As I fill out my 2024 Hugo Award ballot (deadline in a few days), I note that Salon Futura is eligible for Best Fanzine.

Cheryl Morgan has written an article in the latest issue ("Chengdu Revisited") that I think is well worth a look. She did give me an advance look at it, but I hasten to add that I've revealed no "insider information" to her, unless you think pointing people at the published minutes of WSFS MPC/WIP meetings is Revealing Sekrit Information. I did point out that a few places in the USA still use the Town Meeting form of government that we use for WSFS, although as she points out, few places (or none at all of which I'm aware) try to do the day-to-day governance of a town with thousands of residents using it, and that's what people who seem to think have a constantly-in-session, round-the-clock (except during Worldcon itself) online WSFS Business Meeting appear to want. Even a rules geek like me would get tired of that pretty quickly.

I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I have previously speculated that the Ad Hoc Congress of Free Luna was something that Heinlein was inspired to write after attending a WSFS Business Meeting. Note that even in the hyper-libertarian society posited there, they eventually ended up with an elected legislature.

On January 7, 2021, John Scalzi wrote an article entitled, "But What If We Didn't?" In it, he pointed out how the US Republican Party

...recognized there was a suite of political conventions and traditions that were designed to make it easier for things to get done, and that this suite of conventions and traditions were exploitable by denial.

They then proceeded to simply ignore conventions and traditions, and in some cases bright-line laws, and said, when challenged, "So what? Make me."

I am coming to the conclusion that on a much smaller scale, we're seeing this happen with Worldcon. Maybe not all Worldcons — not those run by people who actually care about the long history of the convention and its traditions and practices — but certainly by people who think that you're a fool to care about such things, and that Worldcon and the Hugo Awards are merely things to be captured and exploited.

I'm not solely speaking of the current year's Worldcon. I've seen this attitude among some conrunners in the past few years, and I've seen signs of it among people running Worldcon bids, where they openly scoff at things like WSFS, its rules, and its traditional practices and traditions. They don't care, and they think that anyone who does care is a fool.

If an individual Worldcon runs onto the rocks and doesn't have the sense to call for help before the ship goes down, WSFS can survive, albeit with damage to the ship of state. But if all would-be Worldcon runners think of the convention as a prize to be captured, rules be dammed, then I really don't know what happens after that. Auctioning off Hugo Awards to the highest bidder? Ignoring the WSFS Constitution and daring anyone to stop them?

It's not just the people bidding to hold Worldcon that worry me. The growing number of people who, since at least 2015 (and probably earlier, although I may not have noticed it at the time) who insist that if they don't like the results (of the Hugo Awards, or the Worldcon site selection), then those results should be ignored, the nominations or selections canceled, and the "right" people/sites selected. Who would actually do that and make those decisions isn't clear. But those people demanding Action Now are convinced that they are right, and I don't think they realize the harm they can cause by demanding that the rules be burned and decisions overturned just because they don't like them personally. Such calls for destructive action are just as bad structurally as an incompetent or venal Worldcon committee or people who want to hijack the Hugo Awards for their own ideological reasons.

In practical terms, if the members of Worldcon want to create an entity that would have the authority to unseat a Worldcon for defined causes, or to override the results of the Hugo Awards, they can do so, by changing the organization's rules. And if you say, "but that's too much work and it takes too long," well, I would remind you that by design, constitutions aren't supposed to be easy or quick to change. If you really can convince enough people in enough places that you're right, you can make changes. Ideally, you should be considering how to secure the barn doors before the horses escape and not depend upon "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But you had better be really sure you know for what you're asking. If you propose a new structure, ask yourself, "How easy would this be able to be turned against things I personally like?"

I am waiting to see what happens with DisCon III, which is in the midst of the "Winter Crisis" that hits many Worldcon committees around this point in their timeline. (It was because of ConJosé's Winter Crisis that I ended up as co-chair in 2002, for example.) However, I'd like to ask those people who read my journal this question:

What is the maximum number of Hugo Award trophies that the "winners" of a category should receive from the convention?

