Does what it says on the tin. Adorably cute despite the occasionally awkward English.
Fandom
A small step for Analog. A giant leap for fandom.
“John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fucking fascist”. That was the opening sentence of Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech at the Dublin 2019 Hugo Awards. I was in the audience and the room erupted in applause the moment she said it:
And she is right. Campbell was a fascist, a reactionary, a racist and it’s long overdue that the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is renamed, just like the World Fantasy Award lost its Lovecraft bust a few years back. Back then, it was an uphill struggle to get that far, but fortunately this time things are different:
Named for Campbell, whose writing and role as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog Science Fiction and Fact) made him hugely influential in laying the groundwork for both the Golden Age of Science Fiction and beyond, the award has over the years recognized such nominees as George R.R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, Carl Sagan, and Lois McMaster Bujold, as well as award winners like Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, and John Scalzi.
However, Campbell’s provocative editorials and opinions on race, slavery, and other matters often reflected positions that went beyond just the mores of his time and are today at odds with modern values, including those held by the award’s many nominees, winners, and supporters.
As we move into Analog’s 90th anniversary year, our goal is to keep the award as vital and distinguished as ever, so after much consideration, we have decided to change the award’s name to The Astounding Award for Best New Writer.
It’s frankly amazing — to coin a phrase — to see the editors of analog, long the most stodgy, rightwing of the traditional science fiction magazines, respond so quickly and so willingly. Personally I expected this to be another shot in the sf kulturwars, just like the removal of Lovecraft from the WFA was back then, but it seems sf’s reactionary forces have lost the fight. Perhaps it’s a sign of how far the field has matured, diversified in the years since we first had to confront our own complicity in the racism, sexism and other bigotry endemic in our societies. In some ways, the Sad Puppies attempt to hijack the Hugos for their reactionary values and the bruised egos of petty little men was the best thing that ever happened to us. It forced us to look more closely at how we acted, which values we celebrated and who we considered part of our worlds.
But…
That it had to take until 2019 for this to happen, that it had to be done –again– by a person of colour using their temporary clout to shame us in doing so, rather than being able to celebrate their own success, that means we’re not there yet. And reading that Analog editorial message, it does still soft pedal Campbell’s true nature. We’re still too hesitant in confronting our true history as a genre and a fandom. It’s still too often the people directly impacted by the racism, sexism and other bigotry consciously or unconsciously present in fandom who have to do the hard work of rooting it out.
This is an important victory, but there’s still work to do.
AO3 as Hugo finalist is a victory for inclusive fandom
We’ve got a really great bunch of Hugo finalists this year, including everybody who ever uploaded their drunk Batman making out with Captain America fanfic at three AM on a Saturday night, as Archive of Our Owbn (AO3) was nominated for best related work. All joking aside, this is a very good thing, as AO3 is an example both of the very best modern fandom can do and something that would’ve never gotten a nomination before fandom had to defend itself from the Puppy takeover.
Let me explain.
As you know Bob, fandom, including fanfiction writing fandom, has been on the internet since the very beginning and as a community has had to mostly depend on commercial platforms Like Livejournal, Yahoo groups and Delicious to organise itselves and as such was always dependent on the kindness of at best uncaring strangers. These sort of platforms tended to tolerate, but not encourage fanfiction at best, actively purged it at worst. AO3 therefore started from the desire to have an independent space for fans by fans, not beholden to the whims of commercial entities. As such it fits squarely in the fannish tradition of zine making and con running for the love of it all.
– but ALSO, and here's what's important to realise, this is a community project, a community space, and it was DESIGNED to TEACH.
(Did you know when it was first proposed, they trialed Ruby and Python to see which was quicker for beginners? I know 'cause I voted Python 🐍🤷🏻♀️😂)
— Macey || Jennifer Mace (@englishmace) April 3, 2019
But AO3 is more than that. It’s also a major open source project that’s rare in that it’s been largely run by women and, as the Twitter thread above explains, was set up to be a community project and a teaching project from the start. It’s responsive to its users and remarkably stable, when compared to social media sites like Tumblr or Facebook — it doesn’t have to serve ads after all. AO3 is open to all content, doesn’t censor, allows its users anonymity and pseudonimity and has a brilliant tagging and search functionality that keeps it all useable.
Both for what it offers and the platform it offers it on it’s worthy of a Hugo nomination, but without Worldcon fandom having to defend itself against the Puppies, a group of sad sack rightwing writers who wanted to use a reactionary backlash to cheat their ways to a Hugo, AO3 would’ve never be nominated. Thanks to the Puppies, actual fans mobilised to save their fandom from being taken over, we got organised and long term attempts to make it more inclusive and as a whole Worldcon fandom became more diverse. And with that diversity, that influx of new people both and old fans re-energised, came a new view on what was Hugo worthy or not.
