(1) BUSINESS MEETING. Worldcon 75 has posted the Business Meeting Agenda [PDF file] on the WSFS Business Meeting page. It’s 18 pages — and it may not be done growing yet.
(2) DELANY. The New Republic devotes an article to “Samuel R. Delany’s Life of Contradictions”.
The first volume, In Search of Silence, begins in 1957, when the author was just fifteen, a student at the academically exclusive (and very white) Bronx High School of Science. It ends in 1969, when he was already a successful novelist, about to leave for San Francisco to spend arduous years crafting the novel Dhalgren, his masterpiece. Traversing Delany’s youth, we see a precocious mind grappling with his own talent. Remarkably absent are extended reflections on the difficult circumstances of his outer life: At the time, Delany was navigating through the racism and homophobia of his era, and struggling with poverty, an early marriage, and his own disability. In light of this, the diaries’ portrayal of his serenely intellectual inner life is startling.
(3) COMING TO GRIPS. “On convention hugging” by Sigrid Ellis is a rational model for solving a social dilemma.
It’s SF/F convention season again, and once more we are all presented with the conundrum —
Do I hug this person hello and goodbye, or not?
Social hugging! It’s a thing! Yet, it is MOST DEFINITELY NOT A THING for a lot of people.
Here is how I, personally, navigate these situations. While this may not work perfectly for you, feel free to modify it for your own use….
(3) EMERGING INDIGENOUS VOICES. Silvia Moreno-Garcia says:
We are in touch with the Indigenous Studies Association (ILSA) and it seems this [award] will become a reality. Therefore you can find an IndieGoGo to funnel money via: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/emerging-indigenous-voices#/. My name doesn’t appear on that page, it says Robin Parker, but I am in touch with Robin so don’t worry.
Through today, $70,485 has been pledged. Moreno-Garcia’s latest update has further information:
The Indigenous organization in question will reveal details about how the money will be handled once some logistics are determined, but they are a trustworthy group so don’t be afraid, the money will reach a good place.
There are many other place you could support: Indian and Cowboy, Red Rising Magazine. There’s the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts, and last but not least Full Circle, which supports the development of Indigenous playwrights.
There are other ways to support Indigenous creators. Read, share and discuss their books. This should not be a one-time occurrence, guilt should not be the vector that guides your actions, virtue-signaling should not be your driver.
(4) APPERTAINMENT AT THE NEBULA CONFERENCE. They couldn’t slip a blatant typo like this past the pros:
I choose bear.
To be fair, the hotel made these, not SFWA pic.twitter.com/aigwjOM1RR
— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) May 18, 2017
Always pay at least professional rates for your Bear.
— Elizabeth Bear???? (@matociquala) May 18, 2017
(5) KAREN DAVIDSON OBIT. Karen Lynn Davidson, wife of Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson, passed away today after a long battle with cancer. Steve said on Facebook, “Goodbye baby doll. I hope you got where you wanted to go.”
He also wanted everyone to know how much credit Karen deserved for the existence of Amazing Stories.
It is very important for me to be sure that everyone knows the following:
Behind the scenes, Karen made Amazing Stories happen.
Before we were married, Karen became well acquainted with my love for science fiction. She was not as interested (preferring Stephen King), but she happily indulged my passion…including all of my books.
When I discovered that the Amazing Stories trademarks had lapsed, Karen was the one who double checked me and confirmed that unbelievable fact.
When it came time to register new trademarks for the name, Karen was the one who agreed to spend some of our (very limited) cash reserves to fund the project.
When our investors dried up, Karen agreed to go back to work and allow me to try to bootstrap the magazine.
Whenever I was unsure what direction to take, Karen always provided valuable insight.
Whatever you may think of Amazing Stories, please know that without Karen, none of it would have happened.
This makes me wonder how many other non-fan supporters are owed a big debt by fandom and the genre for that support.
I’m taking the time now to thank Karen for this very special thing she did for me. If you know someone like her, it might be a good idea for you to do the same.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- May 19, 1928 — First Jumping Frog Jubilee in Calaveras County, California.
