feuervogel | Hugo voting

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Hugo voting

As a member of this year's WorldCon, I get to vote on the Hugos. This is extremely exciting. I'm making my way through the novelettes, then I'll get to the novellas. I'm not sure I'll have time to read all the novels, especially the GRRM one bc it's number 5 or 6 in a series, and yeah, fuck that.

I've got the pro artist, fan artist, editor long form, and short story categories ranked already. I may take a pass on the short form dramatic presentation (I don't watch Dr Who, and I don't feel like watching a single episode of Community). If we can find Hugo and Source Code to rent/dl and watch them, maybe I'll have more than 2 things to rank in that category. I don't much feel like watching ALL of Game of Thrones season 1, either.

I'll skip the fancast, since I'm not into podcasts.

That leaves related work, graphic story, semiprozine, fanzine, editor short form, and the Campbell (not-a-Hugo). I should be able to get through much of them before voting closes. I have all the text things on my kobo and am reading them & taking notes.

If any of you want to hear my thoughts & reasonings for ranking, I can post that here, locked, when I'm done. I may write up Thots on the short stories (brief reviews) on my blogger blog.

Here's how I did it for pro artist: I opened the files in the voter packet in Preview, in alphabetical order. The ones that made me go "WOW" or "DAMN" were at the top. Some were technically quite good, but lacking life and vibrancy. You get to rank them in order (Hugo voting is instant runoff), so the two I said "WOW" to, I had to decide which was 1 and which was 2. I ranked the one that was more vibrant first. (Since this is public, I won't tell you which that was.)

Does that interest people? (Even if it doesn't, I may do it anyway, neener neener, it's my journal, I can do what I want.)

(I kind of dig this Hugo-voting thing. I may buy supporting ($50) memberships in the future even if I can't make it to the actual con. Like London 2014. Also kind of meh on San Antonio, because it's Dragon*Con weekend again.)

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I'm starting with the Campbell packet, then graphic story, then short form, then long form, etc.

I KNOW what my #1 pick for graphic story is, but I want to read the rest of the ones that I haven't read yet (I'm a loyal Schlock reader, so I don't need to do that one) so I can rank 'em.

And yes, I agree - the supporting membership may be on my anual purchase list thanks to deals like this. I mean, just...wow.

I started with the short things, because they won't take very long. I got through all the short stories in about an hour, then started in on the novelettes. None of the 3 I've read have excited me all that much. I hope the other two are better. It looks like I still have 2 months (almost) to read everything, which is probably enough time...

One thing I'm finding very interesting in the nominated fiction is the distinct delineation between old-school and new-school writers. Mike Resnick's story is good in the technical and craft aspects, but it's not my thing. Ken Liu's "Paper Menagerie" was barely sff, bordering on magical realism I'd say, but god damn it made me cry. It's not even necessarily older writers like Resnick who give the old school stories; Torgerson's novelette is a good example of "ossification" of a sort.

The discussions about the ways SFF is changing, and whether the people of my/our generation and the one below us are welcome in, interest me a lot. We younger fans (by which I mean people born since about 1965 and especially since about 1985) are more queer, more brown, more female, and there's been some backlash and consolidation among older fans. I mean, shit, if you read

dragoncon, there are annual "who let those stupid anime kids in? What's up with all this pop culture shit? It's ruining the con!" posts, which generate massive commentary for and against.

I'm getting too old to go to anime cons anymore, since I'm over twice their age now (god!), but fandom is going to die out if the Old Guard keeps pushing young people away because they like "stupid" stuff. So I say welcome the new fans. They're the ones who are going to keep conventions existing for the next 50 years.

I wonder if I have an actual blog post I could expand from this...

That's one thing I will say about ConQuesT - it had older fans, and tracks for them, it had fans our age and tracks for them, and then it had a lot fo younger fans as well. I think, on that score, it varies by con. In the end, all of the cons are going to either adapt or die out. I can kind of see the end of Stellar and DucKon, based on the attendance and atendees. I can see young cons like MystiCon growing, because they're aiming for the younger crowds and new parts of the genre.

