Pixel Scroll 1/24/2016 I Saw The Best Scrolls Of My Generation Destroyed By Pixels, Filing Hysterical Numbered

(1) THE FINNISH. Finland hosts the World Science Fiction Convention in 2017 — but if you can’t make it to Helsinki, hit the library: more and more Finnish speculative fiction authors are getting English translations, as NPR reports in “Finnish Authors Heat Up The Speculative Fiction World”.

In the middle of Johanna Sinisalo’s novel The Core of the Sun, the reader is interrupted by an ad. It’s for Fresh Scent, a personal fragrance available from the State Cosmetics Corporation of Finland. It’s marketed to woman, although “marketed” is an understatement. In Sinisalo’s nightmarish, alternate-reality vision of her homeland, a tyrannical patriarchy splits women into two classes — docile “eloi” and undesirable “morlocks,” terms cheekily drawn from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine — as part of an oppressive national health scheme that crosses insidiously over into eugenics.

The ad for Fresh Scent is just one of the novel’s many fragmentary asides. In additional to its more conventional narrative, which centers on Vanna, a woman with an addiction to chili peppers (it makes sense a skewed sort of sense, really), The Core of the Sun is made up of epistolary passages, dictionary entries, article excerpts, transcripts of hearings, scripts for instructional films, homework assignments, folk songs, and even fairytales that exist only in Sinisalo’s twisted version of the world. Chillingly, one passage concerning the social benefits of human sterilization is taken from a real-world source, a Finnish magazine article from 1935.

There’s a streak of scathing satire to the book’s fragmentary science fiction, and in that sense it sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut — but Sinisalo crafts a funny, unsettling, emotionally charged apparition of the present that’s all her own.

(2) SPEAKING OF COLD PLACES. The New York Times captioned this tweet “A Wookie Chills in Washington (Not Hoth)”

(3) AN ALARMING INSIGHT.

(4) DEATH OF A GOLDEN AGE. Saladin Ahmed’s Buzzfeed article argues “Censors Killed The Weird, Experimental, Progressive Golden Age Of Comics”.

In the 1940s, comic books were often feminist, diverse, and bold. Then the reactionary Comics Code Authority changed the trajectory of comic book culture for good.

The comics themselves exhibited wild stylistic variety. A single issue of Keen Detective Funnies could contain one story with gorgeous Art Nouveau-ish illustration, and another with glorified stick figures. The comic books of the Golden Age were also significantly more diverse in terms of genre than today’s comics. On newsstands across America — in an era when the newsstand was an urban hub and an economic juggernaut — comic books told tales of True Crime, Weird Fantasy and Cowboy Love, Negro Romance, and Mystery Men. And Americans bought them.

Even as Amazing-Man and Blue Beetle were rescuing helpless, infantilized women, badass superheroines like the Lady in Red, the Spider Queen, and Lady Satan were stabbing Nazis and punching out meddlesome, sexist cops.

(5) NOW THAT SHE HAS OUR ATTENTION. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s post “Business Musings: Poor Poor Pitiful Me Is Not A Business Model” actually is not a rant telling writers to buck up, it’s a discussion of the true levers of culture change. But it begins with a rant….

Granted, in the recent past, the major publishing companies were the only game in town. But they are no longer the only game in town. A major bestselling writer can—and should—walk from any deal that does not meet her contractual and business needs.

Hell, every writer should do that.

But of course most writers won’t. Instead, an entire group of them beg for scraps from the Big All-Powerful Evil Publishers, proving to the publishers that writers are idiots and publishers hold all the cards.

I already bludgeoned the Authors Guild letter last week, so why am I going back to the same trough? Because this poor-poor-pitiful-me attitude has become the norm in the publishing industry right now, and I’m really tired of it.

The big battles of 2014 and 2015, from all of the fighting over the meaning of Amazon in the past few years to the in-genre squabbling over the Hugo awards that science fiction indulged in last year to the hue and cry indie writers have treated us to over the various changes in Kindle Unlimited since its inauguration have all had the same basic complaint.

Someone—be it a publisher (that Amazon is Evil argument) or a writer (the rest of it)—believes they’re entitled to something, and when they don’t get that something, they complain loudly, on social media or in traditional media or via group letter or through (in sf’s case) hateful spiteful posts about the opposing parties.

Only a handful of people take responsibility for the situation they’re in—if, indeed, they are responsible. Only a few actually analyze why the situation exists.

