... is out!
I like literary awards for loads of reasons, one of which is that they raise similar questions to AI and automation: Can you design and implement a procedure that will reliably replicate human judgment? You run the program again and again, and sometimes it appears to work, and sometimes it's a bit dodgy, and sometimes it's so dodgy you consider tweaking the code. (See note). In fact, it's probably time we had literary awards judged by AI. I will fully get on that.
Also, I like the way they are a democracy cosplay.
Also, I like the way they make so many people incredibly grouchy.
Including me. Comparing longlist with shortlist, I'm personally a little disappointed not to see Sandra Newman's The Heavens and Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail up for Best Novel. Zen Cho would have been great too.
Other minor kvetches? Well, no shade to the brilliant work of the shortlisted artists, it feels a slight shame that the BSFA Award for Best Artwork has once again effectively become the BSFA Award for Best Cover, after a just slightly more varied selection last year. I pledged 50 superdelegates to Cedric Mizero's A New Life in the Village exhibition and 50 superduperdelegates to SinJin Li Studios' Productive Futures conference ephemera (notably an insanely gorgeous booklet, but also name badges sporting symbols later revealed to assign each conference-goer to a science fictional profession and class status: this was a conference with worldbuilding), but no dice.
One of the nice and slightly precarious things about the BSFA Awards specifically is that they don't boundary-police too much, but despite technically allowing any genre fiction authored anywhere in the world -- there is no hard design rule, for example, that prevents the British Science Fiction Association Awards from being completed flooded one year by US-authored epic fantasy -- they do keep a focus on what you might roughly flail your arms at and designate "British SF." Still, in recent years Best Novel has included the likes of Yoon Ha Lee, Ann Leckie, Tricia Sullivan, Aliette de Bodard, and Nnedi Okorafor, and in Brexit year especially, it might have felt better to have a shortlist that wasn't so Very Very UK?
But like I say, these are nano-kvetches and overall -- looks like a seriously strong list! I've not read many of them or anything, but, you know, I Know the authors' Work. A bit of a mix of big publishers and smaller indie stuff is also a plus. I feel like BSFA Awards have a kind of Iowa and New Hampshire energy to them. Not bellweathers exactly, but at least an upward spurt of force that might propel something unusual into the swirling weather of the Nebulas and Hugos. Well done algorithm and the horde of human hearts that execute it.
The Non-Fiction category is a weird one, since it's so often comparing across different forms and modes. One big glitch: a piece I wrote for Big Echo, about Star Trek and work, slipped onto the Non-Fiction shortlist, among proper big books with squillions of hours of research and labour embedded in them.
Also maybe kind of interesting: the Shorter Fiction category is dominated by novellas. Why??? IS THE SHORT STORY DEAD???
Note: Except it's weird, because most of the circuitry this 'AI' is running on is actually made out of human judgments in the first place, only these are a different set of judgments from the set of judgments it's endeavouring to simulate. I.e. the judgment it is attempting to simulate is something like, "What is the best eligible book?" Whereas key judgments which actually operationalise the simulation include things like, "What system shall we use to tally up the votes? What stages shall we have? How shall we time things? Is this particular borderline work eligible in the first place?" And, "Shall I join the BSFA? Shall I vote? Shall I vote for this thing by my friend? Shall I vote for this thing I haven't read but which is by an author whose work I admire?" So related judgments, but different. Also, of course, not just judgments but also plenty of work, in particular the work of BSFA Award Administrator Clare Boothby.
Showing posts with label awards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label awards. Show all posts
Monday, February 10, 2020
Saturday, December 30, 2017
British Science Fiction Association Awards
So, if you're a member of the BSFA, you have one day left to nominate the best SF of 2017 for the BSFA Awards.
If you're not a member yet, consider joining? It's 29 pounds in the UK, and it includes the voting rights, a subscription to Vector, the magazine I'm now co-editing, and lots of other stuff. Oh, and you definitely don't need to live in the UK to join (although it is more dear if you don't).
(Personally, I haven't read much recent SF this year, so, idk. If you need reminding, there is a list of suggestions here that you can scan (and add to). I'll probably nominate Erin Horáková's 'The Bacchae' (on par with Euripedes' version) and Tim Maughan's 'Last Christmas' (almost as good as Wham!'s version) for short fiction. I don't really know if the Shadow Clarke Awards would be collectively eligible as a non-fiction entry ... maybe?
UPDATE: Confirmed, yes, eligible!
You know how I feel about awards).
If you're not a member yet, consider joining? It's 29 pounds in the UK, and it includes the voting rights, a subscription to Vector, the magazine I'm now co-editing, and lots of other stuff. Oh, and you definitely don't need to live in the UK to join (although it is more dear if you don't).
(Personally, I haven't read much recent SF this year, so, idk. If you need reminding, there is a list of suggestions here that you can scan (and add to). I'll probably nominate Erin Horáková's 'The Bacchae' (on par with Euripedes' version) and Tim Maughan's 'Last Christmas' (almost as good as Wham!'s version) for short fiction. I don't really know if the Shadow Clarke Awards would be collectively eligible as a non-fiction entry ... maybe?
UPDATE: Confirmed, yes, eligible!
You know how I feel about awards).
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Award Season
Some ideas for Best Related Work:
ERIN HORÁKOVÁ, Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blakes 7 (Strange Horizons)
JONATHAN MCCALMONT, Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird (Big Echo) [McCalmont: "I have decided to decline any and all future award nomi" -- whatever shut up]
VARIOUS HANDS, #BlackSpecFic: A Fireside Fiction Company special report (Fireside Fiction)
MANU SAADIA, Trekonomics
... having a category which includes big non-fiction books and online articles together doesn't make much sense (see Note).
By the way, since this is a time of year people read things, or remember things that they have read, I would be really interested to know of any genre fiction you've come across that touches on themes of economics and finance. For the Economics Science Fiction & Fantasy database, of course. Drop me an email, a comment, or let me know on Twitter.
For Best Editor:
A joint nomination for ANN VANDERMEER and JEFF VANDERMEER for The Big Book of Science Fiction.
Elsewhere:
Renay's Hugoogle sheets
The Sputnik Awards
Note:
For instance, perhaps also GEOFF RYMAN, 100 African Writers of SFF, Part One: Nairobi for Best Related Work? Although this is a fragment of a much larger ongoing project, so probably it deserves to be considered at a later stage. But I'm not sure. If an online article has a better chance of getting the award than a book into which it is later assimilated, surely that's a glitch in the award taxonomy?
Question:
How do literary awards fit in among other titles and title-like attributions, such as your professional qualifications and certifications, or the letters after your name, the letters before your name (such as Ms. or Colnel), your names, your nicknames, and your pronouns? I'm interested, for example, in how easy or how difficult it is for individuals to disentangle themselves from these public attributions.
Eligibility Posts:
Ian Sales was saying on Twitter the other day, if I saw and remember rightly, that he doesn't think eligibility posts are a good idea, and would simply quietly not nominate work by anyone who has written one. I've written in the past about why I think they are on the whole an OK idea, mainly because it's quite difficult to distinguish what is one and what isn't one (and any author who categorizes their shorter fiction according to the "short story / novelette / novella" wordcount taxonomy is to some extent swanning around eligibly), and because I think taking eligibility posts too seriously in the wrong way can be the first step to taking literary awards too seriously in the wrong way, and because they probably, on the whole, help to surface writing from the margins (although I'm on the fence about that).
That said, if you've only got a few nominations to make, I guess I would usually factor in my sense of the intensity and success of an author's self-promotion. So in a rough way I guess I do partly agree with Ian.
You could imagine a more hawkish version of his rule-of-thumb, where you refuse to vote for anyone who has not proactively sabotaged their writing career in the year in question.
ERIN HORÁKOVÁ, Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blakes 7 (Strange Horizons)
JONATHAN MCCALMONT, Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird (Big Echo) [McCalmont: "I have decided to decline any and all future award nomi" -- whatever shut up]
VARIOUS HANDS, #BlackSpecFic: A Fireside Fiction Company special report (Fireside Fiction)
MANU SAADIA, Trekonomics
... having a category which includes big non-fiction books and online articles together doesn't make much sense (see Note).
By the way, since this is a time of year people read things, or remember things that they have read, I would be really interested to know of any genre fiction you've come across that touches on themes of economics and finance. For the Economics Science Fiction & Fantasy database, of course. Drop me an email, a comment, or let me know on Twitter.
For Best Editor:
A joint nomination for ANN VANDERMEER and JEFF VANDERMEER for The Big Book of Science Fiction.
Elsewhere:
Renay's Hugoogle sheets
The Sputnik Awards
Note:
For instance, perhaps also GEOFF RYMAN, 100 African Writers of SFF, Part One: Nairobi for Best Related Work? Although this is a fragment of a much larger ongoing project, so probably it deserves to be considered at a later stage. But I'm not sure. If an online article has a better chance of getting the award than a book into which it is later assimilated, surely that's a glitch in the award taxonomy?
Question:
How do literary awards fit in among other titles and title-like attributions, such as your professional qualifications and certifications, or the letters after your name, the letters before your name (such as Ms. or Colnel), your names, your nicknames, and your pronouns? I'm interested, for example, in how easy or how difficult it is for individuals to disentangle themselves from these public attributions.
Eligibility Posts:
Ian Sales was saying on Twitter the other day, if I saw and remember rightly, that he doesn't think eligibility posts are a good idea, and would simply quietly not nominate work by anyone who has written one. I've written in the past about why I think they are on the whole an OK idea, mainly because it's quite difficult to distinguish what is one and what isn't one (and any author who categorizes their shorter fiction according to the "short story / novelette / novella" wordcount taxonomy is to some extent swanning around eligibly), and because I think taking eligibility posts too seriously in the wrong way can be the first step to taking literary awards too seriously in the wrong way, and because they probably, on the whole, help to surface writing from the margins (although I'm on the fence about that).
That said, if you've only got a few nominations to make, I guess I would usually factor in my sense of the intensity and success of an author's self-promotion. So in a rough way I guess I do partly agree with Ian.
You could imagine a more hawkish version of his rule-of-thumb, where you refuse to vote for anyone who has not proactively sabotaged their writing career in the year in question.
Monday, January 2, 2017
Interzone Guest Editorial
This week we announced the two finalists of the Sputnik Awards 2015/2016. Here's a guest editorial I wrote about the prize for Interzone 265 back in July (slightly tweaked).
After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. In fact, SubLEMON: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.
Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: ‘Best Action Sequence,’ ‘Best Twist,’ ‘Best Ending,’ ‘Best Villain’? ‘Best New Award’? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: “Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously.” On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence.
And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: “vote if you want, who gives a shit.” Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.
In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is digital democracy, or perhaps more generally, social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully-designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes,’ and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.
The second is politics, perhaps particularly left-wing politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written “from the standpoint of redemption,” and embedded in plexi-glass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.
Oh and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.
BEST IN SHOW
After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. In fact, SubLEMON: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.
Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: ‘Best Action Sequence,’ ‘Best Twist,’ ‘Best Ending,’ ‘Best Villain’? ‘Best New Award’? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: “Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously.” On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence.
And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: “vote if you want, who gives a shit.” Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.
In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is digital democracy, or perhaps more generally, social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully-designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes,’ and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.
The second is politics, perhaps particularly left-wing politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written “from the standpoint of redemption,” and embedded in plexi-glass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.
Oh and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
And the Award for Best New Award Goes to …
I guess maybe the Puppies are to blame for the Sputnik Awards. Or at least: for the Sputnik spark.
The Hugo Awards, arguably the most prestigious literary prize in genre fiction, have been going through a bit of a funny patch. Here’s one of the Chief Puppies, Brad Torgerson, giving his side of the story:
“Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or –” SHUT UP BRAD! INSERT SHUT UPNESS!
For two years, a loose-knit fan community – the Puppies – have been eyeing up the Hugo nominations process like they’re h4ck3rz or something. Entryism! They’ve spotted the Hugo Awards’s vulnerabilities! They’ve managed to pack Hugo ballots with right-wing entries that almost nobody who votes actually wants to vote for, thereby making the Hugos like any other election.
And many of the liberal or progressive or radical science fiction and fantasy type people are really upset. Crushed. The crushedness itself is slightly nerve-wracking, actually: it’s always a bad sign when your political enemies seem to be having more fun than you are, and Sad and Rabid and Near and Quasi Puppies seem to be kind of yukking it up.
Every cloud has its Dr Chuck Tingle, of course, kissing the sky right in its kisser. And every cloud has its zany strobe of camera flashes: in this case, a bit of mainstream press attention for speculative fiction, in a you’ve-been-papped-by-like-The-Guardian-at-your-shambolic-dumpster-fire-worst kind of way. Seeing yourself the way others see you … that can be a wake-up call, right? So could Puppygate turn into speculative fiction fandom’s long, emo stare into the mirror, the one that then cuts to an inspirational training montage?
