WorldCon

At MidAmericon II (Worldcon) Wed Aug 17th- Sun Aug 21st

MidAmericon II (Worldcon 2016)

MidAmericon II (Worldcon 2016)


Flying to KC for MidAmericonII at the crack of dawn tomorrow, so starting to pack now. Cousins are supposed to take us out for BBQ after we settle in at the Marriott, so I hope we don’t get delayed. I grew up in KC (Gladstone, north of the river), but since my mother moved to Tallahassee to be in assisted living close to my brother, there’s no one much to visit except them.

I was a bit disappointed after going through the program when I discovered all the Kaffeeklatsch and beer sessions require signup a few hours earlier — making it unlikely I’ll get any up close and personal time with all those legendary sorts (Niven, Bear, Benford, Resnick, Pournelle,…) So there will be more free time than I expected.

We’re also travelling light, so I can’t bring books to sign or bring back any from those writers I’d want to fanboy. [I have verbed a noun, watch out or I’ll do it to you, too!]

Anyone who especially wants to spend time with me is welcome to drop me a note and we’ll try to get together. I have no book signings –not enough readers yet to merit that kind of thing.

Heinlein Bust Time-Lapse Video



The Heinlein bust to be displayed in the Missouri state capitol’s “Hall of Famous Missourians” is in progress, with a planned unveiling in 2016 and possibly an appearance at the Worldcon in Kansas City that August. The piece is being done by E. S. Schubert, whose site is worth a look. The results are a good likeness of late-stage Heinlein, and I’m happy to see it coming together.

I wrote about my donation here. My donation was only about 20% of the funds required, but I was happy to put it over the top so work could begin early enough to get it to KC in time.

[Jeb Kinnison writes at JebKinnison.com and SubstrateWars.com, and his second science fiction novel, Nemo’s World, is “well-written science fiction that harkens back to the golden age of Heinlein and Asimov.” — IndieReader.]

Death of “Wired”: Selected Comments
RIP Wired

RIP Wired

The Wired article I posted about here created quite a stir. It is from the latest issue, which I’ve looked through — it looks like a desperate ploy for attention, and the readers reacted in the Wired.com comments on the editorial lead-in story, “The Battle for Equality is WIRED,” with these perfect skewerings:

You know what the saddest part of this is? The equality movement had won. It won ages ago, decades. Oh, those beating the drum may not think so, but they had. I turn 40 in a week. When I was a kid, it was drilled into me to treat people with compassion whether they were white, black, straight, homosexual, whatever. I was happy to do it. The only missing element to the change that the equality movement wants was one that change requires – time. Over time, with little nudging, minds would change, attitudes would change.

But no, it’s wanted right now. People are to simply wake up and instantly think in a completely different way. To accomplish this, the movement has used the tools reserved for the worst of budding oppressive regimes – shaming, fear, threats to livelihood, all behind a facade of inclusiveness and friendliness, a mockery of compassion, and a play of weakness even as the movement has held all the power. The question of government is no longer how to promote freedom for us all by finding common ground, but whose side it will take. Because the movement has snapped the common thread among us, it is required that a “side” must be chosen within this country (Talking the U.S. here). And while it may seem the movement is ahead, trust me, there is NO winner in such a scenario.

Note that I said in the beginning that the equality movement “had” won. This barrage of constant propaganda, this barbaric level of social engineering to force people to crawl into their own heads and hide, while having to outwardly smile and pretend to behave as told is beginning to fail. Just looking at comments on articles such as this is evidence of it. They’re sick of it – I’m sick of it. Equality and diversity are lofty, wonderful goals – but as with anything else, they twist into a tragic evil when they become an obsession. And in the United States, at least, this has become an obsession.

I know by now anyone who disagrees with me is probably foaming at the mouth thinking me the root of all evil. But this isn’t a “I can’t wait to see you fail” message. Actually just noting that the path this movement is no longer attracting people, it’s pushing them away. The answer? Stop pushing. To be truly inclusive is to invite everyone with the understanding not everyone will take that invitation.

