51 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/27/24 It’s Scrolls And Pixels I Recall, I Really Don’t Know Files At All”

1. What, a first click?

   (3) So, what’s he suggesting, that we have fandom nominate, then have a jury decide? And how would that be unprejudiced, since everyone will know who the authors are – it’s not like you can hand the jury anonymous mss.

   And on a happy note: my Becoming Terran dropped today. My editor thinks it’s worth a Hugo and/or Nebula – so, buy it, read it… and you decide. Available in all the usual places (including Powell’s, I found).

2. David A. Mack’s Star Trek tie-in novel “Firewall” dropped today as well. For those who are into Queer SFF, give it a try, I’m working on it and really enjoying it.

3. (12) They should have a checklist for that stuff. There’s a reason everyone else uses them, especially for critical work.

4. 5) Well, I still love The Black Hole.

5. Laurie Penny published a lovely article on fandom, and what’s involved in building a community that outgrows and evolves beyond the source material. It’s completely unrelated to the current WorldCon mess and addresses a different sort of fandom angst

   https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-room-of-requirement?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2

6. The Black Hole is a perfectly good bad movie.

7. Is the (1) missing, or is it always missing and I never noticed?

8. Peer: I’ve put in (1). Should have been there.

   Sometimes I even put in (0). When announcing Scroll business or such.

9. Items marked (i) are strictly imaginary.

10. I don’t have a problem with awards using juries in their award process and I like the IGNYTE model of a jury for the nomination stage and an open popular vote for the final. It’s neat.

    However, any juried award needs a trustworthy jury and trustworthy people to pick the jury and so on. They are just as, if not more vulnerable to going horribly wrong in horrible ways the longer they go on and the more notable they become.

    For example: https://file770.com/hwa-on-bram-stoker-award-jury-controversy/
    And come to think of it, objections to a particular member of a Nebula Award jury in 2005 started a chain of events that eventually impacted the Hugo awards…

11. (7) I’ve always thought that Johnny Fever drew at least a little from Martin Mull’s DJ character in FM.

12. Hessman was also in the solidly genre “John From Cincinnati.” He is in the last three or four episodes.

13. Sarcastic award idea: The members nominate and then at Festivus the jury announces why all their picks were wrong.

14. @Gray: Isn’t that how the Clarke Ward works?

    @mark: Congratulations on your book being available!

15. c4c

16. 5) There are things to like about The Black Hole. The music’s good, the visual effects are (sometimes) impressive, there are some interesting ideas at work behind the story. My main problem with it, though, is that it’s a 98 minute movie with about three quarters of an hour’s worth of plot.

17. Congrats, Mark!

    (3) Romance Writers of America’s RITA Awards were judged by a group of five judges. Yet people remember them for the lack of diversity and for controversial finalists and winners.

    That doesn’t mean that a popular vote would have been better. But that’s part of the issue. Juried awards are judged by people. Popular votes are made by people, too.

18. (3) I’m kind of impressed by his ability to weave in complaints about the Hugos with the plight of underrepresented Palestinian authors.

    I mean, I don’t really understand in the slightest how any of that connects together, but you have to be impressed by someone who doesn’t let that bother him.

    Personally, I think that the “we need panels of wise elders who everyone trusts to just do the right thing” concept is kind of dead for a while after Chengdu, because, y’know, that’s more or less what we got there.

    Or, wait, is that why he brought up the Hugo awards, because he’s trying to say that he supports McCarty-style “the people speak, but the panel of wise elders corrects things when the people make the wrong decision” awards, it’s just that that particular panel had too many bad “entitled white men” on it, rather than the good kind of entitled white man that he describes himself as?

    Man, I’m usually better at decoding stuff than this…

19. 5) I have a very soft spot for The Black Hole but I think that’s well known at this stage 🙂

20. Just because I have Funko Pops of Maximillian and VINCENT on my desk doesn’t mean I feel seen…

    The Black Hole is an underrated classic, transposing Disney’s fascination with Jules Verne into a Star Trek future. The design of the Cygnus is a shout out to Belle Epoque Paris, the architecture of Eiffel, and the art of Robida.