In other words, what are the Hugo Awards for?
Okay, they are something to do with having an enormous party, but if this way of having an enormous party is bumming everybody out … I don’t know, could we do it differently somehow?
Or okay, they are something to do with bestowing honour, but do we need all this honour? What is all this honour for?
Juried awards can claim that they surface books of literary merit, books that would otherwise languish in obscurity. Languish. It’s a good bet that the judges who decide awards like have read everything on the shortlist. But the Hugos are a popular vote, decided by the fans. That means the judges are anyone who is willing and able to pay at least $50 for a supporting membership of the World Science Fiction Society: giving them voting rights for both the current year’s nomination stage, the final ballot, and the right to nominate for the following year’s awards.
Anyone who is willing and able to pay, and nobody who isn’t willing and able to pay. I’ve done it twice, and felt super special and powerful, and included in a community, or an illuminati – a communinati? – and also like a total interloper and impostor. How many Hugo voters actually read everything on the novel shortlist? I sure didn’t! You guys I am barely literate.
So should we feel bad if we haven’t read all those books, or most of them? Or even some of them? How much weight should we put on a trusted recommendation, or on knowing an author’s other work? What about the fact that some books tend only to reveal themselves on re-reading? But then again, isn’t a book that really knows how to serve it even on a shallow skim something worth honouring? And if books do sometimes get honoured because it is in some sense that author’s time – maybe because they wrote a great book in a previous year that somehow didn’t nab its accolades – what are the pros and cons of that? And when you vote for a Member of Parliament in a General Election, how much do you know about all the different candidates? Have you read them, drag style?
I don't know how I'd answer many of these questions. It's plausible that it's at least an okay thing to have a big SF award that is fairly open to a lot of voters, although with some kind of filters even if they're not perfect, and where the voters have often read the book they're voting for, even if they've not exactly exhaustively examined the shortlist, and where there's enough of a critical mass that everyone can get bit excited and argue and squee, and of course have some speeches and a big party, and people can either dress up fancy, or maybe just hang around outside and be a bit sarky and check Twitter a lot, or maybe just watch it online from some other part of the world. That seems like a reasonable model.
Although, if that is our model, shouldn't some of that be reflected in how we talk about the accolade, once it's been awarded? Shouldn't it be reflected in how we feel about the accolade? And is that really how we feel about, say, the Hugo Awards? Hmm.
The Hugo Awards have no doubt played a crucial role in constituting speculative fiction fandom as a public from the 1950s to the present. Digital technologies have now probably taken over much of that particular functionality, in terms of giving people the incentives and means to stay connected. And speculative fiction itself has a momentum that doesn’t require any further acceleration force: speculative fiction is already everywhere. It's bigger than the Hugos. It’s Hollywood, baby. It's almost every video game. It’s Patreon. If WSFA memberships used to use “put your money where your mouth is” as a way of sorting the truefen from the fakers and wannabes, then Patreon now allows the same thing on a bigger scale and at a finer grain.
This could be a good thing for the Hugos, and other high profile speculative fiction awards. The Hugos, having helped to kickstart something big, are now freed up a bit. They don't have to focus on raising the profile of speculative fiction; they can do other stuff. Perhaps reflecting political dispute is actually the right thing for the Hugos to be doing right now? So ... maybe they don’t need to be ‘fixed.’ Maybe they’re … working just fine?
But! At the same time, speculative fiction’s culture wars also feel oddly parochial. Okay, if you’re reading this (see note), most of you probably on the whole want the North American liberals (peppered with North American progressives and radicals and Europeans) to win the literary prizes, and the North American alt-right (peppered with well-meaning but cossetted conservatives and outright neo-Nazis) to definitely not win the literary prizes.
But doesn’t it feel like there could be more at stake here? As though a debate has begun, and just technocratically "fixing" the voting system -- while probably worth doing -- shouldn't be an excuse to dial down that debate?
Just for starters, the institution is called WorldCon, so could it maybe be a bit worldier? On the evidence of who actually makes it onto the nominations list, and the cities which successfully bid to host WorldCon, what ‘the world’ means here is many diverse locales around the USA – or, at best, around the Global North.
There's also the closely-connected question of which accessible pipelines culminate in eventually being a Hugo-contender. One nice thing about the Hugos their association with arguably the most prestigious award for baby genre writers, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Because of how it’s set up, it tends to go to writers who can appear in a blaze or splash (or more riskily, a blaze and a splash). For reasons I won’t get into here, I actually quite like that aspect of it, and I generally feel pretty warm toward the award … but my hunch is that citizens of the densely proliferated cultural infrastructures of fandom in North America and the UK have a real head start in concocting these meta-literary forms of blazes and/or splashes.
But more generally, discussions on how to reform the voting system so that the Puppies can never game it again are breathtakingly brilliant in their meticulousness and rigour – and mathematical analysis of mooted Hugo reforms, by Bruce Schneier and Jameson Quinn, suggest how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application – but desultory in their lack of any wider examination of political context.
Let's put it bluntly: is the fear that the Hugos is taken over by racists? Well, if so ...
The Hugo Awards, arguably the most prestigious literary prize in genre fiction, have been going through a bit of a funny patch. Here’s one of the Chief Puppies, Brad Torgerson, giving his side of the story:
“Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or –” SHUT UP BRAD! INSERT SHUT UPNESS!
For two years, a loose-knit fan community – the Puppies – have been eyeing up the Hugo nominations process like they’re h4ck3rz or something. Entryism! They’ve spotted the Hugo Awards’s vulnerabilities! They’ve managed to pack Hugo ballots with right-wing entries that almost nobody who votes actually wants to vote for, thereby making the Hugos like any other election.
And many of the liberal or progressive or radical science fiction and fantasy type people are really upset. Crushed. The crushedness itself is slightly nerve-wracking, actually: it’s always a bad sign when your political enemies seem to be having more fun than you are, and Sad and Rabid and Near and Quasi Puppies seem to be kind of yukking it up.
Every cloud has its Dr Chuck Tingle, of course, kissing the sky right in its kisser. And every cloud has its zany strobe of camera flashes: in this case, a bit of mainstream press attention for speculative fiction, in a you’ve-been-papped-by-like-The-Guardian-at-your-shambolic-dumpster-fire-worst kind of way. Seeing yourself the way others see you … that can be a wake-up call, right? So could Puppygate turn into speculative fiction fandom’s long, emo stare into the mirror, the one that then cuts to an inspirational training montage?
In other words, what are the Hugo Awards for?
Okay, they are something to do with having an enormous party, but if this way of having an enormous party is bumming everybody out … I don’t know, could we do it differently somehow?
Or okay, they are something to do with bestowing honour, but do we need all this honour? What is all this honour for?
Juried awards can claim that they surface books of literary merit, books that would otherwise languish in obscurity. Languish. It’s a good bet that the judges who decide awards like have read everything on the shortlist. But the Hugos are a popular vote, decided by the fans. That means the judges are anyone who is willing and able to pay at least $50 for a supporting membership of the World Science Fiction Society: giving them voting rights for both the current year’s nomination stage, the final ballot, and the right to nominate for the following year’s awards.
Anyone who is willing and able to pay, and nobody who isn’t willing and able to pay. I’ve done it twice, and felt super special and powerful, and included in a community, or an illuminati – a communinati? – and also like a total interloper and impostor. How many Hugo voters actually read everything on the novel shortlist? I sure didn’t! You guys I am barely literate.
So should we feel bad if we haven’t read all those books, or most of them? Or even some of them? How much weight should we put on a trusted recommendation, or on knowing an author’s other work? What about the fact that some books tend only to reveal themselves on re-reading? But then again, isn’t a book that really knows how to serve it even on a shallow skim something worth honouring? And if books do sometimes get honoured because it is in some sense that author’s time – maybe because they wrote a great book in a previous year that somehow didn’t nab its accolades – what are the pros and cons of that? And when you vote for a Member of Parliament in a General Election, how much do you know about all the different candidates? Have you read them, drag style?
I don't know how I'd answer many of these questions. It's plausible that it's at least an okay thing to have a big SF award that is fairly open to a lot of voters, although with some kind of filters even if they're not perfect, and where the voters have often read the book they're voting for, even if they've not exactly exhaustively examined the shortlist, and where there's enough of a critical mass that everyone can get bit excited and argue and squee, and of course have some speeches and a big party, and people can either dress up fancy, or maybe just hang around outside and be a bit sarky and check Twitter a lot, or maybe just watch it online from some other part of the world. That seems like a reasonable model.
Although, if that is our model, shouldn't some of that be reflected in how we talk about the accolade, once it's been awarded? Shouldn't it be reflected in how we feel about the accolade? And is that really how we feel about, say, the Hugo Awards? Hmm.
The Hugo Awards have no doubt played a crucial role in constituting speculative fiction fandom as a public from the 1950s to the present. Digital technologies have now probably taken over much of that particular functionality, in terms of giving people the incentives and means to stay connected. And speculative fiction itself has a momentum that doesn’t require any further acceleration force: speculative fiction is already everywhere. It's bigger than the Hugos. It’s Hollywood, baby. It's almost every video game. It’s Patreon. If WSFA memberships used to use “put your money where your mouth is” as a way of sorting the truefen from the fakers and wannabes, then Patreon now allows the same thing on a bigger scale and at a finer grain.
This could be a good thing for the Hugos, and other high profile speculative fiction awards. The Hugos, having helped to kickstart something big, are now freed up a bit. They don't have to focus on raising the profile of speculative fiction; they can do other stuff. Perhaps reflecting political dispute is actually the right thing for the Hugos to be doing right now? So ... maybe they don’t need to be ‘fixed.’ Maybe they’re … working just fine?
But! At the same time, speculative fiction’s culture wars also feel oddly parochial. Okay, if you’re reading this (see note), most of you probably on the whole want the North American liberals (peppered with North American progressives and radicals and Europeans) to win the literary prizes, and the North American alt-right (peppered with well-meaning but cossetted conservatives and outright neo-Nazis) to definitely not win the literary prizes.
But doesn’t it feel like there could be more at stake here? As though a debate has begun, and just technocratically "fixing" the voting system -- while probably worth doing -- shouldn't be an excuse to dial down that debate?
Just for starters, the institution is called WorldCon, so could it maybe be a bit worldier? On the evidence of who actually makes it onto the nominations list, and the cities which successfully bid to host WorldCon, what ‘the world’ means here is many diverse locales around the USA – or, at best, around the Global North.
There's also the closely-connected question of which accessible pipelines culminate in eventually being a Hugo-contender. One nice thing about the Hugos their association with arguably the most prestigious award for baby genre writers, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Because of how it’s set up, it tends to go to writers who can appear in a blaze or splash (or more riskily, a blaze and a splash). For reasons I won’t get into here, I actually quite like that aspect of it, and I generally feel pretty warm toward the award … but my hunch is that citizens of the densely proliferated cultural infrastructures of fandom in North America and the UK have a real head start in concocting these meta-literary forms of blazes and/or splashes.
But more generally, discussions on how to reform the voting system so that the Puppies can never game it again are breathtakingly brilliant in their meticulousness and rigour – and mathematical analysis of mooted Hugo reforms, by Bruce Schneier and Jameson Quinn, suggest how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application – but desultory in their lack of any wider examination of political context.
Let's put it bluntly: is the fear that the Hugos is taken over by racists? Well, if so ...
... historically, the Hugos have been a set of awards given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements by white men during the previous year. This is starting to shift, but just because you’ve provoked a right-wing backlash doesn’t mean you're now suddenly definitely the good guys. It doesn't mean you’ve found the hill you need to die on just yet.
If WorldCon really wants to put up a fight against racism, maybe it also needs to at least take a good hard look at its US-centrism ... and that $50 voting fee.
There is an awful lot I don't know about the history and current insider controversies and practicalities Hugos, and I also have a sense of not knowing what it is I don't know. I am just a wee bit wary of, you know, treading on toes that angels fear to tread on. Which is perhaps why the energy which might have gone into a nuanced and well-informed and constructive critique has ended up pouring into a preposterous Something New instead.
Cue Sputnik! Now we need a good trophy. In 1843, after the left Hegelian political philosopher Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be a traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel, written “from the standpoint of redemption” (Theodor Adorno), and embedded in a plexi-glass sheet?
Nalo Hopkinson's Lemonade Award for kindness and positive change has, as its trophy, a lovely sci-fi-ish citrus juicer. The personal is the political: and I also like the idea of trophies being put to work in domestic space. I want to see luminaries dicing garlic on their Sputnik, as sugary squished citrus flows down their Lemonade Award, then turning to tenderize beef schnitzel with the racist face of H.P. Lovecraft. “Uh . . . I think WHUMMMM that beef schnitzel BISH is . . . actually pretty THUNK tender now THOK . . .”
In this post I've gone on for aaages about the Hugo Awards, which might give the impression that the Sputnik Awards is some kind of systematic critique-in-kind of the Hugos. It isn't really. The Hugo Puppies controversy provided a spark, which I fanned, and since then the Sputnik Awards have been blazing their own weird trail.