To sum up for Wired – Perhaps maybe you should take the suggestions I see from many on here and return to a focus on, I don’t know, technology? How about a positive-toned magazine showing what the best and brightest in the world are creating, and how it can help? I miss that optimism Wired once had. Frankly, if I want drab “oh what a horrible unfair world we live in” media, I have essentially almost every other publication or news broadcast around to look at.

And that’s the end of my rambling.

−

Problem is, morally driven people simply can’t accept their quest is over, that they won or even leave it alone. That’s because, deep within, we are addicted to righteousness. That feel good sensation of being just and fair, on the side of good. Religion thrives on that addiction. People will devote their entire lives to get it and keep it flowing.

But currently religion no longer is the main purveyor of moral righteousness, at least in the West. It’s all these secular moral quests (feminism, pacifism, the green movement, etc), started mostly during the XXth century and with good reasons behind them. Created to supposedly change and fight the older moral codes and former causes for feeling righteous and good, but mostly, as a replacement for religious fervor and righteousness.

It’s also a matter of education: since the counter-culture movement started, most educated people has been raised with the liberal mindset almost burned into them as an unthinking code of behavior, and the unflinching belief that they are special and worthy, whatever they are, with their goal in life being happy.

But guess what? life really doesn’t warrant those expectations of self-importance and value all the time. Even people raised in the most liberal and sensitive background can be mistreated, undervalued and unhappy with their overall life.

What’s wrong with the world then? if the liberal mindset won and I’m aligned with it, why am I so unhappy, aimless and lacking purpose?

It must be a conspiracy of course! the Man and the old boogeymen have made a return and one with a vengeance! because other people can’t see the ugliness me and my Internet-enabled peers have seen. And thanks to the Internet, I now have an echo chamber of people keeping my confirmation bias strong and going.

James May posted these two comments on my piece which deserve to be read more widely:

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein had an imaginary Future History timeline which included an era called “The Crazy Years.” It’s amazing the SF community was the first to completely fall to our current gender feminist madness, the irony being SF was the most prepared to avoid it by being a canary-in-a-coal-mine genre of warning literature of precisely this type of dystopian world. Even more irony is we were sandbagged by Orwell’s perceptual trap where authoritarian fascism wormed its way in by talking about wheel chair access, social justice and allergies to scented products. The modern KKK is probably kicking themselves for not coming up with that first.

Typical of our new lack of self-awareness is our Orwellian habit of looking at bald-faced racism and bigotry straight in the face and calling it “anti-racism” and “anti-bigotry.” A small slice of how stupid our community has become is typified by TorCom’s Liz Bourke and her column “Sleeps With Monsters,” the title of which is a quote from a poem by the insane lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich. In that 1963 poem Rich shows marriage in the same dystopian light Orwell did his future England, a place of scuffed edges, dead dreams and hollow stupidity. Why are we not surprised a bigoted lesbian ideologue like Bourke was among the first to fist-pump Ann Leckie’s SF novel Ancillary Justice, a mediocre work but which had the good sense to signal boost lesbian feminist dogma about “genderblindess,” the cure for Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality.”

In keeping with the idea of seeing marriage as a cultural cul-de-sac, we have retroactively not only declared all SFF prior to 2009 or thereabouts as a woman-hating, racist, homophobic delight through our new “feminist” lens, but any straight white male who had the temerity to be born without apologizing to our new overlords for the East India Company, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and pretty much any evil humankind has ever indulged in, as long as all other ethnic groups who did the same are thrown into Orwell’s memory hole. We have also decided to wage war on success itself and build statues to failure who talk to us about imaginary restaurants full of menacing face-punching “white cis dudes.”

