(1) NOT A NEW PHENOMENON. [Item by Anne Marble.] If the article quoted in Seanan McGuire’s thread is any indication, the people marketing “romantasy” seem to think they’re the first to publish fantasy novels for women. Or maybe they know better — but they don’t care because they’re trying to market romantasy/romantic fantasy. Bluesky thread starts here.
(2) WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA. Like Abigail Nussbaum says in her headline: “The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse” at Asking the Wrong Questions.
… I’m going to say this again, because it is so shocking that it seems to have taken a lot of people some time to grasp the enormity of it: hundreds, perhaps even thousands of valid, legal nominating ballots were dropped from the final nominating stats, apparently under the pretext of having represented a slate, even though slates are perfectly legal under the Hugo rules. This was done on the orders of the Hugo administrator, with apparently no outside input or discussion, and appears to have elicited so little response from the Hugo team that they are casually mentioning it as if it’s nothing. If these numbers are correct, it’s entirely possible that the whole Hugo ballot should have looked completely different, and that none of the eventual winners in the fiction categories should have even been nominated.
What this means is that the entire 2023 Hugo scandal is something completely different from what we’ve understood it as during the last month. Appalling as it is, the choice to screen English-language nominees for ideological compatibility may, in fact, be a sideshow to the real scandal, which is that hundreds of Chinese voters have been disenfranchised. And—barring even more revelations—this disenfranchisement cannot be blamed on PRC sensibilities and censorship. I truly doubt that it was in the interest of China, or the Chinese business interests who took over Worldcon, to remove Chinese-language nominees from last year’s Hugo ballot. This decision came from the American and Canadian staffers who made up the English-language Hugo team, many of them Worldcon volunteers of long standing.
In this context, it is infuriating to recall just how quickly the response to our original sense of what this scandal was turned to anti-democratic measures and calls to limit the power of rank-and-file Worldcon members. “Elections have consequences!” crowed the people who are still pissed they weren’t allowed to steal the site selection vote in 2021, while others called to limit site selection to those with “skin in the game”—read, those with the wherewithal to travel to US-based conventions. But as it turns out, the call was coming from inside the house. This was never a China problem. It’s an us problem. If the allegations that are now emerging claiming that McCarty has behaved this way in the past, and also harassed other Worldcon staffers, are to be believed (and there is certainly more than enough reason to believe them at this point), it’s a profound failure on the part of Worldcon and its membership to police toxic members, which has now blown up in all our faces….
(3) TCHAIKOVSKY’S STATEMENT ABOUT 2023 HUGO. His Children of Time was announced as winner of the 2023 Best Series Hugo, however, after all the revelations “Adrian Tchaikovsky Will No Longer Cite His 2023 Hugo”.
There are many reasonable points of view about how to deal with the awards. File 770’s goal is to support and respect the recipients’ decisions.
Another author, Samantha Mills, recently made a decision comparable to Tchaikovsky’s, in a blog post titled “’Rabbit Test’ unwins the Hugo”.
(4) THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. The Hugo Awards scandal has even made it into Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter – “Litteraturpris valde bort kinesiska författare”. The article is behind a paywall, though that’s honestly only a problem if you read Swedish.
(5) RAH VS. PKD. Giant Freakin Robot, in “The Sci-Fi Master Whose Work Has Been Ignored By Hollywood, And That Needs To Change”, feels Robert A. Heinlein deserves the kind of cinematic attention given to Philip K. Dick. (Survey says – *bzzzt*! “Wrong!”)
…Hollywood has had an ongoing love affair with the works of Phillip K. Dick for decades now. Sometimes it’s a healthy relationship, giving us masterworks such as Blade Runner. Sometimes it’s downright abusive when it produces flicks like Screamers or Paycheck. And sometimes it splits the difference and serves up enjoyable silliness such as Total Recall.
Still, as many times as the movies have returned to Dick’s catalog, you’d think he was the only SF writer out there. We all know better, of course, and pretty much any SF fan has their dream list of books they’d love to see brought to the silver screen.
If Hollywood really wants to freshen things up, they should take a closer look at the work of Robert A. Heinlein….
(6) BANNED FROM THE HIGHWAY. [Item by Dann.] Remember when non-genre magazines used to publish SFF stories?
