Pixel Scroll 5/17/16 There and Gernsback Again

(1) I WONDER WHAT THE KING IS DOING TONIGHT. Kameron Hurley observes that fame and fortune don’t go hand-in-hand: “Dancing for Dinner: Fame, Publishing, and Breakout Books”.

In my own life, I find I have to remind people often that I have a day job. I actually had a client email me after a conference call one time and ask, “Are you THE Kameron Hurley?” and I had to admit that I was. I had to have a conversation with my boss about online harassment, and how the release of my upcoming essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution, might create some pushback at my job, and how we should handle that should it happen. The whiplash you get in going to an event where people literally scream with happiness when you walk into a room and back to private life where you’re just another cog is really weird (to be truthful, I greatly enjoy my anonymity in Ohio, and don’t want it another way, but the dissonance is weird).

Yet this balancing act between public and private life, or public personae and private day job, is something that many thousands of other writers and artists struggle with every day. I was reading that Joe Abercrombie kept his day job for a lot longer than you might have thought (and even then, picked up freelancing jobs until a few years ago), and Gene Wolfe has had a day job his whole career. Most of us have to do this. It’s just… increasingly awkward to find that the fame part comes so much faster than the money part (if the money comes at all). There’s this strange assumption that by being an artist, you have traded away your private life in exchange for money. But what about those of us who never have the money to keep ourselves safe from the fame?

(2) HILL’S DARKSIDE. Coming in October from IDW, “Joe Hill’s Terrifying Scripts For Tales From The Darkside Collected”.

Originally planned as a reboot for the storied series, Hill’s scripts for these never-broadcast television episodes allow the New York Times bestselling author to stretch his creative muscles, his effortless mastery of the twisted subject matter injecting new terrors into this silver screen legend.

Joining Hill in resurrecting this classic is Charles Paul Wilson III, known to many Joe Hill fans as the artist responsible for the nightmare vision made real in their most recent collaboration…

“When I was offered a chance to reinvent Tales from the Darkside, I leapt,” said Hill. “This was a landmark show for my generation: our Twilight Zone, our Outer Limits. Right away, I wanted to do something that honored the spirit of the original Darkside… and at the same time I wanted to go bigger, to do something fresh, something with scope. In the end I wrote three scripts and sketched a vision for a whole Darkside universe. I envisioned a series of individual horror stories that would, ultimately, turn out to be connected by a single mythology. I really wanted to do something with the scale of Locke & Key. TV is tough and in the end we didn’t quite make it to the little screen. But it’s a delight and a thrill to share the scripts alongside Charles Paul Wilson’s beautifully sick illustrations. Here’s the show that could’ve been, now playing in your imagination.”

Tales From The Darkside was created by George A. Romero.

(3) MONSTER CENSUS. Max Florschutz, in “Being a Better Writer: Micro-Blast #3”, answers the question “Do I Need Fantastic Creatures in My Fantasy?”

No, actually.

All right, let me explain a bit more. Usually when we think of fantasy we think of fantastic creatures: Beings like dragons, unicorns, monstrous beasts, etc. Such creatures fill the realm of myth and legend the world over, and are a common sight in fantasy stories. But do you need one in your story?

Well, no. There are plenty of stories out there where the fantastic and the incredible happen without any sort of mythical, shocking, or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary beasts and creatures entering the narrative. A lot of stories are about human interaction, no beasts needed. You can still write a fantastic fantasy without any indication or even mention of fantastic beasts, and there are plenty of fantasy books that prove this as well. For example, take the success of GRRM’s Game of Thrones books. Granted, they pull in dragons and other fantastic beasts as the series moves on, but such elements only, if I recall correctly, appear right at the end of the first book—the rest of that introduction to the series draws more on the characters and the goings-on of a political kingdom to keep you reading (as well as lots of incest and other elements, which is why I only ever read that first book and didn’t care to move on).

My disinterest in the series aside, the first title in the series shows that your fantasy doesn’t need to have fantastical beasts in order to be gripping. You can write a fantastic amount of drama, magic, and excitement without ever needing a fantastical creature.

(4) STRAW WARS. Bence Pintér, editor-in-chief of the Hungaran SF portal Mandiner.sci-fi, recommends a funny video from Hungary. Public workers created Star Wars sculptures from bales of straw in Tiszaigar, a small village in the Great Hungarian Plain.

(5) PLANETARY SOCIETY. Robert Picardo’s Planetary Post, “A Visit to JPL.”

