Fandom

An Election Manifesto

~ Cheryl

Over at his LiveJournal, Kevin has been talking WSFS politics. You may think that such things are deeply boring, and mostly you would be right. And most of the time WSFS happens quietly behind the scenes and there is no need for those who do not want to be involved to pay it any mind. Every so often, however, it is necessary to air some of the laundry in public.

What Kevin is asking for is essentially a referendum on the work that he, I and others have done on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee over the past few years: the web site, the logo, the active promotion of the Hugos. He’s asking for that because there are people who want us to stop doing those things, to return to what he describes as “an era of quiet neglect.”

Of course most of you won’t be attending Worldcon in Australia, so you won’t be able to vote for him. It is unfortunate that his seat on the MPC is up for re-election this year. But you can at least express support. One of the common claims of the conservatives within WSFS is that they are representative of the views of fandom, whereas Kevin and I are dangerous radicals bent on Destroying All We Hold Dear. It would be good to have some evidence that this is not the case.

Comments on Kevin’s LiveJournal, not here, please.

Finncon Gets Competitive

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

Finnish fandom is normally very calm and civilized about selecting the venue for Finncon. There has never been a contested vote for the site — until now.

For the first time in Finncon history there will be a site selection ballot. Fan groups from Helsinki and Tampere are both bidding to hold the convention in 2012. When news of the election became public they were soon joined by two more bids: one for Espoo, a city to the west of Helsinki, and one for the Moon.

I know which bid I’m supporting. I want to see Eemeli make that happen.

There will be bid presentations on the Friday night at Sohwi. Sadly I think I am having dinner with Pat Cadigan and her Finnish publishers at the time. The results will be announced on Sunday.

Hinckley Horror Transformed

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Hugo-nominated fan artist, Dave Howell, is in the UK at the moment. He’s attending some sort of conference at a hotel in Hinckley. Much to his surprise, he discovered that the place is a famous fannish venue, but having read my Eastercon report he realized that the place has changed a lot. Some of you may know this, but I haven’t been to Hinckley for several years and it was news to me, so I thought I would share it. Dave says:

So I was curious enough to follow links back to your entire trip report for the 2001 National Convention. Good lord! We’re in the same hotel! I would never have recognized it from your description if you hadn’t mentioned the “Hackney Carriage Museum.”

It’s now the Barceló Hinckley Island Hotel, and has clearly been completely redecorated. No more Atlas/Neptune, no more flickering lamps. The bar still has wooden beams, but it’s been re-themed the Triumph bar, featuring a Triumph motorcycle behind the bar and various motor parts in the windows. The restaurant food seems reasonable. I haven’t heard too much complaining, and given that this convention is a crowd for whom “organic” food is generally a minimal standard (one attendee is a raw food vegan, for example), that means they’re doing fairly well.

I could totally go for an Eastercon in a hotel that had a motorbike theme. We could make Jon Courtenay Grimwood the Guest of Honour.

By the way, if anyone in London has a spare room and can put up a couple of traveling fans from the US Sun/Mon/Tue next week then Dave and Eric would be very grateful. Let me know and I’ll put you in touch.

Catch-Up Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Because I have been busy for the past three days…

– One of the reasons I love cosmology is the timescales over which things happen. This story, about a star eating a planet, explains that the poor planet may only have 10 millions years left to live.

– Over at Deep Sea News Dr. M discusses what the effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might be.

– Oliver Morton has a round-up of interesting discussion about the “artificial life” story, including Ken MacLeod’s article for The Guardian.

– Rose Fox has a fun new book out.

– That “gay couple” prosecuted in Malawi? Apparently not a gay couple at all. Natacha Kennedy explains.

– There will be a Tolkien Art Exhibition in Gloucestershire in August.

– Tero explains why Ã…con is so much fun (hint: chocolate!)

– There’s a new issue of Yipe! out.

