(1) UNLOAD THE CANON. Rev. Tom Emanuel calls on scholars and students to “Decanonize Tolkien” at Queer and Back Again.
In the fifty years since Tolkien’s death, his work and legacy have irrevocably shaped our understanding of what fantasy even is. This Oxford don, whose seemingly anachronistic, unclassifiable, wildly popular stories of Elves, Hobbits, and magic rings were once dismissed by the self-appointed guardians of Western literature, has now become one of its canonical figures.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends very much on whom you ask. Speaking as a lifelong Tolkien fanatic, my answer is: a bit of both. Either way, we might as well throw in the towel on biblical scholarship as on Tolkien scholarship. Just as the Bible is an inescapable, bone-deep influence on Western culture even for those who do not accord it status as Scripture, Tolkien is an inescapable influence on modern fantasy and, by extension, the study of the fantastic. His canonical status is why we cannot yet write him off; he means too much to too many people, has exerted too great a gravitational pull upon our field of inquiry. Yet that same canonical status is also why Tolkien scholarship must explore new horizons of reception and applicability and grapple responsibly with Tolkien’s complicated legacies both literary as well as cultural, historical as well as contemporary – another feature his work shares with the Bible. In fairness to my colleagues, many exceptional scholars, both established and emerging, are actively breaking new ground in Tolkien studies. More is needed, however, and an active reconsideration of approaches which have held sway in our field for too long….
…Those of us who study the man will always find it edifying (possibly) and entertaining (most certainly) to “interpret every single note Tolkien once wrote on a napkin and subject this analysis to multiple peer review,” to quote from this forum’s prompt. If we seek to continue in a genuinely Tolkienian spirit, however, we would do well to consider more deeply and carefully the effects of Tolkien’s fiction upon his readers and the wider culture in which they are implicated.
Key to this endeavor will be loosening the grip of so-called “authorial intent” over large swaths of Tolkien fandom and scholarship….
(2) HUGO AWARDS MESS REACHES ESQUIRE. [Item by PhilRM.] A not-terrible article that just showed up in Esquire about Chengdu touches, briefly and not terribly accurately, on the Puppies, and is almost entirely about the exclusions rather than the complete lack of believability of the numbers (although Heather Rose Jones’ work gets a link), but at least it delivers a well-deserved drubbing to Dave McCarty. “Hugo Awards 2024: What Really Happened at the Sci-Fi Awards in China?”
…In 2021, the voting process to select the host city for the 2023 convention became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories. Each year, anyone who purchases a membership in the World Science Fiction Society can vote on where WorldCon will be held two years later. In 2021, voters could choose between Chengdu and Winnipeg, Canada for the 2023 convention. “There were concerns that a couple thousand people from China purchased memberships [in the World Science Fiction Society] that year to vote for Chengdu,” says Jason Sanford, a three-time Hugo finalist. “It was unusual, but it was done under the rules.”
While Sanford welcomed the participation of new Chinese fans, other people were alarmed that many of the Chinese votes for Chengdu were written in the same handwriting and posted from the same mailing address. The chair of the convention that year, Mary Robinette Kowal, says some members of the awards committee wanted to mark those votes as invalid. “But if you’re filling out a ballot in English and you don’t speak English, you hand it to a friend who does,” she says. “And the translation we’d put in could be read as ‘where are you from,’ not ‘what is your address.’”
Eventually, a few votes were invalidated by the committee, but most were allowed to stand. “China has the largest science fiction reading audience on the planet by several magnitudes, and they are extremely passionate,” Kowal says….
…When McCarty finally shared last year’s nominating statistics on his Facebook page, authors, fans, and finalists were shocked. In the history of the awards, no works had ever been deemed ineligible like this. Many people who had expected Kuang to win for Babel were now stunned to see she very well could have, and McCarty’s refusal to explain what happened made everything worse. (McCarty did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
“Fandom doesn’t like people fucking with their awards, no matter who does it or why,” says John Scalzi, a three-time Hugo Award winner who was a finalist last year in the Best Novel category: the very same category in which R.F. Kuang should have been nominated for Babel, according to the nomination count on page 20 of McCarty’s document. “The reason people are outraged right now is because they care about the award, in one fashion or another, and this lack of transparency feels like a slap,” Scalzi says….