21. Simon Bisson on February 28, 2024 at 8:04 am said:
    Just because I have Funko Pops of Maximillian and VINCENT on my desk doesn’t mean I feel seen…

    The Black Hole is an underrated classic, transposing Disney’s fascination with Jules Verne into a Star Trek future. The design of the Cygnus is a shout out to Belle Epoque Paris, the architecture of Eiffel, and the art of Robida.

    Oh, the art direction’s great. And Maximilian Schell gives a pretty great performance.

    But the plot? The wooden dialogue? The whole “she is telepathic, but only with robots” angle? The pacing?

    I think calling it a classic might be overstating things.

22. @Mike Glyer: You could use (2+i2) for particularly complex items.

23. I overestimate the quality of films released in 1979-80 because that’s when my house got pay TV for the first time. Twelve-year-old me watched almost every movie that came out on a set-top box called Veu that only offered movies and only operated from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. weekdays and noon to 2 a.m. weekends.

    The Black Hole (1979) was glorious. I even got the board game for Christmas. Very nearly almost quite played it once.

24. I unironically love The Black Hole, though I don’t think I’ve seen it since I was in high school. Used to check the VHS out of the local library all the time.

    As far as juried awards go, my favorite podcast On the Media recently ran a strong segment on their positives and negatives: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/who-cares-about-literary-prizes-on-the-media2

25. @Olav Rockne:

    The whole “she is telepathic, but only with robots” angle?

    The novelization explains that she’s not telepathic sensu strictu, but has a brain implant that functions as a head phone.

26. Patrick Morris Miller on February 28, 2024 at 9:02 am said:
    @Olav Rockne

    *Rokne (no ‘C’)

    Huh. That would make more sense. I’ve not read the novel. The movie certainly portrays it as telepathy.

    Personally, I didn’t dislike it as much as Bill Warren did. But I did find his rant about it in SF Review to be entertainingly vitriolic.

27. 3.) Honestly? At this point I say faugh to all awards. No matter what facade is raised to pretend that they’re based on merit, the truth is that all of them, even the blind juried stuff, are biased.

    All you get with juried awards is whatever bias is involved in the selection of said jury. Popular awards come down to who can run the best publicity campaign. Campaigning for awards is exhausting both to do and to watch happening, but then again, in that case the benefit goes to the person who can afford to buy assistance, either human or electronic.

    So yeah. Very cynical that any award these days truly reflects anything more than popularity, whether it be of a person, a writing style, or an idea.

28. Fans of Hesseman and Dr. Johnny Fever might enjoy this program he recently “guest-DJ’d” on WFMU: https://www.awphooey.com/wkrp (It’s a 3-hour program edited from Dr. Fever’s DJ breaks, complete songs that he introduced or closed out, and various commercial spots and news reports also heard on the show. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the stream.)

29. After many discussions, it’s clear that a large number fans, the vocal ones at least, do not want an unbiased Hugo award. They seem to feel that the Hugo awards are participatory in both good and bad ways. Good in that fans make them and fans define what they are, but less good in that this becomes more important than that they actually end up selecting the works that fans, in aggregate, feel are the greatest.

    Any time you have self-selected participation and low turnout, the result of the award will be based more on enthusiasm and popularity than on true extraction of fan’s judgment. The biases from self-selection overwhelm the official thing the award is trying to declare. But many fans like it this way, so it’s unlikely to change. (Any low-turnout vote, like US elections, will suffer the same problem.) This is very well understood by the mathematicians who study this field, though it is not very apparent to the general public. (Some day I hope to change that if I can get Defense against the Dark Arts, a class on critical thinking and flaws in the brain and how people will try to use them to trick you and how to defend yourself, in the curriculum)

30. P J Evans on February 27, 2024 at 8:22 pm said:

    (12) They should have a checklist for that stuff. There’s a reason everyone else uses them, especially for critical work.

    Pah! Time-wasting bureaucracy! If private enterprise has to worry about inconvenient details like doing the job properly, then it’ll be that much harder for it to compete! 🙂

31. I remember The Black Hole scaring the crap out of me when I was a kid, so with my regular Friday Movie Night, we watched it a few months ago and … it still scared the crap out of me. Only (mostly) for different reasons and at different points in the story.

