(1) ONE STOP SHOPPING. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] SF2 Concatenation’s Autumn 2019 edition is up. Voluminous seasonal news and reviews page of both SF and science which includes the major UK SF/fantasy imprint book releases between now and New Year. (Many of these will be available as imports in N. America and elsewhere.)
- Newscast for the Autumn 2019. This includes within it many key sections covering SF books, films; and TV; as well as science. See the master newscast link index that connects to all the news sub-sections.
- My Top Ten Scientists – Dominic Dulley (software engineer)
- CERN – Science or Tourism? — Jane O’Reilly
- The Shoestringcon [1]: Polycon 1979 story — Pete Gilligan
- Dublin – The 2019 World SF Convention – Sue Burke
- Ytterbium 2019 – The 2019 British Eastercon — Peter Tyers
- GeyserCon – New Zealand’s 2019 national convention — Alan Robson
(2) LEM V. DICK. [Editor’s note: I apologize for what amounts to misspelling, but characters that WordPress would display as question marks have been changed to a letter of the alphabet without marks.]
[Item by Jan Vanek Jr.] Yesterday the English-language website of the Polish magazine Przekrój published (and started promoting on Facebook, hence my knowledge) the translation of a 2,700-word excerpt (not a self-contained “chapter” as they claim) from Wojciech Orlinski’s 2017 biography of Stanislaw Lem detailing what led to “the famous Lem-Dick imbroglio” with PKD’s “famous Lem report to the FBI”: “access to previously unpublished letters […] resulted in what is likely the first accurate description of the incident, as well as the ultimate explanation as to how the concept of ‘foreign royalties under communism’ is almost as much of a mess as ‘fine dining under communism’ (but not quite as fine a mess)”:
…It all began with Lem’s depiction of Dick – in the third of his great essay collections, Science Fiction and Futurology as little more than a talentless hack. Lem had a poor opinion of almost all American authors, and never thought much of the literary genre of which he himself was an exponent (think of his equally critical view of Pirx the Pilot, for example, or Return from the Stars)….
I found it a quite informative and interesting read, although “Lem’s unfortunate expulsion from the SFWA” that ensued is mentioned only briefly and I think misleadingly (I have checked the Polish book and there is nothing more about it, but it has been described in American sources, many of them online).
(3) ABOUT AO3’S HUGO AWARD. The Organization for Transformative Works has clarified to Archive of Our Own participants — “Hugo Award – What it Means”.
We’re as excited as you are about the AO3’s Hugo win, and we are shouting it to the rafters! We are grateful to the World Science Fiction Society for recognizing the AO3 with the award, as well as to the many OTW volunteers who build and maintain the site, and all of the amazing fans who post and enjoy works on it.
The World Science Fiction Society has asked us to help them get the word out about what the award represented—specifically, they want to make sure people know that the Hugo was awarded to the AO3, and not to any particular work(s) hosted on it. Therefore, while we can all be proud of the AO3’s Hugo win and we can all be proud of what we contributed to making it possible, the award does not make any individual fanwork or creator “Hugo winners”—the WSFS awarded that distinction to the AO3 as a whole. In particular, the WSFS asked us to convey this reminder so that no one mistakenly describes themselves as having personally won a Hugo Award.
Thanks for sharing our enthusiasm, and consider yourselves reminded! We appreciate every one of your contributions.
So far there are 80 comments, any number by Kevin Standlee making Absolutely Clear Everybody Must Understand Things Exactly The Way He Does. One reply says, “You aren’t doing a particularly good job of reading the room here.”
(4) ARISIA PERSISTED. Arisia 2020 has issued its first online Progress Report. Key points: (1) It’s happening! (2) It’s (back) at the Westin Boston Waterfront. (3) The headliners are Cadwell Turnbull, Author Guest of Honor, Kristina Carroll, Artist Guest of Honor, and Arthur Chu, Fan Guest of Honor.
(5) BOO! LAist primes fans for Universal Studios’ Halloween mazes: “Halloween Horror Nights: A Photo Tour Of The New ‘Ghostbusters’ & ‘Us’ Mazes At Universal Studios”.
Halloween’s almost here… well, OK, it’s more than a month away, but that means it’s time for Halloween haunts — aka Halloween mazes, aka scary Halloween things at theme parks and the like, to start.
Halloween Horror Nights has been taking over Universal Studios Hollywood for 21 years, and we got the chance to take a behind-the-scenes tour of two of the brand new mazes, Ghostbusters and Us. We were guided through by Creative Director John Murdy, the man in charge of creating the stories and the scares inside all of the mazes.
He works with an art director to design every moment, writing treatments for each attraction than can run up to 100 pages.
“It’s a narrative from the guest’s POV — everything I see, hear, smell, etcetera, as if I’m going through the maze,” Murdy said. “But it also has a very elaborate technical breakdown by scene, by discipline, down to the timecode of the audio cues.”
(6) DUBLIN 2019. Cora Buhlert’s report begins with — “WorldCon 77 in Dublin, Part 1: The Good…”. There’s also a shorter version for the Speculative Fiction Showcase: “Cora’s Adventures at Worldcon 77 in Dublin, Ireland”. Each has lots of photos.
…On Wednesday, the day before WorldCon officially started, I helped with move in and set-up at Point Square. This involved carrying boxes, assembling shelves for the staff lounge and crafting area, taping down table cloths and helping to set up the Raksura Colony Tree model. This was my first time volunteering at a WorldCon and it was a great experience. Not only do you get to help to make a great project like WorldCon happen, no, you also get to meet a lot of lovely people while volunteering. Especially if you’re new to WorldCon and don’t know anybody yet, I recommend volunteering as a way to meet people and make friends. What is more, I also got a handful of groats (which I used to buy a very pretty necklace in the dealers room) and a cool t-shirt.
