Dave McCarty’s Facebook page is where some are trying – without success – to get full explanations for the ineligibility rulings in the 2023 Hugo Nomination Report released on January 20.
McCarty, a Chengdu Worldcon vice-chair and co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division, previously gave File 770 this reason for ruling R. F. Kuang’s Babel, fan writer Paul Weimer, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman tv series, and second-year Astounding Award nominee Xiran Jay Zhao as “not eligible”:
After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.
People have been trying to pry more information out of McCarty in a prodigious exchange on his Facebook page. Initially he referred them to the original reply above. And slapped back at one fellow who persisted in questioning with “Asked and answered.” Then, when that didn’t silence the questioner:
And
Clearly, Joseph Finn isn’t Tom Cruise, and Dave McCarty isn’t Jack Nicholson.
Yet it’s an innate part of human psychology to want to be understood and accepted by other people. The need is so strong that even the formidable McCarty had to make some effort to answer this question.
Neil Gaiman has been quite upset about what is essentially a Catch-22 explanation – the Sandman series was a Rule 3.8.3 casualty, but the individual episode that triggered the rule was also tossed as “not eligible”. Earlier today he had this exchange:
Silvia Moreno-Garcia replied:
When Jon Nepsha tried to lay some guilt on McCarty his friend Tammy Coxen stepped in with a heavy hint that there’s a more noble explanation, it’s just not being said out loud.
But McCarty himself has taken the opposite tack by defending the adequacy of the report.
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@Bruce Baugh
So much this!
@Paul Weimer
You’re assuming that Chengdu’s problems are the rule, rather than the exception.
I suspect it’s more often like how I felt: proud to be involved, and very very afraid to mess it up.
Have you considered the cost of third parties handling all the counting, with no idea what’s involved? Because I can tell you that it’s a lot of hours now, with volunteers.
@Brad Templeton:
Possibly you start out by taking a hard and humble look at all the barriers that may be blocking those who want to join the community as members, removing them, and extending them the grace of assuming that they are starting from a love for SFF rather than a desire to supplant the precious perquisites of those who came before?
Brad, you just asked, “Is it worth preserving the fandom of people standing right here next to me?”
Yes.
@Aaron Pound:
‘An entity that exists only to serve existing fans of that entity is an entity destined to die soon.’
As nothing that I have written could be interpreted in such a manner, I have no idea what point you feel that you are trying to make.
I have not suggested not selling attending or supporting memberships to anyone.
What I have suggested is that we need some kinds of means to ensure that supporting memberships are not used en masse to send a Worldcon to a place where the bulk of the attending membership is not desirous of it going there.
I am also of the view that we need a method to make the Hugo process transparent.
@Brad Templeton
I notice you quite conveniently overlook the voices of people with assorted disabilities who have not been able to attend a Worldcon For Reasons.
As for your anecdotes–I was a supporting member of various Worldcons before I ever attended one. I have vague memories of voting in Torcon2 and Discon2. I was under 18 at the time, and unable to travel. Furthermore, it was at least 20 more years before I was able to attend an in-person Worldcon.
You’re not doing fandom any favors by this insistence on restricting supporting memberships. Period.
If we could dream, we would want voting to be free for truefen, and impossible for those who seek to corrupt the system for their own agenda. We can’t have that. If the awards are to be held in countries like China and counted and awarded under its laws, we’re not going to like that result either. So you hunt for solutions that try to preserve and improve what you want and block what you don’t, but only compromises are readily available.
It should be noted that many people felt what was done in China was totally OK, as long is all those thousands of supporting memberships were bought by earnest Chinese SF fans who pooled their money or saved up. I doubted, but I saw why people hoped it was that. But it seems it probably was not even that.
Another idea I considered for site selection is, for new-supporting voters, to bring back the common practice of being able to pay a higher voting fee and get an attending membership in the winning convention, and to require that for a never-attended voter. (They become an attending voter this way of course.) But even that can’t satisfy all, and conventions stopped offering this. Though I continue to ask, “If you have never come, and you don’t plan to come, why do you want to spend a large sum to influence where the convention you won’t go to will be?” Resale of the attendings could help with such an approach.
