(1) IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK. CBC reports a Twitter uproar ensued after a Marvel exec made a big contribution during the broadcast of a Trump charity event.
‘Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced at a fundraiser Thursday night that Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter would donate $1 million US to his charitable foundation, and comic book fans took to Twitter in reaction.’
Taral, who knows how fans think, says, “I can imagine a lot of Marvel readers and viewers being horrified and contemplating a boycott for almost 3/10s of a second before lining up to see Antman for the fourth time.”
(2) A DIFFERENT GIVING OPPORTUNITY. George Takei is the draw in a new Omaze donation drive — “Charity Share: Inspire Change Broadway”
Oh myyy! Social media aficionado and former helmsman of the Starship Enterprise, George Takei is offering one lucky Omaze winner the opportunity to “Takei over NYC” with him. Just $10 gets you the chance to have a private dinner with George, sit VIP at his Broadway musical Allegiance, and go inside the stage door to meet the cast! And it all supports Inspire Change Broadway.
Launched in 2009, Inspire Change Broadway provides communities across the tri-state area with subsidized tickets and round-trip transportation to Broadway productions….
…Thanks to donors from around the world and Inspire Change Broadway, 10,000 students who may have been unable to afford tickets got to experience the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis.
(3) ANIMATED JUSTICE LEAGUE. DC’s Justice League will return to the Cartoon Network in 2017, with fan favorites providing some of the voices.
Well, DC’s top superteam is returning to TV in the upcoming Justice League Action. The new series will star DC’s classic triad of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman along with rotating guest stars and its episodes will be 11 minutes long, similar to Teen Titans GO! Speaking of which, Justice League Action will be executive produced by Sam Register, who also producers Teen Titans GO!
…it’s set to feature the return of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. Conroy and Hamill put their indelible stamps on Batman and The Joker in the original Batman: The Animated Series, but they’ve been phased out in recent years…. Both of them returning is a real treat for longtime fans of Warner Bros. Animation’s superhero cartoons. The show will also feature James Woods as Lex Luthor.
(4) THIS JOB AIN’T THAT EFFIN’ EASY! Fansided’s Leah Tedesco, who writes for Doctor Who Watch, tells what it’s like to face the forbidding temporal desert of a show’s hiatus in “Doctor Who: On Writing for a Fan Site”.
When you write for a fan site of a television program, the off season can be a particularly tricky period. Oh, there is a trickle of news, but the big stories are few and far between. Until Doctor Who returns with the 2016 Christmas special, we at Doctor Who Watch have been tasked with the challenging endeavor of continuing to generate at least the minimum number of articles each month for almost an entire new-episodeless year. I imagine that madness will soon ensue… well, more madness than is already involved.
(5) CAREER COUNSELING. At Black Gate, Violette Malan’s “You May Be A Writer” begins with a humorous hook —
Do you enjoy planning? When you want to give a party, do you start making lists? Thinking about the menu? Who to invite? When there’s a trip coming up, are there lists? Are you usually the first one packed? Or have you at least given considerable thought to your packing?
Is organizing an event almost more fun than the event itself? Then you may be a writer.
Do you think planning’s for squares? Do you decide at 6:00 pm to have a party and let people know via Twitter? Are you rushing through the airport at the last minute with your passport in one hand and a pair of (mismatched) socks in the other?
Are you all about the spontaneity? Seizing the moment? Then you may be a writer.
Of course, what I’m talking about here is process: every writer has one, and it’s likely to be different from yours, or mine.
(6) EXPANSEAPALOOZA. “’The Expanse’ Authors Talk Space Epic Size and Crazy Sci-Fi Tech” at Space.com.
Space.com: What’s the coolest technology you have developed for the series?
Franck: In the book series, when we were coming up with the visuals for the ships and stuff, I was talking to a guy I know who works out of Los Alamos Labs. I was talking to him about the fact that the primary weapon on our ships is railguns — those big, electromagnetically fired weapons. And he said you can extend the length of a railgun barrel [by blowing] this plasma out, and you run electricity through the plasma.
“Turning a Sci-Fi Series into a TV Epic: Q&A with ‘The Expanse’ Authors”, from Space.com.
Space.com: I’ve read that the initial concept for the books was actually a video game. Is that right?
Ty Franck: The fleshed-out version of the idea started out as that. I’d had the idea before that, but when a friend of mine asked me to help her come up with a pitch for a video game is when I really sat down and put more flesh on the bones of this idea that I had. It existed before that, but it was sort of nebulous. The video game thing is what really kind of solidified it.