(6) HIGH PRAISE. The first line in David Barnett’s review of Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds is —

Imagine that Diana Wynne Jones, Douglas Coupland and Neil Gaiman walk into a bar and through some weird fusion of magic and science have a baby. That offspring is Charlie Jane Anders’ lyrical debut novel All The Birds In The Sky.

Do you think that’s a lot to live up to?

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 24, 1888 — Typewriter “copy” ribbon patented by Jacob L. Wortman. Harlan Ellison still uses one.
  • January 25, 1984 – Apple’s Macintosh computer went on sale. Price tag: $2,495.

(8) TRI ROBOT. Mickey Zucker Reichert, the author of To Preserve, is a working physician and the author of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot Trilogy (To Protect, To Obey, To Preserve). The third book will be published in hardcover by Roc in February.

Nate, has been Manhattan Hasbro Hospital’s resident robot for more than twenty years. Nate’s very existence terrified most people, leaving the robot utilized for menial tasks and generally ignored. Until one of the hospital’s physicians is found murdered with Nate standing over the corpse.

As programmer of Nate’s brain, Lawrence Robertson is responsible for his creation and arrested for the crime. Susan Calvin knows the Three Laws of Robotics make it impossible for Nate to harm a human. But maybe someone manipulated the laws to commit murder.

(9) DOUGH-REY. Kip W. pays tribute to characters from that billion-dollar movie The Force Awakens.

Poe, a flier; a fast male flier
Rey, who scavenges a bit,
Maz, a host who knows the most,
Finn, a white shirt drone who quit,
Snoke, a hologram quite tall,
Ren, a very angry joe,
Beeb, a droid head on a ball,
Which will bring us back to Poe. Poe, Rey, Maz, Finn, Snoke, Ren, Beeb, Poe!

(10) FLEXIBILITY. Nick Osment analyzes the benefits of reading science fiction in “What We Can Learn From a Time Lord: Doctor Who and a New Enlightened Perspective” at Black Gate.

If tomorrow you stepped inside a time machine and found yourself standing in the yard of this man who is separated from being your neighbor only by the passage of a century, then suddenly his opinions would become somewhat more relevant because now you would actually have to interact with him. But they would not become any more credible to you just because you were now hearing them face-to-face. You would still hear them from the vantage of having come from the future.

Now imagine your life today not as if you were living in your own time but as if you were visiting from a hundred years in the future. The weight given by proximity, i.e., these people are my neighbors, is leveled off, much the way that visiting that long-dead neighbor would be. Detach yourself from all the noise of the television and the Internet and your workplace, your college, your local pub. See it from a more objective position — of not being of this time, with the knowledge that this time, too, will pass, and all these people who are speaking right now; they all, too, will be dead and most of them forgotten.

(11) BIGGER ON THE OUTSIDE. 11.22.63, the eight-part event series based on Stephen King’s 2011 novel, premieres Presidents Day, February 15 on Hulu.

11.22.63 is a thriller in which high school English teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — but his mission is threatened by Lee Harvey Oswald, falling in love and the past itself, which doesn’t want to be changed

 

(12) LONG TAIL OF SALES. Fynbospress summarizes the impact of streaming on the music business, and explains the parallels in book publishing to Mad Genius Club readers in “The Importance of Being Backlist”.

In summary, if publishing continues to mirror music, then streaming will continue to increase, but frontlist sales may continue to fall, and it become harder and harder to get discovered in the initial release period. However, backlist volume is growing, and people are discovering their way through the things that have been out there a while. So, while you can and should do some promotion of your latest release – if it fails to take off, don’t despair. Instead, write the next book, the greatest book you’ve written yet. Sometimes you make your money on the initial release surge, and sometimes, it’ll come in having a lot of things out there all bringing in an unsteady trickle.

(13) TWO COMIC CONS MAY SETTLE. A settlement may be at hand in the San Diego Comic-Con’s suit against the Salt Lake Comic Con for for trademark-infringement. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that on Thursday, attorneys for both conventions asked the judge to extend a procedural deadline so that they could work “diligently” on a settlement. The conventions have scheduled a meeting with Adler on Wednesday in San Diego.

Drafts of the agreement have been exchanged,” according to the Thursday court filing requesting the extension, “and the parties hope to soon reach agreement as to all terms.”

San Diego Comic-Con is a trademarked name, and lawyers have argued that the similarity of “Comic Con” in the name of the Salt Lake City event has confused people into thinking the event is somehow associated with San Diego’s convention.

As Salt Lake’s organizers have seen it, the legal battle isn’t just between them and the flagship convention; it’s a threat to the dozens of other comic book conventions around the world that also use “comic con” in their names. Salt Lake Comic Con co-founder and chief marketing officer Bryan Brandenburg previously asserted that if San Diego wins the case, the precedent will allow it to do this to other organizations.