We're starting slowly. For one thing, the shortlisting process was pure expedience, although shortlisting could easily be a locus of all kinds of interesting experiments (a hybrid popular / juried process, at least). And politics hasn’t seriously informed this year’s selection either. This may or may not be something we do again. But if the Awards do continue in some form, then in the coming years, we’d like the shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.
Oh – and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.
Note: This text comes from the long first draft of an Interzone guest editorial. The much shorter final version, which hardly mentions the Hugos at all, is here.
There is an awful lot I don't know about the history and current insider controversies and practicalities Hugos, and I also have a sense of not knowing what it is I don't know. I am just a wee bit wary of, you know, treading on toes that angels fear to tread on. Which is perhaps why the energy which might have gone into a nuanced and well-informed and constructive critique has ended up pouring into a preposterous Something New instead.
Cue Sputnik! Now we need a good trophy. In 1843, after the left Hegelian political philosopher Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be a traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel, written “from the standpoint of redemption” (Theodor Adorno), and embedded in a plexi-glass sheet?
Nalo Hopkinson's Lemonade Award for kindness and positive change has, as its trophy, a lovely sci-fi-ish citrus juicer. The personal is the political: and I also like the idea of trophies being put to work in domestic space. I want to see luminaries dicing garlic on their Sputnik, as sugary squished citrus flows down their Lemonade Award, then turning to tenderize beef schnitzel with the racist face of H.P. Lovecraft. “Uh . . . I think WHUMMMM that beef schnitzel BISH is . . . actually pretty THUNK tender now THOK . . .”
In this post I've gone on for aaages about the Hugo Awards, which might give the impression that the Sputnik Awards is some kind of systematic critique-in-kind of the Hugos. It isn't really. The Hugo Puppies controversy provided a spark, which I fanned, and since then the Sputnik Awards have been blazing their own weird trail.
We're starting slowly. For one thing, the shortlisting process was pure expedience, although shortlisting could easily be a locus of all kinds of interesting experiments (a hybrid popular / juried process, at least). And politics hasn’t seriously informed this year’s selection either. This may or may not be something we do again. But if the Awards do continue in some form, then in the coming years, we’d like the shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.
Oh – and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.
Note: This text comes from the long first draft of an Interzone guest editorial. The much shorter final version, which hardly mentions the Hugos at all, is here.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Economics and SFF, Awards
A little listicle I made one day featuring, I think, no more than Star Trek, Scrooge McDuck, Tim Maughan, David Graeber, grew and grew till I realized it was, like, a database. So there's now a dedicated tab for economics in science fiction and fantasy.
I will happily take suggestions for entries or links, or any ideas really. (Economics-in-SFF-wise it is kind of ridiculous I haven't read a bit more Atwood, Stephenson, Sterling, Stross, and Robinson, so if anyone wants to donate any reviews or posts they think are relevant, please get in touch! I can be found most days at the Cafe de Gmail, ask for josephclwalton).
A long-term goal is to start including topic articles as well. Currency, Credit, Scarcity, Supply and Demand, Malthusianism, Eugenics, Diegetic Prototyping, Families, Financial Performativity, Quantity Theory, Political Economy as Science Fiction, and Topsy-Turvy Worlds all come to mind.
A long-term goal is to start including topic articles as well. Currency, Credit, Scarcity, Supply and Demand, Malthusianism, Eugenics, Diegetic Prototyping, Families, Financial Performativity, Quantity Theory, Political Economy as Science Fiction, and Topsy-Turvy Worlds all come to mind.
Secondly, over at the SFWA, Setsu Uzumé talks about Lemonade Award, the Mixy Award, and some other badassed yet goodassed awards (including the Sputnik!).
PS: UPDATE: In fact, here's my provisional desiderata list.
Recommended to me & currently or recently on my TBR kang:
Kim Stanley Robinson, rest of The Mars Trilogy
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen.
Ursula le Guin, The Telling.
Clifford D. Simak, "The Fence" (see this snippet)
Jack Vance, Demon Princes series (SVU)
Sarah Zettel, Fool's War.
Charles Stross, Accelerando & others.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
John Varley's Eight Worlds
Robert Heinlein, For Us The Living
Neal Asher, The Skinner (spline)
Anne McCaffrey
Max Gladstone
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy (coinshots, Atium)
Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun (circuit board currency)
Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle (exchange of expertise)
Henry Kuttner, "The Iron Standard"
Scott Westerfield's Uglies Trilogy (Smoke's food pack currencies)
Frank O'Rourke's "Instant Gold"
Geoff Ryman, Air.
Will Garth, "Men of Honor"
Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle and Reamde
Cory Doctorow's For the Win
The rest of Margaret Atwood's Maddadam trilogy
Richard Morgan, Market Forces.
John Chu, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barrier."
Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky
Greg Costikyan, First Contract.
Hayford Peirce, Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars.
Lester del Rey & Frederik Pohl, Preferred Risk
Weis & Hickman's Deathgate cycle (barls currency)
Henry Richardson Chamberlain, 6000 Tonnes of Gold
Guess what? I'd be particularly interested in recommendations of economic science fiction and fantasy by women!
Kim Stanley Robinson, rest of The Mars Trilogy
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen.
Ursula le Guin, The Telling.
Clifford D. Simak, "The Fence" (see this snippet)
Jack Vance, Demon Princes series (SVU)
Sarah Zettel, Fool's War.
Charles Stross, Accelerando & others.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
John Varley's Eight Worlds
Robert Heinlein, For Us The Living
Neal Asher, The Skinner (spline)
Anne McCaffrey
Max Gladstone
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy (coinshots, Atium)
Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun (circuit board currency)
Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle (exchange of expertise)
Henry Kuttner, "The Iron Standard"
Scott Westerfield's Uglies Trilogy (Smoke's food pack currencies)
Frank O'Rourke's "Instant Gold"
Geoff Ryman, Air.
Will Garth, "Men of Honor"
Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle and Reamde
Cory Doctorow's For the Win
The rest of Margaret Atwood's Maddadam trilogy
Richard Morgan, Market Forces.
John Chu, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barrier."
Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky
Greg Costikyan, First Contract.
Hayford Peirce, Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars.
Lester del Rey & Frederik Pohl, Preferred Risk
Weis & Hickman's Deathgate cycle (barls currency)
Henry Richardson Chamberlain, 6000 Tonnes of Gold
Guess what? I'd be particularly interested in recommendations of economic science fiction and fantasy by women!
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Popping My Cogs
A few links:
(1) I went to a really lovely one-day conference at Cardiff yesterday, Fantasies of Contemporary Culture. I've just uploaded the uncut version of my paper to Academia.edu, as y'edu. It's very much research-in-progress. It's called "There Is No Cognitive Estrangement," but really it's way more sympathetic to Darko Suvin's work than it is to, for instance, some of the uses to which it's been put, or to the criticisms and refinements offered by Simon Spiegel.
(2) My sort-of-paranormal-romance novel Invocation is free on Kindle today.
(3) I am loving see the Sputnik battleballots roll in like the Severn tide. Have you cast your vote yet? (See also: The Sputnik Award and the Hugo Awards at File 770).
(4) Many academics are on strike on Wednesdays and Thursday. Here's the official reason. And for a bit more context, here's a Guardian article by Nina Power and a blog post by Plashing Vole. Of course the strike is not just about pay. Almost every academic I know is concerned about this government's efforts to close down the spaces where free and critical thinking can take place, accompanied by a steady, glazed-eyed construction of the most babyish incentive structures, of a kind that would barely make sense in any market, let alone in the provision of education. Calling it neoliberalism is almost too kind. It's more like jocks v. nerds.
(4) Many academics are on strike on Wednesdays and Thursday. Here's the official reason. And for a bit more context, here's a Guardian article by Nina Power and a blog post by Plashing Vole. Of course the strike is not just about pay. Almost every academic I know is concerned about this government's efforts to close down the spaces where free and critical thinking can take place, accompanied by a steady, glazed-eyed construction of the most babyish incentive structures, of a kind that would barely make sense in any market, let alone in the provision of education. Calling it neoliberalism is almost too kind. It's more like jocks v. nerds.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Sputnik PS
Btw: I've received some really touching enthusiasm, warmth and wise counsels and offers of support, as well as a pretty significant amount of "eh?" "baroo?" "mph?" "wha-?", which tbh is also kinda gratifying. One thing I'd love to hear more of is unwise counsel. The best I've heard so far is the suggestion that we do the Dungeons of Democracy for real.
Just imagine, ripping it from the Excel and into the streets, playing out the entire vote as a vast LARP, cosplaying Daleky Phoenixes and Hedgehoggy Thing Itselves . . .
Sputnik Awards
Just imagine, ripping it from the Excel and into the streets, playing out the entire vote as a vast LARP, cosplaying Daleky Phoenixes and Hedgehoggy Thing Itselves . . .
Sputnik Awards
Quick Sputnik Note
It's really exciting to see the votes rolling in!
This year is kind of a trial run, and if it works, we'll make it a recurring thing. Perhaps next year it might work like this:
This year is kind of a trial run, and if it works, we'll make it a recurring thing. Perhaps next year it might work like this:
- Eight places decided by an open nominations process in March and April
- Eight places decided by a jury
(Image: Munchkin)
By the way, it's tucked away at the end of the FAQ, but you can vote for books that are not on the shortlist. (At your peril: democratic processes tend to be a kind of "strength in numbers" thing). If you want to submit a Wandering Monster Ballot, with any four books of your choice, get in touch by email or DM me on Twitter (@jolwalton). The rules around WMBs have changed a little: originally it was going to be a sort of celebrity cameo thing, and there will still be an element of that. But actually it also makes sense, especially since there hasn't been an open nominations process, that anyone can submit a Wandering Monster Ballot. So please do!
Update: Tweaked the submissions form to include a "What's missing from the shortlist?" question, which will also be used as the basis for some Wandering Monsters. The larger the base Ballot population, the more predatory Monster Ballots it can support, so in the interest of biodiversity, get the vote out.
Update: Tweaked the submissions form to include a "What's missing from the shortlist?" question, which will also be used as the basis for some Wandering Monsters. The larger the base Ballot population, the more predatory Monster Ballots it can support, so in the interest of biodiversity, get the vote out.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Inaugural Sputnik Award Shortlist Reveal!
Voting is open for the inaugural Sputnik Award!
- Jim Butcher, The Cinder Spires
- Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
- Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet
- N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
- Emma Newman, Planetfall
- Peter Newman, The Vagrant
- Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix
- Naomi Novik, Uprooted
- Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora
- Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
- Fran Wilde, Updraft
No membership is required to vote. The voting system is unlike anything you've ever seen (well, unlike anything you've ever seen in a voting system). Go and exercise your right as a citizen of the speculative!
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Re-Post: My Proposed Hugo Voting System
Note: This was the system I proposed, tongue-in-cheek (I missed), last year for the Hugos (for the noms process, not the actual vote). It's the basis for what we've ended up doing with the Sputniks, although it's a little different.
Each nominator gets four slots in each category. They're not ranked, exactly, but they are classed. It might be:
Each nominator gets four slots in each category. They're not ranked, exactly, but they are classed. It might be:
BEST NOVEL
Hedgehog: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. witch
Dalek: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. hedgehog
Witch: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. dalek
Mithril Mech: 30 HP, begins in herald slot
Hedgehog: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. witch
Dalek: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. hedgehog
Witch: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. dalek
Mithril Mech: 30 HP, begins in herald slot
... so for best novel, my ballot might look like this:
Hedgehog: Jeff VanderMeer, Southern Reach
Dalek: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
Witch: Adam Roberts, Bete
MM: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
Dalek: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
Witch: Adam Roberts, Bete
MM: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
With each round of voting, each party is randomly paired with another. If the heralds are the same (i.e. in round one, if my ballot encounters another Ancillary Sword mithril mech) then both ballots survive intact and unchanged into the next round. Otherwise, a champion is randomly selected from the non-herald party members of each ballot.
Then:
(1) if the champions happen to be the same (e.g. my Southern Reach bumps into another Southern Reach) then the champions move into the heralds slots, but no damage is inflicted, and both ballots survive otherwise unaltered into the next round.
(2) otherwise, both nominations take damage according to their class. For example, say my Southern Reach hedgehog gets paired against a John Scalzi Lock In dalek. My nomination loses fifteen Hit Points, and the Lock In nomination loses ten (my quills aren't much use against the dalek's armour plating and selfie-stick).
Nominations that have fallen to zero Hit Points are eliminated, and a new round begins.
The cycle continues until all except five novels have been eliminated, comprising the short list.
Each nominator also receives an automated personalised chronicle of their ballot's encounters and deeds. Nominators may also opt to make their ballot non-anonymous, so that their names come up in the battle reports of other nominators with whom they have friendly or warlike encounters. ("I literally met Hoyt in the fourth round! Her Correia Witch kicked my Leckie Dalek's ass.")
