More Reactions to the 2020 Hugo Ceremony and a bit about the Retro Hugos

I’d hoped to get my comments on the generally excellent winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards up today. However, this was not to be, for two days later we’re still talking about the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell, as it will probably be known one day, when some toastmaster at the 2060 Hugos will bore the audience to death with remembering how they survived the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell back in the olden days of 2020. And if that toastmaster should be me, you officially have my permission to kick me off that stage.

You can read my account of the ceremony as one of the finalists who were waiting on tenterhooks while George R.R. Martin went on and on and on here. In that post, I also linked to the reactions and summaries of the disaster that was the 2020 Hugo ceremony by Natalie Luhrs, Sean Reads Sci-Fi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard and Matt at Runalong the Shelves.

However, in the past day I’ve come across even more reactions to the 2020 Hugo ceremony from around the web.

My fellow best fan writer finalist Adam Whitehead shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, including the torturous wait imposed on the finalists. And since Adam is in the UK, he was very much in the same boat as me (and Alasdair Stuart, for that matter) that the ceremony took place in the middle of the night for him.

Erin Underwood, the 2020 DUFF winner who presented the Best Fan Writer category, explains what the 2020 Hugo ceremony was like from the POV of a presenter and confirms that she was never given any guidance in how to pronounce the finalists’ name

At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, mostly quoting from Natalie Luhrs’ excellent post.

At The Daily Dot, Rachel Kiley also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many, many problems with it.

Another of the many problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony is that the acceptance speech of Best Editor Long Form winner Navah Wolfe was cut off by a technical glitch. Navah Wolfe has now shared the full text of her speech online, which you can read here, here and here. I think this is my favourite acceptance speech of the night, though most people seem to prefer R.F. Kuang’s. I’m also horrified that it’s even legal in the US for a company to fire an employee who’s pregnant.

Norwegian fan Dag-Erling Smørgrav shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony and particularly focusses on George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg repeatedly praising John W. Campbell, which was clearly a jab against the renaming of the former Campbell Award as the Astounding Award and Hugo finalist (and eventual winner) Jeanette Ng. And as I said in my previous post, I have some sympathy that Martin as one of the first finalists ever for the Campbell may not be happy about the renaming (even though the fact that the Campbell Award is now the Astounding Award doesn’t take away Martin’s accomplishment in getting nominated for it in 1973), but the repeated jabs at the Astounding Award and Jeanette Ng were petty and uncalled for.

Sword and sorcery writers Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams also weigh in on the 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony in a post fittingly entitled “When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth”. And indeed it’s interesting that both Dag-Erling Smørgrav and Remco van Straten/Angeline B. Adams evoked dinosaurs in their posts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony. I guess Camestros Felapton, who wrote the brilliant Hugosauriad to discuss how dinosaurs are a recurring theme on the Hugo ballot, has found the dinosaurs at the 2020 Hugos, only that this year they weren’t on the ballot, but up on the stage.

As sword and sorcery writers, Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams are well aware that it’s possible to appreciate the SFF of yesteryear while remaining aware of the flaws of these works and their creators and so point out how problematic many of the writers and editors of yesteryear who were explicitly mentioned at the Hugo ceremony truly were.

Van Straten and Adams also have a great post about the controversy surrounding the sword and sorcery anthology Flashing Swords #6, from which several authors pulled their stories, after they became aware that editor Robert M. Price’s foreword was a sexist and transphobic screed. In their post, Van Straten and Adams point out that sword and sorcery was always a diverse genre and that women like C.L. Moore and newly minted Retro Hugo winner Margaret Brundage were an important part of the genre from the beginning and that writers of colour like Samuel R. Delany and Charles R. Saunders and transpeople like artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones were part of the genre at least from the 1960s on. The 2020 Hugo ceremony is only mentioned in passing, but the post very clearly illustrates that the past of our genre was a lot more diverse and a lot less straight, white and male than it is often remembered.

British writer Ed Fortune calls the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony the worst awards ceremony he ever had the misfortune to sit through and also goes into the debacle about the 2019 Hugo Losers Party, where the venue George R.R. Martin booked was too small and several Hugo finalists and their plus ones were left standing outside.

Two time Hugo winner Cheryl Morgan shares her thoughts on the disastrous 2020 Hugo ceremony and also remembers the incident in 2006, where Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis on stage at the Hugo ceremony, just in case you were wondering if Hugo ceremonies can get worse than what happened this year. Cheryl Morgan also points out that Harlan Ellison at least seemed mortified that his behaviour had damaged the ceremony and the Hugos, even if he didn’t quite understand what the problem was. She is not so sure that George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg understand what they did.

Cheryl Morgan also has a follow-up post about how and why Worldcons go wrong, which is well worth reading. Cheryl also points out that pointing fingers at the World Science Fiction Society doesn’t help, because the WSFS is us, i.e. every supporting and attending member of Worldcon.

Jason Sanford also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many problems with it. He makes a lot of good points, but then he goes into something I’ve also seen on Twitter, namely that Worldcon is old, irrelevant and in danger of dying and that the big media cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con in Atlanta are the future.