Frank Wu Recommends

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over at Tor.com my friend Frank Wu has been talking about the Best Fan Artist Hugo. This has always been something of a Cinderella category. It is the one about which I can pretty much guarantee people will say to me, “but I don’t know anyone to nominate,” and “I don’t know any of the people on the ballot.” Jonathan Strahan said that to me during the Hugos chat we did for StarShipSofa. Then I explained to him who one of those nominees was, and why he was on the ballot, and suddenly Jonathan had someone he very much wanted to vote for. Oddly enough, it is the same person that Frank is talking about.

I have been aware of Dave Howell’s fan art for some time. At the Toronto Worldcon I fell in love with his clock face design, “Constantly Ticking”, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to see him chosen as the Hugo base designer for Montréal. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for him to produce the most talked about Hugo base in years. When the 2009 trophy was unveiled, everyone in the pre-ceremony reception suddenly wanted to win one very badly.

Of course I was lucky enough to do so, and I am enormously grateful to you all for voting for me. But I am also enormously grateful to Dave for making such a beautiful trophy. I hoping that he gets one of his own this year.

Dave Howell designed Hugo Trophy

Frank promises to talk about the other Fan Artist nominees in later blog posts, so keep an eye on Tor.com if you have a vote.

Linkage Ho!

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Hmm, teh intrawebs appear to have been busy of late.

– The European Union has caught up with the fact that Wikipedia articles can tell lies about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. There is muttering about legislation.

– At Knowledge Problem Mike Giberson reports on the power of anecdote. Kevin and I are often frustrated at how often fannish online debate is derailed by someone insisting that something that is generally agreed to be broadly correct must be utterly false because his personal experience contradicts it. The UK press commented on how often the participants in the leader debates during the election used personal anecdotes (“I met someone who…”) to make policy points. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have decided to study this problem, designing an experiment to test the power of anecdote to overcome statistical evidence. To make it tough for the anecdotes they used accountants as their subjects, and yet the anecdotes still proved more powerful. Human beings are scary creatures.

– In Barcelona researchers are using virtual reality to put men’s minds into women’s bodies. Quick, someone grab Rush Limbaugh and stick him on a plane to Spain.

– Forbidden Planet International points me to a Financial Times article about the current state of the Tintin franchise. Ignore the gossip and scroll down to the sorry tale of Bob Garcia who has been fined €50,000 for publishing small-press books about Tintin. French fans have an appeal going to help Bob pay. You can find them on Facebook.

– Anil Menon has posted a long and thoughtful essay about the Ramayana on his blog.

– It may be only 1mm long, but the copepod is the strongest and fastest animal in the world.

More Bits and Pieces

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Here are a few more things that may be of interest:

– First and foremost, the Hugo Voter Packet has been released. For a mere £25 (currently rather better value that the US$50 price, though it may not be after the election) you can get a massive collection of ebook goodness, including all six nominees for Best Novel. Bargain.

– Talking of Worldcon news, Reno is going to hold a film festival. That’s excellent news as it shows they are working hard on attracting a new and diverse membership.

– On to some archaeology, and it appears that the Maya were pretty clever at urban plumbing.

– Back in Melbourne, scientists claim to have proved that Phar Lap died of arsenic poisoning. Of course this doesn’t prove murder, so they have not yet declared war on the USA…

– And finally, another plug for James Maliszewski’s excellent Grognardia blog. Although it is ostensibly about role-playing, it has many posts about pulp fiction. Here’s James talking about Lovecraft and Conan. His latest post is about the history of role-playing and its connections to the SCA and science fiction fandom. My knowledge is a bit fuzzy, but if one of you would like to point Lee Gold, Diana Paxson etc. at him I’m sure he’d be very grateful.

Late Night Linkage

~ Cheryl

Because I have booked 10 hours on the Day Jobbe today and have had #ALD10 to worry about.

– The music industry is considering a Trustmark scheme to indicate download sites that are not piracy. Worth checking out if you are an author worried about similar issues.

– MORAL PANIC! MORAL PANIC!!! The Telegraph says that Facebook causes syphilis. Mashable is more cautious, and I gather that Ben Goldacre is on the case, so expect something amusing on Saturday.