Every automobile begins as the sparkle in someone’s eye. In 1981, Neil Peart and his Rush bandmates introduced the world to a Red Barchetta. Saved in an old white-haired uncle’s barn. A relic from before the Motor Law being chased down by gleaming alloy air cars before being saved by a one-lane bridge
But before that, it was an old MGB roadster. Rendered obsolete by wave after wave of modern automobile safety standards had made surviving car crashes not only likely but predictable. The drivers of the newly designed cars expected to walk away from accidents unscathed. As a result, drivers of these Modern Safety Vehicles began targeting older vehicles leaving them in mangled heaps. Those driving older cars were likely to be left in a similarly mangled condition. The price for driving a classic. And so the driver of the old MGB engages in a race for his life pursued by a pair of MSVs.
The story was “A Nice Morning Drive“. It was written by Richard S. Foster and first published in the November 1973 issue of Road & Track magazine. Neil Peart had encountered the story and was inspired to re-tell it in a more distant future where automobiles were banned. It appeared in 1981 on the quintessential RUSH album, Moving Pictures as the second track, “Red Barchetta“.
The band had tried to contact Richard, but R&T no longer had his current address. They did add a credit note referencing the original story in the liner notes.
It was many years later before a friend pointed out that Neil had been inspired by Richard’s story. And it was a few years after that when Richard began corresponding with Neil. The two eventually planned a motorcycle ride along the East Coast. It turns out that they both owned the same model motorcycle, the BMW R1200GS.
As a footnote, Moving Pictures came out in my junior year of high school when I took an advanced composition class. At some point, a red car entered into the zeitgeist of my classmates. The model would shift to suit the moods and tastes of various authors. Sometimes it was only glimpsed under a protective tarp. Other times it would it would fly along country roads kicking up a stream of fall leaves. Our automobile appreciations lasted about a month before our teacher put a firm but kindly end to our vehicular ruminations.
(7) BACK IN ACTION. Nancy Collins’ February 19 update to her GoFundMe backers is good news indeed: “Fundraiser by Nancy Collins : What Doesn’t Kill Me Leaves Me With Medical Bills”.
I want to take a moment to thank all of you once again for the great kindness and generosity you have shown me in the recent weeks and also update you on my current status and plans.
This coming weekend (February 23rd-25th) I will be a guest at Pensacon 2024 in Pensacola, FL. My doctor says I’m in good enough health to travel as long as I continue to pace myself and take my meds and supplements. And, to be blunt, I can’t afford to pass up what is likely my only comic con appearance for the foreseeable future. So if any of you who have donated are at the convention this coming weekend, please stop by so I can thank you in person. My good friend, Adam–who is the one who talked me into going to the ER instead of gutting it out another 24 hours–will be driving me there and back, as well as helping set-up and run my merchandise table for the weekend, so I have reliable support with me.
I have 3 more weeks, more or less, of blood thinners twice a day ahead of me before I get an idea of whether or not the blood clots were a one-off event or a symptom of something more serious. Until I know one way or another, I will be staying close to home. However, I still plan to be at the Outer Dark Writer’s Symposium in Atlanta next month, health permitting.
(8) LEE AND MILLER PHOTO. Following yesterday’s announcement of Steve Miller’s death, Andrew Porter sent File 770 his photo of the Steve and Sharon at Book Expo.
(9) MARK MERLINO DIES. Mark Merlino, one of the early founders of organized Anime and Furry fandoms in North America, died February 20 at age 71. He suffered a stroke in December, then was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer about two weeks ago.
Merlino was known for organizing ConFurence, the very first furry convention, which laid the groundwork for the community’s expansion and visibility. His influential role was also recognized in the documentary feature The Fandom, showcasing his significant contributions.
(10) RICHARD MATHEWS (1944-2024). Scholar Douglas Anderson pays tribute to a colleague in “R.I.P. Richard Mathews (1944-2024)” at Tolkien and Fantasy.
I just googled to see if my old friend Richard Mathews was still the Director of the University of Tampa Press, only to find out that he died last month.
