(1) DRAGON CON BANS AI ART FROM SALES AREAS. The Dragon Con 2024 Art Show Application Form includes this ban:
No AI artwork of any kind will be allowed to be sold or distributed in the Dragon Con Art Show, Comic and Pop Artist Alley, or Vendor Halls. Failure to comply with our AI Policy can lead to immediate removal from show floor.
(2) VOICE FOR HUGO CHANGE. Mary Robinette Kowal shared her knowledge of how Hugos are administered in a Bluesky thread that starts here. She contrasts how the disqualification of her audiobook novella “Lady Astronaut of Mars” was handled by the 2013 administrator versus the way those ruled “ineligible” have been treated by the 2023 administrator.
After providing more background history, Kowal makes a call for change in Hugo oversight.
(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
A couple of Chinese language videos about the Hugos
Whilst looking for coverage of the Hugos on the Chinese internet, I came across this Bilibili video, posted Wednesday 31st. It’s a compilation of 5 news items from a channel that I think I maybe submitted an item for last year. The final item – from around 10:20 in – is entitled
- 雨锅奖余波 (yuguo jiang yubo – Hugo Award Aftermath).
I don’t think there’s anything new there to anyone who’s been following File 770 coverage, but this is one of the few mainland China items I’ve seen on the subject, outside of user comments on various social media platforms, that – as previously covered – have had a tendency to disappear.
As I type this 3 or 4 days after the video was uploaded, it has received just over a quarter-of-a-million views. I’ve got a local backup copy just in case it does belatedly vanish.
The below screenshots and Google Translated renditions thereof are included primarily for the bullet comments from users. Filers might like to note that the video also includes a (machine translated?) screenshot of a Paul Weimer blog post.
A day earlier, I came across this video from a YouTuber in Taiwan, which was posted 4 days ago, and has just over 200 thousand views as I type this. It’s another explainer for mainstream audiences, so again there won’t be much new to people who’ve been reading this site.
The video is edited in a snappy way, and very memey.
(The place where I came across a link to this video is also worthy of a write-up, but that will have to wait for another day.)
(4) SAWYER’S STATEMENT ABOUT TIANWEN PROJECT. Robert J. Sawyer, a Chengdu Worldcon guest of honor, responded to discussion about the Tianwen Project and his participation in a launch ceremony at the Worldcon in a Facebook comment this week.
Elsewhere he answered some other questions about his guest of honor appearance.
And because people have been known to carelessly treat things others say in comments here as if they are my personal opinion (like Robert J. Sawyer, who recently blocked me in social media), I am going to quote what I wrote to a friend in October 2022 after passage at Chicon 8 of a resolution calling for Sergey Lukyanenko to be disinvited from the Chengdu Worldcon:
…Continuing a line of discussion I raised on FB — I want to be clear that I’m not demanding any action from Robert J Sawyer. If he volunteersto make a public statement, obviously I would run it. Otherwise, it’s not his fault that the other two GoHs are problematic. So while I expect at some point the Twitterati will try and railroad him because he’s the only English-speaker and the only GoH who answers his social media, I personally don’t think Sawyer has to take responsibility for the malfeasance of the committee or their refusal to clean up their GoH slate….
Which it seems to me is quite different from what some of his interrogators have had to say here and on FB. (And the malfeasance I had in mind in October 2022 was that the site selection voters who by then had been members for 10 months had yet to hear from the committee, people who wanted to buy new memberships complained that they couldn’t, and that the new Chengdu website had launched without any statement about who their Guests of Honor were, even though the names had been announced immediately after they won the bid.)
(5) NOT IF IT PUTS HIM OUT OF WORK. “Star Trek’s William Shatner Was Asked About His Stance On A.I. Replacing Him, And He Had An Interesting Response” reports Comicbook.com.
…Shatner recently spoke with Comicbook.com ahead of his upcoming appearance at Orlando’s MegaCon, and was asked about the possibility of his James T. Kirk one day being brought back to life, as it were, via A.I. Never one to shy away from hard questions, the actor gave his honest take on the situation, and how he’d respond to it depending on the situation:
“It’s an interesting question. The strike was all about getting permission to do that. And so if I’m alive, I don’t want A.I. to do that, but if I’m dead and they ask my family and they’re going to pay my family very well to sound like me, I would advise them to say yes.”
