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Tempests in Teapots
There is a Hugo controversy.
I know, this surprises anyone at all, right? There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the annual Hugo controversy.
In contrast to the last several, though, this one is very much a tempest in a teapot. Which is why I've written lots of words about it.
Upfront statement of my own biases: I do not believe this is a CoC violation and I think the people saying it is are being overly dramatic. And in general, I like Mike Glyer much more than I like the Twitterati and I think a lot of the hate he gets is unfounded. (Clearly these two things cancel each other out, right? That is absolutely how this works.)
The background: two years ago George R. R. Martin hosted the Hugo Losers Party at WorldCon, handed out many more invites than the actual venue had room for, and was excoriated on the internet when this meant some of the Hugo losers could not get into a party that was ostensibly in their honor. People were quite justifiably upset by this-- it's one thing when you throw an open party and people wind up standing in line, but if you're issuing invitations to anything you're agreeing to a social contract by which you are going to provide hospitality for the people you've invited to the thing and it is unspeakably rude to invite people to something and then leave them standing in the hall. Thus speaketh every etiquette book ever. One thing about spending so much time on Etiquette Hell in my youth is that I can tell you this is not a new or unique problem; every year brides try to get away with a larger guest list than the venue will fit thinking of course some people will decline and every year it goes badly.
Of course, your average bride trying this trick might lose a few friends and get eyerolls on Etiquette Hell, but she's not going to have the entire internet waiting to crash down on her head. GRRM does. The internet fell on his head, there was much arguing, people wrote essays, we're not relitigating it here.
Last year at WorldCon he was chosen to be the Hugo Toastmaster. And the resulting Hugo ceremony was much longer than had been allotted for it, took the focus off the nominees, and was filled with constant references to Campbell and Silverberg and how great they were in a way that was widely perceived as a dig at the recent renaming of the Campbell Award to the Astounding Award and the general "Campbell was racist and misogynist" that had been floating around the ether since then. The internet crashed down on his head once again, there was more justifiable anger which was significantly more angry because people were still upset about the debacle the previous year. People wrote more essays, there was more arguing, it eventually died down.
Which brings us to this year's Hugo finalists. One of whom is Natalie Luhrs, for an essay from last year's kerfuffle called "George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun and Die," in Best Related Work.
Someone, possibly several someones, decided this is a Code of Conduct violation and reported it to the committee as such. And then made lots of noise on the internet about having done so. The basic idea is that it's hostile to GRRM to have something with this title on the ballot, thereby violating the harassment clause, and Something Must Be Done about this.
Which... if there had been some kind of organized campaign to specifically stick it to GRRM by getting something hostile to him on the ballot, maybe, but remember that at the height of the Sad Puppies there was something called "Safe Space as Rape Room" that was left on the ballot and had none of this nonsense surrounding it. As long as people aren't harassing him at the con, something on the ballot that's angry and critical of him isn't inherently harassment.
There are some people suggesting it was nominated in bad faith. No one's shown any evidence of an organized campaign, and given the heat of the discussion, if evidence existed someone would have done so. Which means there can't really be a categorical statement about whether it was nominated in bad faith or not. I know of a number of people who based on their online posts probably did nominate it in good faith. I expect there are at least some people who nominated it in bad faith (although so far no one's admitted such that I've seen), but they're not the majority.
Do I think it deserves a Hugo? No. I would like to see the end of this trend where works about last year's Hugo Controversy(tm) end up on the ballot for this year's Hugo, and I don't think this essay rises above all the other essays on this subject in any significant way. But I'm not a Hugo voter-- I neither read widely enough nor have sufficient budget to participate. Clearly some large part of the electorate thought it deserved to be on the ballot. So on the ballot it is, and the primary thing this becoming such a Thing accomplishes is assuring it will win.
All this being said, the people on Twitter saying how pissing off Mike Glyer means they're doing something right are being incredibly childish. He discussed his own opinions on his own website with his own following--who did not, to my knowledge, venture out of File 770 to harass or even discuss with people not there-- and he made a report to the concom, which is the correct course of action if you perceive something like this to be harassment however absurd I may find that perception. (If the concom does anything other than go "no, this is ridiculous" I will have an issue with them, but that's a separate thing.) Once you accept a major award nomination, you move into a more pro-like space and it becomes like any other review: you show up in someone else's space, you take your lumps about what you see, especially given that everyone involved has specified that Natalie Luhrs didn't do anything wrong.
There's a certain amount of doublethink involved in simultaneously saying "File 770 is fading and irrelevant" and File 770 shooting to the top of the twitter discussion anytime it disagrees with the Twitterati or even hosts discussion for people who disagree with the Twitterati. It starts to look an awful lot like y'all care what's being said there.
(Honestly the heat Glyer takes frequently looks like the leftist version of the heat Scalzi takes; there's this faction of the Twitterati that's just decided he's Terrible because he doesn't agree with them 100% of the time and he allows lively discussion which is sometimes critical of authors or author behavior, and the end result has been a number of people who appear to have put him in the same category as the Puppies, and now you have another example of Reasons I Am Not On Twitter.)
So yes. My opinion on this whole thing is basically "Internet people gonna internet" and lamenting the lack of conversations about the rest of the Hugo finalists and I just required an awful lot of words to say that.
I know, this surprises anyone at all, right? There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the annual Hugo controversy.
In contrast to the last several, though, this one is very much a tempest in a teapot. Which is why I've written lots of words about it.
Upfront statement of my own biases: I do not believe this is a CoC violation and I think the people saying it is are being overly dramatic. And in general, I like Mike Glyer much more than I like the Twitterati and I think a lot of the hate he gets is unfounded. (Clearly these two things cancel each other out, right? That is absolutely how this works.)
The background: two years ago George R. R. Martin hosted the Hugo Losers Party at WorldCon, handed out many more invites than the actual venue had room for, and was excoriated on the internet when this meant some of the Hugo losers could not get into a party that was ostensibly in their honor. People were quite justifiably upset by this-- it's one thing when you throw an open party and people wind up standing in line, but if you're issuing invitations to anything you're agreeing to a social contract by which you are going to provide hospitality for the people you've invited to the thing and it is unspeakably rude to invite people to something and then leave them standing in the hall. Thus speaketh every etiquette book ever. One thing about spending so much time on Etiquette Hell in my youth is that I can tell you this is not a new or unique problem; every year brides try to get away with a larger guest list than the venue will fit thinking of course some people will decline and every year it goes badly.
Of course, your average bride trying this trick might lose a few friends and get eyerolls on Etiquette Hell, but she's not going to have the entire internet waiting to crash down on her head. GRRM does. The internet fell on his head, there was much arguing, people wrote essays, we're not relitigating it here.
Last year at WorldCon he was chosen to be the Hugo Toastmaster. And the resulting Hugo ceremony was much longer than had been allotted for it, took the focus off the nominees, and was filled with constant references to Campbell and Silverberg and how great they were in a way that was widely perceived as a dig at the recent renaming of the Campbell Award to the Astounding Award and the general "Campbell was racist and misogynist" that had been floating around the ether since then. The internet crashed down on his head once again, there was more justifiable anger which was significantly more angry because people were still upset about the debacle the previous year. People wrote more essays, there was more arguing, it eventually died down.
Which brings us to this year's Hugo finalists. One of whom is Natalie Luhrs, for an essay from last year's kerfuffle called "George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun and Die," in Best Related Work.
Someone, possibly several someones, decided this is a Code of Conduct violation and reported it to the committee as such. And then made lots of noise on the internet about having done so. The basic idea is that it's hostile to GRRM to have something with this title on the ballot, thereby violating the harassment clause, and Something Must Be Done about this.
Which... if there had been some kind of organized campaign to specifically stick it to GRRM by getting something hostile to him on the ballot, maybe, but remember that at the height of the Sad Puppies there was something called "Safe Space as Rape Room" that was left on the ballot and had none of this nonsense surrounding it. As long as people aren't harassing him at the con, something on the ballot that's angry and critical of him isn't inherently harassment.
There are some people suggesting it was nominated in bad faith. No one's shown any evidence of an organized campaign, and given the heat of the discussion, if evidence existed someone would have done so. Which means there can't really be a categorical statement about whether it was nominated in bad faith or not. I know of a number of people who based on their online posts probably did nominate it in good faith. I expect there are at least some people who nominated it in bad faith (although so far no one's admitted such that I've seen), but they're not the majority.
Do I think it deserves a Hugo? No. I would like to see the end of this trend where works about last year's Hugo Controversy(tm) end up on the ballot for this year's Hugo, and I don't think this essay rises above all the other essays on this subject in any significant way. But I'm not a Hugo voter-- I neither read widely enough nor have sufficient budget to participate. Clearly some large part of the electorate thought it deserved to be on the ballot. So on the ballot it is, and the primary thing this becoming such a Thing accomplishes is assuring it will win.
All this being said, the people on Twitter saying how pissing off Mike Glyer means they're doing something right are being incredibly childish. He discussed his own opinions on his own website with his own following--who did not, to my knowledge, venture out of File 770 to harass or even discuss with people not there-- and he made a report to the concom, which is the correct course of action if you perceive something like this to be harassment however absurd I may find that perception. (If the concom does anything other than go "no, this is ridiculous" I will have an issue with them, but that's a separate thing.) Once you accept a major award nomination, you move into a more pro-like space and it becomes like any other review: you show up in someone else's space, you take your lumps about what you see, especially given that everyone involved has specified that Natalie Luhrs didn't do anything wrong.
There's a certain amount of doublethink involved in simultaneously saying "File 770 is fading and irrelevant" and File 770 shooting to the top of the twitter discussion anytime it disagrees with the Twitterati or even hosts discussion for people who disagree with the Twitterati. It starts to look an awful lot like y'all care what's being said there.
(Honestly the heat Glyer takes frequently looks like the leftist version of the heat Scalzi takes; there's this faction of the Twitterati that's just decided he's Terrible because he doesn't agree with them 100% of the time and he allows lively discussion which is sometimes critical of authors or author behavior, and the end result has been a number of people who appear to have put him in the same category as the Puppies, and now you have another example of Reasons I Am Not On Twitter.)
So yes. My opinion on this whole thing is basically "Internet people gonna internet" and lamenting the lack of conversations about the rest of the Hugo finalists and I just required an awful lot of words to say that.
no subject
I would also like to see an end to "this year's Hugo drama is next year's BRW nominee." Unfortunately, I can see how it happens, and why it's likely to continue.
Worldcon is shrinking. Not so much in numbers (although, last few years, by numbers too). But in comparison to the scifi/fantasy/horror/speculative fiction industries, fandoms, media, and other communities... Worldcon is no longer a representative sample. The Hugos aren't selected from what most SFFH etc. fans agree are the best of the genre; they're selected from what Worldcon members mostly agree are the best of the genre.
Crunchyroll has three million paying subscribers; I'm willing to bet they don't think an episode of The Good Place was the best short-form scifi dramatic presentation of 2020. But they are, for the most part, not WSFS members, and so their opinions don't count.
Likewise, the dramas that rage through the younger SFFH etc. fandom communities online, don't mostly get noticed by Worldcon members.
My choice for best related work of 2020? The November 5 memestorm on Tumblr, combining Supernatural, US election counts, Dr. Who, Putin's resignation (fake), Dabi's identity reveal, "Rudy at Four Seasons, When the Campaign Ended," and a swarm of rumored or confirmed upcoming fannish events.
But that didn't have a single author. Doesn't have a single format, even. It was an event and an experience... like watching the moon landing in 69, which did win a Hugo. (Moon landing was arguably a scifi-related event; the election wasn't. But a lot of the reactions were.)
A lot of WSFS doesn't like works without an identifiable creator, and that was before the AO3 drama. So with that bias in place, and a great deal of fannish activity happening in communities they're not part of, what's most obviously eligible for BRW is "Nonfiction books published on topics of great interest to SFFH fans" and "recent drama in the WSFS fannish community." And drama's more interesting than books.
It's possible that we'll hit a point of "this year's drama is too scattered and incoherent to be nominated next year" and we'll get a few years of "nobody wants to go through all that again." But unless the structure of the awards or the shape of the community changes, I suspect this is going to be a recurring problem.
no subject