But as soon as they realized how expensive making an MMO [massively multiplayer online game] was, they sort of backed away quietly.
Space.com: What happened to the story next?
Franck: It went from a video game to a pen-and-paper RPG [role-playing game] setting because I wanted to keep playing around with it. And then Daniel did the rest.
Daniel Abraham: I was in Ty’s tabletop game, and I saw the amount of work that he’d done with the background and world building. And I’d written probably six or seven novels at that point, so my pitch was, “Look, you’ve already done all the hard work; let’s just write it down, and it’ll be a book.”
(7) RAFTERY OBIT. SF Site News reports British filker Joe Raftery died January 29.
Raftery debuted his first filk song at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton before gafiating until 2000, when he attended FilkContinental. Following his reintroduction to fandom, Raftery became a regular at filk meet ups and was nominated for the Pegasus Award in 2007 for his role in the n’Early Music Consort.
Farah Mendelsohn credited his behind the scenes design work on Loncon3’s Exhibit Hall with enhancing accessibility:
If our accessibility was so good, it’s because Joe designed the corridors, the seating areas, the shapes of booths and the spaces between boards. We couldn’t have managed the intricacies of the exhibits without him.
He is survived by his wife Gwen Knighton Rafter and his children Anna Raftery and Emily January.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 29, 1845 — Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven was published.
(9) SPEAKER TO GENIUSES. Today Mad Genius Club featured “Hugo History – A Guest Post by Ben Yalow”. It’s fascinating to watch an accomplished fanpolitician at work, but — Why is Yalow working the Mad Genius Club? And he makes an interesting choice to discuss Hugo history as something “we” did — will MGC regulars feel included or excluded? Consider the way Yalow phrased the rules changes that produced the semiprozine category.
When it became clear that, during the late 70s, we had three fanzines whose circulation was many thousands, while most fanzines were having circulations in the low hundreds (when you’re printing and mailing physical fanzines, and generally they were available for free, there were real limits on circulation, depending on people’s budgets), we split out semiprozines, just to get them out of the fanzine category. And we tweaked the rules somewhat, so that there were more contenders than just the three that we moved out of fanzine; if it were only that, then semiprozine wouldn’t be a viable category. We were starting to see the beginnings of small run fiction magazines, and serious academic small circulation magazines, and the semiprozine rules put those into the new category, so it was a category offering reasonable choices.
(10) HAD ME GOING. It turns out Sigrid Ellis’ “Best Brussel Sprouts” post is a recipe, not an idea for a new Hugo category.
Okay, these are not the BEST Brussel sprouts. I am pretty sure the BEST ones are cooked with bacon. But these are pretty good.
(11) MORE RECOMMENDATIONS. Nerds of a Feather continues its recommendations in “2016 Hugo Longlist, Part 4: Nonfiction and Institutional Categories”.
This time we are looking at what are, for lack of a better term, the “nonfiction and institutional categories”: Best Related Work, Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine and Best Fancast. Now, those who follow this blog know how cranky I can get on the subject of certain categories and their bizarre eligibility guidelines–and we’ve got two of them today (Best Semiprozine and Best Fancast). Nevertheless, I will do my best to stay calm and stick to the rules, frustrating as they can be. I reserve the right, will, however, get a little snarky and passive-aggressive in the process.
(12) ANOTHER ELIGIBILITY POST ADVOCATE. Abigail Nussbaum has a few thoughts about the opening of the 2016 Hugo nominations.
The announcement that Hugo nominations are open (as well as the nominating periods for several other awards, such as the BSFA and the Nebula) is usually accompanied by authors putting up “award eligibility posts,” followed by a discussion of whether this is a good thing or whether it makes the entire process into a PR effort. I’ve already said my piece on this subject, so at the present I’ll just repeat what feels to me like the most important point from that essay, which is that my problem with award eligibility posts is less that they’re crass and commercialized, and more that for their stated purpose, they are utterly useless. I don’t want to trawl through an author’s blog history to find the list of works they published last year. What I want is a bibliography–easily found, up-to-date, and ideally sorted by publication date and containing links to works that are available online or for purchase as ebooks. If you haven’t got one of those on your website, I have to question how seriously you want my vote.
(13) THAT MAKES EVERYTHING OKAY. Antonelli reminds himself (and the internet) that John Clute said nice things about his writing.