(7) MEMORIAL. Jim C. Hines tweeted the link to his post about the Memorial held for his wife, Amy, on September 8, a touching and highly personal tribute.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- September 14, 2008 — The Hunger Games novel hit bookstores. (For some reason, the bookstores did not hit back.)
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 14, 1915 — Douglas Kennedy. No major SFF roles that I see but he’s been in a number of films of a genre nature: The Way of All Flesh, The Ghost Breakers, The Mars Invaders, The Land Unknown, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold, The Alligator People and The Amazing Transparent Man. Series wise, he had one-offs on Alcoa Presents, Science Fiction Theatre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits. (Died 1973.)
- Born September 14, 1919 — Claire P. Beck. Editor of the Science Fiction Critic, a fanzine which published in four issues Hammer and Tongs, the first work of criticism devoted to American SF. It was written by his brother Clyde F. Beck. Science Fiction Critic was published from 1935 to 1938. (Died 1999.)
- Born September 14, 1927 — Martin Caidin. His best-known novel is Cyborg which was the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man franchise. He wrote two novels in the Indiana Jones franchise and one in the Buck Rogers one as well. He wrote myriad other sf novels as well. (Died 1997.)
- Born September 14, 1932 — Joyce Taylor, 87. She first shows as Princess Antillia in Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Later genre appearances were The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the first English language Beauty and the Beast film, the horror film Twice-Told Tales and the Men into Space SF series.
- Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig, 83. Best-known for his roles as Pavel Chekov in the original Trek franchise and Alfred Bester on Babylon 5. Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a 28% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and InAlienable which he executive produced, wrote and acts in has no rating there.
- Born September 14, 1941 — Bruce Hyde. Patterns emerge in doing these Birthdays. One of these patterns is that original Trek had a lot of secondary performers who had really short acting careers. He certainly did. He portrayed Lt. Kevin Riley in two episodes, “The Naked Time” and “The Conscience of the King” and the rest of his acting career consisted of eight appearances, four of them as Dr. Jeff Brenner. He acted for less than two years in ‘65 and ‘66, before returning to acting thirty-four years later to be in The Confession of Lee Harvey Oswald which is his final role. (Died 2015.)
- Born September 14, 1947 — Sam Neill, 72. Best known for role of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park which he reprised in Jurassic Park III. He was also in Omen III: The Final Conflict, Possession, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Bicentennial Man, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box, Thor: Ragnarok and Peter Rabbit.
- Born September 14, 1961 — Justin Richards, 58. Clute at ESF says “Richards is fast and competent.” Well I can certain say he’s fast as he’s turned out thirty-five Doctor Who novels which Clute thinks are for the YA market between 1994 and 2016. And he has other series going as well! Another nineteen novels written, and then there’s the Doctor Who non-fiction which runs to over a half dozen works.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Frank and Ernest ask deep questions about Pokémon.
- A Tom Gauld cartoon about The Testaments launch in The Guardian.
(11) LUCAS MUSEUM. George Lucas, his wife Mellody Hobson, and the mayor dropped by the site yesterday to see how things are going: “Force Is With Them! Construction Of George Lucas Museum In Full Swing”.
Construction of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is in full swing.
On Friday, Lucas — along with his wife and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — watched as construction crews helped bring his vision to life.
And he thanked them for the tireless effort.
“You’re doing the impossible — thank you so much,” Lucas said.
“Millions of people will be inspired by this building. We were just in our board meeting for the museum and George said you are the artists so you’re the artists of this art museum,” says Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO of Ariel Investments and the museum’s co-founder.
(12) LISTEN TO LIEN. Henry Lien is the Special Guest Star on this week’s episode of The Write Process podcast, hosted by the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program — “Henry Lien on Worldbuilding, Puzzle Stories, Middle Grade, & Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions”
Henry Lien teaches law and creative writing at UCLA Extension. A private art dealer, he is the author of the Peasprout Chen middle grade fantasy series, which received New York Times acclaim and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist.
(13) COSPLAY ID’S. SYFY Wire has collected all the tweeted photos — “Detroit high school encourages students to dress as pop culture icons for ID photos”.
High school can be a turbulent time for any budding teenager, but when you’re allowed to dress up as your favorite movie or television character, facing picture day isn’t the daunting challenge it once was. Per a report from The Huffington Post, North Farmington High School in the suburbs of Detroit allowed its senior pupils to assume the persona of their favorite pop culture icon for the sake of ID photographs. What followed was a parade of Woodys (Toy Story), Shuris (Black Panther) Fionas (Shrek), creepy twins (The Shining), and so many more!
(14) GUTS. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna profiles YA graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier, whose autobiographical graphic novels have sold 13.5 million copies and who attracted an audience of 4,000 to her talk at the National Book Festival. “Raina Telgemeier became a hero to millions of readers by showing how uncomfortable growing up can be”.
…Now, because her fans kept asking, she is getting more personal than ever. The Eisner Award-winning author who launched her publishing empire with 2010?s “Smile,” about her years-long dental adventures as a kid, is prepared to bare new parts of her interior world with “Guts,” available Tuesday, which centers on how fear affected her body.
“This is the reality of my life,” Telgemeier told her fans. She quickly got to the heart and GI tract of the matter: “I was subject to panic attacks and [was] worrying that something was really wrong with me.”…
(15) SIGNAL BOOST. Naomi Kritzer offers an incentive for supporting a cause that needs a cash infusion.
(16) MARATHON SITTINGS. The Hollywood Reporter considers “The Long Game: Super-Sized Movies Are Testing the Patience of Audiences”.
And there may be a financial cost. Over the Sept. 6-8 weekend, New Line and director Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter Two opened to $91 million domestically, a 26 percent decline from the first It, which debuted to $123.4 million on the same weekend in 2017. The sequel ran a hefty 169 minutes, 34 minutes longer than its predecessor.