William Shatner isn’t so okay with allowing A.I. to take over his character or his own persona if he’s still alive, which is understandable. But if he’s no longer around to pass judgment, he’ll leave it to his family to decide. If a fair price is determined, apparently, he’s giving the green light to allow his likeness to be used for Captain Kirk.
(6) JENNELL JAQUAYS (1956-2024). Artist and game designer Jennell Jaquays, who created scenarios with myriad paths for Dungeons & Dragons, levels for video games like Quake II, and art that invited novices to try role-playing games, died January 10. The New York Times obituary is here.
… Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.
In the early days of D&D, many scenarios were fairly linear — enter dungeon, defeat monsters and plunder, assuming your characters survive.
Ms. Jaquays’s adventures were not so straightforward. They often contained several possible entrances and multiple avenues, some of them secret, by which players could accomplish their goals.
“The result is a fantastically complex and dynamic environment: You can literally run dozens of groups through this module and every one of them will have a fresh and unique experience,” the game designer Justin Alexander wrote about dungeons like Ms. Jaquays’s on his website in 2010…
(7) CHRISTOPHER PRIEST (1943-2024.) British sf writer Christopher Priest died February 2 at the age of 80. (Not to be confused with the comics author with the same name.) His novel The Prestige was a World Fantasy Award winner in 1996. His book The Islanders won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and a British SF Association Award in 2012. Four other works also received BSFA Awards, Inverted World (1975), “Palely Loitering” (1980), The Extremes (1999), and The Separation (2003), the latter winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award as well. He was a Worldcon guest of honor in 1995, and received the Prix Utopia life achievement award in 2001.
In the late Eighties Priest also took time to pen The Last Deadloss Visions “an enquiry into the non-appearance of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions”, which he called “a polemical pamphlet, written to express a point of view and to persuade others of that view.”
The British Council website’s “Christopher Priest – Literature” follows a long biography with a critical appreciation of his work. It says in part:
Christopher Priest was born in Cheadle, Greater Manchester, in 1943…. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, was published by Faber and Faber in 1970, beginning a stretch of two decades during which Priest’s novels appeared almost biennially. 1972’s Fugue for a Darkening Island saw Priest nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. His third novel, The Inverted World (1974), won Priest the first of his four BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Awards. In the mid-1970s he was an associate editor of the UK semi-academic journal Foundations, which provided a distinctive platform for the criticism and popularization of science fiction at a time when the genre was not well established in the academy.
…Priest 1995’s epistolary novel The Prestige was a popular breakthrough. Winner of the World Fantasy Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and nominated for the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke awards, it was adapted into a film directed by Christopher Nolan, released to acclaim in 2006….
As time went by Priest generally was less interested in playing the role of elder statesman his accumulated honors had earned for him than he was in continuing to dish out the kind of fiery opinions he’d shared throughout his career. Consider that in 2012, before going on to win two major awards later in the year, he blasted the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist, saying he was dismayed that several quality books didn’t make the list, with sketches of the defects of the actual choices. (Although not all of the authors took it hard, judging from Charles Stross’ reaction, which was to issue a commemorative t-shirt.)
He is survived by his wife, Nina Allan, who followed her announcement of his passing with a chosen poem.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 3, 1970 — Warwick Davis, 54. This is not by any means a complete listing of everything he’s done. Just remember that before lodging the complaint that I forgot to include something. I didn’t forget. I just didn’t include it.
Warwick Davis is much loved for being the title character in Willow and really not loved for being Lubdan the Leprechaun in, errr, the Leprechaun film series. Look you really don’t need to see the latter even if you’re seriously drunk on cheap fake Irish beer on St. Patrick’s Day. They made him a lot on money but they’re really awful. Willow on the other hand is sublime. It brings a tear to my eye when I see it.
He was the physical aspect of Wicket W. Warrick in Return of the Jedi, Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker though the character was voiced by Darryl Henriques.