Or of course, leave it as it is. Any country willing to put in $100K or so can buy the hosting of the next convention. In the past that was possible but nobody did it. And when they do it, the Hugos will be run on their rules unless you create a permanent floating Hugo committee.
When Sasquan got record-breaking numbers of supporting members (more than DisconIII, I think), was there a lot of concern about the provenance of these new fans, joining in late to a con they wouldn’t attend? That was a bit before I followed File770, so I don’t know what the discussion was like then.
@Andrew (not Werdna): I disagree, as I think Winnipeg was clearly entitled to be on the site selection ballot with Chengdu.
The WSFS Constitution, section 4.6.3, said: “For a bid to be allowed on the printed ballot, the bidding committee must file the documents specified above no later than 180 days prior to the official opening of the administering convention.”
DisCon III was originally scheduled to open August 25, 2021. It was rescheduled to open December 15, 2021. Hence, the filing deadline for bids provided by the constitution had to move too.
Winnipeg submitted its bid documents on April 27, 2021, which was 232 days before the official opening of DisCon III. Granted, that was only 120 days before August 25, 2021 — but at the time Winnipeg filed, August 25 was just another day and no longer the official opening of the administering convention.
@ Brad Templeton
raises hand
But I’m not in the least “high-minded,” just a feminist killjoy because too many people for too many decades (mostly but not always men) have been telling me for too blasted long that I am not, or should not be in, sff fandom. Despite all the rhetoric of high-minded community, there have always been a lot of gatekeepers in sff (which is pretty typical of groups created by humans).
I have been a sff fan since about age five or six (Dad was a geologist and sf fan and I was reading from an early age). I was a HUGE fan of the original ST from the moment the first episode aired (wrote a letter!), but there was no fandom in Moscow, Idaho when I was growing up there (1955-1975).
When I got to college, I found a Star Trek fan club and joined. (Puget Sound Star Trekkers Outpost 13, Bellingham, WA). I then morphed into APA fandom when the club disbanded (too many people graduated, darn it). I attended cons in the Seattle-Portland areas because a college student paying their own way could attend (along with a bunch of others who joined up to rent a room together).
I longed to go to WorldCon but never could. I think I bought a membership one year, but didn’t have the money to actually go.
Later, when I had more money (but less time), after I got my Ph.D. and got a Real Job, I was attending academic conferences and doing scholarship on sff (to the shock and horror of the Deans and higher admins at my small rural university in Texas — I still treasure the memory of my department head — also an sf fan! — telling me that the Dean of the Graduate School couldn’t understand why I didn’t write on T.S. Eliot instead of DS 9, said Dean coming from the Chemistry Department, that well-known arbiter of Quality Literature). I had GAFIATED from fandom when I started my dissertation in 1992, but tumbled back into online fandom in 2003 because of Jackson’s films.
I was active in LiveJournal fandom (pre-Race Fail), and a few years later, when I stumbled on File 770, and became a regular reader and commenter (under my fandom pseud, Ithiliana). Reading about the Sad and Rapid Puppies led to my becoming a WSFS supporting member for several years in a row.*
My primary goal was to nominate all the fantastic radical speculative fiction by the writers I loved (NONE of whom were personal friends). I think I voted for site selection a time or two, but don’t really remember. I am planning to attend the 2025 Seattle World Con because it’s right down the road from where we live (back in Bellingham!). If I am able to manage Seattle, that will be the one and only WorldCon I ever attend (due to age, disabilities and risk factors, and a retirement income).
Given that the topic of the AO3 Hugo Win and the resulting imbroglio has been referenced in one of the posts on this discussion, I’ll add that I GAFIATED from F770 commenting for a while because of the backlash against AO3 shown both in discussions here and at the AO3 site. I don’t remember specific names, just my general disappointment in some (not all) of the regular commenters. The backlash was all too familiar with some of the behaviors and rhetoric I ran into at cons in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
I did not support the Chengdu con.
Given that I suspect there are always more lurkers than active participants at most websites (including but not limited to fan sites), I think it’s unwise to make any generalizations about whatever group it is (in this case, fandom). My experience is that there were always multiple “fandoms” (starting with Star Trek!), and that tendency has only increased with the internet. So saying “Fandom is X” really only means “the small sub-set of fandom I know about is X” (and even then you might be wrong).
