalley Member Login Data
Compromised

Best Editor Short Form Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Short Form Editors

Best Editor Long Form Hugo: Eligible Works from 2020

Long Form Editors

Top 10 Posts for November 2020

Top 10 Posts for October 2020

Top 10 Posts for September 2020

Top 10 Stories for August 2020

Two New Pages