Two faces of fandom: Doc Weir & Sad Puppies

During the closing ceremony of this year’s Eastercon on Monday, the Doc Weir Award was handed out to the bloke on the right, Martin Hoare. Martin is one of those people who has been active in fandom, mostly behind the scenes, for years and decades, quietly helping British fandom ticking over. There are a lot of these nutters spending their free time doing things like setting up artshows at cons, or organising real ale bars, printing newsletters, etc, all with no expectation of reward and little public recognition. The Doc Weir Award is British Fandom’s way of drawing some attention to these unsung heroes, named after somebody the majority of fans never met since he died long before they were born. Arthur “Doc” Weir was somebody who had found fandom late in life and had flung himself headlong into it. It was in his memory that the award was set up in 1963, making it more than fifty years old: hard to think of a better example of fannish timebinding and tradition. There’s no monetary part to the price, just a trophy you get to keep for a year to drink your choice of alcohol out off. For all the ongoing controversies, the day to day aggrevation fandom can stand for, it’s sometimes good to remember that this is fandom too, full of some of the nicest and hardest working people you’ll ever meet.

In sad contrast to this stood the news we got the day before, of the way in which the socalled Sad & Rabid Puppies slates had managed to pack the Hugo nominations, in response to which an emergency panel was convened. Niall Harrison, Charlie Stross, Vince Doherty, Gaie Sebold and Kari Sperring all were eloquent about the damaged done to the Hugo and the room as a whole was outraged and hurt by it. If you come late to this whole thing, basically two groups of rabid rightwingers with massive entitlement issues set out to game the Hugos by running slates of ideologically acceptable candidates (and the occassional useful idiot) then got their followers to vote for them, with the socalled Sad Puppies run by Brad Torgenson and Larry Correira being the most visible of the two, seemingly providing cover for the more reactionary Rabid Puppies slate run by Vox Day and John C. Wright. Correira had the cunning to withdraw himself from consideration while Torgenson didn’t manage to get nominated in the first place even with the slate, but that still left Vox Day & John C. Wright stinking up the Hugos, as well as a host of supporting assholes and the occassional useful idiot.

The response at Eastercon was one of disbelief, horror and despair about what happened. That something bad was coming was well known, with various rumours doing the rounds in fan Twitter and such, but the sheer scale of it depressed people. It seemed that the organised temper tantrum had gotten what it wanted in terms of attention, that all the good work done in the last few years of making fandom and science fiction more diversive, more welcoming, was done in vain. It was not a happy mood that the con was in that Sunday. All the good cheer of the rest of the con, seeing all those people coming together to celebrate a mutual love for science fiction and fandom, for a moment was hidden behind this cloud of grief. While it’s not yet clear what we should do, we should keep in mind the last words of Joe Hill:

Don’t mourn, Organize!