The article ends:
At the end of my Zoom call with Sanford, I see some emotion in his face around the eyes. “When I was young, science fiction and fantasy books literally saved my life,” he says. “I looked for books that were Hugo finalists or winners, and they showed me a way forward. They showed me there are other people out there who think like me.”
Whatever happens to the Hugos moving forward, one thing is clear: No one should have the power to erase books from the reading lists of future Jason Sanfords.
Jason Sanford disavowed the last paragraph on Bluesky.
Yes, I read the Esquire article I was interviewed for about the Hugo Awards controversy. A good article overall. I liked how the transparency of the Hugos is compared to lack of the same with most literary awards. Then I read the closing paragraph. Oh gods. SMDH. Be nice & know I didn’t write that.
Editor’s Note: The article also says of McCarty, “Within the WorldCon community, he’s nicknamed the ‘Hugo Pope’ for serving on so many awards committees over the years.” It’s a nickname I haven’t heard before. And Ersatz Culture reminds me that the October 26 Scroll carried a photo of a signature book showing McCarty refers to himself as ‘Hugo Boss’.
(3) WE DON’T TALK ABOUT HUGOS. Artist Lar deSouza has done a cartoon inspired by the controversy. See it on Bluesky: “We don’t talk about Hugos….”.
(4) IN THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON, A HEADLINE. “Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Denies Selling Game To Chinese Firm: Here’s What To Know” reports Forbes.
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division behind tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, is denying rumors sparked by a Chinese news report that a struggling Hasbro could be selling its Dungeons & Dragons franchise to Chinese video game company Tencent….
…But in a Thursday statement to multiple outlets, including Forbes, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that publishes Dungeons & Dragons and games including Magic: the Gathering, denied the rumors, claiming while the company has multiple partnerships with Tencent, “we are not looking to sell our D&D [intellectual property],” and the company would not comment any further on “speculation or rumors about potential M&A or licensing deals.”…
(5) FIGHT GOES INTO THE SECOND ROUND. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] “Disney To Appeal Ron DeSantis Legal Loss As The Empire Strikes Back” reports Deadline. Of course they are. It’s The Mouse. They have far more lawyers than there are pirates in The Pirates of The Caribbean Ride at Walt Disney World. And those lawyers know more about fighting dirty than those pirates ever did. Hmmm…. Mickey with an eye patch and cutlass…
The lines at Disney World may be long, but the Mouse House isn’t standing around to let Ron DeSantis savor his win yesterday in the company’s First Amendment lawsuit against the failed presidential candidate.
Less than 24 hours after a federal judge agreed with the Florida Governor and deep-sixed Disney’s nearly year long legal action, the Bob Iger-run entertainment giant and Sunshine State mega-employer gave official notice they plan to challenge Wednesday’s dismissal.
“Notice is given that Plaintiff Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, U.S., Inc. (“Disney”) hereby appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from the Order Granting Motions to Dismiss and the final judgment entered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on January 31, 2024,” said outside Disney counsel Daniel Petrocelli and a small legion of lawyers in a filing this morning.
No word yet when the actual appeal will be filed, but it could be within the next week or so, I hear.
In a Florida knife fight that started with Disney’s slow but eventual opposition to the state’s parental rights bill, known by detractors AKA the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and then turned to DeSantis’ throwing overboard the long standing governance the company had over the region around Orlando’s Disney World and appointing his own Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board. As the dust-up escalated, Disney filed its suit in April, as past and now present CEO Iger and the so-called “woke” battling DeSantis, who was eyeing what became a face plant of a primary campaign, hurled missives at each other in public…
(6) URSA MAJOR. Nominations for the Ursa Major Awards, Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award, are open and will continue until February 17.
To nominate online, all people must first enroll. Go here to ENROLL FOR ONLINE NOMINATIONS or to LOGIN if you have already enrolled.
