(1) NEW YEAR’S WHO. “Doctor Who’s special time loop trailer teases huge Dalek moment” – Digital Spy introduces the clip. BEWARE SPOILERS.
The New Year’s Day special ‘Eve of the Daleks’ will see Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor getting stuck in a time loop with Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill), Dan Lewis (John Bishop) and a group of deadly Daleks.
The episode also features Aisling Bea and Adjani Salmon in the roles of Sarah and Nick as they get ready to celebrate the start of the new year….
(2) TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT. Julian Yap and Fran Wilde begin weekly publication of The Sunday Morning Transport in January, delivering speculative fiction using a newsletter platform. Subscribe for one free story a month, or become a paid subscriber and get a story every week.
Subscribing to Sunday Morning Transport means bringing a a new speculative short story connection to your inbox every week, fifty weeks a year.
Sunday Morning Transport readers are makers, thinkers, scientists, artists, authors, dreamers. With a single speculative short story each Sunday, we connect across space and time. We deliver, right to your inbox: a moment of whimsy; a deep dive into an unknown world; a single illuminating transformation; a vibrant community of readers and writers built around the best new speculative stories each week.
Free subscribers receive one story a month. Paid subscribers receive one story each week, fifty weeks a year. For paid subscribers, there’s more: the opportunity to join in a conversation about story, to ask questions, and to help build a year’s worth of moments with authors including Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Katherine Addison, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more.
Subscribe now, and get ready for your Sunday Morning Transport starting in January 2022.
(3) BUILDING A HUGO CATEGORY. Ira Alexandre has launched a discussion on Twitter by asking: For purposes of a Game Hugo, what does it mean for a game to be “in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects”? Thread starts here.
(4) A BAD WORD. Frell from Farscape is my favorite genre swear word, says Cat Eldridge. “Smeg and the art of sci-fi swearing” at Kerrang!
…For a long old time, the quickest way to get taken out of libraries or complained about by parents was to include swearing. This led sci-fi creators to come up with new alternatives to the usual suspects, both to evade censorship and emphasise the ‘otherness’ of the worlds in which their tales took place (if a movie was set 10,000 years in the future and started with someone calling someone else a shithead, that would just seem plain silly).
Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison is a terrific book, a laugh-out-loud funny anti-war satire with a hidden gut-punch of an ending. A bleakly hilarious look at the futility of war and the cruelty with which people can treat one another, it’s a book that should be read by as many people as possible – ideally when they are about 12. During the title character’s ascension through the ranks of the Space Troopers, there’s plenty of effing and jeffing, except Harry opts for his own coinage, ‘bowb’, instead of the curses we all know and love.
As with a lot of made-up swear words, ‘bowb’ is kind of all-purpose – the phrases “Don’t give me any of your bowb!”, “Get over here, you stupid bowb!” and “What is this, “Bowb Your Buddy Week?” suggest it can be substituted in easily enough for ‘shit’, ‘bastard’, ’asshole’ and ‘fuck’….
(5) IN TIMES TO COME NEXT WEEK. Nicholas Whyte tries the thought experiment of anticipating next year with the help of films and stories that treat 2022 as history: “2022 according to science fiction, in novels and films” at From the Heart of Europe. Some of these sources aren’t very helpful!
Time Runner (1993)
What’s it about? Mark Hamill, unsuccessfully attempting to fight off an alien invasion of Earth in 2022, somehow gets sent thirty years back in time to try and prevent it all from happening. He tangles with a corrupt politician who is destined to become the collaborationist president of the world, and ends up assisting at his own birth.
Is 2022 really going to be like that? Actually most of the film is set in 1992, apart from the very beginning and occasional flashforwards. As of now, we don’t (yet) have a President of Earth; as for the alien invasion, we will have to wait and see….
(6) FANZINES IN THE FAMILY TREE. Andrew Porter tells why the Gothamist report is sff-related: “Patti Smith Receives Key To New York City: ‘I Wish I Could Give NYC The Key To Me’”. It has to do with the photo accompanying the article.
In his last weeks as mayor, Bill de Blasio has been bestowing Keys to New York City to a number of figures, including legendary music producer Clive Davis (who helped stage the ultimately Mother Nature-interrupted “Homecoming” concert in Central Park), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his indefatigable support for the city. On his last Monday in office, de Blasio honored one of his favorite artists, the “punk rock laureate,” Patti Smith….
