(1) CANCELLING HERSELF. Samantha Mills mournfully headlined her latest blog post “’Rabbit Test’ unwins the Hugo”. After reading the Barkley/Sanford report and some others’ analysis of the voting reports, Mills says:
…Looking at the information we currently have, it’s hard for me to conclude anything other than: I shouldn’t have been on that ballot. On the one hand, it seems as though the final vote hasn’t been tampered with, and the voters engaged in good faith with the works they were told were the finalists, for which I still say thank you! But it’s really, really hard for me to see past the initial fact, which is that I shouldn’t have been on that ballot.
This entire experience has been very stressful and fraught. Initially I assumed I wasn’t going to be a finalist, because even though the story had taken off like mad in the U.S., the bulk of the membership was not going to be American. I assumed we would see a lot of Chinese nominees — which would have been cool! We’d get a slice of international scifi that I rarely ever see! And then I was really pleasantly surprised to be informed I was a finalist after all. When the full ballot was posted, I was also surprised at how few Chinese nominees were in the fiction categories. There were four in the short story category, though, so I thought it was legit, and that wow, John Wiswell and I somehow made the cutoff anyway, isn’t that amazing!
I accepted the nomination because, you know, it is supposed to be an honor. But then due to concerns about the Worldcon event itself, I elected not to participate in programming or accept a free trip to Chengdu. This was also fraught. I’ve never been to a Worldcon, and I’d never been nominated before. And as I said in my previous long-winded post on the subject, I have nothing against the fandoms at play. But I wasn’t comfortable being one of the faces of local PR under political circumstances that felt entirely above my pay grade, so I bowed out…
(2) HUGO DIAGNOSIS AND POSSIBLE CURE. Nerds of a Feather editorsThe G, Vance K, Arturo Serrano, Adri Joy, Chris Garcia, Paul Weimer, and Alex Wallace have each written part of “The Hugo Awards Crisis Deepens – Where We Stand and How to Save the Awards”.
The G’s segment concludes:
There are two sets of problems here: (a) the proximate issue of what was done in 2023 and (b) what this reveals or illuminates about the the cartel of self-proclaimed “SMOFs” (secret masters of fandom) who treat the Hugos – and Worldcon more broadly – as their birthright, playground and personal fiefdom. The Hugo Awards are supposed to be democratic in nature and process; the behavior of the self-proclaimed “SMOFs” is fundamentally anti-democratic – and this is by no means confined to Chengdu Worldcon.
Now here are my suggestions for how to rebuild trust in the Hugo Awards:
- No one involved in the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards, or who assisted in the collection of political evidence, can ever be allowed to have any role in administering the awards ever again.
- Vote tabulation must be performed in a transparent manner using software that multiple people have access to for purposes of validation.
- All tabulations must be independently audited for purposes of verification.
- Individual Cons should no longer administer the Hugo Awards – this should be done by an independent, rotating committee.
- All decisions by said committee must be audited; all disqualified nominees must be notified and given time to appeal.
(3) STARSHIP FONZIE SCOOP. Eric Hildeman got ahead of the “Glasgow 2024 Passalong Funds Announcement” with the information he reported in Episode 36 of his “Starship Fonzie” podcast. He’s now also posted a transcript on his blog.
Here’s more information about Chengdu’s passalong offer of $40,000 to Glasgow:
“… My colleague, and I think it’s fair to say, con-running coach, Alexia Hebel, is not only the treasurer for Capricon, she was the treasurer for the Western component of the Worldcon in Chengdu. And as such, one of her duties was to administer the pass-along funds from Chengdu over to Glasgow. What are pass-along funds? Well, if there’s any money left over after running a Worldcon, they have the option and traditionally always do of passing that surplus along to the next Worldcon as a donation towards its effort. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. While in between duties at Capricon and after speaking with Ben Yalow about it, she offered $40,000 in pass-along funds to the Glasgow Worldcon. And again, that’s de rigueur. You know, every Worldcon does this if they can. Glasgow turned the money down. They’re so anxious to avoid any associations with the Chengdu Worldcon that they’re unwilling to even touch the money, to the tune of 40 grand.
(4) SEEN AROUND FANDOM. These convention badge ribbons will be in great demand once somebody starts handing them out.