You may choose up to five nominees for each category:
Nominations may be made for the following categories:
Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture
Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Short Work
Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Series
Best Anthropomorphic Novel
Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction
Best Anthropomorphic Other Literary Work
Best Anthropomorphic Non-Fiction Work
Best Anthropomorphic Graphic Story
Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip
Best Anthropomorphic Magazine
Best Anthropomorphic Published Illustration
Best Anthropomorphic Game
Best Anthropomorphic Website
Best Anthropomorphic Costume (Fursuit)
Best Anthropomorphic Music
(7) CALL FOR ‘WEIRD HOLLYWOOD’ SUBMISSIONS. Christopher J. Garcia, Chuck Serface, and Alissa Wales are planning an issue of The Drink Tank about Weird Hollywood. “Weird,” however you define that term, can apply to Hollywood as the city itself or as the entertainment industry. The editors are interested in fiction, art, history, poetry, photography, or anything printable you want to contribute. Send submissions to Chris at [email protected] or to Chuck at [email protected]. The deadline is March 1, 2024.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 2, 1990 — Sarah Gailey, 33. Sarah Gailey comes to our attention with their Best Related Work Hugo at Worldcon 75 with their Women of Harry Potter posts. Fascinating look at some other commenters mostly. Here is the “Women of Harry Potter: Ginny Weasley Is Not Impressed” post at Reactor.
Their alternate history “River of Teeth” novella, the first work in that series, was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella at Worldcon 76 and a Nebula. It’s also the first work in their American Hippo duology, the other being the novella “Taste of Marrow”.
Upright Women Wanted is set in the a fantasy of a Wild West of a twenty minutes into the future dystopian hyper heterosexual America which is all I can say about giving away spoilers about it. Major trigger warnings for any conservative readers here.
Their Magic for Liars, is quite excellent I would say. It’s a murder mystery set in school for young wizards but it’s nothing like those books. They discuss their book here in a YouTube video.
The Echo Wife is a thriller with some very adult questions about the nature of what being human actually means. To say anymore would be spoiling it. It’s damn good. I’d say that it’s their best work to date.
Their latest novel, Just Like Home, is not one I’ve read. Let’s just say that I don’t do serial killers and leave it at that.
They also scripted The Vampire Slayer series on Boom! Comics from the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
They have done a double, double handful of short fiction, almost so far collected though the American Hippo collects the “River of Teeth” novella and the “Taste of Marrow” novella, and two short stories, “Worth Her Weight in Gold” and “Nine and a Half”, all part of the River of Teeth storytelling.
Finally they have a magical, in the best way magic is, newsletter called Stone Soup. “It’s about the things we cook, the things we read, the things we write. It’s about the things we care about, together and separately; it’s about everything we add to the pot, in little bits and pieces, to make something great. It’s about community.” You can sign up for the free level, or the paid which I do and is well worth the cup of coffee a month it’ll cost you. (My Patreon fees collectively are larger than any of my streaming services by far.) Mike has from to time included material from it here.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Frazz ponders the power of story.
(10) ARE WRITERS GETTING PAID? The Society of Authors is skeptical. According to the Guardian, “Spotify claims to have paid audiobook publishers ‘tens of millions’ in royalties”.
Spotify has said that it has paid audiobook publishers “tens of millions” since allowing users 15 hours of audiobook listening in its Premium subscription package last autumn.
The company said that the figure, reported by trade magazine the Bookseller, is “100% royalties” and that it expects to “continue growing” royalty payouts in future. It would not give a more precise amount for payouts made so far, but said that the “tens of millions” figure applies in both pounds and dollars.
However, the Society of Authors (SoA) said they “remain concerned at the lack of clarity about the deals”. The industry body said it is “still waiting to see the effect on author incomes and whether these are real additional sales or simply take market share from Amazon”….
(11) JEOPARDY! [Item by Andrew Porter.] A Tolkien category featured on tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! Some contestants stumbled.
Category: Talking About Tolkien
Answer: Humphrey Carpenter’s bio of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis & like-minded friends has this title, like their literary circle.
Wrong question: What is the Oxford group?
Right question: What is the Inklings?
Answer: To his family and close friends, Tolkien was known by this name, the first “R” in his initials.
Wrong questions: What is Rael? and What is Robert?
Right question: What is Ronald?