The Wired article is fit only for Orwell’s Ministry of Information and as an illustration of how far we’ve fallen, been duped, become stupid and utterly unworthy of a legacy where E. M. Forester and Ray Bradbury shouted at us to no avail. Adrienne Rich is our literary hero now, and God help us.

—

Let’s call the Wired article what it is: lying. It lies from the beginning to the end. I’d need to write a short book to unpack all the falsehoods. One bald-faced lie even touches on GamerGate, and the irony there is one of the sore points with GamerGate were unethical articles like this one which put forth premises with no sourcing or quotes whatsoever and treats them as gospel. And that gospel is the same as in GamerGate: a moral ethos based on straight white men always being wrong and always up to something. For a sick ideology which laughs at the idea of “cabals,” the justice league of race and gender stipulates any time there are too many men, whites or heterosexuals in a hobby there’s some sort of collusion at work, though these sorry “feminists” never provide any proof of such a thing other than demonization theories about “white male cis privilege.”

In a few short years these nuthatches have ruined our hobby. I’ll tell you this, anyone who holds N. K. Jemisin up as a voice of social justice is too far gone to reach.

The Death of “Wired”: Hugo Awards Edition
RIP Wired

RIP Wired

Wired magazine used to be a go-to for in-depth technology reporting. Silicon Valley read it for accessible yet deep articles about upcoming tech and personalities. A tradition of quality writing now sadly being plowed under as ad revenues fall and good writers are replaced by cheap hacks.

Today’s proof: Amy Wallace’s article, “Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle For Pop Culture’s Soul.” We’re already in trouble with the title, with its assumption that pop culture is a singular entity whose soul can be fought for by religious factions. Drama alert!

The writer inserts her partisan judgment frequently, starting off with a nice portrait of Marko Kloos, who withdrew his work to avoid getting involved in the Hugo Kerfuffle. She spins his decision:

Which is why it was so devastating when he realized a few weeks later that his short-listing was, in his eyes, a sham. It turned out that activists angered by the increasingly multicultural makeup of Hugo winners—books featuring women, gay and lesbian characters, and people and aliens of every color—had gamed the voting system, mounting a campaign for slates of nominees made up mostly of white men. Kloos, who is white, says he was sickened to see his name listed.

This isn’t a very good representation of Kloos’ actual views. Like a shyster lawyer, she inserts as fact assertions about the Sad/Rabid Puppies campaigns that aren’t true — “When did you stop beating your wife?” The campaign was not against multicultural/multiracial/gay characters, but against giving preference to such works. The Sad Puppy campaign was motivated by a desire to see quality stories win the awards.

She lets her mask slip further:

But like the sound of starship engines, the Hugos don’t exist in a vacuum. “Gamergate” spawns rape threats aimed at women who have the temerity to offer opinions about videogames. The leading representatives of mainstream political parties build platforms around fear of Muslims and Planned Parenthood.

So now we know she’s incapable of objectivity, because in each of these controversies, there’s a Blue Tribe conventional wisdom: Bad People oppose the Forces of Goodness! And she only knows good people who all think alike. She is bien pensant — a fancy French term for right-thinking. “All right-thinking people agree…” is the end of critical thinking, and since everyone she knows agrees on those controversies, no independent reporting or thought is required to put her credibility on the line by casually taking one side. Christopher Hitchens is spinning in his grave.

Digging the hole deeper, she claims the Puppies want no diversity in science fiction:

So trying to crush diversity of authors, of characters, of stories, of themes in sci-fi crushes the whole point. Which is perhaps the main reason to worry about Puppygate: Sci-fi that accommodates only one future, one kind of politics, and one kind of person just isn’t doing its job.