Although retired, I’m still working on various scholarly projects that I could never finish while teaching full time, and I have been boggled at the fact that I had to write the phrase “Sad and Rapid Puppies” in scholarly paper on feminist sf. OTOH, I can say that Mike G’s overage of the campaigns and fandom responses was outstanding, and I was happy to be able to cite a number of his posts to support my arguments!
Nowadays, I’m writing about alt-right extremist backlash against the readings, scholars, critics, and fans of Tolkien’s legendarium, adaptations, or transformative works who explore or embody in any way “diverse viewpoints” (see: J. R. R. Tolkien: Culture Warrior, a presentation I did on the attacks against the Tolkien Society’s 2021 “Tolkien and Diversity” Online Seminar.
sigh Apparently WordPress (which I admit I have a hate/hate relationship with) no longer recognizes me or my email, so I cannot edit a missing link: I use the phrase “feminist killjoy” in my post (which also has a couple of links so that may be the problem): I need to credit Sara Ahmed for the term and concept.
robinareid: The comment was spammed (for no reason). I found and posted it.
@John S / ErsatzCulture: Was Mary Robinette Kowal actually involved in the decision to accept the address-less ballots in the site selection held at DisCon III? I’m not aware of that.
@Brad Templeton: If you must persist in gatekeeping access to fandom, fannish identity, and the entirely out-of-date, historical, reactionary, and long-discarded shibboleths to qualify as a fan, despite the numerous people in this conversation telling you that it is unproductive, hostile, exclusionary, and would affect them in particular, I feel the need to point out that a trufan would know it’s spelled trufan, not truefan.
@Joshua K: To be honest, I’m not sure. As I understood it, she was responsible for disciplining Kevin (removal from concom or something like that?), but I’m sure I’d seen comments later (possibly misinformed?) that said she was involved in the address thing.
I’d also seen stuff in Chinese media coverage of the 2021 site selection that implied that she was much more involved than I’d previously understood – but I know for a fact that Chinese media has fabricated interviews with a few Hugo and Worldcon related people (basically taking info published elsewhere and rejigging it to look like they had been granted interviews), so I never put too much faith in it.
I apologies in advance if I’m wrong about the address stuff, but I still don’t think it’s a good look for someone with a professional relationship with a member of the Chengdu bid disciplining someone who was raising objections to the Chengdu bid, even if I don’t think those objections were actionable.
@Brad Templeton, I appreciate your earlier work with Linux and EFF etc.
But could you please stop insinuating that the site selection was bought? It looks a bit funny, sure, but there’s no actual evidence of votes buying per se.
Believe me, I advocated against the Chengdu bid, I even raised questions about the site selection votes, but I dropped it. Why? Because there’s no evidence such thing happened.
We know what doubling down could make someone look like. In fact, we are seeing the effect of such a thing right now because people doubling down. Please don’t be the next person.
Brad Templeton:
Maybe that’s your dream. It’s not mine.
My dream involves certain people getting over themselves for long enough to realize that the ONLY person who is EVER in a position to make a valid judgment of whether someone is a “trufan” is that fan. Not you, not me, and not the guy down the pub. They get to decide for themselves. Nobody else does.
The single worst thing for or in fandom is this idea that there is some standard that fans must meet to really be fans. It’s pervasive, it’s been around forever. And in its own way it is every bit as toxic as the damn puppies. (To whatever limited extent there’s even a difference.)
@Mike Dunford: the ONLY person who is EVER in a position to make a valid judgment of whether someone is a “trufan” is that fan. Not you, not me, and not the guy down the pub. They get to decide for themselves. Nobody else does.
Applause! (And shout-outs to robinareid and rahaeli, Meredith, Bruce Baugh, Madame Hardy…)
Reading all of this makes me curious as to the demographics of WSFS. Or, I suppose, the decades of individual WSFSes that have sprung up from year to year as each Worldcon has been held. A glance over the conversation makes me think this group skews… older.
Are there any recent studies as to who (gender, race, age) actually attends these cons?
@Joshua K. (regarding Winnipeg): Fair enough; seems a bit weird to have the bid window close then open again, but 2021 was a weird year.