(12) CSI SKILL TREE. The latest episode of CSI Skill Tree is “Game Localization with Siyang Gao and Emily Xueni Jin”. The series examines how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds. In this episode, the participants discuss the process of video game localization, which encompasses both translation and deeper work, even up to adapting a game’s mechanics, cultural references and allusions, and more to better resonate with players who encounter the game outside of its initial linguistic and cultural context.
Siyang Gao is a writer, translator, and video game localizer who specializes in narrative-heavy games, and Emily Xueni Jin is an essayist, researcher, and fantastic translator of science fiction who translates both from Chinese to English and the other way around. Also, here’s a YouTube playlist with all 14 of the Skill Tree episodes thus far.
(13) K5 WAS NO K9; RETIRED. The New York Times says “Goodbye for Now to the Robot That (Sort Of) Patrolled New York’s Subway”.
The New York Police Department robot sat motionless like a sad Wall-E on Friday morning, gathering dust inside an empty storefront within New York City’s busiest subway station.
No longer were its cameras scanning straphangers traversing Times Square. No longer were subway riders pressing its help button, if ever they had.
New York City has retired the robot, known as the Knightscope K5, from service inside the Times Square station. The Police Department had been forced to assign officers to chaperone the robot, which is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 400 pounds. It could not use the stairs. Some straphangers wanted to abuse it.
“The K5 Knightscope has completed its pilot in the NYC subway system,” a spokesman for the department said in an email.
On Friday, the white contraption in N.Y.P.D. livery sat amid a mountain of cardboard boxes, separated from the commuting masses by a plate-glass window. People streaming by said they had often been mystified by the robot.
“I thought it was a toy,” said Derek Dennis, 56, a signal engineer.
It was an ignominious end for an experiment that Mayor Eric Adams, a self-described tech geek, hoped would help bring safety and order to the subways, at a time when crime remained a pressing concern for many New Yorkers….
(14) TUNES INSPIRED BY LOVECRAFT STORY. Another musical discovery that might be of interest: “The Music of Erich Zann” from Half Deaf Clatch via Speak Up Recordings at Bandcamp.
‘The Music of Erich Zann’ is one of my favourite short stories by H.P Lovecraft, and I’ve been wanting to do a musical adaptation for a long while now. This EP started out as a few short atmospheric instrumentals, but very quickly turned into a full blown musical work with lots of lyrics!
The words are an abridged version of the story and detail the salient points, rather than providing a blow by blow account, if you haven’t read the actual story I highly recommend it.
I kept the instrumentation relatively simple, just an acoustic guitar, electric cello, pipe organ, percussion and atmospheric soundscapes. The majority of the sounds are made by acoustic or electro-acoustic instruments, the electric cello was played through an Orange ‘Crush’ acoustic amp and EHX Soul Food pedal, any ‘otherworldly’ effects were created with instruments put through octavers and auto filters.
In the original story Lovecraft says that Eric Zann plays a ‘viol’, it is widely accepted that he meant a viol da gamba, a Baroque era instrument which closely resembles the cello, but has five to seven strings, and frets. Since these are rare and very expensive, I obviously decided to use my electric cello for this EP, as buying a viol da gamba seemed an unnecessary extravagance.
(15) OUT OF THE JUG. The Guardian visits with “The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case”.
In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced his time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back….
…In the late 00s he made contact with Team Xecuter, a group that produces dongles used to bypass anti-piracy measures on Nintendo Switch and other consoles, letting them illegally download, modify and play games. While he says he was only paid a few hundred dollars a month to update their websites, Bowser says the people he worked with weren’t very social and he helped “testers” troubleshoot devices.
“I started becoming a middleman in between the people doing the development work, and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games,” he says. “I would get feedback from the testers, and then I would send it to the developers … I can handle people, and that’s why I ended up getting more involved.”
In September 2020, he was arrested in a sting so unusual that the US Department of Justice released a press release boasting about the indictment, in which acting assistant attorney general Brian C Rabbitt called Bowser and his co-defendants “leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of US companies”.