The various flavors of Puppies differ, but one thing they’re not is anti-diverse — there are women, people of various colors, gays (like me), religious, atheists, and on and on. The one thing they have in common is that they oppose elevating political correctness above quality of writing, originality, and story in science fiction. Many of the award winners in recent years have been lesser works elevated only because they satisfied a group of progressives who want their science fiction to reflect their desired future of group identity and victim-based politics. For them, it is part of their battle to tear down bad old patriarchy, to bury the old and bring themselves to the forefront of culture (and incidentally make a living being activists in fiction.) These people are often called “Social Justice Warriors” – they shore up their own fragile identities by thinking of themselves as noble warriors for social justice. Amy Wallace places herself with them by portraying the issues as a battle between racist, sexist white men and everyone else.

She then goes on to give some space to Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, and Vox Day (Ted Beale). While her reporting about them is reasonably truthful, they report that she promised to interview Sarah Hoyt (who ruins the narrative as a female Puppy) but did not do so, and left out material from other interviews that did not support her slant. Tsk!

The piece is very long, but written from a position of assumed moral superiority and elite groupthink, a long fall from classic Wired‘s iconoclastic reporting. It’s sad when a quality brand goes downhill — as a longtime subscriber, I’ve noticed the magazine has grown thinner in the last year as ad revenues declined and competition from upstarts like Fast Company ate into their market. Now they are me-tooing major controversies for clicks. Once you see this dishonesty in reporting, you should never view such sources as reliable again.

[For more followup and comments on Wired’s recent tilt, see “Death of Wired: Selected Comments.”]

SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best
Hugo Awards

Hugo Awards

The online discussion on the Hugos kerfuffle is winding down into endless nitpicking between entrenched opponents. As a long-term reader outside the Con/Fan culture, I have a few observations about how new technology and mainstream success of SFF tropes has marginalized written SFF fan culture while exploding the number of choices available, and thus the reader’s problem of reliable guidance in choosing what to read.

Looking back, SF, and later Fantasy, was entertainment for people who wanted to dream of future technology and space travel. Pioneers like Jules Verne used predicted future science and technology as elements combining with more conventional adventure, romance, thriller, and mystery stories to create a mix that was intensely appealing to readers of a scientific and futurist bent, sometimes viewed as escapist because of the contrast with the everyday lives of the time.

As the science of science fiction turned to reality, SF readers evolved to appreciate more nuanced stories with more speculative human interest, with alien civilizations and future humans interacting to reflect issues of culture and politics; this broadening was reflected in “New Wave” science fiction, which also used the more complex literary forms and techniques of literary fiction.

One of the faultlines in readership was already visible: simple, strong stories with linear narrative versus more sophisticated but less broadly accessible storytelling. Where a simple story with many levels can entertain readers at all levels of sophistication (example: the Harry Potter books), a more literary and adult version of similar topics of magic and coming-of-age (example: Lev Grossman’s The Magician) is not going to be as widely read, and only advanced readers will be able to understand and enjoy all of it. Both types can be great achievements, but most people would say only the sophisticated form is “literary.”

So when we’re handing out awards, do we want to recognize just the more sophisticated, but less popular works? I think that should depend on the awards. In the case of SFF, we have the Nebulas as a juried award from an organization of writers, who should be well-suited to picking based on achievement of craft, the recognition of the skill of the writer and the polish of the work. While such a group may choose to recognize an exceptional work that is also accessible, it is more likely they will be impressed by a work that is novel — it does something different, or in a new way, that demonstrates creativity. There will be a natural tendency to award the more advanced and literary over even the most excellent popular work.

Again, look back: when the Hugos began in the 1950s, there might have been a few hundred thousand dedicated readers of SF. Media and communications limited contacts between fans so that face-to-face conventions and clubs were the primary medium to pass along reviews and recommendations. Mainstream media had only the simplest types of SF: space adventure serials and monster stories. Comics were disreputable, to be replaced by real books for young readers as quickly as possible.

This all changed in the 1960s, with Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on television, then Star Trek and Star Wars, which made science fiction tropes mainstream. Children from then on were raised on simplified staples of science fiction, and this provided an expanded audience for a whole new media universe of movies, games, comics, and anime. Novelizations of already-popular science fiction worlds started to sell in larger numbers than original stories.

