Ahem.

I objected to Jason Sanford’s podcast about the fanzine Hugos because it went straight from lauding Ansible and File 770 as great paper fanzines to claiming that Electric Velocipede was the first Hugo winner to be published primarily online. I was annoyed mainly because I had spent much of the day on Maura McHugh’s complaint about SFX ignoring women horror writers, and Jason’s podcast appeared to do the same sort of thing.

I do not claim (and hopefully never have claimed) that Emerald City was the first fanzine to have any online presence. Indeed, as Colin Hinz rightly pointed out, Ansible was available online long before I started Emerald City. I should also note that Teresa Nielsen Hayden was nominated for Best Fan Writer in 1991, as I understand it on the strength of writing she did in newsgroups.

There was a huge amount of hair-splitting that went on when I was running Emerald City regarding what was an acceptable online presence and what wasn’t, and basically that boiled down to anything Dave did online was OK, and anything I did wasn’t. (Dave, bless him, declined to get involved in this nonsense.) And that tells us something important about “format wars”. When it comes down to it, they are often not about formats at all. They are also about who is considered “part of our community” and who isn’t.

Anyway, I’m pleased to see Mike Glyer lauding Dave Langford as a great Hero of the Online Revolution. After all, Mike was firmly against the changes in the Hugo Award rules that made it explicit (rather than implicit) that ‘zines like Star Ship Sofa were eligible in Best Fanzine. In a post worthy of Faux News, Mike raised the specter of the fanzine Hugo being overrun by hordes of slavering, ignorant web readers who would put io9.com, SyFy.com and Tor.com onto the fanzine ballot. Hopefully, if Star Ship Sofa does make it onto the ballot, Mike will be too relieved to object.

The question of podcasts and the Hugos is continuing to generate a certain amount of heat around the blogosphere (see here, here and here, for example). Much of this is due, I think, to misunderstanding.

With regard to the actual rules, WSFS has come down very firmly on the side of saying that it is the content that matters, not the medium of delivery. So a fanzine can be published in hectograph, mimeo, photocopy, email, as a web site, as a podcast or on YouTube. What matters is that it is a periodical produced by fans for the SF community. If Chris Garcia took to standing up in a bar in San José once a month and talking about his favorite SF movies he could class that as a fanzine (and now I have suggested it of course he’ll do it.)

We (collectively) came to this decision because we realized that the alternative was madness: ever-proliferating categories as different media all demanded their own fanzine category; and the same for fiction as well.

However, different media do tend to appeal to different groups of fans. Some fans prefer paper fanzines; some love LiveJournal; some read blogs more widely; some mainly read online fiction magazines such as Electric Velocipede; others listen to podcasts. There is overlap, but not sufficient overlap to stop people going “who? what???” when something like EV or Star Ship Sofa gets mentioned in the context of the Hugos. There’s a tendency amongst some fans, particularly old-time fanzine fans, to mutter that these fancy newcomers are “not part of our community” and will be “single issue voters” who care nothing about the Hugos and Worldcon except for getting a rocket for their favorite web site or personality.

Sometimes that might be true. I’ve certainly seen people yelling about how unfair the Hugos are who know nothing about them and really don’t care much either. I don’t think that’s the case with Star Ship Sofa. Last year Tony Smith had a whole load of people reporting for him at the Montréal Worldcon. In the archives you can hear Amy Sturgis (also here), Gord Sellar, John Joseph Adams, Kate Baker (also here on the Hugos and here interviewing Neil Clarke). Tony has also podcast a number of Hugo-winning short stories, including last year’s winner, Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoths in Bloom”. In other words, Tony and his team put as much effort into covering last year’s Worldcon as I did. And they did that without any expectation of glory because up until recently they had no idea that they might be eligible for a Hugo. That, to my mind, makes Star Ship Sofa very much part of the Worldcon community.

The campaign (and I use that word advisedly) to get a Hugo nomination for Star Ship Sofa is very interesting. Goodness only knows what would have happened to me had I done the same sort of thing for Emerald City 10 years ago, but times do change. Personally I’m delighted that the podcast fanzine community wants to get Hugo recognition, rather than carping about how unfair the process is as other people have done. I’m also very pleased to see different types of fannish activity getting spotlighted.

If your taste runs to more traditional fanzines, however, I warmly recommend Journey Planet. Issue #5 has recently been published, and includes a whole bunch of guest articles by people like Jon Courtenay-Grimwood, John Scalzi, Edward James and Paul McAuley. It is an alternate history special.

And finally, getting back to diversity again, a new issue of Yipe!, the costuming fanzine, has just been published. Sadly Yipe! appears to only have produced 3 issues by the end of 2009, making it ineligible for Best Fanzine in Melbourne. Next year, however, it will definitely be on my ballot.