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Interview With He Xi, 2024 Hugo Finalist

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He Xi 何夕

INTRODUCTION: Eight Light Minutes(8LM) Culture of Chengdu has given permission for File 770 to reprint the series of interviews with Chinese science fiction writers which they have been running this week on Facebook. The third in the series is a question and answer session with He Xi, whose “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet” is a finalist for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novella. He Xi was also a co-chair of the Chengdu Worldcon.

SUPPORTING CHINESE WRITERS SERIES: 2024 HUGO AWARD NOMINATION INTERVIEW WITH HE XI

Translated by Joseph Brant.

He Xi 何夕, real name He Hongwei, was born in December 1971, and has been a science fiction fan since childhood. He began writing Sci-fi as a hobbyist in 1991, with stories focus on exploring the future of macro-sciences and human nature. He is now a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the Sichuan Writers’ Association. His works include The Other Realm, Six Paths of Being, and The Heartbreaker. Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet is shortlisted for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Q1｜On The Afternoon (UK time) of the 29th of March , the 2024 Hugo shortlists were announced, including the works of five Chinese authors (as well as their relevant translators). Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet was shortlisted for Best Novella, alongside Wang Jinkang’s “Seeds Of Mercury”. This was a fantastic surprise for your readers, and we would like to congratulate you on the Nomination. How do you feel about being Shortlisted?

He Xi: I learned the news by email from the Hugo Award Committee, and felt both happy, and calm. The exchange between Chinese science fiction and the rest of the world is growing closer and closer, and in the future, we’ll see more Chinese Sci-fi in the Hugo Awards.

Q2｜This is an unprecedented moment in the history of the Hugo Awards, where outstanding works from three of the “Four Heavenly Kings of Chinese Sci-fi” have been simultaneously nominated, the fourth, Liu Cixin, having already won a Hugo. Could you explain this phrase ”The Four Heavenly Kings”?

He Xi: China’s sci-fi scene has had a long periodical era, and this phrase may have been in use for almost 20 years. There were certainly other names for the top writers, but this phrase has certainly been the most common. Where it originally came from is hard to say, but it should certainly be taken as high praise from the fans to the authors who were particularly prolific at the time. Personally, I feel it puts the pressure on me to keep writing something worthy of readers’ expectations.

Q3｜The original Chinese version of Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet was published 14 years ago, in 2010. What made this nomination possible? And how do you feel about that?

He Xi: Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet was nominated for its appearance in the book Adventures in Space: New Short Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers (Published by People’s Literature Publishing House), which collected works in translation by Chinese authors, alongside overseas writers. When the story was first published back in 2010, it won China’s Galaxy Award, as well as a Chinese Nebula Award. Science fiction has an ability to transcend cultural barriers, and resonate with everyone. There are very few good sci-fi translators out there, but I hope that situation will improve in the future.

Adventures in Space: New Short Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers) Featuring HeXi’s Life Does Not Allow Us To Meet

Q4｜Like much of your work, Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet is popular amongst the domestic audience, and the fact it has been selected for an overseas translation project shows its charm, and classicism, however, Overseas fans may not be familiar with the piece. Could you introduce your story, and tell us some of its inspiration?

He Xi: Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet was written in 2010, and explored the idea that Humans would have to leave the planet, in order to sustain life, but that sort of interstellar migration would inevitably lead to the alienation of humanity. In 2016, Elon Musk famously said “Humans need to be a multiplanet species”, making a similar point from a realistic perspective. The Galapagos Islands, which are only a few tens of kilometres apart, gave Darwin a glimpse of the development, and disconnection of different species in the same region. What would the distance of light years, and the vastly different geographies make of the interstellar migrant humans? Chauvinism, which originally referred to exaggerated patriotism and nationalism, is already part of the space age, and there’s no reason to believe that this notion of “Self-Supremacy” won’t extend to wider areas, and that Human-centricism won’t deepen, in the endless unknown environments of space, which are always accompanied by fear. Earth’s history is full of empires which have strived on aggression and power, that have largely failed, but it is also full of fallen leaders, who remained simple and honest. The call to the stars is irresistible, but on this path, mankind may thrive by its “tyranny”, or perish due to its “kindness”. It’s like facing a multiple choice question without any context. Human intelligence means we’ve begun to understand the structures of universe, but the ‘meaning’ is still closed to us. Perhaps the secrets will be revealed only once we’ve made our decisive choices, but who knows if, by then, there will still be a recogniseable ‘mankind’.

Q5｜Besides being called one of the “Four Heavenly Kings”, you were also once called “The Lyrical Prince” of Chinese Sci-fi, and in Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, Dong Renwei calls you “The premier of Romantic Sci-fi”. In short, your work usually has such delicate, and emotive descriptions, as in The Heartbreaker, Love Of Farewells and Pangu, all of which have moved many Chinese Sci-fi fans. Of course, you’ve also stated that the title “The premier of Romantic Sci-fi” is another burden for you to bear, so, what do you consider to be the role of emotion in science fiction, and in the debate between “soft” and “hard” Sci-fi? Is your work “Soft Sci-fi”?

He Xi: Emotions, such as love, friendship, and loss have always been important themes in literature, and science fiction, as part of literature, is certainly no exception. Since depictions of emotions can enhance the captivating nature of sci-fi, and sometimes deepen the thematic content. You mentioned The Heartbreaker for example, which readers say touched them with the depiction of motherly love. In reality, resources are always biased towards the strong, whilst mothers tend to have more compassion towards their weaker children. If scientific research could be compared to children, I hope society can learn from the mother. Here, emotion is no longer a garnish, but an intrinsic part of the story’s theme. I have never felt that the actual difference between “soft” and “hard” sci-fi is great enough to form them into two distinct camps, and that the majority of “Hard Sci-fi” has a much simpler intellectual content than most popular science books. I’m also of the opinion that many works, who’s technology is already very close to our reality, shouldn’t even be classed as sci-fi, like the film Gravity, which would be more accurately be described as a disaster, or survival movie.

Q6｜The plot of Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet contains a number of themes, such as catastrophes on earth, extra-terrestrial exploration, bioethics, and love. May I ask, how do you organically integrate all these, the emotional plots, Sci-fi elements, and deep reflections of technology and ethics, during the creative process?

He Xi: Storytelling, including the oral tradition, has a history of around tens of thousands of years. Science Fiction is a little over 200 years old, but still, in its brief lifespan, it has expanded the boundaries of literature greatly, with most of the areas explored by science fiction never having been touched by traditional literature. I was once asked whether I thought that future technology would change human nature. I answered yes, because so much of our current core humanity, such as loyalty to spouses, love of children, friendship and suspicion between collaborators, are all the result of the technological advances we have made since the age of hunting and gathering. Emotions, technology, and ethics are always intertwined in sci-fi, not because that’s what makes a good story, but because that’s the true nature of humanity in the current technological age.

Q7｜ Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet has been agented by Eight Light Minutes Culture and the film rights were snapped up a few years ago. I also know there were plans to produce a stage play. How are those going? We also hear Shanghai Film Group is interested in developing a series based on your work, and have opened up the licensing of several of your stories in the call for entries for the Global AI short film competition. What are your expectations for film and TV adaptations of your work? Are there any particular stories you want to see brought to the big screen? And what do you think of this current wave of AI creation?

He Xi: As the creator, of course I want my stories to become Film and TV series. Those are, after all, the media with the largest audience, but once you’ve signed over the copyright, the writer themselves don’t really have much say in the adaptation. Personally I’d like to see The Other Side, The Six Paths of Being, Pangu, The Heartbreaker, Life Does Not Allow and Years Of Heaven all make their way onto a screen sooner, rather than later. On the subject of AI, I’m an AI optimist, and personally, I think the threat of AI, or aliens, “actively” seeking to harm the human race is a very primitive fear. AI does not exist in the same ecological niche as humans. To robotic logic, the arid deserts of the Sahara are a better home than any human city, and the moon, or Mars, would be more hospitable than Earth. Food and water, which humans need, are just clutter and hazard to a robot, so from the point of view of competing for survival, robots are unlikely to ‘actively’ hunt us down. There’s also a popular idea about “unintentional harm”, that aliens or robots, with no active attempt to do so, may inadvertently wipe us out in achieving one of their goals. This scenario is practically identical to a natural disaster, such as a star going supernova, and the only way to combat natural disasters, is to enhance the capacity of humanity as a whole, which only AI can help with. There will be a general blurring of AI and humans at some point. Soon, Alzheimer’s patients will be restored to full health by implanted smart devices, and then, we’ll see healthy people implanting devices to improve their intelligence, so it’s almost inevitable. In the way that the Han dynasty chose to merge with the Xiongnu for a lasting peace, the merging of man and machine is also a foregone conclusion. In the future, there’ll be no pure human, or pure machine, the two factions will have long since become one, so why would robots be a threat to humanity?

Project Cold Plum (2021) based on He Xi’s The Heartbreaker

Q8｜The title of Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet is a reference to a poem by Du Fu, For My Old Friend, Weiba which is also the origin of your pen name. It opens with “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet, Acting the stars of Shen and Shang. So what an evening this evening is, That together we share the light of one lamp?” What influence has classical Chinese literature had on your science fiction career?

He Xi: “What an evening this evening is” comes from the Classic of Poetry which precedes this. I feel lucky to have been born in China, because classical Chinese literature is a cornucopia of creativity. China’s long history, and rich culture contain so much nourishment I can use for my sci-fi.

Q9｜Set aside the lyrical nature of your work, many of them can be considered ‘High Tech Mysteries’, like A Visitor After a Billion Years, and The Darwin Trap, which are similar to the popular fiction of Ni Kuang. What do you think of your writing style?

He Xi: I don’t really think I have a fixed style. As science fiction continues to develop, diversity is an evident trend. Some of my work is in the popular genre of suspense, whilst others are far more works of realism, like The Heartbreaker and my novel Years Of Heaven. The style serves the subject.

Q10｜Science fiction in China has had a very turbulent history, and even Liu Cixin has pessimistically remarked “When science fiction is dying, nobody visits its sickbed” and that “Sci-fi is sailing on a sinking ship”. You yourself have abandoned the genre several times due to changes in your circumstances. How do you judge the current state of sci-fi in China?

He Xi: Actually, Liu Cixin himself said later that the flourishing of Chinese science fiction had altered his view, but in general, sci-fi is not yet fully thriving in China, and only a small number of works and authors gain the public’s attention. Currently the mainstream of Chinese science fiction is mostly concerned with reality, whilst Western Sci-fi explores the ultimate issues, which probably has something to do with the different levels of socio-economic development.

Q11｜What cutting edge technologies interest you at the moment? And what sort of Sci-fi stories do you feel we really need right now?

He Xi: I’m most interested in the areas of science and technology that can bring tangible benefits to a country with a large population, like China. Energy. Food. Important breakthroughs in Medicine, like anti-aging and artificial wombs. As for which kind of sci-fi story is needed right now? I’d say as many different kinds as possible. Sci-fi is supposed to be the freest domain of the imagination, so should be unrestrained.

Q12｜You’ve been living and working in Zigong, Sichuan all along. What sort of place is it? It’s much smaller than Beijing and Shanghai and lacks that cultural atmosphere. What are the advantages and disadvantages for you as a writer, especially 20-30 years ago, when the internet wasn’t so developed?

He Xi: It’s just an ordinary old industrial city, though it’s now known for its dinosaur fossils, and growing Sichuan cuisine industry, but before the internet… Living in a small inland city did affect my creativity. I actually got the internet in the late 90’s, due to the work I used to do, and sci-fi writing in particular requires an understanding of lot of very disparate subjects.

Q13｜What about the way you write now? Do you find that the ways you work and focus different from before?

He Xi: The way I write now is just fine. My biggest problem is time, and the main thing I need to focus on is breaking through to write something new.

Q14｜Science fiction fans are very interested in the Years Of Heaven trilogy of novels you’ve been working on. How is that going? And what do you feel is the biggest difficulty in shifting from short works to novels?

He Xi: Years Of Heaven 2 is almost finished. The sci-fi long form is a difficult genre to work in because it requires a lot of intricate and original science-fictional concepts and ideas, which is completely different conceptually from traditional literature.

Years Of Heaven by He Xi

Q15｜In Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, you mention that print publishing is of the greatest symbolic significance to Chinese science fiction. In the new 2024 China Science Fiction Industry Report, the industry is valued at over 100 billion RMB, but within that, only 3% is from print publication, with the majority coming from games, theme parks, merchandise and movies. What do you think about that phenomenon? Do you play games yourself?

He Xi: the phenomenon has to be accepted. It’s not just a malady of the sci-fi world, since the invention of film and TV, the numbers of people who read for pleasure has decreased. I do play computer games, sometimes, but I feel games are getting bigger and bigger, often needing hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run. The graphics keep getting better and better, but there seem to be fewer excellent titles.

Q16｜Which of your works are your favourite?

He Xi: That’s more appropriate for my readers to answer.

Because Of Love, I Persevered, by He Xi, published in Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vol. 2 by Eight Light Minutes, Chengdu Times Press

Q17｜As Co-chair of the last Worldcon, held in Chengdu, what do you think about the values of promoting Worldcon and the Hugo Awards in China?