“Andy had a lot of story to tell in concluding his adaptation of Stephen King’s book, which is more than 1,100 pages,” says Jeff Goldstein, chief of distribution for Warner Bros., New Line’s parent. “We strategically added more shows and locations to counterbalance losing a show on each screen.”
Adds a rival studio executive regarding It: Chapter Two, “look, $91 million is a great number. But anytime the second film in a hoped-for franchise goes down — and not up — that’s not what you wish for. And I do think the fact that it was so long didn’t help.”
(17) COLBERT. Stephen Colbert’s “Meanwhile…” news roundup includes a furry joke related to the movie Cats, and a bit on “The 5D Porn Cinema No One Asked For.” These items start at 2.02 — here on YouTube.
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Cinema verite of author Liz Hand on Vimeo. A 5-minute video of Hand at work and play
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
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@Goobergunch —
It should be what I say it should be, of course.
😉
Personally, I’d like to see it clarified as a NON-fiction award, as in saying non- fictional things relating to the genre.
@Bill —
Yes, there were definitely murmurs about people calling themselves nominees. It just didn’t occur to me that it would blow up into a big thing like this!
MRM, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and I actually agree with a fair bit of it.
As far as the idea that since some WSFS members are fine with the joking, it is therefore a justification or a validation for that joking, those people don’t speak for all WSFS members, they only speak for themselves — just as the AO3 members who condemn the site for hosting fics with sexual content featuring under-18 characters don’t speak for all AO3 members.
Consider this: if people are making nasty, derisory remarks about AO3 and fanfic all over Twitter, what effect does that have? It makes AO3 members feel personally slapped in the face and disrespected every time one of these tweets pops up in their feed or a hashtag or a saved search.
This is exactly what’s being done to a lot of WSFS members on Twitter. And in many cases, it’s not just a tweet here or there, it’s a sizeable group of people for whom every single one of their tweets which appears is a slap in the face because they’ve changed their twitter name to “Hugo Award Winning”.
While it may not fall into what you consider an invasion of space, it’s still a continual slap in the face to the AO3 members who are seeing the fanfic insults, or to the WSFS members who are seeing the Hugo Awards being abused.
It’s being an asshole. Sure, you can make the argument that they have the right to do it and they’re not obligated to care about someone else’s feelings, but it’s still being a disrespectful asshole.
@MRM–Your position seems to be that a)Only some people are owed courtesy and respect; b)Those active in AO3 are among those owed courtesy and respect; c)That those involved in WSFS and the Hugos are among those not owed courtesy and respect.
That, in fact, no one has the moral authority to say to your nasty friends over on AO3 that they ought to show some courtesy and respect to the people who gave them the award they claim to be so thrilled and excited about.
I was originally delighted by AO3’s nomination, for reasons I now have to assume are beyond your understanding. By the time I voted, they weren’t even on my ballot because the rude and inappropriate behavior convinced me, sadly, it would be bad for the Hugos if they won.
Of course, that is I suppose another opportunity for chortling glee and mockery, because they won anyway. And sadly, I was right. You’re practically wrapping yourselves in self-righteousness, insisting that you’re totally justified in acting like total shits toward people who did, in fact, give AO3 a Hugo, apparently because they gave AO3 a Hugo.
Well, I have learned a lesson. It’s not likely to have any consequences anyone on AO3 cares about, but at least I’ll know not to trust either the words or the opinions of anyone associated with AO3 that I don’t also know from some more respectable context.
That’s what being a transformative works creator has been like for the last 40 years actually. You’re talking about a population of largely women, many of them queer, who have been systematically mocked, marginalised and pushed out by WSFA for decades.
I grew up in SF/F fandom, but the first place I felt at home was transformative works fandom, because I could be my weirdo queer self with my weirdo queer friends. Seeing the two meet finally, where the thing I was a fan of, and the thing where my writing passion came together? Seeing the WSFA side of fandom saying, oh, hey, your voices are important too? THAT WAS AWESOME. And people are having a lot of fun with finally getting to be in that party.
Because frankly, we’ve always been here. AO3 people are also people who fought the puppies, got WSFA memberships to vote in the Hugos, who defended the awards from racist/homophobic/etc assholes. We were told then that the Hugos belonged to all of us, and they do. How many winners for trad pubbed fiction also write fanfic? I bet a lot more of these last few years’ crops of Hugo fiction nominees have been influenced by women sending each other mimeographed/mailinglist/messageboard porn about Kirk and Spock than have been by John C. Campbell.
So yes, seeing the huge, flawed, beautiful archive get a nod, and therefore everyone who contributed to it, HUGE PARTY AT MY PLACE.
It felt like the two sides could finally see each other.
Kevin S is pretty well reminding us of our place. That’s okay though, we plan to outlive him.*
*To be clear, this is not a threat, I’m just a lot younger, and I think most of the AO3 userbase also is. Except for all the glorious fandom elders who’ve been mimeographing those transformative works since Mom was grade school.
Muccamukk: That’s what being a transformative works creator has been like for the last 40 years actually. You’re talking about a population of largely women, many of them queer, who have been systematically mocked, marginalised and pushed out by WSFA for decades.
Yes, that was exactly my point. You would think that AO3 members — of all people — would understand what it’s like to have something you love shit on and disrespected by others. You would think that AO3 members would be the last people to turn around and do that to someone else.
You would think.
@Muccamukk–What you’re missing, or ignoring, is that you people have responded to AO3 being nominated for and then winning a Hugo by treating the Hugos and the people who work on and vote on them, and who have done so for decades, making it into the award you were thrilled to see AO3 win, , by disrespecting and denigrating the Hugos, and anyone who asked you to stop doing that.
If respect doesn’t go both ways, it won’t last.
Belatedly, I do know the difference between SFWA and WSFA and WSFS, it’s late, and I’m pissed off.