In answer to your other question about who made the final decision about the ballots, I found this account to be a bit vague about that issue (it does state specifically that 1591 ballots, not 2000) were missing addresses.
@Mike Dunford,
Hear, hear! Speaking as a person who has been the subject of gatekeeping for 45 years, because I’m female and yet have the temerity to play RPGs (starting with what is now called Basic D&D, aka The Little Brown Books, back in 1977 or so)… Well said, sir.
I am not now, and never will be, in favor of restricting WSFS membership to people with the money, time, and physical, mental, and emotional ability to make it to a Worldcon in person. Putting up those kinds of roadblocks is about as unfannish an activity as I can think of. People, we’re supposed to be BETTER than that.
As nothing that I have written could be interpreted in such a manner, I have no idea what point you feel that you are trying to make.
I have not suggested not selling attending or supporting memberships to anyone.
What I have suggested is that we need some kinds of means to ensure that supporting memberships are not used en masse to send a Worldcon to a place where the bulk of the attending membership is not desirous of it going there.
Good job there contradicting yourself in the space of three sentences.
You’re creating a gatekeeping situation in which you are excluding non-regulars from participation in a major element of Worldcon fandom until they “prove” their bona fides.
@Meredith: Enfeebled solidarity forever!
A whole bunch of folks: I made some notes on who to credit but one of my cats is sitting on. So, just, thank you to everyone speaking up with your own stories and providing encouragement in responses. You are folks I’m happy to share a comments thread with, and you make me feel much better.
I don’t want Worldcon to be only for trufen. I want it to be for everyone who’s kinda interested in sf/f. Some will become trufen down the road. Some won’t. And that’s fine! Rivers and seas need to be oxygenated and so do fandoms. Dabblers should be welcome, not barely tolerated.
I guess my last comment wasn’t clear: I have never been to a worldcon and have no intention of doing so unless it conveniently lands in my backyard, and then maybe not then either because I don’t like big events. I started buying supporting memberships exclusively to vote in the Hugos and have voted in site selection because it just happens to be included in the membership.
Thus same goes for the “others” I mentioned in my last comment; none of them have attended worldcon either. So you can stop Buellering.
@Aaron Pound:
As nothing that I have written could be interpreted in such a manner, I have no idea what point you feel that you are trying to make.
I have not suggested not selling attending or supporting memberships to anyone.
What I have suggested is that we need some kinds of means to ensure that supporting memberships are not used en masse to send a Worldcon to a place where the bulk of the attending membership is not desirous of it going there.
Good job there contradicting yourself in the space of three sentences.
You’re creating a gatekeeping situation in which you are excluding non-regulars from participation in a major element of Worldcon fandom until they “prove” their bona fides.
Swing and a clean miss. In no way does my statement that we need some kind of mechanism to avoid mass buys of memberships to be used to grab a site selection win contradict the earlier part of what I wrote.
If it did, you could have SHOWN, specifically, how it did.
Instead, you merely made an insinuated assertion.
As I said, I do not know what form such a checking mechanism would take.
What I do believe is that the kind of cluster frak that we saw in much smaller doses in 1987 and with the Puppies because HUGE in 2023, on at least two different matters.
I don’t think that such a thing should be allowed to happen again.
Do you ? If so, why ?
Look it isn’t hard to set up a reliable system – we just find a village green and there upon the green place a mighty stone and embedded in the stone, a sword that stands unblemished by the elements and upon the stone is written in stern words “whosoever is pure enough in heart to vote in site selection shall be able to pull this sword from the stone” and all the knights from across the land shall take turns trying to remove the sword. If we aren’t keen on the sword idea we could have a hammer that only the truly worth can lift. I can see either plan working.
Andrew (not Werdna): Winnipeg missed the deadline for making a bid for 2023. Had the rules been followed to the letter, Chengdu would have won by default even without the questioned ballots
Nope, that was legit. When the date for DisCon III was changed, it reset the timetable for filing a bid.
Brad Templeton: Is there anybody here who has ever done this thing people are keen to protect? Anyone? In particular, I am looking for somebody who never attended a Worldcon but bought a supporting (non-attending) WSFS membership other than to vote for a buddy in the Hugos, or to vote for your home city in a site selection?