He Xi: Worldcon, held in China in 2023 was a great success, and countless Chinese people outside the Sci-fi circle learned about it, and enjoyed the culture of Science Fiction through The Hugo Awards, A world class Sci-fi award, the resulting positive influence of which, will be felt for years to come. We often say that science and technology are the first productive forces, but these are not themselves natural products. It is the creativity of human thought that brings science and technology into existence, which means that creativity and imagination are the true original productive forces. Promoting Sci-fi culture in China helps improve scientific literacy throughout its population, and helps build an innovative country.

Q18｜Would you like to say anything to the readers and Sci-fi fans around the world about your nomination for the Hugo Awards?

He Xi: I wrote a message last year, as the Co-chair of Chengdu Worldcon, and I’d like to quote a paragraph here, as my reply.

“Science Fiction knows no bounds. Science Fiction embraces all. Science Fiction is beloved by all mankind. Nowadays, Giant telescopes, built by human beings, can observe the starry sky 10 billion light years away, but the more we learn about this vast universe, the more we can appreciate the immense preciousness of the earth. For ten thousand years, mankind has wreaked havoc on the face of this planet, with the unprecedented power of technology. Now we face a critical crossroads, and the choices we make now, will affect us for our entire future. Science Fiction has given us the chance to explore history and extrapolate the future through thousands of profound thought experiments, to break through our darkness and embrace the light. To become the best versions of ourselves, and help our planet last a little longer.”

WSFS 2024: Three Resolutions

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INTRODUCTION. The deadline to submit proposals to the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting was July 10. The formal agenda will be out soon, but in the meantime the movers of 15 submitted items have provided copies for publication and discussion on File 770.

The first, titled “Apology Resolution”, offers an apology on behalf of the World Science Fiction Society to six named 2023 Hugo nominees and others who were harmed by the irregularities of the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Awards administration.

The second, titled “Chengdu Censure Resolution”, proposes to censure the 2023 Worldcon committee for “failing to uphold the promises expressed during the bid campaign”, its Hugo Administration committee for “improper conduct” and Dave McCarty specifically for “removing works from the ballot for reasons not listed in the Constitution” as well as for “discrepancies in balloting”, and asserts members are owed “a refund of their WSFS Membership fees”.

The third, titled “Make Them Finalists Resolution”, calls for WSFS records to reflect that five works and one individual disqualified by the Hugo Administrator Team of the 2023 Worldcon were Hugo finalists, and likewise disqualified Astounding Award finalist Xiran Jay Zhao for that award.

Below are the full text, sponsors’ names, and supporting statements for all three resolutions.

SHORT TITLE: APOLOGY RESOLUTION

WHEREAS Babel (Best Novel), Color the World (Best Novelette), Fongong Temple Pagoda (Best Short Story), The Sandman (Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form), The Sandman (“The Sound of Her Wings”) (Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form), and Paul Weimer (Best Fan Writer) were arbitrarily and capriciously excluded from the Hugo Awards finalist list for the 2023 Worldcon for reasons not found in the Constitution; and

WHEREAS the invalidation of these nominees voided not less than 1,834 nominations; and

WHEREAS in not less than four categories, the Hugo Award nomination results listed more votes in the ninth-to-last round of nominee elimination than nominating ballots cast; and

WHEREAS an unknown and unquantifiable number of ballots for other works, mostly by Chinese authors or creators, were excluded because of alleged “slate voting”; and

WHEREAS the Chengdu Hugo Administration Committee choosing to cite “the rules that we must follow” with no further elaboration is unacceptably vague; and

WHEREAS upon being confronted with these irregularities, neither the Chengdu Worldcon Concom nor the Hugo Administrator for the Chengdu Worldcon offered a satisfactory or acceptable explanation for these irregularities;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT:

The World Science Fiction Society apologizes unreservedly to all nominees, finalists, and winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards for the improper conduct of the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Administration Committee and any harm which may result from that; and

The World Science Fiction Society specifically apologizes to R.F. Kuang, author of Babel; Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, author of Color the World; Hai Ya, author of Fongong Temple Pagoda; Neil Gaiman, author/writer for The Sandman; Paul Weimer, and Xiran Jay Zhao for their arbitrary, capricious, and extra-constitutional exclusion from the Hugo Award Finalist ballot and/or Astounding Award ballot; and

The World Science Fiction Society apologizes unreservedly to the nominators and voters of the 2023 Hugo Awards for the improper conduct of the Hugo Awards process;

The World Science Fiction Society declares that notwithstanding their extra-constitutional exclusion from the Final Ballot, R.F. Kuang, author of Babel; Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, author of Color the World; Hai Ya, author of Fongong Temple Pagoda; Neil Gaiman, author/writer for The Sandman; and Paul Weimer shall be considered to be valid finalists, and furthermore that said Finalists should be included in all official lists of Hugo Award Finalists and shall otherwise be considered Finalists for all other purposes related to the World Science Fiction Society and/or any Worldcon hereafter; and

The World Science Fiction Society requests that Dell Publications permit Xiran Jay Zhao to be added to the list of finalists for the Astounding Award for Best New Author.

SPONSORS: Kristina Forsyth, Cliff Dunn

DISCUSSION:

While there are practical constraints to what the WSFS Business Meeting can do with respect to the 2023 Hugo Award fiasco, unreserved apologies are within our remit.  We recognize that some damaged parties, specifically those whose nominations “evaporated” due to the removal of an unknown number of ballots from the nominations process, may never be known.  But we do know, in specific, those whose works were excluded under dubious grounds and we can offer apologies there.

In the event that other names become known, we would of course encourage the WSFS Business Meeting to offer similar apologies to them.

Please note: This resolution proposes approaching Dell Publications to ask their permission to list Xiran Jay Zhao as a finalist because of the technical ownership of the underlying award (WSFS merely administers it, rather than “owning” it as with the Hugo Awards).

SHORT TITLE: CHENGDU CENSURE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS the first stated purpose of the World Science Fiction Society in its constitution is to choose the recipients of the annual Hugo Awards (Science Fiction Achievement Awards); and

WHEREAS the Hugo Awards are the most prominent and lasting work of any year’s iteration of the World Science Fiction Society; and

WHEREAS the sense of the Business Meeting of the World Science Fiction Society, as expressed in the debates surrounding the Non-Transferability Amendment in 2021 and 2022, is that members join the Society to support the business of the Society; and

WHEREAS many members of the World Science Fiction Society join the Society primarily or exclusively to participate in nominating and voting on the Hugo Awards; and

WHEREAS Babel (Best Novel), Color the World (Best Novelette), Fongong Temple Pagoda (Best Short Story), The Sandman (Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form), The Sandman (“The Sound of Her Wings”) (Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form), and Paul Weimer (Best Fan Writer) were arbitrarily and capriciously excluded from the Hugo Awards finalist list for the 2023 Worldcon for reasons not found in the Constitution, and in the process not less than 1,834 nominations were voided;

WHEREAS Xiran Jay Zhao was arbitrarily and capriciously excluded from the Astounding Award finalist list, voiding another 178 nominations;

and

WHEREAS no announcement prior to the initiation of the 2021 Site Selection process indicated that rules other than the WSFS Constitution would be used in the Hugo Awards selection process; and

WHEREAS the leadership of the bid committee for the Chengdu Worldcon (generally known as Chengdu in 2023) repeatedly asserted that free speech rights would be respected in the convention and denied that censorship would occur; and

WHEREAS the above election irregularities cannot reasonably be interpreted as anything but censorship; and

WHEREAS Dave McCarty, as Chair of the Hugo Administration committee for the Chengdu Worldcon, has officially declared that he is responsible for all such decisions; and

WHEREAS in not less than four categories, the Hugo Award nomination results listed more votes in the ninth-to-last round of nominee elimination than nominating ballots cast; and

WHEREAS as of the submission of this resolution, no meaningful, public, official explanation has been given by the Hugo Administrator for either above irregularity; and

WHEREAS an unprecedented “cliff” in the number of nominations between the top 5-8 nominees and the remaining nominees in multiple categories was without precedent; and

WHEREAS these irregularities, in their totality, raise substantial and unresolvable doubts as to the propriety of the Hugo Award election process;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT:

The World Science Fiction Society censures the Chengdu in 2023 bid committee in whole and individually for misleading behaviour during the bid campaign; and

The World Science Fiction Society censures the Chengdu Wordcon committee in whole and individually for failing to uphold the promises expressed during the bid campaign; and

The World Science Fiction Society censures the Hugo Administration committee of the Chengdu Worldcon for improper conduct; and

The World Science Fiction Society censures Dave McCarty, specifically, for removing works from the ballot for reasons not listed in the Constitution; and

The World Science Fiction Society further censures the Hugo Administration committee of the Chengdu Worldcon in whole and individually for discrepancies in balloting; and

The World Science Fiction Society expresses the opinion that, as the primary, if not sole, purpose of many members joining the Chengdu Worldcon, as the 2023 iteration of the World Science Fiction Society was to participate in nominating and voting for the Hugo Awards, these irregularities mean that the Chengdu Worldcon failed to provide its members with the rights and privileges in the Constitution, and therefore owes those members a refund of their WSFS Membership fees.

SPONSORS: Terri Ash, Kevin Sonney, Cliff Dunn, Kristina Forsyth

DISCUSSION: While most of this resolution is self-explanatory and discussion of this affair can be found anywhere from File770 to The Guardian to other submissions to this year’s Worldcon Business Meeting, we wish to elaborate on a small number of points:

First, we recognize the non-binding nature of this resolution.  There is only so much that the WSFS Business Meeting can do, particularly in retrospect.  Another resolution has been submitted to make the irregularly excluded works finalists, so this resolution is focused solely on reprimanding the Chengdu Worldcon Committee.

Second, we feel compelled – given the debates of the last few years – to begin marking a line in the sand around what the “business of the society” is.  The Non-Transferability Amendment got rid of a major avenue for members of a given year’s WSFS to “bail”, but if a major purpose of people joining WSFS is to participate in and support the “business of the society” then we must acknowledge that there is some minimum standard to reasonably consider that the business in question has been executed – and that Chengdu didn’t meet that standard.  We don’t want a Worldcon Committee to be able to “have it both ways”, with WSFS memberships being non-refundable and non-transferable but the Committee having no actual responsibility to carry out that business.  We cannot force Chengdu to refund anybody’s money, but we can make it clear that they ought to do so.

Finally, our intent is to “name and shame”.  Prominent members of our community chose to participate in a process which became grossly corrupted.  They presented the illusion that everything was alright until it was too late to fix the problem.  And several of those members have taken the position that they did nothing wrong.

We wish to make it clear, beyond all doubt, that we hold what they did to be wrong.  Excuses about protecting the process from getting worse or refusing to publicly disagree with a committee that is misbehaving have limits, and we want to make it clear for the record that we do not accept their excuses as sufficient to excuse what transpired.

SHORT TITLE: MAKE THEM FINALISTS RESOLUTION

Be it Resolved That: Notwithstanding their disqualification by the Hugo Administrator Team of the 2023 Worldcon, Babel (Best Novel), Color the World (Best Novelette), Fogong Temple Pagoda (Best Short Story), The Sandman (Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form), The Sandman (“The Sound of Her Wings”) (Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form), and Paul Weimer (Best Fan Writer), are deemed to have been designated as [finalists] by the Worldcon community for the 2023 Hugo Awards; Xiran Jay Zhao is deemed to have been designated by the Worldcon community as a finalist for the Astounding Award; and

Therefore, the aforementioned people and/or works shall be entitled to be listed as being finalists for a Hugo Award and/or Astounding Award, and shall be formally indicated as Hugo Award Finalists and/or Astounding Finalists in any and all relevant publications.

SPONSORS: Terri Ash, Kevin Sonney, Cliff Dunn, Erica Frank

DISCUSSION: The listed works and creators were all listed in the nominations report for the 2023 Hugo Awards as having enough nominations to make the Final Ballot and were excluded for reasons not stated beyond being deemed not eligible for reasons not found in the Constitution.  While we cannot run the vote again and we cannot be sure that other works were not excluded through the improper exclusion of ballots or via other methods, these irregular exclusions were explicit.   These works objectively qualified for the final ballot, and the historical record should respect this and the authors/creators be duly honored.  Should further clear evidence of other victims of irregular exclusions be provided, we would support adding them to the official lists of nominees as well.

We acknowledge that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman will receive dual finalist slots – one for the individual episode and one for the full season – when it would not normally be on the ballot in both places.  As both the full season and the individual episode had sufficient nominations to make the ballot, we cannot predict which one Mr. Gaiman would have chosen to go forward.  However, we feel it is safe to consider that the irregular exclusion of “The Sound of Her Wings” should have made the full season eligible and therefore consider both to be victims of this.

We also acknowledge that aside from correcting the record, this resolution does not right the other wrongs wrought by their exclusion.  We would encourage the 2025 and 2026 Worldcons to take steps to right what other wrongs might be (such as providing them with Finalist pins, attempting to arrange a photo op for all the folks in the relevant category from 2023, and so on), but we do not wish to prescribe what actions those committees ought to take.

Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #88, A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

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In Search Of…The 2023 Hugo Awards      

By Chris M. Barkley: On February 17, 2024, I received the following email:

Feb 17, 2024, 4:25 AM

Dear Hugo and Related Award Winners,

Many of you are wondering when Hugo Awards, and Finalist pins and certificates will be shipped out to those who did not take possession of them in Chengdu. We could not distribute Finalist pins to Acceptors at the convention as is generally the custom, because we were not yet in possession of a large enough supply. So only attending Finalists received pins, and we missed some of them if they showed up early.

