214 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/7/16 Pixels On Earth, Fifth To All Mankind”

1. One other thing people tend to forget is that the various local comic cons that are now 60,000 to 100,000 have for the most part seen their rapid growth in the last few years. Denver went from 15K to 60K+ in one year, Phoenix grew relatively slowly (compared to others) going from 7,000 in 2009 to 78,000 in 2014 (and actually dropped a couple of Ks in 2015). Until recently the only cons bigger than Worldcon on a regular basis were San Diego CCI and Dragon*Con (and possibly FanExpo Canada). A lot of new fans seem to think that 10s of thousands of fans at a con is normal and don’t really realize it is a recent phenomenon. Meanwhile, most local fan run cons have gone down in size and many have disappeared completely.

   Re: Book fans at Dragon*Con. That is pretty much correct in that there is a literary/book convention within Dragon*Con. It’s comparable to what I created within our local comic con where I’d have 5-6 panels, ranging in size from 500 to 20 attendees, at a time, an author guest list (60+ participating) comparable to a large regional SF con, and several major publishers exhibiting or involved in some manner. The last year I was on board my budget for authors was double or triple what the entire budget for our local fan run cons usually has been.

2. Greg:

   The Hugos have a long tradition that is strongly opposed to campaigning for nominations. The new awards have a blank slate. Perhaps something that will distinguish them is that they will encourage campaigning.

   Have you noticed the ‘candidate FAQ’? Although there is nothing a person has formally to do to become a candidate, there seems to be an assumption that people will have an interest in getting themselves nominated. It also refers repeatedly to ‘your fans’, with the suggestion that each nomination comes from dedicated fans of the thing nominated, rather than from people looking around and saying ‘Now, I wonder what…?’

3. @Lee Whiteside, I was very disappointed to get to PHXCC last year and find that your participation was no longer “needed”. There were quite a few authors who felt differently about that.

4. Re: The Prometheus Awards, libertarians

   American libertarianism is a strange funny beast, even if you live here. The problem is that there are about sixteen kinds of it. “Libertarian” in a lot of the Northeast and West Coast can me “economically, I am a Republican who likes guns, but I have no problem with black people, women with autonomy, or LGBTQ.” In places which are strongly one party, it’s easier to say your a libertarian than a member of the other party. In ultra-liberal places like NYC or San Francisco, it’s your hip distinctiveness. In more rarified, stereotypically tech and science circles, it’s anarchism with touches of the American frontier and futurism.

   And in parts of the South and West, it’s white supremacism with a college degree. You’re not cousin Leroy in his trailer – you’re a professional with a college degree, who just knows that “those” people were “better off” (fill in the blank of chosen regrettable time period). You’d be very offended to be called a white supremacist! It’s just the logic of biology. There’s some overlap with the tech libertarians here (Hi Teddy!) because the “why can’t you just let me be” sounds better than the Horst Wesel.

   In other words, libertarians comprise a large group with a lot of lovely people in it – but shot through the with the ugly. I remember an interview Tobias Buckell did where he described how he’d gotten a lot of racist hate mail about his books, and then found out he’d been nominated for a Prometheus. A few years latter, he saw his hate mail spike again – and then found out that yes, he’d been nominated for another Prometheus.

   A lot of this is of course phrased in that they just hate political correctness so much, they simply *have* to condemn every work featuring non-white characters, to protect good literature from the PC hordes. Sound like anyone we all know?

5. I say we scroll off and pixel the site from orbit…

6. TheYoungPretender said:

   American libertarianism is a strange funny beast, even if you live here. The problem is that there are about sixteen kinds of it.

   And I think sixteen is an underestimate, unless one supposes that there are at most fifteen libertarians in the U.S.

7. Re: Lack of a democratic movement on Barrayar. Don’t forget it also has a very feared and competent secret police force with regards to ImpSec. Combine that with apparently no one at or near the top being interested in trying to establish such a movement, and any movement would likely be considered treason to the throne once it reached a certain size. Said size being somewhere between “two folk drunkenly discussing it in a bar” and “holding meetings of more than 10 people”; i.e. it gets nipped in the bud before it can make any real impact, and since things have apparently generally been going well, there’s little impetus to risk ImpSec and try to change.