Note Lenny Kaye in the photo behind her. Lenny was a teenage science fiction fan, active in science fiction fandom and publishing a fanzine, Here’s an article about his SF fanzine collection: “The Tattooed Dragon Meets The Wolfman: Lenny Kaye’s Science Fiction Fanzines”, a 2014 Thought Catalog post.
(7) TAKE BIXELSTRASSE TO I-95. Gwen C. Katz tweeted her interpretation of the history that shaped Worldcon’s administrative culture. Thread starts here.
(8) THE PRESTIGE. Catherine Lundoff followed-up the Katz thread with her thoughts about the Hugo Awards. Thread starts here. Lundoff evidently is focused on book-length work, since publishers of finalists like Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, for example, aren’t operating with “deep pockets.”
(9) END OF WATCH. At Vox: “NASA will let the ISS disintegrate into the atmosphere. Here’s why”. When hasn’t been specified, but “NASA has only technically certified the station’s hardware until 2028.”
The International Space Station brings together astronauts from around the world to collaborate on cutting-edge research, and some have called it humanity’s greatest achievement. But after two decades in orbit, the ISS will shut down, and a crop of several new space stations will take its place. While these new stations will make it easier for more humans to visit space, they’re also bound to create new political and economic tensions.
NASA is scaling back its presence in low-Earth orbit as the government focuses on sending humans back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. As part of that transition, the space agency wants to rent out facilities for its astronauts on new space stations run by private companies. When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won’t just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too….
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1893 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] One hundred twenty-eight years ago, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes was first published by G. Newnes Ltd. sometime late in 1893 with an actual publication date listed as 1894. It was the second collection following The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and like the first it was illustrated by Sidney Paget. This hardcover edition has two hundred seventy-nine pages comprising twelve stories. The stories were previously published in the Strand Magazine.
Doyle had determined that these would be the last Holmes stories, and intended to kill off the character in “The Final Problem”, but a decade later a new series, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, would begin in the aftermath of “The Final Problem”, in which it is revealed that Holmes actually survived.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born December 27, 1938 — Jean Hale. If you’ve watched Sixties genre television, you’ve likely seen her as she showed up on My Favorite Martian, In Like Flint (at least genre adjacent), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, My Brother the Angel, Wild, Wild West, Batman and Tarzan. (Died 2021.)
- Born December 27, 1951 — Robbie Bourget, 70. She started out as an Ottawa-area fan, where she became involved in a local Who club and the OSFS before moving to LA and becoming deeply involved in LASFS. She’s been a key member of many a Worldcon and Who convention over the years. She was the co-DUFF winner with Marty Cantor for Aussiecon 2. She moved to London in the late Nineties.
- Born December 27, 1960 — Maryam d’Abo, 61. She’s best known as Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights. Her first genre role was her screen debut in the very low-budget SF horror film Xtro, an Alien rip-off. She was Ta’Ra in Something Is Out There, a miniseries that was well received and but got piss poor ratings. Did you know there was a live Mowgli: The New Adventures of the Jungle Book series? I didn’t. She was Elaine Bendel, a recurring role, in it.
- Born December 27, 1977 — Sinead Keenan, 44. She’s in the Eleventh Doctor story, “The End of Time” as Addams but her full face make-up guarantees that you won’t recognize her. If you want to see her, she’s a Who fan in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Her final Who work is a Big Finish audio drama, Iterations of I, a Fifth Doctor story. And she played Nina Pickering, a werewolf, in Being Human for quite a long time.
- Born December 27, 1987 — Lily Cole, 34. Been awhile since I found a Who performer and so let’s have another one now. She played The Siren in the Eleventh Doctor story, “The Curse of The Black Spot”. She’s also in some obscure film called Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a character named Lovey. And she shows up in the important role of Valentina in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Not mention she’s in Snow White and The Huntsman as Greta, a great film indeed.
- Born December 27, 1995 — Timothée Chalamet, 26. First SF role was as the young Tom Cooper in the well received Interstellar. His only other genre role was Zac in One & Two before he played Paul Atreides in Director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- The Far Side shows something by the side of the road – a little too big for a hubcap, I’m thinking.