Earlier: full post.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Strange Puppies
As is now customary, at around this time of year I produce my Hugo nominations recommendations slate, Strange Puppies. Go forth and nominate, minions. And should you find that any of these items make it onto the ballot, you may be assured it is by your agency alone.
BEST NOVEL
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
BEST NOVELLA
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
The Builders by Daniel Polansky
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
BEST NOVELETTE
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
“Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu.
“Obits” by Stephen King
“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke
BEST SHORT STORY
"Asymmetrical Warfare" by S. R. Algernon
"The Commuter" by Thomas A. Mays
"If You Were an Award, My Love" by Juan Tabo and S. Harris
"Seven Kill Tiger" by Charles Shao
"Space Raptor Butt Invasion" by Chuck Tingle
BEST RELATED WORK
Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini
“The First Draft of My Appendix N Book” by Jeffro Johnson
“Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day
“The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland
BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jerry Pournelle
Sheila Williams
Ex Machina written and directed by Alex Garland
Etc.
j/k obv
BEST NOVEL
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
BEST NOVELLA
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
The Builders by Daniel Polansky
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
BEST NOVELETTE
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
“Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu.
“Obits” by Stephen King
“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke
BEST SHORT STORY
"Asymmetrical Warfare" by S. R. Algernon
"The Commuter" by Thomas A. Mays
"If You Were an Award, My Love" by Juan Tabo and S. Harris
"Seven Kill Tiger" by Charles Shao
"Space Raptor Butt Invasion" by Chuck Tingle
BEST RELATED WORK
Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini
“The First Draft of My Appendix N Book” by Jeffro Johnson
“Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day
“The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland
CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER
Pierce Brown
Sebastien de Castell
Brian Niemeier
Andy Weir
Sheila E. Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Jim Minz
Toni Weisskopf
Pierce Brown
Sebastien de Castell
Brian Niemeier
Andy Weir
Alyssa Wong
BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM
Vox DaySheila E. Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Jim Minz
Toni Weisskopf
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jerry Pournelle
Sheila Williams
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM
Avengers: Age of Ultron written and directed by Joss WhedonEx Machina written and directed by Alex Garland
Mad Max: Fury Road written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, directed by George Miller
The Martian, screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, written by Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, directed by J.J. Abrams
The Martian, screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, written by Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, directed by J.J. Abrams
Etc.
j/k obv
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Half-Ignoring Sad Puppies
I half-noticed recently that this year's Sad Puppies' slate (perhaps not the right word) contains a sprinkling of SJW pixie-dust. My first thought was, alol, a wedge issue and bid for legitimacy courtesy of the right wing genre culture trolls, perfectly tactically commendable if perhaps a bit transparent. It's a familiar pattern in mundane politics too: divisive, nasty, "populist" tub-thumping to build your brand, then try to de-toxify it and play in the mainstream. I.e. I assumed those recommendations weren't sincere.
Just now I half-noticed that the Sad Puppies list (perhaps that is the right word) was put together by an open process (albeit one perhaps not very well-publicized outside veteran Pup circles). So while I wouldn't put it past a cadre of battle-wizened Pups to have infiltrated that process, in order to promote the very thing they hate -- a v. GG move obv., playing the long game bro -- it's much more likely it is what it seems: a collated recommendations list drawing on a right-leaning constituency, but not a totally repulsive constituency.
Obviously this Sad Puppies should have done a bit more to distance itself from last year. But my inclination would be, on the little I've seen, let's give them a break? This is deep, deep ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ territory. If you have awoken with horror to find yourself on their list, maybe don't sweat it. You're no more in a moral quandary than usual. Don't feel obliged to fall on your #SJWaward and declare yourself ineligible, or anything brave and silly like that. My hunch is, ignore it. This is probably the one time in your life you're not a pawn in somebody's grand evil scheme.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank The Atlantic, from whose Google cache snippet I have copypasted the shrug emoji more times than you've broken hot takes.
Just now I half-noticed that the Sad Puppies list (perhaps that is the right word) was put together by an open process (albeit one perhaps not very well-publicized outside veteran Pup circles). So while I wouldn't put it past a cadre of battle-wizened Pups to have infiltrated that process, in order to promote the very thing they hate -- a v. GG move obv., playing the long game bro -- it's much more likely it is what it seems: a collated recommendations list drawing on a right-leaning constituency, but not a totally repulsive constituency.
Obviously this Sad Puppies should have done a bit more to distance itself from last year. But my inclination would be, on the little I've seen, let's give them a break? This is deep, deep ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ territory. If you have awoken with horror to find yourself on their list, maybe don't sweat it. You're no more in a moral quandary than usual. Don't feel obliged to fall on your #SJWaward and declare yourself ineligible, or anything brave and silly like that. My hunch is, ignore it. This is probably the one time in your life you're not a pawn in somebody's grand evil scheme.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank The Atlantic, from whose Google cache snippet I have copypasted the shrug emoji more times than you've broken hot takes.
Monday, February 8, 2016
BSFA Shortlist
The British Science Fiction Association Awards shortlist has just been announced.
Best Novel
Dave Hutchinson: Europe at Midnight, Solaris
Chris Beckett: Mother of Eden, Corvus
Aliette de Bodard: The House of Shattered Wings, Gollancz
Ian McDonald: Luna: New Moon, Gollancz
Justina Robson: Glorious Angels, Gollancz
Best Short Fiction
Aliette de Bodard: “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight”. Clarkesworld 100
Paul Cornell: “Witches of Lychford,” Tor.com
Jeff Noon: “No Rez”, Interzone 260
Nnedi Okorafor, “Binti”, Tor.com
Gareth L. Powell: “Ride the Blue Horse”, Matter
[The Tor.com nominations refer to the actual novellas rather than the online excerpts]
Best Non-Fiction
Nina Allan: “Time Pieces: Doctor Change or Doctor Die”, Interzone 261
Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce: Letters to Tiptree, Twelfth Planet Press
Jonathan McCalmont: “What Price Your Critical Agency”, Ruthless Culture
Adam Roberts: Rave and Let Die: The SF and Fantasy of 2014, Steel Quill Books / NewCon Press
Jeff Vandermeer: “From Annihilation to Acceptance: a writer’s surreal journey”, The Atlantic, January 2015
Best Artwork
Jim Burns, Cover of Pelquin’s Comet, Newcon Press
Vincent Sammy: “Songbird”, Interzone 257
Sarah Anne Langton: Cover of Jews Versus Zombies, Jurassic London
Best Novel
Dave Hutchinson: Europe at Midnight, Solaris
Chris Beckett: Mother of Eden, Corvus
Aliette de Bodard: The House of Shattered Wings, Gollancz
Ian McDonald: Luna: New Moon, Gollancz
Justina Robson: Glorious Angels, Gollancz
Best Short Fiction
Aliette de Bodard: “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight”. Clarkesworld 100
Paul Cornell: “Witches of Lychford,” Tor.com
Jeff Noon: “No Rez”, Interzone 260
Nnedi Okorafor, “Binti”, Tor.com
Gareth L. Powell: “Ride the Blue Horse”, Matter
[The Tor.com nominations refer to the actual novellas rather than the online excerpts]
Best Non-Fiction
Nina Allan: “Time Pieces: Doctor Change or Doctor Die”, Interzone 261
Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce: Letters to Tiptree, Twelfth Planet Press
Jonathan McCalmont: “What Price Your Critical Agency”, Ruthless Culture
Adam Roberts: Rave and Let Die: The SF and Fantasy of 2014, Steel Quill Books / NewCon Press
Jeff Vandermeer: “From Annihilation to Acceptance: a writer’s surreal journey”, The Atlantic, January 2015
Best Artwork
Jim Burns, Cover of Pelquin’s Comet, Newcon Press
Vincent Sammy: “Songbird”, Interzone 257
Sarah Anne Langton: Cover of Jews Versus Zombies, Jurassic London
Friday, January 29, 2016
Eligibility Awks
It's awksward season. Here's your relevant meta.
How can SFF de-expensify itself? Why was everyone so cross at Neil Gaiman? Why do some people feel like cons are compulsory? Etc.
BSFA's new nomination system
How to reform the Hugos
The best looks back at 2015 of 2015
Eligibility & vote-splitting
From two years ago, Adam Roberts's very sensible post about this sort of thing. The post can easily be construed as an argument against eligibility posts. On the other hand, he's using a technical term, self-pimpage. And maybe a little eligibility post and perhaps a pinned tweet don't quite qualify as self-pimpage.
(Unless you're super-duper-pooper famous).
Here are quick current thoughts on eligibility posts:
1) Eligibility posts seem to be here to stay. They have pros and cons but on balance they're very good. One of the cons is that I hate the word "eligibility," but what synonym would you use -- "fitness"?
2) On balance, it's also a good thing when authors -- so long as they're not super-duper-stormtrooper famous -- say what they think was their best work in that particular year. It's quite a sensitive balance though, for the following reasons.
3) Even if you think eligibility posts are very good, making your own eligibility post can be pretty awkward and embarrassing. And even when you see your friends and/or favourite authors doing it, there may be a bit of you that feels it's a bit gross. Take heart! That's okay! Awkwardness can even be part of why eligibility posts are good. The awkwardness and grossness is part of the point.
4) Huh? Because if eligibility posts didn't make some people awkward, they would just be an echo chamber for the existing megaphones. If it was an entirely comfortable, frictionless process, it would only minimally and mostly arbitrarily impact visibility.
5) The promise of eligibility posts is that they can make people feel uncomfortable to different degrees, and that in a very, very rough way, this may map onto the extent to which people should feel uncomfortable. It's precisely that awkwardness acts as a selection pressure, meaning that some authors do and some don't, and some do something in-between. In particular, to the extent that there is an energetic affirmative discourse around women's voices and other marginalised voices and the necessity of eligibility posts -- e.g. #dontselfreject; cf. Amal El-Mohtar going on a tear in 2014 -- awkwardness can be intrumentalised as a progressive selection pressure. Also if you're already highly garlanded, successful, exposed etc., then hopefully you feel awkward commanding your legions of fans to tennnn-hut.
Of course, actual awkwardness departs from ideal awkwardness. The whole Sad Puppies slate year can be interpreted as a sort of monstrous mutant eligibility post gone on a rampage.
At a finer grain, "pros and cons" implies that there is a mixture of desirable and undesirable features which this awkwardness selects for. For instance, there's a certain kind of democratic and egalitarian idealist who tends to feel on a gut level that prizes are stupid, or at least that wanting one is stupid, or at least that not actively trying not to want one is stupid, and the awkward eligibility post convention is going to tend to select against those greathearted folks. But what can you do. Raise them up over their fellows against their will, and dash their brains out on the celestial vault I guess!
So, yup. Eligibility posts are good.
And prizes are actually bad. Alol.
One way of mitigating the awkwardness of eligibility posts would be to centralise them a bit. If it really is a public service, why not do it as a public? On balance I think that's a bad idea, because they need to be at least sometimes prohibitively awkward for some people. I'm sort-of-okay with the big threads that Scalzi and others host from time to time.
Another way of mitigating the awkwardness would be to make them a bit more fun. Again, I'm against this.
How can SFF de-expensify itself? Why was everyone so cross at Neil Gaiman? Why do some people feel like cons are compulsory? Etc.
BSFA's new nomination system
How to reform the Hugos
The best looks back at 2015 of 2015
Eligibility & vote-splitting
From two years ago, Adam Roberts's very sensible post about this sort of thing. The post can easily be construed as an argument against eligibility posts. On the other hand, he's using a technical term, self-pimpage. And maybe a little eligibility post and perhaps a pinned tweet don't quite qualify as self-pimpage.
(Unless you're super-duper-pooper famous).
Here are quick current thoughts on eligibility posts:
1) Eligibility posts seem to be here to stay. They have pros and cons but on balance they're very good. One of the cons is that I hate the word "eligibility," but what synonym would you use -- "fitness"?
2) On balance, it's also a good thing when authors -- so long as they're not super-duper-stormtrooper famous -- say what they think was their best work in that particular year. It's quite a sensitive balance though, for the following reasons.
3) Even if you think eligibility posts are very good, making your own eligibility post can be pretty awkward and embarrassing. And even when you see your friends and/or favourite authors doing it, there may be a bit of you that feels it's a bit gross. Take heart! That's okay! Awkwardness can even be part of why eligibility posts are good. The awkwardness and grossness is part of the point.
4) Huh? Because if eligibility posts didn't make some people awkward, they would just be an echo chamber for the existing megaphones. If it was an entirely comfortable, frictionless process, it would only minimally and mostly arbitrarily impact visibility.