After spending most of 2015 – the period from April 4 until August 22 – being told I was an worthless hack writer and overall loser by the s-f literary establishment because I was a Sad Puppy nominee for the Hugo awards, I sometimes go and read my entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia by John Clute to remind myself I sometimes rise to the level of occasional competency:…
(14) MASSIVE MULTI-LAWYER ROLEPLAYING. Motherboard explains how “Sony’s Greedy Attempt to Trademark ‘Let’s Play’ Was Shot Down”.
Gaming is a hugely popular category for video content on the internet. It’s why Amazon acquired the video game streaming platform Twitch for $1 billion, and why the most famous creator of “Let’s Play” videos Pewdiepie has the most popular channel on YouTube with 41 million subscribers. Basically, if Sony managed to register this “Let’s Play” trademark, the company would be in a good position to sue any YouTuber or Twitch streamer who used the term to promote their videos, even though the term has been commonly used in the gaming community for roughly a decade.
The USPTO said it would likely reject Sony’s application in its initial form, but gave Sony six months to address its concerns, namely that Sony’s application is too similar to an existing trademark called “LP Let’z Play.”
(15) SAVORY TWEETS. The connoisseurs at Fantasy Faction bring you “The Top 15 Tweets & Top 7 Blog Posts of Robert Jackson Bennett”.
The Twitter-feed of Robert Jackson Bennett is a wondrous, but dangerous place to spend time. If you follow Robert in addition to another 1000 or so people, the normality and reason of the masses will likely dilute the strangeness and zaniness of Robert’s feed to the extent there will be no lasting damage or changes in personality from what you consume. If you spend time looking through Robert’s Tweets on a Tweet-by-Tweet basis though, as I was asked to do by Jo Fletcher Books for this feature, there may be some lasting damage…
Here is their comment about Bennett’s 2009 blog post “Finished.”
Link: http://robertjacksonbennett.com/blog/finished
I love this blog post because, as someone who writes, it is a reminder that not everything you write is publishable or even good; in fact, ‘80% of your output will be unacceptable shit, even if you polish it.’ I’ve spoken before about my thoughts that too many novelists of 2016 are too quick to use Amazon direct publishing as an alternative to admitting their work isn’t ready to be published and that they need more practice. Robert’s ability to take the good and learn from it combined with a willingness to ‘toss the rest and start all over again’ is undoubtedly the reason his books have gotten better and better.
It’s interesting to note the book The Long Wake of which Robert says ‘I like it. I really like it a lot.’ has not been published yet (i.e. it became another, unexpected, learning experience). You can read about that here and here.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter and Steven H Silver for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Today’s read: Flora’s Dare, by Ysabeau Wilce
This YA fantasy series continues to be a delight, with a high-spirited writing style and narrative voice that makes it a pleasure to read. (Although there is some surprising bloodshed occasionally going on as well — blink and you’ll miss the decapitation — but I don’t mind that.) A more straightforward plot than the first book in some ways, but twists and subplots kept things moving at a rapid pace. Secrets that were hinted at in the first book are revealed, and I anticipate more to come. Thumbs way up, highly recommended.
@Camestros Felapton: LOL, I agree with the sentiment and love the filk! If I may suggest: “Tiny veggies come to me” scans a bit better (right number of syllables).
@Peter J & @Many Others: (groan) I can’t take much more of this. 🙂
@Camestros: By “sausage,” I mean classic, sage-spiced breakfast sausage. Links or patties, though science demonstrates that patties are better. It’s the kind most directly comparable to bacon, the inferior breakfast option. It has the additional advantage that nobody is deluded enough to think that wrapping beef tenderloin in sausage somehow improves it.
Camestros Felapton on January 30, 2016 at 2:36 pm said:
I completely agree with this, but my wife is protesting vociferously.
@Soon Lee
Oh that’s gold. While the whole list is fantastic, I love what the final two are, and can’t blame the rankings either.
I like Brussels Sprouts and have them frequently in winter. Of course, it’s possible to do them badly, but pretty much every food can be ruined by overcooking.
Here are three good Brussels Sprout recipes:
Brussels sprouts with peanuts
Brussels sprouts with apples, mustard and caraway.
Brussels sprouts roasted in schmaltz
The last one may be difficult to do, if schmaltz or lard aren’t easily available where you live.
I’m also very fond of Brussels Sprout curry with red lentils, but unfortunately the recipe is only available in German.
