Your Happening World (June 17th through June 18th)

Blog fodder for June 17th through June 18th:

  • The Abstinence Method – Modern Farmer – But the Netherlands’ success demonstrates this isn’t true. The country is tiny, but its livestock-raising is intensive and high-tech: 17 million people and about 118 million farm animals share a space only the size of Maryland, yet the Netherlands is Europe’s leading meat exporter. So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
  • BUTT THEN | Good Dogs
  • Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image | Art and design | theguardian.com – In this way, Jennifer in Paradise became the first colour image used to demonstrate the software they had started to call Photoshop.
  • Silence is Complicity — The Radish. – I don’t know how we can make this right to the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have been injured by our complicity in these horrors. And yes, I am including myself in this because I have been part of fandom for more than a decade now and I have not spoken loudly enough, if there is even one person still standing who thinks this is okay. Our community must become an unwelcome place for predators.
  • On doing a thing I needed to do – Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches – I read and reread her daughter’s words this week. I read, too, portions of MZB’s own court deposition (from her husband’s trial, also for child abuse) that I hadn’t read before. Then yesterday I took a deep breath, and I added up the advances from my two Darkover sales, my Darkover royalties, and (at his request) my husband Larry Hammer’s payment for his sale to MZB’s magazine.

Bookmarks for June 5th

Blog fodder for June 5th:

Alanis would think it ironic

The visceral anger and loathing some science fiction fans can display when confronted with anything that’s different from “how we did things thirty years ago”. In this case it’s one Taral Wayne, complaining in The Drink Tank #259 (PDF) about the wrong people winning the Best Fanwriter and Best Fanzine Hugos. With the first award, Taral was offended that Frederik Pohl had won the award, because he didn’t consider him to be a fan and blamed the voters and voting committee for not realising this:

My point is this: Pohl spelled it out, right there in his blog, that these were early drafts for a new edition of the old book. How much more plainly must he tell us that this is not fanwriting?

I think we can say why the voters nominated a professional writer for his blog. Many had likely never seen more than a small number of fanzines, perhaps only con publications such as the Worldcon’s own progress reports. I’ll make a further guess that most of the voters have little appreciation for what fanzines do, beyond discussing science fiction. They can have no sense of fanzine fandom as a community, or of fanzines as a means of expression rather than information. It is self-evident that this must more or less be the case, since there are only two or three hundred fans involved in the fanzine network at any given time… but several thousand Worldcon members with a vote.

What puzzles me is why the Hugo committee permitted Pohl’s name to appear on the ballot. If the rules are to mean anything, his name had no business being there. But odds are that the committee members were no better informed about fanzines than the majority of voters.

What annoys me about Taral’s reasoning is that a) he doesn’t engage the quality of Pohl’s work, just argues his blog has to be disqualified as fan writing because it might end up as source material for a new autobiography and b) that he accuses the Hugo voters and administration of being ignorant. That last slur is the first thing every loudmouth trots out when the Hugo votes don’t got the way they want it and honours the wrong people. It’s never “the voters disagreed with me on the quality of the candidates for Best Novel, it’s always “Harry Potter should not have won because it’s fantasy, but the voters are so ignorant that they don’t even know it’s a science fiction award”. Bonus points if, like the example here, they themselves gets basic facts about the Hugos wrong. At least Taral does acknowledge that professional writers can and have been honoured for their fan work, even if he’s boneheaded about Pohl not being a real fan for the purpose of the award.

You can certainly argue whether Frederik Pohl deserved the award, but to say that his blog should be disqualified because he may some day be paid for the material he publishes there is stupid. But apart from that Taral has no argument: if posts about the earliest days of not just organised fandom but science fiction as a genre, days Pohl was around for, isn’t fannish enough to qualify, than what is?

(As an aside, thousands may have the right to vote in the Hugos, but only 558 people did for Best Fan Writer, so Taral’s two-three hundred fanzine fans could’ve easily swung the vote to a more deserving candidate had they agree with him and/or had a con membership. Also, I wonder how accurate his guesstimate is here, or whether he’s defining fanzines too narrowly. My guess is the latter.)

Speaking of fanzines, that was his other beef with this years Hugo winners:

The fanzine Hugo has been corrupted, just as the fanwriter Hugo has been. Last year, a webpage called Electric Velocipede encouraged its viewers to vote, and succeeded in taking the award from conventional media for the first time. The debate over whether or not a webpage is a fanzine is far from over. There are arguments for both views. But this year the issue was quite clear. The winner, StarShipSofa, is a podcast. Under what conceivable circumstances can a dramatic presentation be compared to the written media? To bring up apples and oranges is a tired cliché. Let’s use a different analogy. Allowing a podcast to compete with fanzines for the Hugo makes as little sense as judging between a Gene Kelly musical comedy and a lecture by Mark Twain.

(See? I was right)

As I said on File 770, this is a luddite attitude for a science fiction fan to take, confuses form with content and is clearly elitist to boot. As long as StarShipSofa does what expect from a fanzine, it’s a fanzine, one being done through voice rather than print, just like an audio book is still a book. If you look at the contents of any given issue it’s clear that whatever Star Ship Sofa is doing does not differ greatly from a print ‘zine. The format should not matter, the content should. And Taral isn’t just dismissive of audio fanzines, but also talks about whether or not a webpage can be a fanzine.

It’s this sort of attitude that I call luddite, with excuses to the historical luddites, whose attitude to technological progress was not half as unreasonably negative as this. There’s something absurd in having science fiction fans of all people reject creative uses of new technology, new and perhaps better ways to keep the conversation going.

Octocon covering itself in glory

[UPDATE 8 October]: Octocon and Pádraig Ó Méalóid have issued a joint statement resolving their issues. Fandom can be sensible, sometimes…

Proof positive that it’s not just giant multinational companies that are clueless about p.r. in the age of the internet, comes the saga of Irish sf convention Octocon banning Irish fan Pádraig Ó Méalóid without providing good reasons. They did this with the incredibly moronic assumption that they could keep this ban quiet when the banned fan is actually quite well known and active online and had no reasons to keep quiet. The ensuing comment thread on the post linked above is a wonder to behold, as one fan after another comes out and says “well, I don’t know anybody involved in this, but boy is this stupid” while the Octocon committee flails around tryind to defend themselves, coming across as increasingly petty.

As Gary Farber notes in the thread, when you ban somebody for credible reasons, nobody makes a fuzz, but then again such bans rarely happen before the convention takes place. So when you do feel you need to pre-emptively ban a fan, especially a wellknown fan, especially when everybody in Irish fandom seems to know there’s bad blood between you and said fan, do so publically, with good reasons and make these reasons know. Don’t try to do it on the sly and don’t do it because he hurt you widdle feelings. No matter how much of an asshole you think he is, banning somebody will only rebound on you otherwise.

UPDATE. It doesn’t help your case if you ban somebody with as sole explanation that it was “due to your behaviour at the convention some time ago and your online behaviour”, say the matter is not open for discussion and will not be discussed with anybody, then complain when Pádraig doesn’t get in touch with you but complains online (and afaik only after the matter became public knowledge anyway). Apart from anything else, it’s not up to him to humbly request why he was banned, it’s up to you to explain it properly in the first place.