He also played a lot of other Star Wars characters. The Phantom Menace saw him play Wald, Weazel, and Yoda in the walking shots, and a street trader on Tatooine; The Force Awakens a Wollivan (and no, I don’t recognize all of these characters); A Star Wars Story saw him being Weeteef Cyubee; then Star Wars: The Last Jedi got the sneeze-worthy character names of Wodibin / Kedpin Shoklop, the latter in a deleted scene. Think I’m done? No. Next is Solo: A Star Wars Story where he’s Weazel / DD-BD / W1-EG5 / WG-22 and finally there’s The Rise of Skywalker where he’s Wicket W. Warrick for the final time plus Wizzich Mozzer again. Whew!
He’s in all five of the Harry Potter films in one or more of three roles — Professor Filius Flitwick, Goblin Bank Teller and Griphook, the latter just as the voice of that character. I’ve only seen the first three films and yes, I’ve loved them deeply even though all I’ve read of the novels was the first hundred pages of the first which I found exquisitely, deeply boring. God, I found her a bad writer.
Now here’s one that I really didn’t expect. He was in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Marvin the Paranoid Android. (Love the voicing of that character in the BBC radio production!) Again he didn’t voiced the character as that was provided by Alan Rickman.
He shows up twice in Narnia productions, once as Nikabrik in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian film, and on the television film Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as Reepicheep. Loved those novels.
Finally he voiced Sniff (Snufkin) in the English language track for the Finnish crown funded animated Moominvalley series. Really great books. The Estate just allowed the likeness of the characters to be commercially used less than a decade ago. Have you seen a Moomin plushie? Oh really cute! I want!
(9) AND GOOD-BYE TO YOU TOO, OLD RIGHTS-OF-MAN. Bill Coberly asks “Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek?” in a piece for The Bulwark, a political Substack, about the changing portrayal of Starfleet across the decades.
…This is not to say that the ’90s shows never delved into the complexity and nuance of this ethos—indeed, playing at the edges of their internal morality was how they derived much of their interest. A number of Starfleet admirals throughout TNG are shown to be venal or corrupt. One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT IN modern Trek. By “modern Trek” I mean the five major TV shows that have aired since the franchise returned to the small screen in 2017: Discovery (2017–present), Picard (2020–23), Lower Decks (2020–present), Prodigy (2021–present), and Strange New Worlds (2022–present). Starfleet as an institution often plays a partially antagonistic role in each of these shows. By the time of Picard, the titular paragon has quit Starfleet in a huff because it no longer lives up to his principles, and in both seasons one and three it is revealed that Starfleet has been compromised by hostile alien agents and cannot be trusted. The first season of Discovery ends with Starfleet condoning genocide, only to be stopped by our heroic crew; Season 2’s villain was an out-of-control Starfleet AI that threatened all life in the galaxy; and Seasons 3 and 4 keep the crew in near-constant conflict with Starfleet and/or Federation brass. Lower Decks is centered on the adventures of a low-level officer who routinely defies Starfleet regulations to help nearby planets in ways that Starfleet would not condone. Even Strange New Worlds, the most archetypal of the modern shows, emphasizes how unjust some of Starfleet’s rules are: In the first episode of the second season, the crew is forced to steal the Starship Enterprise itself to rescue a comrade in defiance of Starfleet’s orders….
(10) SFF BOOKS ON SALE. [Item by BGrandrath.] Back with another Whatnot commercial. The other day someone posted asking about a good place to buy books this might be the answer… “Over 40 Science Fiction Books | Vintage Book Haul”.
BOB’S Books will be on my nomination list for Best Fancast this year.
(11) ROMANTASY. The Guardian discusses “A genre of swords and soulmates: the rise and rise of ‘romantasy’ novels”.
…It is unclear where the “romantasy” label originated: though Bloomsbury said it coined the term to “identify the genre [Sarah J. Maas] was spearheading”, the term was posted on Urban Dictionary as early as 2008. In any case, its usage has exploded in the last year on social media and in marketing copy for fantasy romance titles.
Romantasy authors are selling well in part because of their huge popularity on social media; Maas’ publisher, Bloomsbury, says that videos with hashtags connected to her books have more than 14bn views on TikTok alone. On “BookTok”, the corner of the platform dedicated to book-related content, fans share their rankings of book series, theories about what might happen in future novels, compilations of favourite quotes and outfits inspired by books.
Such novels are typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles. “Romance readers have discovered that romantasy has all the tropes they adore, but set in a world they can escape to and get lost in,” explains Ajebowale Roberts, an editor at HarperCollins.