8. Does Dragon Con have a “real name” policy for its award nominators? There are aspects of how this will work that seem to be under the hood.

   Are we inclined to just trust them? Serious question.

9. Libertarianism is what neoconservatives use when they want to pretend they are rebels.

10. Let’s scroll…turn on the pixels and scroll the news. Let’s scroll, let’s scroll, let’s scroll, scroll, scroll…let’s scroll.

11. It’s likely a similar order of magnitude to Worldcon. . . . Given that there are five tracks dedicated to written media, I’d believe that it draws 5,000 or more fans of written SF/F.

    Sure, I don’t think anyone has suggested that there aren’t book readers at Dragon*Con. Just that Dragon*Con isn’t more attractive than Worldcon to book publishers as a place to interact with book readers. The typical claim one sees from those who assert that Worldcon is dying and that places like Dragon*Con are where authors and book publishers should go is “There’s only 10,000 people at Worldcon, just think how many more readers you could reach if you went to Dragon*Con where there are 60,000 attendees!”

    The problem with that comparison is that, as you’ve illustrated, a lot of Dragon*Con attendees aren’t that interested in books. Some are to be sure, but no one is talking about how Worldcon is dying and they should switch to Dragon*Con by telling authors “you could go to Dragon*Con and be a sideshow to the main event and reach somewhat fewer book readers that you would at Worldcon”.

12. Don’t forget it also has a very feared and competent secret police force with regards to ImpSec.

    A feared and competent secret police force that somehow happens to nip nascent democratic movements off at the bud without an overt and tangible reign of terror really just highlights the ruritanian nature of the depiction of Barrayar. The fascist ruritanianism of it. Having a ruthless and powerful agency protecting a feudal status quo implies a vast network of terror and oppression keeping everyone in their place. But ImpSec is portrayed as this stern but ultimately benevolent paternal organisation. Barrayar is moving in a progressive direction, yes, but at a pace rigorously dictated by the ruling elite. One suspects that the feudal power structure will be transferred smoothly to the more democratic system, with cronyism and corruption and the general looting of the public coffers that goes with it. Civil Campaign REALLY soured me on Barrayaran society.

13. (7) Ancillary Moggy

14. @Brian Z Are we inclined to just trust them? Serious question.

    ROTFL But sure why not? I mean as much as we trust anyone or anything which asks for a name and email address in today’s world.

    ETA: Perhaps next time you could include a list of things which would be worrying?

15. @Steve Davidson,
    Best wishes to you and your loved ones.

    @Aaron,
    Not all Worldcon goers are into books either. But I take your point that the general vibe of Worldcon is more literary than Dragoncon.

    Title idea: “Scrolling frequencies open Captain”.

16. It will be fun to see the shortlist after the nominations:

    1. Honor at Stake, Declan Finn
    2. Somewithers, John C. Wright
    3. Boaty McBoatface
    4. Space Raptor Butt Invasion
    5. SJWs Always Lie, Theodore Beale

    Open voting on the internet always brings out the best in folk.

17. I tend to think people are underestimating the crossover between media and book fans, although maybe because I’m both. I’ve been to Dragon*Con and liked it well enough that I’d go back, although it’s not something I’d want to attend regularly. I will say that most of the media fans I know are more interested in popcorn books than getting their socks blown off.

    @bookworm1398
    Re: Democracy and Barrayar – I recommend to you the fanfic Twenty-Year Man by ellen_fremedon (available on AO3), which is about “Lord Ivan Vorpatril and Byerly Vorrutyer, making Vorbarr Sultana safe for (highly limited experiments in) democracy.”