- May 19, 2011 — HP Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness opens in Los Angeles.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born May 19, 1920 — Claude Degler
(8) NATAL YEAR FLIX. Thrillist invites you to check out “The Biggest Movie From the Year You Were Born”. It’s no surprise that I was considered old enough to see the “biggest” picture long before the “Best Picture” winner.
If you were born in 1953…
The BIGGEST movie was The Robe , which grossed $17.5 million in the United States.
The Best Picture winner was From Here to Eternity, which also won Oscars for Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Best Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best Writing, Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra), Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Film Editing, Best Sound
But the best movie was Tokyo Story. A delicate, heart-crushing view into the lives of two grandparents reaching out to their narcissistic children for support and finding none — marked by director Ozu Yasujiro’s pristine attention to detail and framing.
(9) A HUNK OF BURNING LOVE. Add this to the list of things I’ve never heard about before: “China claims breakthrough in mining ‘flammable ice'”.
The catchy phrase describes a frozen mixture of water and gas.
“It looks like ice crystals but if you zoom in to a molecular level, you see that the methane molecules are caged in by the water molecules,” Associate Professor Praveen Linga from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore told the BBC.
Officially known as methane clathrates or hydrates, they are formed at very low temperatures and under high pressure. They can be found in sediments under the ocean floor as well as underneath permafrost on land.
Despite the low temperature, these hydrates are flammable. If you hold a lighter to them, the gas encapsulated in the ice will catch fire. Hence, they are also known as “fire ice” or “flammable ice”.
Chip Hitchcock suggests, “Filers may remember a sudden release of hydrated methane starting off a John Barnes(?) novel.”
(10) ICE HOUSE. Meanwhile, in the land of the midnight blog, Jon Del Arroz trolls the Worldcon.
Question @worldcon75 will you have a booth and promotion for Finland's biggest and best SF publishing house, @CastaliaHouse?
— Jon Del Arroz (@jondelarroz) May 15, 2017
Jeffro I think we might be going to worldcon!
— Jon Del Arroz (@jondelarroz) May 18, 2017
(11) MEMORY VERSE. Carl Slaughter thought I should know this:
“I do not aim with my hand,
I aim with my eyes.
I do not shoot with my hand,
I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun,
I kill with my heart.” – The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower
Stephen King
(12) TRAGIC TROPE. Steven Harper Piziks tells “Why I Won’t See Alien: Covenant” — and he hopes everyone else will give it a miss, too. BEWARE SPOILERS.
I will not see this movie. I will not rent the DVD. I will not support this movie. And here’s why.
SPOILERS (you are warned)
According to various on-line sources, the sins of the same-sex relationship portrayal are the standard ones we’ve come to expect. First, although there were several initial shots to the contrary, there is little or no indication of a marriage–or any kind of relationship–between the two men throughout the film. They don’t touch. They don’t exchange endearments. There was apparently a brief moment of hugging between them in a preview, but that scene has been cut from the film, and that preview has been removed from the Internet. In other words, gay people are still invisible. No LGBT characters are actually in the spotlight. No LGBT protagonists. Just a couple of background guys who may or may not be in a relationship.
But the worst sin comes early in the second act. Hallett, one of the (so far probably) gay men, becomes infected with the alien infection, and a baby alien bursts out of his face. (Not his chest, like in the other movies, but out of his freakin’ face. He’s probably gay, so we have to up the nastiness.) While the ship’s captain leans in to murmur quiet apologies, Lope, the other probably gay guy, whispers, “I love you” and then is forced to walk away.
One more time, we have the gay tragedy….
(13) CRACKED CORNERSTONE. Critics gave the movie that launched the franchise a cool reception (for different reasons) — “‘Alien’: Why Critics in 1979 Hated It”. (I liked it a lot, myself.)
“Don’t race to [Alien] expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretentions of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” wrote Vincent Canby of The New York Times. A better comparison, he wrote, would be Howard Hawks‘ 1951 monster movie The Thing from Another World, all suspense and jump scares. Canby wasn’t the only critic to associate Alien with the kinds of horror flicks that played at 1950s drive-ins. Variety compared the film to It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and The Guardian’s Derek Malcolm to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). To these critics, Scott’s film was a throwback to a less sophisticated era of filmmaking. That’s why The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert dismissed Alien as “basically just an intergalactic haunted-house thriller,” while Chicago Reader‘s Dave Kehr described the film’s conceit as “a rubber monster running amok in a spaceship.”