So the Hugos are represented as “science fiction’s most prestigious award.” Depending on who’s blathering about it, they are either awards for quality science fiction for all readers, or the award presented by WorldCons which has become prestigious because of its long history of highlighting quality works. There’s a tension between claiming ownership for just Con-attending fans and claiming it represents quality for all fans, including readers outside Con fandom.

One horror often mentioned is the idea of a People’s Choice Award, meaning the lowest common denominator, the hordes of less discerning fans, might overwhelm quality works and choose, for example, the (mediocre but very popular) Twilight series of sparkly vampire romance novels, beloved of teen girls.

The Hugos that I grew up with were useful guides for readers not in touch with Cons and fandom looking for a good book to read, something worth the money and time. Why might that have changed in the past few years, as the Puppies contend?

The explosion of popular interest in all SF media has meant younger fans are now flocking to Comicons and other new festivals, and online spending time talking about movies, games, and anime, far more than SFF books. While readership has stalled for books, participation in other forms has ballooned. For those of us who grew up reading SFF in the 1960s, there’s not a lot of original thinking in the other media, and so we tend to dismiss them as derivative — and they often are. But that is where the future readers went.

As a result, WorldCon attendees are older than SFF readers generally, and far older than the body of possible readers that could be drawn into reading science fiction and fantasy as a regular habit. WorldCon Fandom’s cherished culture is a mix of whimsy, counterculture from the 60s, and insider references. The cultural gulf between them and average readers, especially younger readers, is larger than it has ever been.

One of the Puppy complaints is about the zealous progressive tendency they think has held back works that don’t advance that agenda, and authors who don’t represent “intersectional” minorities. There is probably some truth to that complaint — for example, “MilSF” (military SF), unless it is consciously antiwar (as in Forever War), is going to have a hard time winning over WorldCon voters no matter how good it may be, and the obvious fact that a lot of the subgenre is not very well written is used to denigrate all of it.

But the real problem is not political skew, that is a symptom. The issue is insularity, a consequence of the very small numbers of people who have been voting. Fans who are active in fan affairs are more likely to vote, and naturally favor friends, and publishers and writers work to befriend them. Publishers and writers who have an active Con and online presence are favored over those who do not, even when the works are of the same quality. The Brits as a class have been slighted for some time, for example, because they simply have less presence and contact with the bulk of US Fandom.

Honest WorldCon Fans can see that this criticism hits home, and this year’s kerfuffle should be used to advance the cause of more and broader participation. Someone pointed out that the Locus recommended list came close to predicting the nominations until recently, and the obvious reason is that it was one of the only guides to what qualified for nomination! So if anything one could celebrate the end of one magazine’s ability to determine the nomination list, and look forward to more lists of qualified works to guide the clueless on what to read and nominate.

“What to read next?” used to be answered, for me as an isolated reader, by looking through the list of new releases at Amazon. By scanning for authors I had read and enjoyed before, and occasionally taking a chance on a highly-rated book by an author new to me, it wasn’t hard to find good books. That began to change ten years ago, when the number of new releases began to grow and the quality of novels in general started to decline. This was before the explosion of self-publishing, which has made it worse, but the result was that the wheat was lost amid the surfeit of chaff. And the Nebula and Hugos each year were good guides to the best new fiction — this has also changed, as some recent winners were not all that satisfying to read or truly creative, from my point of view.

I think it was GRRM who recently observed that readers who didn’t regularly read fanzines were not committed enough to qualify as True Fans. Fanzines are certainly one way to communicate reviews and find better reading material; the fanzine for you is the one that shares your reading tastes, and so a curated list from a fanzine partly solves the problem of finding quality work, and could also be the key to suggesting lists of qualifying works for nominations. I have yet to subscribe to even Locus, and I probably should, but like everyone else I already have a vast amount of input to keep up with, and I suspect it would stack up unread somewhere. An online version that works with CSS might work for me, but I haven’t seen the right one yet.