Welcome to the fourth installment of The Planetary Post, our monthly newsletter from Robert Picardo featuring the most notable space happenings. This month we head to JPL for a tour with two young friends.

 

(6) LONGLIST. Aaron Pound is gathering data for “The Hugo Longlist Project” at Dreaming of Other Worlds.

As I noted a few days ago, it does not appear that anyone is tracking the nominees on the Hugo longlist. There are plausible reasons for this, the most important of which is that it is entirely informal and unofficial. The Hugo administrators usually do not even bother to determine if a particular nominee is eligible in the category they have been nominated in unless it makes the list of finalists. This does not mean, however, that this data is not without value. Thus far, however, it has not been compiled into a coherent whole. This project is intended to fill in this gap by compiling all of the Hugo longlist data into a series of posts so it is all accessible in one location. Some notes:

  1. Though the Hugo statistical data that is released concerning the top fifteen nominees lists the total number of nominations each work received and ranks them accordingly, they are presented here in alphabetical order. Perusing the statistics, it is not uncommon for a work to receive the most nominations in the nominating round, but not win the Hugo award in the award selection round. This indicates to me that the raw number of nominations is not a worthwhile guide to whether one work is “better” than another in the eyes of the Hugo voters.

(7) NEBULA TRIP REPORT. Zak Zyz filled in readers about “My trip to the Nebulas, Installment 1: Cry Havoc and let slip the Blogs of War”.

I was sick as hell on Thursday but made a point to get out to see at least @MikeRUnderwood’s sales panel. Very valuable info, he first went into an explanation of a few retail-style presentation techniques useful for displaying books when working a booth at a con.

Two presentation points I plan to implement:

  1. Have bookstands, a tablecloth, and ideally a banner or a sign that complement your brand
  2. Have a stack of books underneath yours, so people know they aren’t taking your last copy.

Mike Underwood has a lot of sales and retail experience and it shows. He talked about a flowchart method to his sales pitch, favoring a soft-sell approach with a lot of emphasis on gauging the comfort and interest level of a prospective buyer. He talked about the importance of genre familiarity, knowing what’s popular for comparison not just to your own genre, but to build bridges to people who aren’t necessarily SFF readers (or even big readers at all) in larger conventions with a more diverse crowd. A final tip was offering people who were interested but not willing to commit to a sale a chance to join your email list.

This was a valuable panel that taught me a few things that will make it easier to sell books in person. He also fielded my question about selling books to independent stores, with some great advice about talking to book buyers. Just the information in this one panel was worth the price of admission to me.

I should also note Mike has an active Kickstarter going for Genrenauts.

(8) CAMERA ARTISTE. John Scalzi announced on Whatever that he posted an exquisite set of photos of the Nebula Awards banquet in this Flickr album.

(9) ZERO YOBS. Nigel battled Damien Walter on Twitter.

I don’t think Walter is actually wrong. Those looking for WSFS rules permitting an action should try the thought experiment of looking instead for rules that will prevent that action. The WSFS rules give great latitude to the committee in all matters that aren’t specifically addressed in the WSFS constitution. The necessary ingredient is for the corporate entity running the con to have the political will to act — I have no idea whether MACII has even discussed the idea. Also, it would cost money to refund memberships — don’t underestimate that issue.

(10) S.H.I.E.L.D. TRAVELS IN TIME. Comic Book Resources reports “ABC Bumps ‘Agents of SHIELD to New Timeslot”.

When “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” returns to ABC this fall, the show will air in a new timeslot: Tuesday nights at 10 pm EST. This pushes the show back an hour from its original 9 pm slot, which will now be filled by “Fresh Off the Boat” and “The Real O’Neals.”

The news follows the cancellation of “Agent Carter,” which aired during “S.H.I.E.L.D.’s” past two winter hiatuses, and ABC’s decision not to move forward with the Mockingbird-centric “Marvel’s Most Wanted” spinoff.

(11) INNOVATION. The Valley Forge in 2017 NASFiC bid has posted a new progress report on Facebook.

We’re pleased to announce the Valley Forge 2017 Mobie Fund!

Mobie Fund Mission: The Mobie Fund will provide monetary assistance to those fans who have difficulty attending NASFIC due to the financial burden of mobility scooter rental. We will seek donations from all who want to help make NASFiC accessible. Valley Forge 2017 will match donations to the fund, up to $500.

After the site selection vote at MidAmeriCon II, the 2016 WorldCon, we will accept donations in cash or through Paypal via our website. At the same time, those who wish to apply for financial assistance for mobility scooter rental can contact us through our website.