(14) PRIZE-WINNING ADS. Adweek reports “Graham, the Human Redesigned to Survive Car Crashes, Wins Best of Show at New York Festivals”. “Field Trip to Mars” and “Gravity Cat” also received awards.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne has won Best of Show at New York Festivals for “Meet Graham,” the PSA campaign for Australia’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) that involved the model creation of a human designed to withstand car-crash forces.
Automobiles have evolved much faster than humans. Graham was created by artist Patricia Piccinini, with help from a trauma surgeon and an accident research engineer, after she was commissioned to study the effects of road trauma on the human body. As the only “human” developed to withstand trauma on our roads, Graham is meant to make people stop and think about their own vulnerability, Clemenger says.
Two other campaigns received two Grand Prize Awards each: Lockheed Martin’s “The Field Trip to Mars” by McCann New York, in Activation & Engagement and Outdoor/Out of Home Marketing; and Sony Interactive Entertainment/Gravity Daze 2’s “Gravity Cat” by Hakuhodo Tokyo, in Branded Entertainment and Film–Cinema/Online/TV.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Mark-kitteh, Cat Eldridge. Steve Davidson, Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. A little bit short today because I’m fighting a terrible cold. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]
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Condolences, Steve.
@Darren Garrison – Not backwards, just a place using printed pint glasses. CRAFT 3D.
(12) I have no interest in this film (and I am probably showing my straight white male ass, but you don’t learn if you don’t ask), but my takeaway from the ads was that this was a colony ship looking to populate the planet. Does the film mention technology allowing them to reproduce?
Claims of ‘tragic gay romance’ ring hollow in a film where I am guessing 80% or more of the cast die gruesomely. Every romance on that ship will probably be tragic.
@GSLamb
ROT13 as spoilerey
Gur fuvc unq gjb gubhfnaq pbybavfg f va Ulcrefyrrc, gur bayl barf njnxr ner perj. Gurl nyfb unq sregvyvfrq mltbgrf va serrmref ernql gb dhvpxyl tebj gur cbchyngvba. Fb lrnu cyragl bs bccbeghavgl sbe gurz gb or cneragf.
Gurl’er nyfb obgu frphevgl bssvpref fb vg’f abg yvxr gurl jrera’g hfrq gb orvat ng evfx.
Naq lrnu, nalbar jub qbrf fheivir gur svyz vf dhvpxyl tbvat gb jvfu gurl unqa’g.
(5) KAREN DAVIDSON OBIT. Very sad! My sympathies. Your love for her has shone through in comments here in the past, as well as the post at #5.
IanP
True, though I like the idea of a colony ship within the setting. Though the trailers make me wonder why a colony ship would go to a planet that hadn’t been well scouted to ensure the environment wouldn’t kill them all. I’m going to wait to rent/netflix it probably, still haven’t made time to get out to see GotG2 yet and the trailers so far just make me want to rewatch the first two.
I didn’t bring anything political up in my letter about Worldcon. I attempted to add to their programming a group of popular SF writers that would give them nice publicity. It’s likely they’re not responding *to* me over politics, as the folk in charge have shown to be quite unable to control themselves in the past.
It’s too bad, because as Mike implies… lotta people would come just to see.
If you want to save SF, make your SF cons about SF. Castalia House has a nice chunk of SF and is the largest of the indie publishers out there with huge name ID. To exclude when we’re willing to help is politics. It’s like Tor’s #SpaceOperaWeek — they talked about mostly politics and not about much space opera. I took it over and made a much better event of it. They could see the same for WorldCon if they’d let me help out.
Love,
The leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction.
Uh, isn’t the concom for WC75 mostly Finnish? Since, you know, the con is in Finland? And I haven’t check recently, but I’m guessing that the Finns really don’t give a hoot about US politics, except insofar a weakening of NATO might give their big neighbor ideas about making hostile moves without consequence.
So, don’t think the concom cares about any US political stance. OTOH, they might have opinions about a guy who has made it his focus in life to destroy the awards being given out at the con. But I bet if he wrote a check like everyone else, they’d sell him a booth to market his authors.
