I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.
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Many years ago the fanzine I edit won an award. It was not anything as prestigious or as well-known as the Hugos. It was an Ursa Major Award, a fan-nominated and fan-voted award which was consciously set up to be an anthropomorphics-fandom version of the Hugos. And because I also write stories that are published in those sorts of ‘zines, I have had one or two of my tales receive enough nominations to make it onto the ballot some years. I didn’t win, but it was an honor just to be nominated. And that isn’t just something I say to be polite, it really was an honor.
I would have been much more excited to win, obviously. I certainly was very pleased when the fanzine won the award. But, the two years my ‘zine won, there were other publications on the ballot who didn’t win, which was a disappointment for their editors, I’m sure. That’s what happens with any kind of award. Someone wins, and a bunch of people don’t.
It so happens that when you make it on the ballot but don’t win, you often find yourself receiving a lot of condolences from friends, acquaintances, and random fans on the internet which include some variant of the statement: “I can’t believe you didn’t win! I voted for you, and know several other people who did, too!”
And that is flattering. It makes you feel at least a bit better about not winning. Obviously, you received enough nominations to make it onto the ballot, so you already knew that there were people who liked your work. But something about having a person tell you directly is even more of an ego boo.
It so happens that one of the years that I didn’t have any story make the ballot, I received a lot of those sorts of condolence messages. After the award winners were announced months later, the committee that administers the award published voting and nomination statistics. Foolishly, I looked at them, only to discover that the only one of my stories published that year which was nominated received a grand total of exactly 3 nominations. I confess, that when I nominated that year I had voted for my own story (and I was fairly certain my husband had, as well). Which meant that only one person other than myself or my husband had nominated me.
But far more than just one person had seemingly sincerely told me—they had volunteered the information without any prompting from me—that they had nominated me. Which means that most of those fans told a little white lie. It wasn’t malicious. In some of the cases, the person probably had meant to participate in the nominating process but put it off until it was too late. A few of them may have been misremembering: they had nominated me, but it was the year before. Others simply were trying to be nice, having noticed that I didn’t make the ballot and assuming that I was disappointed.
When you realize something like that has happened, what can you do but laugh, shrug it off, and try to move on?
The Hugo trophy given out last night. Designed by Matthew Dockrey, photo by Kevin Standlee. (Click to embiggen)The 2015 Hugo Awards were announced last night at a ceremony at Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Con, held in Spokane, Washington. The hosts were David Gerrold and Tananarive Due.
First, congratulations to the Helsinki Worldcon Bid Committee! They’re hosting WorldCon 2017 in Helsinki! So at least one of the votes being counted at WorldCon this weekend went the way I voted. Woo hoo! Onneksi olkoon! Congratulations!
In other updates to things that I’ve included in recent Friday Links posts, a lot of people I follow have been posting a link to a Vocativ post about how very, very white the winners of the Hugo Awards have been over the years: Science Fiction Is Really, Really White. The article has graphs and some statistics and seems legit, right?
Screenshot of the graphic, caption, and a bit of the article.The first thing that made me wary about simply retweeting the link is something really minor: the caption on the picture that they illustrate the story with. “Amazing Stories was a comic that helped launch the sci-fi genre.” No. Amazing Stories was a magazine that printed literary stories founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsbeck. It was not a comic book. While it is often credited with launching the pulp version of the genre science fiction, so that part is true, but it wasn’t a comic.
Bar graph as originally published.Now, ordinarily that would be a quibble, but this article is about statistics, so seeing in the caption that they have already gotten a fact wrong made me a teeny bit apprehensive. Then we get to the most dramatic graph, and I think, “That can’t be right.” What about Saladin Ahmed, author of Throne of the Crescent Moon, Best Novel nominee in 2013? Shouldn’t there be a bar labeled “Arab” with at least 1 person it it?
This only just barely qualifies as data…Amusingly, I started this post early this morning, then had to go to a nearby clinic for some scheduled medical tests, and while I was sitting in the waiting room, Mr. Ahmed’s tweet commenting on being erased from the data came through my feed. Since then, one of Vocativ’s editors sent out a tweet that they’re correcting the article. The bar graph now does list one Arab-American. That’s a bit better, but that’s the thing. Now how do we trust them about the other 295 authors they claim are white? You might think that clicking on the “Get data” link under the graph would give you a spreadsheet of all the nominees, right? Nope. You get a spreadsheet, all right, but it just says “White 295, Black 3, Chinese 1, Arab American 1.”
This may seem really petty and nitpicky, but here’s the thing: if you are trying to make a statistical argument to back up a claim, you have to get every fact right. And you have to give us confidence that you are likely to get every fact right. There is a big argument to be had about what we mean by race. Race is a social construct with no basis in biological science, so there will be lots of people who will want to nitpick the data if we did have a big spreadsheet that listed all 300 nominees. I suspect that the graph now is close enough to correct to still illustrate the point that the Hugo Awards have hardly been a paragon of diversity. Even more importantly, the ludicrous charge that the Hugos have been being somehow secretly controlled by a liberal cabal that has imposed political correctness onto the ballot for many years is demolished by facts such as this.