(14) RING OF POWER. Jim C. Hines snapped this photo at Confusion:

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Henley.]

228 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/24/2016 I Saw The Best Scrolls Of My Generation Destroyed By Pixels, Filing Hysterical Numbered

  1. JJ/Lurkertype,

    Petrea is right. The hypothesis that announcing the Hugo ballot on Easter weekend kills potential publicity has been comprehensively falsified, as Karl Popper would have put it, by the increasing turnouts of the last few years, not to mention the significant level of media discussion last year.

    Given that the purpose of the Hugos is not to gain publicity as an end in itself, but to generate interest among fans for them to honour what and who they want to honour, I think that the custom of announcing at conventions over Easter weekend would be defensible even if it had a demonstrable negative impact on wider publicity. But there is no evidence that it did.

    Since this year’s nominations deadline is actually after Easter, it looks like we will now be able to test the hypothesis that announcing the ballot at another time will make a difference in the media environment as it is now. But the evidence is pretty clear that the Easter weekend announcements at worst did no harm at all and probably boosted the Hugos overall.

  2. Nicholas Whyte: The hypothesis that announcing the Hugo ballot on Easter weekend kills potential publicity has been comprehensively falsified, as Karl Popper would have put it, by the increasing turnouts of the last few years, not to mention the significant level of media discussion last year.

    No, sorry — correlation does not equal causation.

    The increasing participation the last few years can be directly linked to the ability of members to enter their nominations and final ballots online rather than by snail mail, the Hugo organization’s efforts to publicize that and increase participation, and the increasing availability of free short fiction and online promotion and discussion of the Hugo awards.

    The “significant level of media discussion” last year was not caused by announcing the finalists at Eastercon and Minicon — it was caused by the disruption created by the Puppies and the subsequent outcry of the rest of fandom.

    I still don’t know what year the Hugo finalists started being announced on Saturday nights at conventions — but a lot of things have changed in the last 15 years or so, culturally and media-wise, which would have a significant effect on the amount of participation in the Hugo Awards program.

    Around 800 people attend Eastercon; 600 people attend Minicon. I think the people who attend, and hardcore members of fandom, probably have an exaggerated perception of the “buzz” in general fandom created by announcing at these cons, based on their own experience being immersed in it — which is going to be rather different from the experience of the “average” member of fandom.

    Given the fact that an Eastercon/Minicon announcement this year is not possible, it will be interesting to see how the committee chooses to handle the publicity — and the results generated from that.

  3. rob_matic on January 25, 2016 at 10:27 pm said:

    Johan P on January 25, 2016 at 2:17 pm said:

    The perhaps most interesting e-book tools for the non-tech-savvy are browser plugins. Amazon has a plugin called “Send to Kindle” which extracts the text of a webpage and sends it to your Kindle. I use this on e.g. short fiction from Tor.com.

    Ah, great, I didn’t know about this. Tor.com has now become much more useful for me – I hate reading fiction on a computer screen.

    There is also similar functionality on Kobo using pocket.

  4. Philip Sandifer’s open letter to Sad Puppies 4.

    asks a question I’ve been wondering myself. If anyone works out the answer, do let us know.
    From what Kevin Standlee was saying the other day about people thinking ConComs made a mint, do they think that as gatekeepers for the awards then they’ll gain access to the (imagined) Tor slush fund? Given how 2015 went it can’t be that they expect to get positive recognition from fandom. Being a puppy is surely a career killer.

  5. redheadedfemme on January 25, 2016 at 6:01 pm said:

    @Xtifr:

    Are you sure about Apache Open Office being dead? Because I’m downloading and installing version 4.1.2. as we speak.

    Oh yes, I’m quite sure. IBM pulled out about two years ago, and all that’s left at this point is a small handful of folks trying to prop up the corpse and pretend it’s not actually dead. They lost their release manager, they went for nearly a year with a well-known security hole in their installer, then they lost their project manager….

    They did manage to get a release out last year, but I strongly suspect that’ll be the very last one. And what they released was pretty underwhelming. (Although they did fix that security bug.)

    I don’t have recent statistics, but this article from last March notes that: “In the one-year period since late March 2014, there have been 381 changesets committed to the OpenOffice Subversion repository.” And only 16 developers contributed all those changes. In contrast, “in the same one-year period, the [LibreOffice] project has committed 22,134 changesets from 268 developers.”

    And things have not improved for AOO since then.