- The Argyle Sweater spots the moment an undercover operator’s cover is blown.
(13) IS SF ABOUT THE PRESENT OR FUTURE? Star Trek shouldn’t be gloomy insists Reason Magazine’s Eric Studer: “Even if Modern Star Trek Doesn’t Think So, the World Is Getting Better”.
For decades, various incarnations of Star Trek have offered mostly positive visions for the future of humanity—one in which we’ve set aside petty, earthbound squabbles in favor of boldly seeking out new worlds (and, of course, finding the occasional conflict).
But the first three seasons of Star Trek: Discovery (Paramount+), the seventh television series in the long-running franchise, have too often seemed tied down by storylines that might have more in common with real-world politics of the 21st century rather than the unbridled optimism that was such an important part of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s original conception for the show. Discovery is highly serialized, more focused on a single calamity than a larger sense of exploration, and with far more internally focused characters who care more about their own interests than in a larger plan for society.
As a result, Star Trek now seeks to reinforce the trepidation and existential doubt that is a hallmark of our modern culture. Instead of showing the potential of what humanity can become, Discovery seems to reflect more on what the feelings of the human condition are today…
(14) INVADER FROM MARS. Space.com celebrates an anniversary: “On This Day in Space! Dec. 27, 1984: Famed Allan Hills Mars meteorite found in Antarctica”.
On Dec. 27, 1984, one of the most famous Mars meteorites was found in Antarctica.
…Weighing in at just over 4 lbs., this space rock is considered to be one of the oldest Martian meteorites ever found on Earth. Scientists estimate that it crystallized from molten rock more than 4 billion years ago, when Mars still had liquid water on its surface. It also has been the source of controversy about the search for life on Mars that continues to this day.
(15) NOT JUST ANY KIND OF HORROR. The new episode of the Rite Gud podcast features an interview with John Langan on cosmic horror. And also about the horror of dealing with the publishing industry.
Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan joins us to talk about cosmic horror, his novel The Fisherman, upstate New York, how much money writers make (none), and how hard it is to get published when you’re a little too literary for the genre crowd but a little too genre for the literary crowd. Special appearance by Langan’s wiener dog/beagle.
(16) OPENING OUT OF TOWN. “Terry Gilliam’s Disputed Sondheim Show Finds a Home” – the New York Times knows its address.
For weeks, a question hung over London theater: What would happen to Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”?
On Nov. 1, the Old Vic theater canceled a revival of the musical, co-directed by Terry Gilliam, after a dispute in which the renowned director was accused of endorsing transphobic views and playing down the MeToo movement. That left the production in limbo and London’s theater world wondering if anyone would dare to take it on.
Now, there is an answer. On Aug. 19, 2022, Gilliam’s “Into the Woods” will debut at the Theater Royal in Bath, 115 miles from London. The show will run through Sep. 10, 2022, the theater said in a statement….
(17) CRITICAL COMPONENT. DUST presents a short film about a young robot with a defective part, trying to find their way in the world.
(18) A BETTER PLAN. “Tesla agrees to stop letting drivers play video games in moving cars” says the New York Times.
Tesla has agreed to modify software in its cars to prevent drivers and passengers from playing video games on the dashboard screens while vehicle are in motion, a federal safety regulator said on Thursday.
The agreement came a day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal investigation of the game feature, which is known as Passenger Play. The investigation was announced after The New York Times reported this month on the potential safety risks the games posed….
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Alasdair Beckett-King’s parodies are news to me but not to his quarter of a million YouTube subscribers. Here’s a sample.
As the first person ever to spoof Doctor Who, I decided not to bother doing an impression of 13 different actors, and just wore a jaunty hat instead.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, N., Bill, Raquel S. Benedict, Jeffrey Smith, Nicholas Whyte, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
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First!
Thanks for the title credit! I had a sneaking feeling that was one of mine….
(19) ABK is great – I first encountered his Every Scandinavian Detective show parody and then went on an archive binge.
Rob Thornton: You have a good memory. It comes from 2016!
(18) I’m still surprised that Tesla thought this was a good idea.
(9) I feel that a better orbital station is easier than a moon base – and far more useful.