But to the next person who wants to compile something like this: quadruple check your results before publishing!
Hugo Awards Announced Tonight!
The award are tonight! From the official Hugos website:
The 2015 Hugo Awards Ceremony is scheduled for Saturday, August 22, 2015 at 8 PM Pacific Daylight Time in the INB Performing Arts Center in Spokane, Washington. The Hugo Awards web site will once again offer text-based coverage of the 2015 Hugo Awards ceremony via CoverItLive, suitable for people with bandwidth restrictions. For those with the bandwidth for it, Sasquan will also offer live video streaming of the 2015 Hugo Awards ceremony via UStream. In addition, Sasquan will present “The Road to the Hugos”, a livestreamed Internet pre-and-post Hugo broadcast featuring hosts Stephen Schapansky and Warren Frey of Radio Free Skaro, as part of the coverage, starting one hour before and ending one hour after the ceremony.
No Award will take maybe two categories, causing cheering from some and more threats from the Überpuppy,
At least two nominees from one of the Puppy slates will walk home with a Hugo,
Some people on both sides will claim victory,
Some people on both sides will claim it is a defeat for all that is right and just in the world,
Regardless, science fiction will survive!
I plan to have a mini Hugo Watching Party here tonight.
Now matter what happens, please offer congratulations to the winners and please console any nominee (and I mean anyone) who does not get a trophy. Similarly, offer condolences to anyone you know who is disappointed that their favorite in any category didn’t win.
And for the future: if you are a fan, read and watch good science fiction and fantasy (however you define it) and support the writers and artists who make it. If you are one of those writers or artists: in the immortal words of Neil Gaiman, I urge you to make good art.
quickmeme.comIt’s Friday! The third Friday in August. I’ve been feeling especially worn out most days this week, so don’t have much particularly clever to say.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
TFG Film & Tape has performed a digital restoration to the 1909 Edison film of Mark Twain. The image has been flipped left to right to correct the camera-to-subject orientation. It has had it’s speed corrected from the camera frame rate of the day. The detail has been enhanced dramatically bringing out visuals never before seen. The fluctuations in the exposure have been reduced markedly making the image much more pleasing to watch:
Lost in Space, 20th Century Fox Television & CBS Broadcasting (Click to embiggen)The first episode of Lost In Space aired on CBS in September of 1965, and I was glued to my set. It debuted less than two weeks before my fifth birthday, so I don’t remember a lot about my feelings about the first episode. If you aren’t familiar, the show follows the adventures of the “space family Robinson” (Professor John Robinson, his wife Dr. Maureen Robinson, their grown daughter Judy, and younger children Penny and Will; their pilot, Major Don West, and their robot called B-9 in the early episodes) who were sent off to be the first colonists of the Alpha Centauri system, except their ship is thrown off course due to the bumbling actions of the stowaway/saboteur Dr. Zachary Smith, who ends up trapped on the ship when it takes off.
Lost In Space is not remembered as being serious science fiction, or even as a serious series. Though this is primarily because of the second and third season. The first season was intended as a serious action adventure series giving a science fictional spin to the early 19th Century novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, which had itself been inspired by the 18th Century novel, Robinson Crusoe. Like those novels, the early episodes focused on the crew as castaways trying to survive in a hostile environment. Some of the sci fi notions of some first season episodes were pretty silly by modern standards, but mostly because they were attempts to adapt the sort of complications that might appear in a western series or a contemporary slice-of-life series and put a spacey spin on it…Continue reading Computerized Clods and Squeamish Scoundrels: more of why I love sf/f→
Slippery slope arguments get thrown around a lot. As a queer man I’ve been on the receiving end of more ridiculous slippery slope accusations than I can count. A surprisingly large number of them always end in something about man on dog sex (though the wingnut who kept typing in all caps about lesbian witches eating babies was actually giggle-worthy!).
The reason the slippery slope is considered a logical fallacy is because the predicted end result is usually an extreme event which would require a rather large number of increasingly improbable steps to get to from whatever current proposal is under discussion.
I had something else entirely queued up to publish today, but I think this video, which I saw this morning thanks to a Towleroad post is a better use of your time:
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Televangelists:
Watching this, seeing the clips John plays of televangelists telling people god will erase their debt if the just charge another thousand dollars to their credit card to donate to the “church” made me angry, but also very sad. I remembered a specific family in one of the churches I attended as a child (this was about 1972 or so) who sent a lot of money to one of the television preachers because he told them if they give “with faith” god would send it back “a hundred-fold!”
They did not get any money back of any kind: no windfall, no spontaneous arrival of a big raise or whatever. What they did get was a lot more money problems.
A Kentucky newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader has published a rather stern editorial about the thrice-divorced county clerk who is still defying the federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples and the hate-group paying for her lawyers: Time for Davis to do her job or resign. I’m just going to quote the main point:
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has chosen to prolong her moment in the limelight by defying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to legally qualifed people who apply for them.