    Recent reading…
    Thanks to whomever recommend Territory by Emma Bull; I really enjoyed it. Especially when it avoided the trope of lying to someone in order to protect them. Needs more Doc Holliday scenes though. And more Kate scenes. And more scenes with the original characters. Basically, I want more of it. I was disappointed we never got more conversations between Holliday and Jesse.

    Library has notified me that The Windup Girl is available, so that’s next up on my list. I remember this got mixed reviews from Filers.

18. @Brujce Baugh – Thank you very much for that book recommendation. It sounds amazing. Immediate purchase. I’ve read one of the stories you mentioned – the Ligotti – and dug it. It’s one of his more obviously Lovecraft-inspired stories, not just Lovecraftian, but in the overtones.

    RE convention growth, I think the SDCC is an excellent cautionary tale about the perils of growth and appealing to as many people as possible. People may not realize this, but at one point, the SDCC was primarily focused on comic books, not collectible toys, movies, and TV shows. Crazy, but true.

19. Lee Whiteside said:

    Until recently the only cons bigger than Worldcon on a regular basis were San Diego CCI and Dragon*Con (and possibly FanExpo Canada).

    Nitpick: The only ones in North America bigger than Worldcon. (Well, and Gen Con probably goes on that list too.) There are a number of events in Europe that have been huge for a while, and Comiket has been big enough to eat all of the above alive for decades.

    Meanwhile, most local fan run cons have gone down in size and many have disappeared completely.

    Define “most” and “many”?

20. Viverrine: I tend to think people are underestimating the crossover between media and book fans, although maybe because I’m both.

    It’s probably true that (1) people underestimate how many book readers are among the attendees of DC or SDCC, and (2) the overall number isn’t a large percentage of their attendees, because if it was, people would be selling a lot more copies of books.

21. Brian Z asked:

    Does Dragon Con have a “real name” policy for its award nominators? There are aspects of how this will work that seem to be under the hood.

    Are we inclined to just trust them? Serious question.

    I personally trust that the D*C awards administrators will be making a good-faith effort to run honest awards that adhere to their vision of a broad-based fan-voted award.

    How well that vision matches up with what people outside the organization hope or fear it is, and how well the administrators will cope with people who want to participate in bad faith, are questions that are not fully answerable until the awards are handed out. Possibly not even until they’ve tried this for a few years.

22. Viverrine: The Territory recommendation might have come from me; if so, you’re welcome! I know that there’s a sequel in … some stage of completion, but I believe that’s been the case for at least the last several years, so while I haven’t given up hope of seeing it, I’m also not holding my breath at the moment.

23. @Kathodus: Glad to share. 🙂 It really is a great volume, one where a story like “The Last Feast of Harlequin” actually has a whole bunch of worthy neighbors.

24. Title question: Have we had “Ready Scroller One” yet?

25. DragonCon happens to be the same weekend of the Decatur Book Festival (Decatur is just outside the city of Atlanta). Writers and publishers could attend both in the same weekend and some have done so. I live in Atlanta and know many who have attended both events–or wish they could attend both and didn’t have to choose between the two.

26. Nigel: This sort of thing [long periods of war and serious civil disruption] makes revolutionary popular unrest more rather than less likely.

    It can also engender a profound terror of/distaste for even the possibility of certain kinds of civil unrest among the general population. Maybe Barrayar is either A) working slowly towards a more egalitarian society, thus avoiding revolution while (mostly) not realizing it, or B) heading for a Massive Civil Disaster a few decades down the line . . .

27. I personally trust that the D*C awards administrators will be making a good-faith effort to run honest awards that adhere to their vision of a broad-based fan-voted award.

    Why? Who are they? As far as I can tell, the identity of the administrators has not been released, so how can one trust their intentions one way or another? Thus far, the awards are blank slate. Once they have a track record (or the identity of the people running them is revealed and people can evaluate their track record), one could assess their trustworthiness, but until then, how can you make any evaluation at all?

28. Brian Z : Does Dragon Con have a “real name” policy for its award nominators? There are aspects of how this will work that seem to be under the hood.