And then we see the Anime Cons, Furry is growing by leaps and bounds, and even smaller specialty cons which are going to grow.

I can see StellarCon staying a similar size or getting smaller--they have a steady influx of college students, after all, and college students are in charge of it. Presumably they know what their peers are into. This year there were a couple Hunger Games panels.

"Adapt or die" pretty much sums up the state of SFF fandom (and publishing) right now. The crusty old farts (and less-old farts) who don't want those queer brown girls ruining their fandom are either going to persist in their little corner or die out, because those of us who think that books starring characters who aren't white nor American nor male are groovy aren't going anywhere.

I mean, I love some of the books in Baen's catalog, but it's definitely skewed to a demographic that, to put it mildly, would prefer that people like me didn't exist. Even the books that aren't a hard-right-wing power fantasy are full of straight, presumably-white, American-ish dudes. *sigh*

This year's StellarCon had a HUGE "that guy" problem, that I haven't particularly noticed at past Stellars. Don't know why, and I hope it doesn't persist.

And yeah, since they're run by SF Cubed, UNC-G's student-run sf club, they're always getting an influx of new blood. OTOH, they've done pretty well at chasing off the old guard StellarCon folks, and institutional memory is a real problem in those types of situations. When you piss off the people who did something, and did it well, for several years, you've lost all that expertise and are left reinventing the wheel.

I only remember that one special guy, but I was only there for the day and missed out on a lot.

That sounds like a bad strategy for continued success.

There was the one at the room party who had that poor girl trapped on the couch. Then after she left, he latched onto me.

There was the dude who interrupted the Geek Dating panel by coming into the room and shouting, "It's all about the clitoris!" After he left, Allegra and her other panelists basically said, "See that? Don't be that guy." That was on Friday night.

Clitoris-man came back on Saturday night and made a nuisance of himself in the Barfly suite, until they kicked him out.

My friend Cherie, who was dressed as a Ghostbuster for most of that Stellarcon--e.g., she was in a baggy jumpsuit (not that any of this would've been appropriate no matter how she was dressed), was accosted so many times over the course of the weekend that she finally asked her fellow Ghostbusters pals to come pull her away if they saw a guy they didn't recognize talking to her, because it was inevitably someone being not just clueless, but clueless and creepy.

I don't know what it was about this particular con this year, but it pushed a lot of us over the edge and we started the Nerdiquette 101 thing. Another friend says we're just shouting into the wind with it, but we have to try.

I forgot about Clitoris Man. I did spend most of my con at the ConTemporal table doing stuff for that, so fortunately? I missed the worst, I guess.

BayCon, which I attended as a vendor this year and haven't seen since 2006, has gotten really small. A big part of that is the generation gap you mentioned; they are aging themselves into irrelevancy, and they don't appear to be making any effort to change that. One thing they could do that would make a huge difference is to court the furries. There's no furry event that weekend, and the other cons that are competing with BayCon for that weekend (a gaming con, an anime con, and a steam con) aren't directly furry, so if BayCon made an effort to invite the furries in, they would see a substantial increase in attendance. Furries are young and enthusiastic, and there are a LOT of them in the Bay Area. BayCon needs to invite them back if they want to continue as a viable convention. It's the only solution I see, unless they move which weekend they hold the con, which is extremely unlikely.

I think BayCon dying out is more likely than them courting furries :/

alchemist's GF is Ursula Vernon, creator of Digger.

Oh, I agree.

summer_jackel and I talked to several of BayCon's organizers, who approached us as new vendors and said, "You're new vendors, we're so happy you came! Please come back next year! Tell us what you'd like to see at BayCon because we'd like to keep you!" We said basically what I outlined above, and they said, "Um. Please tell us what you'd like to see next year!"

So yeah, I don't think they're going to court the furries, but it's clearly the way to go. It wouldn't even be that hard (seriously, throw a fursuit dance. You won't even have to provide your own BayCon DJ; furry DJs are coming out the walls around here), but they aren't going to do it.

Ursula Vernon is THE BEST. And she is the GoH at the next FurCon!