You’re a singer?
If someone vandalized my yard and threatens to burn down my house, not inviting them in when they offer to ‘help’ has little to do with politics.
CH on Amazon has three SFF books, none published within the last year. A grand total of twelve books in the category on the CH website store, one of which is a parody-but-not-really. On the CH web page shows 4 authors and two affiliates.
But you are right that it does have a huge reputation!
For someone y’all are supposed to hate, you sure do seem to give Jon Del Arroz a lot of free publicity. Kind of like complaining that the fox killed all your chickens after you had opened the door and invited him into the hen house.
Just sayin’, y’all, just sayin’…
Isn’t the Castalia party line that Worldcon, fandom, the SFWA, and maybe cons in general, are an evil den of paedophiles? Seems odd that anybody who took Castalia House seriously would want actively to be involved.
Steve, my deepest condolences to you and yours.
*cough* Guillermo del Toro *cough*
Good point!
So premise: 1. ‘we’ are all supposed to hate Jon Del Arroz
And 2. ‘we’ give him free publicity
but 3. that contradicts 1.
so 4. hey, maybe that was a silly premise
so 5. maybe we love Jon Del Arroz
so 6. maybe soon he’ll buy one too many books because of something he read in the comments
so 7. maybe then he’ll start building a scale model of this place like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters, but out of too be read books
no 8. I mean the tower of books looks like the mountain – I don’t mean it will look like Richard Dreyfus
yes 9. he was good in Jaws as well but we need the books to be dry – Jaws just isn’t an appropriate film in this analogy
so 10. where was I?
oh yes 11. Jon Del Arroz now has a mountain of books which he hasn’t read yet
so 12. QED
*cough*Junot Díaz, Daína Chaviano, Daniel José Older, Silvia Moreno-Garcia just off the top of my head*cough*
Castalia House has a lesser chunk of the market than Chuck Tingle. Worse writing too.
I think Jon Del Arroz is talking 76, not 75, since he mentioned San Jose.
Though there is one thing that Castalia & associates does lead in – the number of gamed Hugo nominations and an insurmountable lead in Hugo No Awards for VD.
Not sure if Castalia would draw many people – badly-written SFgunpr0n and excruciatingly-badly-written Christian message fic isn’t exactly a large market.
Anyway, just finished Neal Asher’s Infinity Engine, book three (and last) of the Transformation series, set in his polity universe. Wow. He definitely managed to stick the landing, bringing in many disparate threads and wrapping it up nicely. Great mix of pewpewpew action and more thinky bits (the whole series is basically a riff on war, PTSD, personal responsibility, personal loss, what does death mean if you can be recorded and cloned, and the ability to change/redeem your earlier actions). One of the problems with bringing in god-like AI’s is that it can derail your story in double quick time, but he managed to avoid that pitfall in this one, though (in D&D terms) there’s a lot of “leveling up” as various characters get super-powered or get hold of magic +6 items. Mad AI’s, lost civilizations, Gabbleducks, what’s not to like? Though the “twist” early on isn’t really a twist, and is signaled in the name of the series. The ending line is pretty sweet, too. Not really sure where he goes with this universe now, but if this is the last, he ended with a bang. Or crunch. Really well done, but if you didn’t get on with the Polity before, this won’t change your mind.
Seems to me that badly-written SF gun pr0n has a large market and excruciatingly-badly-written Christian message fiction has a gigantic one. (In fact, there are whole bookstore chains dedicated to badly-written Christian message fiction.)
*cough*Malka Older. Carmen Maria Machado.*cough*
*cough* Ann Aguirre *cough*
@IanP – Thanks for the info. That does answer my questions. I’m still not watching it, as this is not my type of film anymore.
@Jon Del Arroz: “They’re unfortunately not responding…”
Change your tactics and your chances are good:
@Matt Y: “…why a colony ship would go to a planet that hadn’t been well scouted to ensure the environment wouldn’t kill them all”
I haven’t seen it, but it’s clear from reviews that the planet the colony ship was supposed to go is not the planet they end up going to.