Clickity
(1) For those who get tired of seeing the same bit of trailer repeated over and over, and over and over (I lost count), at 7:09 is a new piece … before it all repeats again. Sneaky, that.
(11) chalamet shows up in the 2021 movie don’t look up
I do need to watch Don’t Look Up…
I’d like to see more of Alasdair Beckett-King’s work.
11) The Guardiian gave Don’t Look Up quite a bad review, and even ran an opinion piece on its faults. Personally, I really enjoyed it.
For once, I have no idea what this Pixel Scroll title is alluding to. Help!
It’s a Dylan Thomas line, a really lovely one: the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
7) Gwen’s piece would be a bit more supportable if it weren’t a teaser for a short story that takes place at a Worldcon in 1969 in which it’s pretty apparent to someone who was there that Gwen was not there. People in the 50s did not spend all of their time at the malt shop saying “Daddyo” or “Keen”, and fans in 1969 did not speak the way they do in that story.
As to her Twitter critiques, she writes:
“WorldCon was born of these twin ideas. It both served as a Masonic temple for initiates to use their esoteric knowledge away from interlopers, and as a proving ground to demonstrate the superiority of their bureaucratic ideas about the right ways to run society.”
Or, maybe, it also served the purpose of allowing the outsiders (the Fans) a place where they could do their thing away from an often hostile society?
and
“Any suggestion that maybe someone could sort out the obvious troll ballots, or that they should throw out the results and hold a new vote, was received like drowning a kitten. How dare you suggest that human intervention could counteract flaws in the system!”
Ummm, how about “How dare you suggest that people who have all voluntarily agreed to abide by a set of rules continue to follow those rules even in the face of adversity because they take honoring their commitments seriously?
Oh and, ummm, guess you missed the news that MR Kowal, Chair of the Con, DID take responsibility for the Raytheon thing.
Sherlock Holmes was “dead” for ten years. Return wasn’t just one year after Memoirs.
(7) TAKE BIXELSTRASSE TO I-95.
I’m so tired of bad takes on Worldcon and the Hugo Awards posted by people whose knowledge seems to have come from reading Twitter threads.
Do Worldcon and the Hugo Awards have some serious problems? Sure. But if you want me to take your opinions seriously, throwing in obviously false whacko theories is not the way to get me to do so.
7
The surest way to convince me to call it sci-fi is to tell me not to call it sci-fi. Fans have always struck me as an ornery bunch of contrarians, which is why, in my typical (G.) Marxist logic, I can’t be one.
I don’t know about gatekeeping. I’m surely not qualified to address that issue, but from my outsider perspective, it always seemed to me that many fans were peevishly snarkish. Way, way before it was cool, as it seems everyone is peevishly snarkish these days. You either came informed and ascerbic, or faced the rhetorical consequences. I mean, sci-fi peer pressure is the equivalent of a tongue-lashing by the Mad Frenchman in Holy Grail. It’s salutary. Sometimes the best medicine is a good piss-letting.
Also,.I have to agree that it is foolhardy to make pronouncements about events you are aware of second hand, especially when attendees are still alive, especially if those attendees are as sharp as sci-fi fans, as per see above.
@Cliff: Dylan Thomas’s line was also adapted into a story title by Roger Zelazny, “The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current”, from 1976.
“No Scrollicon heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the Pixelators go?”
La Vie en Scroll
On the one hand, once the motivation you’re assigning is so nakedly bad faith it’s hard to take seriously as a criticism, on the the other hand, I personally had someone jump down my fucking throat the other day for the very possibility that my criticism of an organisation implied criticism of individuals who might not be personally responsible, so.
#7: I guess this person isn’t old enough, or, more to the point, apparently unaware how fans and their reading of SF were mocked (“that crazy Buck Rogers stuff”), once upon a time. No, it’s obviously got to be some vast conspiracy by people behind the curtain to control the Worldcon.
Also, “Fans are Slans” wasn’t fans saying we are smarter than everyone else. Nope, it’s just fans having fun.
Also, posting this on Twitter means she’s gatekeeping responses herself.
I wonder what she would think of Ghu, Staple Wars, and other silliness?
JJ: I couldn’t see what Katz gained by grafting a tail of distorted or simply wrong fanhistory onto complaints about the current state of affairs that manifestly deserve to be made. Those complaints were strong enough without being diluted by weak historical claims.