Anyway, no, I don’t see that we are shitting on the award. It’s our award too. I’m not going to say that I’m sorry that you feel that way, because that’s a weasel apology, and frankly I’m not sorry, but I hope some day you see it differently.
A lot of people seem to think there’s a them and us happening. I don’t.
@Lis Carey
“You people” is exactly the wrong term. That’s making everyone on AO3 sound like they’re all doing it, when it’s a small minority and most of the people on AO3 don’t know anyone who’s doing it.
(Yes, my memory goes back to the days of mimeographed zines. Some of them were able to go to offset for their illos, even. Some of those fanfic writers became feelthy pros later.)
@JJ
True, that was a weak argument on my part. In any sufficiently large group there will be members of the group that disagree about the impact of any particularly joke. However, that does not mean that the ones who are offended are automatically the ones who are right. Just because a person feels hurt, that does not mean that the joking (again, occurring not in their space, not in direct conversation with them) is actually causing harm. The people I had to deal with who were so pissed off that they had to wait in a line – I believe they genuinely felt hurt. But nobody else in the queue was doing them any harm.
I would highlight, for clarity’s sake, that I did point out the difference in clearly offensive remarks or remarks calling for harm. For example, twitter users have called for AO3 to be reported to the FBI, or for AO3 authors to be killed, or threatened to cause bodily harm to writers general and specific, on a sadly regular basis. There’s really no excuse for such remarks other than to cause harm, and such remarks would be equally harmful if directed at the WSFS.
However, Random Twitter User going ‘lol, did you hear that joke about how many AO3 authors it takes to screw in a lightbulb?’… well, no, it doesn’t cause me, An AO3 Author, to feel personally slapped in the face. Now, if I was talking to a friend who knew I am An AO3 Author, and my friend said dismissive things to me about the people who post on AO3, then I’d feel hurt. But people have the right to post their opinions about the quality of the AO3 and, yes, jokes about it, too. It doesn’t diminish the AO3 as a project for it to be publically discussed, criticized, or joked about, no matter my feelings on the subject. Parody alone does not automatically make somebody an asshole, or even disrespectful. And, in the case of the Hugo Award Winning Author joke (again, as separate from the people who are legally infringing against the mark or sincerely under the mistaken belief that they personally won a Hugo), it has been my understanding that it is mostly a loving parody, directed more at the AO3 than at the Hugos.
Now, the joke is actually funny… eh. I mean, I do believe they sincerely think it is, just as I do believe you sincerely think it isn’t. To be honest I don’t think any joke could survive this amount of analysis, which has rendered my own opinion of its humour rather moot. I am sorry you feel hurt by it, but I also do not personally feel the need to apologize on the behalf of other people who may be making that joke. English is a bit of a bad language for that, in that our default method of expressing empathy is to apologize for something.
@Lis Carey:
This is a rather astonishing reading!
I’m going show you some of the courtesy you refuse me and explain myself one more time. “Believe victims” is an argument designed to try to combat society’s tendency to disbelieve members of disprivledged groups. Stating that it’s inappropriate to apply that argument here isn’t saying that WSFS should automatically be disbelieved – it means that the WSFS is not a group suffering from a crime that has a systemic high risk of being disbelieved, and therefore evidence of that crime should be judged on its own merits, without the need for a reminder to the public that they must overcome their built-in prejudice.
Now, with the courtesy out of the way: maybe I’m wrong in my assumption that belonging to a fiction society doesn’t load one down with societal prejudices that may affect job security, personal safety, access to healthcare, and a host of other modern problems caused by people struggling against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other modern systemic imbalances. Or perhaps you’ve got a selective blindness to the words ‘societal inequality’ or ‘prejudice’, so you can’t understand discussions about why some groups might be inherently disadvantaged and disrespected by society?
But that doesn’t explain where on earth you pulled b) from, as I didn’t mention anything about courtesy and respect directed at AO3 members anywhere until my reply to JJ in the first part of this comment — and if you missed the part in there about AO3 being a legitimate target for parody and criticism, then you really are in need of reading glasses. Unless it was this bit?
A simple statement that an org could do PR better isn’t a call for more courtesy and respect. It’s calling for them to know how to handle the public. But considering the rest of your comment, I suppose such a misunderstanding is on a level with the rest of your reading comprehension skills.
As for c), you appear to be confusing ‘courtesy and respect’ with ‘never ever being joked about’. Which is funny, really, because you’re the one turning yourself into a joke, here.
Hi, I’m a member of AO3 and a Hugo Winner, and no one has ever in any way implied that my Hugo wins were lessened because a fanfic archive got one…except for people claiming to support the WSFS telling me the award has now been denigrated. Nor have I been at all bothered by people cracking jokes about it. Six months of jokes about being nominees? Yeah, maybe there were. I saw like three, but I didn’t seek them out. We’ve had a month of jokes about 30-50 feral hogs, too. We’ll probably live. I’d be cynical if the pork industry started claiming those jokes were hurtful, too.
I guess being on AO3 makes me one of “you people” though and…um. Really? Do we really wanna walk down that road? ‘Cos we can do that and then I’ll have to type a big long comment and it’ll all be exhausting, so if we could not do that, I’d really be much happier. Being a You People is exceedingly tiresome and then one has to be tiresome about it and no one wins.
@P J Evans–Yet apparently asserting the fact that the AO3 organization, not every single person who has posted work there, won a Hugo, is disrespecting all of transformative works fandom, while no one on the WSFS/Hugos side of the divide even has a right to express offense at whatever whoever the people over at AO3 are saying even when it’s direct insult and open mockery.
And yes, I’ve been on the painful side of double standards all my life, including within my own family, and while completely pragmatic arguments can sway me “but you might hurt their feelings!” has long since lost its persuasive power. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but in contexts like this it sounds an awful lot more like an attempt at manipulation than real feelings at risk of really being hurt. Not when they openly mock the Hugos and insult any suggestion that the people who work on and vote on them might be genuinely hurt by their shitty behavior.