Meanwhile, I will never understand the American impulse to dump bacon into everything. I don’t have a problem with bacon, though I personally don’t like it. But there is no reason for ruining perfectly good vegetables by adding bacon. It’s mean to vegetarians as well, because the veggie side dish is often the only thing they can eat.
Sausages come in casing. If they come as patties, they are not sausages! If you must, you may call them “sausage meat”.
The Nth Sausage War begins in three, two, one…
@Soon Lee:
Exactly the sort of outmoded thinking I’d expect from a Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Reactionary Foodie.
@Soon Lee: Re. Ted Chiang reasons for withdrawing a story in 2003, how bizarre! Thanks for mentioning it; I hadn’t heard of this.
On the surface, not knowing the hinted-at “full story,” his reasons annoy me. But I’ll keep this short and just say: I’m glad that didn’t become a trend among authors (from what I can tell, anyway!).
@Cora: There are lots of recipes for Rosenkohl-Linsen-Curry out there: which one were you referring to? I will happily translate it and post the translation.
Bravo, Cat! To think such a thing could sprout from a comment thread…
Argh, that feeling when one of your hands is in the wrong place on the keyboard and you make a typo and you can’t even undo it because Backspace has become some key that just keeps adding junk to the mistake. (I hear that’s a really annoying feeling. Some say.)
@Jim Henley
I think you mean a Cliquish, Hoity-toity, Outmoded, Reactionary, Insensitive, Zymotic Overcooker. This is a sausage war, damn it!
My favourite from the Hierarchy of Doubt is
Oh no, is this turning into another sausage fest?
@Kendall
What’s the wurst that could happen?
Soon Lee: And related, have you seen Aidan Doyle’s The Science Fiction Writer’s Hierarchy of Doubt?
Aidan Doyle:
Why does Jeff VanderMeer think my stories are too weird?
Why hasn’t a Tangent reviewer illuminated my moral failings as a human being?
*snort*
Back in the mists of time a shop called ‘Simply Sausages” lived at the corner of Smithfield Meat Market; they sold quite a number of different sausages, but we all had our favourites, and to this day my heart leaps when I hear Heeps number two or the English Breakfast Sausage.
Sadly they were bought out by people who wanted to expand the brand, and of course they sank without trace, as was only too predictable.
Kyra – you just reminded me that I never did get around to reading Flora Segunda. Must get on that.
I’m currently reading a few books: Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, The Rap Yearbook by Serrano, and Dungeons and Drag Queens by Johnson. The latter is, um, not to my usual tastes.
JJ on January 30, 2016 at 5:16 pm said:
That has to be right up there with “Why does Kameron Hurley think my stories are too grim?”
Andrew M on January 30, 2016 at 3:17 pm said:
Good point. If I decide to go tilting at windmills and submitting the proposals, the Semiprozine one will need to include deleting all references to Semiprozines.
I’m still not certain I want to submit the proposals, for practical reasons including the fact that I’m Chair of the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting in Helsinki and I’m leery of setting myself up to have to recuse myself for up to six different ratification debates. (I had to do so for one that was up for ratification in 2015 that I’d co-authored the year before.)
@Kendell:
Oddly enough, I toyed with pitching a related article to, like, Buzzfeed or such place. Literal “sausage fests” are a thing that exists, like barbecue competitions and chili cookoffs. I thought there might be a few hundred light-hearted words in investigating the gender breakdown at a real one. And perhaps I was right, but it remains on the long list of things I haven’t gotten around to writing.
@Kip W: Your objection deserves serious consideration.
@Kendall
Back in August, I got an email from a newsletter sort of thing that focuses on local events. This one had the header “IT’S A SAUSAGE PARTY!” I’ve never deleted or filed it, because whenever I look at it, it makes me smile broadly. Heh. Sausage Party.
@Jim Henley
Thanks! That’s all I ask. Well, that and (see appended list).
Oh man, I didn’t know Joe Raftery, but I know his wife, or knew her back when we had an active folk harp group here in the Atlanta area. I’m sorry to hear this. 🙁
I am currently in Seattle where a Pike Place Market stall sells sprouts as “Little Green Balls Of Death”…
Actually, the Administrators do, in the notification letter to Professional artists, remind them of the 3.9.2 citation request, and the artists are generally pretty good about sending in the citations.
What’s not often used is the section on the nominations ballot where the administrators ask the nominators to cite something about the artist — but that’s a request for the convenience of the administrators and is not in the Constitution.