The award materials were shipped in bulk to the US for individual mailing, and arrived just recently. We need you to send us the shipping addresses(es) of the Winner or Winners. This needs to be a facility that can take delivery of a medium sized box. A PO Box will not do, unless you have a really understanding post office or a really large PO box. While we have a list of who got their Hugo Finalist pins in Chengdu, we would appreciate you confirming that you did or didn’t receive yours in your responses so that we can be sure we’re getting everyone handled appropriately.

Even if you have previously sent us an address, we would appreciate it if you could send it to us again to confirm things before we ship items out.

Thank you so much for all your cooperation during the preparations for the Awards Ceremony. Everything went really well, and we were pleased with the participation level of our Finalists and Winners at a Worldcon so far away from many of us. The Chinese fans experiencing all of this for their first time were thrilled to see so many finalists and winners there.

Should you have any questions regarding these instructions, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] and [email protected] Because, of course, the HugoTeam email address is still occasionally having hiccups.

Congratulations again to all of you.

——————

Ann Marie Rudolph
Hugo Award Selection Committee
Chengdu Worldcon
https://en.chengduworldcon.com/

Now, after reading this message, I, and everyone else who received this email, had every expectation of the delivery of all of the materials and awards due to the recipients. 

But this is not the case.

On January 20, fandom was rocked by the release of the 2023 Hugo Awards Long List and nominating ballot statistics, which inexplicably excluded a number of nominees and works, from within and outside the People’s Republic of China, and some without any explanation whatsoever.

Thirty-two days later, on Valentine’s Day, matters were confounded even further when my colleague Jason Sanford and I published a revealing investigative report that provided part of the answer; with material provided by award administrator Diane Lacey, it was revealed that the Chengdu Hugo Award Administration team, headed up by Dave McCarty, had ruled that some of works had been ruled “ineligible” because of their alleged or perceived bias against China. 

The Hugo Awards arrived in the United States in late January, but, as I have reported here in an afterword to my interview with Dave McCarty, all of the display cases and some of the awards were damaged in transit from China. As of this writing, there has been no comment from the Chengdu Worldcon Committee how the awards were shipped nor has anyone ascertained how the damage occurred or taken responsibility for their condition.  

Before and during these tumultuous events, I made several inquiries as to when the recipients might expect their awards to arrive. Other than an email asking for my correct mailing address in mid-March (from an administrator not implicated in the scandal), I have not received any other news regarding the awards. 

I must take a moment to commend the work and artistry of Liu Cheng and his team, who designed and manufactured the beautiful and exquisite base of the 2023 Hugo Award. I have often said that I was envious of those who received the 2007 Hugo Award depicting the rocket alongside the Mt. Fuji and the iconic tokusatsu hero, Ultraman (designed by Takashi Kinoshita and KAIYODO). 

2023 Hugo Award by Richard Man

After the ceremony, I couldn’t take a step in any direction as I was besieged by fans for nearly 45 minutes as they clamored to pose for photographs with this magnificent piece of sculpture (and me), a yearning panda, reaching out of a stargate towards the Hugo rocket. I indulged everyone I could that frenzied and crazy evening because who knows when they might have a chance to see and hold such a fine work of art.  

A lot has happened since the end of the Hugo Awards Ceremony nearly eight months ago; most notably an extensive delay in the delivery of a number of Hugo Award trophies won by those residing outside of the People’s Republic of China (estimated to be 29 in total) to the United States to be dispersed by the 2023 Hugo Awards Administrator, Dave McCarty. 

In the past few weeks, as I marked the seventh month since the Hugo Awards Ceremony, I began to wonder if any of the 2023 recipients had either received their awards or have had any other contact regarding their Hugo Awards.

And so, starting on May 15th, I set out to contact all of the twenty-nine recipients via email or social media to conduct a survey of who and who did not receive their Hugo Awards. 

(Note: I did not attempt to contact Samantha Mills (Best Short Story, “Rabbit Test”) or Adrian Tchaikovsky (Best Series, “Children of Time”) since they have publicly declined to accept their awards due to the controversy surrounding their selection. I also did not contact any of the Chinese recipients, for obvious reasons.) 

I made a concerted effort to contact the following people:

T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), Best Novel, Nettle & Bone

Seanan McGuire, Best Novella, Where the Drowned Girls Go

Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Best Graphic Story or Comic, Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams

Rob Wilkins, Best Related Work, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar and Breck Eisner, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, The Expanse: “Babylon’s Ashes”

Neil Clarke, Best Editor – Short Form

Lindsey Hall, Best Editor – Long Form

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Chimedum Ohaegbu, Monte Lin, Meg Elison, Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky, Best Semi-Prozine, Uncanny Magazine 

Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson, Best Fancast, Hugo, Girl!

Richard Man, Best Fan Artist

Out of all of the queries sent, I received the following responses:

 T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) conveyed to me, via social media, that as of this writing, she had not received her award. She also stated that she was vociferously ambiguous about keeping it, saying that she would decide whether or not to keep it after she received it.

Daniel Abraham’s assistant, Ms. Rogers, reported on May 23rd: 

“Nope, no award, no emails, no nothing. I’m just answering for Daniel but I will check with Ty and Naren. Please keep us posted if you hear anything.”

Lindsey Hall, responding on a social media site on May 18th, was surprised; she kept her Hugo Award after the ceremony and had fully intended to have it shipped but never connected again with Mr. McCarty, so she decided to squeeze the case and award into her luggage and she cleared customs in China and the US with no problems at all. She also expressed surprise that none of the other recipients had received their awards yet.  

Lynne M. Thomas commented via social media a few days ago that the Hugo Awards she and her husband Michael Damian Thomas won were dropped off at their Chicago area home by Mr. McCarty at an unspecified date. She also said that both trophies did not show any damage but they were given without the display boxes. She also stated that they did inquire by email in May about the other awards for their staff members but have not received any response as of this writing.  

It turns out Lori Anderson of the Hugo, Girl podcast team was just as curious as I was; my inquiry to her prompted her to email Dave McCarty on May 28th:

Email screenshots with permissions from Lori Anderson

Undeterred, she sent a follow up email on June 6th:

As of this writing, there has been no response from Mr. McCarty.

On May 16th, Richard Man sent this DM response via Facebook:

 “Nope, heh.” And, he followed up by asking, “Have you? Has anyone?”

And I responded, nope.

As for myself, I had a chance to receive my Hugo Award twice; I considered taking it home in my luggage but decided against it on the evening of the ceremony because I did not know what level of bother to expect at customs. So, I can easily attest that my Hugo was the very first to be boxed up. Which I regret to this very day.

Hugo Award in a display box by Chris Barkley, 21 October, 2023

The second time was the weekend of Capricon 44 on February 3rd; when Juli and I arrived, we encountered Mr. McCarty in the upper-level lobby near the dealer’s room and the art show. He told me that the damage to the display box was so bad that it was totally unusable. The Hugo base needed to be tightened up and there was a notable chip in the paint on the panda. He generously offered to bring it to me to take home the next day but also said that he could have it repaired and restored.

After agonizing over it for a few minutes, I told him, yeah, please have it repaired. Which I also regret to this day because not more than an hour later I was taking custody of a flash drive and emails from Diane Lacey that would completely upend Mr. McCarty’s life, and fandom as well.

With the exception of passing along my condolences on the death of a mutual friend, I have not attempted to contact Mr. McCarty. 

On Saturday, June 8th, 2024, I attended the 50th Anniversary celebration of my high school, Purcell-Marian High School, Class of 1974.

I was invited back by the alumni association on the 25th anniversary back in 1999 but I was still feeling a bit resentful and raw from my experiences there; the teasing, fights, bullying and being made to feel as though I was a social outcast still weighed heavily on me. 

But I had grown a lot a quarter century ago and I decided to attend, if anything, to finally put this part of my life behind me for good.

And from the moment my partner Juli and I arrived, we were warmly greeted. Several people personally sought me out and we shared some personal memories that reminded me that not everything was as hellish as I remembered.  

When they asked what I had been doing over the past 50 years, I regaled them with stories about my daughter Laura, my four grandchildren, jobs I held over the decades and my many adventures in fandom.   

Of course, this all culminated with me (repeatedly) whipping out my phone and showing them a photo of myself, holding the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, proudly holding it while being in the People’s Republic of China.

Chris M. Barkley with 2023 Fan Writer Hugo Award by Pablo Vasquez, 21 October 2023

I was delighted to find that there were some sff fans among my classmates and their partners who KNEW what a Hugo Award was and there was much eye-popping and praise.

And when my classmates inevitably ask where I keep it, I cryptically replied that I have a special space reserved in our dining room. 

As of today, June 10th, there has been no response from Mr. McCarty, Ms. Rudolph, Chengdu Worldcon Co-Chairs Chen Shi, Ben Yalow and Hongwei He and convention liaison Joe Yao about this situation. 

What we have at the moment is an astonishing lack of responsibility, accountability and transparency regarding this issue. 

We all know what needs be done:

  • All of the Hugo Award Finalists should be sent their pins and certificates, immediately.
  • If there is a condition or repair issue regarding anyone’s Hugo Award, they should be sent a notice stating what the current situation is and when a delivery can be expected.
  • If an award needs to be replaced in its entirety, the recipient should be notified.
  • If the awards are going to be disbursed to everyone at the same time or as each award has been repaired, recipients should be made aware of that status.  
  • Each and every Finalist should receive a written apology for the convention’s lack of transparency and delay of their materials and awards.  

While I can safely say that no one’s life is at stake here, I can also say that once again, fandom’s black eye from the trials and tribulations of its own making continues to be on public display and, at this point, may actually be festering.

And the silence is absolutely deafening. 

The Pidu District of Chengdu Announces a 10-Year Science Fiction Plan

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By Ersatz Culture: (Note: All the following text extracts are machine translations from Chinese, using a mixture of Google and DeepL tools.  Some minor manual edits have been made, but there are minimal attempts to try to decipher the meaning of terms such as “online carrier”, “brand inheritance” or the “Through the Wormhole” plan.)

The local government of the area where the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon took place has published a 10-year plan, which — amongst other things — indicates an intention to bid to hold the Worldcon again, within the next five years.

On April 8, the Jingrong Town WeChat/Weixin account posted the Pidu District Action Plan to Build the Chengdu Science Fiction Center.  (Pidu is the district on the western side of Chengdu, where the 2023 Worldcon was located, with Jingrong Lake being the body of water adjacent to the SF museum that was the venue for the event.)  This text of this article was also posted on the Pidu district local government website a couple of days later, with some additional opening text that is seemingly aimed at local government employees:

Notice on the issuance of the “Action Plan for the Construction of Chengdu Science Fiction Center in Pidu District (2023-2033)”

To district-level departments, streets (towns), and industrial functional zones:

The “Pidu District Action Plan for Building the Chengdu Science Fiction Center (2023-2033)” has been reviewed and approved by the 29th District Governor’s Office Meeting and the 31st Executive Meeting of the 19th Pidu District, Chengdu City, and is hereby issued to you. Please comply with it and implement it.

Chengdu Pidu District People’s Government Office

The plan comprises 24 items, split into eight sections:

  1. Overall requirements (items #1-3)
  2. Overall positioning (items #4-6)
  3. Implement the science fiction industry agglomeration project (items #7-9)
  4. Implement the science fiction technology integration project (items #10-12)
  5. Implement the science fiction branding project (items #13-15)
  6. Implement the science fiction business prosperity project (items #16-18)
  7. Implement the science fiction ecological construction project (items #19-21)
  8. Safeguarding measures (items #22-24)

Much of the plan seems to be about science and technology, rather than science fiction, so those items will not be covered here.  Furthermore, a lot of the text is also somewhat obtuse in terms of what exactly is being planned, which may or may not be down to the vagaries of machine translation.

However, there are some items which cover areas of direct relevance to File 770 readers and the wider fandom.  These are extracted below, with my highlighting in bold of the most relevant bits.

4. Focus on IP creation and introduction. Establish a science fiction IP creation center, using the Worldcon Metaverse as the online carrier and the World Science Fiction Master Village as the offline support, to collect original science fiction works, carry out training in screenwriting, writing intelligent tools, technology-enabled creation, and worldview licensing co-creation, capital docking, brand promotion and other services, and strive to create or introduce more than 2 Hugo Award-nominated works and 100 science fiction-themed IPs within 3 years.

6. Promote IP development and transformation. Establish a science fiction IP operation and transformation center to integrate the power of science fiction creators, technology research and development institutions, and science fiction operation teams, connect with investors, developers, producers, channels and other professional institutions, and promote top domestic and foreign IPs such as the Hugo Awards and the Galaxy Awards. Transform into products or scenes such as film and television animation, cultural and creative products, live entertainment, etc. Strive to sign and establish more than 2 Hugo Award IP blockbuster film and television dramas within 5 years, and develop more than 10 science fiction demonstration products and application scenarios with national influence.

