Fandom

A small step for Analog. A giant leap for fandom.

Fandom, science fiction
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“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

Fandom
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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 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

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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?

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This is utterly ridiculous:

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 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.

Harlan Ellison

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Really, all you need to know about Harlan Ellison’s legacy is that he trademarked his own name and he’s the guy who did this to Connie Willis:



Harlan Ellison was that guy who used to be an important writer and editor but now was just some old guy with anger management issues (and grabby hands as it turned out) for as long as I’ve been reading science fiction. And I’ve been reading science fiction since at least 1982. As a kid devouring anything about science fiction I could get my hands on back then, mostly from the somewhat out of date local library’s collection, he was omnipresent in books about esseff, not so much as a writer in his own right. A few stories scattered here and there among anthologies, but I’ve never read all that much about him. And what I read of his I sometimes ended up hating.

Ellison’s importance to me, as he seemed to be presented in fanzines and sf history books and such, was as a model for how to be a certain type of fan turned writer, a template for whole generations of baby boom/gen X fans. Well but narrowly read in science fiction and adjacent genres, argumentive, elistis, bit of an asshole and proud of it. Ellison campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, but as it turned out, had a bit of a history with harassing women that didn’t make it into the sf history books or fanzines.

With the news of his death came of course the eulogies, which touched off something that I think Jasmine Gower put it best:

As someone who was only 16 when Harlan Ellison sexually assaulted a colleague on stage at WorldCon, I have only ever known him by that reputation.

It’s very concerning to see my community today celebrating this sexual predator as someone who made our field stronger.

If you’re the same age as me or younger, Ellison always was somebody who had been cutting edge and radical once but now was a sour old coot; even ignorant of his sexual assaults, he came across as an asshole and celebrated for it. But there also a great many fans and writers to whom Ellison was and is still important because they were there when he was in the vanguard of the American New Wave, freeing sf from its self imposed shackles. Then there are people like Tananarive Due, who remembered Ellison for supporting both Octavio Butler and herself. And, as mentioned above, Ellison championed the ERA. In other words, the not at all rare example of a progressive man being awful in private. It’s a mixed legacy indeed, you can’t deny his good parts, but as I said eight years ago already, who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?