There was once a time when there was one trophy per category, period. If you were co-authors, you had to work it out amongst yourselves. Then conventions started giving every co-author a trophy. In 1993, we gave Paramount two trophies for "The Inner Light" and allowed them to purchase a third trophy (we had one spare) for about what it cost us to make it (around $300). But what do you do for a work that declares that it has ten or twenty co-authors/co-editors/co-creators?

In addition, I want to know where people think there should be a limit, or if there should be any limits at all. More than one person has pointed out to me that in a dramatic presentation, there are certainly a lot of people who could claim to have a stake in the work. Who should get trophies and award credit? Director, every person with the word "producer" in their title, and every person who had something to do with the script or the underlying story if applicable? Should we stop there? If so, where do we stop. And then what do you do with things like An Archive of Our Own, where there are a large number of people who insist that every single contributor is a co-author.

Here's another case that seems way too likely to me: a crowdfunded project offers to list anyone who contributes as a particular level as a "co-author" or "co-producer" or "co-editor." This work makes the ballot and wins. Are all of those contributors entitled to award credit and/or a trophy? Again, where do you draw the line?

Anyone who claims that I'm trying to discriminate against any particular person or group by asking this question is wrong. I am asking you where you think the practical limit should be for demand on a resource that is not infinite, even though from the outside it may appear to be so. "Get a bigger room" is not necessarily the wrong answer for complaints about pre-ceremony receptions or post-ceremony parties, but assuming that Worldcons have unlimited resources is wrong, too. Pretend that you're running the convention and tell me what you would do.

Worldcon trophies used to be a significant proportion of the total Worldcon budget. Nowadays they are almost a rounding error, but they are a finite resource. The bases are all custom-made, so you can't just go to your local trophy shop and buy some extra blocks of wood. (It would be much easier if that's what you had to do.) The rockets themselves have to be ordered from the one foundry with the one and only one mold, but this is less tricky than bases, especially as it's not unusual for Worldcons to club together for larger orders and to share rockets with each other. So the issue is less about absolute fabrication cost than about the logistics of production. Trophies have to be ordered well in advance of when you know who won, and if you ordered the absolute maximum you might need, you could easily end up with more leftover trophies than the ones you actually gave out. Is this what we want?

I am taking half-days off from work today through Friday, working only from 04:30 to 09:30, which gives me the rest of the day to attend CoNZealand on time. I had some idea that I might spend some of that time taking a nap before Noon, when one of the online party bands that I wanted to attend opened. However, duty called, as we got the material (photos, transcripts) necessary to set up the 1945 and 2020 Hugo Award trophy pages. This involves uploading the photos, linking them into the page, copying and making sure I didn't mess up the material from the artists, and also placing the thumbnail versions of the photos on the 1945/2020 "static" pages. This takes a lot longer than you might expect. Oh, and also when that was done, there was the post to TheHugoAwards.org about the trophy reveal from last night.

( Afternoon Party & Retro-Hugo Awards )

The 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony is not until Saturday morning NZST / Friday afternoon PDT, when I will have another nervous afternoon with Twitter and WordPress. With luck, the bugs in today's Retro-Hugo ceremony will be ironed out for the 2020 Hugo Ceremony, just like the bugs we had with the live coverage in Dublin during the Opening Ceremony/Retro-Hugo Awards were fixed in time for the Main Event.

CoNZealand announced this year's Hugo/Lodestar/Astounding/Retro-Hugo Award Finalists. That meant it was my responsibility to get the finalists pages online and announced at the Hugo Awards web site, and I did get the announcement posted a few minutes after the embargo lifted at 1:30 PM PDT, shortly after CoNZealand's video announcement of the finalists finished.

From the outside, it looks simple, but I sweat this out every year. I had an embargoed copy of the finalists, but getting it formatted from a Word document/PDF into the way it needs to be laid out HTML in WordPress is non-trivial. No, you can't just do a save-as HTML. There's lots of cutting and pasting and putting in tags, and so forth.