You must be joking.
I’ve been reading your comments and the fact is, the way you think Worldcon is, ceased to exist more than a decade ago. You’re stuck thinking it’s still what it was back when you were actively involved in Worldcon 15+ years ago.
You showed up in 2015/2016 to argue that you knew better than the rest of us what we wanted EPH to do. You were completely out-of-touch with what we wanted even then, you tried to mansplain EPH to those of us who had been deeply involved in its development, and you weren’t willing to listen to the rest of us back then, either.
The horse has been out of the barn for more than a decade now. The Worldcon ship you knew has long ago sailed. Your “vision” of what Worldcon is (or should be) is long gone. And a great many of us are very happy that’s the case.
There are tons of people now who buy WSFS memberships to nominate and vote in the Hugos because they actually care about the Hugos, but who are unable to attend Worldcon due to financial, physical, or mental health limitations. And I would argue that the quality of finalists and winners has increased exponentially in the years since the Puppy garbage got cheated onto the ballot — precisely because all of these new and varied voices are being added into the mix.
Your vision of “trufen” is outdated and exclusionary. It’s a brand-new Worldcon now, and you’ve left yourself in the past. You can continue to argue that you want to drag Worldcon back to what it used to be when you were active — but the only people who are going to agree with you are the few older fen who are still around and think that the olden days of Worldcon are the ideal.
No one else here is interested in your proposed methods of gatekeeping so that only the “right” people can be involved in Worldcon. There are people here who I vehemently disagree with regarding issues relating to the Hugo Awards, but I will defend to the death their right to be here and to have a voice. They make the Hugo Awards and Worldcon better because of their input — input which you want to prevent.
No one else here is interested in having you drag Worldcon back to what you remember it being and think it should be. You’ve been arguing until you’re blue in the face about it, but you’re not persuading anyone here who wasn’t already on board with your exclusionary ideas, and — much as in 2015 and 2016 — you simply can’t accept that what you apparently perceive to be your “persuasive” rhetoric isn’t persuading anyone here.
You’re repeatedly embarrassing yourself and it’s just painful to watch. Please stop.
@Camestros Felapton
I for one think we should look into bringing back Annatar’s suggestion that voting rights be distributed as rings crafted by the elven-smith Celebrimbor.
@Camestros Felapton I’m gonna put in an opposing plan for watery bints handing out swords, and we can hash it out in the next scroll.
@JJ – really well said.
@Jay Blanc – that’s utterly ludicrous. The lines along which Worldcon voting rights should be distributed are lines of longitude. See, you take the average attendance of the previous N conventions and apply a population growth factor determined by the population growth in countries members were fun, scaled to the percentage of membership each country provided (of course), and that gets you the natural membership allowed at the next one. Then you divide that by 360 to get the allowed members per degree of longitude. Excess natural members allowed and general excess members much choose to be north or south polar; north polar members must face a polar bear gauntlet, while south polar members must face monsters spawned in subsurface lakes…
I trust that all this is perfectly clear to any honest observer.
Well, Worldcon has always been reluctant to centralise power but clearly having three rings in the hands of particularly trustworthy elves is an excellent idea. I can’t see any flaws in that plan.
The details of HOW the swords get distributed is secondary to there being swords (and/or hammers and/or rings and/or the magical gold of the Rhein)
@Brad Templeton(and thanks to everyone who has talked about this before):
I am going this year to my oficial first attending worldcon(I was once a virtual member on that worldcon). I don’t think I haver ever been the problem (except with a little more work for the volunters because of the discusion because of Paypal).
I have never voted in Siteselection because I have given up because that seemed to be imposible. So am I in your opinion the problem or yust nonexisting?
I’ve tried to restrain myself, but folks like Brad Templeton suggesting that unless you have attended a Worldcon you’re not a “truefan” (sic) manage to be classist, ableist and racist, a rare three-for.
I have a suggestion: folks who think this, they could go make a new convention called “Worldcon Classic” where the ever shrinking numbers of them can talk about the good old days. And perhaps others can try to build something new, freed from the male stale and pale past.
Fandom is for everyone, no gatekeeping.required
@Camestros: Remember, though, if you stare into the Palantir of Site Selection too often and too deeply, you may despair.