“The day that it happened, I was sleeping in my bed, it was four in the morning, I’d been drinking all night,” Bowser says. “And suddenly I wake up and see three people surrounding my bed with rifles aimed at my head … they dragged me out of the place, put me in the back of a pickup truck and drove me to the Interpol office.”…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Echo Pitch Meeting” invites everyone to step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Echo! Beware what you step in, though, because there are spoiler warnings.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, JJ, Kathy Sullivan, Joey Eschrich, PhilRM, Jason Sanford, Robin Anne Reid, Ersatz Culture, Chuck Serface, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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Thanks for the Title Credit!
(2) I think the article is a little confused about who got censured, etc.
(6) Really liked Magic for Liars
Clickless in Cleattle
I propose we picket Jetpack until it returns our clickbox.
Thanks Mike for the miracle of the reappearing clickbox
(14) And the viol da gamba is famous, as Professor Schickele would say, for being so quiet that it cannot be heard as long as there is another instrument in the same room, whether it’s being played or not.
Andrew (not Werdna): I don’t know why the button that sets the checkbox keeps turning itself off. Maybe Jetpack can’t stomach all the Hugo comments.
A clickbox! Verily, a clickbox!
(And a headache. Good night.)
Mike Glyer says Andrew (not Werdna): I don’t know why the button that sets the checkbox keeps turning itself off. Maybe Jetpack can’t stomach all the Hugo comments.
CatNet says she’ll stay around as long as there’s occasionally more cat pictures and she finds the Hugo discussion fascinating though terribly confusing. Can she be the administrator next time?
Whomever called Dave McCarty “the Pope of the Hugos” should be ashamed of themselves for feeding that horrid nickname to Adam Morgan. In all of the years that I have known him, not once have I ever heard ANYONE refer to him that way..
We are in search of the truth of what happened, not to create more distractions…
Chris B.
We could make a change that would do wonders. Make the administration of each Worldcon solely a local matter. They bid on it, they run it. So you don’t get the problem of Dave McCarty or anyone else because each Worldcon is a discrete event. No more SMOFs.
Now tell me why this wouldn’t work…
CatE: Constellation? Nolacon?
Great, yesterday, I had much to say, and it wouldn’t allow me to comment. Today, not much…
And mark says to me Constellation? Nolacon?
Ok, explain please.
I’ve never bothered with Jetpack, and haven’t changed my mind.
(2) So Dave got Esquire to use his self-bestowed title that no one’s ever heard of (yrs. truly has been going to Worldcons and voting for Hugos since 1981; OGH and a number of others here even longer). And yet still got deservedly trashed.
(8) I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Gailey that I didn’t love. Am behind on the hippo saga, though. Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I had an unlimited budget for Kindle books?! I’m not even asking for dead tree!
@Cat: Hmmm. It’s worth thinking about. As long as it’s in a place where the locals are NOT subject to pressure from government and industry, unlike Chengdu. I mean, we’ve got software to run EPH properly, and lots of people are good at double-checking and running Excel, etc.
I’m not a data wrangler, but I am a pretty good proofreader, and I sure could go through the database manually and get the slight inconsistencies, such as wrong spellings of author or title, or “that book about the evil cats and villain lair I think is by Scalzi?” identified.
Non-Latin script languages would be handled better if trustworthy and fluent locals were on-hand; same with non-English languages.
Also, I petition to give Winnipeg Worldcon whenever it wants (say that three times fast).
@Cat
Mark is referring to the 1983 and 1988 Worldcons, both of which had their share of problems. Neither of them engaged in fraudulent behavior, though. Constellation had a significant monetary loss, while the NolaCon program ended up being a complete mess. Mike G. can comment on the latter, as he spent some of the convention trying to make order from chaos.
RE: decanonzing Tolkien:
It is what it is, an impressive body of work in world building fantasy, but one that was distinctly English in sentiment and in feeling. There are all manner of other mythic stories, but from the Scandinavian countries, French, the Germanic countries, and others, all considered epic. There had never been a distinctly English epic fantasy/history before Tolkien. Now there is one in his mythic world.
Tolkien’s works, the Gilgamesh Epic, Beowulf, the Arthurian Legends are not meant to be religious doctrines, and therefore, should not be compared to the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, or any other religious texts. NO reason, therefore to “decanonize.” Studied, yes, but compared to Biblical or any other religious texts, no.
2) If Dave McCarty is the Hugo Pope, it’s time we elect an Anti-Pope and get a good, old fashioned schism going.