13. Extend the brand effect of the Worldcon. Implement the conference brand inheritance plan, strive for authorization from the World Science Fiction Society, and continue to carry out ten parallel venues of the Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Industry Development Promotion Forum, the Future Choice of the Worldcon [presumably referring to Site Selection?], the “Hugo X” [aka “Discover-X”] Science Fiction Carnival, and the Worldcon Organizers Conference [referring to SMOFcon?].  A large-scale derivative international brand activity strives to establish the Worldcon Brand Protection and Communication Center, and strives to apply for the Worldcon again within five years. Implement the conference heritage reuse plan, prepare to build the 81st Worldcon Memorial Hall, collect and preserve the convention’s Hugo Award-winning works, trophies, audio and video, artistic creation and other resources, and continue to develop a series of cultural and creative derivatives based on the cultural IP of the Worldcon and Xingyun Award.

14. Enhance the city’s science fiction brand. Expand the brand influence of science fiction exhibitions, strive to host the Asia-Pacific Science Fiction Conference, host science fiction events such as the China (Chengdu) International Science Fiction Conference, and hold prestigious international and domestic science fiction awards such as the “Chinese Science Fiction Xingyun Award” and “Future Science Fiction Master Award”. Cultivate local science fiction exhibition brands, introduce well-known performing arts groups, science fiction enterprises, and professional institutions, focus on Tianfu culture, cutting-edge technology and other fields, plan and hold themed exhibitions such as the “Near Future” science and technology concept exhibition.  It will also develop and build the “Science Fiction Time and Space – Ancient Shu” theme, stage plays, music festivals and other special performing arts brands, and strive to hold no less than 10 industry-influential science fiction exhibitions and performing arts activities every year .

17. Build an international community system. Lead the establishment of science fiction alliances in colleges and universities, guide and support the establishment of science fiction associations in colleges and universities in the region, and explore the working mechanism of establishing science fiction associations in colleges and universities to export talents to science fiction enterprises. Gather sci-fi practitioners, innovate consumption discounts, customized services and other models, create interactive scenes such as parent-child gatherings, themed salons, business negotiations etc, and create a club for sci-fi practitioners. Create colorful fan communities, continue to operate the online space of the Worldcon, implement the “Through the Wormhole” plan, build a regular online communication space between domestic fans and core members of the Worldcon, and senior foreign fans; accurately cultivate unique IP communities, implement the “Stars and Sea” plan, rely on the new media matrix and offline science fiction space, and carry out classic IP promotion activities with one theme per quarter.

I had a cursory look at the Weibo accounts of some of the people on the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon concom, and couldn’t find any posts or comments referencing this plan.  It is certainly possible that there could have been posts around the time this plan was first announced in early April, but I’m a bit doubtful – this announcement only seemed to be picked up a couple of weeks later, in this SF Light Year Weibo post on the 24th.  There will be events at the Chengdu SF Museum over the weekend of 18-19 May – including the Xingyun Award ceremony – so perhaps some further announcements will happen then?

[The complete Chinese language graphic follows the jump.]

Continue reading →

See Videos of 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Events

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By Ersatz Culture: The fan organization that oversees the Japanese national sf convention recently posted videos of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon to their YouTube channel. These are a mix of business meeting sessions, the Hugo Awards, and Closing Ceremonies.

  • Worldcon 81 in Chengdu Bussiness meeting Day2-2 (20 Oct. 2023)
  • Worldcon 81 in Chengdu Bussiness meeting Day3 (21 Oct. 2023)
  • Worldcon 81 in Chengdu Hugo Ceremony (21 Oct. 2023)
  • Worldcon 81 in Chengdu Hugo Night (21 Oct. 2023)
  • Worldcon 81 in Chengdu Closing

So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #84: A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

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Chris M. Barkley

Unburdening Myself of Unfinished Business

By Chris M. Barkley: 

ITEM ONE: As we emerge from the cold and cloudless days of January and February, you would think that the prospect of sunny days, baseball, international football (soccer), the open swimming pools and children playing outside would bring some joy to my soul.

Every year for the past forty years or so, the coming of the so-called “Daylight Savings Time” fills me with sadness, anxiety, moodiness and lastly, anger. (Yes, I only appear to be a mild-mannered reporter for a daily metropolitan daily sf news zine.)

Because myself and most of my fellow North Americans have lost an hour’s sleep. And why?

Because the farmers, blah, blah, blah. And the kids getting on the bus in the dark, blah, blah. And commerce and businesses flourish, blah, blah, blah… 

When I was a young lad in the mid-1960’s, the prospect of time travel (in this fashion) was novel and exciting. Forward into the future and then returning back into the past a few months later was a perfectly appealing idea to my young mind.

But, as I got older, my priorities and attitude towards DST gradually changed. Just the thought of the approaching date brought on bouts of gnawing and persisting dread. Changing the clocks forth and back became (and still are) a hassle. And the loss of an hour’s sleep every spring is just plain wrong.

 I’m not going to bore everyone with its history, musings, opinions or statistics about whether we should choose to sat in “standard” or “daylight” time or why the DST should be hunted down with pitchforks and torches, staked through the heart and left burning in the noonday sun. 

Instead, I will leave you with a well known Native American aphorism:

“Only a white man would have you believe you could cut a foot off the top of the blanket, sew it onto the bottom of the blanket, and you’d be left with a longer blanket.”

Contact your congressional representative and Senators; they are the only ones who can kill this stupid and unhealthy abomination once and for all.

Enough. Said. 

ITEM TWO: On the morning of February 5, 2024, my audio interview with Dave McCarty was published here on File770.com.

As many of you may know, I distribute the daily “Pixel Scroll” and other standalone news items on eight sff Facebook groups and on the Bluesky app. (I have mostly avoided posting on X/Twitter since September 2023.) If there is something more important or pressing at hand, like an exclusive interview with Dave McCarty for example, I post a File 770 link to a more widespread group of forty groups…well, actually, thirty-nine as of today. Let me explain…

That particular morning, I started posting the interview to my usual group but when I came up to the Washington Science Fiction Association, I had to pause because I was served with a notice that stated that my posting privileges had been suspended:

“Your profile been (sic) suspended in this group. The admin has temporarily turned off your ability to post, comment and earn contribution points in the group until February 23, 2024, 10:19 AM.”

I was flabbergasted for several reasons, the first of which was that I had not received any notice of the suspension from any of the administrators, there was no previous indication of any trouble before that day. 

Since I was locked out of the page, there was no way to send a message to an admin, so I decided to shout out on my own page:

To the Washington Science Fiction Association Facebook Page:

While posting my latest File 770 column this morning, I found out that the admins of the Washington Science Fiction Association suspended my posting privileges on their page for three weeks. Apparently they found my most recent dispersing news on a regular basis either offensive and/or disturbing.

I have done my best to pass along vital and accurate information there for some time and I am HIGHLY upset that I was suspended without notification or an adequate explanation. Do I need to point out the parallels to what happened recently regarding the Chengdu Long List nominees?

As a journalist, I resent being effectively censored in this fashion; sf fans have every right to be informed, whether the news is for good or for ill, especially during these tumultuous times in sf fandom.

While I recognize that they have every right to run their page as they see fit, I find this action egregious, unnecessary and a disservice to the other members of the group. As a result of these actions I will be leaving the group later today.

Chris B.

During the course of that day, several friends offered advice and support, which, for the most part, I appreciated. Several suggested I reach out to the administrators to find out what the problem was. I wasn’t very receptive to doing that because I was very upset and the aggrieved party; so why would I do that? 

Two friends intervened on my behalf and made inquiries on my behalf. One reported in a direct message:   

“Sent your message to the three admins. I’m guessing what set this off was the piece with the McCarty interview.”

I did not hear back from anyone else about this that day. And so, at a little after 10pm, the Washington Science Fiction Association page had one less member. 

My other friend sent me the following message in the early morning hours of the next day:

“Chris, you were paused by the moderator because they were traveling and could not monitor posts.”

I sent back the following message:

“Well, that’s a troubling explanation. Was this applied to everyone? Or just me? Because without a notification to me or on the page, it felt like I was being targeted.

Also  the period of time described in the suspension notice wasn’t for a period of days but weeks. 

So yeah, I’m having a hard time believing this.”

As of today, I have not been contacted by any of the admins involved nor have I been given an adequate explanation for their actions or offered an apology.

My reason for airing my grievance here and now is two-fold; this incident has been simmering with me for over five weeks and I felt the need to let loose before I lose my sanity, self esteem or both. Secondly, this is not my first rodeo with unresponsive page admins and frankly I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with social media and Facebook in particular.

And at its best, Facebook is a wonderful tool to keep in touch with friends and share ideas and opinions. But I am beginning to realize that for me, the pervasive and oftentimes intrusive effects of social media may outweigh its benefits. 

Lately, I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for good. Incidents like this just nudge me a little further towards doing that.

ITEM THREE: And then there was the matter of D.G. Valdron’s essay on Medium.com.

On February 18, Mr. Valdron, who describes himself on the website as a “Canadian Speculative Fiction and Pop Culture writer”, published an article that was ominously titled “Moral Compromise and the Lesson of the Hugos”.

Mr. Valdron, in an imperious and somewhat solemn tone, vaguely (and, mind you, without attribution) outlined the problems regarding the Chengdu Worldcon:

In 2023, the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Chengdu, China.

This was a little bit controversial, given the Chinese government’s genocidal actions regarding Ughyers and Tibetans, their authoritarian police state shtick, etc. But everyone went along with it. Why rock the boat?

The problem came with the Hugo Awards.

Now, the thing with the Hugos, is that everyone submits nominations, the Hugo Awards Committee vets the nominations, and a final list gets put out for the fans and convention members to vote on by secret ballot. Now, that’s how I understand it. I might have gotten some detail wrong, but I believe that’s the gist. It doesn’t matter.

Here’s what matters:

The Hugos were corrupted. The Hugo Awards Committee turns out to have been screening out the works of American, English and Chinese creators, on behalf of the Chinese government. Basically, anyone whose novel or background was critical of the Chinese government, or even politically sensitive, like mentioning Tibet, was dropped from the list.

But you know what strikes me?

It’s how trivial this is.

Forgive me, I’m sure it’s important to the people involved. Careers and friendships ended, a community rocked.

But let’s get a grip. Most people in North America have never even heard of the Hugos. Most people in North America are not science fiction writers, or readers. Hell, most people in North America are not readers.

The Hugos aren’t the Nobels, or the Pulitzers. In the larger scheme, they’re a minor award, restricted to a literary/social subculture which might result in a few extra sales and an ego boost.

No one’s life was at risk. No one’s freedom was imperiled. No huge sums of money, no public safety.

This was a small trivial thing.

In my cynical side, I suspect that most times, people would make the wrong moral choice, but hopefully, in the face of more pressure, or intimidation or incentive than this. Maybe I just want people to suffer more.

Anyway, we’ve been down this path before you and I. Sorry to belabour it. How we treat each other is a hobby horse of mine. I’ve had my tests, and I’ll have more. I’ve dealt with them.

What about you?

I’m SO GLAD you asked, sir.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Valdron is entitled to his opinion. And granted, what happened with the Chengdu Worldcon and the 2023 Hugo Awards is definitely not as important as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the current battle between democracy and fascism in the United States or our ever increasing concerns over climate change and various environmental crises all over the world.

What really ticked me off about D.G. Valdron’s article is his rather cavalier attitude towards what happened, the Hugo Awards and general air of disapproval of the fandom that supports it.  

Fantasy, science fiction and horror is, despite the bleating of insufferable academics and mainstream literary critics, a vital part of the tree of literature, and whose roots run a millenium or two deep.

Modern sff literature (and fandom) started over a hundred years ago when teenagers in the US and United Kingdom began to correspond, meet, talk and write about their mutual fascination. 

And out of those meetings came conventions, cosplay, and generations of aspiring publishers, writers, editors, artists, game creators, filmmakers, and commentators, like myself.

I have had the privilege of growing up in a period of this history to witness sff grow from being considered a freakish sideshow to becoming a dominant force in world culture.

And the Hugo Awards, for better or worse, have provided all of us with an invaluable anecdotal, year by year snapshot of what people thought about fantastic literature and the visual arts. Readers, writers, editors, artists and publishers look to it as a bellwether of the field’s vitality. 

So, no this is NOT “a small trivial thing,” Mr. Waldron.

And I find it very disappointing to see a member of our own community like yourself thinking so little of the situation as to look down your nose at the sff fandom and its history under the pretense of high handed criticism.

There is a term for this Mr. Waldron. 

It is called “bad form”.

ITEM FOUR: Having a little notoriety in your life can be fun. I have been a fan guest of honor at three conventions (Windycon in 2019, Astronomicon in 2021 and Confusion in 2023), a panelist art auctioneer at local, regional conventions and at Worldcons. I’ve been nominated for a Hugo Award twice (and may have even won one).

But speaking personally, I don’t go out of my way to seek it out. I know myself well enough to know that if my ego were well fed on a regular basis it would be to the detriment of myself and my family and friends.

So, as you can well imagine my quandary as the Chengdu Worldcon story grew exponentially, my name (as well as my co-author, Jason Sanford) popped in all sorts of media outlets like the Guardian (UK), NBC News, the Associated Press and the New York Times among others.

I was even interviewed by Andrew Linbong for National Public Radio, which, as a listener of fifty-plus years, was the thrill of a lifetime as far as I’m concerned.