@GSLamb: “Does the film mention technology allowing them to reproduce?”
Sort of: they have a bunch of embryos in storage.
Jon Del Arroz: They’re unfortunately not responding which may have something to do with the fact that the partner of the chair of the convention swore in all caps at me nastily over my support of President Trump. Hopefully they can get over the political nonsense and we can have a beautiful Worldcon San Jose together and talk about the sci-fi we love!
I imagine that they’re not responding because they saw how you publicly lied about what happened and bad-mouthed the Baycon staff when you were one of the people Baycon rotated off programming this year.
Fan cons are private events run by fans who put in hundreds of volunteer hours and lots of their own money in order to make things happen. It’s hardly surprising, if someone has demonstrated themselves to be a liar and a bad-mouther, that concoms are not going to be interested in inviting them to participate. Concoms want their events to be enjoyable for all involved, and are not interested in providing programming venues to people who have demonstrated themselves to be hostile, belligerent liars.
I agree that Castalia House does have “a huge name ID” in SFF publishing — but that identity is not for producing lots of excellent genre work, it’s for putting out small quantities of alt-right, religious, and pro-gun message fiction and badly-edited books (and, apparently, fiction portraying ephebophilia and abuse of minors as virtues) — and for cheating appallingly poor-quality works onto the Hugo ballot because those works couldn’t make it onto the ballot on their own merits.
No fan con is in need of “saving” by you and the other Puppies. They’re doing just fine without you — and I expect that is what is sticking in your craw.
Also, continually announcing that you are “the leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction” just makes you look really silly, because, as numerous other people in this thread have pointed out, genre fans are already well aware of the people that phrase might actually describe.
The painful thing about John is that as bad as Vox Day is, it’s almost worse to see someone consciously trying to emulate his style.
The con’s over a year away, you haven’t been accepted or rejected yet, and you’re attacking them and impugning their motives. Maybe there’s a reason other than politics the approach you’re taking with con organizers might not be working.
If you want to save SF, make your SF cons about SF. Castalia House has a nice chunk of SF and is the largest of the indie publishers out there with huge name ID.
I see that you like to make jokes.
Not even Wikipedia notices the existence of Castalia House.
Aaron: The Wikipedia doesn’t completely ignore Castalia House. It gets mentioned in the article about Vox Day — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day#Castalia_House_publishing.
Naturally it gets much better coverage at Infogalactic — https://infogalactic.com/info/Castalia_House
@JJ: Oh sure, if you’re going to bring facts into it.
@Mike: Well, yeah, but when allegedly one of the “largest of the indie publishers” only gets a passing mention in an article about an Alt-Right fringe figure, it kind of shows exactly how important they are to genre fiction.
Sorry for your loss, Steve.
JJ there’s not a single person who is in any sort of knowledge of the situation outside of this site’s false article on me that believes at this juncture that Baycon didn’t disinvite me because of my public Trump support. They sent info early on trying to gaslight me but that was quickly shown to be a sham from their programming director’s facebook posts which I posted over on the blog.
I know how fan cons work. I’ve spent hours helping them out in the past, lots of hours. There are problems with ones that are overtly political like Baycon — and they are seeing massive drop offs in attendance and interest in recent years. Worldcon is unfortunately in that boat.
Your whole post is “you’re a liar bad!” and “You’re not a real science fiction fan!” in a nutshell. Both of those are observably false if you cared enough to pay any attention to what’s going on. My goal is to bring fun sci-fi content wherever i go, and i’m delivering that. The problem is these organizations that claim that’s their goal and then they don’t deliver that, and then make these little gaslighting stories like you’re repeating against science fiction writers they don’t like. Gotta stop doing that bro.
Jon, you have a very high opinion of yourself, for someone that I hadn’t heard of before you started whining about being mistreated.
(I’ve been reading SF for well over 60 years. I’m not impressed by you or your publisher. And having been a minor concom member, I’m also not impressed by your ideas about how cons should be run. They don’t have time to cater to you.)
Jon, you purportedly are heavily credentialed as a space opera expert, apparently.
I recently reread Ian M Bank’s Excession. What did you think about it?