I met him at the 1987 Mythcon in Milwaukee, where we both appeared on a panel on David Lindsay. We found we had many common interests. Richard had published, with Borgo Press, a short book on Tolkien, Lightning from a Clear Sky (1978), and other short books on William Morris and Brian Aldiss. His most notable work was the Twayne volume Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (1997; reissued in 2012), which was filled with insights despite the somewhat odd structure of the book (presumably imposed upon him as part of the series it was in). Richard also contributed introductions to some of the William Morris reprints for the Newcastle fantasy series in the 1970s….
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 21, 1946 — Alan Rickman. (Died 2016.) The first time I saw Alan Rickman was in the decidedly not-genre role of German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in Die Hard, a film that’s still high on my list of great thriller films. Great role for him, too. It was amazingly his first film role.
He would won a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I actually did see that film. No, I’ll never watch again. Simon R. Green’s publicist tells me he made a lot of money for writing the novelization.
Rickman went on to play the wizard Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. I can’t say I cared for the character but I don’t think we were supposed to. I never got beyond a hundred pages in the first novel before I gave up reading it, but loved the films.
While in the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyWarwick Davis played Marvin, the android who was clinically depressed and in the novels I thought a royal pain in the ass, it was Alan Rickman who actually voiced the character.
He also voiced Absolem, the Caterpillar in an odd version of Alice in Wonderland. Look it up. Trust me, it’s weird.
And yes, I saved the best first last for last which as you already know is his role in the Hugo Award winning Galaxy Quest which is by far his best genre role. Alexander Dane is a Shakesperean actor who resents his character Dr. Lazarus, the ship’s science officer. His catch phrase? Oh, you know that by heart.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Macanudo shows who really was entitled to say, “How wude!!”
(13) ALL IN THE FOUND FAMILY. [Item by Steven French.] How the story of the ‘Hopkinsville goblins’ led to ET, Gremlins and a bunch of other movies! “The Long, Surprising Legacy of the Hopkinsville Goblins” at Atlas Obscura.
…THE STORY COMES TO US from the local newspaper Kentucky New Era, which, on August 22, 1955, reported strange goings-on the previous night, eight miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. At about 11:00 pm, two cars arrived at the local police station, blasting out of the night filled with at least five adults and several children, all of whom were highly agitated. “We need help,” they told the police. “We’ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.”
Once they’d calmed down enough to talk, they unfurled a strange story. One of the men, Billy Ray Taylor, had been visiting from Pennsylvania. At one point, he went outside to fetch water from the farm’s well. As he walked through the failing light, he saw a circular-shaped object hover through the air before coming to rest in a nearby gully…
… Concerned, Taylor retreated inside and returned with a shotgun to investigate. As he walked into the gloom, a strange, goblin-like thing with glowing eyes appeared and moved toward him. It had “huge eyes,” and hands out of proportion with its body, and looked to be wearing some kind of “metal plate.” Taylor retreated to the house yet again and grabbed a .22 caliber pistol, while Lucky Sutton grabbed a shotgun and joined him.
A creature—whether it was the same one, they didn’t know—appeared in the window, and Sutton unloaded his shotgun at it, blowing out the window screen. When they went outside to see if they’d hit anything, Taylor felt a “huge hand” reach down from the low roof above and grab his hair….
(14) CARVING OUT A PLACE IN SPACE. “Japan to launch world’s first wooden satellite to combat space pollution” – the Guardian has the story.
The LignoSat probe has been built of magnolia wood, which, in experiments carried out on the International Space Station (ISS), was found to be particularly stable and resistant to cracking. Now plans are being finalised for it to be launched on a US rocket this summer.
The timber satellite has been built by researchers at Kyoto University and the logging company Sumitomo Forestry in order to test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they can act as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently constructed.
“All the satellites which re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles, which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years,” Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut and aerospace engineer with Kyoto University, warned recently. “Eventually, it will affect the environment of the Earth.”…
(15) IT’S SUN-GRY. The Guardian reports — “Astronomers discover universe’s brightest object – a quasar powered by a black hole that eats a sun a day”. (“Feed me!”)
The brightest known object in the universe, a quasar 500tn times brighter than our sun, was “hiding in plain sight”, researchers say.
Australian scientists spotted a quasar powered by the fastest growing black hole ever discovered. Its mass is about 17bn times that of our solar system’s sun, and it devours the equivalent of a sun a day.
The light from the celestial object travelled for more than 12bn years to reach Earth….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Animation Magazine encourages readers: “Watch: Prime Video Sneak Peeks ‘The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy’ in New Clip”. The series debuts February 23.