Leaving aside the irony that the Puppies said the very same thing back in 2015/16, for better or for worse, Worldcon is a different beast than commercial cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con (and let’s not forget that Dragon Con’s literature trek leans strongly conservative/rightwing, even if the overall membership doesn’t). Worldcon is less polished than the media cons, because it’s entirely run by volunteers. At Worldcon, the barriers between fans and pros are much lower, because everybody is a fan first and a writer, artist, editor, publisher, filmmaker, etc… second. This doesn’t always work out as intended, as this weekend’s events have shown, but I still love the inclusive idea behind it and it makes me sad when I hear of people – often writers and fans of colour – who were made to feel unwelcome at Worldcon. But while Worldcon isn’t perfect, as Cheryl Morgan said, Worldcon is us. We can make it better and many of us try in a myriad of ways, whether it’s people braving the Business Meeting to submit proposals or this year’s Hugo finalists and others who worked behind the scenes to make programming more diverse and inclusive or the many volunteers who keep the convention running.

But the best thing about Worldcon is that it’s not stationary, like San Diego Comic Con, Dragon Con and so many other cons, but that it moves around. Of course, the “World” in Worldcon is still too often ignored, the locations are still too often in the US, though we’ve been seeing more non-US locations in recent years, and whole continents barely get a look in. But while there’s at least a chance that Worldcon will eventually come to your country or continent (plus, if you find enough likeminded fans, you can bid to bring a Worldcon to your country), you’ll always have to go to San Diego to attend Comic Con and to Atlanta with its hellish airport to attend Dragon Con. Entering the US was always an unpleasant experience (ask me why I hate Atlanta airport so much sometime) and it has only gotten worse in the past twenty years and even worse in the past four. Even if they get a visa, which is by no means assured particularly for people from non-western countries, a lot of people from outside the US are reluctant to travel to the US. Some people like Cheryl Morgan are unable to enter the US at all through no fault of their own. So those who are saying, “Worldcon is old and irrelevant, so let it die and go to Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con instead” are saying to everybody who can’t or won’t travel to the US and everybody inside the US who cannot afford to travel to Atlanta or San Diego, “You don’t matter. We don’t care if you can’t come.” I’m sure that’s not what they mean to say, but that’s how it comes across.

Jason Sanford goes on to declare that the Retro Hugos must die, because John W. Campbell and Cthulhu won Retro Hugos this year. Like so many others who complain about Campbell and Cthulhu and maybe Forrest J. Ackerman, he fails to mention that Leigh Brackett and Margaret Brundage, two awesome women who went unrecognised in their lifetimes, also won Retro Hugos this year.

I’ve already pointed out how strongly I disagree with the people who cry for the Retro Hugos to be abolished, because they don’t agree with some of the winners (and I’m not thrilled about the Retro Hugos for Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation either). I also strongly disagree with Jason Sanford when he calls Retro Hugo voters “a small group of people stuck in the past giving today’s genre the middle finger”.

I have nominated and voted for the Hugos and Retro Hugos, when they were offered, since 2014. Like so many others, I was frequently underwhelmed by the finalists and winners, so I decided to do something about it. I started the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews to point potential nominators to worthy works and to show what else was out there beyond the big name writers and editors. I also didn’t vote for or nominated Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation.

It’s perfectly fine if someone doesn’t want to engage with the Retro Hugos and doesn’t care for older SFF in general. However, if you didn’t bother to nominate and vote, don’t complain about the results. And don’t call those of us who are interested in the history of our genre reactionaries – unless maybe they are presenters hijacking the current day Hugo ceremony to reminisce about the past.

I care about the history of SFF because I think it is important to know where we’ve been to understand where we are now and how we got here. It also infuriates me how much of the history of our genre has been forgotten and erased, how the only ancestors that are remembered are a narrow group of straight white men and tht there’s another round of “Wow, women, writers of colour, LGBTQ writers and other marginalised groups are writing science fiction and fantasy now” every twenty years, even though women, POC, LGBTQ people have always been here, only that their contributions to the genre have been ignored and forgotten.

I like having a way to honour those writers and artists who went unrecognised during their lifetimes. The Retro Hugos are one of the few ways we have to do this. They may not be perfect and I certainly don’t think that John W. Campbell needs yet another Hugo, considering he won plenty during his lifetime. But rather than abolish the Retro Hugos, I’m trying to make them better and also to challenge received wisdom about what the genre was like in days of old, a received wisdom that’s usually much straighter, whiter and male than reality.

Font Folly also points out that a lot of the problems with the Retro Hugos stem from people trusting received wisdom such as that Astounding was the best SFF magazine of the 1940s and that John W. Campbell was the best editor, even though this isn’t the case when you actually read the magazine.

And yes, Hugo voting already is a lot of work and Retro Hugo voting adds to that workload with the added complication that there is no helpful Hugo voter packet – you have to track down all of that stuff yourself. But I’d rather help voters and nominators to make more informed decisions than to abolish the Retro Hugos altogether, because I don’t like how they turn out.

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