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The Hugo Awards: things I won’t consider (II): categories

Published on July 1, 20143 Comments

For Loncon3 there are sixteen Hugo Award categories, plus the not a Hugo John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, to vote in. That’s a lot to be knowledgeable about. They reflect the history of the award, as categories came and went:

Best Novel
Best Novella
Best Novelette
Best Short Story
Best Related Work
Best Graphic Story
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Best Editor – Short form
Best Editor – Long form
Best Professional Artist

Those are all what you might call the professional awards, the ones most like other literary awards. The first four are perhaps the core Hugos, though the distinction between novella and especially the novelette and short story is more of historic than actual importance and nobody outside fandom pays attention to anything but the novel award anyway. Best professional artist in one way or another has been around since the beginning as well; illustrations, especially cover paintings have of course always been important in science fiction.

Meanwhile the editor and dynamic presentation –basically anything that isn’t written science fiction– awards are split up the way they are because voters over time thought that e.g. writing a single episode of a tv series is slightly different from writing a movie and the same for editing short stories vs novels. Best graphic story is for comics.

The next category is sort of a transition category, where the smaller commercial magazines mix with the bigger fanzines, always a bit of a mess. Beyond that there are the fan awards, awarded for work inside of fandom. It’s always a bit of a surprise for newcomers to discover that yes, professional writers too can be eligible for these awards, as long as they are active in fandom in some way or another. That I think is the real charm of the Hugos: they’re for all of us, not just fans voting for their favourite “celebrities”.

Best Semiprozine
Best Fanzine
Best Fancast
Best Fan Writer
Best Fan Artist

In short, there’s a split in awards categories that deal in the business of science fiction and awards that deal in the business of science fiction fandom, but pros can be nominated and win in fan categories and vice versa. It’s one of those things that are utterly charming about sf fandom even if it made a lot more sense back in 1953 when every other fan was a pro writer and the rest were aspiring pro writers. There is still much less of a pro-fan distinction than there is in related fandoms like media sf or comics.

Now, if I’m completely honest, the only two Hugo categories I’m truly interested in are the Best Novel and the Best Fan Writer ones; these are the only ones I can form opinions about without the help of the Hugo Voter Package. But thanks to the voter package I can at least make a stab at rating the candidates for the other categories too. Which I’m going to do with the following exceptions: I won’t vote in either of the dramatic presentation categories, nor in the graphic story one, because I don’t believe the Hugo is suited for them. These are not where this fandom’s strengths and interests lie and they always default to already well known, well established works.

The two other categories I’m wavering about are the editorial categories. It’s not the awards themselves so much that are the problem, but rather my ability to judge them. Editing is a largely invisible art to me as a reader, not helped by the lack of editorial acknowledgement in most sf books. And since I don’t read sf magazines, where the role of the editor is much greater in shaping the magazine as a whole, it’s hard to judge those kind of editors too. Some editors have been thoughtful enough to include samples of the stories/books they’ve edited, but just because I like a story doesn’t mean the editing was any good, nor the other way around. Therefore I probably will take a look at these categories and decide later if to vote on them.

All other categories I will be voting on, which means a lot of reading and thanks again for the Hugo Voters Package for making this so easy. I think I’ll be blogging about the various awards throughout July and aim to have made my choices by August. For some that will be easy; for others, not so much.

The Hugo Awards: things I won’t consider (I)

Published on June 30, 2014Leave a comment

I’d been dithering about going to the Worldcon this year, even though it’s rare that it’s held inside Europe, partially because it’s been such a long time that I’ve been to a proper con and would I not feel uncomfortable going to the biggest of them all. However when Rose Fox turned out not to be able to go and offered their membership for sale I took the chance. So now I just need to book a hotel and a train journey and I’m there.

Oh, and I have slightly longer than a month to decide what to vote for in the Hugo Awards.

Here’s how I’m going to do this: I’m of course going to blog about it, so I’m laying down some ground rules. First, I’ll have to address the rightwing attempt to turn the Hugos into a propagandafest. That’s easily solved: everybody on this slate is disqualified and won’t appear on my ballot.

This includes:

Best Novel: Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia (Baen Books)
Best novella: The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells (Privateer Press)
Best novella: The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen (Analog, Jul-Aug 2013)
Best Novelette: The Exchange Officers by Brad Torgersen (Analog, Jan-Feb 2013)
Best Novelette: Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (The Last Witchking, Marcher Lord Hinterlands)
Best editor Long form: Toni Weisskopf
Best fanzine: Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond

All these won’t be taken into consideration, won’t be read, won’t appear on my ballot.

There’s one other borderline entry on the Hugo ballots,The Wheel of Time series, which is slightly dodgy for two reasons. One, it’s a complete series put on the novel ballot under the idea that it’s one single book split up in parts and two, people campaigned for it in honour of Robert Jordan. The latter I have no problems with, as the people who nominated it did it out of a genuine appreciation of Jordan and his work. Remains the question, is it a single book?

Not to me. I find this stretches the definition of single book too far and hence won’t be putting it on my ballot. To be fair, even if had put it on the ballot I’ve read enough of the series to know it would’ve finished dead last. I like Jordan and will always appreciate The Wheel of Time for getting me through some dark times, but it’s not good enough for a Hugo Award.

So those are the works that drop off immediately for me. In the next post: which categories to exclude. I have opinions.

(Updated for pronoun errors.)