    Are we inclined to just trust them? Serious question.

    No reason for distrust — YET — the awards are “pie-in-the-sky” at the moment. I do notice among those rules that the administrators have the option of discarding votes — the impression I’m getting is that they’d disqualify anything that met their description of ballot-stuffing.

    Problem is that ANY voting system can be gamed, and some of the ways of doing so can be very subtle and hard to catch. There’s a reason why award administration crews tend to not publicize these methods.

29. It can also engender a profound terror of/distaste for even the possibility of certain kinds of civil unrest among the general population.

    I dunno. I think the same old tyrants getting back in after ousting the horrible new tyrants at no doubt terrible cost is more likely to engender anger and resentment than anything else. The populace seems so docile I’m assuming ImpSec drugs their food.

30. @alexvdl – Yes, I was dismissed i n February, three months before the con and already had about 50 authors lined up. Programming was done ad-hoc with many things I never would have done (a Paranormal Romance panel with several writers who don’t write it and without the author guest know for writing it)., other panels with topics with authors not really suitable for them, scheduling spotlight panels in the mid-evening, etc. This year the programming looks to be better, but the number of authors will be further reduced and the major author guest is one I arranged for two years ago.

    Petrea, that was intended to be North America specific. I did forget to include Gen Con which does have a very good sized author/writing track.

    As for local cons, here in the Phoenix/AZ area, CopperCon is pretty much dead (did not happen in 2015 and may or may not happen in 2016). The parent organization pretty much has no funds to put on a con. LepreCon has struggled to get 400 attendees and has been losing money each of the last several years (2015 did apparently come out in the black). TusCon continues to struggle, although having GRRM this year should help.

    I’m not sure about the San Diego fan cons, but I don’t see that they’ve been growing and may be maintaining size (since they all combined for WesterCon last year, it’s hard to tell), and LosCon has been continuing to decline in attendance for quite a while. BuboniCon in Albuquerque is the nearby con which continues to grow, and they continue to make use of their local author resources whereas the other locals tend to drive them away. There are a lot of local and regional cons that do seem to be thriving, but in my area, its mostly the other direction.

    For a disclaimer, I have chaired two CopperCons, three LepreCons, the 2006 Nebulas, and the 2009 North American Discworld Con and was Books and Authors Manager for Phoenix Comicon from 2009-2014.

31. @Mike Glyer: (reader population isn’t large at DC/SDCC) “because if it was, people would be selling a lot more copies of books.”

    Actually, I blame Amazon and the rise of ebooks for that more than anything else. I mean, I’m a voracious reader, I’m a “lapsed” DC attendee (because of how hard hotel rooms are to get), and I tend to shy away from the book dealers at all cons these days. It’s not because I don’t want to support them or because I don’t read – it’s because lugging a huge book purchase around the convention is awkward, the car’s usually packed pretty tight, and I prefer pixels over paper.

    Show me a book dealer who can sell me ebooks, and I’m there – in fact, I’ve set up solutions for authors who want to sell their ebooks in meatspace. (And they can even add signed copies to their inventory, but personalized ones are tougher.) Otherwise, I’m just not interested unless the paper is of interest for some other reason. (Graphic novels, for instance – I like having those as paper, especially when I can get one of the creators to sign it at the con.)

    Short form: Why go to a con to buy a physical book when you can have an identical copy delivered to your door? Other canny readerfen can reach those conclusions just as easily as I did, which makes “book sales at cons” a singularly poor way to judge how many avid readers are attending.

32. Nigel: I think the same old tyrants getting back in after ousting the horrible new tyrants at no doubt terrible cost is more likely to engender anger and resentment than anything else.

    Depends on what the possible alternatives to the same old tyrants are, doesn’t it? And maybe on how tired the populace is, and how afraid of anarchy. I’m oversimplifying, of course, but think of Tudor England after the Wars of the Roses. The 16th Century wasn’t calm, by any measure, but on some levels almost ANYTHING seemed preferable to another dynastic war. Maybe one of the things we’re getting on Barrayar is just a sign of how effective Aral’s Regency and the years immediately following were? Bujold has dropped hints that the Regency was one long firefight after another, with disaster always barely averted–but as we look around since then, the middle class is rising, technology has caused massive and almost immediate social change so there is hope for Better Times as well as Peace . . . and so on.

33. @Bruce Baugh: I also want to thank you for that book recommendation – I’d seen it and been wondering about it, and your review makes it clear it’s just my kind of thing. (Squamous, to be precise.)

34. I don’t hear much about the Prometheus awards for good or ill. I don’t hear many people praising their choices for being incredible works, but I don’t hear many people criticizing their choices either. It seems an award that is best described by, “Well, if you like that sort of thing, it’s probably good to follow.” Does my impression match up with yours?

    I would say that matches the early years but sometime in the 1990s, they began noticing books not intuitively of the sort you would expect American libertarians to notice positively. So, always worth looking, if not necessarily useful as a default reading list.

35. Rev. Bob: I didn’t mean the number of books sold at the cons.

    I mean, when authors talk about absolute numbers of books sold, or somebody posts a stat from a point-of-sale counting service, with few exceptions that number is a small fraction of the membership in DC/SDCC.

    Never mind that people who don’t attend those cons can also be buyers — if a lot of members were buying books the marketplace would report higher absolute sales figures.

36. And for a footnote to the Phoenix area con scene.

    The Phoenix SciFi Con mentioned here a while back has thrown in the towel.

    Their go fund me page’s latest status reads:

    I regret to announce that due to an almost complete failure to raise the necessary funds the con is cancelled. We’ve sold only one ticket. The GoFundMe only raised $50, not even enough to cover what I’ve spent already on the project. With no money and apparently little interest there’s no way we can make the preparations necessary in the next few months to bring it off. And there’s little evidence we’d have much attendance if we did.

    Their webpage at http://phxscificon.com/ is also gone.

37. Lee Whiteside: LosCon has been continuing to decline in attendance for quite a while.

    Even people who want to come to a LosCon are daunted by the problem that hotel parking is saturated by Thanksgiving weekend travelers.

    However, LosCon also has a long history of a lack of ambition for excellence. It’s amazing how many people Gallifrey — which has a high ambition for excellence — attracts to the same facility. Almost three times as many.

38. (9) DRAGON AWARDS: MORE REACTIONS.
    So would Charlie Jane Anders’ ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY novel be eligible as SF, fantasy, or both? (It’s got computers, it’s got magic.)

    (12) THESE ARE THE JOKES.
    IIRC, Heinlein used this joke back in GLORY ROAD, “Just don’t make a hobbit of it.”

    CAT-TITLING:
    Stringer In a String Land
    Stringworld
    I Haz No Food And I Must Meow
    Catnipped! (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
    The Trouble With Tribble Furballs
    Yowl! (by Allen Ginsberg)
    “…And He Built A Crooked Mouse.”
    Fun With Your New Fishheads

39. @ Steve Davidson
    All best wishes for you and you loved ones getting through this hard time in the best way possible.

40. @Rev. Bob

    Show me a book dealer who can sell me ebooks, and I’m there – in fact, I’ve set up solutions for authors who want to sell their ebooks in meatspace. (And they can even add signed copies to their inventory, but personalized ones are tougher.)

    I’ve wondered whether authors could arrange to autograph single sheets of paper with the cover image on them. (Maybe with a white space at the bottom.)

41. And maybe on how tired the populace is, and how afraid of anarchy.

    That might buy you a few years, but at this point the seeming contentment of the lower orders to let their betters chart a course to a more equitable society defies credulity unless one suppose that in the background organs of the feudal state are repressing the lower orders with an invisible iron hand.

42. @Nigel – That might buy you a few years, but at this point the seeming contentment of the lower orders to let their betters chart a course to a more equitable society defies credulity unless one suppose that in the background organs of the feudal state are repressing the lower orders with an invisible iron hand.

