Hugo award controversy
Apr. 15th, 2015 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dbskylerI'm surprised that I haven't seen more about what's currently happening with the Hugo awards on LJ, but then again, I'm not exactly "hooked in." Anyway, I thought I'd share this article for the benefit of those who might be as clueless as myself. The whole thing raises some important issues, not only for the Hugos but for fandom:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1376743/-Freeping-the-Hugo-Awards
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1376743/-Freeping-the-Hugo-Awards
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(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 04:58 am (UTC)This will be my first year as a member of the Worldcon voting membership. Not a great start by some measures, but that's how it goes. (Fortunately, the existing voting protocols make it easy to designate No Award as a higher contender than the Rabid Weasels.)
The bright spot is that, if I understand it correctly, I also get to send in nominations for next year, which will be a chance to focus on supporting the Good Guys instead of fighting the slime monsters.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 06:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 04:05 pm (UTC)Glad to hear you'll be sending in nominations next year. It sounds like wider participation in the nomination process is the best way of preventing this from happening again.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 04:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 08:31 pm (UTC)Basically, participation in the Hugo process -- nominations and voting -- is one of the things that you get as a member of the World Science Fiction Society. The $40 is your annual dues, a supporting membership. If you want to attend the annual convention of the WSFS, at which the awards will be presented and much other fannish stuff will occur, you have to get a different level of membership -- an attending membership -- since you're now part of the group on whose behalf the physical convention space must be rented. There's a strong effort to keep the supporting membership cost as low as possible, so it will be economically accessible to as many people as possible.
Unfortunately, the nomination phase has always been horribly skimpy in participation. There's been a strong tendency to say, "Oh, I'll wait until the people who read everything draw up the list of finalists, and then I'll read the good stuff." I hope that this mess has finally killed that complacency, or at least stunned it into a short-term coma. The result was, to me, very familiar: this is not the first or even the fourth small group I've seen get inundated with jackasses who quickly dragged the group down into ruin. It doesn't take that many haters to poison a small pool of participants, and haters tend to have a lot of energy for their hate.
In recent years (largely due to Scalzi, as it happens), much of the Hugo-nominated material has been made available in electronic form, for free, as a membership perk that is supposed to make voting less of a challenge. For about the first 65 years, you had to buy the works or get them from the library if you wanted to read any items on the slate that you didn't already own. No guesses as to what will happen this time: I suspect that the Hugo committee won't bother to assemble a reading packet at all. It's a great deal of work even in a good year, and will be a particularly nasty project this year. (Actually, I do have a guess: the Rabid Weasels will probably put together a Special Snowflake packet of their slate only. Since there's very little on the ballot that isn't their slate, it won't be too difficult to read what's left.)
For more information on what this is actually about (because it is not about who deserves an industry award, it's about the bullies trying to kick holes in the clubhouse walls and roof because the chicks got in), here are a few of the key blog posts:
Old Men Yelling At Clouds
The Swimming Club
Twelve Rabid Weasels
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-16 08:37 pm (UTC)In a nutshell: straight white homophobic racists just aren't getting nominated for Hugos. Instead, many of the same people get lots of nominations, and they're all progressives. Therefore, the Hugo Awards are:
1) not important, because straight white guys don't control them
2) really not important, because they're controlled by the SJW cabal that is out to castrate straight white guys and eat their brains
3) very important, and the straight white guys must rescue them
This is not multiple choice: all these things are simultaneously true. This crap comes from the same cesspit as the MRA types, and Gamergate. They didn't need to get people to join their cause: they already had the troops. There's a lot of crazy online.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-17 05:26 am (UTC)I was trying to read through George R. R. Martin's blog posts about it. This post is especially interesting and disheartening:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/421363.html
I hope he's wrong.
o noes, another long answer!
Date: 2015-04-17 09:39 pm (UTC)My belief is that the Rabid Weasels pretty much shot their wad when they rigged the nominations. There has, indeed, been a flood of new memberships, and a good deal of discussion about that. Many people, like me, have quietly acknowledged that we've done so as an anti-weasel defense.
I've seen some number-crunching that reaches the cautious conclusion that the same bias that helped the freepers during the nominating -- the fact that general nominations were dispersed, and theirs were concentrated -- is now likely to work against them. Unless they decide on a "Superpuppy" slate, and get ALL their lackeys to vote exactly the same way, they're at a severe disadvantage against the general voters, who ARE strongly motivated to vote a unified slate (that is, No Award for all Weasel nominees).
Their very success is now a problem: in most categories, anyone who doesn't want to vote for a Weasel candidate has, at most, two other options. Meanwhile, the Weasel minions have full slates, up to five possibilities in each category. In at least one, they've got more than one work by the same guy.
A funny thing I learned about white supremacists when I was doing research for fic: they have difficulty in unifying and staying unified. They can form short-terms mobs and head in the same general direction, but as soon as someone tries to anoint himself a Great Leader and tell everyone to do a specific thing (such as move to Idaho), pushback sets in. There is no single Tea Party organization; there are hundreds of little groups, each one its own empire.
Torgerson and his minions are already falling into pity-parties over their sudden unpopularity, and trying to simultaneously backpedal from Vox Day while keeping hold of the presumed voting power of his minions, who have always been more noisy than numerous. I don't see them pulling off a single-point vote. I also don't see them keeping the stuff off the fan and pulling it off next year, especially since the Hugo administrators are likely to implement some additional controls to make it more difficult. (Limits on the number of items a single member can nominate, expansion of the short list from five items to seven or more, etc.)
Last year, the voting membership rallied against the slate, and the result was a massive ass-kicking. I think there's a good chance that will happen again this year.
The Hugos will survive this. There have always been political struggles in the SF community; I don't think this will be the last. It might not even be the ugliest.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-18 01:07 pm (UTC)Re: o noes, another long answer!
Date: 2015-04-20 06:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-20 06:06 am (UTC)Re: o noes, another long answer!
Date: 2015-04-20 12:32 pm (UTC)Re: o noes, another long answer!
Date: 2015-04-20 08:05 pm (UTC)author, author!
Date: 2015-04-21 02:02 am (UTC)One lovely item from his comments:
this isn’t the demolition of a childhood landmark; it’s graffiti. It can be cleaned off and the landmark can continue on. It just takes people getting in there and scrubbing.
At this point, three entries from the Rabid Weasels slate (two written works and one website) have withdrawn from their nominations, acts greeted with general praise and acclaim (and, in each case, a minority response from the assholes of YOU COWARDS YOU'RE A DISGRACE DIE). This is apparently now being called "Acing the Kobayashi Maru test for authors".
Missy tells me that GRRM, against my own expectations, has been saying all the right things and generally being entirely admirable about the issue, so I'm going to have to let go of at least part of my knee-jerk negativity about him. I think this is a Fine Thing! Finding myself to have been wrong about ugly crap is a wonderful mistake to have corrected. *g*
Re: author, author!
Date: 2015-04-23 07:19 am (UTC)