(5) DRAMA CRITIC. Lauren Oyler asks what effect Goodreads one-star reviews – or any other reviews – have in “’God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad” at the Guardian.
Something dramatic happens on a social media platform every day. On Goodreads, the anachronistically designed website for logging, rating (out of five) and reviewing books, the dramas are more amusing, and they occasionally even draw attention from areas beyond the site’s supposedly book-loving users. The most recent featured Cait Corrain, the fantasy author who set up an elaborate network of fake accounts to post positive reviews of her own forthcoming book as well as negative reviews of authors she felt were her competitors. When citizen journalists uncovered her plot in December 2023, her book was cancelled, and she lost her agent and a future book deal.
A juicy, postmodern story of self-sabotage, or a sad one about the intersection of the internet and mental health. Regardless, its stakes are relatively low: publicly harassing one’s colleagues is a sackable offence anyway, and it’s hard to find someone who really cares about the vicissitudes of the young adult literature world who isn’t part of the subculture. I’m not; I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors. And while Goodreads has been around since 2007, its significance to the broader literary world remains steadfastly confusing. Does it sell books? Does it make and break careers? The flashy, funny stories that have emerged about the site over the last several years have done exactly what its proprietors surely want: make it seem like Goodreads is important. But is it?…
(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents episode 72 of the Simultaneous Times podcast with Eugen Bacon & Todd Sullivan. Stories featured in this episode:
- “A Good Ball” by Eugen Bacon, with music by Fall Precauxions, read by Jean-Paul Garnier
- “Shards of Glass” by Todd Sullivan, with music by Phog Masheeen, read by Jean-Paul Garnier
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
Available on all podcast players or at Podomatic.
(7) THE SOURCE: SARAH MAAS FANTASY. Ann Smoot points out “The Jewishness of Sarah Maas’ Fantasy World” at Hey Alma. Beware spoilers.
Whether you’ve been thinking about starting to read “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” or you’re a long-time fan of “Throne of Glass,” it’s likely that you’ve heard of Sarah J. Maas. The author is making headlines the world over thanks to her fantasy series. Whether you’re invested in them for the well-written smut or the beautiful way she weaves her stories, fans can’t put down her novels. But what some readers might not know about the rather private author is that she was raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father and attended Hebrew school in her youth. She went on to attend Hamilton College for religious studies and met her future husband at her college’s Hillel, where he served as president. Her connection to her Jewish faith isn’t just apparent when looking at her personal history, though. It just takes a keen eye and a flip through any of her series’ to recognize that she has woven her culture through every story….
… The way that Maas deftly and lovingly weaves her Jewish culture and faith into her writing opens up the world of our stories and tradition to a wider audience. Jewish faith hasn’t had a very loud voice in fantasy — but thanks to Maas, that might be about to change.
(8) ROLE MODEL. [Item by Danny Sichel.] “Peter Talks To a Spider”, a ten-page comic, by Donny Cates and Chip Zdarsky, published on Marvel’s official Threads account: “What happens when Spider-Man chats with an actual Spider”. Images at the link.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 18, 1919 — Jack Palance. (Died 2006.) Tonight I’ve come to talk of Jack Palance who was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents with name of Volodymyr Palahniuk. His last name was actually a derivative of his original name. While guesting on What’s My Line?, he noted that no one could pronounce his last name, and how it was suggested that he be called Palanski but instead that he decided just to use Palance instead. He didn’t say where his first name came from.
(OK nitpickers, I do not want to hear from you. Seriously, I don’t. His career makes a gaggle of overly catnapped kittens playing with skeins of yarn with lots of lanolin still on it look simple by comparison so I may or may not have knitted it properly here, so bear with my version of it.)
Surprisingly it looks like that he got his start in our end of things in television performances and relatively late as they started in the Sixties with the first one being Jabberwock on a musical version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I’m sure I want to see that as it had Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, and the Smothers Brothers as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Next up was a Canadian production with him in the title role of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that in turn saw him being the lead in Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the last when the ego of the Director got way, way too big.