    It’s really too bad. I was hoping that competition between the two projects would help encourage both to improve, but AOO just never got over that critical limit needed to attract new talent. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be keeping its momentum on its own pretty well.

    A year to fix a security hole (and a fairly simple one to fix from what I’ve heard). That is not pining for the fjords. That is a dead parrot.

  6. nickpheas: From what Kevin Standlee was saying the other day about people thinking ConComs made a mint, do they think that as gatekeepers for the awards then they’ll gain access to the (imagined) Tor slush fund? Given how 2015 went it can’t be that they expect to get positive recognition from fandom. Being a puppy is surely a career killer.

    I think it’s more a question of Puppies not wanting to lose face, and thinking that if they just keep at it, the silent multitudes of fans who support them might show up and render them victorious.

    The alternative is to fold their hand, cease their incessant ranting at strawmen, and either slink away with their tail between their legs, or start participating in the same, good-faith way that the rest of the Worldcon members do.

    The Puppies are an insecure lot. They’re not selling heaps of books, they’re not winning awards or even being nominated for them, they’re not getting publishing contracts but are self-publishing, they’re counting their success not by books sold but by number of pages viewed on Kindle Unlimited.

    Their egos and self-esteem cannot tolerate what they would consider to be “backing down”.

    I think that many of the Sads — especially after the lackluster participation in their “recommendation posts” — have realized that they are going to spend another year being irrelevant, apart from being VD’s stalking horse. I imagine that a number of them are facing the upcoming nominations with dread because of this. But they’ve been committed for months now; after the results of the 2015 Hugos there was no way they were going to be willing to acknowledge the falsehood of their arguments and back down.

    And I’m sure that a number of them are in it simply because they have nothing to lose: they know that, on their own, they will never be up for a major award for their writing, and this is the only hope they’ll ever have of changing that.

  7. @Xtifr: Huh, thanks for that info! I downloaded OpenOffice not too long ago because I’m sick of the extortionate amount of money MS wants for everything, but I didn’t know the project was pretty much dead in the water.

    Just downloaded LibreOffice and tested out some of the stuff that I tend to use it for; seems faster, the UI is a little nicer and does everything I need it to (so far) in the same way or better than OpenOffice

  8. > “… could I get some recommendations for Fancasts from 2015?”

    Rachel & Miles X-Plain The X-Men is on my currently short longlist.

  9. @Oneiros:

    I’ve been using LibreOffice for some time now. I have some quibbles with Writer’s export-to-HTML filter, but that’s about all they are: quibbles. I actually use the Portable version, so I can take the documents anywhere and know that as long as I have access to a Windows box and a USB port, I’m golden.

  10. @JJ

    They’re not selling heaps of books, they’re not winning awards or even being nominated for them, they’re not getting publishing contracts but are self-publishing

    To be fair, Hoyt does reasonably well even though she’s had a recent fallow period. She’s sharecropping for Larry in the Monster Hunter franchise this year, for example. Freer also has a Baen book out this year.

    I think that many of the Sads — especially after the lackluster participation in their “recommendation posts” — have realized that they are going to spend another year being irrelevant, apart from being VD’s stalking horse.

    I’m not sure they’ve realised it but, yeah. Perhaps their rec posts will liven up once they get to the fiction, but right now their support are showing a distinct lack of interest in the non-fiction categories. For example, I see 7 different names in the Best Editor Short Form thread, which is pretty poor when I could probably pull out 7 credible names on my own without much thought.

  11. I do suspect though that Teddy is ginning up his Dead Elks in email, won’t be making the mistake of telling the world what he’s doing this year and when the nominations are collated will declare that whatever happened is exactly what he planned.

  12. I use LibreOffice myself. I find there are occasional glitches with headers and footers (like only appearing on every other page, or being unable to suppress the first page header on a manuscript), though these problems seem to come and go. Possibly from updates that aren’t quite glitch-free, but corrected by later updates? Otherwise it seems to work well for what I do with it.

  13. @Rev. Bob, Bruce Arthurs:

    I mainly need it for Calc – and it works just fine for sorting large amounts of data in CSVs and all the spreadsheet calculations I generally need to do week-to-week. So far no glitches (but I haven’t exactly been very intensive in my use of it just yet.)

    I’m tempted to screw around with its version of Access and see what I can do with that at some point too, when I’ve got a spare moment (hah!)

    Most of my personal writing is private, so I don’t foresee too many issues with glitches and quirks with that; and most of my work writing goes into Google Docs which makes working remotely quite a bit easier since we can all work on the same things at the same time, together.