Oh yeah, that's the other thing that cracks me up. The furries have got their shit together: they have a pro-looking website, they communicate lots with their members and dealers, and they are on top of things. From FurCon, I got a nice thick vendor's packet two months in advance of the con. From BayCon, I got an emailed FAQ two days before the con.

....Yeah. That may be why all the vendors ended up at the steampunk con instead, and why I may be either there or Fanime next year.

That's really unfortunate. I hate seeing things die out, but that will probably be their fate. Especially if they're so anti-furry.

I've heard decent things about Fanime. They had some pretty good guests this year! Gilles Poitras! (OK, probably only exciting if you're into sociology of fandom and fannish academia... He's sort of an anime Henry Jenkins.)

Speaking of steampunk conventions...I put your name on the potential 2013 guests spreadsheet. The costuming director (ex, I think, and we haven't even had our first con yet?) wasn't terribly communicative. Hopefully that will be changing.

Oo, yes please! I would love that. I could do a couple of workshop type panels, like how to fit a corset and how to fit a bodice. Especially if you're willing to be a fit model for me.

but fandom is going to die out if the Old Guard keeps pushing young people away because they like "stupid" stuff.

I've been singing this song for a long time, too.

Mostly it seems to fall on deaf ears; so many of the older fans (especially the 50+ age groups) are stuck in a sort of cross between a hazing mentality (we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways, to find our fannish peers and damned if we're going to let just ANYONE into our secretive slan shack now) and close-mindedness ("true" fandom is either just old pulps, or old pulps + fanzine writers/fans + Golden Age sf fans, and that's it--costumers aren't "true" fans, neither are gamers or media fans or anime fans or comics fans or or or...).

There's an email list, the Southern Fandom Classic list, and this divide has played out there repeatedly --and don't even get me started on some of the old-school jerks on the list who aren't even Southerners (long rant).

Anyway, the SFC old school crowd all got their panties in a wad a few years ago when StellarCon made my friend Cheralyn Lambeth one of their guests of honor. Oh, the angst. Oh, the spew. It was all "Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers! She's a 'costumer,' not a real fan! How dare they! No respect for their elders! This other person here [who lives in Las Vegas, ffs] would be a much better GOH! Not my con! Not 'true' fandom!" And on and on and ON.

I and a few others, including Cherie herself, tried to defend the con and its choice, but the old-timers were all too set in their ways to budge an inch off their "that's not 'true' fandom!" position.

Same thing happened a couple of years later when ConCarolinas, as that year's DeepSouthCon, gave the Rebel award to Albin Johnson. Cue the outrage at someone who's "just" a costumer winning a *nose in the air* "fannish" award. Never mind that he co-founded the 501st StormTroopers, which is one of the biggest fan groups in the world, and has raised millions of dollars for various charities, etc. Nope, not "true" fandom.

There's a reason I'm not on the SFC email list anymore...

At the other end, the younger fans (I refuse to use the term "fen," it seems stupid to me) don't really help when some of them cop an attitude of not giving a shit about fandom's past, as if it has zero connection whatsoever to them and what they're doing at this very moment.

Another mistake that I see the younger set making is when they act all surprised-n-shit when someone who's not into their thing (be it anime, comics, gaming, etc) also claims the word "fandom."

Here's my "Between the Candle and the Star" article that I published in a fanzine, in a special attempt to reach the old-timers (much good that it did, I think):

http://www.challzine.net/28/28between.html (http://www.challzine.net/28/28between.html)

I wrote it four years ago, but it holds true today.

It's never a good thing to antagonize or exclude based on perceived age and interest, whether it's the crusty bastards hating on the people who like everything but pulp (ugh, golden age pulp) or the fucking wanker who wanted to start a con "without old people" around.

I kind of hit that stage in anime fandom, because all the incoming students in COUP weren't interested in anything older than 2 years ago, and I was like, fuck you, there was some good shit in the 80s. (And some really bad shit. Then the 90s happened.) But if it wasn't done on a computer with shiny designs or whatever, they didn't want to see it. Fuck them. They don't care that show X was deeply influenced by something 20 years ago that its creator watched growing up? Fuck them.

I wonder if I should save my commentary on my blogspot about the generation divide until after voting closes 8/1...

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