I’m going to digress here because it’s so fascinating. In 1963, The Greatest Show on Earth first aired. This Circus drama had Johnny Slate as the big boss who keeps the circus running as it moves from town to town. It was produced by Desilu, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sr. It lasted but one season as it was up against shows by Jack Benny and Richard Boone.
A bit of hard SF was next, Cyborg 2, released in other countries as Glass Shadow, creative but terribly uninformative, where he’s Mercy, an old renegade cyborg.
Remember my Birthday recently on the wonderful Carol Serling? Well he was in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics film that she made possible as Dr. Jeremy Wheaton in “Where the Dead Are”.
If Treasure Island counts as genre and yes I do count it in my personal canon, then his role as Long John Silver is definitely canon.
He got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. Now the fun part is that it’s set in the Old West, where he is the most greedy, corrupt and mean-spirited crook in the old West obviously, he sees no value in “Holiday Humbug” by several reviewers. This film I went to look up on Rotten Tomatoes, but no rating there.
Not at all shockingly to me, he shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where he plays a character of Louis Strago in a two-parter “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” which got reedited as “The Spy in the Green Hat”.
A bit of horror was next in Tales of the Haunted as Stokes in “Evil Stalks This House” was up late in career.
Finally for roles that I’m reasonably sure were of genre interest, he was on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kaleel in the “Planet of the Slave Girls” episode.
One more gig for him related to genre or at least genre adjacent, though not as a performer, but as the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for four years. He had three different co-hosts from season to season, including his daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and finally singer Marie Osmond.
I’ll take your leave now.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Brewster Rockit has a writing tall tale.
- Broom Hilda has writing hopes.
- Crabgrass plans writing time travel.
- Non Sequitur brings us to an odd facts sideshow.
- Reality Check has a lot of mixing.
- Wallace the Brave has a detailed worry.
- The Argyle Sweater shows a genie with a hearing problem – or maybe a listening problem.
(11) HEAVENLY OSCULATION. [Item by Steven French.] David Tennant answers Guardian readers’ questions about the length of his sideburns, what kind of cheese he would be and being a Doctor Who fan: “David Tennant: ‘Kissing Michael Sheen was fine. He’d brushed his teeth’”.
“Am I as geeky as the Doctor who fans? Yes. As a Doctor Who fan myself of old, I can very much can plug into that. I don’t think I ever got in trouble at school. That is one of those stories that’s ended up on Wikipedia. I wrote an essay on Doctor Who, which some unpleasant newspaper found and printed. But I didn’t get in trouble for it. I think I got quite a good mark for it.”
(12) LGBTQ VIDEO GAMERS. The New York Times article about a GLAAD study says “Report Says 17 Percent of Gamers Identify as L.G.B.T.Q.” There were 1500 participants in the survey.
Less than 2 percent of console video games include L.G.B.T.Q. characters or story lines even though 17 percent of gamers are queer, according to GLAAD’s first survey on the industry.
The survey, whose results were released on Tuesday, said a majority of respondents had experienced some form of harassment when playing online. But it also found that many queer gamers saw virtual worlds as an escape in states where recent legislation has targeted L.G.B.T.Q. people. Seventy-five percent of queer respondents from those states said they could express themselves in games in a way they did not feel comfortable doing in reality.
“That is a statistic that should pull on everyone’s heartstrings,” said Blair Durkee, who led the advocacy group’s survey alongside partners from Nielsen, the data and marketing firm. “The statistic is driven largely by young gamers. Gaming is a lifeline for them.”
GLAAD has produced a similar breakdown of queer representation in television since 1996. Its latest report found that 10.6 percent of series regulars in prime-time scripted shows identified as L.G.B.T.Q., which researchers said helped put their video game study in perspective….
(13) CREATING VIDEO FROM TEXT. That’s the latest step forward in artificial intelligence says OpenAI in “Sora”.
We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.
Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.
We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon….
… The current model has weaknesses. It may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The second trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has dropped. Only in theaters March 29.
The guardians of nature. The protectors of humanity. The rise of a new empire.