  14. Fancast Rec: I quite like the Sword and Laser, which is a combination reading group on Goodreads and podcast split between discussing SF&F news, interviews and talking about their book of the month from the goodreads group.They came close to a momination last year.

  15. Do any of the current Libre Office releases have a good database version? I did try and do something in the last Open Office (I think) but it was so clunky compared to a ten year old version of Access that I abandoned my principles and went back to Microsoft.

  16. @Oneiros

    Does LibreOffice also open OpenOffice files? (.ogt, .rtf, .doc) I would think so, but I don’t want to download it unless it does.

  17. Thanks for the link to Sandifer’s piece and also thanks for bringing up LibreOffice. I’ve been using Open Office for ages but it is probably time to upgrade.

    I would also like to know if LibreOffice can open Open Office files, since a lot of my stuff is in that format. I could use Open Office to convert to .doc if necessary but it would be helpful to know beforehand that I needed to do that.

  18. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, so it does everything OpenOffice could do in 2010 plus what they’ve added since. Specifically, yes it does handle .odt .rtf .doc files.

  19. JJ asked:

    Moving the announcement to a major convention weekend was a net plus thanks to the increased buzz within fandom.

    What year did that occur?

    2010.

    And also said:

    Around 800 people attend Eastercon; 600 people attend Minicon.

    I believe your implied assumption is that the announcement is only accessible to the members of the cons where it happens.

    If I am correct about that, then I would like to point out that’s also accompanied by live announcements on that year’s Worldcon’s Twitter feed, and most years, one or more of the at-con announcements have been live-streamed. (There was one year I recall not being able to find a stream; can’t remember which one it was, though.) So while the at-con announcements are the hook, fans can find out the finalists at the same time from pretty much anywhere with Internet access.

  20. Yes, LibreOffice is OpenOffice. And yes, it’s compatible with itself! 😀

    When Oracle bought Sun, they stopped development on OO. The code was free/public, but the name was trademarked, and Oracle (initially) refused to give up the mark, so OO was renamed LibreOffice. It’s not a different program; merely a different name.

    (Apache OO is also OpenOffice, but no more so than LibreOffice is. The history there is complicated, and a bit messy, and I won’t get into it, especially since I don’t actually understand some of it. As I say, though, AOO appears to be dead in the water at this point.)

  21. JJ,

    I did not argue that correlation equals causation; but I think you must admit that a lack of correlation is not good evidence for causation either.

    You seem to be arguing that the negative publicity impact of announcing the lists at Easter has been countered by other positive factors that just happen to have happened around the same time. I certainly don’t deny that those other factors exist; I simply say that there is therefore no evidence of a negative publicity impact of announcing at Easter.

    And what are “the Hugo organisation” and “the Hugo Awards program”?

  22. Petréa Mitchell: I believe your implied assumption is that the announcement is only accessible to the members of the cons where it happens… fans can find out the finalists at the same time from pretty much anywhere with Internet access.

    It’s not. I have never attended Eastercon or Minicon. I find out who the Hugo finalists are from the Internet.

    Which is my point: I think that people who go to those cons, or who are deeply immersed in fandom (SMOFs, con-runners, etc) perceive the “buzz” generated by the announcements being made at those cons to be a far bigger influence than it really is.

    I’ve been participating in the Hugo process for years, as well as going to Worldcons every other year, and last year was the first year I found out that the announcement was “traditionally” made at Eastercon and Minicon. And the only reason I found that out was because I read it here on File770 after coming to this site after the news about the Puppy slate taking over the final ballot was all over Facebook.

    IMO the buzz is generated, for the largest part, by social media and the Hugos being what they are.

    And the contention is not, as Nicholas Whyte put it, “that announcing the Hugo ballot on Easter weekend kills potential publicity”. It’s that the potential publicity would be greater if the news were released during weekday business hours rather than buried in the depths of a late Saturday night.

  23. JJ said:

    IMO the buzz is generated, for the largest part, by social media and the Hugos being what they are.

    If that’s the case, why are you worried about whether the mainstream media notices or not?

  24. Petréa Mitchell: If that’s the case, why are you worried about whether the mainstream media notices or not?

    Um, because wouldn’t it be nice if the Hugos had bigger buzz than they do?

    Isn’t that the point? Don’t we want the Hugos to have a higher public profile?

  25. If the Hugos had a bigger buzz than they did last year, we’d all be deaf.

    I’m not thanking the Puppies for that, though. Once the culture war aspect is removed, we do need to think about getting a better positive buzz in the mainstream press–Is that a good thing? If so, how is it best accomplished?