16) Quite disappointed in Terry Gilliam now I’ve read the article. No one with any basic decency should be behaving the way he did in that interview for the Independent.
Terry Gilliam has spent the last 60 years being provocative. Why would anyone interview him and be surprised that he’s still that way?
Meredith moment: Caroline Graham’s The Killings at Badger’s Drift is available from the usual suspects for a buck ninety nine. It’s the first of the Midsomer Murder mystery series involving Inspector Barnaby.
bill says Terry Gilliam has spent the last 60 years being provocative. Why would anyone interview him and be surprised that he’s still that way?
Because his expression of these particular views are not something that go back that far. He hasn’t, not to my knowledge, expressed them before.
After Worldcon, this Pixel Scroll title came to mind:
“Make Room Party, Make Room Party”
“These particular views” are in response to current events, so of course he never expressed precisely that way them before. But his career is full of commentary on race, sexuality, gender roles, and other hot button issues. And like many people, the older he gets, the more blunt he becomes. I don’t think there is anything novel in the Telegraph interview.
What @JJ said about Gwen C. Katz’s (7)’s Twitter philosophising wankery, and all similar things. My eyes wandered down that tweet storm, saw things that included “The way WorldCon runs is arcane by deliberate design” and “Any suggestion that maybe someone could sort out the obvious troll ballots, or that they should throw out the results and hold a new vote, was received like drowning a kitten”, and thought, “Ah, right, doesn’t actually have any idea what she’s talking about, and has no idea about the intricate practical problems of running fair, trusted elections on a community-run basis, but just has an idle, poorly informed hot-take from afar.: Standard Twitter bushwah.
Ms. Katz cannot even bother to get ground-level basic facts right, like her maundering on about how nobody ever took responsibility for the sponsorship mistake, which is exactly contrary to the truth.
I don’t hold against her this being-foolish-in-public-on-Twitter thing. That seems to be what the service is for.
@bill
I’m disappointed because he’s just repeating orthodox bigotry – punching down where he used to punch up. And of course because I’m a trans lesbian and he’s being rude and hurtful to me and my friends.
(3) On video games and SF-ness, Monica Evans published an article for Vector a while back which argued (more or less) that digital games are an inherently science fictional medium …
https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/12/20/the-needle-and-the-wedge-digital-games-as-a-medium-for-science-fiction/
Mike Glyer: I couldn’t see what Katz gained by grafting a tail of distorted or simply wrong fanhistory onto complaints about the current state of affairs that manifestly deserve to be made. Those complaints were strong enough without being diluted by weak historical claims.
Unfortunately, all Katz gained with me was becoming one more person added to my “Has No Idea What They’re Talking About With Regard To Worldcon And The Hugo Awards” List. I presume those tweets were made with the goal of playing to an existing audience rather than engaging in actual meaningful analysis.
(7) Katz is very confusing. She complains that no one running Worldcon wanted to make the simple choice to have someone to weed out the “troll” votes, which means she wanted to add an Official Gatekeeper? to all the unofficial gatekeepers she was complaining about? Does this make sense to anyone else?
And then there is the problem that an Official Gatekeeper with the power to weed out troll votes would have the power to weed out all the nominations for N K Jemisin’s books, because “no one I know has read them; people are only voting for her because she’s a black woman”. I do not consider this a good thing. But wait! This could be fixed by adding rules to govern how and why votes could be rejected—but Katz says that relying on rules is wrong, because Rules Are Bad, People Are Good. So now I am confused again.
Sophie Jane says I’m disappointed because he’s just repeating orthodox bigotry – punching down where he used to punch up. And of course because I’m a trans lesbian and he’s being rude and hurtful to me and my friends.
Thank you for summing it up the issue with him so precisely. Gilliam hurt lot of people with what he did.
@Nancy
I get the impression that she doesn’t want to bother with How It Really Works, because a lot of what she’s saying makes no sense.
I didn’t read the Katz thing beyond what was displayed here, but as someone who grew up in fandom, I have to say that I did not find the whole “Slans are Fans” thing to be at all funny! Granted, it was slightly before my time, but my reaction, when I heard about it in the early seventies, was much closer to disgust than amusement.