The epic battle continues! Legendary Pictures’ cinematic Monsterverse follows up the explosive showdown of “Godzilla vs. Kong” with an all-new adventure that pits the almighty Kong and the fearsome Godzilla against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence—and our own. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” delves further into the histories of these Titans and their origins, as well as the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond, while uncovering the mythic battle that helped forge these extraordinary beings and tied them to humankind forever.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Paul Weimer, Eric Hildeman, Joshua K., Cliff Ramshaw, Kathy Sullivan, Jean-Paul Garnier, Dan Bloch, Rich Lynch, Danny Sichel, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
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1) I admire her position and support that Mills takes. I dislike the idiots using her stance as a club against others though.
(1) I admire Mills’ grace and class as well (and agree with Paul on the other).
(2) Good suggestions.
(2) Hell, yes. More than yes – I’m tired of being the only self-proclaimed antiSMOF. I have no master, I am a free fan!
(3) Good for them!
(8) snort
(10) Non-sequitur – one of those is completely ridiculous. You can’t file your taxes in Jan, when most forms aren’t mailed until 16:59 on 31 Jan.
(13) So when will someone who’s actually gotten even the minimal bit of AI, and add recursion and checking into these chatbots, so human hands have the right number of fingers, and physics isn’t Wile E. Coyote physics?
(14) We still want to see Godzilla Minus 1
(1) As Paul says, don’t use Samantha Mills’ admirable position as a stick to beat others.
(7) I read some Sarah J. Maas work. I concluded that it was well-done, but not for me. Really not for me. That was a few years ago. The last few months, no matter where I go, I see her stuff, often shoved in my face as stuff I will like.
She does not appear to have transitioned to writing a markedly different type of fantasy. It’s still not my thing, and I’m getting cranky about not being allowed to simply leave her to the people for whom this is their thing, while I ignore it. I don’t want to stop anyone from enjoying her work. I know she’s a good writer, and obviously there are a lot of people who enjoy what she writes.
But, pretty please with sugar on top, may I please be allowed to go back to ignoring this writer who is clearly in no need of my poor additional contribution to her income?
No individual case of Maas being waved in my face is the problem. It’s the frequency and pervasiveness.
Lis, someday I’ll introduce you to the wonderful world of genre publicity.
So you want to know everything about an author that you didn’t care anything about the first time you got an email on them? Just wait for the next six identical posts touting how damn great this novel is, and how fascinating the life of the author is without actually saying anything about that writer.
I had one such author described as having a fascinating story as she grew up in Asia and therefore was deeply knowledgeable on Asian mythology as if that was a monolithic subject.
I received my last form around Jan 20th and easily could have filed before the end of January. (I’ll probably get them filed by the end of this month.)
9) Not even remotely genre, Palance brought down the house in “City Slickers” as the trail boss Curly. My favorite line from that one is when Billy Crystal asks early one morning “Kill anyone today, Curly?” with Palance fairly growling the reply: “Day ain’t over yet”
Palance’s Dracula is often overlooked, but he turned in a creditable performance and the film was one of the first to connect the character of Count Dracula to Vlat Tepes. I believe that the film was renamed as “Dan Curtis’ Dracula” after “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” came out as a way of differentiating the films.
Curtis after the success of “Dark Shadows” in daytime was given the greenlight to produce several low budget productions for ABC-TV LateNight. “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Dracula” were the first two. Jekyll was videotaped in Toronto CA and heavily re-used music tracks from “Dark Shadows”
He also did a version of “Turn of the Screw” with Lynn Redgrave and two movies entitled “Dead of Night” one done on videotape called “Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisdon” with several castmembers from Dark Shadows and an anthology film called “Dead of Night” which consisted of 3 short stories.
While I have nt read any Sarah Maas, I would tend to disagree with Ann Smoot’s statement that the “Jewish faith hasn’t had a very loud voice in fantasy.” I would direct her to Peter S. Beagle, especially in “The Last Unicorn” and its sequels (featuring Schemendrick the magician) and in stories such as “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifka and The Angel,” We Never Talk About my Brother,” and (a personal favorite) “The Rabbi’s Hobby.”
(14) I’m a sucker for stories involving teamwork, so this looks both wildly stupid and highly attractive.
Mark,
on 10, while I agree that the Non Sequitor is unlikely, when my wife and I were newly married, for a number of years both our employers tended to get their W-2 out by the third week in January. For about 3 or 4 years, since those were our only sources of income and we didn’t have savings accounts yet (yeah, stupid, but we were young,) we often had our taxes filed by the first week of February. Theoretically, we could have mailed them (at that time, the only way) by the end of January.