  26. Right, I’ll try again.

    If you, JJ, believe that social media is the primary driver of Hugo buzz, and you want to increase the buzz, why bother focusing on something that is not social media?

  27. Petréa Mitchell: ,Right, I’ll try again. If you, JJ, believe that social media is the primary driver of Hugo buzz, and you want to increase the buzz, why bother focusing on something that is not social media?

    There is a difference between “social media is the primary driver of Hugo buzz” and “social media should be the only driver of Hugo buzz”, isn’t there?

  28. What JJ said. I’ve been going to Worldcons since 1981, and I had no idea they were announcing the Hugo nominations at whatever-the-hell-tiny-con until last year. And I ONLY found out about that b/c the geekosphere went ballistic about Puppies. Otherwise, I would have probably come across them a day or two later (I didn’t have a membership at the time), as I had in recent years.

    But since we’ll still have Puppy Poo in our categories this year, burying the announcement in the middle of a weekend is probably a good idea. After EPH passes (Ghu grant it will), THEN we can move it to a time when mainstream media will notice. So maybe next year?

    Easter weekend is a terrible time to announce anything you want publicity (non-social-media) for. Everyone in Western countries is checked out, regardless of religion. Much of Europe still has Easter Monday as a holiday, meaning news doesn’t get going till Tuesday.

    Have the Hugo administrators say “We’re gonna announce them at XX time on YY day, tune in to the livestream! Don’t miss it!” Have the press release ready to go out instantly. Heck, they announce the Oscar nominations at 5:30 AM local time in winter and those get a ton of live coverage by sleepy mainstream journalists, followed by sleepy nominees mumbling happy things.

    Since the nominees will have been informed ahead of time, they’ll be prepared to issue Tweets or whatever — and their local newspapers/TV stations will have some second-string reporter looking for a local interest story, who’ll then hear about it, interview the author, and then that goes up on the web page where lots more people see it eventually.

    People are already programmed to pay attention and buy stuff on Tuesdays. That’s when new albums drop, new books come out, movies on DVD, etc.

  29. Have the Hugo administrators say “We’re gonna announce them at XX time on YY day, tune in to the livestream! Don’t miss it!”

    Such as, perhaps, “We’ll be announcing the results simultaneously at the British National SF Convention in the UK, Minicon in Minneapolis, and Norwescon in Seattle, with a UStream live feed of all three”? (Which is exactly what was done one year.) But presumably three conventions with a combined attendance of several thousand is a “whatever-the-hell-tiny-con.”

  30. So, having finished Leviathan Awakens, for the plot conflict that fills the second half of the book: I think it was more interesting when it was written by Neil Asher. Didn’t stop me from starting the second book, though–I’m hoping some Gabbleducks show up.

  31. I can see a way that the SP organisers can do what they said they would while retaining the illusion of relevance. They can publish their recommendation list, short of entries in some categories, full of inoffensive stuff that might well have been nominated anyway in others, and then shout ‘Why do the CHORFs want to suppress this?’. When some of their picks get on the ballot (because they are genuinely popular works, and it isn’t their authors’ fault they are on the list, so voters are ignoring the slate) they can say ‘Look, we have won! The CHORFs tried to stop these popular works being nominated, but we have defeated them!’.

  32. lurkertype said:

    What JJ said. I’ve been going to Worldcons since 1981, and I had no idea they were announcing the Hugo nominations at whatever-the-hell-tiny-con until last year.

    And yet they weren’t doing weekend announcements until 2010, but that doesn’t seem to have made a difference one way or the other in when you heard about them.

    The people who have handled the announcements over the last several years are reporting that the switch to a weekend announcement has caused a marked improvement in Hugo buzz. What is your or Scalzi’s basis for arguing that their direct experience is false?

  33. Petréa Mitchell: The people who have handled the announcements over the last several years are reporting that the switch to a weekend announcement has caused a marked improvement in Hugo buzz.

    Okay, so what do they define as “Hugo buzz”? How are they measuring it? How do those measurements compare to pre-2010 measurements?

  34. Okay, so what do they define as “Hugo buzz”?

    I remember Gordon Garb making a handsome award for Bob Vardeman. It was a rocket ship on a base. “And,” said Gordon, “When you hit this little switch in the base, it goes into hyperdrive!” He flicked the microswitch, and the Hugo-like object began to buzz loudly.

    That’s when I realized the ‘ship’ was a gold spray-painted vibrator with fins glued on.

  35. What’s anybody’s evidence that mine and JJ’s direct experience is false? (Also my husband, our BFFs, and a number of other fen.)

    And how do you even measure “Hugo buzz”?