The thing that frightens me the most about this is the chance that I'll accidentally hit Publish instead of Save Draft, even though the buttons are nowhere near each other. Most of the editing is offline in a text editor, but you have to paste it in and it's wise to hit Preview to find out if you left a tag open. (I did, multiple times. And there was one open tag that didn't get caught until several hours after it posted.) So the chance of posting too early was real to me. Some years ago, we accidentally broke the embargo on the finalist. (It was a technical issue caused by the WordPress-to-LiveJournal connection not respecting the "publish at a set future time" setting.) To our mortification, the Administrator that year accused us of doing it deliberately to try and get a "scoop." (It's not the case, but some people assume malice where clumsiness is at least as likely.) For several years thereafter, we couldn't get embargoed information, and I understood why. Eventually, we worked our way back into Hugo Award administrators' good graces, and I very much do not want to break that trust.

We managed to get it done this time, with only what I might consider the "usual" sorts of hiccups, such as the aforementioned open tag, a few misspellings (some of which were in the original copy we got), a couple of duplicated category names (cut and paste strikes!) and sundry other small things. I stayed online this afternoon and kept checking e-mail, and in some cases got things fixed within a minute of getting the e-mail or comment pointing it out. Here's hoping that there's nothing major left to correct.

I'm also very relieved that today at Day Jobbe was only an ordinary eight-hour day, because it meant that I could be there watching the video of the announcement, making last minute edits to the about-to-be-published results, and watching the clock to make sure we didn't post too soon, but also were online within three minutes of the time we were allowed to be.

A lot of the questions that come to the Hugo Awards web site can be broadly classed in the following two categories:

1. I want to submit my work to your Awards Committee. (Variations include questions like "What is the entry fee for your Award?")

2. Your Board of Directors should add [category] to your Awards.

We get these even though our web site explains that the answers are:

1. You can't. (Linked right off the top menu under the single word "Submissions.")

2. It doesn't work that way. (Linked from "The Awards/Changing the Rules.")

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most people probably think that the Hugo Awards are run by the Board of Directors of a Big Corporation with a Big Boss who decides who wins and what the categories are, because that's how all other awards with which they're familiar work. Or at least they think they're familiar with them.

We recently got a query from a publicist behind a work that is effectively a business textbook in graphic story/comic book form. (Sounds find to me; I much enjoyed a calculus textbook in comic form when I was in high school.) It took more than one reply to convince them that A. There was no submission process. B. There was no submission fee, and C. Just because your work is in comic book format doesn't make it eligible for Best Graphic Story, unless you're saying that your work is science fiction and fantasy, which seems unlikely considering the way you're pitching it.

I'm going to promote (somewhat reworded) the conclusion from a comment I made elsewhere to here, because I think it encapsulates my thoughts on the AO3 issue.

Saying, "I won a Hugo Award" is not something that any one AO3 contributor should legitimately say for their individual and personal contribution to AO3. Anyone doing so is implicitly denying the agency of every other contributor, whether they intend to do so or not.

Saying "We won a Hugo Award!" is appropriate. In my opinion, it's just as legitimate as the fans of a sports franchise saying, when their team wins the championship, "We won!" In fact, it's more appropriate, given the "ownership" of the individual AO3 contributors in the combined entity and joint authorship of the work that WSFS honored.

I have contributed articles to The Drink Tank, a Hugo Award-winning fanzine. Heck, I have a Hugo Award trophy (one of two leftovers from ConJosé, engraved for the two co-chairs). Does that make me a "Hugo Award winner?" Of course it does not. When, back in 2002, I brought that display copy up to show to my mother (who is the person who set me to reading SF/F), she said, "My little boy has a Hugo Award!" and I carefully said that having a display trophy and having an actual Hugo Award were not the same things.