Nowadays, of course, while we don’t have complicated returns, there are several income streams, most of which don’t get their W-2’s out until the last, possible, legal moment.
CatE: yeah. Last class I took before getting my bachelor’s was a distro class on world religions. Our instructor did his best to try to bring reality into it, but the textbook – did you know that all Native Americans, from Central America to the Inuit all venerated tobacco?
And then there was the pic from “world relgious service news photo”… of John Calvin preaching. I got a smile from my instructor when I said I wanted to see the negative…
And the rest of you, coming down on me for making a silly criticism of a comic strip, let me point out that those are older folks, not young ones right out of school, and so their W-2, etc, probably were sent late.
1) What Paul said. I guess we should have suspected sooner that something was wrong when that story won or even before that, since there were so few Chinese nominees. I mean, it’s a great story and I’d have voted for it, but it’s so completely American.
4) Sign me up.
(5) Just read the whole article. Nope – I have to open a tab to go look at my books – it is certainly not right up front all the time.
Oh, and Dann… 11,000 Years is explicitly NOT mil-sf, in case you missed that.
On Non Sequitur – they used to get the tax forms out right around New Year’s. That was when changes to the schedules got made before September.
(I’ve gotten amended stuff from my finance people in March. Because changes in the rules.)
1) I admire Mills’ integrity, and am sad that she felt she had to do that. I hope she realizes her story will someday be looked back on as a classic.
10) I got my W-2 on Jan. 18 and filed as soon as the IRS website opened up (the 28th? 29th?) Got my refunds a few days later. But my taxes are very simple and straightforward, with no itemizing.
All but three of my tax forms (I get a lot of tax forms now) were on my hard drive before 2024-02-01, and if you call me young I will tell you several things about my intestines that you do not want to know.
Patrick Morris Miller: That seems like a very small thing to ask of us to be spared that in-testimony.
(1) What a mess. The repercussions from the 2023 Hugo Awards will go on for years.
(2) “Trust, but verify” will have to be the way forward if we are to regain the integrity of the Hugo Awards.
And don’t forget Palance’s role in Baghdad Cafe. What an actor.
(1) Thank you, Samantha Mills.
(4) The first rule of China is “you censor what we say to censor.” China wins. The Hugo committee deserves blame for the cover-up, but not for the fact of censorship.
(1) I also admire her position — and agree with Paul and others that we shouldn’t use her position against others.
(9) The Palance Dracula was one of Dad’s favorite versions —“He really put his heart in it.” It looks like it’s available on both Tubi and DVD, as is the Jekyll movie.
All smofs are bad? By definition, a Smofcon is anyone who runs conventions. I guess no more cons, then?
13) I encourage folks to go to the link and watch some of the videos. The quality is draw-dropping. I wouldn’t have believed video of this quality and consistency was possible if you’d asked me a week ago. There’s a clip of Labrador puppies playing in the snow that is incredible: amazing light transport through the snow, fur moving realistically, snow clumps rebounding plausibly off the dogs and breaking up.
There’s also a set of videos demonstrating instances where the program didn’t get things right, a sort of AI blooper reel.
@ Lisa Hertel convention goers and panelists laughing to each other that you’d need to be a Secret Master Of Fandom to wrangle all this is a funny in-joke. Organizers unironically referring to themselves, and viewing themselves, as Secret Masters Of Fandom has crossed over into something unhealthy
Ryan H: Organizers unironically referring to themselves, and viewing themselves, as Secret Masters Of Fandom has crossed over into something unhealthy
Are there some SMOFs who regard themselves that way? Probably, McCarty and Yalow among them.
But I think most SMOFs these days just consider the term as a shortcut equivalent to “Worldcon conrunner” and aren’t putting on any precious airs about it.
@Lisa Hertel said:
Ossification and territoriality are bad and it’s an organizational failure when it happens, even when it doesn’t lead to towering, public, comprehensive negligence.
Do you really think cons can only be run by self-described SMOFs? Because if you do, then you might be part of the problem. If you don’t, then perhaps you would consider using your knowledge for organizational good. In this case, it might include rethinking the notion that concoms work best when not much changes.