    The people who attend those cons would have found out about the nominees anyway without being there. It’s their kind of thing. The mainstream media and web sites (which is what Scalzi’s talking about) isn’t ever going to cover something that happens in the middle of a holiday weekend.

    So: maybe, possibly more buzz amongst dedicated con-going fen, absolutely no buzz outside that. A wash, at best.

  36. What’s anybody’s evidence that mine and JJ’s direct experience is false? (Also my husband, our BFFs, and a number of other fen.)

    And how do you even measure “Hugo buzz”?

    The people who attend those cons would have found out about the nominees anyway without being there. It’s their kind of thing. The mainstream media and web sites (which is what Scalzi’s talking about) aren’t ever going to cover something that happens in the middle of a holiday weekend.

    So: maybe, possibly more buzz amongst dedicated con-going fen, absolutely no buzz outside that. A wash, at best.

    Why not announce them on a weekday this year, it’s the perfect time to experiment.

    But not like what Kip W said. Oooh, the trouble we’d all have.

  37. lurkertype: But not like what Kip W said. Oooh, the trouble we’d all have.

    For some reason, I’m thinking Ann Leckie would get a kick out receiving one of those “hyperdrive” Hugos. 😉

  38. lurkertype asked:

    What’s anybody’s evidence that mine and JJ’s direct experience is false?

    Who’s disputing your assertion that you heard about the finalists at the time and in the manner that you have explained?

    And how do you even measure “Hugo buzz”?

    If you were to claim that a weekday announcement had done better, what metrics would you find appropriate?

  39. Petréa Mitchell: If you were to claim that a weekday announcement had done better, what metrics would you find appropriate?

    Except that that hasn’t happened.

    What has happened is that claims have been made, without any substantiation other than “The people who have handled the announcements over the last several years are reporting that the switch to a weekend announcement has caused a marked improvement in Hugo buzz.”

    The SMOFs, and con-runners, and other people heavily-invested in fandom love having the Hugo finalists announced on Saturday night, pre-party at Eastercon and Minicon. I totally get that. I know it’s probably really awesome to be present for that, and if I were at an Eastercon or Minicon, I would really enjoy it, too.

    But that is egoboo. It is fans choosing to do what gives them the most enjoyment over what might give the Hugos a more public profile and wider recognition.

    It’s been published in this thread the patently ridiculous strawman argument that it’s being claimed that the Easter weekend con announcement is “killing” Hugo publicity. No one has said that. What people have said is “maybe there’s a better way to go about raising public awareness of the Hugos”.

    Clearly, you’re hugely personally invested in this — but you’re giving me arguments which involve emotions and feelings. Well, the Puppies have the “feeling” that non-Puppies have been awarding stories for being politically-correct rather than because they truly like them — and I’m not buying that “feelings” argument from the Puppies any more than I’m going to buy it from you.

    You’re also trying to discredit me with spurious attacks. First you tried to claim that I was saying that Hugo finalist news was only available at the cons — which was actually the opposite of what I said. Then you tried to pretend that I was saying that the only place the Hugo finalists should be publicized was via social media — another ridiculous strawman with no resemblance to what I actually said.

    If you’re going to try to argue that the Easter weekend finalist announcements should continue because they increase participation in the Hugo Awards process, then please try to come up with rational reasons instead of “feelings”.

    Show me a poll of Hugo nominators and voters taken on the nomination and voting forms of “how and when did you first find out you could participate in the Hugos?” and “how long have you participated?” and “what made you decide to participate?” Show me a direct correlation between attendees of Eastercon and Minicon over the past 5 years and the people who’ve nominated and voted for the Hugos — and a distinct rise in the participation of those attendees.

    But don’t try to convince me that insiders who attend, volunteer at, and run lots of cons, have been doing so for years, and who are heavily immersed in social circles with other heavily immersed fen, are somehow able to provide an objective evaluation of whether the Easter weekend con announcements have actually increased Hugo participation.

  40. “It is fans choosing to do what gives them the most enjoyment over what might give the Hugos a more public profile and wider recognition.”

    I’m very happy about fans choosing to do what gives them the most enjoyment. Seems exactly as it should be. It is a fandom award.

  41. Hampus Eckerman: I’m very happy about fans choosing to do what gives them the most enjoyment. Seems exactly as it should be. It is a fandom award.

    And that’s fine, Hampus — because you’re not trying to pretend that it is something other than what it is, and you’re entitled to feel that way.