But, there’s a downside as well. While I and Jason received universal praise for our reporting, we were also reminded that there are a lot of cranks out there who were more than willing to let the air out of tires, so to speak.

There were several that stood out; sff author Larry Correia was irked because of Jason and I had previously reported on and commented negatively against his involvements in the Sad/Angry/Rabid Puppy wars a decade ago. Frankly, having someone like Correia upset with me is a badge of honor as far as I’m concerned. (See my post on Bluesky.)

My partner Juli alerted me that some wag on Reddit had heard my interview with Dave McCarty and had come to the startling conclusion that I was actually in cahoots with him to cover up his complicity in the scandal. To which I replied that he had obviously seen far too many episodes of The Traitors reality competition show to be reasoned with. 

I was very heartened when I read that both Samantha Mills (author of the acclaimed short story “Rabbit Test”) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (who wrote The Children of Time series) had both decided not to acknowledge their Hugo Awards in the wake of the Chengdu scandal. 

Adversely, I received a bit of backlash from some people once I let it be known that I was going to keep my Hugo Award more as a keepsake and family heirloom than a personal achievement. 

I might have felt the same way as Ms. Mills and Mr. Tchaikovsky if I was sitting at home watching the Hugo Awards Ceremony at home and found out later that my presence on the ballot was dubious at best and that many Chinese writers and fans were most likely disenfranchised from the process.    

But, I went to China, had the time of my life, made the speech of my life and felt a close affinity for this award I thought I had rightly won. If anything, I wanted to be reminded of the trip, the people I met and befriended and the devastating revelations that followed.

Well, for a very vocal fringe minority of people, keeping this Hugo Award was tantamount to rooting for Lex Luthor, killing baby seals, helping the Houston Astros win the 2017 World Series or actually being a communist.

I laughed off nearly all of this outrage as either sour grapes, jealousy, pettiness or “virtue signaling”. In the course of all of this sturm and drang, I posted the following on Bluesky:

This generated a (unnecessarily snarky) response from @afab boyfriend:

It’s responses like these, that seemingly come out of the social ether that occasionally bother me, referring back to my general unease about social media. I don’t know this person and they CLEARLY don’t know me and yet it seems my comment struck a nerve that needed a pointed response. And I get it; I admit that in the past, I too, have sought out people I don’t know to comment on how reprehensible I thought their opinions or positions were, but tried to do so from a reasonable point of view and not to make it personal enough to hurt someone’s feelings.

THIS comment was meant to be both condemning AND personal. 

But, I decided to take the high road:

I followed that up with:

Case Closed, @afab boyfriend.

ITEM FIVE: Last week, this happened:

My response was:

Two things happened after I posted this; two days later, on Sunday March 10th, I fumbled my understanding of GMT time and Eastern Daylight Time (DAMN YOU AGAIN, DST) and as a result, both Juli and I logged onto the Glasgow Worldcon site three hours too late to nominate anything for this year’s Hugo Awards for the first time in more than a decade.

Even more ironically, I began to hear from friends and acquaintances who openly stated that despite my recusal of future nominations in my speech at the Chengdu Hugo Award Ceremony and my public statement on March 8th, people were still nominating me in the Best Fan Writer category.

Their reasons ranged from they viewed my “win” in Chengdu as invalid and they wanted me to have another chance or that my works from 2023 were quite worthy of consideration.

I have to admit that the idea of being nominated again in light of what happened last year excites me, but the other side of that coin brings feelings of despair. 

Do I actually deserve another nomination? Would I be depriving someone else of a nomination? And, what if I get that email in the next week or so; am I allowed to change my mind? 

My partner Juli says that she will abide by and support any decision I make, which is one of the many reasons why I love her so much.. The few friends I have asked about this dilemma all said I should take the nomination.

Right now, I have no idea what I should do.

Watch this space, readers…

Pixel Scroll 3/10/24 He Who Controls The Pixels Controls The Scroll

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(1) HUGO, GIRL! REVERSES PERMANENT RECUSAL DECISION. The Hugo, Girl! the Podcast team tells why they have changed their minds about permanently recusing themselves from the Best Fancast category in “Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards”. The complete explanation is at the link.

Following the Chengdu Hugo Awards, we believed in good faith that we were the legitimate winners of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fancast. We subsequently announced Hugo, Girl’s permanent recusal from the Best Fancast category. We were honored and delighted by the win, and we wanted to make room for others to experience the same.

However, with each recent revelation about the administration of the Hugo Awards, we have become increasingly uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as legitimate winners. Viewing the nomination and voting data that others have meticulously combed through, analyzed, and presented in a thorough and digestible way, it initially seemed that Fancast was one of the less obviously suspicious categories. It did not appear that any of our Fancast co-finalists or entries on the long list had been mysteriously disqualified, as was the case in several other categories. That being said, Fancast is not free from strange numbers.

We became even more dubious once we learned that the Hugo Administrators had investigated and disqualified potential finalists* on the basis of assumed politics, queer and trans identity, and an imaginary trip to Tibet. We ourselves likely should have been disqualified under the same criteria. It does not escape our notice that as four white people, we may have been scrutinized less closely….

… For the foregoing reasons, we have decided to withdraw our recusal from Hugo eligibility, effective in 2025. We hope to have a future opportunity to participate in a fair, transparent Hugo Awards process, if voters decide to honor us again with a place on the ballot. 

(2) FALSE GRIT. Heard too much about Dune lately? Then your brain will probably explode in the middle of reading “Charles Bukowski’s Dune” at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

It had been a long day. The hot-shit new supervisor, who looked about sixteen and probably hadn’t even started shaving yet, had written me up twice. I’d crumpled both slips in front of him, thrown them in the trash.

On the way home, the 48-Arrakeen worm died at the base of the hill, and we all had to hop off into the sand. The thing was already starting to stink as I began the trudge uphill, bone-tired and thirsty….

(3) NO ARMY IS SO POWERFUL AS AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME. Variety reports, “SAG-AFTRA Chief: Chance of Strike Against Game Producers is ’50-50’”.

Issues around the use of AI in the production process is the big sticking point in SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations with the largest video game companies, SAG-AFTRA chief Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Saturday during a wide-ranging Q&A at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Crabtree-Ireland, who is national executive director and chief negotiator of the performers union, said he put the chances of union members striking against key game companies is “50-50, or more likely than that we will go on strike in the next four to six weeks because of our inability to get past these issues,” Crabtree-Ireland told Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company, during a conversation focused on AI….

… Some pushed the union to demand an outright ban on the use of AI in union-covered productions. Crabtree-Ireland said he know that was a nonstarter.

“We would not have succeeded, any more than any union ever in history has been able to stop technology,” he said. “Unions that try that approach, they fail and they give up the chance to influence how those technologies are implemented. “The fact of matter is, we’re going to have AI.”

Crabtree-Ireland emphasized repeatedly that the union’s position on AI revolves around “consent and compensation” for its members when AI engines use their work. “We want to make sure the implementation is human-centered and focused on augmentation [of production], not replacement of people,” he said….

(4) SFF WINS CANADIAN COMPETITION. The Québecois author Catherine Leroux’s The Future, in a translation by Susan Ouriou, has won the 2024 Canada Reads national competition. (Canada Reads is a television show. ) “’Canada Reads’ 2024 Winner: Catherine Leroux’s ‘The Future’” at Publishing Perspectives.

…The Future by Catherine Leroux, published by Biblioasis in Windsor, was named the winner of the weeklong series of elimination programs  from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBCbooks. The book is translated from French by Susan Ouriou and is a dystopian history of Detroit, a book the program refers to as, “a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future.”

(5) REID Q&A. Sff gets two callouts in this Guardian interview: “Taylor Jenkins Reid: ‘Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are unbeatable’”. Taylor Jenkins Reid will be international author of the day at the London Book Fair on March 12.

The writer who changed my mind
I thought I didn’t like sci-fi until I discovered Octavia Butler. Kindred defies genre, but it taught me that I’ll go anywhere in a story if I trust the writer….

My comfort read
Whenever I want to read a book I know will be good, I go to Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Her genres are ever changing, her ability to take on a wild story each time is incredible. You never know what she’s going to do, but you know it will be a page-turner. I cannot wait for her next book, The Seventh Veil of Salome. Fifties Hollywood, two starlets, the role of a lifetime … what more could you want?

(6) FLATIRON STILL AWAITS ITS FUTURE. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] In a news item today on the BBC about America’s office market, there’s a passing reference to the former Tor offices:

The famous triangular Flatiron building nearby has been vacant since 2019. Last autumn, the owners said it would be turned into condos.

Way back in January 2009, File 770 reported that the owners originally had different plans:

However, the offices of Tor Books are housed in New York’s Flatiron Building, which an Italian investor has announced plans to convert into a luxury hotel. Reports say hotels take so long to construct that it might be a decade before the Flatiron Building comes online in its new capacity.

The departure of Tor and the wider Macmillan publishing organization was reported in the June 5th, 2019 Pixel Scroll.

(7) TEENAGE BROADBAND. “New Emotions Move in for ‘Inside Out 2’” – and Animation Magazine makes the introductions:

Disney and Pixar today unveiled the official trailer plus new images and poster for Inside Out 2, which welcomes new Emotions to now-teenager Riley’s mind. Joining Joy (voice of Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) is a group of Emotions perfectly suited for the teenage years: 

Maya Hawke voices Anxiety, the previously announced new arrival bound to shake up everything in headquarters and beyond. A bundle of frazzled energy, Anxiety enthusiastically ensures Riley’s prepared for every possible negative outcome.

Envy, voice of Ayo Edebiri, may be small but she sure knows what she wants. She’s perpetually jealous of everything everyone else has, and she’s not afraid to pine over it. 

Ennui, who’s voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos, couldn’t care less. Bored and lethargic with a well-practiced eye-roll, Ennui adds the perfect amount of teenage apathy to Riley’s personality, when she feels like it.

Embarrassment, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, likes to lay low, which isn’t easy for this burly guy with a bright blush-pink complexion….

(8) BILL WAHL TRIBUTE. Brian Keene is overwhelmed by the loss of another friend – Bill Wahl died March 6 — as he told readers of “Letters From the Labyrinth 371”.

…Bill, like me, was always blunt and spoke his mind. And he did indeed give Mary and I a TON of pointers and help in the setting up of Vortex Books & Comics. It is Saturday as I write this, in the bookstore, and it is not lost on me that he had planned on coming in here today, right about the time I’m typing this (2:31pm).

I guess maybe I wrote a eulogy after all. Maybe half-assed, but that’s still pretty good considering that I’m typing it amidst a car crash of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion from which I may not be able to beat this time.

After 56 years on this planet, I finally know what it means to be tired…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 10, 1918 — Theodore Rose Cogswell. (Died 1987.) Let’s consider Theodore Rose Cogswell. He was a member of the Minneapolis Fantasy Society and later noted that fellow members Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson said that he should he should be a writer. 

He was in his thirties before his first work, “The Spectre General” novella was published in the June 1952 issue of Astounding. SWFA considers it one of our best novellas. 

Theodore Cogswell in 1955.

He would co-write with Charles A. Spano, Jr., Spock, Messiah. Prior to this novel, only one Star Trek tie-in novel intended for adult readers instead of YA readers had been published, Spock Must Die!, written by James Blish. Blish was supposed to do a Mudd novel but his death obviously prevented that. A real pity that. Though Mudd’s Angels would be written by J.A. Lawrence, Blish’s wife.

Back to Cogswell.

He wrote a fair amount of short fiction, some forty works, collected in The Wall Around the World, the title novelette here was nominated for a Retro Hugo, and The Third Eye.

Perhaps, his most interesting work was as editor of Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies where such individuals as Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke, Avram Davidson, Gordon Dickson, Fritz Leiber engaged in what is best described as a very long running written bull session. A copious amount of these writings was published as PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies. Though NESFA distributed it, it was published by Advent Publishing. It was nominated for a Hugo at ConAdian for Best Related Non-Fiction Book. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) NEW MARVEL UNLIMITED PROGRAM LETS YOU ACCESS INFINITY COMICS FOR FREE.  Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling became available starting March 7.  

It’s time to Start Scrolling! Today, comic fans will have even more access to their favorite stories spanning the Marvel Universe with the all-new Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling digital program. The new program, exclusively from Marvel Unlimited, allows readers to access select Infinity Comics for free.   
 
Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrollingwill provide instant access to select free comics, with no login required. Readers can experience over 100 issues of bingeable Marvel stories starring fan-favorites including the X-Men, Spider-Man, Jeff the Land Shark, and many more, by visiting Marvel’s Infinity Comics: Start Scrolling. With an extensive library of over 30,000 comics on Marvel Unlimited, fans can expect other free Infinity Comics to be rotated in throughout the year.  
 
Marvel’s Infinity Comics are a vertical format designed for phones and tablets exclusive to Marvel Unlimited. Since launching in September 2021, Marvel Unlimited has published over 1,000 Infinity Comics to date from over 300 top Marvel creators.  

(12) FOLLOW THE MONEY. Or the spice. The economic engine that drives Dune’s universe isn’t explained in the movie, but GameRant has volunteered for the job: “Dune: CHOAM, Explained”.