So why is it that a bunch of people who contributed toward a Hugo Award-winning related work have taken it into their heads that they — all of them, thousands of them — are all individually "Hugo Award winners?" (And why have several online news sources repeated this assertion when they should know better.) And when the organizers politely pointed that out, some people seem to interpret it as the Big Bad Meanies Want to Spoil Our Fun. It's not like that at all.

For an award like the Hugo Award to have any meaning, it needs to be something that not everyone can have. That means trying to enforce our service mark. We're not trying to be bad guys. It's not like anyone pays those of us doing it. We're just trying to make sure that it's being used legitimately, so that anyone who has legitimately won the Award is entitled to their legitimate honor.

A certain group of people set out to deliberately destroy the Hugo Awards a few years ago, and they didn't succeed in doing so, thank goodness. It would be terribly ironic that people who celebrate and embrace their corner of fandom having won a Hugo Award would, by excessive exuberance, end up undermining the very award they claim to value.

All good things must come to an end, and Worldcon 76 was a Very Good Thing. Today the convention ended, and now we can look forward to next year's convention in Dublin, Ireland.

( Read more... )

Following the ceremony, I caught up to James, who claimed that the sounding block had shattered into multiple pieces, but he was just pulling my leg. The block was recovered (fortunately it didn't roll down under the stage, where retrieving it would have been difficult), and the Gavel of WSFS given to my safekeeping, as Dublin 2019 doesn't intend to use it for their meetings between now and the convention. I'm grateful that the trust me to keep it safe. I generally keep it with the ballot boxes sometimes given to my care.

A tentative membership count (subject to clean up after the convention) of warm bodies on site for Worldcon 76 is 5,440 individual human beings who attended the convention at some time during the five days of the event. There are a bunch of other numbers I have, but I'm waiting for the post-con clean up before reporting them to the WSFS Formulation of Long List Entries (FOLLE) committee.

After the closing ceremonies, there was one final panel (the last feedback session). Lisa caught up with me there as we'd been on separate paths most of the day. There I was able to give Kuma Bear something that Registration gave me this afternoon.

( Badged Bear )

Following the final panel, it was time to go. I wish I'd taken a final photo of the Hugo Award office, which was full of boxed-up Hugo Award trophies that we need to ship. One of my final WSFS tasks today was to get the correct person within the Worldcon 76 Committee in touch with the Hugo Administrators. I'm grateful to Dave McCarty and Susan De Guardiola for packing up a bunch of trophies and riding herd on them.

( Support Your Local Business )

Lisa and Scott had already eaten, but each had a small taco while I had a burrito at the taco shop beyond the Fairmont. We were joined by other convention membership who were also picking up dinner.

I've tried to talk with other members, particularly those I've not met before. I've spoken to a fair number of first-time convention attendees, and I mean first-time any SF con, just like how the 1984 Worldcon was my first. There were so many people having a good time. It gives me a huge lift to know how many people were here enjoying themselves. That's why those of us organizing these things do what we do.

( The Last Party )

Shortly after the Induction Ceremony, Lisa and I called it a night and we returned to the Hilton. We initially had planned on sleeping in tomorrow, but we do have a breakfast appointment with friends, so it's time to try and get some sleep now.

I've completely left out the last WSFS function: the WSFS Mark Protection Committee meeting. I was re-elected as Chair of the MPC. There's other stuff on which to report, but it will have to wait until I have a few more brain cells to rub together.

Today is the final day to vote in the 2018 Hugo Awards and 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards. You have until 23:59 Pacific Daylight Time tonight to vote. If you are a member of Worldcon 76, haven't voted yet, but want to do so, I strongly suggest logging in as soon as you can, because there have been numerous reports of people having problems accessing the ballot. You need to have JavaScript enabled on your browser, and you should try the https: addresses for the ballot first. If that doesn't work, try the http: address, although it's not ideal. If that still doesn't work, write to the Hugo Administrators explaining what you have tried and what messages you are seeing, and they'll try to help you.

Yes, I've voted. I did so several days ago. Don't let it be said that I don't take my own advice about voting before the last minute.