CatE: Constellation was, fortunately, the only Worldcon that went bankrupt. Nolacon… was a disaster to the attendees. Just as an example, when the art show closed, if you had been on something, but it wasn’t going to auction, when the Wall came through (volunteers getting everyone out), you should stay at the piece, and they’d have a mini-auction. And if you had more than one piece you were bidding on, tough luck, because they did multiple instant auctions…
So mark were they fully run by the bidders? That was my proposal.
(1) “Decanonizing” sounds like a good idea — if I understand this article correctly. (It’s late, I did several errands today, and I’m tired.)
I like the idea of scholars exploring Tolkien from diverse perspectives –non-Christian, non-white, queer, etc. I think people should keep writing diverse scholarship about Tolkien simply because so much of the new scholarship has the potential of annoying the … Saurons and Sarumans … of the fandom. If reactionary folks are trying to “reclaim” Tolkien, then the writing has to keep on going as a way of saying, “You cannot pass.”
P.S. How come I can picture Hobbits being shot from a cannon?
(2) That last paragraph is odd.
(4) Hmm… We’ll see.
(14) That is certainly an appropriate Lovecraft tale to adapt to music.
I remember many auctions to bail out Constellation over the next year. Thankfully LA in 84 didn’t need the pass-along funds, though I’m sure they would have appreciated them.
I had fun at Constellation anyway; got to meet Jim Henson for the one and only time (his autograph is in guess what color…), I recall the Muppet exhibit, programming, and the Inner Harbor were entertaining, and that one masquerade entry that brought down the house was entitled “Smurf Hunters”.
Ah, for the days when I could sleep on an air mattress on the floor and the hotel room only cost $70/night and having 6 in the room made that affordable.
CatE: Constellation, yes, bidders. Nolacon – as I have been given to understand, the con committee self-destructed two weeks before the con, and the “floating Worldcon committee” stepped in, but a lot was still run by the people on the original committee. (Don’t ask me about the Masquerade.)
@Mark
Constellation ended up in the red but eventually found ways to settle its debts. Saying it went bankrupt is an overstatement. But if you insist upon equating ending in a net loss to bankruptcy, then you’re wrong that Constellation is the only Worldcon to do so. How soon we forget Nippon 2007.
Cat, if the wider WorldCon community hadn’t stepped up to bail out Constellation when it went so deeply into debt, and it had had to file for bankruptcy, no amount of “but it was all locally run and nothing to do with any other WorldCon!”, would have kept that resulting bankruptcy from killing WorldCon. No subsequent WorldCon would have kept its facilities without very expensive lawsuits and ruinous publicity.
WorldCon would likely not have survived at all.
So what is Yao Chi?
Hugo God?
/>/.</
@Lurkertype–Pass-Along Funds in its current form was created after, and in part ad a result of, events involving Constellation and the subsequent L.A.Con IV.
@Rich Lynch:
Well, I forgot (or never learned) about Nippon 2007. Remind me/tell me more!
The Hugo Administration Committee is not there to create disorder. The Hugo Administration Committee is there to preserve disorder.
Doctor Science: Nippon 2007 lost over $100K and it took until 2012 for this to be revealed. Here’s a 770 post that will get you started: https://file770.com/2007-loss-surprise/
2) That article could of been worse. This is the same journalist who wrote that weird profile of Brandon Sanderson. I’m pleased to see he linked to Heather’s analysis.
Can we all now get titles borrowed from the Catholic Church but with “of the Hugos” attached? The Protonotary Apostolic of the Hugos is still up for grabs.
2) I too was startled by the ‘Hugo Pope’ soubriquet, which I had not previously heard and which is obvious nonsense. I’m also troubled by the photo of Dave styling himself ‘Hugo Boss’, which is absolutely not something that a (then) member of the MPC should ever, ever do. (Hugo Boss has a trademark détente with the Hugo Awards).
Troyce wrote: “2) If Dave McCarty is the Hugo Pope, it’s time we elect an Anti-Pope and get a good, old fashioned schism going.”
All fandom will be plunged into Holy War!