…The Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles is a monopolistic conglomerate that controls all commerce throughout the Dune universe. All material goods flow through CHOAM. All substantial wealth comes through interests in CHOAM. The CHOAM network runs through every other seat of power. CHOAM is under the Corrino Empire, the highest station in the universe, which oversees CHOAM’s board of directors. CHOAM was a publicly traded company. Shareholder profits could make any participant fabulously wealthy. Only the noble patriarchs of the Great Houses could become shareholders in CHOAM. The Houses fought for directorship positions, seeking to earn dividends and skim profit from their impossibly vast businesses. The Emperor reserved the right to revoke or hand out director positions, giving him the final say in any profit-seeking venture….

(13) CALLING SOLOMON! Space tells “Why astronomers are worried about 2 major telescopes right now”.

There’s a bit of tension right now in the U.S. astronomy community and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has to do with telescopes — extremely large telescopes, in fact. Here’s what’s going on.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a source of public funding that two powerful next-gen observatories have been banking on for financial support, is facing pressure to go forward with only one telescope. This is because last month, the National Science Board — which is basically an advisory committee for the NSF — recommended that it cap its giant telescope budget at $1.6 billion. This is a lot of money, but it’s just not enough for both. The board even says the NSF will have until only May of this year to decide which telescope gets the go-ahead.Yet, both telescopes are already in the middle of construction, both are equally important and both are actually supposed to work together to fulfill a wide-eyed dream for astronomers. Because of how utterly huge they’re meant to be, they’re expected to one-up even the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in many ways. That’s the gold-mirrored, silvery-shielded trailblazer sitting a million miles from Earth right now, finding deep space gems so quickly it’s normalizing us to seeing things humanity once couldn’t fathom seeing. Imagine something better….

… One of the big scopes is the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). It’s taking shape as you read this in the clear-skied deserts of Chile, and it’s projected to cost something like $2.54 billion as a whole. The other is called The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). That one’s location is a bit more controversial. It’s planned to decorate a mountain in Hawaii called Mauna Kea, but locals have protested the decision because this stunning volcanic peak that boasts low humidity and gentle winds (perfect conditions for astronomy) is extremely meaningful in native Hawaiian culture. It’s a fraught situation, as 13 other telescopes already live in the area and some local people say the facilities are  impacting the natural environment. In terms of cost, however, the projected amount is just about symmetrical to the GMT’s….

(14) WHAT’S THE MATTER? “Controversial new theory of gravity rules out need for dark matter” – and the Guardian tries to explain it to us. However, the last time I heard a doctor use the word “wobbly” in connection with anything about spacetime, his last name was “Who”.

…There are multiple lines of evidence for dark matter, but its nature has remained mysterious and searches by the Large Hadron Collider have come up empty-handed. Last year, the European Space Agency launched a mission, Euclid, aiming to produce a cosmic map of dark matter.

The latest paper, published on the Arxiv website and yet to be peer-reviewed, raises the question of whether it even exists, drawing parallels between dark matter and flawed concepts of the past, such as “the ether”, an invisible substance that was thought to permeate all of space.

“In the absence of any direct evidence for dark energy or dark matter it is natural to wonder whether they may be unnecessary scientific constructs like celestial spheres, ether, or the planet Vulcan, all of which were superseded by simpler explanations,” it states. “Gravity has a long history of being a trickster.”

In this case, the simpler explanation being proposed is Oppenheim’s “postquantum theory of classical gravity”. The UCL professor has spent the past five years developing the approach, which aims to unite the two pillars of modern physics: quantum theory and Einstein’s general relativity, which are fundamentally incompatible.

Oppenheim’s theory envisages the fabric of space-time as smooth and continuous (classical), but inherently wobbly. The rate at which time flows would randomly fluctuate, like a burbling stream, space would be haphazardly warped and time would diverge in different patches of the universe. The theory also envisions an intrinsic breakdown in predictability….

(15) GIANT SQUID. [Item by Lise Andreasen.] This is the last place I would look for characters from 20000 Leagues Under The Sea.

(16) NO PLANET FOR OLD MEN. Dan Monroe is determined to find out “What Happened to THE BOMB from BENEATH the PLANET of the APES?”

(17) WITH AND WITHOUT STRINGS ATTACHED. [Item by Carl.] “Here Come The Puppets” was a PBS special produced by KQED at the International Puppet Festival in Washington DC. It was hosted by Jim Henson and the Muppets, and features internationally known puppeteers. It’s NEVER been offered in DVD form. It can now be seen on YouTube.

(18) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. “Watch: Rare Footage Of Leonard Nimoy Hosting 1975 Special Presentation Of Star Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’” at TrekMovie.com.

In 1975, Paramount produced a special movie presentation for syndication of the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie,” hosted by TOS star Leonard Nimoy. The original Spock recorded introductions for each part of the episode as well as closing remarks for the special presentation. In the special, Nimoy explains how “The Menagerie” uses footage from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage” and more….

There’s a nod to its Hugo win at the 4:51 mark.

…This morning, WJAR Channel 10 in Rhode Island posted a clip from their morning show with guest Leonard Nimoy from what appears to be around the end of the first season of the series. The actor talks about concerns the show will be canceled and the fan campaign to keep it on the air along with the origins of his signature Vulcan ears….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, JJ, Lori, Carl, Ersatz Culture, Lise Andreasen, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joseph Hurtgen.]

Pixel Scroll 2/24/24 To Yeet Or Not To Yeet?

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(1) HE FALL DOWN BUT NOT GO BOOM. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Job #1 — Stick the landing. Oops. “Odysseus: Moon lander tipped over at touchdown, limiting the data it’s sending”.– AP News has the story. (Captain Kirk was not available for comment.)

A private U.S. lunar lander tipped over at touchdown and ended up on its side near the moon’s south pole, hampering communications, company officials said Friday.

Intuitive Machines initially believed its six-footed lander, Odysseus, was upright after Thursday’s touchdown. But CEO Steve Altemus said Friday the craft “caught a foot in the surface,” falling onto its side and, quite possibly, leaning against a rock. He said it was coming in too fast and may have snapped a leg.

“So far, we have quite a bit of operational capability even though we’re tipped over,” he told reporters.

But some antennas were pointed toward the surface, limiting flight controllers’ ability to get data down, Altemus said. The antennas were stationed high on the 14-foot (4.3-meter) lander to facilitate communications at the hilly, cratered and shadowed south polar region….

(2) FAMOUS LA MOVIE THEATER NOW HAS FAMOUS OWNERS. The New York Times learns “Star Directors Buy Los Angeles Cinema With Plan for ‘Coolest AV Club’”.

With the moviegoing experience under threat from streaming services and ever-improving home entertainment options, a group with a passionate interest in its preservation — three dozen filmmakers who create their works for the big screen, to be enjoyed in the company of large audiences — has decided to do something about it.

The group of directors, led by Jason Reitman — whose films include “Juno,” “Up in the Air” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” — announced Wednesday that it had bought the Village Theater in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was put up for sale last summer to the concern of film buffs. The group, which also includes Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Lulu Wang and Alfonso Cuarón, among others, plans to restore the 93-year-old movie palace, which features one of the largest screens in Los Angeles.

“I think every director dreams of owning a movie theater,” Reitman said in an interview. “And in this case, I saw an opportunity to not only save one of the greatest movie palaces in the world, but also assembled some of my favorite directors to join in on the coolest AV club of all time.”

The announcement of the directors group buying the Village Theater, which has long been a favorite venue for premieres, follows on the heels of Quentin Tarantino’s recent purchase of the Vista Theater in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz….

(3) TO MESSIAH OR NOT TO MESSIAH, THAT IS THE QUESTION. [By Mike Kennedy.] David Fear, writing for Rolling Stone, seems absolutely agog over Dune: Part Two. And eager for Part Three.

His review is chock full of spoilers if you don’t know the plot already (but I suspect most of you do). It’s easily arguable, though, that there are some spoilers for elements of the movie itself. So, read the review at your own risk. “‘Dune: Part Two’ Is Bigger, Bolder — and Yes, Even Better — Than Part One”. Here’s a non-spoilery excerpt:

… For some, these names may ring bells way, way back in your memory banks; mention that they’re characters played by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, and a who’s-who of equally recognizable actors, and you’ll see the lights go on in their eyes. For others, the heroes and villains, mentors and monsters that populate Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult novel are old friends, their exploits etched into readers’ brains like gospel. One of the great things about Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 partial adaptation of that original book, was that you could take in its story and swoon over its imagery regardless of where you fell on the scale. It’s a classic hero’s-journey tale of — to paraphrase author/film professor Howard Suber — a kid rescued from his fate and put on the path toward his destiny. And it was the sort of faithful yet bold, properly bonkers realization of the novel for the screen that fans had been dying to see, the perfect melding of artist and material….

(4) CHINESE FAN ANALYZES SOME OF THE CHINESE WORKS ON THE NOMINATION REPORT. An English language blog post by Chinese fan Prograft follows on from the Heather Rose-Jones/Camestros Felapton report, covering the Chinese works that appeared in the prose fiction categories, excluding those in the SF World recommendation list. “More on Other Chinese Hugo Nominations, based on ‘Charting the Cliff’”.

They suggest that perhaps some of the Chinese works that appeared in the “Validation” report for Best Series, but not in the nomination statistics, may not have been eligible according to the Best Series rules. This, of course, would not explain why those works disappeared between the “Validation” spreadsheet and the actual nomination statistics report.

Prograft’s article also links to (Chinese language) Weibo posts from early March 2023, which discuss why there had not been much by way of self-promotion by Chinese authors at that point in time. (The SF World list did not appear until April; another from 8 Light Minutes was published on March 27.)

(5) MEANWHILE, BACK AT 2014. Camestros Felapton says, “Larry is cross that I’m not writing about him”.

… From time to time key Puppy figures would dally with the idea that the way the Hugo vote was administered was rigged against them, particularly when they lost, but the repeated substance of their complaint was that the MEMBERSHIP was rigged against them, i.e. it was cliques of voters and publisher buying memberships for the vast number of employees that they imagined publishers have.

So no, Larry didn’t “warn us” nor has the 2023 Hugo scandal validated the core of his complaints about the Hugo Awards.

(6) CLIFF NOTES. Noreascon II in 1980 was the first Worldcon required by the WSFS Constitution to report the Hugo voting statistics (though not the first to disclose some of them). Kevin Standlee, with the help of The Hugo Award Book Club, discovered File 770 issue 24 published partial 1980 Hugo Award final voting and nominating statistics. He’s uploaded a copy to the Hugo Awards website and added a link to the 1980 Hugo Awards page. This quote about the margin for error caught my eye:

Note on counting procedure. After initial validation of the ballots, the data were keypunched by a commercial firm, (Only in the Gandalf [Award] vote was every ballot proofread against the printout; but nearly all keypunching errors were flagged by the computer, and in any other category the residual errors should be less than about 5 cards.) The votes were then counted by computer, using a counting program written by Dave Anderson.

There were 1788 valid final ballots cast that year. The reason for proofing the Gandalf votes is that it was the only category which ran close enough for a potential five-vote error to change the winner. Ray Bradbury ended up outpolling Anne McCaffrey 747-746.

(7) STAR TREK: DISCOVERY SEASON 5. Paramount+ dropped a trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5.

(8) NOW WE KNOW WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE. Amal El-Mohtar reviews Kelly Link’s The Book of Love in the New York Times: “Kelly Link Returns with a Dreamlike, Profoundly Beautiful Novel”.

A certain weight of expectation accrues on writers of short fiction who haven’t produced a novel, as if the short story were merely the larval stage of longer work. No matter how celebrated the author and her stories, how garlanded with prizes and grants, the sense persists: She will eventually graduate from the short form to the long. After an adolescence spent munching milkweed in increments of 10,000 words or less, she will come to her senses and build the chrysalis required for a novel to emerge, winged and tender, from within.

Now Kelly Link — an editor and publisher, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of five story collections, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — has produced a novel. Seven years in the making, “The Book of Love” — long, but never boring — enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.

Reviewing “The Book of Love” feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain….

(9) RETURN TO NEW WORLDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has an advance post up ahead of next season’s edition. An October 1955 edition of New Worlds provides an excuse to explore that magazine’s history and some of the SF professionals of that era.

You never know what is around the corner. There I was, at my local SF group, quietly enjoying a pint, when a friend brings in a copy of New Worlds magazine, issue no. 40 dating from October 1955 and this opened a window into Britain’s SF scene of that time. Let me share…

Click here for the full “New Worlds magazine revisited” article.

(10) CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND KIM STANLEY ROBINSON CONSIDERED. Imaginary Papers Issue 17 is out. The quarterly email newsletter from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University covers science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and the imagination.

In this issue, Erin K. Wagner writes about the interplay between art and science in Christopher Nolan’s films, especially Oppenheimer and Interstellar; Joe Tankersley celebrates the “subtle utopia” of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel Pacific Edge; and we discuss the Necessary Tomorrows podcast, which pairs original science fiction stories with nonfiction analysis of sociotechnical issues.

Subscriptions are free.

(11) RAMONA FRADON (1926-2024). “Comic Book Creator Ramona Fradon Has Died, Aged 97” reports Bleeding Cool. She only just retired in January!