“The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games” is how Canadian author Nisha J Tuli describes one of her romantasy novels, Trial of the Sun Queen….
(12) BURNSIDE Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] John Burnside is an award-winning poet and author: “John Burnside: ‘My stoner friends were into The Hobbit, but Gormenghast was darker’” in the Guardian.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series. My stoner friends were into Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but that didn’t interest me. What Peake created was darker, more intricate, at once more sinister and more beautiful than anything else I had read up to that point. At the end, I was left with a powerful impression of the richness of language, of its magical power. As my father would say, “people like us” didn’t become writers, (or musicians, or artists) but Peake made me wonder if writing was maybe worth the risk of honourable failure.
(13) TOP 10 STREAMING SFF FOR JANUARY. JustWatch has shared its rankings of the Top 10 Sci-Fi streaming films and TV series for January 2024.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Ersatz Culture, BGrandrath, Ken Josenhans, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Maytree.]
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Well, it’s not going to that hot here tonight.. The low overnight is going to fifteen. It of course is as warm and comfortable as a Hobbit hole here and I’ve no medical appointments ‘til Friday blissfully.
I’m listening to book five of Simon Green’s Ishmael Jone series and Lis will soon be reading Peter Beagle’s forthcoming So You’ve Got Dragons, a novel once butchered by the Rat Bastard but now restored in all its glory by his editor and friend Deborah Grabien.
Click…
(1) Well, good for them.
(2) I think we also need to look at opening up the business meetings to all members. The argument for the changed way that you pay for membersihps, first WSFS, then attending. But the way the businesses meetings are run, it is false to say that you can vote… because you cannot IF YOU ARE NOT ALSO ATTENDING.
I offer, with RFC, an amendment to the rules:
6.3 “Nothing in this Constitution shall be interpreted to prohibit
conducting Hugo Awards nominating and voting and Site Selection or voting in the business meetings…”
This would permit/encourage HYBRID business meetings.
As it is now, attending Worldcon, and then attending the business meeting, I am reminded of a game from, I think the old political/social magazine Evergreen. On one square, if you land on it, reads “You take a two week SDS-sponsored trip to Cuba, and spend the first 13 days in a meeting. They expel you for complaining”.
(3,4) Yep. It was a business setup, and we were used.
(5) That’s not a bad answer. Need to consider it more.
(9) Is that the viewers… or the studio’s idea?
(13) Streaming charts: which Godzilla movie? We had to buy it to watch the 2016 Shin Godzilla a month or so ago. Is this that one, or is Godzilla Minus One now streaming? (And Interstellar is still right in the middle…)
@mark
The Hugo nominations are long over before Worldcon. So are the final votes. (You have to allow time for the plaques to be engraved. And for the slides/videos to be done and collected.)
At-the-con site selection exists, and has for many years. It’s not needed at the business meeting, either.
PJEvans, I’m aware of when the Hugos are voted on. My RFC is not about that, but about attending the business meeting.
So I finished Babel and happily dived into Nettle & Bone. Finally, some nice easy comfort reading…
Oops.
Jim Janney: That’s for sure, Nettle & Bone starts with some heavy imagery.
Oh, it’s meant as “elder statesman”, not statement; got me confused for the while. Also, The Prestige is hardly “epistolary” (shame on you, British Council!).
Also, for those who prefer Sawyer’s statement as text (and may have also been bocked on Facebook, though that can be circumvented in an anonymous browser), he put it in the File770 comments as well.
Current audiobook is Babel.
Current reading is The Last Unicorn.
So You’ve Got Dragons has not yet reached me.
A nasty headache has reached me, though, along with serious complaints from various joints and limbs.
It would be best not to assume I’m awake.
Jan Vanek jr.: One of the Sawyer statements never appeared on 770. The other has been revised since it appeared in comments here, so it’s the latest version that needs to be quoted.
Thanks for catching “elder statement” — I wonder how many more times I was going to have to reread the item before I noticed on my own…
@mark
Then why did you include them?
(AFAIK, no one has been blocked from attending a business meeting if they’re a member, unless they’ve hit the room limit.)