What is true about 3.9.2 is that, particularly in this cycle, the acceptances for the Retros for professional artists generally don’t have citations. Since, in no case, were we ever contacting the artist, but, instead, some publisher or heir, we weren’t expect the citations, but knew we needed to check to ensure that the artist had done professional work and qualified for the nomination.
John Scalzi asked to be my arch enemy, but I was too busy to accommodate him.
Arch nemesisism is a commitment, you know.
@Laura Resnick
I’m shocked, really. Didn’t you know that Scalzi can, and would gladly, take care of both parts for as long as you needed to get back in the swing? He’s pretty much the gold standard for arching.
I prefer the old classic MilSF ‘Starship Tubers’
This is unfair; I’ve spent hours when I should have been asleep researching sausages – it’s 3.54 am here- and nobody has displayed any interest in the true sausage.
I have decided not to share my knowledge of the Polish boiling ring because no one seems to care; it’s a pretty bad state of affairs when not even organic sauerkraut can galvanise people into activity…
…I sometimes go and read my entry…to remind myself I sometimes rise to the level of occasional competency…
If that’s an accurate quote, it says everything I need to know about the relative hackery of the writer. We shall know you by the examples you provide, sir.
@Dexfarkin
The classics are always good, but I like to “keep current,” as the young folks say, with more recent classic genres.
The finest sausage I have ever eaten was bought from a butchers on the outskirts of Wigan. Pork and sage naturally but with extra black pepper that would make your mouth tingle as you drank your tea. That was a lifetime ago 🙂
Didn’t one of the top nominees for pro or fan artist for 2015 get dropped because of rule 3.9.2?
@Bruce A,
Yes, it was Jon Eno in the Best Professional Artist category for not having enough qualifying works.
Camestros
Thank you for those immensely helpful words. It is 5 am and I’m now wondering why my housekeeping arrangements fail to possess sausages as a keyword; it’s not as if nowadays there are lots of different sausages.
However, you have moved me to reveal stuff hitherto unknown to others; the most perfect pork sausage ever was made by a pork butchers called ‘Crasks’, in Norwich, and the recipe was passed on to the Co-op in Norwich. Sadly, after many years I ceased to get frozen Crasks sausages, and I do hope this is a lesson to us all. After all, I’ve learned mine…
Bah. I see we’re still stuck in the Eurocentric sausage world. I’ll just be here, flying the flag for lap cheong, aka Chinese sausages. More specifically, the southern Cantonese version, which is amazing sweet and lard-y, and goes really well with any spicy stir-fry.
The Campaign for Sausage Diversity puts forward for your consideration the spicy merguez from North Africa, and from South Africa comes the boerewors for those who find that a link or two just isn’t enough for their sausage needs.
ETA: Just finished reviewing my choices for the Asimov’s Readers’ Award and got a few that will be in my Hugo nominations too. Interzone (to which I also subscribe) has been good too but their stories are less “core SF” in general. In general, I struggle to keep up reading short stories, else I might subscribe to more magazines.
@Camestros: waves lighter
If we’re getting back to our roots, is jicama allowed, or is it too “ethnic”? (It’s native to Mexico, after all) But then potatoes are South American, and so are sweet potatoes. Doomed to turnips and rutabagas, then? And certainly no sprouts still on the stalk. Or the God Stalk.
@Soon Lee: “Sausages come in casing. If they come as patties, they are not sausages! If you must, you may call them “sausage meat”.”
This poses a curious problem. While I was out shopping earlier, I selected a large summer sausage and took it to the deli section to have it peeled and sliced. I now have the slices in a ziplock bag in my fridge.
Do I currently have a sliced sausage, or merely “sausage meat”?
(This is completely true, BTW. I did not invent the anecdote as a hypothetical situation. Mmm, sliced sausage…)
Stevie wrote:
Oh, how I miss that shop, and the sausage only dinner-parties it inspired in my youth.
Lakes of bubbling onion gravy, mountain ranges of snowy mash, and the massed ranks of Sausages in at least 5 varieties…
@IanP: “What’s the wurst that could happen?”
As JJ would say: *snort*
@k8: “Dungeons and Drag Queens”
Uh . . . what?! (checking) Hmm, that’s an interesting array of titles Amazon suggests when I go to the book’s page. Anyway, you’ll have to report back when you’re done, to tell us what the book was like. 😀
@Kip W: LOL! A Sausage Party sounds like a scaled down version of a Sausage Fest (which I presume is, er, larger because, you know, Oktoberfest!).