Please note: The Mobie Fund is first-come, first-serve. We will confirm that your spot is available, but it won’t be secured until we receive your registration for the con. Upon arrival at the hotel, you can pick up your pre-paid mobie at the mobie rental spot. If, at the end of the con, the Mobie Fund still has a balance, we will reimburse that money among the other mobie riders at the con.

(12) SUICIDE SPINOFF. According to Yahoo! Movies, “Margot Robbie Spearheads Proposed Harley Quinn Movie With More Female DC Comics Characters”.

Months ahead of the opening of Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. is already contemplating a spin-off for the DC Entertainment anti-heroine, Harley Quinn.

Margot Robbie, who stars as the villainess in Suicide Squad, is attached to reprise the character and would also produce the untitled spin-off, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

But in an interesting twist, the project is not a Quinn solo movie. Rather, it would focus on several of DC’s female heroes and villains.

Details are being closely guarded but names such as Batgirl and Birds of Prey have surfaced, although in what capacity, it’s not clear. Warner Bros. isn’t commenting.

There is also a scribe penning the script but those details, too, are being kept secret, although it is known that the writer is female.

(13) STANISLAW LEM HONORED. A Kraków Science Festival will be named after Stanislaw Lem says Radio Poland.

Late science-fiction writer, philosopher and futurologist, Stanislaw Lem, is the patron of the 16th edition of the Science Festival, which begins in Kraków, southern Poland, on Thursday.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Lem’s death. The slogan of this year’s festival is “Time and Space”. “Lem’s work strongly refers to the concept of time and space, which are also the domain of science,” the chairman of the festival’s organising committee, prof. Robert Stawarz, said.

(14) OLDIE BUT GOODIE. Just discovered this 2011 Robot Chicken video today: “Aliens Acid Blood.“

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Bence Pintér, JJ and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Leslie C.]

131 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/17/16 There and Gernsback Again

  1. @Bill:

    But any process which allows for this to happen, when the decision to void a ballot is based on what the ballot is cast for, just goes to validate the original puppy complaint — that the Hugos are selected by an insular self-validating group rather than a larger community.

    Nope. It does no such thing.

  2. The puppies have complained about basically everything. Any action taken by WSFS members will be validating a complaint they’ve made somewhere.

  3. Puppy leaders say lots of things. Most of it not true when it comes to how Worldcon, Hugos, and WSFS works because they haven’t taken the time to read the WSFS constitution or learn Hugo history. No matter what WSFS/attending Worldcon members do or don’t do the puppy leaders will find something wrong.

    When making decisions about changing the rules the concern is whether it’s within the spirit of WSFS. Do the changes accomplish the objective and is the objective something we want to do? Do two Worldcon business meetings made up of whatever attending Worldcon members show up agree is good and right for WSFS.

    In this case we’d like to solve a problem of bloc voting which has never been acceptable.

  4. I can’t get worked up about kingmaking (“I slated X and it’s a finalist” and/or “I slated Y and it won”), at least not as much as keeping good works (or a particular work) off the ballot, which IMHO is a very different thing.

    ETA: And yes, Puppies of both stripes say a lot of B.S. I’m not sure everything they have ever said should tie our hands from doing things. I’m not sure about throwing out ballots though…ugh gets to strong admins that some don’t like the thought of (and which the admins don’t seem to want to be).

  5. In other news, ebook sales (U.S. and I don’t promise which store has what, only that iTunes has them as I type this).

    I mentioned a $2.99 sale for Carrie Patel’s The Buried Life Angry Robot), bemoaning the fact that it wasn’t on iTunes. Well, now it is for sale on iTunes, too. (On? at? in? iTunes – bleah, insert your preferred preposition.) ::snapping it up::

    Jonathan Wood’s No Hero (Titan; DRM) is on sale for 99 cents; this has been on my “check-it-out” list for a while. Apparently Barnes and Noble listed it as one of the 20 best paranormal fantasy novels of the last decade – who knew? 😉 It sounds quasi-horror-ish, but I’ve read good things about it elsewhere, too (not just from B&N).

    James A. Moore’s Seven Forges (Angry Robot; sale price = DRM) is on sale for $2.99; I’ve read some recommendations for this here in Filerville. 😉

    #YesIMissMeredithWhyDoYouAsk
    #NoI’mNotForgettingToCheckTheBoxWhyDoYouAsk

  6. Any process that allows ballots to be voided will also have to have clear definitions of what circumstances allow them to be voided. At which point it becomes “You broke the rules. We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”

    Personally, I consider what the Griefers are doing to be voter fraud.