32. @mark: And now purchased….

33. I remember liking the robots when I saw The Black Hole as a kid. Several years ago I was listening to a podcast review of the film (don’t remember which podcast, maybe The Incomparable?) and at the point towards the end where they go through the black hole with the heaven and hell scapes, one of the reviewers said “look, it’s Maximilian Schell in a Maximilian shell” and now that’s all I can think of when I see the movie mentioned.

34. @Brad Templeton: The idea that a juried award is “unbiased” is kinda whack. A juried award means that you have a very specific set of preferences and biases. It may or may not be fairly adjudicated, based on the rules of the organization, but the idea that there is some sort of objective measure of art is…well, as I said, whacked.

    You seems to be laboring under the impression that it was somehow the mandate of the Hugos to fairly and impartially represent the judgment of all fans, but a) that was never the mandate and b) that would require you define “fan” and please dear god let’s not do that!

    The Hugos always were the judgment of the people who chose to participate in the process, and that electorate was always fairly small and skewed in particular ways. It selects for a small, highly engaged readership. It also selects for more wealth, which tends to skew white, and I agree that this is a problem. Still, it is what it is, and not some other thing. If the judgment of the people who chose to participate in the Hugos doesn’t seem to be useful to you, I encourage you to ignore the awards.

    There are juried awards! Lots of ’em. Some have cachet, some do not. If you want to pay attention to a juried award, no one is stopping you. Hell, start your own.

35. RE Uncle Hugo’s Book Shop article previously on File770:

    For those interested Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore is at:
    2716 E 31st St, Minneapolis, MN 55406
    612-824-9984
    E-mail: [email protected]

36. Thanks to all who congratulated me on Becoming Terran dropping, and double-plus thanks to those that bought it.

    Now, if you’ll nominate it for a Hugo…

    Meanwhile, I got up around 10 this morning, and it struck me that I hadn’t gotten calls yet for interviews from the WaPo and the NYT….

    Sorry if anyone spat out their drink laughing while reading the above.

37. @PJ: There’s always a checklist for things like that. Even the small newspace companies are usually pretty good at that, and I know Intuitive Machines has been hiring first-rate people who know how to do space mission assurance. But:

    First, it’s often the case that the checklist calls for Alice to remove the safety from the laser, and then later for Bob to double-check that the safety has been removed, and then for Charlie to triple-check. And once you get three people in that chain, it’s disturbingly easy for Alice to rationalize “I think remembered to take off the safety – oh well, if I forgot, Bob and Charlie will catch it”. Which is OK if it’s only Alice who does it…

    Second, even if the checklist will be followed perfectly, it merely shifts the problem from “remember to remove the safety from the laser” to “remember to put ‘remove the safety from the laser’ into the checklist that people will be following to the letter”. And this was probably the first time that team ever built a spacecraft or wrote a checklist featuring a laser with a safety catch.

38. (no ‘C’)

    Damn my eyes. (Also damn autocorrupt, which probably did that but I should have caught it.)

    The novelization was by Alan Dean Foster, who was not above using psi in his own books but may have decided it didn’t fit the tone of that story.

39. All choices by any person or a group of persons are biased, a choice of a jury and resulting choices of juries will be biased.

    Fandom that votes for Hugo is biased, it is natural, but the main plus is that if you want to support your favorite authors or works you may pay to nominate and vote. Yes, this is a wealth barrier, but also a self-selection of the most hardcore SFF fans, who are interested enough to have their choices heard. Therefore, I think that what Hugo award needs is not a jury but more openness with data, up to publishing the list of all nominees with 10+ votes (not starting from a single vote, for maybe someone asked friends to vote for them, but sees only one vote and knows it is theirs)

40. @Lydia, I don’t think I made any mention of juried awards in what I wrote above. That was in the OP.

    We do have different opinions about what the Hugo awards are meant to be or represented as. The answer is there is not one answer. I do think there’s a difference between what they are — this thing Fans who care do at Worldcons to choose some winners — and how they are seen by various audiences, including the outside audience, broad “fandom,” the general WSFS audience (including the majority who don’t participate in them but still care somewhat about who wins,) people on File770 and other groups.