5) The promise of eligibility posts is that they can make people feel uncomfortable to different degrees, and that in a very, very rough way, this may map onto the extent to which people should feel uncomfortable. It's precisely that awkwardness acts as a selection pressure, meaning that some authors do and some don't, and some do something in-between. In particular, to the extent that there is an energetic affirmative discourse around women's voices and other marginalised voices and the necessity of eligibility posts -- e.g. #dontselfreject; cf. Amal El-Mohtar going on a tear in 2014 -- awkwardness can be intrumentalised as a progressive selection pressure. Also if you're already highly garlanded, successful, exposed etc., then hopefully you feel awkward commanding your legions of fans to tennnn-hut.
Of course, actual awkwardness departs from ideal awkwardness. The whole Sad Puppies slate year can be interpreted as a sort of monstrous mutant eligibility post gone on a rampage.
At a finer grain, "pros and cons" implies that there is a mixture of desirable and undesirable features which this awkwardness selects for. For instance, there's a certain kind of democratic and egalitarian idealist who tends to feel on a gut level that prizes are stupid, or at least that wanting one is stupid, or at least that not actively trying not to want one is stupid, and the awkward eligibility post convention is going to tend to select against those greathearted folks. But what can you do. Raise them up over their fellows against their will, and dash their brains out on the celestial vault I guess!
So, yup. Eligibility posts are good.
And prizes are actually bad. Alol.
One way of mitigating the awkwardness of eligibility posts would be to centralise them a bit. If it really is a public service, why not do it as a public? On balance I think that's a bad idea, because they need to be at least sometimes prohibitively awkward for some people. I'm sort-of-okay with the big threads that Scalzi and others host from time to time.
Another way of mitigating the awkwardness would be to make them a bit more fun. Again, I'm against this.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
How can SFF de-expensify itself? Lotteries! Lotteries! Lots and lots of lotteries!
1.
Science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive!
Okay, the books and magazines are expensive. But at least there are libraries. And so much of it is available free online nowadays. More than you could read in a lifetime, maybe.
But ... free time is expensive.
And ... being able to vote in the awards is expensive. Paying for the memberships that let you vote is expensive, and paying for those books and magazines and things, the ones on the longlists and shortlists -- the ones you can't get in libraries yet -- that's expensive.
Being able to participate in the conversation around the awards is expensive. Because if you're not voting, maybe you feel a bit stupid or poor or like a trespasser, hmm? You maybe get a smidge of imposter syndrome. Just a smidge. The smidges add up.
And the conventions. And the workshops.
The conventions are incredibly expensive! The workshops are incredibly expensive. Here are two great posts about the recent kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clarion West, the quasi-idiomatic expression "you want x, you NEED x" etc.: Ann Leckie's and JY Yang's.
JY Yang's is probably the more pertinent to this post. "[F]or somebody like me – living and working outside of the UK or US – different culture, different continent, different context – breaking into the SFF publishing scene, getting people to actually sit up and notice you, even getting better at your craft, is extremely. fucking. difficult." Yang talks about community. It's expensive to feel part of science fiction and fantasy.
It is expensive to visit the science fiction and fantasy Top of Mount Olympus, but there aren't too many other kinds of obstacle to getting there. You pay your money, you get on your Mount Olympus Funicular. For a lot of money, you can see, hear, touch -- I guess you shouldn't touch -- living legends. For a huge amount of money, you can have them read your stuff and suggest how to make it better. So long as you're not too picky about your living legend, one living legend or other should be available.
Part of the kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clairon West, etc., is probably driven by the suspicion that workshops like that don't just give you sound advice, they give you even sounder contacts. "Okay, so you're a good writer. There are a lot of good writers out there. There are a lot of good, hard-working writers out there. The ones that know how to network, the ones that can pay to get close to the big nodes ... they're the ones that succeed."
That's the suspicion, anyway. I don't really share it? Not that I have some kind of naive ideal about canons crystallizing according to pure merit, or anything. But I do suspect that there's a third thing, that isn't exactly instruction and isn't exactly networking, although it's a bit like both those things, that you get from something like Clarion West. Or get from a coffeeklatch with a living legend, or whatever. It's the anxiety and pleasure of community. I think we systematically underestimate its importance in shaping, strengthening, and projecting writing outward into the world. Writing is intimately entangled with pleasure, with jouissance. Writing is intimately entangled with community, and perhaps extra intimately entangled with provisional, fragile, hodgepodge, competitive, mercurial, anxious, disputed, and disputatious community.
2.
Anyway: science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the future. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the otherwise unimaginable alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to keep some kind of fragile candle-flame flickering through the dark times. And science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive.
Because it's expensive, it's elitist.
It directly selects against those on low incomes. It directly selects against those living in countries with comparatively weak currencies. It indirectly selects against those groups who tend to have low incomes, or who live in such countries.
(If you're lucky -- lucky? -- you live somewhere like where I live, and science fiction and fantasy has its free fringe).
I'm sure people way more knowledgeable than me have talked over these problems a zillion times. I know for a fact there are all kinds of practical initiatives that go some way to ameliorating them.
But I'm just wondering: is there some neglected low-hanging fruit here, ripe and ready to drop?
Maybe focusing on the feeling of inclusion, and the anxiety and pleasure of community, might make it a bit easier to improve accessibility?
If it has proved hard to extend the full shebang, to extend the full masterclass-from-a-living-legend, to every talented and hardworking writer who in some sense deserves it ... maybe it's easy to at least extend the feelings of inclusion and of community? Extend it a bit?
UPDATE: Elsewhere, Sunny Morraine writes eloquently on similar subjects. "[...] at least in SFF writerdom, there is really no meaningful distinction between friends and colleagues [...]" (Fuck, cons shouldn't be something people feel they have to go to, should they?)
3.
One way you feel included in something, if that something is something which is cyclical, is if you even have a chance of going to that something. A free lottery ticket, each time it comes round. And/or if you feel like someone who's a bit like you just did go to it. You didn't win, but the person who did reminds you of you.
"Didn't make it last year, or this year, but one year I might, and in the meanwhile, I still feel included. I still feel invested."
Or: "I could afford it that one time, and with my memories of that one time, plus my ritual of entering the lottery, I still feel part of this thing. Which creates all kinds of positive feedback loops and virtuous circles in my reading and my conversations and my writing."
So the guideline is: for any SFF-related thing that involves money, take a moment to pause and think, Is there some spare capacity here that we could give away for free? Is there some aspect that could be hived off and given to whoever's name gets pulled out of a hat?
4.
So for instance:
(1) Could Neil Gaiman and some of his friends figure out a way to make Clarion more accessible, at least for a temporary span of time? I have no idea what the economics of Clarion are, although I bet they're flexier than the folk in charge of them will tell you at first. But for instance, could an instructor (e.g. Neil Gaiman) waive a fee and instead sponsor a low income attendee?
(2) More low income pass lotteries for cons please. Every major con should have tickets that get handed out at random to applicants on low incomes. I'm talking about cramming in a few extra bodies that otherwise wouldn't be there at all.
(3) If it's financially feasible, some lotteries available to everyone too, regardless of income. The important thing is: lots and lots of lotteries, so the more you want to go somewhere, the more scrupulous and energetic you can be about throwing your name in every hat everywhere. Okay, it's not perfect, but "I won the lottery to go to LaserswordCon, help me raise travel and accommodation!" ain't a bad way to Kickstart something.
(4) Associations should also do free membership lotteries. The BSFA could probably do with a membership top-up. Promote the lottery hard, and you'll get a big pool of applicants, and instead of giving some existing member a free ride, you'll get a new member you never would have had in the first place. Maybe they'll stick around. Voting rights in particular: it makes hella sense to me to engage more widely by offering partial memberships that permit voting. The cost to the association could be literally zero (sorry, no paper ballots for lottery-route members).
(5) Magazines should do more lotteries for free digital subscriptions. This is probably less important.
(6) I've forgotten what this one was. More lotteries, probably. Oh, maybe it was more online stuff. Clarion West on an Open University / Khan Academy model? (But beware the risks of the latest round of cyberutopianism).
(7) I know the e"con"omics (pretty good joke huh) generally rule out giving volunteers a free pass, but could some volunteers get a free pass? Or first time volunteers get half price, kind of thing? I'm sure many cons already do this kind of thing.
(8) Errr ... and of course if there are ways of making paying cons and workshops and awards and things a little less central to the affairs of science fiction and fantasy in general, that might not be a bad thing. And if we do multiply the lotteries throughout the lands, we should take care not to use that Good Thing as an excuse to do Bad Things; the more privileged participants in science fiction and fantasy should take care never to use lotteries as an excuse to understate or neglect persistent patterns of marginalization, take care never to use them as a reason not to energetically engage with and promote the work of non-Western and other marginalized groups of writers.
(9) Aaaaaaand of course while all this is going on, it's necessary to step back from time to time and think about how thinking about fairness and finance in the fandom context may operate as a distraction from, or sublimation of, fairness and finance in the wider world.
(10) Masked Clarion. Compulsory masks. Clari-anon. Everybody foxes etc. Who went to Clarion? We all did.
PS: Con or Bust is taking requests for assistance from fans of colour from Feb 15-25.
PPS: I really like something JY's post touches on at the end. It isn't just about making the core more accessible to the periphery: it's about the possibility of developing the periphery, shedding the periphery-ness, making new, alternate cores. Basically it's also about sf and fantasy localism, about growing vibrant small press scenes that don't necessarily kowtow to whatever aesthetics and politics and whatever which dominate mainstream sf and fantasy and, even more importantly, which resist and/or transform co-option by the more progressive venues and institutions of mainstream sf and fantasy. Just as a quick comparison, for some reason basically all the even slightly good poetry in the UK is published predominantly by small and micro presses.
PPPS: I notice that this post falls into that genre of "x costs money. y costs money."-straight-talkin' type posts. I didn't mean to talk straight and I'm sorry.
PPPPS: Some aspiring writers should be discouraged! I wish somebody had discouraged me! But I haven't quite figured out yet how to tell them apart, the ones who should be discouraged and the ones who shouldn't. Just putting a big discouragement buffet out there for people to help themselves to usually just further marginalizes the marginalized (within this particular context, although being marginalized in one context may free you up to flourish in another, which is what makes this whole thing so tricky. Hmmm).
PPPPPS: I also have the quasi-rationalized superstition that social contact with the authors of texts can sharpen your reading of those texts in a way that is also by the way frequently fruitful in your writing, assuming you are cultivating them as an influence. The Death of the Death of the Author is basically a done deal from where I'm sitting. Btw I heard a fantastic neologism today: not autobiography but bioautography.
PPPPPPS: [To do: are there some general good tactics to adopt when you find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core? Lessons from poetry and/or activism maybe? Simple things: if there doesn't seem to be the constituency to support a genre writing night, start off with a music and comedy and genre writing and open mic night. Or if you don't find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core, then what practical measures can you take to support those who are? What can the sort-of-established editors and authors and publishers, who still aren't happy with what they're established in, do in order to provide real solidarity with and support to these more local and distributed sff efforts, without de-energizing / appropriating / undermining them?]
[Also to do: I sense that "writing," although that term needs interrogating, can really flourish at the moment that you withdraw yourself from a "community" -- and maybe that's not quite the right word either, if it's something that functions most powerfully at the moment of alienation. But yeah: writing obviously isn't really a lonely pursuit, and it obviously isn't a social pursuit either. It has a particular characteristic status in the dialectic of individual and collective, which I need to think about more carefully some time.]
PPPPPPPS: The bit about "hiving off aspects" of memberships / passes etc. does of course raise the question of a tiers, or a sense of being present or participating, but feeling second class. That's a real issue, although at the same time, it is probably something to be sensitive to and try to deal with, not something that renders the whole notion untenable. What's the alternative -- simply keeping the barriers to entry high, just so the people who can't make it at at all are saved the risk of feeling like they're hard done by or interlopers or deserve the full welcome pack or whatever dammit? And it's not as if those feels aren't in circulation already. My Night Nurse is kicking in big time rn.
Science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive!
Okay, the books and magazines are expensive. But at least there are libraries. And so much of it is available free online nowadays. More than you could read in a lifetime, maybe.
But ... free time is expensive.
And ... being able to vote in the awards is expensive. Paying for the memberships that let you vote is expensive, and paying for those books and magazines and things, the ones on the longlists and shortlists -- the ones you can't get in libraries yet -- that's expensive.
Being able to participate in the conversation around the awards is expensive. Because if you're not voting, maybe you feel a bit stupid or poor or like a trespasser, hmm? You maybe get a smidge of imposter syndrome. Just a smidge. The smidges add up.
And the conventions. And the workshops.
The conventions are incredibly expensive! The workshops are incredibly expensive. Here are two great posts about the recent kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clarion West, the quasi-idiomatic expression "you want x, you NEED x" etc.: Ann Leckie's and JY Yang's.
JY Yang's is probably the more pertinent to this post. "[F]or somebody like me – living and working outside of the UK or US – different culture, different continent, different context – breaking into the SFF publishing scene, getting people to actually sit up and notice you, even getting better at your craft, is extremely. fucking. difficult." Yang talks about community. It's expensive to feel part of science fiction and fantasy.