  7. @ Rail

    What the griefers do is immoral, but it isnot voter fraud. Voter fraud means either counting votes that does not exist, or not counting votes that does exist. Neither applies here.

  8. Any process that allows ballots to be voided will also have to have clear definitions of what circumstances allow them to be voided.

    It should also include refunds, since a significant benefit of a supporting membership is the right to nominate. And the problem of a current year having to refund supporting memberships paid to a previous con committee is significant, and is a likely attack vector by griefers.

  9. Bill on May 20, 2016 at 8:55 am said:

    It should also include refunds, since a significant benefit of a supporting membership is the right to nominate. And the problem of a current year having to refund supporting memberships paid to a previous con committee is significant, and is a likely attack vector by griefers.

    I agree that any Worldcon that wants to reject a person’s membership should be obliged to refund it. I also think that the issue of interlinked Worldcons here (three conventions, three legal entities, but members of all three have nominating rights) makes rejecting votes for the reasons speculated here very difficult. The Worldcon could reject the nominating votes from the current members by rejecting their memberships, but I don’t see any mechanism by which they could reject the memberships from their neighboring Worldcons.

    Mind you, I think it’s a bad idea to reject memberships because of how people voted. It confirms all of the worst accusations about Worldcons. But if we do want to pursue that solution, I think we really need to restrict nominating to only members of the current Worldcon. They can police their own membership (and refund memberships should they choose to reject the person) in a way that they cannot police their neighbors.

  10. Mind you, I think it’s a bad idea to reject memberships because of how people voted. It confirms all of the worst accusations about Worldcons.

    Agreed. Ousting people for behavior (such as harassment) is one thing, ousting them because their opinions about who should get a Hugo don’t match yours is something else entirely.

  11. @Bill:

    Agreed. Ousting people for behavior (such as harassment) is one thing, ousting them because their opinions about who should get a Hugo don’t match yours is something else entirely.

    This is a nice summary of a view several people have expressed. So let me take it as the jumping point for my qualified but strong disagreement. This formulation grossly mischaracterizes the issue at hand.

    In the last several years, the Hugo awards process has had to deal with two different types of concerted action, “booster slates” and “griefer slates.” The former don’t just represent a difference of opinion on who should get a Hugo; they represent a flouting of norms of behavior long recognized within the community. Their apologiae for their actions included accusations against “legacy fandom” that are outright slanderous. (“The SMOFs/PNH/Torlings have been rigging the awards all along!”) All this represents not just opinion but conduct. Arguably, a broad enough code of conduct would apply against it: booster slates and accompanying propaganda are detrimental to the well-being of Hugo-oriented fandom as a whole.

    That said, the level of self-dealing and agitation it represents is the sort of thing that, if the motivations behind it better matched my own ideological priors, I might find myself making excuses for. I think I’d be wrong to do so, but I can’t promise I wouldn’t.

    Ah but griefer slates are a whole other level of malignity. Griefer slates represent attacks born of malice on the process and reputation of the award itself, and on the mental health and social standing of specific members of the community. They represent not different opinions about who should get a Hugo but an attempt to enact contempt for the award and all associated with it. I would happily defend a decision by the MAC II leadership today to declare that everyone with “If You Were an Award, My Love” and another RP2 nominee in violation of MAC II’s code of conduct: they are engaged in harassment under color of their convention membership, whether it’s a MAC II membership they bought or the residual privileges conveying from Sasquan. (On the Sasquan-membership issue, there are two options: 1) invite the revoked nominators to “go ahead and sue”; 2) work with Sasquan admins to revoke the membership of the leftover griefers.)

    Unlike Damien Walter, I’m not demanding the MAC II do this. I’m saying if they did it, I would consider it justified.

    Now, let’s say you think that there’s enough of a grey area in the present code of conduct, and what residual nominating privileges do and don’t mean in terms of membership to make it impractical for MAC II to do such a thing. At the very least that’s a defensible position. What I’m saying is that the proper response to that is to write new language that gives the admins the ability to enforce code of conduct violations on residual nominators and that the sense of the membership is that Hugo balloting is in the purview of each conventions CoC.

    I completely disagree with the line you quoted (lost attribution – sorry) that, “Any process that allows ballots to be voided will also have to have clear definitions of what circumstances allow them to be voided.” That kind of narrow legalism isn’t adequate to the range of griefing enabled by the Social Web and simply invites a perpetual cycle of exploit discovery and process patches.