@Stevie: “I have decided not to share my knowledge of the Polish boiling ring”
The first rule of Polish Boiling Ring is you don’t talk about Polish Boiling Ring. Sorry, I’m getting punchy. And hungry, thanks, you and everyone else!
@Soon Lee: “not having enough qualifying works”
Yeah, though he had no qualifying works, apparently (it only takes one). (Sorry, “not enough” implied to me he had something.)
ObSFReading (mini review?): I finally finished The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M.H. Boroson. I’ve commented before on it. I liked it okay, but it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. Descriptions of emotions and reactions were clunky at times, the protagonist was an odd mixture of experienced and naive, and occasionally she got a bit tiresome. The world building and magic were interesting, though; 19th century Chinatown, San Francisco with spirits, magic involving burning paper to stand in for real things in the spirit world, et al. The Author’s Note in the back explained where various folklore, religion, etiquette, etc. came from, how he combined or simplified in places for story purposes or for modern readers, etc. I’m really glad he included that!
But the book didn’t always hold my interest, so I read a little of another novel and a couple of novellas, and took a while to finish this. This perhaps slowed down my reading overall, but I didn’t want to get too into other books and not finish this.
Anyway, it’s a first novel and I’ll check out his next one, as he IMHO shows promise and I bet his next novel irons out some of the issues.
Now, back to Cold Iron, methinks.
Speaking of sausage parties, there is also the sausage sizzle, aregular feature of Australian elections:
http://stumblingpast.com/2013/09/07/sausages-and-australian-elections, which I a assured by my kid is a Real Thing.
I am totally jealous – all I get is the occasional flyer from folks the requisite 100 feet from the entrance to the polls.
Yes but:
1. The sausages are Australian sausages and hence likely to be *beef* sausage and a bit bland
2. The how to vote leaflets are really big
3. It is on a Saturday morning
@Ben Yalow:
Hear, hear!
(12) @Laura Resnick
You seem to be quoting Nussbaum saying that “commercial” isn’t an objection, and then arguing against the use of “commercial” as an objection…
Nussbaum isn’t saying the problem with eligibility posts is commercialism; it’s that they’re a much less effective tool (commercial or otherwise) than an up-to-date bibliography. So IF you do eligibility posts but not a bibliography, why then, the Nussbaum scoffs at ye.
Brussel Sprouts:
Years ago I almost convinced Spencer Gifts to stock “Cabbage Patch Abortions” – a mason jar filled with olive oil with a single brussel sprout floating in it….(interestingly enough, their only concern was infringement of the name Cabbage Patch….)
That would have been accompanied by a kit for camping that contained bags of dehydrated water. A gallon ziploc bag – “just add water…”
I’d like to formally announce two of my nominations for Best Related Work:
1. Silberman’s Neurotribes
2. Bacon
I believe the rules allow for this:
“Awarded to a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, “-
No one can argue that Bacon is not related to the field of sf, fantasy or fandom. Try.
“…appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year.”
Bacon from last year was not produced from he same pigs that produced this year’s bacon. I don’t think you can get any more “substantially modified” than that.
“The type of works eligible include, but are not limited to, collections of art, works of literary criticism, books about the making of a film or TV series, biographies and so on, provided that they do not qualify for another category.”
Will anyone argue that Bacon is not art? It certainly doesn’t fit into any of the fiction categories – bacon is anything but fictional. One must have a real-world, non-fictional encounter with bacon in order for it to have any impact.
The only place I anticipate issues with this nomination is in identifying which particular bacon is being nominated. I will submit that the award can be given to all Bacon produced and consumed in 2015, in the same sense that people who nominate a novel are actually reading different copies of that novel, but are all referring to the same work.
I’ll be happy if either nominee makes the ballot; equally happy if this nomination raises fan’s awareness of the possibilities of nominating Bacon in the future. (I suspect that this will become so popular that Bacon will come to dominate the Best Related category in years to come and that it will eventually be necessary to split the category into Best Related and Best Related That Is Not A Foodstuff, but that is for future Worldcons to decide. I already weep for brussel sprouts upcoming annual disappointments….
Jon Eno being disqualified from the Sasquan Hugo Award ballot had nothing to do with 3.9.2. It has entirely to do with the basic structures of the Hugo Award, in general.
3.2.1: Unless otherwise specified, Hugo Awards are given for work in the field of science fiction or fantasy appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year.
He had no professional work which first appeared in the previous calendar year, so he could not possibly have qualified.
It is impossible for any Professional Artist to be disqualified by 3.9.2.