(8) Looks around for Edward Plantagenet
(Still reading The Princes in the Tower)
(7) This should have been at the top, since Christ Priest was one of the few really good SF authors (no-one would ever, of course, “confuse” him with a nobody comics writer!), it is really a sad loss, but at 80, what is really to expect? We’ve lost a lot of the best ones, as GRRM wrote the other day: Bishop, Waldrop etc.
And the ongoing thing about that Chinese worldcon and the Hugos – what would you, really, expect when letting the con go to a dictatorship run country? Some people are just so, eh, naïve, to put it mildly…
(7) May his memory be a blessing.
My blog post on Sawyer’s Worldcon remarks (https://garymcgath.com/wp/sawyer-grovels-to-china/) still gets occasional views, so I’ve just updated it to cite his comments quoted here, which improve my opinion of him.
@Jan-Erik
Hey now, Christopher Priest the comic book writer (AKA Jim Owsley) is definitely not a nobody. He’s generally considered to be the first black writer /editor in mainstream comics, and his book “Quantum and Woody: The World’s Worst Superhero Team” is a great deconstruction and partial reconstruction of the superhero genre. He has had a long and distinguished career in comics and deserves more respect than that.
Belated click.
1) Good idea, but if the artist says it isn’t AI, what’s the standard of proof?
A serious look a L. Ron Hubbard’s career as an SFF writer.
I’m reading the March/April 2023 F&SF issue– both the Arneson story (Mr. Catt) (charming and moderately scary) and the Beagle story (The Weremouse of Millicent Bradley Middle School) (terrifying) are plausible Hugo nominees..
It’s been a long time since I’ve bought an SF magazine, and I was shocked to find it cost $11,
I’m afraid Robert Sawyer is going to have to continue to live without my admiration.
In response to @mark talking about opening up the business meeting:
People are proposing to pass a variety of constitutional amendments that would effectively limit the ability of China to bid for and win a second Worldcon. Assuming we could figure out a way to run an effective virtual/hybrid meeting,, how do people feel about that making it much easier for two years worth of concerted effort by Chinese members to overturn any rules we put in place? They’ve already demonstrated that they can turn out voters when it matters to them and when remote participation is allowed.
Requiescat in pace, Christopher Priest
Jan-Erik Zandersson: Remarkable insight about censorship in China. If only someone here had posted literally dozens of news items about that before the bid was even voted on. Or I guess you could have said something then, and not just smirk about it now.
9) I believe this is a slight exaggeration. Even in the TOS there were the same themes the author decries today; Kirk and Spock go against the rules of Starfleet (down to courting the death penalty) to help their friends, and Starfleet field-tests replacing the captain and other crewmembers with an AI. Nothing in that episode or any other notes that Starfleet developed some inhibition about trying again later. While Starfleet is a noble concept, it was recognized from the start that any organization can go wrong regardless how excellent its founding principle may be.
(7) RIP, Chris, and thank you for all the amazing fiction.
Currently rereading The Inverted World, a book that I think permanently altered the shape of my brain.
@Jan-Erik Zandersson “(no-one would ever, of course, “confuse” him with a nobody comics writer!)”
I’ve probably read more stuff by the comics Christopher Priest than the other one.
(7) The critic John Clute wrote a fine commemoration of Christopher Priest for the Guardian.
WRT #11. Romantic fantasy has been around for a long time, even if not necessarily under that name.
Romancelandia is a VAST area, encompassing a huge range of titles!
If there’s a core romance with a Happy Ever After or Happy For Now, it’s a romance.
This is why “Gone with the Wind” is NOT a romance.
Actually, yes and rather no: as anyone can easily check, the screenshoted, second version of Sawyer’s Facebook post (rather than comment) differs from the earlier one (identical with the one he posted at https://file770.com/barkley-so-glad-you-didnt-ask-80/comment-page-2/#comment-1603108 ) only technically, in that he changed “My official Chengdu Worldcon programming schedule — the only one ever given to me — is up on my website” to “… is below”.
@P J Evans: The clause of the WSFS constitution that mark is proposing to amend already has “… by electronic means” as its next three words.
The point of Mark’s proposal is to add “voting in the business meetings” as one of the things that could be done by electronic means, in addition to “Hugo Awards nominating and voting and Site Selection voting” which are already mentioned as being permitted to be done electronically.