  12. @Jim Henley What I’m saying is that the proper response to that is to write new language that gives the admins the ability to enforce code of conduct violations on residual nominators and that the sense of the membership is that Hugo balloting is in the purview of each conventions CoC.

    I really like this idea. I believe Geekfeminism Community anti-harassment has resources and templates for including online harassment in one’s in-person event CoCs. We may need to consider a baseline CoC for WSFS which all future Worldcons have to agree to in order to submit a bid.

  13. @ Jim Henley
    You may be (hell, you are) right with respect to the group. But administrators don’t have the ability to deal with the group — they can only deal with individuals as members, and with ballots. (Because that is how the group approaches the Hugos, as individuals who vote)

    Now, if they want to disassociate themselves from a particular member or group of members (i.e., griefers), they can set up a blacklist, vet incoming memberships against it, and accept or reject them. I think doing so fails the “fair/appearance of fairness” test mentioned by Schneier and Quinn in such a huge way. You, as an insider who’s been paying attention to the last few years might be able to live with that, but the outside world would see it for what it is: the WSFS/con committees blackballing certain groups (the outside world no doubt encouraged to do so by Beale, etc.). To the extent the SF community cares about what the rest of the world thinks of the Hugos, this is asking for trouble. Super bad optics — imagine the headlines. Even if you don’t care if this is a win for Beale (and it would be), it is a loss for the WSFS/Hugos, and a self-inflicted one at that.

    Or they can accept all comers, and then reject some of them based on conduct as it occurs (harassment, etc.) The ability to do so is already in place, but if you want to use it to keep griefers out, you’ve got to come up with standards of conduct that apply (and I don’t see a simple set of rules that works, or that isn’t just an end-run around the blackballing idea — “members shall not participate in internet discussions with Brad Torgersen, or publicly endorse works listed by Vox Day”). Maybe you can come up with such a code of conduct, and get it passed through two business meetings.

    One to votes and nominations and ballots. You can accept/reject based on who casts them — “This ballot is from George Puppy, who blogged about how SJWs ruined the Hugos — Strike it.” Doing this gives all the decision-making authority to the ballot reviewers, and I think the discussions here are strongly rejecting that approach. (and again, it fails the “fairness/appearance of fairness” test)

    Or you can come up with an a priori rules-based approach: “If a nominating ballot is identical in 4 out of 5 fields in 60% of the categories to 10% of the total number of ballots submitted, strike it and the correlating 10%.” That is an even-handed, objective method that is fair. But . . .

    It is a computational problem (for 2000 ballots, each has to be compared to 1999 other ballots — nearly 4 million comparisons). You could automate it, but it then becomes a software and data entry problem.

    It may not work. EPH tried an approach from a similar philosophy to reduce the slate influence and was less than successful.

    Unintended consequences may cause problems. It may open new avenues to gaming the system.

    You said my formulation “grossly mischaracterizes the issue at hand.” Maybe so, but it accurately engages the tools and data available that the administrators have to deal with the issue at hand.

    You can do one of three things, as I see it:
    1. Do something that rejects a body of people explicitly, and accept the heat that comes with it (blackball griefers, based on their being an identifiable griefer, at either the membership level or voting level).

    2. Come up with a rules/procedure based solution that filters or re-weights “bad” ballots based on predefined objective criteria. My impression from reading Schneier and Quinn is that you cannot solve the problem this way — voting theory tells us there is always a way to game the system

    3. Give administrators the power and authority by some means (juries, ability to void ballots, etc.) to adjust the long/short lists to something “acceptable”. I think that the current mood is that this won’t fly, and that it also changes the Hugos to something that they currently are not. (Long term, it may be where things end up, though).

    That’s it. If you see another means, please suggest it. But do so with enough specificity that we can see what must be submitted to two consecutive business meetings — so many of the suggestions are really wishful thinking, or completely ignore a process that needs to be respected. A suggestion to “to write new language that gives the admins the ability to enforce code of conduct violations” isn’t complete — what is the necessary language? What is the element of the code of conduct? Someone has to figure that out, and that’s the hard part.

    I completely disagree with the line you quoted (lost attribution – sorry) that, “Any process that allows ballots to be voided will also have to have clear definitions of what circumstances allow them to be voided.” That kind of narrow legalism isn’t adequate to the range of griefing enabled by the Social Web and simply invites a perpetual cycle of exploit discovery and process patches.