…In a new exclusive clip shared with Animation Magazine, we get an advance look at the premiere episode. The excerpt features Dr. Klak (Keke Palmer), Dr. Sleech (Stephanie Hsu), Dr. Vlam (Maya Rudolph) and Dr. Plowp (Kieran Culkin). In Season 1, doctors Sleech and Klak take on a highly dangerous and potentially groundbreaking case and, in doing so, put existence itself in jeopardy. (Although considering their dismal personal lives, oblivion might be an improvement.)…
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Taral Wayne, Rich Lynch, Anne Marble, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Jones.]
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@Ryan H: I will note that, if you look through the minutes (and I completely understand not want to do that, esp. with the very badly formatted ones) there are several cases where agenda items are rescheduled because there were conflicts with people, they understand that it is a commitment of time and they won’t have your motion fail simply because you can’t be there at 9:40 AM on Saturday to present and debate for it.
But yes, they want you to be there. And, you know, the only qualification to be there is “have an attending membership” and a small sacrifice of time. (I’ve pushed for allowing supporting member to attend the business meeting and nothing else even though they’re not attending members, but that hasn’t gone anywhere.)
And I know there are times where a whole bunch of not typical business meeting fans attend the business meeting and effect change – it’s why we have BDP Short, Best Editor Long Form and EPH, because a number of BM (heh) regulars were very much against those.
It is a sort of test. Do you care to try to make changes? Then you get someone to cover your table, you get up at 8AM, you make sure to tell the programming staff that you’re not available for panels during the business meeting – a request they will 100% understand and work with you on – you make arrangements so that you can be there at least for the parts you care about. Indeed, the main purpose of the preliminary meetings is to schedule when those debates happen so that you have an idea when you need to be there.
Yes, it’s a sacrifice of time – just like being on a concom in any role is, just like gophering to get a membership refund is, just like….really, any decision at a convention – you can’t see it all, Doing X means you cannot do Y.
Other people manage it. Larry Smith made a few and he was only at the convention to sell books. And personally….I would NOT want to be anywhere near a business meeting if the first part is validating that the proxy holders are holding valid proxy votes, and that everyone on a conference link is a valid member of the convention, and then doing at again when the link drops and everyone has to reconnect.
Well, anymore, you can put a full stop after the word meeting, but I hope you understand what I’m saying. There’s often quite a bit of business happening (and I’m sure Glasgow is going to have a FASCINATING meeting) and having everyone there in the room makes sure you can handle that business in minimal time.
But….that’s my opinion. You disagree. That’s fair – I am not going to say “you’re wrong.” If you want help drafting the motion to amend the constitution to change this, I’m more than happy to help you do so, or point you at other actually active business meeting members who would do the same.
But, to move it and argue for it, you have to be there, and I personally thing that’s a good test of commitment to the changes, because a simple majority in two sequential Worldcons can basically end the Worldcon – and if the Angry Puppies had been able to vote remotely, they would have done just that.
@Mike. I absolutely don’t think they are LARPing. They genuinely care. But I think there’s more than a few participants where their feelings of accomplishment are directly tied to the difficulty of the process. And they’re actively uninterested changes that would lower those barriers
Asimov’s Prime Radiant!:
(quoting the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) )
2)
<- This.
Though Hugo Awards data is destroyed, in 2015 there was a plan to run anonymized nomination data through EPH to see what the effect would have been if it had been in place that year. The data was still around in January 2016, based on comments to a Ben Yalow post on Mad Genius Club.
So there’s at least some precedent for nominating and voting data to still exist for a many months afterward.
Has anyone who would know stated that the 2023 Chengdu data is gone?
(6) Quite a few science fiction stories appeared in “men’s magazines”, such as Mayfair and Knave in the UK, Playboy in the US.
Making enfranchisement a “sort of test” is OK for some things, but is it creating an organization that is accountable to the members?
As a Business Meeting observer from afar I’ve felt bad for the people who have to be there for multiple hours during important debates and votes. Worldcon is short and there are so many fun things they could be doing instead. There are other ways we could decide our rules, even (gasp) remotely.
I took the opposite lesson from that crisis. When a small malicious bloc showed up to burn down the Hugos, a much larger group of people joined and used their votes to save them.