Yesterday this thread made me so mad I had to put the internet down and walk away. I’m pleased to come back this morning to find a more welcoming place. Thank you so much to everyone who spoke up about the gatekeeping.
Now I’ll share a bit about me in hope it may make someone else feel more welcome too. I have been participating in Hugo voting for a about decade now. I do it for the joy of discovering Hugo worthy work and seeing it honored. I want “Hugo worthy” to continue to mean what it should.
I’ve never been to a Worldcon. I don’t plan on ever physically attending. I have time and money. I am able bodied and work hard to stay healthy. But I still prefer to enjoy Worldcon virtually and vicariously. Since I figured out a few years ago that I could and how I could, I’ve voted in site selection. I do that because I care about where the Hugos are held, and I want to support the running of the Hugos.
Let me be part of the solution instead of trying to kick me out of the WSFS clubhouse. Many puppies were supporting members but so were the surge of voters included in the overwhelming response to them. The issue with Chengdu isn’t really whether or how much the support for them was fake or not. The bigger issue is that for many reasons there wasn’t enough support for another option. If more SMOFs had rallied around the bids that folded, maybe we’d be arguing about what Nice or Memphis did or didn’t do instead. If Winnipeg hadn’t been too little too late, maybe people would be talking about their Worldcon instead of their NASFiC. Maybe if more people eligible to vote in site selection (attending, virtual, and supporting!) were aware they could vote, knew how to vote, or just bothered to do so, the outcome would have been different. If more people who love SFF and want to celebrate it knew they could have a say, maybe we wouldn’t have been hearing “How could you let this happen?!” ever since Chengdu won the bid.
You think a rule involving who can vote in the Hugo’s should be created first, without enforcement powers because by just having a rule people will obey it.
I’d called that Second Lieutenant thinking. Thankfully, they almost all grow out of it.
Hey, Brad? And Andre?
What, pray tell, is wrong with the both of you?
There are multiple people in this thread who have explained that disabilities, lack of money, and/or lack of paid time off have has prevented them and other people from attending conventions. I could also bring up things like the inability to get a visa or passport, or the challenges of wrangling children. Or the desire to avoid COVID, because it is still a problem, no matter what you’ve heard to the contrary.
The way you both blithely ignore these issues and the people here who have spoken up about them does not speak well of you, or of the WSFS in general.
You owe a lot of people in this discussion, especially Bruce Baugh, an apology.
Brad Templeton: “Is there anybody here who has ever done this thing people are keen to protect? Anyone? In particular, I am looking for somebody who never attended a Worldcon but bought a supporting (non-attending) WSFS membership other than to vote for a buddy in the Hugos, or to vote for your home city in a site selection?”
Since you asked. Yes. I have bought supporting; even attending, memberships to conventions I hoped (but was not certain) I would be able to attend.
And have then been unable to attend.
There is a tension between everyone deciding for themselves whether they are a trufan, including fans who live in a culture or under a political system different than ours, and the wish to allow the free recognition of the excellence of any of them without exclusion.
I’ve still got whiplash trying to follow when the Hugos should or shouldn’t be censored. (They were right to leave SJWs Always Lie etc. on the ballot in the face of great pressure, wrong to remove puppy-supported items on a technicality, right to leave Chuck Tingle on, and at that point pretty much had to leave the meta-joke response to that on, but it was still wrong to leave “GRRM can eff off” on. I sort of wish they’d ruled Jeannette Ng’s “Joseph Campbell (sic) was a fascist” ineligible: it was a poorly researched rant and if there is going to be an award for those I want it.)
While an American author might not win the Nobel Prize and be hailed as the next Boris Paternak for writing pornography about, oh, Egyptian police who follow people on LGBTQ dating apps (though you never know), such an author’s visa application would be rejected in order to stop him from appearing at an event in Cairo with a pink bag over his head. Conversely, if you can’t see scenarios where future finalists are banned or authors have their visas rejected in Europe or North America, you aren’t thinking it through. Remember, BRICS is perfectly capable of organizing a rival Worldcon that leaves ours in the dust – they just offered us an olive branch first. It will come to that if it has to.
