Yesterday saw the first session of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. One of the issues due to be raised was the decision by the Mark Protection Committee (MPC) to ban me from serving on it, or any of its subcommittees, unless I agreed to decline any Hugo nominations I might receive. Allegedly being on those committees gave me an unfair advantage in the awards, with the implication that my wins in 2009 and 2010 had been unfairly obtained.

Well, a number of WSFS regulars were concerned that the MPC was over-reaching its remit here. They argued that the MPC had no right to decide who was eligible for a Hugo and who was not. Johnny Carruthers and Chris Barkley brought a resolution to yesterday’s meeting ordering the MPC to rescind the policy. This was the first step towards clearing my name.

Somewhat to our surprise, Johnny and Chris faced a new hurdle before they could bring their resolution to the floor. The chair of the meeting, Don Eastlake, ruled it unconstitutional.

To understand that you have to get to the real issue that was being debated here. In order to justify kicking me off the committee, the MPC had to attest that it did indeed have the right to set policy regarding Hugo eligibility. (And indeed if it had that right, I should not be on the committee.) Eastlake’s argument was that not only did the MPC have the right to decide who was eligible for Hugos, but that the Business Meeting had no right to overturn their decisions. He was, in effect, arguing that the MPC was an elected Board of Directors for WSFS that could adopt whatever policies it liked. The only way to change those policies would be to elect different people to the MPC and hope they adopted different policies.

I have no idea why Don took this line. Possibly he wanted to make the enormity of the power grab that the MPC members were making very clear to the meeting. Had his ruling been sustained, he would have fundamentally changed the nature of WSFS democracy. Maybe he wanted that decision on record. But equally by ruling that way he ensured that Johnny and Chris’s motion needed not just an ordinary majority, but a 2/3 super-majority in order to progress, that being the requirement for sustaining a challenge to the chair. It is hard not to see his action as yet another piece of parliamentary trickery intended to stifle debate on a contentious issue.

Update: Kevin has been in touch to tell me that my memory of debate rules is fault, and only an ordinary majority is required to overturn a chair’s ruling. So apologies to Don on that one, and I really do not know why he took that position.

Fortunately we had Kevin on our side. He was able to bring forward numerous examples of past occasions when the MPC had taken direction from the Business Meeting, thereby establishing precedent for the MPC being subservient to the BM. Also the regular BM attendees are an independent-minded lot. The thought of having their authority taken away from them was more than sufficient to rouse them to action. The chair’s ruling was rejected, and Johnny & Chris’s motion went on to pass.

That wasn’t necessarily the end of it. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it is perfectly consistent to believe that the MPC had no right to adopt such a policy, but still believe that the policy was a good one and should be imposed by the BM. A Constitutional Amendment to that effect had been proposed, and was due to be debated today. However, Chris raised an Objection to Consideration motion against it and the BM, having decided that they had discussed the issue quite enough already, backed him.

So the good news is that I’m in the clear. Any insinuations of improper conduct on my part have been disposed of. Where we go from here is not clear. I need to talk to Kevin about it, and it will depend to a certain extent on who gets elected to the MPC today. There are 8 people vying for 4 places. I note that Mark Olson and Stephen Boucher were among the people who took action against me in Australia, and Kate Kligman was one of the backers of the motion to write that action into the WSFS Constitution this year. So if I were in Reno I know who I would not be voting for.

That was by no means all of the business that got done yesterday. The meeting also had to cope with some complex drafting issues arising from multiple motions on similar topics. The first set of motions were all about removing podcasts and video from the Fanzine category of the Hugos. To some extent this is a bit like the people who claimed that Emerald City was not a proper fanzine because it was published electronically rather than on paper. There is, however, a crucial difference, in that these motions do not seek to ban productions such as Star Ship Sofa from the Hugos. Instead they argue that the skills necessary to produce a podcast or video are fundamentally different to those required to produce written words, and that a separate category is required. Many fan awards around the world already make this distinction. The people behind the various motions have apparently come to an agreement on a common approach. I’ll be interested to see how this goes today.

The other major drafting issue surrounded the semiprozine committee’s report. I talked more about this here. There were, as of yesterday morning, two proposals that actively conflict with the committee’s recommendations. One of the fanzine motions contained wording that, I think inadvertently, would make all professional magazines — such as Asimov’s and F&SF — eligible for semiprozine. If this was a mistake, hopefully it has been corrected.