It is expensive to visit the science fiction and fantasy Top of Mount Olympus, but there aren't too many other kinds of obstacle to getting there. You pay your money, you get on your Mount Olympus Funicular. For a lot of money, you can see, hear, touch -- I guess you shouldn't touch -- living legends. For a huge amount of money, you can have them read your stuff and suggest how to make it better. So long as you're not too picky about your living legend, one living legend or other should be available.
Part of the kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clairon West, etc., is probably driven by the suspicion that workshops like that don't just give you sound advice, they give you even sounder contacts. "Okay, so you're a good writer. There are a lot of good writers out there. There are a lot of good, hard-working writers out there. The ones that know how to network, the ones that can pay to get close to the big nodes ... they're the ones that succeed."
That's the suspicion, anyway. I don't really share it? Not that I have some kind of naive ideal about canons crystallizing according to pure merit, or anything. But I do suspect that there's a third thing, that isn't exactly instruction and isn't exactly networking, although it's a bit like both those things, that you get from something like Clarion West. Or get from a coffeeklatch with a living legend, or whatever. It's the anxiety and pleasure of community. I think we systematically underestimate its importance in shaping, strengthening, and projecting writing outward into the world. Writing is intimately entangled with pleasure, with jouissance. Writing is intimately entangled with community, and perhaps extra intimately entangled with provisional, fragile, hodgepodge, competitive, mercurial, anxious, disputed, and disputatious community.
2.
Anyway: science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the future. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the otherwise unimaginable alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to keep some kind of fragile candle-flame flickering through the dark times. And science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive.
Because it's expensive, it's elitist.
It directly selects against those on low incomes. It directly selects against those living in countries with comparatively weak currencies. It indirectly selects against those groups who tend to have low incomes, or who live in such countries.
(If you're lucky -- lucky? -- you live somewhere like where I live, and science fiction and fantasy has its free fringe).
I'm sure people way more knowledgeable than me have talked over these problems a zillion times. I know for a fact there are all kinds of practical initiatives that go some way to ameliorating them.
But I'm just wondering: is there some neglected low-hanging fruit here, ripe and ready to drop?
Maybe focusing on the feeling of inclusion, and the anxiety and pleasure of community, might make it a bit easier to improve accessibility?
If it has proved hard to extend the full shebang, to extend the full masterclass-from-a-living-legend, to every talented and hardworking writer who in some sense deserves it ... maybe it's easy to at least extend the feelings of inclusion and of community? Extend it a bit?
UPDATE: Elsewhere, Sunny Morraine writes eloquently on similar subjects. "[...] at least in SFF writerdom, there is really no meaningful distinction between friends and colleagues [...]" (Fuck, cons shouldn't be something people feel they have to go to, should they?)
3.
One way you feel included in something, if that something is something which is cyclical, is if you even have a chance of going to that something. A free lottery ticket, each time it comes round. And/or if you feel like someone who's a bit like you just did go to it. You didn't win, but the person who did reminds you of you.
"Didn't make it last year, or this year, but one year I might, and in the meanwhile, I still feel included. I still feel invested."
Or: "I could afford it that one time, and with my memories of that one time, plus my ritual of entering the lottery, I still feel part of this thing. Which creates all kinds of positive feedback loops and virtuous circles in my reading and my conversations and my writing."
So the guideline is: for any SFF-related thing that involves money, take a moment to pause and think, Is there some spare capacity here that we could give away for free? Is there some aspect that could be hived off and given to whoever's name gets pulled out of a hat?
4.
So for instance:
(1) Could Neil Gaiman and some of his friends figure out a way to make Clarion more accessible, at least for a temporary span of time? I have no idea what the economics of Clarion are, although I bet they're flexier than the folk in charge of them will tell you at first. But for instance, could an instructor (e.g. Neil Gaiman) waive a fee and instead sponsor a low income attendee?
(2) More low income pass lotteries for cons please. Every major con should have tickets that get handed out at random to applicants on low incomes. I'm talking about cramming in a few extra bodies that otherwise wouldn't be there at all.
(3) If it's financially feasible, some lotteries available to everyone too, regardless of income. The important thing is: lots and lots of lotteries, so the more you want to go somewhere, the more scrupulous and energetic you can be about throwing your name in every hat everywhere. Okay, it's not perfect, but "I won the lottery to go to LaserswordCon, help me raise travel and accommodation!" ain't a bad way to Kickstart something.
(4) Associations should also do free membership lotteries. The BSFA could probably do with a membership top-up. Promote the lottery hard, and you'll get a big pool of applicants, and instead of giving some existing member a free ride, you'll get a new member you never would have had in the first place. Maybe they'll stick around. Voting rights in particular: it makes hella sense to me to engage more widely by offering partial memberships that permit voting. The cost to the association could be literally zero (sorry, no paper ballots for lottery-route members).
(5) Magazines should do more lotteries for free digital subscriptions. This is probably less important.
(6) I've forgotten what this one was. More lotteries, probably. Oh, maybe it was more online stuff. Clarion West on an Open University / Khan Academy model? (But beware the risks of the latest round of cyberutopianism).
(7) I know the e"con"omics (pretty good joke huh) generally rule out giving volunteers a free pass, but could some volunteers get a free pass? Or first time volunteers get half price, kind of thing? I'm sure many cons already do this kind of thing.
(8) Errr ... and of course if there are ways of making paying cons and workshops and awards and things a little less central to the affairs of science fiction and fantasy in general, that might not be a bad thing. And if we do multiply the lotteries throughout the lands, we should take care not to use that Good Thing as an excuse to do Bad Things; the more privileged participants in science fiction and fantasy should take care never to use lotteries as an excuse to understate or neglect persistent patterns of marginalization, take care never to use them as a reason not to energetically engage with and promote the work of non-Western and other marginalized groups of writers.
(9) Aaaaaaand of course while all this is going on, it's necessary to step back from time to time and think about how thinking about fairness and finance in the fandom context may operate as a distraction from, or sublimation of, fairness and finance in the wider world.
(10) Masked Clarion. Compulsory masks. Clari-anon. Everybody foxes etc. Who went to Clarion? We all did.
* * *
PS: Con or Bust is taking requests for assistance from fans of colour from Feb 15-25.
PPS: I really like something JY's post touches on at the end. It isn't just about making the core more accessible to the periphery: it's about the possibility of developing the periphery, shedding the periphery-ness, making new, alternate cores. Basically it's also about sf and fantasy localism, about growing vibrant small press scenes that don't necessarily kowtow to whatever aesthetics and politics and whatever which dominate mainstream sf and fantasy and, even more importantly, which resist and/or transform co-option by the more progressive venues and institutions of mainstream sf and fantasy. Just as a quick comparison, for some reason basically all the even slightly good poetry in the UK is published predominantly by small and micro presses.
PPPS: I notice that this post falls into that genre of "x costs money. y costs money."-straight-talkin' type posts. I didn't mean to talk straight and I'm sorry.
PPPPS: Some aspiring writers should be discouraged! I wish somebody had discouraged me! But I haven't quite figured out yet how to tell them apart, the ones who should be discouraged and the ones who shouldn't. Just putting a big discouragement buffet out there for people to help themselves to usually just further marginalizes the marginalized (within this particular context, although being marginalized in one context may free you up to flourish in another, which is what makes this whole thing so tricky. Hmmm).
PPPPPS: I also have the quasi-rationalized superstition that social contact with the authors of texts can sharpen your reading of those texts in a way that is also by the way frequently fruitful in your writing, assuming you are cultivating them as an influence. The Death of the Death of the Author is basically a done deal from where I'm sitting. Btw I heard a fantastic neologism today: not autobiography but bioautography.
PPPPPPS: [To do: are there some general good tactics to adopt when you find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core? Lessons from poetry and/or activism maybe? Simple things: if there doesn't seem to be the constituency to support a genre writing night, start off with a music and comedy and genre writing and open mic night. Or if you don't find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core, then what practical measures can you take to support those who are? What can the sort-of-established editors and authors and publishers, who still aren't happy with what they're established in, do in order to provide real solidarity with and support to these more local and distributed sff efforts, without de-energizing / appropriating / undermining them?]
[Also to do: I sense that "writing," although that term needs interrogating, can really flourish at the moment that you withdraw yourself from a "community" -- and maybe that's not quite the right word either, if it's something that functions most powerfully at the moment of alienation. But yeah: writing obviously isn't really a lonely pursuit, and it obviously isn't a social pursuit either. It has a particular characteristic status in the dialectic of individual and collective, which I need to think about more carefully some time.]
PPPPPPPS: The bit about "hiving off aspects" of memberships / passes etc. does of course raise the question of a tiers, or a sense of being present or participating, but feeling second class. That's a real issue, although at the same time, it is probably something to be sensitive to and try to deal with, not something that renders the whole notion untenable. What's the alternative -- simply keeping the barriers to entry high, just so the people who can't make it at at all are saved the risk of feeling like they're hard done by or interlopers or deserve the full welcome pack or whatever dammit? And it's not as if those feels aren't in circulation already. My Night Nurse is kicking in big time rn.
Sunday, January 17, 2016
BSFA longlist
I haven't read that much short fiction on the BSFA longlist yet, but here are a few of my possibles:
Tim Maughan, "Special Economic Zone" (Medium)
Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space" (The New Inquiry)
Alyssa Wong, "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" (Nightmare)
Yoon Ha Lee, "Variations on Apple" (Tor.com)
Alix E. Harrow, "The Animal Women" (Strange Horizons)
May add to, or even subtract from this list.
Tim Maughan's probably isn't science fiction and it's definitely not a story. It's probably the most solid contender for me.
Yoon Ha Lee is one of the few writers whose language I feel actually deserves, at least intermittently, those common encomiums "rich" and perhaps "poetic" and perhaps even "lyrical." (Especially the more disintegratingly courtly and/or Metaphysical kinds of lyricism: Petrarch, Donne. Often prose described in these terms strikes me as a sleazy and linguistically predictable attempt to woo by introducing heightened straightforward sensuality -- and introducing it at every opportunity and in multiple dimensions (diction, prosody, subject matter). I am depraved and easily wooed and so it sort of works, but the hook-up is regrettable. Whereas Yoon Ha Lee's cryptic similes can actually assail the readerly nostril with the sickly-sweet reek of foundered courtships).
Sam Kriss's story has a brief appearance in my economic speculative fiction listicle.
Earlier:
BSFA's new nomination system
How to reform the Hugos
The best looks back at 2015 of 2015
Tim Maughan, "Special Economic Zone" (Medium)
Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space" (The New Inquiry)
Alyssa Wong, "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" (Nightmare)
Yoon Ha Lee, "Variations on Apple" (Tor.com)
Alix E. Harrow, "The Animal Women" (Strange Horizons)
May add to, or even subtract from this list.
Tim Maughan's probably isn't science fiction and it's definitely not a story. It's probably the most solid contender for me.
Yoon Ha Lee is one of the few writers whose language I feel actually deserves, at least intermittently, those common encomiums "rich" and perhaps "poetic" and perhaps even "lyrical." (Especially the more disintegratingly courtly and/or Metaphysical kinds of lyricism: Petrarch, Donne. Often prose described in these terms strikes me as a sleazy and linguistically predictable attempt to woo by introducing heightened straightforward sensuality -- and introducing it at every opportunity and in multiple dimensions (diction, prosody, subject matter). I am depraved and easily wooed and so it sort of works, but the hook-up is regrettable. Whereas Yoon Ha Lee's cryptic similes can actually assail the readerly nostril with the sickly-sweet reek of foundered courtships).
Sam Kriss's story has a brief appearance in my economic speculative fiction listicle.
Earlier:
BSFA's new nomination system
How to reform the Hugos
The best looks back at 2015 of 2015
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
BSFA noms
Just real quick: haven't fully checked out eligibility etc. but will probably nominate Sandra Newman, Country of Ice Cream Star, Adam Roberts, Rave & Let Die, Steve Aylett, Heart of the Original & others tba. Here is the list of suggestions (& here is where you can suggest eligible works).
Update: Oops, Ice Cream isn't actually eligible -- seems to have been published in 2014 in the UK and 2015 in the US. I wonder about the eligibility of Adam Roberts's The Thing Itself, which was published at the very end of 2015 but says it was published in 2016? (UPDATE: It's on the longlist). Also have fixed the AC Wise link, and this from Wise is a hella useful hub.
Update: Okay, I have to admit the BSFA process confused me a bit. I am easily confused. I think this is how it works, although I sound kind of paranoid and weird even to myself.
Suggestions and round one
There is a window for both suggestions and nominations from 1 September to 31 December. Anyone can suggest anything, so long as it is eligible. Suggestions are different from nominations. You don't have to be a BSFA member to suggest something. Suggestions basically go into a big crowdsourced eligibility list, which is this Googledoc spreadsheet. Updates are more-or-less live. You could suggest your own writing if you want to. You make these suggestions using this form.
