I'll be returning to SFF social media more once my MS is off, but whew...
Today I went from writing a piece on Hindu nationalism to catching up on the latest SFF industry SNAFU: a massively corrupt administration behind this year's Hugo noms.
And yes, it's certainly a mess for writers getting arbitrarily blocked from consideration, but...
This is also why I'd become *so* disheartened by industry in the first place.
Nonsense like this keeps folks in crisis bubbles, far from the greater world.
@MLClark it wouldn't be SFWA without a Hugo scandal. 🙄
SFWA's Nebulas have their own messes, on account of the noms and awards being selected only by SFWA members.
Hugos (the awards by fans) always have their own Worldcon fuckery behind them. And this year it's definitely at a whole new level. Here's Neil Gaiman's attempt at a polite, probing chat with one of the WSFS admin (Dave McCarty) who's behind some of the extremely arbitrary eliminations this year. Just... such petty nonsense. This should not be what's taking up air here.
@MLClark Thank you for reminding me. it's been a long time since I had anything to do with SFWA.
"Petty nonsense" is about right.
@MLClark I ran the GEnie Science Fiction Round Table in the early 1990s. I got TPTB to allow me to give SFWA members free access and a private forum. It attracted members, but as you might suspect it degenerated into "petty nonsense." I was ordered by management to banish anyone who criticized management; after a few days of that, I quit.
Just found this. I did the flyer, probably in WordPerfect.
My thought process while scrolling this wiki:
"I wonder what Stephen's connection to GEnie could be. General Electric? Astrology? Gardening? But where's the--"
*scrolls down to the next subject header, smiles*
"Star Trek." 😊🖖
@MLClark JMS used the SFRT to document in real-time the production of B5. I forget which episode it was, but there's a line where spatial coordinates equate to the location of the B5 forum in the SFRT. 🤣
At our best, we were the home field for Star Trek, B5, and SFWA.