– Mega sale of old mimeo fanzines on eBay (mostly comics-related). Thanks to Forbidden Planet for the tip-off.

– Justine Larbalestier ponders one of the age old questions of the Internet (the one I tend to call, “Why do you see the fact that I don’t like the same books as you as a threat?”) She also considers forcing John Scalzi to wear a ballgown.

– The Economist does a daily blog post linking to interesting writing about economics. Today’s links included one to this post by Charlie Stross on the economics of book length.

– One of the more interesting presentations at the recent DEMO conference was about the use of quantum dots in camera phones. Mashable has a nice summary. I like seeing technology I first read about in SF novels finding its way into everyday life.

– Mind control: wear this simple helmet and you can control a computer just by thinking.

For The Record

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

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.

Now I’m Invisible

~ Cheryl ~ 48 Comments

Over at Star Ship Sofa Jason Sanford has done a guest editorial talking about the Nebulas and Hugos. Sanford makes some excellent points about the way that the community is changing. New authors are coming through, and new technologies are being used to make fanzines. However, when he gets on to talking about fanzines, the same old forgetting happens. He mentions Ansible and File 770 (both edited by men). And then he goes on to talk about Electric Velocipede (also edited by a man), which he says is the first winner of Best Fanzine to be primarily published online. Now I know exactly how Maura felt on reading that issue of SFX.

Lazy Sunday Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Because I’d much rather be watching the Sharks take on Team USA in the Olympic final.

– A.S. Byatt has some long thoughts about Alice that seem to me to prove that everyone brings their own biases to reading a book.

– The Finnish government continues to subsidize important cultural activities such as science fiction fanzines.

– This year the UK will be celebrating the 50th birthday of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Report in The Guardian here, and official web site here.

– Some folks at NASA think a new propulsion system could mean a trip to Mars would take just 39 days.

Part of Which Community?

~ Cheryl ~ 30 Comments

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.

Some Random Linkage

~ Cheryl

A few things that caught my eye over the past few days.

– Interesting interview with Jeanette Winterson at The Guardian (she describes herself as “post-heterosexual”).

– The Independent discovers a new subgenre: Steampunk Romance (interestingly I’ve found a lot of hostility amongst UK fans towards steampunk, but I may just be talking to the wrong people – thoughts?)

– Fingertips talks about how a good artist can still sell albums in the age of free downloads.

– John Scalzi talks a great deal of sense about one-star reviews at Amazon.

– Charles A Tan rounds up some great posts about the Australian speculative fiction scene.

Fanzine Choices

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

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.

Costuming Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Issue #2 of Yipe, the costuming fanzine, is now online. It includes reports from various events, articles by my friends Espana Sherrif and Jean Martin, some extreme mockery of Chris Garcia (because everything involving Chris has to be extreme in some way) and another photo of the Sparkly Goths from the St. George’s distillery visit. That one isn’t as good as this for Kevin and myself, but it does show Kevin Roche and Spring very nicely.

And for the benefit of those people who still maintain that costuming has no place in the science fiction community, here’s the Secretary of SFWA in an outfit she wears for her day job.

Going to Dudcon III?

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Next year Australia is hosting Worldcon. Of course it also needs to hold a national convention where it can give out the Ditmar Awards. Different countries have different approaches to this.

– The Americans don’t bother to hold a natcon when Worldcon is in the USA, or when it is in Canada.

– The British won’t be moved from the Easter date for their natcon so they hold it anyway and everyone complains about how much work this is and how poorly attended it will be.

– The Canadians generally elect the Worldcon to be their natcon as well.

– And the Australians hold a natcon separate from but coincident with the Worldcon – hence Dudcon III.

Why do the Aussies do this? Well one very good reason is to raise money to support the Ditmars. If you can charge membership for the natcon and all you have to do is hold the award ceremony and a party then you can raise a fair chunk of cash. Why would anyone be so daft as to pay good money to be a member of such a dud of a convention? Well, because they want to support Australian fandom, perhaps because they want to vote in the Ditmars, and perhaps because the idea of a membership category called “Protector of Kittens” is too cute to resist.