@ Jon Del Arroz
The last book I read by Castalia House author John C. Wright’s was an interminable slog. If that is “fun sci-fi,” include me out.
By the way, could you please provide impartial evidence that attendance at those “overly political” cons are dropping? Thanks.
Well, I’ve read everything you’ve made publically available about ‘the situation’ and you haven’t presented much of a case. Indeed, if Baycon was as political as you say then why would they not just publically say ‘we don’t want a vocal Trump supporter as a guest’.
Cuz it’s terrible PR. If it didn’t matter, they’d just ignore it.
Look, I’m obviously someone who cares enough about our little hobby that I’m here, in a place where I’m supposed to be hated. I don’t have to be. It doesn’t gain me anything at all to post here, but outside of puppy blinders, Mike does aggregate a lot of good SF news and I respect that. Maybe, just maybe, I have a point about blackballing and blacklisting that’s going on. I’m not the only one talking about that.
A lot of comments to me now, which usually I’m happy for but after my original comment cuz I heard about being on here I read about Steve Davidson’s loss. Perhaps we should arrange an AMA or something so it doesn’t dominate this convo?
Jon Del Arroz: there’s not a single person who is in any sort of knowledge of the situation outside of this site’s false article on me that believes at this juncture that Baycon didn’t disinvite me because of my public Trump support.
I realize that the book The Secret tells you that repeatedly saying how you want things to be will make them be that way, but I’ll clue you in — that’s not actually true. Your “magical thinking” is not working for you.
I’ve seen several other people point out that they were also rotated out of the Baycon programming this year, and none of them feel that was due to their political leanings. I’ve concluded that this is a justification manufactured by you to gin up outrage.
Jon Del Arroz: Your whole post is… “You’re not a real science fiction fan!
I never said anything remotely resembling that, and it’s very interesting that you claim that I did.
But I’ve noticed that you have a history of having done this on numerous occasions now — claiming that people have said things that they haven’t actually said — and yes, that does make you a liar.
I also read what you wrote about the Baycon situation, and I read what Baycon wrote, and I have indeed concluded that you are a liar — and a hostile and belligerent one, to boot.
Hey, speaking of Castalia, I just finished “An Unimaginable Light” by JCW. It was some of the most heavy-handed message fiction I’ve read, and a poorly-written dialogue to boot.
JJ there’s not a single person who is in any sort of knowledge of the situation outside of this site’s false article on me that believes at this juncture that Baycon didn’t disinvite me because of my public Trump support.
I’m sure the lurkers support you in e-mail as well. Not even our own arguments make you look good on this. The idea that it is “terrible PR” to just say they were not inviting an outspoken Trump supporter to a convention is a fabrication of your fevered imagination. No one would have batted an eye had they given that explanation save for the overheated fan-boys who scream on the internet and do nothing else of note. But they didn’t say that, and their explanations are much more reasonable than your rants.
Maybe, just maybe, I have a point about blackballing and blacklisting that’s going on. I’m not the only one talking about that.
The problem is, you haven’t made any kind of case that substantiates this. Look, I know you’re used to an environment in which whatever wild-eyed conspiracy theory you throw out is given credence, but thus far you haven’t made any claim on any subject in this thread that isn’t at the very least a half-truth, and several that are pretty clearly false. Your first option should be simply to stop digging.
Maybe you are thinking of a different Trump? I mean I get that you like him and that other Americans do, but for a con that wanted to be “political” & leftwing? How exactly would being anti-Trump be bad-PR?
The whole point of the plot that you have imagined is against you would be to put off rightwingers from the con. But your theory relies on these same people hiding what they were doing. That makes no sense. The only reason for acting against you on the grounds that you are pro-Trump would be to milk the PR they’d get from acting in an anti-Trump manner.
So ‘bad PR’ makes no sense as an explanation. It only makes sense if they don’t want to put off Trump supporters from their con AND at the same time WANT to put off Trump supporters from their con.
Put aside the politics for a moment and your lack of evidence and think about it just from a plot-hole POV. Does your story make sense as A STORY? Nope. It isn’t even good fiction.