At the same time as suggestions are being gathered, BSFA members can make up to four round one nominations in each category. This is done using the form at the bottom of this page. I assume (but I can't find anything to confirm it) that the output will be a longlist of all nominations received, in order of popularity. Perhaps it will also say exactly how many people nominated each work. (UPDATE: No, it's just a big list in alphabetical order).
Round two
Then, from 1 January to 31 January, BSFA members can vote for works on the longlist to determine what actually gets onto the ballot. I'm not sure how that works: perhaps each member has four unranked votes per category, or perhaps some other system. (UPDATE: yep, the four votes thing). I assume the output will be a ballot of five works per category (unless there are ties, and/or some of the most-nominated five works get fewer than the minimum of three second round votes each). The form and the instructions will appear when they are needed, on the same page which currently hosts the round one nominations form.
Voting
Then the shortlist is assembled for each categories, the ballots are sent out, and BSFA members have until Eastercon (in April) to vote using a ranked preference system.
If I have got it right, there are some things I quite like about it. It's useful to throw a wide net at the suggestions stage. Then seeing the slightly more filtered longlist might be productive and fun: if there are some much-nominated things you've never heard of, you've got enough time to check them out; if something absolutely fantastic has slipped onto the lower reaches, you might have time to hose everyone down with your zeal. (UPDATE: the first bit holds true, but not really the second bit, since it's not in order of popularity after all).
An obvious question is how it would stand up to Puppy-style slating etc., though the UK doesn't really do that, or school shootings, in quite the same way yet. While we're at it, here's my proposal for reforming the Hugos. Last year, when there was only one round of BSFA nominations, I suggested four nominations per member was too few: with a small membership, and diffuse voting in the short story category, only three stories got three or more nominations. (I think that's what happened). The tweaks this time round should go some way to fixing that, if people who nominated the lower reaches in round one generally drift toward the upper reaches in round two, or seriously drum up support for their original nominations. We'll see. Maybe Marine le Pen will do really well on the longlist, but not on the shortlist. (The BSFA don't seem to be using the word "longlist," so some of this may be wrong. (UPDATE: OK, now everyone's talking about the "longlist")).
tl;dr: I think I like the new system!
Update: I've already made my noms but it just occurred to me, too late, that maybe I should have nominated this post, by Édouard Brière-Allard, a fairly numbingly persnickety and studious response to Laura J. Mixon's even more numbingly persnickety and studious Hugo-winning take-down of the collected trolls and criticism of Requires Hate. Whatever you think of the controversy, or wherever you are placed in it, or whatever personal suffering you've -- oh Gawd, I can't really avoid bringing this up without having a Stance, can I? For what it's worth, I've no clue how to navigate the huge mass of claim and counterclaim, and I basically just tend to fall back on the heuristic that Requires Hate's politics feel far more sensible to me than what I reasonably presume Mixon's politics are, together with the presumption that the conflict was surely political as well as interpersonal and/or literary-critical and/or about "how you should treat people" -- the three of us should hang out and get to the bottom of it! -- so, whatever you think of the controversy, it's possible you might admire Brière-Allard's handling of the overblown and Grand-Guignol idiom of contemporary online social justice, and the bewilderment or bad faith in which it is frequently received by liberals, and his gently relentless dismantling of Mixon's scientism and tacit claims to objective systematicity. Of course, it's a sly piece too: because its own scientism can always be disavowed as a knowing, quasi-satiric pseudo-scientism. Anyway, like a lot of us, I was brought up to believe that you can always show any tacit claim to objective systematicity to be hooey, but I think Brière-Allard has gone ahead and done it here.
But I don't know? -- I guess the only good I can really imagine coming from Brière-Allard's piece sliding onto the BSFA longlist, or even the ballot shortlist, would be if it got a few more hits, but maybe not gazillions, and if the piece's getting mildly valorized were mediated through that fairly pervasive, though probably not pervasive enough, USian perception of British eccentricity, where that perception is intermixed with a vague suspicion that those Brits might just be onto something, with their Monty Python and their anarchism and their Grimes and their NHS, as well as with the concrete comfort that if they are onto something, it will never matter, because they will always insist on "communicating" it through the discursive equivalent of a post-supernova star collapsing in under its own gravity and, especially, its own awkwardness. Because if it weren't softened in some way, it might just be reviving old griefs and fanning the wrong kind of flames. Oh I'm just vice-signalling here basically. (UPDATE: it's on the longlist).
I'm a feminist, but the kind that only exists as defined by her relationships to the men in her life.
— Dystopian YA Novel (@DystopianYA) July 16, 2015
Might try to squeeze in some haphazard short fiction reading before the end of the year: AC Wise has a pretty intriguing looking list & Ethan Robinson looked at hundreds of stories in half the year. Nina Allan has some short sf recommendations and some great non-fiction recommendations (to which you should add something by Nina Allan).Update: Oops, Ice Cream isn't actually eligible -- seems to have been published in 2014 in the UK and 2015 in the US. I wonder about the eligibility of Adam Roberts's The Thing Itself, which was published at the very end of 2015 but says it was published in 2016? (UPDATE: It's on the longlist). Also have fixed the AC Wise link, and this from Wise is a hella useful hub.
Update: Okay, I have to admit the BSFA process confused me a bit. I am easily confused. I think this is how it works, although I sound kind of paranoid and weird even to myself.
Suggestions and round one
There is a window for both suggestions and nominations from 1 September to 31 December. Anyone can suggest anything, so long as it is eligible. Suggestions are different from nominations. You don't have to be a BSFA member to suggest something. Suggestions basically go into a big crowdsourced eligibility list, which is this Googledoc spreadsheet. Updates are more-or-less live. You could suggest your own writing if you want to. You make these suggestions using this form.
At the same time as suggestions are being gathered, BSFA members can make up to four round one nominations in each category. This is done using the form at the bottom of this page. I assume (but I can't find anything to confirm it) that the output will be a longlist of all nominations received, in order of popularity. Perhaps it will also say exactly how many people nominated each work. (UPDATE: No, it's just a big list in alphabetical order).
Round two
Then, from 1 January to 31 January, BSFA members can vote for works on the longlist to determine what actually gets onto the ballot. I'm not sure how that works: perhaps each member has four unranked votes per category, or perhaps some other system. (UPDATE: yep, the four votes thing). I assume the output will be a ballot of five works per category (unless there are ties, and/or some of the most-nominated five works get fewer than the minimum of three second round votes each). The form and the instructions will appear when they are needed, on the same page which currently hosts the round one nominations form.
Voting
Then the shortlist is assembled for each categories, the ballots are sent out, and BSFA members have until Eastercon (in April) to vote using a ranked preference system.
If I have got it right, there are some things I quite like about it. It's useful to throw a wide net at the suggestions stage. Then seeing the slightly more filtered longlist might be productive and fun: if there are some much-nominated things you've never heard of, you've got enough time to check them out; if something absolutely fantastic has slipped onto the lower reaches, you might have time to hose everyone down with your zeal. (UPDATE: the first bit holds true, but not really the second bit, since it's not in order of popularity after all).
An obvious question is how it would stand up to Puppy-style slating etc., though the UK doesn't really do that, or school shootings, in quite the same way yet. While we're at it, here's my proposal for reforming the Hugos. Last year, when there was only one round of BSFA nominations, I suggested four nominations per member was too few: with a small membership, and diffuse voting in the short story category, only three stories got three or more nominations. (I think that's what happened). The tweaks this time round should go some way to fixing that, if people who nominated the lower reaches in round one generally drift toward the upper reaches in round two, or seriously drum up support for their original nominations. We'll see. Maybe Marine le Pen will do really well on the longlist, but not on the shortlist. (The BSFA don't seem to be using the word "longlist," so some of this may be wrong. (UPDATE: OK, now everyone's talking about the "longlist")).
tl;dr: I think I like the new system!
Update: I've already made my noms but it just occurred to me, too late, that maybe I should have nominated this post, by Édouard Brière-Allard, a fairly numbingly persnickety and studious response to Laura J. Mixon's even more numbingly persnickety and studious Hugo-winning take-down of the collected trolls and criticism of Requires Hate. Whatever you think of the controversy, or wherever you are placed in it, or whatever personal suffering you've -- oh Gawd, I can't really avoid bringing this up without having a Stance, can I? For what it's worth, I've no clue how to navigate the huge mass of claim and counterclaim, and I basically just tend to fall back on the heuristic that Requires Hate's politics feel far more sensible to me than what I reasonably presume Mixon's politics are, together with the presumption that the conflict was surely political as well as interpersonal and/or literary-critical and/or about "how you should treat people" -- the three of us should hang out and get to the bottom of it! -- so, whatever you think of the controversy, it's possible you might admire Brière-Allard's handling of the overblown and Grand-Guignol idiom of contemporary online social justice, and the bewilderment or bad faith in which it is frequently received by liberals, and his gently relentless dismantling of Mixon's scientism and tacit claims to objective systematicity. Of course, it's a sly piece too: because its own scientism can always be disavowed as a knowing, quasi-satiric pseudo-scientism. Anyway, like a lot of us, I was brought up to believe that you can always show any tacit claim to objective systematicity to be hooey, but I think Brière-Allard has gone ahead and done it here.
But I don't know? -- I guess the only good I can really imagine coming from Brière-Allard's piece sliding onto the BSFA longlist, or even the ballot shortlist, would be if it got a few more hits, but maybe not gazillions, and if the piece's getting mildly valorized were mediated through that fairly pervasive, though probably not pervasive enough, USian perception of British eccentricity, where that perception is intermixed with a vague suspicion that those Brits might just be onto something, with their Monty Python and their anarchism and their Grimes and their NHS, as well as with the concrete comfort that if they are onto something, it will never matter, because they will always insist on "communicating" it through the discursive equivalent of a post-supernova star collapsing in under its own gravity and, especially, its own awkwardness. Because if it weren't softened in some way, it might just be reviving old griefs and fanning the wrong kind of flames. Oh I'm just vice-signalling here basically. (UPDATE: it's on the longlist).