Oops. I caught this a bit past the edit time-limit. Where I wrote:
I had intended to write:
I certainly do not mean to state that the joke is actually, objectively funny. Certainly at this point I feel like the horse died, was mummified, and is now being dug up from a bog millennia later…
(Edit: it would seem my previous post is still in moderation. Dear moderator, please do approve that one before this one, or if you choose not to approve it, please don’t approve this one either, as this one is probably not going to make any sense without that one. Also, hugs and kisses, and apologies for some rather excessively long comments; but I’m going to bed now, so you’re free of me until tomorrow.)
@RedWombat–But you, and AO3, are actual Hugo winners.
The people expressing outrage and offense at WSFS trying to protect its trademark, and claiming they personally are Hugo winners based on AO3’s win, mostly are not.
And it all makes me tired and sad, not that anyone cares about that, but still. It does.
This is really uncomfortable. Can we please stop arguing with anyone who is not actually misbehaving? A little lightheartedness at finally (as it seemed) being accepted ought to be understandable to those of us who spent our youths being outcasts. Let people have their squee, and let’s only go after people who are over the line toward commercial use.
All approved now.
Sorry for the delay. I had to spend half an hour explaining DMCA takedown law to Richard Fox (over on Camestros’ blog). Of course I did.
Has anyone quoted Naomi Novik’s speech yet? I found it on themarysue. I’m bolding a bit that I think has already so soon been forgotten by some of those who listened to it?
“All fanwork, from fanfic to vids to fanart to podfic, centers the idea that art happens not in isolation but in community. And that is true of the AO3 itself. We’re up here accepting, but only on behalf of literally thousands of volunteers and millions of users, all of whom have come together and built this thriving home for fandom, a nonprofit and non-commercial community space built entirely by volunteer labor and user donations, on the principle that we needed a place of our own that was not out to exploit its users but to serve them.
…This Hugo will be joining the traveling exhibition that goes to each Worldcon, because it belongs to all of us. I would like to ask that we raise the lights and for all of you who feel a part of our community stand up for a moment and share in this with us”
Now I’ve only seen one thread, so maybe there’s a few dozen others, but I haven’t seen anybody say “How dare you enforce trademark!?” I’ve mostly seen a lot of “Holy wow, tell people not to sell Hugo pins, fine, but telling people not to joke about being a fractional percentage of a winner is incredibly humorless, and also sheesh, this whole “You realize you’re not REALLY a winner, PERSONALLY” bit is coming across as really damn condescending.”
I highly doubt the intent was to make AO3 feel bad, but boy howdy, that stepped hard into the middle of a long, ongoing sore spot. Is it any wonder that some people felt it as yet another Know Your Place, Mere Fanfic Writers by a mainstream that’s been doing that to them for years?
It’s not WSFS’s fault for being so ignorant of the culture of AO3 that they put their foot in it. But I also don’t think it’s anybody’s fault for being pained at being kicked in that sore spot, for the Nth time, in what really did come across as exactly the same You’re Not A Real Writer schtick as ever.
Leah, Naomi’s speech was very nice, and I thought it was great the way that she acknowledged the AO3 members. It doesn’t make the individual AO3 members actual Hugo Award Winners, though, which seems to be what you are claiming.
The Best Related Work category definition is this:
Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category.
In other words, fiction is specifically not eligible in this category.
If the Hugo Administrators had thought that AO3 was noteworthy primarily for its fictional text, they would have disqualified it from the category, just as a fiction anthology which got enough nominations to make the ballot was disqualified from the Related Work category in 2002 because it was noteworthy primarily for its fictional text.
I’ve seen people on Twitter claiming that authors whose works win a Hugo get to call themselves Hugo Award Winners, therefore AO3 members are also Hugo Award Winners. In the first case, the author’s work won the Hugo. In the second case, the author’s work did not.
Also, thanks for providing an example of an AO3 member who takes the Hugo Award Winner claim seriously, since so many AO3 members are denying that anyone actually does take it seriously.
In all of this, please let us not forget that neither AO3 or WSFS are monolithic. I think there has been too much generalisation which really does not help: feels like whole swathes of people are being accused when they are blameless. That is no way to reach any sort of rapprochement.
There are a bunch of overlapping sets here from those who are only members of one or the other, to members of both. Not all WSFS members are grumpy at all of AO3. And not all AO3 members are going around claiming to be Hugo winning authors. It’s fandom right? Any time there are n fans, there will be more than n opinions.
RedWombat: Now I’ve only seen one thread, so maybe there’s a few dozen others, but I haven’t seen anybody say “How dare you enforce trademark!?”
The problem is that, at this point, the problem has become so pervasive that the people who are calling themselves Hugo Award Winners would all need to be given Cease-and-Desist letters, because there is no way to distinguish people who are joking from people who are serious, and the law requires WSFS to seriously address infringement if they wish to keep the exclusivity of their marks.
The AO3 members who are “joking” have put WSFS members in a really hard, crappy position by doing this. There may be one or two people who actually enjoy trying to put a stop to the infringement, but everyone with whom I’ve had discussions is absolutely sick and unhappy about being put in this position — about having to play “bad guy” — and they really wish that the AO3 members hadn’t put them there.
JJ, she didn’t say they won for writing fiction or their fiction won (and ao3 hosts fanworks of other types than fiction too), but she said they won for participation without which the whole thing would be pointless. And she specifically said she was accepting the award on behalf of the volunteers and members of the site, so in that sense all of them did win a Hugo award collectively, not for their fiction but for the collective achievement.
As others have said, if they didn’t win, let’s have the Dublin Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte tell us exactly who he decided the award was presented to. Because he sure arranged it to be accepted by someone who thought it was awarded to the entire volunteer staff and membership as a whole and I don’t see how what you and Lis are saying doesn’t completely disregard her words “it belongs to all of us.”