    However, I disagree with a claim that there isn’t a sizeable population that doesn’t wish them to be accurate and to do a good job at recognizing the greatest works in the field. It is true that people will often say that the Hugos are a popularity contest — and indeed in many ways they are — but there are populations who find that a bug and those who find it a feature, and neither are small. Even those who find it a feature probably would pay lip service to the idea that the winner of the Hugo should be the greatest work of the year in some sense beyond their personal opinion, though it is their opinion which governs how they set their ballot (or decide to vote at all.)

41. wish them to be accurate and to do a good job at recognizing the greatest works in the field.

    What does that even mean, in a practical sense? And how does it look different from the current results?

    As a point of reference, please provide a couple examples of awards in other genres or media that are seen as identifying what are the objectively best works.

42. One view (not the only one but common) is to define some ideal, such as “what would win if everybody voted?” or “What would win if every voter read every nominee?” or “What would win if every read every nominee and voted?” You can’t directly get the ideal, but you judge your system based on how close, in spite the limits of what you can do in reality, it would get to your ideal, because there are often (but not always) approaches to measuring that.
    Today the is “wsfs members (including those who bought memberships just to promote their slate or other such reasons) who are motivated to cast Hugo votes, often without having considered all the candidates.” Some think that’s fine, maybe even the ideal.

    While the biggest flaw in the current system is self-selection, the other big flaw is that if you have not read a work, you typically leave it off your ballot, but the counting system treats that as ranking below all other works you ranked, including “no award.” So in a contest between work B that you put last on your ballot, and work C that you did not read and left out, your ballot would vote for B when your real view is at best “I have no view” or “Can’t compare, but B was not very good.”

    Consider three works, A B and C. A is the 3rd book of a popular trilogy, good, but not as good as the earlier ones. B is a good but not great work from a popular author. C is a work from a less-known author that got a third of the readers, but almost everybody who did read it feels it’s clearly superior. The clear trend among those who read all 3 is C > B > A, but the Hugo system will probably deliver the reverse. Some might think that’s right, others that it’s wrong.

    There is reasonably large field of mathematics devoted to how to study data, and detect and eliminate the biases in results introduced by various flaws in how the data are collected. It is not easy, and in fact a very large fraction of the scientific papers published, by some of the most skilled researchers in the world, contain flaws and mistakes in doing this. So while WSFS is not going to be perfect, that doesn’t mean it can’t do much better.

    When it comes to reading everything, that’s one of the reasons I started what is now called the Hugo Packet. It improves things a lot, but I would also do more to encourage people to consider all candidates or avoid voting in a category, and not to vote if you only looked at 1-2 candidates. I would also alter the ballot so you can mark a candidate as “not considered” so that your ballot will not be counted in a contest with only 1 work you ranked, or possibly 2 of them. (Some people might lie.) I would try to separate the decision to participate in the Hugos from the sending in of the ballots — though the challenge there is the voting population is already small, leaving little room to make it harder. There are a variety of techniques.

43. Brad, I think the problem is that you are operating under the base assumption that there is a set of criteria to assess aesthetic works held by fans that is, if not universal, common among them. It sets up an opposition between this ‘unbiased’ evaluative system as opposed to ‘biased’ taste. You tend to assume that those challenging you accept this framing and prefer the latter to the former. However, that is not the objection. Instead, they are arguing that the common critical criteria to evaluate the genre simply don’t exist.

    To give you a concrete example, I remember JJ providing a fairly accurate assessment of the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The description had a pretty good understanding of how that work was organized and how it engaged in the genre. It was thoughtful criticism. The difference was that JJ hated those qualities and I really enjoyed them. We simply have very different evaluative standards and that’s fandom. There’s a reason that the phrase ‘I bounced off it’ has become such a standard one. There’s a recognition that the work that I hated might be embraced for those very qualities.

    The reason why Lydia brought up the juried awards is that it has a greater ability to do what you are after. You can set up a set of criteria to assess a work and find a small group of people who accept those criteria. (I will note that there is nothing unbiased about this. It just allows the audience to understand the underlying assumptions and either embrace or reject them.) That is simply going to be impossible with a popular fan award because fans come in with very different criteria in their assessment. It’s just an intrinsic part of the process.