    Revolution generally starts with the middle class or aspirants to same, not with the so called lower orders. I’m not defending Bujold’s political worldbuilding, but if revolt were to happen it would be after the loosening that allows the rise of educated and financially comfortable classes, assuming they aren’t also oppressed for other reasons (like ethnicity or religion).

43. @Kevin Standlee

    WSFS made an organizational error about ten years ago that made it almost impossible to get the site updated or replaced. We’re trying to get it done now. I’d rather not discuss the details, though; they’re too painful

    If you could nudge someone else into providing the details, I (and I’m sure others) would be morbidly fascinated. I’m having trouble picturing how such a situation could even come about. Might be a good example to help other organizations avoid similar pitfalls.

44. Re: Lack of a democratic movement on Barrayar

    Don’t forget that they are also only in the first generation or two with access to the kind of universal-ish education and free communication necessary to foster much of anything.

    A good real world comparison might be current day China. Their industrial progress and growth has been so huge over the last few generations that even mismanaged, corrupt, and with dictators up top, the quality of life growth for much of the population has been so huge that it’s gone a long way towards eliminating any serious rebellion or unrest.

45. Revolution generally starts with the middle class or aspirants to same, not with the so called lower orders.

    Or members of the landed gentry with ideals, aspirations or an eye on the main chance, speaking from my own history. I’m not so much talking about revolution as revolt or rebellion. Of course, revolting against someone as awesome as the Emperor and plotting against gentle loving aristocrats like the Vorkosigans means you can only be a bad guy, so there’s that. Having said that, certainly in Lord Vorpatril’s Alliance, it seemed to me that Barrayar was ripe for an intellectual bourgeois elite to begin espousing revolutionary principles. Overdue, in fact. I would be expecting strikes and mass meetings and demonstrations as the old order crumbles.

46. And of course, there are cons which have no ambition to grow whatsoever, like the World Fantasy Con, which still seems to be doing fairly well (minus some awkward stumbles last year). Despite their deliberately small membership, they have managed to create one of the field’s more prestigious awards.

    I tend to divide genre conventions into two categories. No, not literary and media, though there’s some correlation between those categories and mine. I don’t really have good terms for the two types, but “participant” and “audience” have the right flavor. At some conventions, you go to meet and talk; at others you go to watch and listen. The former are more likely to have a bar at the Meet the Guests event, while the latter are more likely to have fixed seating and a stage. And long lines everywhere. I much prefer the first type. But they’re inherently smaller. If they’re too large, it’s really hard to feel like a participant.

    Worldcon started as the former type, but at its peak, I feel it was edging dangerously into the latter. I think one of the reasons the Hugos have become so prestigious is that they’re voted on by people who want to participate in a dialog about SF, rather than merely be passive consumers.

47. Speaking of Dragons, SpaceX just launched one, and for the first time, they successfully recovered the first stage on a barge at sea.

    https://youtu.be/x8y6nANi32U

48. Lori Coulson said:

    I do notice among those rules that the administrators have the option of discarding votes — the impression I’m getting is that they’d disqualify anything that met their description of ballot-stuffing.

    Same here. And if there’s one way I’d be especially concerned that they screw up in their inagural year, it’s in the unstuffing of the ballot. Either by accidentally deleting too many ballots, or bungling the PR aspect of it. (Because, unfortunately, in these tense times and with D*C’s visibility, there will be a lot of ways to screw up the PR on that one.)

49. Aaron said:

    I personally trust that the D*C awards administrators will be making a good-faith effort to run honest awards that adhere to their vision of a broad-based fan-voted award.

    Why? Who are they? As far as I can tell, the identity of the administrators has not been released, so how can one trust their intentions one way or another?

    Statistically speaking, nearly all human beings are operating in good faith at any given time, so why not?

    I’ll note that assuming good intentions on their part is different from assuming that they’ll do a good job of expressing or implementing those good intentions.

50. And SpaceX nail the water landing at last!

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