@Gary McGath:
There is no evidence that McCarty et al. were following instructions from someone in China. That hypothesis wouldn’t explain why so many Chinese-language stories published in China were quietly removed from the ballot, in favor of English-language stories published elsewhere. It also doesn’t explain why, after creating that censored list of finalists, McCarty silently threw away all or part of some people’s ballots.
“You censor what we tell you to” doesn’t lead to “you, sitting in North America, spend significant time and effort looking through potential nominees’ history looking for things that someone might find objectionable.”
2) We will take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer will have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs – but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more complex matters.
3) If I were Glasgow, I’d take that 40K and do something like endow a new award to be given out every year. I’d call it something like ‘The West Taiwan Award for Free Speech Absolutism’ and it would be given ‘to the person who, over the last year, was the greatest champion of the 1st Amendment and the principles enshrined therein. ‘
14) Like Robin Hood or King Arthur, I’m always down for a new Godzilla movie.
@JoelZakem. I agree about Beagle, also there has been Naomi Novik and Helene Wecker’s Jewish themed work.
@ Lis…I agree about Maas, at least her early work, nor did I notice particularly Jewish themes in it. I should look at her more recent stuff; writers can improve.
(4) Want!
Gary McGath says The first rule of China is “you censor what we say to censor.” China wins. The Hugo committee deserves blame for the cover-up, but not for the fact of censorship.
At this point, we’ve no idea if Chinese authorities had anything at all to do with this clusterfuck. They could well have nothing at all with this fuck-up. Indeed I don’t think they did.
I think that the individuals involved got seriously paranoid all by themselves and then decided what they needed to do. It’s the sheer, obviously panicked ineptness of their response that surprises me. Did they think that no one would notice? Or care?
Several points here
I have been going to SF cons for over 40 years and have never been able to break into the higher ranks. What I did notice was the snottiness of some con runners and the I am better than you attitude. Come on, most people don’t even know SF cons are happening and pay not attention. A big fish in a very small pond. When I talked to people about Chengdu, I was dismissed. This will be fine. How come my thoughts of what could happen are not even as bad as what did happen? I thought about Hugos and people attending and panels but not the. horrid take over by Chinese businesses.
I had not thought of the people nominated for the Hugos as being hurt by this. Now I know that this must have happened to more than just one.
I want one of those No Fucking Censorship ribbons
I concur whole-heartedly with Paul. I’ll note that over on Blue Sky it’s the Rite Gud crew going after Ursula Vernon. I’m becoming quite fond of how Blue Sky is handling blocks as a result.
As for Ms. Maas…sigh. It would be nice as an indie to be able to reach that level of readership. However, I have serious qualms about that level of promotion. I probably shouldn’t since otherwise I don’t get attention within fandom, and yet…oh well, no one in fandom really cares one whit about reading science fantasy contemporary western with relationships. And there’s just enough spec fic cooties in what I write that selling the work outside of genre is crickets chirping as well. Yeah, I’m weird. I’m writing what I want to read. I just wish the Ivan Doig, Craig Johnson, and Willa Cather fans liked to venture into genre.
As far as SMOFs go, well, I have friends who are SMOFs. All the same, there needs to be some significant rethinking about how fandom is doing conventions, especially ones that are supposed to be international in outreach. When my latest thinking about organized fandom is that “the Democratic Party is better organized than this!” that should be telling (for non-USAians, the Dems have been notorious for years amongst political sorts for being quite…disorganized).
But some of this is also due to the dynamics of volunteerism. The reality is that most volunteer-run organizations end up depending far too much on a small percentage of participants to run smoothly. If that small percentage is made up of ethical, competent, organized people, then things go well. But if that small percentage has one or two bad actors, or a charismatic bad actor who gets power-drunk, then yikes. It all comes down to the dice throw of who rises to the top and how painful the organization makes it for the ethical, competent, organized folx to do their jobs.
I’ve spent enough of my life in assorted volunteer organizations outside of fandom, from kid-oriented stuff to quilt guilds to community organizations to writers’ groups to politics to union leadership. The more structure and framework available, the better in the long run. It’s not about rules lawyering, it’s about having frameworks to ease managing the inevitable problems that arise.