People are capable of thinking something is true and still not taking it seriously. When someone says on their twitter that they’re a “hugo award winner” for being an AO3 member, they don’t think it’s a serious credential in the sense that it’s going to make them notable enough to deserve an article on Wikipedia or that it ought to go on their resume.
But they do take it seriously as a recognition that their hobby is meaningful and worthwhile by the overall fan community, and I think that’s a good thing. They’re happy and excited like a person whose co-op company won a Best Place to Work in (their country) award might claim (despite not even fully vested yet in their shares) that they are an ‘Owner of Best Company to Work For’ now.
But why does someone calling themselves a .0000000001 % of a winner actually NEED to be stopped? Who cares? Stop the people making money. Stop the people using the logo on covers or merch. But until I see an actual trademark lawyer tell me that dumb jokes are an actionable dilution of the Hugos, I’m gonna be skeptical.
I mean…look, people put things in their bios that are sometimes made up. I am pretty sure Batman is not actually on Twitter. DC Comics is not going after someone claiming to be Batman on Twitter for trademark infringement because that would be a ridiculous waste of time and resources. I absolutely get that WSFS does not want someone claiming to be a Hugo winner on a book cover or whatever because of AO3. The vast majority on AO3 also understands that! But STOP JOKING THERE WILL BE NO HUMOR IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT HUGOS ARE SRS BUSINESS was not even remotely the way to do it. And whether because of a badly worded press release or a dire cultural mismatch in comment styles, (coughStandleecough) that’s unfortunately how it came across to a lot of people.
Leah F: let’s have the Dublin Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte tell us exactly who he decided the award was presented to.
He already has. It was awarded to AO3 the entity. You may not find that a satisfying answer, but it is the answer.
And I’m pretty sure that he gave the OTW the option to specify a handful of recipients (editors/coordinators) by name, as he did with The MexicanX Initiative, and that OTW deliberately declined to do so, because they didn’t want to single out anyone. I think that was a really appropriate decision.
@redwombat
I think you’ve put it really well. Thank you for being an actual Hugo winner who’s been willing to step forward and say you don’t feel like your awards are devalued by people jokingly claiming to be 0.0000000473% a Hugo winner. I think for all the claims of devaluing the Hugos and hurt feelings on the part of WSFS members, some of them are very aggressively overlooking the hurt feelings on the side of AO3 users – for being treated like misbehaving school children who are expressing happiness and excitement the “wrong” way and for being directly compared to the Sad Puppies by several people, including active commenters here – and the devaluing of the collective nature of AO3 and the OTW and their very purpose to be by fans, for fans. This is very much everyone’s win to celebrate.
No, I don’t plan on adding Hugo Award Winner to my bio because I’m not a Hugo winner. But I’ve published fic on the AO3, I’ve participated in the fan culture there, and I’ve even been a volunteer. If I want to celebrate them winning an award by joking with friends about our Hugo and I’m not actively infringing on the Hugo trademark, I don’t see that as devaluing the Hugos. It’s taking joy in AO3’s win and the effort that I and so many others have put into the site and the community that we’ve built there, and the fact that it’s gotten recognition from the side of fandom that is often seen as more “legitimate”. The fact that people see this as such a nefarious thing, quite frankly, seems to say more about them and their opinions of the transformative side of fandom than anything.
TMax: being directly compared to the Sad Puppies by several people, including active commenters here
The only one I’ve seen was a one person on an LJ account, I believe. If there were others, please provide links, and I’ll have words with them, because I don’t think it’s an appropriate comparison.
TMax: The fact that people see this as such a nefarious thing, quite frankly, seems to say more about them and their opinions of the transformative side of fandom than anything.
I’ve seen lots of AO3 members claiming that this is about “fanfic cooties”, but apart from a couple of people I’ve seen deride fanfic, I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think most of the upset is about people claiming unearned honors. I think most WSFS members are quite happy to see AO3 members referring to themselves as “contributor to / participant in a Hugo Award-Winning project”.
I think it’s being portrayed as being about “fanfic cooties” because then it’s easy to make WSFS members the villain. I don’t think that’s a fair representation of most of the objections I’ve seen.
@JJ
Then you’ll need to be having words with yourself about that comparison.
And:
I mean, I guess thanks for saying we’re on a “different place” in that spectrum, but this was still and extremely shitty comparison to make.
TMax: I mean, I guess thanks for saying we’re on a “different place” in that spectrum, but this was still and extremely shitty comparison to make.
AO3 members are a special-interest group which mobilized Hugo nominators and voters. That’s different from saying that you’re like Sad Puppies as human beings.
You may not like having it pointed out that AO3 members are a special-interest group, but I don’t think you can deny that it’s true.
I don’t like people claiming to be Hugo Award Winners when they are not. I think that’s a pretty shitty thing to do.
This is a very long comment thread, so I have probably missed some things, but JJ, you and several others have repeatedly insisted that a subset of the AO3 contributors are consistently and persistently “shitting” on the Hugo by checks notes making statements (whether joking or not) that they are also Hugo winners now.
Please read this slowly and carefully: you say that them taking glee in being in proximity to the Hugo Award is a “slap in the face” and “shitting on” and “disrespecting” the award.
It is an EXTREMELY reasonable conclusion from those “disrespecting/shitting on/slapping in the face” comments to infer that fandom cooties are what you are objecting to. Seriously, not just extremely reasonable, it is the MOST reasonable conclusion.
I’ve been a WSFS member for at least 5 years, and a member of NWSFS here in my home state for about 30 years. I’ve only been professionally published three times but I’ve been reading (and writing) fanfic for 47 years. So I have multiple stakes in this argument.