If the WSFS Constitution enfranchises remote voting for supporting or attending members, I think we’ll see a lot more participation in good faith than bad.
@Andrew (not Werdna)
Genre stories used to be published in places like the American Legion Magazine and the VFW Magazine. The Saturday Evening Post has published Bradbury and Heinlein. It was a different time, indeed.
@Steve Wright
That would also be great! There are lots of new stories coming into existence each year. Instead of “re-imagining” an existing property, work with something new!
I see the phrase “re-imagined” and generally walk away from whatever it is (book, movie, etc.) as quickly as possible. The odds are low that it will be any good at all.
@JJ
Honestly, what is “the fix”? If the administrators were willing to toss out nominations before despite that not being part of the process defined in the bylaws, why would an extra, super-duper bylaw get in the way?
I’m genuinely curious.
As Paul Weimer suggests, some sort of third-party auditing/QA process will certainly improve confidence in the process going forward. Given that electronic storage of records is so cheap, it probably should have been adopted many moons ago.
Without sacrificing the privacy of the nominators, I do think it would be interesting to have some general demographic insights into the pool of nominators.
Regards,
Dann
TANSTAAFL/TINSTAAFL/TNSTAAFL – Truth no matter how you slice it.
So rcade wisely says If the WSFS Constitution enfranchises remote voting for supporting or attending members, I think we’ll see a lot more participation in good faith than bad.
For those of us who can’t travel anymore, this would be a blessing.
Now playing: Blowzabella’s version of Violent Femme’s “Hallowed Ground”. With bagpipes and hurdy-gurdys.
@Cat Eldridge I think it would be a great idea. However, given the degree to which fandom is whole-heartedly INSISTING on in-person and ignoring those of us who can’t travel or are immunocompromised, I don’t have much confidence in this ever happening.
Maybe someone should tell Giant Freakin’ Robot that a significant number of s-f literary critics (and lay readers) do not consider any cut of BLADE RUNNER to be a “master work” (let alone the sequels).
A SCANNER DARKLY on the other hand ….
Just saying.
Joyce Reynolds-Ward says I think it would be a great idea. However, given the degree to which fandom is whole-heartedly INSISTING on in-person and ignoring those of us who can’t travel or are immunocompromised, I don’t have much confidence in this ever happening.
I unfortunately agree. For all of their apparent belief in inclusiveness, they’re really terribly traditional about some aspects of what being a fan is, so they really do believe that involves doing as much as possible in the flesh.
Now listening to Laura Lam and Elizabeth May’s Seven Devils, female cantered space opera.
JoeH: No, for Cherryh, you’d need a miniseries. Could you see Downbelow Station as one? Kurtz? An, um, acquaintance actually has an option on Kurtz novel about the British witches during the Battle of Britain. He may get it made, or maybe not.
Joyce: No, I’m not underinformed. I point to the destruction of one of the two national distribution systems for magazines in the early fifties, or, what brought this up, the studios cancelling megamillion dollar movies for the takes write-offs. I think you underestimate the perfidy and greed of middle and upper management.
As far as forgetting things goes, Andre Norton does have a movie! The Beastmaster (1982) was loosely based on her novel. Of course, one might hope for a better Norton movie, but still.
Zelazny, on the other hand, does not have any film adaptations. And nothing you can say will change my mind on that. I didn’t excitedly attend the premiere when I was young, because no such movie exists! 🙂
But yeah, as far as “romantasy” goes, I’m fine with the new name, but much less fine with the erasure of a huge swath of the last several decades of fantasy.
@mark, you might want to stop digging and start looking at what is actually happening in agriculture and how it’s structured. Both of the examples you cite are in entertainment. Apples and oranges.
Xtifr says Zelazny, on the other hand, does not have any film adaptations. And nothing you can say will change my mind on that. I didn’t excitedly attend the premiere when I was young, because no such movie exists!
Errrr, really you forgot about Damnation Alley, a film that really isn’t even close to the Zelazny novel it was based off?
And Amazon is doing Amber Chronicles as a really extended series.
@mark–Read and learn.
https://agfundernews.com
@Cat Eldridge–
I think that’s what Xtifr means. He does not acknowledge the existence of that film, because it isn’t even close to the Zelazny novel, and it’s really bad. That’s why he denies excitedly attending the premiere. He can’t possibly have done so, if he doesn’t admit the movie exists.