U.S. District Judge David Bunning kindly but firmly told Davis Wednesday that in our system her religious beliefs don’t trump the rights of the taxpayers who pay her almost $80,000 annual salary. Sharing Davis’ glow is Liberty Counsel, which describes itself as a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal representation related to “religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family,” funded by tax-deductible donations and grants. In 2012 those gifts reached just over $3.5 million and in 2013 topped $4.1 million, according to IRS filings.
The husband and wife team who founded and run Liberty Counsel, Anita and Matthew Staver, were paid $137,758 and $153,591, respectively, in 2013. The staff of five ran up $184,479 in travel expenses that year and spent $429,584 on conferences, conventions and meetings. Liberty Counsel paid one independent contractor over $600,000 for “email alert services,” and another almost $500,000 for printing and mail services. “Case costs,” were reported at $105,487. Liberty’s attorneys know they can’t win the case in Rowan County.
Same-sex marriage is legal since the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision and it’s Davis’ job to issue marriage licenses. So, why is Liberty Counsel marching alongside Davis in this losing cause? It takes a lot to keep that marketing machine humming and those executives paid, and the only way to keep those donations coming is to stay in the news. For that purpose a losing cause is just as good as, perhaps better than, a winning one.
When I describe the Liberty Counsel as a hate group, that’s not just one queer’s opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has decades of experience fighting hate groups of many kinds, officially designated the Liberty Counsel a hate group some years ago, and lists them as a still active hate group.
GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) has more details about the on-going activities of the Liberty Counsel and it’s co-founder/leader, Mat Staver.
The editorial’s conclusion puts the whole affair quite succinctly: “Davis can resign if she’s morally unable to issue the marriage licenses while the appeal is pending. Law-abiding, taxpaying Rowan County citizens have been denied their constitutional rights for almost two months while Davis has kept her job and Liberty has ginned up its marketing machine.”
One of the links I included yesterday accused one of the young women who interrupted the rally of being a rightwing Christian whack-o, based on the fact that she attends Seattle Pacific University and has admitted online that when she was younger (as in, middle school aged) she was a Sarah Palin supporter. The piece I linked is hardly the only one of that nature I’ve seen online, with lots of people not understanding how someone who claims to be progressive could attend such a conservative school.
So let me just say that I am an extremely liberal (so liberal that I neither eschew the label “liberal” nor do I consider it an insult when someone calls me a socialist) queer man… and I attended Seattle Pacific University. Even harder for some people to believe: I attended that extremely conservative christian university back in the days when their policies still required “unrepentant homosexuals” to be expelled! (They have since lightened up only a little bit, and actually have allowed a straight-gay alliance type club to officially form on campus).
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: kids raised in extremely conservative families sometimes have to go to the kinds of schools their parents and community will support, even if they have outgrown their family’s rightwing beliefs. You get the education you can, and you go out into the world and make your way. I had some extremely good professors and will put the quality of the higher mathematics, physics, and rhetoric classes I took there against any other university you care to name. Also, some of the most fiercely progressive activists I have known have not only been Christian, they were ministers.
Anyway, I’m glad that they stood up and made their voices heard. I love Bernie Sanders, but I have to agree that until this happened, he hadn’t been connecting the dots in either his speeches or his campaign materials between his economic justice arguments and institutional racism. And we can’t solve the problems of economic disparity without addressing institutional bigotry that contributes to it.
It’s Friday! The second Friday in August. Tonight is the first pre-season game for my beloved Seahawks, playing against the team I grew up rooting for because of where I lived, the Denver Broncos. Which means that mostly it will be all the rookies on both sides, because neither coach wants to risk the star players getting injured in what is merely an exhibition game. But it’s the first time seeing them play, so I’ll be watching!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Hardcover copy of the original version of David Gerrold’s When Harlie Was One.I was thirteen or fourteen years old when I found the copy of When Harlie Was One in the public library. The book jacket described an intelligent machine that has to prove he is a person or be shut down. It sounded really cool. This was during a period in my life where I was literally reading at least one entire book every day. I visited the library constantly, turning in a pile of books I’d finished every few days and checking out more. I read during every free moment. I even read while I was walking to school or while walking home. Yep, I was that kid, walking down the sidewalk with my nose stuck in a book. Books weren’t my only friends, but they were my best friends.
Thinking back, I’m sort of surprised that particular public library in that tiny town had this book. It had only been published a year or two previously. Most of the science fiction they had was stuff that had been around for much longer. Of course, When Harlie Was One had been nominated in the best novel category for both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award (it won neither) not long before the library acquired it, so maybe that’s why the librarian who ordered new books picked it. I don’t know…Continue reading Thinking Machines and Thoughtless People: more of why I love sf/f→
Many years ago the fanzine I edit won an award. It was not anything as prestigious or as well-known as the Hugos. It was an Ursa Major Award, a fan-nominated and fan-voted award which was consciously set up to be an anthropomorphics-fandom version of the Hugos. And because I also write stories that are published in those sorts of ‘zines, I have had one or two of my tales receive enough nominations to make it onto the ballot some years. I didn’t win, but it was an honor just to be nominated. And that isn’t just something I say to be polite, it really was an honor.
Font Folly 