Jan Vanek jr: What are your answers to these questions: Was Sawyer’s statement more newsworthy when he left it here as a comment or when he presented it to all his FB readers? Was Sawyer’s statement more newsworthy before or after the post here about the Tianwen Program?
Everybody can figure out what my answers to those questions are, because I didn’t turn the comment into a Scroll item. I did quote his FB post.
(9) @Jayne, aside from Spock stealing the Enterprise in that one mash-up episode, I can’t think of a single case in TOS where any of the main cast disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer who was physically present unless alien mind control was involved. And several occasions when the superior officer was clearly an idiot who was likely to get them killed, but Kirk et al obeyed orders anyway.
Because they (writers and characters) understood that they were on a warship, and the only way that works, the only way that’s not a menace to everyone else within reach, is if everybody is on the same side working towards the same goal and absolutely clear as to who is in charge. If that doesn’t happen, OK, it’s an imperfect universe – but it has to be rare, and it has to be taken seriously.
“Strange New Worlds”, seems to mostly follow this ethic with a few lapses (including one steal-the-Enterprise moment that needs to not be a regular thing). But on the “Discovery” pilot has the protagonist committing actual violent mutiny over a tactical disagreement with her commander and we all know this is going to be effectively forgotten as soon as the writers can manage it. They have the crew of a starship, backed by Starfleet, going up against literally anything in the universe that the writers want, and it’s like the only way they can think of to achieve drama is to turn them against one another.
That’s a loss, and a big step down from what Star Trek used to be.
Adding to the piece about Christopher Priest, he was active in SF fandom before he was professionally published, and during his earlier years of writing fiction. He contributed to fanzines, and Last Deadloss Visions originally was an issue of Deadloss (#5), his fanzine.
Re. (4) as the person who first picked up on Tianwen – at least in the Anglosphere – way back in the 2023-10-20 Scroll (and slightly earlier than that on Twitter), I was a bit surprised to see a tweet (IIRC) come up on my feed a couple of days ago, about Robert J. Sawyer denying any involvement in Tianwen, as I couldn’t recall seeing his name on any of the material I read/documented at the time. My guess is that this particular mess has been due to a combination of any lack of a proper press release to back up the glitzy on-stage antics, and sloppy journalism.
(I did ask Dave McCarty on Facebook on November 1st what Tianwen was, but he dodged the question. Compared to what others later received from him, I guess I got off lucky.)
Regarding Sawyer and Lukyanenko, can I remind people that an anthology containing works by them and Cixin Liu was launched at the con? I first mentioned this in the September 28th Scroll, and my Sent email folder indicates there were later updates on October 10th, October 12th and November 6th.
However, there should have been an additional update regarding this anthology on October 23rd. Unfortunately on that day I had to attend to my mother being rushed to hospital that afternoon (she’s fine now), which meant that all Mike got by way of Chengdu updates that day was a set of very incomplete rough notes, in an unpublishable state. When I was able to get back to work on the updates, I failed to pick up on all of the missed October 23rd items. The missed item that may or may not be pertinent here is a Weibo post, which contains a photo taken at (I think) the booth of the publisher of that anthology, with a standee promoting that book.
How much of a difference there is between people appearing on stage together, and appearing in an anthology together, I leave to Filers to determine for themselves.
Romance fiction 101, oh boy.
Secondly, the wave of current reporting about romantasy always completely acknowledges that such books have been around for a long time. That’s completely besides the point, since no one, but absolutely no one, is claiming otherwise, as would be clear to anyone who read any of the various stories, including this GUARDIAN piece, or watched any of the various video news reports from this past month.
What is the point is that in recent months, a wave of bookstores devoted strictly to romantasy have opened, existing romance-dedicated bookstores have experienced in recent months a vast wave of new, enthusiastic, readers demanding more romantasy and enlarged their dedicated sections, and publishers have vastly extended their lines of romantasy.
That there’s a new generation of writers in the subgenre in the past year is news.
Plenty of industry authorities have testified to the vast new waves of enthusiasm for romantasy in the past several months. They’re not talking about what’s been around for years, or long-standing facts, or Romance Fiction 101.
GUARDIAN:
BookTok super-enthusiasm for romantasy has not “around for a long time.”
1) “A Taste of Armageddon”: Scotty refuses orders from the Ambassador in charge of their diplomatic mission to drop shields. The Ambassador explicitly has authority and power to overrule Scotty, but Scotty explicitly refuses to obey his direct orders.