Just like you refuse to acknowledge that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and other people steadfastly maintain there are either no sequels to Dune, or nothing after Dune Messiah.
That’s a TV series, not a film.
@Cat: No, I didn’t forget. I denied. Quite a different thing. Also, neither The Matrix nor Highlander have any sequels. Nor did Indiana Jones ever survive a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator! 🙂
JJ:
There’s definitely evidence in the stats that multiple types of WTFery are going on. But the stats (as opposed to other types of evidence) suggest the opposite: that some categories show evidence of significant numbers of “slate” ballots being added. One might hypothesize that the nominees on “slate” ballots were overwritten by other nominees. On the other hand, the categories that have slate-like distribution patterns correlate badly with the categories for which known recommendation lists were published. So even the hypothesis of “overwriting one slate with another” doesn’t fit the known data. I’ll repeat: it has been asserted in several places that a massive number of “slate” ballots were disappeared, but I haven’t seen anything in the numbers that would support that specific scenario other than the absence of some of the items from the alleged slate on the long-list. And there are other possible mechanisms for that apart from disappearing the ballots. There are clearly multiple layers of shenanigans, but that particular one is a bad fit for the data. (In my opinion.)
Lenora Rose:
This is what I mean when I say “the deletion of “slate” ballots would make the stats look more normal, not less.” There are a number of categories that look extremely slate-like…but the categories don’t correspond well with the SFW rec lists, and the nominees benefiting from the slate-like patterns aren’t on the SFW rec lists. So either there were more than one independent massive slating movement in play (only some of which got deleted), or in some cases (but not all) the hypothetical “slate” votes got reassigned rather than deleted, and/or in some cases (but not all) the hypothetical “slate” votes were disappeared leaving what appears to be a typical distribution (but absent certain types of expected content).
My issue is the confidence with which some people are asserting the “slate deletion” scenario as a proven fact, as opposed to it being a hypothesis that might explain certain aspects of the data, while being contradicted by other aspects.
Xtifr:n
Unless my memory is betraying me, it spawned an entire series!. Yep, here we are.
Argh, connection problems made it lose my link and also my edit window.
Beastmaster series
Inevitable n00b: there are times where a whole bunch of not typical business meeting fans attend the business meeting and effect change – it’s why we have BDP Short, Best Editor Long Form and EPH, because a number of BM (heh) regulars were very much against those.
Yeah, no. We have EPH because a whole lot of Business Meeting regulars fought for it, and were supported by a lot of non-regulars who also showed up to vote.
rcade: Though Hugo Awards data is destroyed, in 2015 there was a plan to run anonymized nomination data through EPH to see what the effect would have been if it had been in place that year. The data was still around in January 2016, based on comments to a Ben Yalow post on Mad Genius Club.
Yalow was very much an avid, vocal Puppy supporter in 2015 and 2016, and he did everything he could to sabotage the passage of EPH. As far as I’m concerned, all the years of his positive contributions to Worldcon were wiped out by that. Everything I saw of his behavior in the intervening years only confirmed that for me. Even more so, now that he shares a profound amount of culpability for the Chengdu Worldcon fiasco and the Chengdu Hugo Awards fiasco.
For the last 10 years, Ben Yalow has been a much bigger detriment to Worldcon and the Hugo Awards than any positive contribution he might have made (not that I saw any of those). It’s time for Worldcon committees and WSFS to stop letting him participate and cause any more damage.
Back in 2015, a lot of Puppies were demanding that they be given the raw nomination data for the Hugo Awards. I don’t know why they thought they were entitled to that data, because no one gets that data outside of the Hugo Admin Team. But then, the Puppies were a bunch of people who had an unjustified sense of entitlement to a whole lot of things — including those shiny awards that they thought would somehow make a lot of people magically like their mediocre writing.
What Ben is referring to here is that the 2015 Hugo Admin said they would see if they could anonymize the raw nomination data sufficiently that it could be released to a very small number of trusted EPH testers. No promise was ever made that this data would be released to the public — but the Puppies kept demanding that it should be. Based on what I know of the 2015 Hugo Admin and my perception of their integrity, I think it would have been a cold day in hell before that data was ever given to Yalow OR the Puppies, and he was just talking out of his ass (something he does quite a lot) in the blog post to which you linked.