Alternatively people might have a hankering to be GoH at a convention. The Aussies are putting both their local and international GoH slots up for auction.

Further information, including how you can get to be a GoH, help protect kittens, or even design your own custom membership category, can be found on the Dudcon III web site.

The Origins of Fanzines

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Every so often some hard core fanzine fan will proudly declaim that science fiction fandom invented fanzines. My reaction to this is to remind them that the idea of the APA dates all the way back to the 19th Century. H.P. Lovecraft was a keen APA contributor in his day. Mostly when I point this out I get ignored, so I am delighted to see the same point being made by Patrick Nielsen Hayden over at Tor.com as part of their Cthulhu Month celebrations (yes, Cthulhumas is coming, you can all have your sanity back in the new year, provided you have been good and don’t get your brains eaten by Ssantha). What is more, Patrick actually suggests a causative link through HPL’s friendship with Donald A. Wollheim, the founder of FAPA. If only Lovecraft had lived a few more years, he might actually have attended the first Worldcon. There’s an alternate history idea for you.

Those of you who have no idea what an APA is, click through to Patrick’s article where he explains all.

Get Tuckerized for TAFF

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This year’s TAFF candidates have been busy fundraising. Via Anne Murphy I have the following:

The opportunity to specify the name for a character in an upcoming work have been donated to TAFF by none other than Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Bear, Charlie Stross, Nalo Hopkinson, David Brin, Julie Czerneda and Mary Robinette Kowal! – Click through to bid on the auctions at eBay!

There are also TAFF auctions for first editions of Orwell’s 1984 and John Hersey’s Hiroshima, donated by Terry Hickman. All auctions close at the end of the day PST on December 7.

Out and About

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The last 24 hours have been fairly busy for Kevin and myself. We’ve managed no less than four separate events in that time.

Last night we attended the Transgender Day of Remembrance service in San Francisco. It was extremely well attended — not just standing room only but packed solid. The event went very smoothly, and included messages of support from Mayor Newson and the State Senate (the latter delivered personally by Mark Leno). It is always depressing to attend such events and hear about how many people have been killed (often very brutally killed), but at the same time it is good to see more and more people expressing sorrow over the murders, and more politicians prepared to stick their necks out by doing so themselves.

Having finished there we headed off to FyDySyFy, a Friday night fannish meet-up that takes place in the bar of the Hyatt Regency down by Embarcadero. It is a fairly small event — there were only six of us there — but the hotel is truly spectacular inside and the hot buttered rum they were serving as a winter warmer went down very well indeed. Many thanks to Espana Sheriff for inviting us along.

This morning we had a board meeting of SFSFC, much of which was given over to a post-mortem on the World Fantasy Convention that we ran. Thankfully most people seem to be very happy with us, though the art show was well below par and the World Fantasy Board appears to never be happy with the performance of its operating committees. Most importantly, we did not lose money, though the people who are continuing to spread rumors of rapacious profiteering on our part will need to be very creative with our accounts in order to justify their claims.

Finally this afternoon a group of us headed up to Alameda for an open day at St.George’s Distillery, our local vendor of superb flavored falling-over-water. The theme of event was “prom night” and there were many fine outfits in evidence, but we decided to go as the school’s goth kids. Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley were superbly attired as ever, and my outfit went down sufficiently well for one young lady to ask me if she could have her picture taken with me.

As well as various spirits, fruit liqueurs and so on, the event features numerous quality food vendors, including another local favorite: Recchuiuti Chocolates. There was also a band called Farewell Typewriter who played mostly cover songs but were very good.

So I’m totally rocked out on absinthe and 80’s pop numbers. Thankfully Kevin makes a wonderful designated driver. I’m now off to drink lots of water and orange juice. I’ll leave you with a photo of us in the old aircraft hanger that the distillery calls home.

Cheryl & Kevin in Hanger One