    This has always been true, but it has only become more true as the genre has expanded and fragmented, producing an archipelago of different fandoms, rather than a fandom that has a set of common set of texts in common. (There really can’t be a figure at this point that plays the role of someone like Robert Heinlein did in the 40’s and 50’s.)

44. @Robert Wood replying to Brad: Well put. Even if there was consensus that, say, believable characters are more important than plot, or vice versa, what’s a believable character? And believable to whom? There are people who think that nobody can be both a nerd and athletic; if I wrote about Roger Bannister, would I have to stop and prove that he existed?

    Brad’s “What would win if every[one] read every nominee and voted?” is unanswerable and probably not helpful. because if everyone commenting here read the same book, we’d have a lot of different opinions, including “I stopped reading because I didn’t care about these people” and “I want a book that doesn’t require close attention or an unabridged dictionary.”

    Sad Puppies wasn’t the first time science fiction fandom got into huge disagreements about what science fiction should be, not just about how well a given work was meeting that goal.

45. And there’s another metric as well when it comes to Hugo-nominated books; in every Hugo packet for the last ten years or more, there have been works that I start to read and bounce off… but that I can still recognize their intrinsic quality. I can recognize that a work absolutely deserve a Hugo award, based on the skill in its wordcrafting, that I never-the-less have absolutely no interest in reading; in a few cases they have been works that I have intensely disliked. But I can still honestly believe that they belong on the Hugo ballot, and should they win, that they deserve the rocket.

    As opposed to during the Puppy years, when not QUITE all (if memory serves) but MOST of the slated nominees were simply schlock that were not award-worthy works.

    I should add that popularity does not mean a work is award-worthy; popular schlock is still schlock, and the award it wins is simply the bank account of the author. And that’s fine, too. The Sword of Shannara made Terry Brooks a lot of money, but I doubt anyone in these precincts believe it should have won a Hugo.

46. For the first few Hugos I think they were the answer to the questions (asked of the Worldcon attendees) “What’s the best Novel/Short Story/Nevelette you read last year?” “Who did the best SF art you saw last year?” “What was the best SF mag last year?” etc. And the added up the answers, and gave the award to whatever got the most votes.

    That system worked pretty good, for the most part. Paper ballots. One attendee, one vote. It’s hard to say that the Hugo for, say, “Allamagoosa”, is any less valid than one that resulted from EPH. Maybe it should be revisited.

47. @Cassy B
    I remember voting for a few nominees that I wouldn’t read a second time. They were very well written, though.

48. Brad Templeton: I do think there’s a difference between what [the Hugo Awards] are — this thing Fans who care do at Worldcons to choose some winners — and how they are seen by various audiences, including the outside audience, broad “fandom,” the general WSFS audience (including the majority who don’t participate in them but still care somewhat about who wins,) people on File770 and other groups.

    I’ve previously pointed out that you seem to be stuck in an idea of WSFS and Hugo fandom that was what you knew 15+ years ago, but is completely out-of-date now.

    Dude, you are so out-of-touch that you don’t even realize that a massive percentage of the regular commenters here at File 770 nominate and vote in the Hugo Awards every year. Many of them read all the works on the final ballot before voting.

    You keep trying to teach all the grandmothers here how to suck WSFS and Hugo eggs. And it just makes you look hopelessly clueless and out-of-touch.

49. Wait, is there anyone who is interested in Fandom enough to be regularly posting here, but not interested enough to vote in the Hugos at least occasionally? I’m mostly fandom-adjacent, and have wandered on and off this site over the years, but even I have voted a few times as my interests and budget have allowed.

50. Vicki, I definitely agree. The debates definitely aren’t new. You can go back to the disparaging comments made by Jules Verne about the work of H.G. Wells, and that implicit debate got later picked up by John Campbell to explain his differences with Hugo Gernsback. (I’m pretty sure that I got this from Gary Westfahl’s The Mechanics of Wonder, but it’s been a while.)

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