WSFS needs that sort of permanent, consistent, reliable structure. Drop the “Secret” from SMOFs because it’s apparently no longer ironic. Let’s get some organization into the structure that befits 21st century realities…or else risk losing the whole damn thing.
I know I keep harping on about the numbers but the numbers point to a giant mess of things going on with the Hugo nominations that do not appear to be anything to do with Chinese government censorship in any sense. The disqualifications obviously are the most obvious thing but Sanford & Barkley’s report shows a mix of high-handedness and slapdash incompetence in the eligibility process that wasn’t caused by the Chinese government but by supposedly experienced Worldcon volunteers.
Cheryl Morgan has posted a statement on her blog.
Does item 7 make sense to anyone here?
ChewyGlacier: Makes sense to me. One of Morgan’s businesses is being a publisher.
1) This makes me sad because I thought her story was amazing and I’ve passed it on to / encouraged many others to read it. I know as a fact it has opened minds to the very plausibility of the terrifying future she writes. However, I also understand her conflict over “Hugo winner” and respect her choice to remove that classification from her bio.
Honestly, I was shocked Rabbit Test won. I voted for it, a bunch of people I know voted for it, I campaigned for it. But I did not think it would win the Chinese votes, especially against a robust (haha) slate of Chinese nominees. Little did I know that would not be my biggest surprise of the 2023 Hugos.
I am thankful got the chance to read it, and ill that I feel that way, knowing it’s only through deception and censorship that it came into my awareness. With that said … if you haven’t read Rabbit Test, go read it!
@Cat Eldridge–That’s how censorship works in China. The rules are imprecise enough, and enforced arbitrarily enough, that people are very careful, and self-censorship does most of the work. McCarty and others are absolutely to blame for their actions. But they were working with the Chinese Hugo subcommittee members who live within the system and have for their whole lives. And people keep ignoring the fiur-hour meeting McCarty says he had with the Chinese subcommittee members before doing these things.
Absolutely hold the Americans and Canadians involved to account. Absolutely never give McCarty a position affecting the Hugos, or any responsible position in fandom again.
But can we please stop pretending that the Chinese members of the Hugo subcommittee were helpless, voiceless schmucks who had no part in this and that Chinese censorship rules had nothing to do with what happened? Seriously?
So the Chinese members were responsible for removing the Chinese works published in China? Sorry, that doesn’t add up.
In the replies to me, I think people have forgotten how pervasively subtle a modern censorship state can be. When the government says, “You shouldn’t have done that,” it’s too late. The line is unclear, by design. People have to anticipate the government’s wishes and say a safe distance from the blurry line. I agree that the Hugo Committee panicked, but I think they did because they were trying to protect the Chinese fans who were involved. This doubtless led to internal flailing and senseless decisions. Someone may have said, “Hey, Neil Gaiman criticized the Chinese government a couple of times! Better keep him off the ballot!” The choices didn’t necessarily make sense from the standpoint of any actual guidelines, but they were (I think) a desperate attempt to avoid trouble for the Chinese organizers. The only proper way out was to walk away completely. That’s what they should have done.
The Chinese fans who bid on a Worldcon despite being Chinese and having a way better idea of the way their country runs things than people who fly in?
If everyone could stop imputing noble intentions to the authors of this cockup, I’d probably not be the only one to really appreciate it.
And while I’m at it, could we start routinely adding in Ben Yalow’s name to the cast of the Hugo Malfeasance Awards. The Ben Yalow who hasn’t resigned from anything, even though he’s part of it. Please and thank you.
Authoritarian censorship is never “here’s a carefully thought out and internally consistent set of rules”. It’s “You’ll know if you crossed a line by if we come for your family in the middle of the night, have fun guessing where the lines are”
Is there any sort of list of things he’s still in charge of?
@ Joyce Reynolds-Ward
Thank you for pointing out that thread. I had a block party.
As far as SJM goes, I read some of her books, and they were … fine. (There are certainly better examples to read.) Some of her fans can be aggressive, though…
This is shorter than I wanted because I’m posting on my iPad as I had browser issues on my laptop. ????