    And I accept that a process-based solution may be incomplete, may not work at all, and may need to be adjusted annually (this may be a reason to amend the “two consecutive years” feature, at least for some class of problems). But, either you have and respect a process, or you don’t, and legalism (broad or narrow) is a part of it. There isn’t a middle ground.

    If you want the Hugos to look like an award for the best of SF/F, as determined by a broad cross-section of fandom (which is what I’ve always regarded it as, YMMV), then you have to let a broad cross section (including people you don’t like) participate.

  14. From my perspective, at least one of the works on the ballot would likely be illegal in my country with gross defamation against a living person. I absolutely believe that nominating that work should be against the Code of Conduct.

  15. @Jim:

    I completely disagree with the line you quoted (lost attribution – sorry) that, “Any process that allows ballots to be voided will also have to have clear definitions of what circumstances allow them to be voided.” That kind of narrow legalism isn’t adequate to the range of griefing enabled by the Social Web and simply invites a perpetual cycle of exploit discovery and process patches.

    That was me. And I absolutely agree with you that it would be a game of whack-a-mole. But I don’t see the admins voiding ballots (which yes, necessarily entails voiding memberships) or nominations without a hard and fast rule. For that matter, I don’t see it getting past the business meeting.

    I would point out, though, that allowing the nominations of harassing material to be voided is the kind of clear rule I had in mind.

    Some of this reminds me of the trillian dollar coin nonsense.

  16. Jim Henley: While you’re looking for a hammer to drive a nail, I am convinced you will discover trying to use the Code of Conduct to solve administrative problems of the Hugo Awards is going to break the hammer — it will trivialize the CoC by injecting it into a controversy that does not involve personal safety. It will get some people invested in undermining the CoC, and add substantially to the verbal chaff those who need help already face.

    If specific works violate the CoC, then argue they should be left out of the voter packet. Having the names of those works listed as Hugo finalists — that’s not a threat to personal safety.

  17. @Mike Glyer: Hm. I felt like I was just fleshing out the principle you espoused in Item 9 of this very post, that the WSFS probably does have the authority to act right now if they want to (which they clearly don’t). But perhaps not.

  18. @Rail:

    That was me. And I absolutely agree with you that it would be a game of whack-a-mole. But I don’t see the admins voiding ballots (which yes, necessarily entails voiding memberships) or nominations without a hard and fast rule. For that matter, I don’t see it getting past the business meeting.

    I would point out, though, that allowing the nominations of harassing material to be voided is the kind of clear rule I had in mind.

    Thanks. In terms of harassing material being the sort of thing one should block, we’re on the same page. But the search for hard and fast rules a the cost of perpetual whack-a-mole seems like the mistake of trying to solve a social problem through mechanical means that I’ve been decrying ever since my comment likening the situation to trying to address a problem player in an RPG group by coming up with new game rules.

    The strength of 3SV is that it’s not a mechanical solution to a social problem but a meta-rule giving the membership as a whole the power to apply social sanction to social abuse.

  19. Mike Glyer on May 20, 2016 at 11:31 am said:

    Jim Henley: While you’re looking for a hammer to drive a nail, I am convinced you will discover trying to use the Code of Conduct to solve administrative problems of the Hugo Awards is going to break the hammer — it will trivialize the CoC by injecting it into a controversy that does not involve personal safety. It will get some people invested in undermining the CoC, and add substantially to the verbal chaff those who need help already face.

    If specific works violate the CoC, then argue they should be left out of the voter packet. Having the names of those works listed as Hugo finalists — that’s not a threat to personal safety

    In the earlier post I was thinking more in terms of a separate terms-and-conditions style document that was what a member is agreeing to when they vote. That could include anti-harassment clauses (for example nominating a work whose title was intended to defame or harass somebody.

  20. @Bill:

    I think doing so fails the “fair/appearance of fairness” test mentioned by Schneier and Quinn in such a huge way. You, as an insider who’s been paying attention to the last few years might be able to live with that, but the outside world would see it for what it is: the WSFS/con committees blackballing certain groups (the outside world no doubt encouraged to do so by Beale, etc.). To the extent the SF community cares about what the rest of the world thinks of the Hugos, this is asking for trouble. Super bad optics — imagine the headlines. Even if you don’t care if this is a win for Beale (and it would be), it is a loss for the WSFS/Hugos, and a self-inflicted one at that.

