geekdom – Page 23 – Wis[s]e Words

It’s Hugo time again

Published on April 29, 2011

Earlier this week the Hugo Award nominations were announced and the category I’m primarily interested in, Best Novel, is okay but not great:

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Interestingly enough four out of the five nominees are women, something that hasn’t happened too often. So far I’ve only read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but have both Cryoburn and The Dervish House on the to-read pile. Was I forced to vote, I’d go for the Jemisin (one of the best books I read last year and a very strong first novel, followed by the McDonald and the Bujold — but knowing how much the Hugo voters like Willis, she seems a safe bet to win this category.

It being Hugo Award time again, of course it’s also time for the semi-annual Hugo Award bitchfest, as online fandom once again berate the voters for being out of touch and exclusive. This time there has been a small storm brewing over the fan categories:

But don’t even get me started on the Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer awards. Maybe I’m exposing my ignorance here, but beyond StarShipSofa, I haven’t heard of a damn one, nor am I familiar with any of the writers. My beef, obviously, is the lack of presence of blogs, bloggers and online writers. Where’re the Nialls (Harrison and Alexander)? Where’s Abigail Nussbaum or Adam Whitehead? No nod for SF Signal? Really?

James Nicoll, nominated for the second year in a row for best fanwriter (congrats!) was quick to put Aidan Moher right: “Apparently the net is large enough for us not to have run into each other in the 25 years I’ve been online + however long you’ve been online“… Most of the nominees Aidan complained about were online and had been online for years, if they hadn’t always been online — that he didn’t know them was an indication of how big online fandom has become.

Setting that aside, there remains the more general complaint about the out of touchness of the Hugo voters, as echoed in comments by Jonathan M: Hugo voters tend to be older and not too involved in online fandom and generally are conservative in their choices, much of which I agree with.

The problem with the Hugo Awards is that they were established in a time when science fiction and fantasy were much smaller and the fan commmunities build around them even smaller, a time when it was probably possible to know every active fan in the world. They got their prominence when it was still possible to read every word of science fiction published in English in a given year and when it was true that the Hugo voters were the sf and fantasy community.

This hasn’t been true for decades now, but the Hugos, as the oldest still existing awards in the genre, retain their standing even when the community that votes on them has become less and less representative of fandom as a whole, if you can still even speak of fandom this way. You can be an active, happy and well connected fan and never ever know about worldcons, Hugos, fanzines and old skool fandom at all, just like many Hugo voters happily putter around the same small world of their fandom.

All of which doesn’t really matter if not for the fact that the Hugos are the most important award in science fiction and fantasy still — if they’re out of touch and conservative, they’re worthless. I’m not certain this point has been reached already and certainly in the fan categories there has been somewhat of a renaissance the last few years — James Nicoll may be know in traditional fandom, but his fanac is as untraditional as you can get. Being ignorant of the nominees does not necessarily mean the awards are at fault; as said fandom is big enough that this will quite often be the case.

If people do want to reform the Hugos they need to put money where their mouth is and buy a supporting membership of this year’s Worldcon to get involved. At fifty dollars (about .5 euros in real money) this is a significant barrier to entry in these economic depressed times, I agree, but it’s the only way to change them as the organisation behind the awards, the World Science Fiction Society can only change the awards if their members want it. Online kvetching won’t change that.

fiawol/fijagh/gafia

Published on April 27, 20111 Comment

Dave Lartigue is sick to death of “nerd culture”:

I am tired of zombies. I am tired of Joss Whedon. I am tired of steampunk. I am tired of Monty Python. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of ninjas. I am tired of Batman. I am tired of bacon. I am tired of Star Wars. I am tired of Nintendo. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of Halo. I am tired of elves. I am tired of Cthulhu. I am tired of Boba Fett. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of pirates. I am tired of Battlestar Galactica. I am tired of mecha. I am tired of superheroes. I am tired of Star Trek. I am tired of “funny” bands. Have I mentioned that I am tired of zombies?