But I have to say, the extremely technical and pedantic argument you claim to be trying to make, is being lost behind all those slurs you keep hurling.
fontfolly: checks notes… Please read this slowly and carefully: you say that them taking glee in being in proximity to the Hugo Award is a “slap in the face” and “shitting on” and “disrespecting” the award.
Please read this slowly and carefully: Your notes are flawed; you need to go back and re-read my comments. I never said anything of the sort.
I said that their claiming to be Hugo Award Winners, when they’re not, is a slap in the face.
It has nothing to do with “fanfic cooties”, and everything to do with claiming to have earned an honor that you have not earned.
@JJ The AO3 is not a special interest group, it’s an Internet archive used by many, many people. There is an argument to be made for the OTW being a special interest group, since they do have some involvement in the legal and policy side of things. But the AO3 and its users aren’t campaigning for any sort of social or political advantage. They’re just posting fic. And the people who nominated them for the award do not constitute a special interest group, either.
Making the comparison that you made and specifically using the language that you used, which brings to mind political connotations, does imply that the people who nominated and campaigned for AO3, and its supporters and users used similar tactics to the groups that you compared them to, which is shitty. Maybe this isn’t what you intended, but I don’t know if I’m willing to give you that benefit of the doubt after your constant goalpost shifting and your co-opting of language designed around believing victims that MFM previously did such a good job addressing in their comments.
I should be in bed, but I want to register that I feel very unslapped. My Hugo is, if anything, even COOLER for being part of a tradition that now includes a project with over a million people writing out of passion and love and maniacal glee. What a thing to have as a peer! Holy crap!
Almost makes up for also being part of a tradition with “They’d Rather Be Right” but let’s not get too carried away.
TMax: Making the comparison that you made and specifically using the language that you used, which brings to mind political connotations, does imply that the people who nominated and campaigned for AO3, and its supporters and users used similar tactics to the groups that you compared them to, which is shitty.
You’re right. While I do consider AO3 members a special-interest group, and there was campaigning, it was neither political nor toxic, and it did not resemble the Puppies in any other way. I apologize for that comparison.
I don’t begrudge AO3 their nomination or their win. I do wish that they’d shown a lot more respect for the Hugo Awards and for the WSFS members who’ve put a lot of work and heart into running them.
The “I’m a Hugo Nominee! / Winner!” joke was funny for about 24 hours. After that it was just tedious and obnoxious, like the person at the office who keeps telling the same tired joke over and over again ad nauseum, and then complaining that you’re a dick with no sense of humor when you don’t laugh at their endless repetition of the “joke” and ask them to please stop telling it.
@JJ
Thank you for the apology. I appreciate it.
I 100% get that the joke was not funny to some people! That often happens with jokes, especially ones that end up as memes, and I get that it’s annoying to be made to feel like you’re a curmudgeon for not finding them funny. That’s never a fun situation to be in. The joking that I saw was all on people’s personal social media platforms or on Discords or message boards with fellow AO3 users and seemed to be meant as more of an in-group thing, but I’m admittedly not everywhere on the internet and the AO3 user base is very large, so it may have been one of those things that seemed inescapable. I get how that could be annoying! But I do think it was being made out to be much worse behavior than it actually was, in part because people were annoyed by it.
And I truly don’t think it was meant to de-value the Hugos or any of the hard work that the WSFS members put into making them happen, so much as a way for AO3 users to celebrate the site’s win together. I do think that the Hugo’s are a great thing, and it is an honor that AO3 won one. And I commend everyone at the WSFS who put so much hard work into making them happen, yourself included. Without the Hugo’s or the WSFS, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, and that’s not a small thing.
If anything, I think this may all be miscommunication and culture clash between parts of fandom that approach things differently. I think from your point of view, the AO3 users were that one guy in the office who just keeps telling the same joke over and over and will just not let it go. From the pov of AO3 users, the WSFS members were the co-workers glaring at them and loudly asking them to please stop laughing with each other in the break room, it’s not what that space is meant for.
I think we’ve all (at both AO3 and the WSFS) got some “not good enough” baggage that’s informing things here and making people (and I include myself in this) read things in the worst possible light. Because, as fans, we all get pretty prickly about those kinds of implications, especially if we feel like they’re coming from fellow fans.
TMax: If anything, I think this may all be miscommunication and culture clash between parts of fandom that approach things differently.
I agree that’s a big part of it. And now there’s a lot of damage that’s been done, on both sides, and I don’t see that being healed anytime soon, especially since I see a lot of people on Twitter now vowing to double down and be even bigger assholes about it (which is, of course, going to do a whole lot to convince WSFS members that they’ve been wrong about AO3 members). <sigh>
It all makes me very sad.
Red Wombat:
I do not know how Trademark laws work, but my guess is that this would be seen as a joke and therefore it would be acceptable. But remove the ” .0000000001 %” part and the meaning becomes something different and should be stopped.
So to be clear: I’m not against joking about being a “0.00000001%” winner. I am against those who on twitter proclaimed themselves winners and changed their profile pictures to Hugo rockets and those who did the same on other platforms. And I’m even more against those who tried to sell winner merchandise with the Hugo rockets.
There are jokes that are funny. And there are taking things too far. And I think all these defensiveness only helps to blur the lines.
Wow.
I finally went over and read some of the posts on the AO3 thread. And I gotta say, most of the comments I read posted by AO3 members sounded like entitled and immature princesses. I’m embarrassed to see AO3 being represented by their attitudes.
Yeah, PLEASE let’s get that BRW definition clarified so this doesn’t happen again.
To the people saying they should have NA’d AO3 on the ballot: Either part of the stewardship of the Hugo Award rests with the AO3 userbase and contributors, in which case feel free to try to take back the rocket trophy which has already been given to Worldcon’s travelling exhibit, or the AO3 userbase is not responsible in any way for the Hugo Award winning nature of the Archive and judging it based on the merits of its community and userbase is completely irrelevant. You can’t have your cake and eat it. Choose.