Fandom can be a pretty wonderful thing at times, but it’s also had some pretty awful elements for as long as I’ve been part of it. And “Slans are Fans” just smacked of the parts I’ve always disliked, for…basically as long as I can remember.
Y’all have been busy dissecting what is probably just an emotional reaction as if it were rational. There’s more than one way to speak.
Speaking of Slan, has anyone here read “Superstition” by Lester Del Rey?
Xtifr: If you didn’t find it at all funny, then maybe there’s no need for me to say that what caused the persistence of “Fans are Slans” is that a very small number of people liked the idea, and a very large number of people found it mockable (like the LA fans who named their residence Tendril Towers). But the phrase hung around as another reminder for fans not to take themselves too seriously. (Which we almost always do, in the end…)
7) It is true that the WSFS rules are deliberately hard to change, for good reason, but the process is painful. At one of the meetings last week a poor soul raised his hand after a lengthy exposition on a subclause of an amendment to an amendment. “Point of information… What?”
FIAWOL
FIJAGH
Fan vs. faan. Neofan. Trufan. Jophan.
This stuff was going on before I attended my first Worldcon–St. Louiscon, as it happens, which (in my decaying memory) bore little resemblance to what is described in Katz’s story. Though my wife-to-be and I did meet Harlan, who intercepted us as we were about to meet Bob Silverberg, and who did treat us like we’d just fallen off a turnip wagon. We rolled our eyes and moved on. (A year later, we honeymooned at PgHLANGE and got to meet Bob properly.)
And to be fair, the kindness of the Spocktacular kids in the story strikes me as what a lot of con-going fandom was like then and now.
I was just going through the quote-tweets of and replies to Katz’s thread, and there’s basically three reactions:
Fen unfamiliar with Worldcon taking it as gospel. (Sigh.)
Fen with more familiarity either disagreeing or, fair cop, not everything’s right but she’s got some points, or, that but also pointing out that more or less all of the described flaws apply not just to Worldcon but most other fannish spaces in every form of fandom. (Pretty much. Rules and humans are imperfect, and tend to have imperfections that run along similar fault lines, whatever fandom they’re in.)
Extremely-Not-Worldcon fen saying that it would be fine for Worldcon to be Like That if only it wasn’t for the Hugos, which are clearly far too important for a convention Like That to deserve, and it would be much better if only the Hugos had a different, better gatekeeper in charge. (No, really, one of them was specific about “better gatekeeper” rather than… no gatekeeper.) Because Hugos are Money and Prestige and that has Value. (Which. Hm. Is certainly a take.)
Make your own award, nurture it, feed it over time, and if it builds up a rep it’ll mean something. Other groups have. It can be done. You don’t have to wait around for it to happen if you don’t want to! You can be free of having to think about Worldcon forever, I promise! Or just decide to care more about one of the many other awards that already exist, no effort required! But the Hugos are Worldcon’s award. Not all of fandom everywhere’s. No-one has a right to it without (literally) paying their (membership) dues.
(Side note – I read the story she linked at the end and there’s a particular bit of dialogue which read more like “goddammit, I researched all this bloody slang and I’m damn well going to use all of it immediately” than anything I’ve ever seen someone say in any of my extremely jargon-filled fannish subcultures, which made me laugh. Cute story, though, if not anything I’d run off to add to a nomination ballot. Content note for not being kind to Harlan Ellison.)
(Side-side-note – she’s really, REALLY not wrong about the criticism-to-well-you-volunteer-then thing, and that’s a bad look and people should stop doing the thing, not least because I don’t think the thing people do for joy and love and duty for fandom ought to be both weapon and shield against fannish mistakes.)
The reason everyone, not just critics, is asked to volunteer is because Worldcon does everything on the cheap, and it’s all done by volunteers. Sometimes there aren’t enough volunteers and things are not as good as they should be. This is basically the equivalent of the Worldcon running out of spoons. When this happens, of course we’re going to ask if you happen to have a spoon and can help. It’s okay to say no. It’s a volunteer operation.
A story I read today because of kiva’s thread on the Lindsay Ellis stuff (which, while that thread is linked in tomorrow’s scroll, I’m putting here because of the Gilliam item) is, I think, a wonderful, painful allegory, and I’m sorry I didn’t read it soon enough that it could have gone on my maybe-nominating-this list for its year.