Still extant, however, is Ben Yalow’s attempt to wreck the semiprozine committee proposal by defining any paying market as professional, thereby ensuring that almost no magazines will be eligible as semiprozines, and allowing Ben to then argue that the category is not needed. That one will certainly come to the floor of the BM today. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Neil Clarke in attempting to deal with it.

There was one other decision that the BM took yesterday that I’d like to talk about. There was a Constitutional Amendment pending proposing the creation of a Hugo Award category for YA books. This too got the Objection to Consideration treatment, and therefore will not be discussed today. I have my reservations about the proposal, but it is one with a lot of support in the community and I think it was wrong for the BM not to allow the issues to be openly debated.

Anyway, my deepest thanks to Johnny, Chris and Kevin for their efforts on my behalf, and also to everyone who supported them with speeches and votes. Kevin has the video of the meeting available here if you want to see what went on.

Another issue that will come up for debate at this year’s WSFS Business Meeting was last year’s decision by the Mark Protection Committee (MPC) to bar me from working for the Hugo Award Marketing Committee (HAMC). The excuse given for this is that by working for the committee I was at an unfair advantage in the Hugo Awards (and by implication the Hugos won by myself, in 2009, and Clarkesworld, in 2010, had been won unfairly). However, this excuse is such a transparent fabrication that I am in no doubt that it was aimed squarely at getting rid of me, and casting doubt on my Hugo wins. Let’s take a closer look at what is involved.

First of all, what is this work that I was doing that gave me this unfair advantage? Well, I built and maintained the official Hugo Award website. That was largely an administrative job. I made a point of not signing posts with my own name so that I would not be seen as representing the Hugos. I also helped behind the scenes with running the logo contest, but again I made a point of letting Kevin be the front man whenever possible. The only major official public action I took while on the HAMC was hosting the live coverage from Melbourne. This is something I had done for several years via SF Awards Watch. And when I finally got asked to do it officially on the Hugo website, rather than on my own, suddenly this became “cheating”, despite the fact that I didn’t to it until after the votes for 2009 and 2010 had been cast.

I note that I have never served on a Hugo Administration committee, or been involved in putting together the Voter Packet.

Now obviously there is a conflict of interest of some sort. But conflicts of interest abound in the SF&F community. I’d have to give up reviewing if I restricted myself to only reviewing books by people I didn’t know. And other people on the HAMC have an interest in the results of the awards too. Rene Walling, the current chair of the HAMC, runs a small press. Should a work that he published be up for a Hugo, that would be perfectly OK under the HAMC ruling, because he would not be the author. Rene is also on the staff of a very fine fanzine, The Portal, but any nomination would be in the name of the editor, Val Grimm, so Rene would still be clear to serve on the HAMC. It seems, therefore, that a conflict of interest is only a conflict of interest if it involves you personally winning a Hugo, not if it involves your business or your colleagues winning one. It is a distinction, but it is a pretty shaky one, and one designed specifically to only exclude me.

There are other very specific and personal issues involved here. I have tried hard to not become one of those people who wins too many Hugos. When I finally beat Dave Langford to Best Fan Writer one of the first things I did was rule myself out of competition for the following year. And I have kept doing that. I would only have put my hat back into the ring if Dave had started winning again. I now have a Best Semiprozine Hugo. Had it been up to me, I would be perfectly happy to only win one with Clarkesworld. But I can’t withdraw the magazine, only Neil can do that. And besides, I really want to see Kate get a Hugo, so I’m happy the magazine is still in the running. What I would have liked, would be to get a nomination with Salon Futura. That would have helped my fledgling business quite a lot. It could have been key to helping me get back to the US.

So in order to continue serving on the HAMC I would have had to resign from Clarkesworld, and I would have had to give up any possibility of getting a nomination for Salon Futura, which at the time had only published one issue. I submit to you that the people who chose to bar me from the HAMC knew that they were putting me in an impossible position, and that my hopes of getting back to the US were in part dependent on my continuing to be eligible for Hugos. This was a very, very personal action.

There are, of course, other Hugo winners involved in promoting the Hugos. The Hugo Voter Packet was created by John Scalzi, and we should all be very grateful to him for that. The jury for the logo contest included Neil Gaiman, who has lots of Hugos, and Geri Sullivan, who won one in 2007 for the fanzine, Science Fiction Five-Yearly. Do you think anyone would object to these people helping out the HAMC again? Of course not. The argument would doubtless be made that they were not actually members of the HAMC, they were external consultants. But if Kevin had suggested that I be recruited as an external consultant to help maintain the website, or to host the live coverage, do you think that would be allowed? No, of course not.