    I think this is wrong at pretty much every step. In itself that’s not bad – we all make mistakes – but if fear of “looking bad” inhibits effective solutions to the actual problem before fandom, then the current griefing never ends and the Hugos will be vulnerable to any new set of griefers that come along. (Note: fandom would not actually look bad. Also, fandom would not actually fail the test of fairness itself, and “the appearance of fairness” is not a neutral test. People regularly disagree on what is fair based on their priors.)

    Or you can come up with an a priori rules-based approach: “If a nominating ballot is identical in 4 out of 5 fields in 60% of the categories to 10% of the total number of ballots submitted, strike it and the correlating 10%.” That is an even-handed, objective method that is fair. But . . .

    I have consistently argued that trying to solve the problem of malicious attacks on the institution and the people who cherish it with algorithms is misconceived, so no disagreement with your critique of it.

    You can do one of three things, as I see it:
    1. Do something that rejects a body of people explicitly, and accept the heat that comes with it (blackball griefers, based on their being an identifiable griefer, at either the membership level or voting level).

    2. Come up with a rules/procedure based solution that filters or re-weights “bad” ballots based on predefined objective criteria. My impression from reading Schneier and Quinn is that you cannot solve the problem this way — voting theory tells us there is always a way to game the system

    3. Give administrators the power and authority by some means (juries, ability to void ballots, etc.) to adjust the long/short lists to something “acceptable”. I think that the current mood is that this won’t fly, and that it also changes the Hugos to something that they currently are not. (Long term, it may be where things end up, though).

    That’s it. If you see another means, please suggest it.

    No, your list of general categories is pretty good. I favor 1 and/or 3 since, as we agree, 2 is a non-starter.

    But do so with enough specificity that we can see what must be submitted to two consecutive business meetings — so many of the suggestions are really wishful thinking, or completely ignore a process that needs to be respected.

    Your demand, while peremptory, is premature. We are early in the process. You can’t sincerely hold that one must not think out loud about a tough problem but only present a finished product.

    But, either you have and respect a process, or you don’t, and legalism (broad or narrow) is a part of it. There isn’t a middle ground.

    No, legalism is an attempt to explicitly codify all norms in explicit, objective terms so that “that which is not expressly forbidden is permitted.” That is not how small, private, consensual groups ever have functioned or could function. What is appropriate for the nation-state is not viable for voluntary social groups in civil society. If your brother sticks his finger a half inch from your cheek and crows that “I’m not touching you!” Mom is still going to turn the car around. If you try to write a sexual harassment policy that catalogs every specific behavior that will be construed as harassment, your policy will fail.

    If you want the Hugos to look like an award for the best of SF/F, as determined by a broad cross-section of fandom (which is what I’ve always regarded it as, YMMV), then you have to let a broad cross section (including people you don’t like) participate.

    Characterizing the sort of griefers currently afflicting the Hugo awards as just “people you don’t like” is a massive failure of social intelligence. It is literally all of the Five Geek Social Fallacies at the same time. The notion that the health of the Hugo Awards and the community around it requires “a broad cross section” that includes people who want to destroy that community is exactly backwards. Insisting on treating griefers as if they were just “people you don’t like” guarantees the destruction of the community.

  21. Jim Henley on May 20, 2016 at 5:22 pm said:

    @Camestros: But “Shake It Off” is great! So I don’t see the relevance…

    To be honest, I was expecting kangaroo jokes based on my ‘hop’ comment.

  22. @Jim: Oh, I wasn’t saying I thought voiding ballots was an appropriate route to take, just that the person I was replying to really didn’t have to worry about it happening without a lot of public debate and a clear guideline passed by the Business Meeting.

  23. @Jim Henley
    I don’t know how important you judge “fair/appearance of fairness” to be — I think it is pretty important. And that colors how I judge the three paths of action I mentioned above (blackball; rules/algorithm; and delegated powers to administrators). To my way of thinking, only rules/algorithms is fair, and would appear so to a neutral observer.

    Your demand, while peremptory, is premature

    I didn’t mean it as a demand, and am sorry if it came across that way. It was more a desire for concreteness, in that many suggestions aren’t fleshed out in to something workable, and that they appear (to me, at least) that any serious consideration would show that they can’t be made to be workable.

    That is not how small, private, consensual groups ever have functioned or could function.

    Mebbe so, but the WSFS/assorted Worldcons aren’t small private consensual groups. They are large international groups, with a million dollar budget. Members aren’t selected internally by invitation, but are solicited from fandom at large. Anyone with a check that clears can get in.