Gilliam has made art that meant – that means – a lot to me. But not in years, and even if he had, I can find enrichment elsewhere from people who aren’t dismissive of sexual assault and harassment, and who don’t cause pain to others to whom his art also means something, and whose only “sin” is to exist. This is good work now, from a good author, and worth reading.
I liked The Waterseeker, too, also linked in this brief thread.
@Tom Becker
The problem is not asking for volunteers. Worldcon needs them, and lots of them. The problem is lashing out at those who have been harmed by some failing or other and demanding that they volunteer or shut up – regardless of whether they have, in fact, volunteered in the past. That neither values volunteering nor addresses whether the criticism is valid or needs to be acted upon in future. Nor is it likely to result in many volunteers materialising – why would you? You’ve just been told that whatever you had to say, whatever you experienced, has no value or interest to the people you’d be volunteering to work with.
In that context, it’s a shield from criticism and a weapon against critics, not a sincere request.
the Hugos, which are clearly far too important for a convention Like That to deserve
There’s a grain of truth in this, which is that the Hugos are clearly the field’s premier awards, and Worldcon is clearly not the field’s premier convention. (The Hugos are widely known enough that a couple of days after this year’s presentation, I saw an item about them in the news snippets that are projected onto walls in some Berlin subway stations.) There’s a mismatch, as if the Oscars were presented at an overgrown director’s party and only broadcast on the Criterion Channel. Some people who are deeply into movies love it, say it expresses the heart of moviemaking, and anyway would be hard to change. People who love movies but have had different experiences say, Hmm, there’s a mismatch.
“What would a Worldcon that is clearly the field’s premier annual convention look like?” is an interesting question, but putting on a Worldcon that is like all the previous ones with a little local twist takes so much effort that I am not sure anyone relevant is asking that question.
@Phil – thanks! I did not know that.
Doug: There’s a grain of truth in this, which is that the Hugos are clearly the field’s premier awards, and Worldcon is clearly not the field’s premier convention… There’s a mismatch
Well, Worldcon members are what has made the Hugos into the field’s premiere awards.
The only “mismatch” is that the people who keep demanding that the Hugo Awards be taken away from Worldcon members just don’t seem to get that the Worldcon members are the ones who have made them into the premiere awards that they are.
As Meredith says, the people who don’t like the fact that Worldcon members own the field’s most prestigious awards are certainly welcome to start their own even more prestigious awards.
Also, I read your blog post, and you’re wrong: the Winnipeg bid was filed completely in accordance with WSFS rules, and there was nothing “fishy” about it. It would be good if you could do your research before posting.
Which is approximately how the Dragon awards came to be. Anyone can nominate and vote. (I did) DragonCon does not reveal voting numbers and is explicitly acting as a gatekeeper. Is it representative of SF/Fantasy reading public? Impossible to say given the opaque process
For what it’s worth, The Old Guard scored a Hugo/Dragon double this year.
Speaking 8as almost always) only for myself, I think there is value in knowing how an award is, ahem, awarded. Or, well, the decision process from “nothing” to “awarded” works.
In some cases, this is “creators / agents / publishers put items forward for consideration”, followed by “somehow a shortlist is made”, followed by “a jury decides”. In other cases, it is “as close to all available works are pruned, somehow into a shortlist”, followed by “a jury decides”.
In yet other cases, it is “we literally do not know” (but, there seems to be nominatiosns, and there MAY be a voting stage?).
And in the Hugos, “nominations are crowd-sourced, from a small subset of people”, followed by “a shortlist is created by essentailly a mechanical process, based on the nominations”, followed by “a subset that shares a substantial subset with the nominator subset votes on the shortlist”.
I think all of these are valid models (and there most certainly models that I have missed) for awards. I just happen to find the Hugo one appealing.
JJ: the people who don’t like the fact that Worldcon members own the field’s most prestigious awards are certainly welcome to start their own even more prestigious awards.
Peter Card: Which is approximately how the Dragon awards came to be.
Yes, and at least the administrators of the Dragon Awards have managed one out of two, which is more than the complainers on Twitter have done.