Contrarius: Yeah, PLEASE let’s get that BRW definition clarified so this doesn’t happen again.
I think that the definition could use some tweaking, but I’m not sure this is going to be an issue again. AO3 would have to re-write their entire user interface to become eligible in the category again, and when what they’ve got works so well, that’s not going to happen.
Most websites will qualify in the Fanzine or Semiprozine category, so they’re not ever going to be eligible in the Related Work category. And I’m perfectly happy with website things like Nerds of a Feather’s Feminist Futures project being a finalist in the Related Work category; it’s the equivalent of a Letters to Tiptree anthology.
@JJ —
I’m not sure that’s true. When 770 was having all those eligibility discussions, and some folks were arguing that AO3 was eligible in this specific year, they claimed that specific work done in 2018 on the… tags and search engine, IIRC?…. were what made it eligible. And if that’s true, then any future significant upgrade could make it eligible again.
I don’t know enough about Feminist Futures to have an opinion. I’d have to read up on it!
Also, in the hope that some of the AO3 members can get a better understanding of why there’s a perception of the Hugos being disrespected and shit upon, I’d like to add this.
I know that this is the height of hilarity to a lot of AO3 members, but if you can understand that there are a lot of WSFS members like me who will always be upset that the official Hugo records will always ever after include piece-of-shit Puppy works like “Safe Space As R*** Room” and porn stories, you can understand why stuff like this is not the least bit funny to a lot of people (and this is just a very small sample of what’s out there).
https://twitter.com/CA_Young/status/1113156601706369024
https://twitter.com/allyousailors/status/1165746529308762112
https://twitter.com/delabaisse/status/1163654912451891200
https://twitter.com/ArtistFailure/status/1163602182366781441
https://twitter.com/KaiserNoire/status/1163285210580029441
Contrarius: I’m not sure that’s true.
I am. I’ve been privy to some eligibility discussions in the past, and “significantly changed” is an extremely high bar for a work to clear in terms of Hugo eligibility.*
* I am not, nor have I ever been, a Hugo Administrator, nor do I ever want to play one, not even on TV, and also, I am not bidding for a Worldcon.
Contrarius wrote
Riiiight, this is doing so much to convince us that this isn’t about misogyny and gatekeeping the silly little fangirls and their silly little porn stories.
“Oh look, a community of several million underrepresented and marginalized people who love genre fiction enough to devote thousands of hours of their lives to thoughtfully and intelligently criticizing the contents of it through their writing! I bet they’re exactly what this moribund and aging community needs, let’s honor their work with a Hugo! …or we could lecture them about ABSOLUTELY NO DANCING, STOP HAVING FUN and endlessly whinge about how they’re just like the Puppies”.
JFC, you people would deserve it if every last fiction award categories’ nominees next year were nothing but Stucky A/B/O. Which is, for the record, often smarter about gender and misogyny than any ten of you.
(For the record: Hugo nomimator and voter since 1997.)
In my opinion, it doesn’t. It’s obviously not intended to be taken literally. We don’t parcel out Hugo Awards to the one ten-billionth.
For those suggesting there’s an anti-fanfic bias among the WSFS members here, you’re misreading the room. There are a lot of people who like fanfic among the File 770 community.
@ rcade:
I am pretty sure there’s more than one regular commenter here that has published at least one work on AO3.
Speaking only for myself, I was super-happy about AO3 winning, until about yesterday morning. Now I am only happy that AO3 won.
I have finally gotten off mobile, and @JJ, I read your links to tweets that are supposedly shitting on the Hugos.
…dude. Come ON.
Hell, I shared a ballot in my category with “Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex” which means that my real name will be linked to that work in front of God and Google for as long as the internet shall last, yea, unto the end of the world. I hummed a few bars of “I Will Survive” and got the hell on with my life. You seriously want me to clutch my pearls and feel shat upon because someone somewhere tweeted that a coffeeshop AU abandoned in 2012 was a Hugo winner? Good lord. At least they were happy about the Hugos and wanted to be included! I’d rather share a stage with a million silly people who think it’s awesome to be part of a win than one dour sexist guy shrieking that Tor buys all the awards.
I try not to troll about stuff that isn’t potatoes or monocultural corn, but if I keep getting told how my awards are being denigrated by happy people cracking jokes, I am honestly THIS close to dusting off my account and transferring the old stuff from Fanfiction.net just so I can tweet that my Iron Bull bondage fic is now Hugo winning, and if people keep being so absurd about it, I’ll throw in the Reylo for free.
Also–sorry for double post, mea culpa–but I would be terribly remiss if I did not include a link to this bit of genius, which is, in traditional AO3 fashion, presented as fic.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20670977
This sums the whole thing up better than I ever could.
Bad sum up. A more fitting version would have been:
That is more like what is taking place.
There you go again. “Slap in the face” I don’t need to check my notes. You keep doing it.
The only logical way it could be construed as a “slap in the face” was if there is something wrong about THEM.
What you mean to say is, “Them claiming to be Hugo winners when they are not dilutes the value of the award in my opinion and hurts, in the long run, the reputation of the award.”
As long as you keep saying “slap in the face” you’re making the fanfic cooties argument, whether you intend to or not. I’m trying to educate you here, and you are stubborning doubling down on your blindspot exactly like my homophobic relatives do every time that I try to explain THOSE issues to them.
And I will stand by that analogy.
Hampus, I’ve heard of exactly one person selling crap on Etsy with a Hugo thing on it, and I haven’t seen anybody putting “Hugo Winner” on a Twitter bio that was any more serious than “Batman” or “sparkle unicorn” or “talking wombat.”
If there are actual examples of this behavior, can we get links? Because if this is a huge gigantic problem, Imma need something more than one person trying to cash in on Etsy.