    While they may wish to believe that they are governed by norms and traditions, and that people who vote “wrongly” can be expelled for violating those norms and traditions, they may in fact governed by things like the Uniform Commercial Code, and customers (you might call them “members”) have a good faith expectation that, having paid for a membership, they have the same right to have their votes count just like everyone else’s.

    People who bring up the idea of deleting ballots haven’t been engaging this. Worldcon is a business, and businesses have limits on how they can discriminate. Taking the membership fees, and not denying the benefits of membership is one of those limits. Perhaps characterizing the griefers as “people you don’t like” is a failure of social intelligence, but you’ve still got to count their votes.

    Read the minutes of the Mark Protection Committee at LonCon with respect to “Fancaster”. Shit got real very quickly, and that was a fairly minor situation of C&D letters and responses going back and forth. Yet it had the potential to bankrupt the MPC.

    Now compare that minor legal skirmish to what would happen if several people had their nominations/votes voided on ideological grounds (association with Beale, voting for works that are perceived as problematic, etc.), and those people decided to invest whatever Castilia House would bankroll into a class-action lawsuit. Where is the budget to defend the suit? Could that year’s committee survive the hit? Would a committee member who had unwisely expressed himself on the subject on File770 find himself personally liable? Let me put it this way — I think it would be extraordinarily foolish to participate, or to countenance participation as a committee member, in any process to void ballots based on anything other than a clear violation of a priori rules that were in place at the time the membership was purchased (in other words, at least 2 years ago).

    If the Hugos are to remain an award selected by the membership of Worldcons, then an adjustment to the algorithm/rules is the only way to deal with griefers, I think. For the reasons outlined above, I don’t think blackballing individuals or their votes can work. And giving administrators superpowers or setting up juries changes the character of the awards.

    I mentioned three paths forward, but there is a fourth. The voting theorists have said that the Hugo process is, and has always been, vulnerable to slates, and that a possible defense against them is counter slates. Compare the awards of the 1950s to town hall democracy — everything was at a smaller scale: the pool of eligible works, the size (and homogeneity) of the voting body — as opposed to modern awards, more akin to a national presidential election: ideological factions, mass campaigns, diverse participation. It has gotten to the point that factions and their slates aren’t so much a feature or bug as they are a fundamental element of the process, and should be dealt with as such. You can’t take them out of the system, but you can use them to accomplish your goals.

    People don’t want counter-slates, you say. But what if they produced a set of awards that was much more acceptable to the community as a whole than the Rabid Pupply slate? Would counter-slates be so bad then? What if there was a MilSF slate, a gay-friendly slate, a libertarian slate, an alternative history slate, a SJW slate, a sword & sorcery slate, a Baen’s Bar slate, space opera slate, a Making Light slate, etc., etc., and they all duked it out? I’m not pushing for this, but while we are considering alternatives, maybe this one shouldn’t be swept away so quickly.

  24. @Bill

    That you can talk about juries and super powers altering the character of the awards and then encourage discussion of counter slates is astounding.

    Slates are anathema because they are completely out of the character of the award. The Hugos ask for fans to nominate the best science fiction of the last year based on their own reading. Slates surrender personal judgement to a preference for winning instead of actually judging quality. Winning is not the end goal of the Hugos. Honoring the best is the goal. Any slate, for any reason, is totally unfit for the purposes the Hugo is trying to achieve. If that is the best we can do then the Hugos are dead.

    Frankly a Juried+2 remains the best option on the table. In non slate years it could signal boost the hidden gems that didn’t get buzz in mainstream channels. In slate years it provides a bypass for non-slate works to get through. Those works would still be judged on quality against the 5 normally selected works, slated or not. The voters remain the ultimate judges.

    The Nebulas use a jury to select 1 overlooked work per category outside the works nominated by members. I’m not a Nebula voter but I’m not seeing it distort the character of the Nebula. Perhaps an actual Nebula voter could chime in on their observations?

    In any case: counter slates? No.

  25. @Bill: You do realize that you’re re-arguing fights that have substantially died down, right?

    Of course you do. The argument style is unmistakable.

    img[src*=”18b6605496253931b9c672338650dd41″] + span::after, /* Bill */

  26. Bill: I think it would be extraordinarily foolish to participate, or to countenance participation as a committee member, in any process to void ballots based on anything other than a clear violation of a priori rules that were in place at the time the membership was purchased (in other words, at least 2 years ago).

    Are you really a “I paid for a room in this hotel, I can do anything I like here” kind of a guy? People who want to keep their business going have to be brighter than that.

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