This year, if – hypothetically, since I see no evidence this actually happened – some branch of government leaned on the committee in order to prevent outspoken overseas Chinese authors from being given a platform in China – or if there was self-censorship by the committee out of fear of vaguely defined repercusssions – our mature response would be to recognize that Worldcon’s institutional culture must become resilient enough to handle these shocks. Accept that the committee made a bad call in a difficult situation. But also demand a certain level of transparency so that everyone understands what happened and try to think rationally about how to deal with it. (To the exent any of us can think rationally.)
If the focus can be kept on fans recognizing great works of genre fiction with less use of the platform to score political points or campaign for particular publishers, the Hugos are less likely to die. (American publishers who engineer “open secret” campaigns are also at fault here.) But we’re not going to make the political or industry conflicts disappear. The committee should step up with a coherent story about why they did what they did, preferably offering the raw data to at least a few others in the community to rerun. As a way to start to rebuild trust. This is going to happen over and over again, on any continent.
It seems obvious that the quality of Worldcons has declined – and the cause seems pretty clear as well: the vast increase in aggregate Worldcon experience (the golden Worldcons of the deep past were run by people who had been to one or two or no Worldcons before, because there had been so very few Worldcons before them). As a solution, I suggest that every ballot contain a question: “How many Worldcons have you attended?” People who answer “none” get 2 votes, people who answer “1 to 5” get one vote, people who answer “6 to 10” get a half vote, “11 to 16” get a third of a vote, and so on (people who claim more than a hundred Worldcons get a negative vote, since they are Cretans and clearly liars). Poor Silverbob would get only a tiny fraction of a vote, but this method would solve all our problems, anyway. Thanks to those who pointed out the decline of Worldcons and suggested questioning people on how many Worldcons they had attended. In all modesty, my idea is a simple extrapolation of those two unbiased observations.
Whoops. I did not realize that I would need to put an extra smiley face on “truefen.” To me, that is always meant as an ironic term, and that each person’s definition of it will be different from anybody else’s. It is thus extra ironic to see so many folks wanting to explain that. Is there a non-ironic meaning of the term? People seem to think there is. No true Scotsman would think that. I explicitly described it as an unattainable dream, hoped that would make it clear.
The point made was that while one might dream of somehow being able to divide the “truefen” (ie. whatever each individual subjectively thinks are the best fans) from the others, we can’t. But we might be able to tell those attempting to corrupt the system from those not.
As for the allegation over whether the Chengdu bid was that or not, I have seen evidence presented, though not proof. That it might be true is reason to discuss defending against it, and that it might not be true is reason to temper that discussion with arguments out limiting such defence.
The circumstances of the voting, with thousands of last minute supporting memberships coming in without addresses were indeed suspicious, suspicious enough to cause many to question them, and for there to be resolutions and debate about the matter in the business meeting. There were counter arguments, and in the end the votes were accepted. No conclusion was proven. I did not see (but did not search myself for) proof in either direction. I have read vague claims that conversion to attending by the supporting voters was rare, which would be further evidence in one direction. I would have hoped the convention might have published, as can be easily done, and is indirectly done by most cons in their publications of membership lists and counts, evidence to help people examine this. (Admittedly prior worldcons are arguably too open about membership rolls, though not about counts.)
This is evidence (in both directions) but not proof, but it is wrong to say that does not mean it can’t be discussed. If only as a basis for what has been alleged and could happen.
Some years ago I was advising a friend who put together a bid for a country which has never hosted a Worldcon and could never gain sufficient support outside the country at the time, not until it built up a more developed fandom within the country etc. through a lot of work and time. He said, “we can win just buy buying a ton of supporting memberships.” I told him that would not work, that other fans would react to this as they did to the puppies. To my surprise that was bad advice.
In case y’all didn’t see the comment I left yesterday on the Pixel Scroll — sometime between the 24th, when Marshall checked, and last night, Ben Yalow’s name was removed from the Glasgow 2024 Committee & Staff List.
So, one of the first steps in recovering institutional trust in the Hugos & Worldcon has been taken: making sure no-one who was involved with 2023 is working on 2024.