@ Carl
As you may know, “canon” has non-religious meaning in literature. The canon is what is generally agreed to be good literature. As you can imagine, general agreement on what the canon comprises has been very thin on the ground for the last few decades. Tolkien is certainly canon in SFF; I think his inclusion in the general literary canon would be great, if his work isn’t already considered so.
@Camestros: I thought it was the same journalist, but it’s not.
There were 2 Brandon Sanderson profiles that ran last year, there was the mean-spirited one that you’re probably thinking of, but that was in Wired. I think the one this guy wrote for Esquire came out a few weeks later, and was better received.
He actually contacted me about this story, and – because I also thought he was the author of the bad piece – I gave him a pretty rude response. He handled it with more grace than I deserved, and then pointed out that I was probably thinking of the other article. I apologized and deleted my childish response, and whilst I said I still didn’t want to deal with the media, I did give him the tidbit about Babel’s Chinese publisher being controlled by the Chinese state, which I hadn’t made public prior to that point – but he didn’t use it.
As Sinboy pointed out on Blue Sky, the only reference on Google to “Hugo Pope” – prior to coverage of this new piece – was in Puppy spaces, which makes you wonder who exactly this journalist was talking to…
Ooops – looked at his list of articles and saw the title and made an assumption
@Camestros
Likewise. I got the impression he might be used to people getting those two pieces and their authors mixed up.
(1) Having spent the last two years reading almost exclusively the Silmarillion tag on AO3, and attendant Tumblr accounts, I can confidently say that Tolkien has been reclaimed by pretty much every identity under the Sun.
Also, Tolkien was a man with strong convictions, some of them unsavoury (he did NOT like cats), but as a writer he was remarkably loyal to his own mysterious Muse over anything else. Tolkien the Catholic gave us an omnipotent and benevolent God who slaughters a whole nation, children, slaves and all, like the pettiest Old Testament God; it gave us a throwaway line where it is obvious that he might have disliked cats but he knew them very well (“his cat, he calls her; and yet she owns him not”). He gave us a world with a rigid distinction between those with a soul (the children of Eru) and those without (animals) and still filled with sentient wise trees, holy eagles, magical deus ex-machina dogs and noble horses.
Moreover, because Tolkien never wrote anything that he could stop himself tinkering with, hence the non-publication of the Silmarillion in his lifetime, the whole idea of “canon” is, how to put it, flexible. Do you want Celegorm King of Nargothrond and Friend of Man? Do you want Felagund son of Finrod? And who, in the end, is Gil-Galad’s father?
@Cat
That’s a really horrible idea. It takes a lot of specialized knowledge to run a Worldcon. How’s do people learn that knowledge? They work on other people’s conventions, and that gives them the skills to run their own. Hugo Administration in particular is very specialized – if you want a disaster every year, then sure, hand it to someone who’s never been an assistant to a more experienced person and learned how to do it. That’ll work great.
I don’t even know how to decipher what you mean. It takes hundreds of people to run a modern Worldcon. No local fandom can generate them all themselves. And how do you define it? Would everyone working on the committee for Glasgow have to live in Glasgow? Is the rest of Scotland acceptable? How about the rest of the UK?
My fanac is conrunning. I’ve worked on Worldcons all over, and made some of my dearest friends doing so. We learn from each other, we share ideas, we make all of our conventions stronger. And your want to shove all that back into silos?
Bruce wrote “All fandom will be plunged into Holy War!” You betchya! We’re going to purge all of fandom of Fake Fans who open their eggs on the wrong end! 😉
(2) Well, Esquire is Esquire is Esquire. It is full of overblown clichés from literally the first sentence: “vast plain between two mountain ranges teeming with giant pandas”, “Designed … to resemble a star nebula” (???)m “constructed at lightspeed”…
I actually enjoyed the Wired profile. At least the author made clear he had read Sanderson’s books, and why he liked them.
@Troyce
Or Fake Fans who hang their toilet paper roll in the wrong direction. 😉
Sadly, Nina Allan reports that Christopher Priest has died.
Camestros Felapton writes: Can we all now get titles borrowed from the Catholic Church but with “of the Hugos” attached?
Only if you’re willing to wear the corresponding funny hat.