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Obligatory Eligibility Post
In 2015 I authored the following Hugo-eligible listicles, playlists and thought lists:
Top Ten Meta-Meta Listicle Entries of 2015
Top Ten Just in Case You Know this Isn't Real Right of 2015
Top Ten Utopias It Would Just Be Okay but Nothing Special to Go Live in of 2015
Top Ten Titles that Look Really Weird if You Lowercase All Articles, Conjunctions and Prepositions of 2015
Ten Unbelievable Hexes which these High Fantasy Authors ACTUALLY Predicted! of 2015
Top Ten Indistinguishabilities of Magic and Technology of 2015
The Ten Least Influential SF Writers of 2015
Top Ten Republican Presidential Candidates of 2016 of 2015
Top Ten Recommended This Actual Specific Blog This One My Own Blog The One Called Aaaargh Or Something of 2015
Greatest Ten Popes of 2015
Top Ten Algae Bear Batchelards of 2015
Best Ten BristolCons of 2015
Greatest LonCon 2014 of 2015
Top Ten Animals That It Would Be Great If They Came Up To Bernie Sanders In A Rally Sometime Next Year of 2015
Greatest Ten Bristols of 2015
Top Infinite Ook Vloggers of 2015
Top Ten Glitterbombed Bards of 2015
Top Ten "Did You See Which Way That Elf Ran? / You're Only Lying To Yourself Fam"s of 2015
Recommended Greatest Ten Proposed Hugo Awards Nomination Systems of 2014 You Have to Try of 2015
Recommended Top Ten Interzones of 2015
Recommended Top Ten Tor.coms of 2015
Recommended Top Tentacles of 2015
Greatest Ever Ten Flights of Rapturous Passion Formally Arranged as Debunking of Thomas Piketty of 2015 of all time of 2015
Top Ten of Some Thing it is Hard to Imagine Experiencing More than about Ten Instances of During a Single Year of 2015
Top Ten NaNoWriMos no not a Book Written Then the Actual Month Itself Top Ten of Those in 2015
Top Ten Non-Complications of Sexual Consent of 2015
Top Ten No-Longer-Honored Racist Heads of 2015
Top Ten Remember Poetry of 2015
Top Ten Books of 2015 that were Published after Final Top Ten Books of 2015 List Was Finally Finalized
Top Ten Somewhat Quick Attribution of Trollhoods of 2015
Greatest Ten Suffixes for Troll to Suggest in One Word the State of Being a Troll of 2015
Top Ten Identity Characteristics Excluding Economic Class of 2015
Top Ten Nuggets of News Discovered in Actual Mainstream Newspapers like Some Kind of Ultra-Rare Drop Items in Some Kind of MMORPG of 2015
Top Ten Cory Doctorows of 2015
Best Ten Women Writers (plus one bonus fella-legion!) of 2015
Top Ten Twelve Tomorrowses 2016 with Only Eleven Tomorrows in Them of 2015
Best Ten Movies of 2015
Top Ten Names of ISIS in 2015
Ten Unmissable Trojan Relatabilities of 2015
Top Ten Elif Batumans of 2015
Top Ten Jules Verne Diesels of 2015
Top Ten Purposeless Advisory Nuggets from a Suctionless Nan of 2015
Favorite Ten Liberticides of 2015
Top Ten Small Back Gardens whose Most Rotting Qualities Strike Your Heart in a Moment of Generalized Sensory Derangement as a Kind of "Blossoming" of "Winter Foliage" this "Winter Foliage" Comprising Mud and Desiccated but Soaking Plant Matter of 2015
Top Ten Non-Twitters of 2015
Top Ten Forrealthoughs of 2015
Ten Unmissable Social Atomizations of 2015
Top Ten Neutropic Noons of 2015
Greatest Ten Handfuls of Nuts before Morning Ketamine Yoga of 2015
Top Ten Newmans of 2015
Greatest Ten Netflix Passwords of 2015 of All Time
Top Ten Views of the Time of 2015
Unbeatable Ten Named Unnameables of 2015
Favorite Ten Groups of Ten Steve Ayletts for a Total of One Hundred Steve Ayletts of 2015
All Georg Simmels Ranked from Best to Worst of 2015
Top Ten Cis Clinaman of 2015
Top Ten Lone Wolf Shooters of 2015
Top Ten Lives that Mattered in 2015
Most Perfect Ten Complete Gene Sequencing of a Micro-Aggression of 2015
Top Ten Youtube Videos that You I Found Funnier than Anything I Had Ever Experienced in my Life and Yet Still Somehow not Funny Enough for the Person who was Showing them to Me in 2015
Top Ten Terry Pratchetts of 2015
Top Ten Father Goroits Joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015 of 2015
Top Ten Qualities of 2015
Top Ten Unaccountable Euphorias of 2015
Top Ten Mortality Mornings of 2015
Best Ten Sepp Blatters of 2015
Top Ten Totally Bizarre Reviews Written by Me whose Deformations are Partly Attributable to an Exponentially Growing and Ratcheting Fear of Spoilers and whose Subjects' Authors are Moreover Almost Certainly Talking about Even the Most Unarguable of those Spoilers to their Vast Fanbases by way of Promotional Activity on Social Media at this Very Moment
Best Ten Carious Unicorns Predicted by Charlie Stross in Equiod That Actually Came True! of 2016
Top Ten Storybundles Curated by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer Featuring Among Others Berit Ellingsen and a Bestiary with Like China Mievelle of 2015
Top Ten Start-Ups Whose Idea is that Storybundle Could be Unbundled of 2015 of Dune of 2015
Best Ten Black Vein Votives of 2015
Top Ten China Mievelles of 2015
Top Ten This is When I Admit I Always Do the Acute Accent by Copy-Pasting it of 2015
Best Ten Recommended Books I Loved this Year about a Laseriferous Organelle Cocked in a Beneficent 3-Dimensionally Convex Dalek like a Little Hatching Sun in Hammock Slingshot of 2015
Top Ten OK I Don't Know Much About China Mievelle but I Did Really Really Like The City & The City & Perdito Street Station and he is a Trotskyist or at Least Leftist in Some Way but also Someone I Can't Remember Who But I Think it Was Someone whose Judgment I Trust in Such Matters Did Mention he was Problematic for Some Reason I Can't Really Remember Either so a Balanced Attitude for me to Take Given All That Is Probably to Pretty Much Contemptuously Refuse to Spell his Name Properly from Now On at Least till he Clears this Whole Thing up of 2015
Top Ten Pig Ceremonies of 2015
Top Nine Tens of 2015
Top Ten Medical Humanities of 2015
Top Ten Powers of Storytelling of 2015
Best Ten People Getting Healed by a Kind of Misunderstanding of 2015
Favorite Ten Twitters of 2015
Top Ten Grout Crystal Klout Gris-Gris of 2015
Top Ten Landscaping Change a Series of Talks, Art, Poetry, Free Wine and More Here in Bristol the Next One Being 10 December on the Theme of "Route!" of 2015
Top Ten Favorite Ideas that the Idea is Being Creative of 2015
Top Ten Raptures of Relaxation Upon Realizing How Prohibitively High the Level of Labor Required to in Good Conscience Offer an even Tentative Semi-Informed Opinion upon Some Subject of Some Pretty Serious Moment of 2015
Top Ten Contexts of 2015
Top Ten Bit Lips of 2015
Top Ten Vin Diesel Natural 20 Critical Hits of 2015
Greatest Ten Busted Superviral Satires of 2015
Top Ten Simple Laughs With Which a Seraph Fell Tremblingly Apart in 2015
Best Ten Microscopic Gills Seething on the Sensual Margin of 2015
Best Ten Bad Sex Awards of 2015
Best Ten Bad Love Awards of 2015
Top Ten a Man
Top Ten a Face
Top Ten a Bus
Top Ten Climate Chaos
Top Ten Credit
Top Ten War
As these were all published in qualifying markets, mostly National Geographic in the Murdoch era, I would appreciate if you would consider them for nomination!
Top Ten Meta-Meta Listicle Entries of 2015
Top Ten Just in Case You Know this Isn't Real Right of 2015
Top Ten Utopias It Would Just Be Okay but Nothing Special to Go Live in of 2015
Top Ten Titles that Look Really Weird if You Lowercase All Articles, Conjunctions and Prepositions of 2015
Ten Unbelievable Hexes which these High Fantasy Authors ACTUALLY Predicted! of 2015
Top Ten Indistinguishabilities of Magic and Technology of 2015
The Ten Least Influential SF Writers of 2015
Top Ten Republican Presidential Candidates of 2016 of 2015
Top Ten Recommended This Actual Specific Blog This One My Own Blog The One Called Aaaargh Or Something of 2015
Greatest Ten Popes of 2015
Top Ten Algae Bear Batchelards of 2015
Best Ten BristolCons of 2015
Greatest LonCon 2014 of 2015
Top Ten Animals That It Would Be Great If They Came Up To Bernie Sanders In A Rally Sometime Next Year of 2015
Greatest Ten Bristols of 2015
Top Infinite Ook Vloggers of 2015
Top Ten Glitterbombed Bards of 2015
Top Ten "Did You See Which Way That Elf Ran? / You're Only Lying To Yourself Fam"s of 2015
Recommended Greatest Ten Proposed Hugo Awards Nomination Systems of 2014 You Have to Try of 2015
Recommended Top Ten Interzones of 2015
Recommended Top Ten Tor.coms of 2015
Recommended Top Tentacles of 2015
Greatest Ever Ten Flights of Rapturous Passion Formally Arranged as Debunking of Thomas Piketty of 2015 of all time of 2015
Top Ten of Some Thing it is Hard to Imagine Experiencing More than about Ten Instances of During a Single Year of 2015
Top Ten NaNoWriMos no not a Book Written Then the Actual Month Itself Top Ten of Those in 2015
Top Ten Non-Complications of Sexual Consent of 2015
Top Ten No-Longer-Honored Racist Heads of 2015
Top Ten Remember Poetry of 2015
Top Ten Books of 2015 that were Published after Final Top Ten Books of 2015 List Was Finally Finalized
Top Ten Somewhat Quick Attribution of Trollhoods of 2015
Greatest Ten Suffixes for Troll to Suggest in One Word the State of Being a Troll of 2015
Top Ten Identity Characteristics Excluding Economic Class of 2015
Top Ten Nuggets of News Discovered in Actual Mainstream Newspapers like Some Kind of Ultra-Rare Drop Items in Some Kind of MMORPG of 2015
Top Ten Cory Doctorows of 2015
Best Ten Women Writers (plus one bonus fella-legion!) of 2015
Top Ten Twelve Tomorrowses 2016 with Only Eleven Tomorrows in Them of 2015
Best Ten Movies of 2015
Top Ten Names of ISIS in 2015
Ten Unmissable Trojan Relatabilities of 2015
Top Ten Elif Batumans of 2015
Top Ten Jules Verne Diesels of 2015
Top Ten Purposeless Advisory Nuggets from a Suctionless Nan of 2015
Favorite Ten Liberticides of 2015
Top Ten Small Back Gardens whose Most Rotting Qualities Strike Your Heart in a Moment of Generalized Sensory Derangement as a Kind of "Blossoming" of "Winter Foliage" this "Winter Foliage" Comprising Mud and Desiccated but Soaking Plant Matter of 2015
Top Ten Non-Twitters of 2015
Top Ten Forrealthoughs of 2015
Ten Unmissable Social Atomizations of 2015
Top Ten Neutropic Noons of 2015
Greatest Ten Handfuls of Nuts before Morning Ketamine Yoga of 2015
Top Ten Newmans of 2015
Greatest Ten Netflix Passwords of 2015 of All Time
Top Ten Views of the Time of 2015
Unbeatable Ten Named Unnameables of 2015
Favorite Ten Groups of Ten Steve Ayletts for a Total of One Hundred Steve Ayletts of 2015
All Georg Simmels Ranked from Best to Worst of 2015
Top Ten Cis Clinaman of 2015
Top Ten Lone Wolf Shooters of 2015
Top Ten Lives that Mattered in 2015
Most Perfect Ten Complete Gene Sequencing of a Micro-Aggression of 2015
Top Ten Youtube Videos that You I Found Funnier than Anything I Had Ever Experienced in my Life and Yet Still Somehow not Funny Enough for the Person who was Showing them to Me in 2015
Top Ten Terry Pratchetts of 2015
Top Ten Father Goroits Joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015 of 2015
Top Ten Qualities of 2015
Top Ten Unaccountable Euphorias of 2015
Top Ten Mortality Mornings of 2015
Best Ten Sepp Blatters of 2015
Top Ten Totally Bizarre Reviews Written by Me whose Deformations are Partly Attributable to an Exponentially Growing and Ratcheting Fear of Spoilers and whose Subjects' Authors are Moreover Almost Certainly Talking about Even the Most Unarguable of those Spoilers to their Vast Fanbases by way of Promotional Activity on Social Media at this Very Moment
Best Ten Carious Unicorns Predicted by Charlie Stross in Equiod That Actually Came True! of 2016
Top Ten Storybundles Curated by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer Featuring Among Others Berit Ellingsen and a Bestiary with Like China Mievelle of 2015
Top Ten Start-Ups Whose Idea is that Storybundle Could be Unbundled of 2015 of Dune of 2015
Best Ten Black Vein Votives of 2015
Top Ten China Mievelles of 2015
Top Ten This is When I Admit I Always Do the Acute Accent by Copy-Pasting it of 2015
Best Ten Recommended Books I Loved this Year about a Laseriferous Organelle Cocked in a Beneficent 3-Dimensionally Convex Dalek like a Little Hatching Sun in Hammock Slingshot of 2015
Top Ten OK I Don't Know Much About China Mievelle but I Did Really Really Like The City & The City & Perdito Street Station and he is a Trotskyist or at Least Leftist in Some Way but also Someone I Can't Remember Who But I Think it Was Someone whose Judgment I Trust in Such Matters Did Mention he was Problematic for Some Reason I Can't Really Remember Either so a Balanced Attitude for me to Take Given All That Is Probably to Pretty Much Contemptuously Refuse to Spell his Name Properly from Now On at Least till he Clears this Whole Thing up of 2015
Top Ten Pig Ceremonies of 2015
Top Nine Tens of 2015
Top Ten Medical Humanities of 2015
Top Ten Powers of Storytelling of 2015
Best Ten People Getting Healed by a Kind of Misunderstanding of 2015
Favorite Ten Twitters of 2015
Top Ten Grout Crystal Klout Gris-Gris of 2015
Top Ten Landscaping Change a Series of Talks, Art, Poetry, Free Wine and More Here in Bristol the Next One Being 10 December on the Theme of "Route!" of 2015
Top Ten Favorite Ideas that the Idea is Being Creative of 2015
Top Ten Raptures of Relaxation Upon Realizing How Prohibitively High the Level of Labor Required to in Good Conscience Offer an even Tentative Semi-Informed Opinion upon Some Subject of Some Pretty Serious Moment of 2015
Top Ten Contexts of 2015
Top Ten Bit Lips of 2015
Top Ten Vin Diesel Natural 20 Critical Hits of 2015
Greatest Ten Busted Superviral Satires of 2015
Top Ten Simple Laughs With Which a Seraph Fell Tremblingly Apart in 2015
Best Ten Microscopic Gills Seething on the Sensual Margin of 2015
Best Ten Bad Sex Awards of 2015
Best Ten Bad Love Awards of 2015
Top Ten a Man
Top Ten a Face
Top Ten a Bus
Top Ten Climate Chaos
Top Ten Credit
Top Ten War
As these were all published in qualifying markets, mostly National Geographic in the Murdoch era, I would appreciate if you would consider them for nomination!
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