The Puppies, with their obsession with strong men being manly men doing real manly science fiction and fear of women hate a project like AO3, mostly female run, catering to a philosophy of building consent and being welcoming rather than “getting gud”, hosting all those cootie inducing stories about K-pop stars french kissing each other. That’s why having AO3 among the Hugo finalists is a blow for inclusivity and a raspberry in their direction.
That it was named by Naomi Novik in a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own? Icing on the cake.
Not Heinlein, not Asimov, certainly not Vox Day
N. K. Jemisin is the first author to win three back to back to back Hugo Awards for best novel:
This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers — every single mediocre insecure wanna-be who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s meritocracy but when we win it’s identity politics. I get to smile at those people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.
Worldcon screwed up: incompetence or sabotage?
Finally — and this has come up a few times — there’s a generation of amazing Hugo finalists who represent a set of voices that is exciting to nominators, but completely unfamiliar to many folks who will be attending. I can give you a concrete example of this: we have no panel explaining what #ownvoices is, and I’ve had to field multiple questions essentially asking me, “What is that?” I suspect *everyone* at WisCon is familiar with the hashtag and its significance. I would guess maybe 20% of Worldcon 76 members know what it means.
IF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT #ownvoices AND YOU’RE NOT RUNNING A PANEL ON IT, RUN A PANEL ON IT.
Preferably on day one. How hard is this shit that you have to write a patronising email with a completely unnecessary dogwhistle about WisCon to explain to people you haven’t been doing your job because you couldn’t be arsed?
Note that all this is in the context of the convention blatantly ignoring and snubbing the Hugo finalists, especially the newer and upcoming writers, “because they’re not well known enough”, so they can’t be on panels.
THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE PANELS.
Worldcon 76: science fiction fans are a notoriously incurious breed, wary of anything new, so let’s keep programming the same people we have had on panels since 1976. It’s not as if the people coming to our con are the same as the people who nominated these writers in the first place, right? It’s not as if you want to value these fans as a con, the most dedicated ones that could actually be bothered to nominate, to give them a chance to meet and get to know the people they’ve been nominating, to get to know those writers they got curious about because other people nominated them.
All of this is bad enough, but the official Worlcon biographies pages misgendered Bogi Takács, who goes by either E/em/eir/emself or they, which isn’t hard to find out, but who was written about as a “he”, something e has never used for emself. This stuff isn’t that hard to get right if your intentions are good, but at this point feels like a deliberate slur. I’m not saying this is some deliberate gamergating or something, but it does feel like it.
There has been more going wrong with this con after all, with the request that Hugo finalists should wear formal clothing during the ceremony being perhaps the most innocent incident, but even then it’s obnoxious at best and downright hostile at worst to expect this when this is not how Hugo ceremonies have ever been run. It would’ve frozen out or made to feel unwelcome all those who for various reasons cannot or would not wear formal clothing.
Combine this with the scasual gatekeeping that seemed to have happened in the programming, with Hugo Finalists as said ignored for not being noticable enough yet the conrunners and their friends assigned multiple panels as well as the misgendering of Bogi and similar incidents with other marginalised writers and a nasty picture emerges of a convention that wants to take Worlcon back to a more narrower, whiter convention. If it doesn’t want to keep this impression, it has some ‘splaining to do.
Meanwhile the damage has already been done. As Foz Meadows put i:
I will say, though, that it frustrates me how discrimination of this sort always ends up having a double impact on marginalised writers, as they are both the most frequently targeted and the first to resign in solidarity with the mistreatment of others. The Worldcon program is changing, but the people who stepped down from programming to force that change were overwhelmingly POC, women, queer folk, disabled folk, immigrant voices and marginalised writers from around the world – exactly the same people whose mistreatment by the programmers was the problem in the first place. Those with the fewest seats at the table shouldn’t have to step aside to effect better treatment for those who take their place while the majority, unaffected, stays where they are. That doesn’t increase the number of marginalised speakers; it just treats them as a resource to churn through, burning them out and replacing them while claiming to give them a platform.
I have good hope that Worldcon 77, in Dublin, will not take the path this year’s Worldcon has taken, but all this does highlight the need for Worldcon to stay out of the US, especially with Trump as president. America is the heartland of the fascist adjecent Sad Puppies movement, and the fascist right in general has been using nerd culture as its recruiting base there as well as a battlefield. I don’t feel safe going over there and I’m a boring old cishet white bloke with only a few intemperate tweets to worry about.