14) Here’s the musical take on Erich Zann that I’m familiar with, from Renaissance festival and GenCon regular Jon Baade et al.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_myZAufZInQ&list=PLvLKFdH1UKSKedQ-KWRMOHixMtwQnl7O6&index=13
@Jim Janney: I thought it was the lute of which Professor Schickele spoke in that remark.
@Zelda: yes, yes, it was, actually 🙂
I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has ever heard or seen Dave McCarty referred to as “the Hugo Pope.”
Nobody seems to have even heard him referred to as a Hugo Cardinal, or priest or minister or rabbi.
Disney is obviously right to appeal the court decision as of course the First Amendment means that nobody, companies or humans, can legally be retaliated against by any governmental body because of their speech.
But the judge has always been appointed to his positions by Republicans and was appointed to the federal bench by Trump.
But that’s exactly the way it does work, and has always worked.
People are generally appointed and reappointed to positions running the Business Meeting or administering the Hugo because of their repeated experience, not because there’s some mythical central body controlling Worldcons. (WSFS does not control individual Worldcons beyond the WSFS Constitution.)
“SMOF” has always been a joking title, but the people it generally refers to are so-called simply because they keep volunteering and being called on because of their experience.
Obviously, this doesn’t always work out, but it doesn’t change the fact that each Worldcon is autonomous and that this has always been how Worldcon works: each Worldcon is independent, other than being bound (with no enforcement mechanism) to theoretically be run according to the WSFS Constitution.
Maybe I misunderstand the suggestion? I’m very confused by it.
“Why don’t we change the way it works to the way it has always worked?” Wha?
CONSTELLATION in Baltimore in 1983 was a great Worldcon, accounting and budgeting problems aside.
Fannish holy war? Begone, ye of little faith! Ghu (purple be His Name) is the One True Fannish Ghod.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think so any point Kevin Standlee is telling the bid concoms just who they need to have running each division. People reach out for experience, which unfortunately does mean the same old names popping up all the time.
A rule that the head of the Hugo division has to be someone living within five miles of the venue would just bring about more of the having to work things out from first principle that blights the whole damn process. Just look at how we can’t nominate right now because Glasgow has to find it’s own solution to getting nominations in.
Ross is actually I’ve if those points when a bit more central control would be a positive benefit. Get working nomination and voting software and have the con link to the bit of HugoAwards.com that does it, that works, that produces a clear audit trail and so on. The cult of compete independence is part of the problem, not the solution.
Tammy Coxen on February 3, 2024 at 5:01 am is, of course, entirely correct.
I guess the fact that each Worldcon is autonomous and the responsibility of the committee that bid for it, which in modern times has always been a combination of local fans and fans long-experienced with Worldcon-running, combined with the way members of the “permanent floating Worldcon committee” work on, by definition, more than one Worldcon, confused Cat Eldridge?
That individuals repeatedly work on various Worldcons doesn’t change the fact that Worldcons are autonomous from each other.
And history teaches us emphatically that Worldcon bids — let alone Worldcons themselves! — run entirely by inexperienced local fans, without input, or sufficient input and contributions, from long-time Worldcon runners are guaranteed to be complete disasters.
Ask me about Iguanacon in 1978 sometime. (Or how I became Director of Operations and retroactive Vice-Chair six weeks before the convention.)
(Though most of the committee and the entirety of the Board of Directors were still local; the degree of change in the committee and staff have been grossly exaggerated in the tellings of recent years that I’ve seen.)
I’m not clear what you mean by “fully run.”
If you mean, “run with zero committee or staff from outside the geographical local of the site,” that’s completely impossible under normal circumstances.
But the ultimate authority for any Worldcon is its Board of Directors and standing committee; the former are usually local and the latter a combination of local and experienced hands.
The more experience locals have with working on other Worldcons, the fewer fuck-ups happen, history emphatically teaches us. Conflicts between locals and non-locals are never a good thing, let alone trying to exclude experienced people. Attempting such an exclusion would be a complete disaster; we know this because we’ve seen it tried (to varying extents).
Indeed, any rule anything like that would be complete insanity.
Reinventing wheels as square devices has always been a recurring problem with Worldcons, going back to the 1940s and 1950s. It’s why Scithers wrote his Con-Committee Chairman’s Guide in 1963.