Dave himself is of course as guilty as any other nerd of the excesses of nerd culture — Write More Good e.g. — and his post is part of a larger wave of nerd anxiety that regularly courses through various fan communities that is as old as the concept of geekdom as a coherent community itself. As such I think it would be enlightening to look at three concepts from science fiction fandom, one of the oldest clusters within this community: fiawol, fijagh and gafia.

Science fiction fandom quite early on realised that there is an inherent tension between people for whom fandom is a way of life and behaved accordingly, the be and end all of their lives and for whom fandom is just a goddamn hobby, no more or less so than e.g. going out bowling with your workmates, with most fen hovering between these two extremes. This tension is unresolvable, is different for everybody, but will lead a lot of people to gafiate: get away from it all. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Indulge yourself too much in almost anything and you get sick of it; spend some time doing something else, recharge your batteries and you can come back refreshed or you realise that you don’t actually need it anymore. Either way you win.

Trying to change the wider nerd culture because you don’t like certain aspects of it (mashups, bacon, obsessive quoting, bacon, undsoweiter) is a mug’s game. It’s only worthwhile when you’re trying to change genuinely toxic aspects of it, as with the whole racefail “debate” of a few years ago. The rest is only a matter of personal taste where you always have to remember that no matter how played out, tired and boring something is to you, it’s always somebody’s first exposure to a particular idea/meme…

The dirty little secret of publishing

Published on April 13, 2011

Nick Mamatas has it:

Finally, I saw some question about whether or not the original withdrawing author will be “blackballed” for being a troublemaker. The best answer to this is HAHAHAHAHAHA! The sad fact that nobody ever believes is this: there’s not a lot of competition out there. There really isn’t. It’s hard to find people who can write well, and that goes double for short stories or convincing young adult material. The field may seem competitive because of all the semi-literate baboons out there blogging about their rejections slips, but they don’t count. Remember the try-out weeks on American Idol—it’s like that. Tens of thousands try, maybe a couple hundred are good enough to make it to Hollywood Week, and in publishing there’s no need to find a single winner. Verday, whom Bookscan tells me sells fairly well, ain’t going nowhere. Certainly no book publisher cares about the placement of a story in someone else’s anthology, or any ensuing controversy. Verday almost certainly made back her lost $250 and more in terms of goodwill and linking and solidarity purchases of her books. So good for her, bad for the editor, and bad for the publisher for being snotty and defensive in its public statement.

Context available at his original post.

Honey is all right but beeswax is right out

Published on March 19, 20112 Comments

Bottle and glass of St Peters Honey Porter

So I was looking for something to drink during the last day of the Six Nations rugby and amongst others, found this: St Peter’s Honey Porter (dark brown, 4.5 % alcohol by volume). Now I like porters and I like honey flavoured beer, so the combination seemed a natural for me to try. Unfortunately, it turned out a bad idea. Perhaps this particular bottle had gone off somehow because I found it to be undrinkable, like biting into honey flavoured potpourri or beeswax. My first impression was the honey, then came the more disagreeable elements. The mouth feel was like drinking liquid soap, all smooth and cloying without any of the fizziness you expect from beer, while the taste evolved into a mixture of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and perfume, all floral and sweet. Very unpleasant indeed and in the end I poured it down the drain.

If this was how it was supposed, it wasn’t for me, though some people certainly like it.

Much more to my liking was the ordinary porter I drank before this abomination, the Klein Duimpje Porter: Light golden brown in colour, 5.5 % alcohol by volume. Starts off light, with metallic overtones, almost lager like, but becomes more bitter as the bottle progresses and ends at the Kilkenny or Murphy’s Red end of things. Something you could drink all day long without damaging your taste buds.

Giefors

Published on March 16, 2011

Really everything that came out in the seventies or eighties and has some appeal to thirty and fortysomething grownup nerds is being made into movies or tv series these days, isn’t it? Gatchaman is no exception and while the hardcore fan might find anything but the original anime suspect, I suspect this is really aimed at those of us who got to know it under another guise, as Battle of the Planets, bowlderised and chopped to bits as it was. Gatchaman was my first fandom, playing in the sandlot at kindergarten in the very early eighties and fighting over who got to be Mark, Jason, Tiny though not so much the princess or Keyop. Yet back then we didn’t have the slick version shown above; rather we had something like this: