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Understanding the world science fiction convention

144 points by cstross 1 year ago | 52 comments

p0w3n3d 1 year ago
Fun fact: antipope is not an anti-catholic name, according to the site (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html)
"What sitename do you want?" he asked.
I'd been posting on usenet under the alias "AutoPope -- pontifications by email". (If you don't know what the long word means, go look it up.) So I said, "How about autopope.uucp?"
"Okay." Hic. Burp.
And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp
- Boogie_Man 1 year ago
  Historically being an antipope didn't mean that you were anti Catholic, it meant you believed yourself to be the true Pope in opposition to the Pope in Rome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope
  My fun fact: Some antipopes resided in Avignon France, and a (delicious) wine from that region (allegedly, I'm not a wine guy) is called Châteauneuf-du-Pape (House of the New Pope) for this reason.
  - NoZebra120vClip 1 year ago
    > Châteauneuf-du-Pape
    That reads more like "[The] Pope's New Castle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teauneuf-du-Pape_AOC
    In fact, Avignon was the site of the Apostolic See and indeed, seven canonically-accepted Popes resided there, plus two antipopes. https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/avignon
    This period also featured Italian antipopes! It was dramatic! https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/western-schism
    - jameshart 1 year ago
      It's actually a great example of how we just associate French names with 'fancy'. If you saw a bottle of an alcoholic drink for sale under the name "Pope's Newcastle" you'd be forgiven for assuming it was a down-to-earth real ale.
      Newcastle United's goalkeeper is called Nick Pope. Perhaps he should go by the name Pape-du-Châteauneuf.
    - Boogie_Man 1 year ago
      This is correct, thank you for clarifying! The information was relayed from an intoxicated man to an even more intoxicated man, so I didn't get quite all of it. Time to get reading!
WBrentWilliams 1 year ago
I've seen more than a few of these kerfuffle happen now. Other commenters have mentioned other times in other directions that the voting has come out weird.
All I can say is that while yes, these awards do matter, they don't have to matter as much as you think. At best, all the outcome tells you is what someone else thinks is worth reading. Consider it a starting point. It follows that any given list of nominees is way more important, in terms of gathering a list of books with neat ideas and execution, than a list of winners.
- awithrow 1 year ago
  They matter as a signal of quality for reading recommendations. As someone who has read many/most of the previous Hugo (and Nebula) winners, it used to be a high quality signal for good sci-fi stories.
  And, while it's always been a popularity contest at it's core, I can't help feeling some disappointment at seeing it descend into whatever nonsense it has become.
  So really I guess I miss them as the high quality signal it used to be and it's on me to find new signals
boznz 1 year ago
The world of book writing is an iceberg, and with thousands of works being released a year that not just go unreviewed but unread there is little chance the awards are inclusive of the genre.
We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984 and as a new author myself this makes me so sad.
- pavel_lishin 1 year ago
  > We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984
  I think we're there already, no? Amazon is being flooded with AI-written novels, including "fun" ones like a guide to foraging mushrooms; Clarkesworld had to stop accepting submissions for awhile due to AI-generated garbage flooding their inboxes.
- fsckboy 1 year ago
  > The world of book writing is an iceberg...
  and like icebergs while melting, rolls over every now and then, so what was up is down and down is up, and not in a regular way but in a chaotic way
maire 1 year ago
This article answers one of the questions I had about this year's Hugo awards.
R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!
I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.
- maire 1 year ago
  I just looked at the votes - and Babel would not have won in any case. It was ranked #7 when it was disqualified.
  Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.
  The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.
  - ianburrell 1 year ago
    People are talking about them miscounting nomination votes to eliminate Babel. It is very strange that the #3 position would lose to #7. Like there would have to been no ballots that ranked Babel in lower position. The only thing makes sense is that they disqualified it early and stopped counting votes.
    - maire 1 year ago
      Although Babel was removed during the final vote count, here is what the interim vote count looked like. It looks like it would not even be on the short list.
      https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25245686/h...
1 year ago
senkora 1 year ago
I think HN may be interested in another recent instance of the Hugo awards running into difficulties because of its rules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
TL;DR: A conservative block of voters swept the nominations for certain categories. At final voting, members voted to not give awards at all in those categories.
- jtr1 1 year ago
  IIRC they swept because Hugo membership is open and they made a coordinated effort to join and sweep those categories. The idea of a coordinated anti-diversity effort pissed off a lot of people. For a few friends of mine who are lifelong sci-fi nerds, it was motivation to finally join Hugo so they could vote “no award”.
  - cstross 1 year ago
    Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.
    You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.
    Sad Puppy 2015 slate: https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/sad-puppies-3-announces-...
    Patterson biography, volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Dialogue-Century-1948...
  - light_hue_1 1 year ago
    They swept for of the same reason the Chinese worldcon was a mess: we are used to operating much of society by an unwritten set of rules that assume everyone is pretty much a good actor. Sure, they may have an axe to grind, and might stretch things, but no one will deliberately find loopholes at scale to abuse. This worked for several millenia. Whole countries used to not have written constitutions, just unwritten agreements on how to behave.
    But in the age of the internet, it's much easier to find communities that you can break this way. These systems are resilient to a few people who are bad actors, but totally fall apart if there are coordinated actions.
    It's exactly what the Republican party is doing in the US now. And what Trump supporters plan to do if he's elected with Project 2025.
- LanceH 1 year ago
  I would agree that a group swept the nominations. (and I don't agree with them)
  Having attended a couple conventions, including a worldcon just before this happened, I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story.
  The sad puppies effort was more mutually assured destruction than really trying to win. They know their books are pulp. But they also believed that nobody actually read those other books.
  I've been to conventions biased one way or the other and they have one thing in common: nobody seems concerned with whether a story is good or not. This is probably why we keep getting superhero movies.
  - sangnoir 1 year ago
    > I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story
    Which undeserving stories/authors exemplify this?
    - LanceH 1 year ago
      Of the winners, I've only read The Three Body Problem, which I liked for a number of reasons.
      I'm not familiar with any of the other winners.
      Which of these are monsters on par with the big winners from the 60's through 90's?
      There are a lot of people saying that the current trend is a backlash against sad puppies (which would also be wrong) while simultaneously denying that it was happening before sad puppies.
      My experience is they were doing this, the sad puppies blew it up, now it seems to be happening with impunity. There are alternate more conservative cons out there, maybe the two groups have separated entirely.
      Putting all the blame on the sad puppies (who, again are wrong, but I have to say this because people like painting anyone who disagrees as right wing fascist) isn't taking in the whole picture.
- ooterness 1 year ago
  The only fun thing that came out of that mess was that Chuck Tingle was nominated for a Hugo Award.
  - defrost 1 year ago
    The nomination of Space Raptor Butt Invasion in 2016 was a Sad Puppy footgun.
    He disavowed their coordinated campaign and then engaged further:
    Satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle's massive troll of conservative sci-fi fans, explained
```
    Right-wing sci-fi writers tried to delegitimize the Hugo Awards by nominating a writer no one took seriously. Here's how he took them all by surprise.
```
    https://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11759842/chuck-tingle-hugo-awa...
    - mock-possum 1 year ago
      Also people who don’t take him seriously have not been paying enough attention. Chuck Tingle is a master craftsman.
- TwentyPosts 1 year ago
  Is there any summary of what happened from the side of the proponents? Given Wikipedia's track record when it comes to certain topics, it'd be very nice to have some points of comparison here.
  - gred 1 year ago
    https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/06/a-letter-to-the-s...
    - melagonster 1 year ago
      notice this from article!
      >Go through our list of nominees for yourself. You’ll find that we have liberals, conservatives, moderates, and question marks who’ve kept their politics to themselves.
  - Arn_Thor 1 year ago
    You think it’s biased because it’s using words like “right-wing” and “anti-diversity”? I’ve usually found such terms to be right on the mark, even if some don’t like it pointed out
    - TwentyPosts 1 year ago
      I assume that "right-wing" and "anti-diversity" are correct labels here, that's not really my problem. It's frankly less about bias, and more about the fact that the Wikipedia article is pretty sparse, and all I could see is the link to Correia's blog.
      This is completely disconnected from my own politics, really. I don't need to read articles on how a "right-wing voting campaign got owned at the Hugo awards". That story writes itself. The other side of the story is more interesting.
- 1 year ago
aaron695 1 year ago
[dead]
resolutebat 1 year ago
[flagged]
- KittenInABox 1 year ago
  Small details of note: all world science fiction conventions are run by a bunch of amateurs; this is designed not to be a professional operation. This is supposed to be a passion project by passionate fans to celebrate works they love! In fact, attempts to create a central authority to run these conventions have faced severe resistance, all the way back to Heinlein's involvement in worldcons (to be clear, Heinlein hated the notion of central authorities ruling over how worldcons are run)!
- progbits 1 year ago
  Is not banning books "woke" now?
  The word also never appears in the post so your summary is disingenuous.
  - DonHopkins 1 year ago
    [flagged]
    - resolutebat 1 year ago
      I am precisely none of those things, but if I were, you would be doing a far better job of arguing the case against yourself than I ever could.
- B1FF_PSUVM 1 year ago
  > they're not woke enough
  The dash of TDS delicately shoved in for good measure was very subtle too.
Jiro 1 year ago
[flagged]
- ncallaway 1 year ago
  The problem wasn’t the voting, the problem was the inexplicable dropping of nominees (literally inexplicable, as they have provided no explanation).
  - teddyh 1 year ago
    It was unexplained, not inexplicable.
- bigbillheck 1 year ago
  > let social justice stack the awards
  Going back the last ten years or so which, say, Best Novel winner do you think was undeserving and was only there because of "social justice"?
  - 1 year ago
PeterStuer 1 year ago
This reads like an extremely one sided take with a myopic US west coast moralising slant. The author seems oblivious to the irony of calling something worldcon, then throwing a tantrum if the world does dare not to prostrate to their idiological microbubble.
- donaldihunter 1 year ago
  What an odd take. I don't see the moralising or the tantrum, just a take on events that happened and the likely consequences. I don't think you're getting a myopic US west coast viewpoint from a British author.
  - abosley 1 year ago
    +1 Stross is decidedly the opposite of the stereotypical US west coast sci-fi author.
- falcor84 1 year ago
  You can say a lot of negative things about it, but it's most definitely not a "micro" bubble. The ideological influence of the US West Coast on the world at large during the past century has been de-facto defining much of the global culture, even if you limit it to just Hollywood and the Silicon Valley.
  A world that were to shrug off this influence would be, for better or worse, fundamentally different.
  - cstross 1 year ago
    Not only am I not Californian, I'm not American: I'm a left-wing Scot living in Edinburgh.
    - PeterStuer 1 year ago
      That's what I deserve for just quickly skimming an article on the trone on my phone.
      I guess the gratuitous Trump trope succeeded trowing me off a more nuanced reading.
      Mb.
- 1 year ago