What Cheryl Said. There is absolutely no reason to believe that China wanted Babel off the nominations. Or to remove people who had traveled to \Nepal\Tibet. (China likes tourists to go to Tibet!) Or that China wanted most of the Chinese-language works dropped from the nominations.
I’m sure there were quiet suggestions made. It seems unlikely that they were this stupid.
Who is “China” here? This sort of censorship, particularly interfacing with foreign actors, is going to be couched in vague suggestions and requests without context. And certainly isn’t restricted to coming through one point of contact.
Someone suggests people associated with Tibet might be a problem. Where’s that line? Who makes the call? The Chinese people would probably really prefer not going on any record for that. Do your best. You’ll find out if you were wrong.
Someone else nudges it might be best if Babel doesn’t make the final list. Why? Who is directing this? Could be someone from the government with a problem with the author. Could be a local censor who happened to disagree with the book, even if it got an official release. Could be coming from a rival author or publisher who sees an opportunity to cut out the competition. No way to know.
Yes of course it looks stupid from the outside. And even from the inside. That’s part of what makes it terrifying if you’re caught up in it because the consequences are not funny at all.
This is not excusing the SMOFs. Quite the opposite. They were obviously in deeply over their heads, even before they gleefully embraced their cosplay communism.
But the truth of if this was caused by intentional Chinese censorship, incidental censorship, or western SMOF malfeasance is almost certainly “yes”
Madame Hardy: When this story began a month ago the could-they-be-this-stupid bar was much higher. Then people analyzed the EPH numbers in the report and they were not only a mess, they were impossible. And still some thought there must be some kind of intelligent design involved, like Cheryl suggesting they must be an elaborate distress signal (which I never bought). Now the Hugo team spreadsheets have come out showing the American-Canadian team members’ willing complicity in disqualification research. That’s why I’m not ready to close my mind to either the possibility of quiet suggestions from people in China or stupidity. Or to “all of the above”.
At this point I pretty much expect to wake up each morning to find out that this matter is even worse and more stupid than it had seemed the day before.
The trickle of steadily dumber and more awful revelations is quietly infuriating.
I’m certainly at the point where I find McCarty talking about a 4-hr meeting with unnamed others makes it seem less likely to me that such a meeting occurred. I’d certainly be in the lookout for sightings of him off shopping or something. I can’t think of a single appeal of his to any external authority for rule-breaking behavior that has held up, and doubt he was honest just that one time.
Ben Yalow is a member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee (until 2025), the Formalization of the Long List Committee and the Chengdu Worldcon co-chairman.
A 2021 blog post from Glasgow 2024 described him as a member of the chair advisory team, but that is no longer true. He was listed in that position on the staff page on Jan. 18, 2024, absent by Feb. 2, 2024 and not there today.
He was on staff at Smofcon 40 under the category “Hotel.” Though Smofcon is not officially WSFS it is a place where people who lead WSFS efforts talk shop.
I find myself in agreement with Lis (in best Jack Palance voice, “Believe It . . . . Or Not!”). It may be that no one from the Chinese government ever said a word about censorship to anyone involved in running Chengdu — but if China didn’t have long, well-known, agressive history of state-demanded censorship, this wouldn’t have happened.
(9) [The following is offered only as additional information about the career of Jack Palance that I find interesting and relevant, without any criticism or nitpicking implied or intended of Cat Eldridge or his birthday write up.]
Jack Palance served in the Army Air Corp in WW2. After the war, he attended Stanford University and started acting in university productions. In Oct. 1945, he was in “A Highland Fling”, which had been produced on Broadway by George Abbott the previous year.
The Stanford Daily’s review said: “From the first scene in which the Scotch ghost here was discovered cheating at solitaire by his nagging angel wife, to the last scene where they fly off to heaven together, the fantasy of the situations and the excellence of the performers delighted the crowd which filled the auditorium. Jack Palance deserves special mention for his portrayal of the 150 year old ghost, for he turned the unearthly Don Juan into a comedian that stole the show for acting honors.”
The local Peninsula Times Tribune mentioned the difficulties in staging the “flying” scenes required by the play. A harness for the wire rigs broke just before opening night, and a parachute harness had to be borrowed from nearby Moffett Field.