Comic book creator Ramona Fradon has died at the age of 97. Her agent, Catskill Comics, posted the news earlier today. “It comes with great sadness to announce that Ramona Fradon has passed away just a few moments ago. Ramona was 97 and had a long career in the comic book industry, and was still drawing just a few days ago. She was a remarkable person in so many ways. I will miss all the great conversations and laughs we had. I am blessed that I was able to work with her on a professional level, but also able to call her my friend. If anyone wishes to send a card to the family, Please feel free to send them to Catskill Comics, and I’ll be happy to pass them along. You can send cards to Catskill Comics “Fradon Family”, Po Box 264, Glasco, NY 12432″

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 24, 1957 — Edward James Olmos, 67. Where I first experienced the acting of Edward James Olmos was as Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, a role I see he reprised in Blade Runner 2049.

Edward James Olmos

No, I’ve not seen the latter film, nor do I have any intention in doing so as I consider Blade Runner one of the finest SF films ever done and nothing will sully that for me. We gave it a Hugo at ConStellation, so there later films!

It wasn’t his first genre film as that was the Japanese post-apocalyptic science fiction film Virus (1980), but his first important role came in Wolfen (1981), a fascinating horror film about, possibly, the idea that werewolves are real, or maybe not, in which he was Eddie Holt who claims to a shapeshifter. 

He has an almost cameo appearance in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a musician at the barbecue.

It was supposed to have a theatrical release but that was not to be, so Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was released directly to video. In it Olmas was Vámonos. I’ve not seen it. It sounds, well, intriguing. Who’s seen it? 

Edward James Olmos in The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

He’s in the debacle that was The Green Hornet in one of the primary roles as Mike Axford, the managing editor of The Daily Sentinel. 

As you most likely know, he was William Adama on the rebooted Battestar Galactica. At seventy-three episodes, it didn’t even come close to his run on Miami Vice as Lt. Martin Castillo which was one hundred and six episodes. Now there was an interesting character! 

Olmos as Adama in Battlestar Galactica

I’ll end this Birthday note by note noting he had a recurring role on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as Robert Gonzales.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

(14) SHRINKAGES AND DISAPPEARANCES. [Item by Kathy Sullivan.] Paper newspapers have been dropping comic strips. But the latest cuts are those by women creators. The Daily Cartoonist explains why “The Real Gannett Conspiracy = Chauvinism”.

In one of my answers in the comments section of The Great Gannett Comics Conspiracy I sarcastically said, “It’s like saying Gannett dropped Between Friends because they are misogynistic.”

Further analysis suggests that may not be far from right….

(15) MARVEL MUST-HAVES. Announced at ComicsPRO the Comic Industry Conference, Marvel Comics’ MARVEL MUST-HAVES! These FREE issues collect multiple iconic issues that spotlight the Marvel characters and comic book series currently at the forefront of pop culture. These stories have been handpicked to get fans in-tune with current Marvel adventures, and act as perfect jumping on points for new readers too. That’s more than 80 pages of comic book adventures for free, available at comic shops next month. [Based on a press release.]

 SPIDER-MAN/DEADPOOL #1 (2016)

It’s action, adventure and just a smattering of romance in this epic teaming up the Webbed Wonder and the Merc with a Mouth! Talk about a REAL dynamic duo! Brought to you by two Marvel superstars—Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness—it’s a perfect tale for those looking forward to the Deadpool’s return to the big screen. 

Dive into the full story in SPIDER-MAN/DEADPOOL MODERN ERA EPIC COLLECTION: ISN’T IT BROMANTIC? TPB (9781302951641)

 IMMORTAL THOR #2 (2023)

An Elder God of the Utgard-Realm had marked Thor for destruction – and a city with him. Yet the only power that could prevail carried its own terrible price. This is the story of THE IMMORTAL THOR…and the hour of his greatest trial. Following his masterful work on Immortal Hulk, Al Ewing is breaking mythology yet again in this acclaimed new run of the God of Thunder. Featuring breathtaking artwork by superstar Martin Coccolo.

Dive into the full story in IMMORTAL THOR VOL. 1: ALL WEATHER TURNS TO STORM TPB (9781302954185)

 MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT #1 (2023)

Resurrected back into this world of hate and fear, Kamala Khan has a secret mission to pull off for the X-Men, all the while struggling to acclimate to this new part of her identity! Co-written by the MCU’s own Kamala, Iman Vellani, and Sabir Pirzada of both Dark Web: Ms. Marvel and her Disney+ series! Don’t miss this exciting evolution for one of Marvel’s brightest young heroes!

Dive into the full story in MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT VOL. 1 TPB (9781302954901)

(16) THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY? Or just a ripoff. Behind a paywall at The Sunday Times: “BBC accused of plagiarising new series from Spanish drama”. Brief excerpt:

The Ministry of Time bears a striking resemblance in title and plot to El Ministerio del Tiempo

The BBC will be asked for “explanations” from the Spanish state broadcaster after allegations of plagiarism over a new British television series.

The commissioning of the BBC’s The Ministry of Time was announced this week, described as an “epic sci-fi, romance and thriller” that is “utterly unique”.

Based on an as yet unpublished debut novel by Kaliane Bradley, it is about a newly established government department, the Ministry of Time, which gathers “expats” from across history to experiment how viable time travel would actually be.

The striking resemblance, however, in title and plot to the Spanish series El Ministerio del Tiempo — The Ministry of Time — created by Javier and Pablo Olivares and broadcast by RTVE between 2015 and 2020, has prompted allegations of plagiarism.

The allegations have been made by Javier Olivares, who said that the BBC “had not changed a hair” of his creation, and also by scores of social media users….

(17) FLORIDA LEGISLATION WOULD RESTRICT SOME TEEN ACCESS. “Florida Passes Sweeping Bill to Keep Young People Off Social Media” – details in the New York Times.

New Florida rules would require social networks to prevent young people under 16 from signing up for accounts — and terminate accounts belonging to underage users.

…Florida’s Legislature has passed a sweeping social media bill that would make the state the first to effectively bar young people under 16 from holding accounts on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

The measure — which Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “be wrestling with” over the weekend and has not yet signed — could potentially upend the lives of millions of young people in Florida.

It would also probably face constitutional challenges. Federal courts have blocked less-restrictive youth social media laws enacted last year by Arkansas and Ohio. Judges in those cases said the new statutes most likely impinged on social media companies’ free speech rights to distribute information as well as young people’s rights to have access to it.

The new rules in Florida, passed on Thursday, would require social networks to both prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users. It would apply to apps and sites with certain features, most likely including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Last year, Utah, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio enacted laws that would require social media platforms to get permission from a parent before giving an account to a minor under 18 or under 16.

Florida’s effort would go much further, amounting to a comprehensive ban for young people on some of the most popular social media apps. It would also bar the platforms from showing harmful material to minors, including “patently offensive” sexual conduct….

(18) UP ALL KNIGHT. From The Hollywood Reporter: “‘Game of Thrones’ Spinoff ‘The Hedge Knight’ Gets 2025 Release Date”.

… Dunk and Egg keep journeying closer to their HBO debut.

On Friday, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav gave an update on the next Game of Thrones spinoff series: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight (a title that seems destined to be changed to something that doesn’t have “Knight” twice).

“[Creator and executive producer] George R.R. Martin is in preproduction for the new spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which will premiere in late 2025 on Max,” Zaslav said.

The show is expected to begin production sometime this year.

Given that House of the Dragon is launching its second season this summer, the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms date next year raises the possibility of HBO settling into a flow of having a Thrones drama each year (assuming both shows can turn around their next seasons within two years)….

(19) ACADEMIC REPORT ON THE LANGUAGE USED BY THE CHENGDU BUSINESS DAILY. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] As is hopefully well-known by now, the Chengdu Business Daily organization – also known as Chengdu Economic Daily, which I believe is their “official” English name – provided a number of staff for the Chengdu concom in senior roles, including a Co-Chair, an Honorary Co-Chair, and members of the Hugo team.

I don’t want to get into why what is nominally a newspaper was so involved in running a science fiction convention here, but earlier today I came across a piece of academic research from 2017 that investigated how their journalistic output was summarized on Chinese social media.  Although the authors of this report appear to be Chinese nationals from a Chengdu university, the study is in English.

A couple of extracts give examples of how CBD news stories were covered on their social media accounts.  (The text from the study is left unaltered, other than reformatting for readability, and the censoring of an English language swear word.)

In all these samples, there were 23 cases of non-standardization, accounting for 7.7% of the total samples, including 10 cases of using ambiguous words, 6 cases of insufficient sentence composition, 3 cases of vulgar words, 2 cases of exaggerated titles, 1 case of non-standardized proverbs, 1 case of ambiguity. Specific reports are listed below. Such as 

  • “Ball-Hurting! #One Man Tied 7 Cars On His Testis# [sic] And Pulled Cars 8 Meters.” (“@Chengdu Economic Daily” April 1st)
  • “It Is Said That The Relevant Agencies Have Organized The Second Mental Identification Towards The Guilty Driver.” (@Chengdu Economic Daily” on March 1st)
  • “Two Small UAVs Were Artificially Installed Artillery That May Be Firecrackers And Attacked Each Other For Fun.” (“@Chengdu Economic Daily “February 1st).…

After combing the entire sample, this article also found that the use of spoken language is very common. “@Chengdu Economic Daily” accounted for 22.2% and “@Chengdu Evening Post” accounted for 30.00% (see Table 3). Such as: 

  • “Easy To Learn: Home-Made Pickle-Fish Is Super Cool.”(@Chengdu Economic Daily January 1st)
  • “F*ck Off. Just Get Off. Why You Not Just Get Off.” (@Chengdu Economic Daily January 1st) 
  • “Old Lady Started Stall Besides Street While City Inspectors Helped Her.” (@Chengdu Evening Post January 1st)
  • “A Lady Shouting At A Naughty Child Was Beat By His Parents.”(“@Chengdu Evening Post” March 1st)

The use of network buzzwords and verbal expressions, with the characteristics of freshness and populism, usually adopts irony, ridicule, exaggeration and populist expressions to report and comment on events or peoples, and the contents conveyed are thoughtful, active and critical.

(20) AI’S ELECTRIC BILL. “Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret” reports Kate Crawford in Nature.

Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.

Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations….

(21) AN EARLIER ‘GREAT WALL’. “Great ‘Stone Age’ wall discovered in Baltic Sea”. “Megastructure stretching nearly 1 kilometre long is probably one of the oldest known hunting aids on Earth.”

Divers have helped to reveal the remnants of a kilometre-long wall that are submerged in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Rerik, Germany. The rocks (pictured) date back to the Stone Age.

Primary research paper here.

(22) LICENSE PLATE FRAME OF THE DAY.  “Bigfoot doesn’t believe in you either.”

(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes arrives in theaters May 10.

Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Martin Easterbrook, Kathy Sullivan, Joey Eschrich, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kevin Harkness.]

Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones

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Introduction by Camestros Felapton: Since the release of the 2023 Hugo Award nomination statistics on January 20, there have been a plethora of questions about the awards and the process followed. One of the earliest insights into the data was made in a series of graphs drawn by Heather Rose Jones on her Alpennia (“A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics”.)  The graphs revealed several categories with highly unusual “cliffs” in the number of nominations.

This new report [available here] builds upon that initial analysis and delves further into the unusual features of the 2023 data. By collating data from all of the Hugo nominations from 2017 onward, the report looks at unusual features in the nomination statistics, compares 2023 with previous years in multiple dimensions and looks at additional data such as the recently leaked validation lists.

This report contends that the nomination statistics provided cannot be treated as a reliable presentation of the actual nomination votes by members. The report shows that there are known errors in the listed names of nominees, inconsistencies in the vote totals, inaccuracies in the manner points were calculated in elimination rounds and highly atypical patterns of voting. In particular, there is evidence in the categories of Best Novel and Best Series of a very large number of highly similar votes for the main finalists in these categories, that these votes advantaged English-language works over Chinese-language works and that these votes do not resemble organic voting by members.

The 51-page report can be downloaded from two locations:

File 770: “Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics”

Google Docs: ChartingTheCliff-Hugo2023

Pixel Scroll 2/22/24 Home Is The Pixel, Home From The Scroll

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(1) WE’RE BACK. “Odysseus becomes first US spacecraft to land on moon in over 50 years” – CNN not only has the story, they enlisted Captain Kirk – William Shatner – to help tell it on the air.

The US-made Odysseus lunar lander has made a touchdown on the moon, surpassing its final key milestones — and the odds — to become the first commercial spacecraft to accomplish such a feat, but the condition of the lander remains in question.

Intuitive Machines, however, says the mission has been successful.

“I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus just announced on the webcast. “Welcome to the moon.”

Odysseus is the first vehicle launched from the United States to land on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Mission controllers from Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the robotic explorer, confirmed the lander reached the lunar surface Thursday evening….

…After some intense waiting, Intuitive Machines, the company behind the Odysseus lunar landing mission, has confirmed the spacecraft is “upright and starting to send data.”

That’s a major milestone…

William Shatner on CNN.

(2) 2023 BUSINESS MEETING MINUTES POSTED. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The 2023 WSFS Business Meeting minutes are now available at the WSFS rules page.

All documents are updated except the Resolutions of Rulings of Continuing Effect, which are still being reviewed by the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee. 