From Rachael Acks: Sound and Nerdery: The Hugo Nomination Problem or, I Am a Bad Reader:

This is the point where I obviously speak only for myself, but what I need is help, to be honest. I don’t need someone breathing down my neck and telling me I need to nominate when I have no idea what the hell I’d even nominate. Some of it’s a self-actualization issue, where I need to just get off my ass and find the time to read more, and try to read things the actual year they come out. But it’s pretty overwhelming, guys. We are blessed to live in an age where your genre choices are not limited to what you can find on the spinny racks at the grocery store, or on that one shelf in your local library where the dude with the funny-smelling coat always hangs out. Which is awesome! But it also means that there’s so much coming out every day, at some point book mountain gets so high that you’re like fuck this, I don’t even know where to start so instead I’m going to make myself a cup of tea and play World of Warcraft while Captain America: The Winter Soldier plays on the TV in the background.

I’m sure this does not reflect on me well as a human being. I also know I used to read a hell of a lot more back before I didn’t have a full time job and a part-time writing gig and a daily commute during which reading tends to give me severe motion sickness. But here it is, the call for help. I seriously need some helpful soul, or maybe some kind of crowd-sourced thing that can tell me what I should be reading as things come out so I’m not floundering under drifts of pages on book mountain when the Hugo nomination period opens. Preferably some recommendation engine where my fellow writers, bless you guys I love you all but damn I know how we are, are not allowed to nominate or push their own books. I don’t want reviews, I don’t even want opinions, I just want a simple list or titles and authors and maybe a helpful link where someone can say hey, I think this book should totally get a Hugo, and then other people who agree can maybe give it a plus one, and that’s it. Let me form my own opinions.

If you don’t live and breathe fandom and live in a commune of SFF fans, this is a problem for you, too. One suggestion I have is for WorldCon people to join with others to develop their web presence and nominations booklet into something like a compendium of reader recommendations and a bundle for sale to give some revenue back to the nominees and their publishers for making their work available, as the Nebulas do with their yearly anthology. And this could be combined with some reforms in award categories to allow self-published works to have time to overcome obscurity when they are really good; it is a travesty, for example, that The Martian was disqualified for having been published in obscurity a few years ago even though it is recognized this year — following mass-market success — as one of the best novels widely read and *noticed* last year.

The idea is to take WorldCon into the future — to make it both a face-to-face and virtual presence, allowing much broader participation, and to start accepting the new media fans as they mature and want more advanced kinds of science and story. The problem of small groups destabilizing the awards goes away if participation is broadened, while the idea of ring-fencing the awards to keep out barbarians will ultimately continue the relative decline of WorldCon and old-school fandom into old age and irrelevance.

On File770, one longtime WorldCon supporter quoted me and commented:

JJ on April 29, 2015 at 8:02 pm said:

Jeb Kinnison: “I think we can get most reasonable people to agree that an award that supposedly recognizes the best SFF should be more broadly representative of the readers, including the vast majority who can’t take time out from busy lives or afford to go to conventions. Having a tiny in-group select award winners from their friends and people they know leaves out most of the writers, and almost all of the readers.”

Here is yet another person claiming that an awards program which was created and lovingly nurtured by Worldcon members for decades should somehow “belong to everyone” — without explaining how that’s actually supposed to work. Will “everyone” be putting in hundreds of volunteer hours every year to continue the program? Which day of Worldcan can we expect this “everyone” to be showing up to help?

It’s incredibly ironic that a bunch of self-described conservatives and libertarians think that they should be free to take for themselves, and give away, the labors of someone else’s initiative and ceaseless hard work, isn’t it?