You’re missing the point. I get you don’t like me, and that’s okay but let’s focus on the important part:
Disinviting sci-fi authors from a sci-fi con over politics is the bad PR because it looks petty. Trump has nothing to do with the PR angle as other than on here, but that’s not what people on the street see persuasion wise. Nor, incidentally, would it have anything to do with my speaking at the con, as it hasn’t at any other time I’ve spoken. I even moderated David Gerrold who took a topic and twisted into rambling about Trump last year without even bothering him on the topic. I’m sure he’d tell you his experiences with me in person were only pleasant. I’m pretty personable tho 🙂
But the first sentence of my above is the problem. The vocal minority of the let’s call them the “in-crowd” is an echo chamber that is as you say, extreme in their politics. The moderates don’t care. They see “oh, this doesn’t look fun it looks political, I get enough of that” — and they move onto other things. Really if you look at my original call out — it’s more about that overall “you guys really need to back off this political thing and focus on fun” than anything else. I still hold by that and that’s my goal in sci-fi. Hopefully it shows in my books.
My guess is that Karisto, Kirjavka, and Like would all take exception to Jon Del Arroz’s claim that Castalia House is Finland’s biggest and best SF publishing house, especially since they all publish Finnish language SF, and as near as I can tell, Castalia House does not.
Jon Del Arroz: Disinviting sci-fi authors from a sci-fi con is the bad PR because it looks petty.
You were not disinvited from Baycon.
They had not invited you to participate in programming this year; therefore, you could not be “disinvited”.
You assumed that being on Programming was an entitlement, rather than what it actually is: a privilege which authors may or may not be offered.
I realize that this pissed you off because you have a self-published novel to promote this year, but you are not entitled to expect (or demand) to be on Programming at any con, including Baycon, and you just sound like a really pathetic, whiny crybaby.
Disinviting sci-fi authors from a sci-fi con over politics is the bad PR because it looks petty.
First off, they didn’t do that, which has been explained to you many times. Saying that it happened that way over and over doesn’t make it any more true now than it was when you first came up with this conspiracy theory.
Second, you’ve provided no evidence that doing so would actually be “bad PR” beyond your say-so, and to be blunt, no one is going to take your pronouncements on a subject seriously just because you say them. Perhaps you’d like to point to an actual, demonstrable example of a convention excluding someone explicitly because of politics that turned out to, in fact, be “bad PR”. I suspect you won’t be able to, because you don’t actually have anything to back up your claims but figured you’d be able to run your mouth without be questioned about it.
I remember when Poul Anderson was not invited as a guest to Baycon. He didn’t throw a snit. He came as a regular member, because so many of his friends were there.
Not being invited as a special guest is not even in the same ballpark as being disinvited. The fact that someone who apparently makes their living with words is so unclear on their meaning is…not a good sign.
The only dislikable element I’ve seen from you is this tendency to make everybody’s motives into being for or against you.
As for the rest, you really haven’t dealt with my point. You claim they are trying to make it all about politics AND that they want to hide the politics.
Meanwhile OBSERVABLY *you* did make it about politics (and keep doing so) and then say you don’t want politics!
I’ve never been to Baycon, and I doubt that I know anyone from their concom, but if I were on it, and if we had elected not to put several repeat guests on panels for the next year, and we had a paragraph on the website explaining why some repeat guests are not on panels this year, and one of them made a big stink about how he was disinvited due to his politics, I’d be advocating that we permanently disinvite him for making a big stink about it and continuing to disparage us after we explained that it was a new policy that affected multiple former guests and was not personal nor permanent. It’s not the politics, it’s that you continue to disparage Baycon after their rebuttal, Jon, that makes me wonder what conventions will want to invite you to be a guest in the future.
@Xtifr where can I find information on the Poul Anderson Baycon topic? Makes it even worse that they have a history of this sort of thing that dates back that far and with one of the greatest SF authors to ever live at that. Can I interview you?
It’s not the politics, it’s that you continue to disparage Baycon after their rebuttal, Jon, that makes me wonder what conventions will want to invite you to be a guest in the future.
The thing is, about a week ago, almost no one here knew of or really cared about Del Arroz, and now the only impressions they have of him is the ranty guy who has a baseless conspiracy theory about being disinvited from Baycon, and who has an inflated opinion of the importance of both himself and Castalia House.