(3) HELP PAY TRIBUTE TO STEVE MILLER. Sharon Lee is asking people to send Locus their recollections about her husband, Steve Miller, who died on February 20. This link should work: [email protected].

(4) THE YEAR’S BEST AFRICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION VOLUME THREE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Volume Three anthology is now open to submissions through March 31, 2024. See full guidelines at the link.

This next volume of the series covers works originally published in 2023. It will be published with a release date of late 2024 under the Caezik SF & Fantasy imprint (Arc Manor).

​Editors for this volume are Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Chinaza Eziaghighala.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpedi
Chinaza Eziaghighala

(5) LINK Q&A. “Interview: Kelly Link on Writing Her First Novel” at New York Magazine.

How did you intellectually and practically and physically and spiritually transition from writing short stories to writing a rather long novel?

Even if one is a short-story writer at heart, this is a world of novels. This is a world where readers love novels, which I get. I love them too. But if you’re a short-story writer, any time that you are talking with somebody, they will say, “Well, have you ever thought about writing a novel?”

My husband and I ran a small press for a couple of decades. I had the enormous privilege of working with a bunch of writers on novels. I also, in my writing life, have a group of friends that I meet with, sometimes on a daily basis, and they are all novelists. We spend a lot of our time talking about the possibilities that novels present to a writer. And I love their books. I get to read them when they’re working on them. And eventually, if you’re me, at least, you start to think, Well, what could I do at this length? My very good friend, one of the writers that I work with, Holly Black, said to me about nine years ago, “If you don’t intentionally write a novel, you will write one by accident. And so you might as well plan out how to do it intentionally.”

(6) MYMAN ON THE 2023 HUGOS. Francesca Myman, who attended the Chengdu Worldcon, has written several illuminating posts about the current Hugo Award crisis.

Here’s the first post from February 16:

…The thing that gets me is, if they truly believed they were taking care of people’s safety, and they couldn’t possibly think about it creatively and find other solutions because {reasons}, they were remarkably blasé about a lack of reasonable guidance.

And it does seem that the internal justification was safety. On June 7 Kat Jones says “I’m pointing out examples of both that I find for these fan writers out of an abundance of caution, because I’m assuming we’re talking about the safety of our Chinese con-running friends when we’re making these evaluations. Maybe any fan writer concerns can be mitigated by asking them to curate their voter packet materials with our Chinese friends’ safety in mind?” Of course, “I’m assuming” isn’t the same thing as “I’m asking” and no answers are given.

Then in the February 3 interview, when Chris Barkley asked if people were likely to be endangered on some sort of social or physical level, Dave’s response was some aggrandizing bluster about “the friends I would make and how much I love them and how much I would set myself on fire for them if I needed to,” which inappropriately puts the blame for everything underhanded and weaselly and inexcusable that he did into the laps of the very people he’s claiming to protect.

I’m not here to say Chinese censorship doesn’t exist, we ourselves had to comply with regulations and couldn’t sell magazines and books at Worldcon and it did cause me a considerable amount of stress (and to be fair it was incredibly difficult to obtain any information about exactly what we needed to do to be in compliance, things like whether or not we were allowed to sell digital subscriptions and the actual problem was physical materials sold on site, or whether no sales at all were permitted), but the active participation of Westerners in hand-selecting targets for censorship is stomach-churning….

The second post appeared on February 17:

Soooo while I do think you should read my last long-but-important post about the Hugos, literally the MOST important news about what happened to the Hugos is this: Vajra Chandrasekera on Bluesky linked to a Chinese language post by “zionius” explaining that the supposed “slate” of Chinese voters that was removed from the voting was actually the result of a recommended list from Chinese publication Science Fiction World, their most respected and popular magazine. To be clear, a close analogy is if people removed a batch of Hugo votes from the voting process because they were listed in the Locus Recommended Reading List and voters had too-similar patterns because of that. A recommended reading list is NOT a slate.

Apparently there were one to nine recommendations per SF World category including both Chinese and non-Chinese creators. I suppose the “one recommendation” category, whatever that was, could be tough — but nine recommendations? That’s quite normal for a recommended reading list. The readership of SF World is vast, way higher than Locus, let me tell you that (Chandrasekera claims it’s bigger than that of every western SF magazine put together which seems plausible to me), so they have a ton of influence, but that doesn’t make it illegal….

The third post came out on February 19:

…If McCarty DID receive an earlier heads-up — I’m envisioning something like “you must remove these things because their inclusion will harm us” — we have no way to be sure. And it’s possible I’m wrong here. We lack a WHOLE lot of papertrail, and it’s probably not the worst thing we don’t have it, in terms of all the aforementioned safety concerns.

About which I would like to add: I imagined that if I had been in the committee’s position I would have been most worried about someone saying something about “Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China” onstage. But I don’t really have a basis to determine the impact of speeches, so. . .

. . .I asked an expat friend yesterday what the consequences would be if someone, for example, used the Worldcon stage to opine on the political situation in Taiwan, and got an “eek” face emoji.

Eek face emoji situation, I guess. Here’s what he said, which I found particularly illuminating:

“The entire community would face repercussions. Outright censoring, problems for the organizers, attracting Beijing’s ire. The government liaison who helped bring this thing to Chengdu would have severe career blowback and would either lose position or have to pivot and punish to save themselves. It would be a very selfish thing to do and would hurt the Chinese sci fi community significantly. Think of what happened when Bjork called out ‘Free Tibet!’ She said that one phrase on a stage in Beijing and for a decade + afterwards there was a massive crackdown on all artist performances and a massive impoverishment of live music in general. All the festivals struggled. Probably the most damaging thing done to China’s live music scene in the modern era. And Bjork did it because she didn’t know or care about consequences, she just wanted to say her piece. Because the West teaches Westerners that we are morally superior to everyone else and have a right or obligation to ‘speak truth to power’ especially in non white non European places.”

So based on this and other research I absolutely believe safety concerns were real. Which is why I keep coming back around to the point that the best way of handling that was just letting the rules play out and letting Chinese voters take the lead as they were meant to.

(7) ANOTHER ONE ON THE SHELF. “Stephen King Is Baffled by Decision To Keep New Salem’s Lot Movie on the Shelf” reports Comingsoon.net.

Salem’s Lot Still in Limbo

Back in November of 2023, King championed the adaptation of his celebrated vampire novel, saying it had a feeling of ”Old Hollywood” to it. The movie was originally due to be released in 2022, and then in the Spring of 2023, where it lost its spot on the calendar to Warner horror stablemate Evil Dead Rise.

Then came the SAG-AFTRA strike, which reportedly caused Warner Bros. to reconsider a theatrical release altogether, subsequently being eyed for a streaming debut on Max. However, a Warner spokesperson told Variety that ”No decision has been made about the film’s future distribution plans.”

Yet nothing else has been said about the film’s status since.

King isn’t feeling all that patient with Warner Bros. and has once again reiterated his praise for the film while failing to hide his bafflement at its continued release limbo.

”Between you and me, Twitter, I’ve seen the new SALEM’S LOT, and it’s quite good. Old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big payoff. Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows. I just write the fucking things.”…

(8) PRODUCTION ALMOST SHUTTERED, NOW OSCAR CONTENDER. The Hollywood Reporter found out “Why Megan Ellison Saved the Animated Film ‘Nimona’”.

In January of 2021, Megan Ellison got a call from Erik Lomis, the former head of distribution at her company, Annapurna Pictures, asking if she’d like to take a look at a movie whose filmmakers needed a lifeline. Disney was days away from announcing that it planned to shutter Blue Sky Studios, the 500-person, Greenwich, Connecticut-based animation studio it had inherited in the 2019 Fox acquisition, and with that closure, the Burbank media giant would be dropping Blue Sky’s most promising movie, Nimona.

“I wasn’t really engaging in new film projects at the time, but being curious, I said yes,” Ellison said, in an email.

Ellison watched the hand-drawn storyboard reels, which directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane had adapted from ND Stevenson’s 2015 graphic novel, and instantly connected with the title character, a shape-shifter voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz who appears most often as a young woman, but can change into animals or other people. “I had never seen a character like Nimona in a film, let alone an animated family movie,” Ellison said. “I needed this movie when I was a kid, and quite frankly, I needed it right then and there. It was the perfect story to come into my life at that moment.”

Nimona — which has LGBTQ themes that Disney executives wanted to downplay — seemed destined to become a tax write-off before Ellison scooped it up. Now the movie, which Netflix released last June, is nominated for an Oscar for animated feature…. 

(9) ANALOG SCORES GERROLD INTERVIEW. There’s a “Q&A With David Gerrold” at The Astounding Analog Companion.

Analog Editor: What is your history with Analog?
David Gerrold: I have a long personal history with Analog. My first year of high school was at Van Nuys High. The library was a good place to hang out at lunch time and they had a subscription to Astounding. I started working my way through every issue they had. Astounding represented (to me) the high point of science fiction magazines. It introduced me to so many great stories and writers, that it became a goal. It was decades before I sold a story to the magazine, but that was one of the high points of my career.
This story was a sequel to an earlier piece where Ganny knit a spaceship out of cables and plastic sheeting. I suspect that construction of habitats in space would probably use a lot more fabricated materials than metal. So that was the spark. But once I’d written about how to build the ship, I began to wonder about the interplanetary politics, the economics, and how it all might work where everything is light minutes away from everything else. I think that’s part of the effect that reading Astounding/Analog had on me—I want to know how things work, especially in science fiction.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 22, 1959 — Kyle Maclachlan, 65. I of course came to know Kyle Maclachlan first for playing Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune. Like Timothée Chalamet, who was twenty-six when he played Paul Atreides, Maclachlan also was too old at twenty-five for the teen aged character. Just noting that.

(Remember that I’m not going to not noting everything that he’s done, just what I find interesting,)

Kyle Maclachlan at Cannes in 2017.

It was his first film role which I didn’t know until now, so he was old for an actor getting his film career going.

Next up was Blue Velvet in which he was Jeffrey Beaumont. Definitely genre, as it is a thriller mystery blended with psychological horror. Also directed by David Lynch. Weird film, and even weirder role for film. 

He did an excellent job as Lloyd Gallagher in The Hidden, a great SF film. He was not in The Hidden II which was not a great film. 

Yes, the Twin Peaks franchise is genre given some of the things that happened here. His Dale Cooper character is played to perfection over to the thirty episodes of the original series and the eighteen episodes of Twin Peaks known as Twin Peaks: The Return and Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series. He was also in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Did you know that he voiced Superman? Well he did. In one of the better animated films, Justice League: The New Frontier, he was as Kal-El / Clark Kent / Superman. He voiced him very well. 

He showed up as Edward Wilde, a librarian in The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, one of the films in The Librarian franchise. Just on the off chance that you’ve not seen it, I’ll say no more as it, but it like all The Librarian franchise, is great popcorn viewing. 

He was Cliff Vandercave in The Flintstones, the only Flintstones film worth watching. 

Lastly he was in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the dual role of Calvin Johnson / The Doctor. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) MASTODON UNDER ATTACK. TechCrunch says “Discord took no action against server that coordinated costly Mastodon spam attacks”.

Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications. But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.

“The attacks were coordinated through Discord, and the software was distributed through Discord,” said Emelia Smith, a software engineer who regularly works on trust and safety issues in the fediverse, a network of decentralized social platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. “They were using bots that integrated directly with Discord, such that a user didn’t even need to set up any servers or anything like that, because they could just run this bot directly from Discord in order to carry out the attack.”

Smith attempted to contact Discord through official channels on February 17, but still has only received form responses. She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.

“We’ve seen this costing server admins of Mastodon, Misskey, and others hundreds or thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs, and overall denial of service,” Smith wrote to Discord Trust & Safety in an email viewed by TechCrunch. “The only common link seems to be this discord server.”…

(13) A TUNE, NOT TUNA. “Whale song mystery solved by scientists” reports BBC.

… Baleen whales are a group of 14 species, including the blue, humpback, right, minke and gray whale. Instead of teeth, the animals have plates of what is called baleen, through which they sieve huge mouthfuls of tiny creatures from the water.

Exactly how they produce complex, often haunting songs has been a mystery until now. Prof Elemans said it was “super-exciting” to have figured it out.

He and his colleagues carried out experiments using larynxes, or “voice boxes”, that had been carefully removed from three carcasses of stranded whales – a minke, a humpback and a sei whale. They then blew air through the massive structures to produce the sound.

In humans, our voices come from vibrations when air passes over structures called vocal folds in our throat. Baleen whales, instead, have a large U-shaped structure with a cushion of fat at the top of the larynx.

This vocal anatomy allows the animals to sing by recycling air, and it prevents water from being inhaled….

(14) DEAR SCHADENFREUDE. Between bites of popcorn Shepherd exacted a little payback.  

(15) [DELETED]. I apologize for drawing a comparison between Shepherd and Vox Day in the item that formerly appeared in this space. I was wrong to give into the impulse, which vented at Shepherd my emotional reaction to all the Hugo stuff I’ve had to write news about for the last month, something he has nothing to do with. (And if you want to ask why, then, is item #14 still here — Shepherd intended the needle, and I felt it. Ouch.)

(16) MIDNIGHT PALS. But do you know who’s really spinning in his grave? Read this and Bitter Karella will tell you.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Laura, Joyce Scrivner, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Kevin Standlee, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]