2) In “Turnabout Intruder,” the entire bridge crew refuses the orders of Captain Kirk after “he” orders the execution of crew for mutiny. That Kirk was possessed via alien tech doesn’t change the fact that none of the crew who actually did plot mutiny were mind-controlled; they were disobeying the orders of a superior officer, their captain.
3) In “Amok Time,” Kirk disobeys orders to go to Altair Six and deliberately chooses to go to Vulcan instead, to save Spock’s life.
4) In the movie STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, Kirk disobeys the orders of the Starfleet Commander, steals the Enterprise, takes it to the Genesis Planet, and blows up the ship. You can’t get more disobedient than that.
5) “Balance of Terror”: Kirk violates orders and enters the Neutral Zone to chase the Romulan ship.
6) “The Mark of Gideon”: Spock violates Starfleet orders and beams down to the planet to search for Captain Kirk.
Is that enough times?
You’ve cited one episode from four seasons of DISCO and one episode from two seasons (granted, short seasons) of SNW, as opposed to, say, the six (or five, if you disallow the cited movie) times on TOS (off the top of my head).
This does not do a great job of being persuasive that somehow the STAR TREK franchise is suffering “a loss, and a big step down from what Star Trek used to be.”
(2) VOICE FOR HUGO CHANGE.
Mary Robinette Kowal: You can expect to see me at the WSFS meetings in Glasgow. And I’m pissed.
This is pretty rich — coming from the person who overrode WSFS and the Site Selection Division and forced them to accept the improper stuffed ballots for the Chengdu Worldcon Bid, for which her Chinese Editor was on the bid committee.
Hey, MRK, I think you’ve done more than enough damage already, why don’t you sit this one out???
Agreed. I’ve thought of science fiction’s Christopher Priest as the “real” Christopher Priest since discovering his brilliant rant “The Last Deadloss Visions,” but I wouldn’t call the one in comics a nobody. He is a pioneer among Black comics editors and creators. His role in the launch of Milestone and co-creation of Static cement his place in comics history and he continues to be active in the field, most recently to my knowledge on Dynamite’s Vampirella.
@JJ
That’s just nasty.
P J Evans: That’s just nasty.
No, it’s not. It’s on point.
MRK inappropriately interfered in a situation where 1) she shouldn’t have been interfering anyway, and 2) she had an explicit Conflict of Interest.
And now she’s upset about a situation that she specifically helped to create?
If she actually feels bad about what happened with the 2023 Hugo Awards, a mea culpa would be the better place to start.
If the site selection committee at Discon voted to reject improper ballots and Mary Robinette Kowal overruled them, it’s as big an abuse of power as what Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow have been censured for. It rendered the site vote illegitimate.
Can someone more familiar with the administration of site selection votes explain whether there is precedent for a Worldcon chair making a move like that to override the authority of the people put in place to make that decision?
MRK’s decision to count all the ballots was appropriate and necessary. The Chinese fans who went through the process of paying for a site selection token, which was very difficult from China, deserved to have their votes counted.
There are many reasons to be disappointed about the results of the election, but at the time, MRK had to make a call, and she made the right call.
Tom Becker: MRK’s decision to count all the ballots was appropriate and necessary.
That is your opinion. It is not a fact.
Remembering what I heard about at Discon, I’m not sure there were any good choices. Winnipeg was accused of trying to play the “they stuffed the ballot box” card as well, so people were mad at everyone, and then there were all the “no home address” issues.
Who do you piss off, and no matter what your decision, half of fandom will be mad at you either way.
rcade: To my knowledge none of the participants involved has gone on the record to tell how DisCon III made the decision to accept the site selection ballots that were lacking entries for addresses, or despite whatever other problems existed (that Kevin Standlee has alluded to here and in other writings.) So we don’t know what MRK did.
That said, the WSFS Constitution vested DisCon III with full authority to handle the 2023 site selection. The chair of DisCon III was in line of authority over the Site Selection administrator. If she made a decision about the matter it was an exercise of her actual authority, not an abuse of it.