  42. It’s not like there is any experimental proof to the Hugo-buzz theory available for the next several years anyhow.
    Last year was announced at Easter and got lots of attention for entirely the wrong reasons.
    This year will be announced at some point after Easter (I think the nomination window is the Wednesday after) and will get quite a lot of attention because of last year even if there isn’t more dogshit to clear up.

  43. There are two questions you could reasonably ask
    1) Does the announcement get a lot of coverage in the mainstream press?
    2) Does the announcement get a lot of coverage in fandom?

    Obviously, if you’re a nominated publisher or writer, you want as much mainstream press coverage as possible. It’s free advertising! If that’s the question you want to answer, answers are available – PR agencies will track that for you, and you can get comparisons of year to year.

    Is that the important question for Worldcon? I’m not sure why it would be. There are no sponsors that are paying for coverage, the Hugos are not a profit centre for Worldcon, or the core function of Worldcon. If the people who are interested in the Hugos find out about the Hugos, isn’t that enough?

  44. Ray on January 28, 2016 at 3:05 am said:

    There are two questions you could reasonably ask
    1) Does the announcement get a lot of coverage in the mainstream press?
    2) Does the announcement get a lot of coverage in fandom?

    Sensible questions.

    Let me offer one data point.

    The online book publishing news letter Shelf Awareness runs the Hugo finalist and winners announcements. I suspect most have not heard of it, so ….

    We currently have more than 37,000 readers of the emailed and web versions of Shelf Awareness Pro. The list consists mainly of booksellers, librarians and publishing professionals. Of the booksellers, many are independents, but the buyers at B&N and Amazon read us daily as well.
    http://www.shelf-awareness.com/about.html

    Anyone else with data points?

  45. Ray: If the people who are interested in the Hugos find out about the Hugos, isn’t that enough?

    How are you defining “the people who are interested in the Hugos”? Because how those people are defined will make a difference in how you try to reach them with PR.

    My contention is that the group of reasonably well-read SFF fans who care about the Hugo Awards as a touchpoint for reading recommendations, and who would be delighted to participate in the process if they are aware that they able to do so, is a wider set than just the fans who go to cons all the time.

  46. How do readers of SF/F who are not aware of the Hugos or that they could participate in their selection end up knowing about the Hugo awards?

    News. And these days more like online news.

    How does each Worldcon make this news known?

    Ideally there’s a decent sized list of news organizations and the like who receive a press release from Worldcon each year.

    [Limekiller!]

  47. I’m not convinced that there is a large population of people out there who
    a) care about the Hugos
    b) don’t hear about the Hugos from ‘inside’ sources (fannish or book press) but would hear about them from mainstream sources
    c) would sign up as Worldcon members if they heard about them

    It seems to me that potential Worldcon members are unlikely to get all their SF news from the mainstream press.

    If you’re a publisher/author, then yes, mainstream press coverage is important. You want to reach that audience who might only buy one SF book a year – I’m sure people like that are a sizable proportion of Scalzi’s sales, for example. But why would those people sign up for Worldcon?

    (and marketing people prefer a big bang of simultaneous publicity in multiple outlets, rather than a trickle of news over a week or a month, but why is that a Worldcon concern)

    Taking this to the logical conclusion – if Worldcon want to maximise publicity for the Hugo announcement, they should hire a fancy venue somewhere media friendly, and pay some big names and attractive starlets to attend. And yeah, be very mindful of the day of the week you hold your media event on. And while they’re at it, hold Worldcon somewhere media-friendly too – same place every year! – and get the big names and starlets to show up for some photo-ops. Lots more publicity.
    But why?

  48. Ray: It seems to me that potential Worldcon members are unlikely to get all their SF news from the mainstream press.

    If someone made the argument that potential Worldcon members get all their SF news from the mainstream press, I must have missed it. It seems to me that potential Worldcon members are unlikely to get all their SF news from attendance at cons, either. I think a multi-pronged approach is the best strategy in terms of promoting participation in the Hugos.

    Ray: if Worldcon want to maximise publicity for the Hugo announcement… Taking this to the logical conclusion…

    Again, the concept “maximise publicity” is dependent on to whom you want to publicize and what you’re trying to achieve.

    Why are you insisting that publicizing the Hugos has to consist of what you describe — which you surely are willing to admit is ridiculous, and which to me bears more than a passing resemblance to a deliberate strawman argument?

    I think that assuming announcements at cons and word-of-mouth amongst fans is sufficient publicity for the Hugos is more than a bit myopic and uninclusive. There are avid SFF fans who can’t attend cons because of health or financial or geographical or family or work issues — people who nevertheless are (or at least should be) part of the “target market” for Hugo participation.

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