In practice, of course, this shouldn’t matter very much. Despite the fact that Kevin and I have been able to do very little for the HAMC this year, we have record turnouts in both the nomination and final ballot stages of the Hugos. The logo is getting used. It could be better, but other people could be recruited to do the jobs that I was doing. I’m perfectly happy to have less volunteer work to do. That’s not what this is all about.

What I am mainly concerned about here is that people have been using small, barely quorate WSFS committees to prosecute a fannish feud, and to go against the wishes of the Business Meeting by trying to prevent the HAMC from getting any work done. It is dirty politics.

People keep asking me why WSFS is not a proper organization with a board of directors: people in charge who can take decisions. Well, the main reason is that if we did it would quickly get mired down in exactly this sort of nonsense. People would be forever pulling back-door tricks of this sort in search of “power”, no matter how illusory and ineffectual that power might be. Unfortunately, even with small, simple committees like the HAMC, people can’t resist the temptation.

The other thing that concerns me is that this is a deliberate attempt to alter the Hugo record. History says that I won a Hugo myself in 2009, and won one with Clarkesworld in 2010. The decision of the MPC meeting in Melbourne clearly implies that those wins were unfairly obtained, because if I wasn’t operating at an unfair advantage it would not have been necessary to bar me from serving on the HAMC. The effect of this is, as they say in sporting halls of fame, to “put an asterisk against my name” in the record. It is absolutely outrageous that a group of 5 people on barely quorate and little-known committee should be able to alter the official record in this way. If they are allowed to get away with in it my case, what it to stop them from doing it to other people as well?

Kevin has more to say about the issue here, in particular he has all the practical details of what is likely to happen at the Business Meeting.

It looks like the WSFS committee investigating the fanzine/semiprozine split is going to report at the Business Meeting at this year’s Worldcon. Neil Clarke has a report here explaining what they have decided. The actual report and and some minority reports from dissenting members of the committee, is available here.

The objective of most of the people involved has been to try to find a clearer definition of what constitutes a semiprozine, because the existing definition was deemed too confusing and ineffectual. The point of semiprozines, at least as I see it, is that they are run as commercial concerns — in that they pay their contributors, may have advertising and so on — but they are run by people who all have other jobs, and those people often take no pay for their work on the magazines.

This has caused some confusion in the past because many people who are in the SF&F community have a variety of jobs. So, for example, Jonathan Strahan edits reviews for Locus, edits anthologies for other people, and has a day job. David Hartwell edits NYRSF, but also has a full time job with Tor. So focusing on the editors made it hard to see who was professional and who wasn’t.

What the committee appears to have done is shift the emphasis onto the ownership of the magazine. So if the magazine is owned by a company that employs staff, then it is a professional magazine, but if it run entirely by people working for it in their spare time, then it is a semiprozine. The actual rules are a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the substantive change.

Under this rule, magazines like Locus, Weird Tales and Lightspeed, which are all owned by proper companies, are professional. Magazines such as NYRSF, Clarkesworld, and of course Strange Horizons, though as far as I know they continue to ask not to be considered, are semiprozines.

The new rules are still fairly opaque, in that your average voter is not going to be easily able to tell which magazines are eligible are which are not. But that’s because there is no simple and easy rule that can be written. If you want to have a semiprozine category, you will have to have complex rules. Given that, this is probably the best we are going to get. It is certainly a new idea, and I wasn’t sure that the committee would be able to come up with one.

It is worth looking briefly at the various minority reports. I see Stu Segal’s point, in that we have had new winners in the past two years, so things do seem to be getting better. However, I am fairly certain that Locus will win again this year, and the “stop Locus” people would be very unhappy if the committee reported back that Locus had indeed been stopped, and then it went and won again.

Saul Jaffe is right when he says that the rules are still too complex, but it will be very easy for various websites such as the Hugo Recommend LiveJournal, or the SF Editors wiki, and indeed semiprozine.org, to list eligible magazines. Saul’s problem appears to be that he’s still hung up on the issue of “campaigning”, and he’s opposed to anyone even mentioning that they are eligible. I think we have moved well beyond that.

As for Ben Yalow’s proposal, it cuts against the whole philosophy of semiprozines. The reason that I and many other people work on them for nothing is that by doing so we are able to provide struggling writers with additional income. If you stop semiprozines paying their contributors then they become indistinguishable from fanzines. And, as Neil points out, Ben’s proposal will gut the semiprozine category. There will be so few eligible magazines that there will be no point in having the category. Given that Ben is one of the people who wanted to do away with the category in the first place, it is easy to see why his proposal is crafted the way it is.