The business meeting, on the other hand, had NO authority to decide anything about the 2023 site selection — which is why the question was slid in the side door as a resolution. But if the Site Selection administrator would shop for an answer there, it’s easy to imagine he would also have decided against making a decision by himself and took it up the line to the division head or convention chair.
@JJ–We had reasons to question the ballots, but no hard evidence. Throwing them out on iffy evidence would have caused a different kind of damage to WorldCon.
Even now, with disqualifications of finalists that are clearly either direct censorship, or self-censorship due to fear of official consequences, we still don’t know that the site selection ballots weren’t legitimate.
And this is why we need to be able to disqualify bids based in authoritarian regimes at the start, not wait until questionable or clearly corrupt things actually happen.
Lis Carey: We had reasons to question the ballots, but no hard evidence.
Numerous e-mail addresses each having a large number of ballots associated with that address is fairly solid evidence that the “One vote per individual” rule was being violated.
And no matter how you slice it or dice it, there was no way MRK had any business weighing in on decisions affecting a Worldcon bid of which her own editor was a main participant.
It doesn’t matter whether she had any nefarious intent. She knew her editor was on the Chengdu bid committee. She knew she had a Conflict of Interest.
Since you are so certain, tell us about the ballots the site selection committee wanted to reject, the grounds for rejection of those ballots, and the total number of such ballots.
If you don’t know these answers, I suggest your certitude about the appropriateness of Kowal’s action is misplaced.
I would feel better about that proposition if I heard that other Worldcon chairs overruled their site selection or Hugo Awards committees regarding the rejection of votes. If Kowal was the outlier and her action helped her Chinese editor in a personal conflict of interest, that doesn’t pass the smell test. Especially in light of everything else we now know about Chengdu and how the whole thing was corrupted to push massive business deals at the exclusion of Chinese science fiction fandom.
I’m sad to hear the news of Jennell Jaquays’ passing but glad to see the New York Times give her career such a prominent remembrance. She did some wonderful art for Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games during the early years, particularly of the game’s eponymous monster. One of my favorites is the dragon shown on the cover of Dragon Magazine 182. The children were modeled after her son Zach and daughter Amanda.
Her RPG designs were also exceptional. I have several of her Central Casting gaming supplements and likely her best-remembered Judges Guild D&D module Dark Tower as well.
I didn’t know she also worked on games for ColecoVision! She was all over my childhood.
rcade: The “smell test” doesn’t seem very meaningful to me. Because if over a thousand site selection ballots cast by accepted members of DisCon III from China were tossed because somebody vetoed them behind the scenes, ballots which did not violate a clear requirement of the rules (remember, this is why the Site Selection administrator went to get a resolution from the business meeting), and which could not be proven fraudulent (rather than merely announced in social media as suspicious), social media would have justly fallen on MRK’s head for undermining the democratic process. That would not have smelled too good to anyone either.
@JJ:
It’s my understanding, I think from things ErsatzCulture has said/quoted (but correct me, please, if I’m wrong) that talking to Chinese fans has revealed that those very suspicious-looking site ballots in fact represented lots of individual Chinese fans whose ballots were “bundled” because:
–it’s so difficult to get through the Great Firewall, it’s much easier to bundle and go through once via a solid VPN
–it’s so difficult to do international payments, ditto
–many (a majority?) of the site selection voters were college students, because the votes were coming out of college SF clubs, so their physical addresses were unstable
–it was much safer for the students to make international contacts via an obscured, bundled system
SO: I don’t think they were cheating, morally speaking.
HOWEVER: any jurisdiction where people feel as though they need to obfusticate whether they’d voted in Worldcon Site Selection or for the Hugos should be disqualified from bidding for a site. A priori.
IMHO no Chinese site can be considered for Worldcon while the Great Firewall remains up.
The WSFS Constitution says
It does not say it must be a postal mail address. It does not say each voter must have a unique address.
There was a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt raised about the 2023 site selection ballots filed from China. But the Site Selection Administrator had to follow the rules. Again, it was the right call to count the ballots.
As far as i can tell, the Chinese fans who voted a Worldcon in their country were legitimate. They deserved to have their votes counted. They also deserved to have a better Worldcon committee and a better-run Worldcon than what they got.
Now that we’re hearing about problems with Chengdu, people are bringing up the fear, uncertainty and doubt about the site selection ballots again. There still is no substance to the allegations.