Well, that was emotion-tugging. “Ceaseless hard work” is a bit hyperbolic. I don’t think anyone wants to take away the credit due to the WorldCon volunteers past and present for their hard work, or suggest taking away the awards for themselves. On the contrary, by developing non-attendee memberships and online voting, WorldCon already recognized that the views of the community that cared enough to pay and vote even when they couldn’t attend are important, and WorldCon reps have commonly told outsiders that not only are the Hugos the most prestigious award in SFF, but also are supposed to represent all readers’ interest in quality SFF. His suggestion that “showing up to help” is required to have any stake in the process is emotionally understandable, but not practical if there is to be wide participation.

So the classes of people who read SFF include:

The outer circle who like SFF ideas and stories but take them in the form of movies, games, and comics. This class includes several billion people, mostly young, across the world, and should be a primary target of recruitment to increase numbers of book readers and sales. I was recently contacted by a Chinese media company who wanted to sell my books translated into Chinese to their customers who largely read on their phones.

A hundred million people read some English-language SF. They never go to cons or read fanzines; they pick what they read by store display, word of mouth, or Amazon listing, and follow up on authors they like, and they are also fans of other media SFF which is widely promoted; it is impossible not to hear about the latest Marvel-universe movie, for example.

A few million read mostly SF. They may occasionally read fanzines or io9-like sites, but again have little contact with Fandom. I was in this class, and haven’t read an SFF magazine since Omni.

A few hundred thousand obsessively read SF and may account for about half of sales. These are the readers who are committed enough and knowledgeable enough to nominate, and many do go to regional Cons (but only a small number to Worldcon). Many are also game, anime, and film fans, and those under about 50 are likely never to have been involved with Fandom.

Remember there are ten times as many regular readers of romance. Romance mixed with paranormal (like Twilight) or science fiction (Hunger Games) sells to YA readers in large numbers; they are mostly female. Science fiction which feeds their romantic interests can bring them into more advanced science fiction.

“Curating” means selecting for quality and audience. WorldCon has been tending to curate for a small and eccentric audience, and favor-trading, log-rolling, and political prejudice has been apparent since… forever. WorldCon has already recognized the outreach possibility of the Internet. There is no longer a reason for what purports to be *the* award of SFF fans, not Worldcon attendees, to be closed to the fans who can’t be there, or as GRRM remarked, aren’t fannish enough to regularly read fanzines. If the award is to be chosen by small groups with a certain Fannish mindset, then it’s not *the* award of SFF readers and not a useful guide to quality for those who don’t share the mindset. And it will tend to slight publishers and authors who haven’t sucked up to the attendees and “curated” their online presence to groom their own fans. Some decry the possibility that the Hugos might become a mere popularity contest, with “Twilight”-ish popular works swamping the less-accessible quality fiction; but that ignores that the status quo prior to Puppies was a popularity contest among a small and not necessarily representative group shot through with personal conflicts of interest and logrolling.

We can honor all the work of the elders who curated and nurtured the Hugos when there was no other way for fans to get together. We can also open up the nominating and voting to committed readers who haven’t been Fannish, and the effort involved is more about software and thinking about systems than sitting at tables and handing out papers while chatting with passersby. There are problems with nominating voters being unaware of what qualifies, and problems with qualifications — suggestions about more classes for long works and allowing small pub and self pub books more time to be discovered are good.

As a new author, I’d like to preserve a large market for fiction because it is inevitable that larger media productions will be unable to pioneer new ideas or truly eccentric new virtual worlds — there are just too many people involved in these larger productions to take as many risks on unique visions, and until the tools for game storytelling, for example, are easily accessible and usable by singleton game authors, games won’t be the medium to create the experience of the great novel or story. Opening up the Hugos and doing more outreach to fans of other media would help a lot in renovating fandom and bringing in more new readers. And if the field doesn’t start gaining more readers, it will die, since it is already harder to make a living writing SFF than it used to be. If the only writers left working are supported by academia or other jobs, the field will lose its finest future works.