That Breendoggle: much, much worse than you think

Published on June 16, 20147 Comments

As we learned earlier, fandom basically covered up for the child abuser Walter Breen (and his enabler, Marion Zimmer Bradley) for fifty years until he got caught and convicted. Even when Stephen Goldin put up the court documents documenting his abuse and MZB’s enabling, this was largely ignored. It was ancient history, an old fan controversy and something that was described mainly in terms of the affect it had on Berkeley fandom and beyond. What has struck me every time I’ve been reminded of it and started looking for it, was that the original oh so cutesy named Breendoggle fanzine setting out the case against Breen was often referenced but never available.

Well, thanks to one Ruthless Ames, it’s up now, in a redacted form with the names of the victims removed, and it doesn’t make for nice reading. The flippant, dismissive tone in which this abuse is described, the victim blaming, the idea that it was enough for children just to barricade themselves in their bedrooms if Breen came to visit their parents (!), the confusion between honest homosexuality and pederasty, the idea that the children wouldn’t be harmed by this abuse, or actually seduced him, it’s all godawful — and it’s all coming from a writer in favour of expelling Breen.

But what really struck me, what was at the heart of why I wrote that earlier post, is the following:

And they swung between two points of view. “We must protect T—-” and “We’re all kooks. Walter is just a little kookier than the rest of us. Where will it all end if we start rejecting people because they’re kooky?” So they swung from on the one hand proposing that if Walter wasn’t to be expelled, then the banning from individual homes should be extended so that club meetings were only held in such homes, and on the otherhand calling the whole series of discussions “McCarthite” and “Star Chamber”. “I don’t want Walter around T—-, but if we do such a horrible thing as expelling him, I’ll quit fandom.”

The idea that it’s worse to expell a harasser than to let him continue his harassment is, unlike much of what’s describe above, one that’s still alive in fandom today. It’s why people like Frenkel could return to the con they were caught harassing people at the previous year, why Ed Kramer could get away with his activities at Dragoncon for decades.

I’m sorry Mario, your harasser is in another castle

Published on June 14, 2014Leave a comment

Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!

Following on from this post, if we do want to change as fandom, want to make cons safe, what should we be doing? For a start of course cons need to do what Readercon and then Wiscon failed to do: not allow a known harasser back next year. Cons need not just a consistent, thought out policy against harassment, they also need to make it known to concom, volunteers and members alike and make sure that any incidents and harassers are known to next year’s concom and volunteers as well.

The key point to remember is that if a con doesn’t prevent know harassers from attending, it means excluding or even endangering their victims; while it may be harsh on a harasser to be ejected and banned, it’s much harsher to subject victims to potential new harassment. The other thing to remember is that for every victim of a harasser that comes forward, there are usually more who don’t for various reasons, especially in a climate where until very recently harassment wasn’t taken seriously.

But there’s a larger problem. Even if every con has its harassment policy and bans harassers, it of course won’t help much if they can just amble along to the next con to menace fresh victims. That’s the silo problem, where each con knows who their problem cases are, but the cons aren’t sharing that information. There therefore need to be some way to share information. You can’t rely on informal networks, as Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s comment on the previous post shows, because there will always be people and cons left out of it.

So there needs to be more formal ways of cons to inform each other about harassers, as well as its own members, volunteers and concom. This doesn’t necessarily mean making this information public, but there are back channels for con “professionals” where this sort of exchange could happen. We need to get this in place sooner rather than later, to avoid harassers just choosing new cons to trawl.

Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley

Published on June 11, 20143 Comments

Last year, in a post about that year’s harassment scandal at Wiscon Natalie Luhrs wrote:

I’ve also seen a handful of posts about how, at science fiction conventions, women will work together to let each other know who the serial harassers and creepers are. I find this extremely interesting because I have never been warned about anyone at any of the conventions I’ve attended.

Which I had to think about when reading about the revelations of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s (sexual) abuse of her daughter. It had been public knowledge since at least 2000 that MZB had enabled her husband, Walter Breen’s abuse, who would ultimately be convicted of it, but that she herself was abusive was news to me and a lot of other science fiction fans. The question is, as Agent Mimi put it why didn’t we know earlier, when all the evidence had been there. Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims?

Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so. In the years and decades since, those who knew about Breen and MZB kept schtum and if you weren’t in the know, you didn’t get to know until Stephen Goldin put up the court documents.

But even after this, fandom hasn’t been open, hasn’t been willing to draw lessons from this horrible history, still by and large thinks it’s better to leave molestors in peace than to risk excluding people, is willing to stay silent. What MZB and Breen did and why they did it in fandom is the logical result of a culture that tolerated Asimov’s butt pinching, Randall Garrett’s propositioning or Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis.

There’s a culture of harassment in fandom, mostly of women by men, which fandom has known about and tolerated (or evne actively encouraged) for decades, where those women lucky enough to have the connections were warned against those know to be harassers (everybody knew Jim Frenkel was one of them, but nobody was willing or felt able to say so out loud until Elise Matthesen did so. Because of that culture of silence, those who do get harassed, often those without the network, new to fandom or for some reason an outsider, feel they’re the only ones to have suffered and are less likely to report it, justifiably thinking that they won’t be taken seriously if they do report being harassed by somebody famous.

The “new” revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own actiosn therefore should serve as a wakeup call to fandom, not only to take harassment seriously, develop policies about it, but also to be honest and open about its (our) own history, acknowledge that we do have a problem providing safe spaces for everybody and that we need to change that.