Heather Rose Jones: it has been asserted in several places that a massive number of “slate” ballots were disappeared, but I haven’t seen anything in the numbers that would support that specific scenario other than the absence of some of the items from the alleged slate on the long-list.
Did you read the Validation document provided by Diane Lacey? That is extremely strong evidence that a bunch of front-runner Chinese works were just… disappeared. Most of them don’t even appear on the Longlists, even though they were frontrunners very close to the nomination deadline.
At this point, all we can say about the numbers is that it’s obvious that they are fraudulent. I don’t think it’s possible to make the numbers support anything other than fraud on the part of the Hugo Admin Team — so arguing that they don’t support a given hypothesis is meaningless.
I am so sad about Steve Miller. I only ever met him once at a Worldcon, then in passing at another, and later via video link at a local con, but I love the Liaden books. My heart goes out to Sharon and all the giant floofy cats.
@JJ: The validation document, and Cam’s analysis of how EPH should have gone in the final counting both indicate that. But as you said, the data is so flawed that we can’t prove anything except massive administrator malfeasance. It’s completely fucked up and we’ll never see any legit data, because Dave and Ben think they’re gods.
He and Kevin S did do an adequate job of running the emergency business meeting in San Jose when nobody won a majority of Westercon ballots due to the miserable campaign of the only registered bid, and the location of the subsequent but one had to be decided by several hours of wrangling, discussion, and voting.
Which (Sacramento, the semi-hoax bid — it was complicated) turned out to be one of the best cons I’ve ever been to in my 40+ years of fandom. Also, the only business meeting I’ve ever been to, because it was at a reasonable hour and it was only 16 hours, tops, between finding no one had won, and the end of the meeting, in which time everyone also had to get a little sleep.
I don’t trust Yalow any more than you do, so my primary interest was in the claim being made that nominating data was retained for many months after the Hugo Awards were done.
If anyone has knowledge of how long the nominating or voting data was kept after recent years, please let us know.
@Lurkertype
I wish I knew enough about how to run a con to bring it back here to Sacto. That was one of the best cons I’ve been to as well and I could go. Kevin and Andy did a great job with their accidental Westercon.
JJ:
There’s strong evidence that a bunch of front-runner Chinese works were disappeared, but there are a lot of possible mechanisms for how they were disappeared. The simple fact of their disappearance, by itself, isn’t strong support for any specific mechanism. For example, they could have simply been line-item removed from the data prior to processing the long-list, regardless of whether they appeared in coordinated sets on ballots. (That is, they could have been individually excluded without excluding other items co-nominated with them.) They could have had their nominations arbitrarily re-assigned to other nominees (which is a different matter than “throwing out” the ballots.)
I’m not in any way arguing against the apparent arbitrary exclusion of certain items from the long-list. I’m only arguing that the specific scenario of “thousands of slate-llike ballots being tossed out” is not an established fact.
And I think it is possible for analysis of the data to provide support or counter-arguments for certain hypotheses. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have put so much effort into the analysis. It’s also possible that the true mechanism(s) could be far more arbitrary and random than anything that can be divined from the data itself. I think there is value in trying to go a step beyond, “Yep, this data is bogus” to thinking about how it’s bogus and what specific actions could have produced those particular bogosities.
(And now I’m going to wonder what underlying linguistic patterns have convinced me that “bogosity” is the appriopriate nominal derivative of “bogus”. I can’t help it. This is what my brain does reflexively.)
“bogosity” has been in dictionary for a while: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bogosity has a cite from 1967
@ Heather Rose Jones – it’s definitely more cromulent than the technically grammatical ‘bogusnesses’.
At one time, I used to deliberately include (at least) one neologism in every SFF-related thing I wrote (with the proviso that its meaning had to be obvious in context). I’m getting too old and tired to keep it up, but neology is how languages advance.
Andrew (not Werdna):
Ah, that’s good to know!
“Bogosity” is much older than 1967.
“I found it absolutely and entirely bogus, insomuch that its bogosity was surprising and suggestive in the extreme.” NY Times, Feb 26, 1893 p 18 col 2
@bill: Thanks (and wow!)