@Lem Taylor
I disagree that “Worldcons have declined” in a sginificant part, in that the Worldcons (The Event) that I’ve attended have been making very good strides in improvement. But that’s down to the people handling Logistics, conduct standards and gently (or not too gently) guiding the grognards away from pulling levers marked do-not-pull. Some of us have put in a fair bit of work to tamp down the “volunteerism” attitude that caused errors and harm in the past.
This is why it’s so upsetting to us when Worldcon (The Administration) foul up and massively backslide. It feels like a slap in the face every time someone takes all the good will we build up by running a better show on the ground, and sets fire to it by mishandling the Hugo Awards.
And let’s face it. The WSFS as embodied in the Business Meeting and the MPC are still stuck in the 1950s, so it can’t be said to have gotten worse, they’ve always been this bad.
Keep going on like this, and the people who run ground level stuff for the Worldcon are going to just stop. I know I will not be volunteering at Glasgow 2013, despite Interaction being my first Worldcon and first volunteering at a Worldcon when they built an information desk around where I’d sat down. I just can’t stand the inevitable pain when a voluntarist shouts “ARE YOU USURPING MY AUTHORITY?”* at me for trying to properly organise a queue so that fire escape routes aren’t blocked.
This happened. I am not making this up. I am not using hyperbole. This happened to me because someone had taken ownership of an event without wanting responsibility to handle the queues he was letting build up where they shouldn’t. He then went on to cause more problems ordering a GOH to stop selling merch when her appearance contract required we let her. This is a systemic volunteerism problem we have to constantly cope with due to the WSFS’s “Do what thou whilst” leanings in refusing the very concept of “holding people responsible”. It’s actually completely impossible due to the structure of the Worldcon to prevent this person from volunteering at any future Worldcon. And in spite of this we’ve some how managed to keep slowly making a better Worldcon.
But it’s been very very slow progress. And the attrition grinds you down. Worldcon (The Event) and Worldcon (The Administration) have essentially been at war with each other this past two decades. Every Worldcon there’s been another problem caused by people who think Worldcons are special places where you can have authority without responsibility. It’s unsustainable.
No one who voted in site selection at DisCon3 needed to add attending for Chengdu. We all automatically received 2023 WSFS membership plus virtual and attending.
@Doctor Science
Good to hear. Thanks for sharing the info here. I’m behind on my Pixel Scrolls.
@Doctor Science
I feel uncomfortable about Ben Yalow’s removal to persona non-grata status. Particularly done by unannounced erasure. From the various comments made inside and outside of China, that after Ben Yalow’s “Worldcon In China” bid won it was coopted by a a consortium of Publishing and Resort Development concerns. And that Yalow was relegated to figurehead.
@Laura: Welcome, with a garnish of strong agreement.
@Lem Taylor: You’ve loaded the target onto flatbed truck and are driving off with it at Autobahn speeds. The rest of us are responding to Brad on being allowed to participate. Running a con is something else altogether. It’s the difference between recent Americans being allowed to vote versus running for President or other national office, IMHO.
I’m now curious, but not right now curious enough to look it up: did folks on the Chengdu bid have no Worldcon experience? And if so, how many of them, and what experience did they have with other con running? I can imagine my reaction to various possibilities ranging from confidence to alarm (though in fairness I’d have voted against anyway for fear of the political problems, having seen them blight scholarly gatherings I was interested in). But that translate into dislike or distrust of any and all actually existing Chinese attendees and participants.
@Jay Blanc: Lots of agreement on event versus organization. That reflects my observations from a distance.
If Yalow doesn’t want to be persona-non-grata he can blood well address the fandom community and make a case for why he shouldn’t be held accountable for what happened in Chengdu. So far we’ve had radio static from him.
@Kalin Stacey:
Exactly. That ship hasn’t just sailed, it hit the iceberg, sank, and we’re looking for survivors.
It’s quite possible he quit voluntarily, but we don’t know because he’s said NOTHING. If he didn’t want to be persona non grata, he’d be doing rescue work.
I’d caution that not everyone likes to loudly announce things that may not be in their best interests immediately and without forethought or consultation with lawyers. Yalow is also someone to whom the advice of “Do not talk in public about this without talking to a trademark attorney” applies due to having been appointed a Director of Worldcon Intellectual Property.