Everyone's Angry About the Hugos

John Scalzi has argued that the Hugo nominations shouldn't be announced so close to Easter since too many people are busy to get caught up in them. Cleverly, the voters circumvented that this year by nominating people that would piss everyone off.

The most outrage is about Vox Day's novelette, Opera Vita Aeterna, published in The Last Witchking. Everyone was furious without having read the story. Why? Because Vox Day is also a cartoonishly bigoted blogger, most famous for writing unforgivable things about N.K. Jemisin. Here his fiction has been nominated, not the person, but liberal voters have a difficult time extricating the two, or even seeing why they should bother. It's the most brazen example yet of Hugo voters copping to the awards not being exclusively about the works nominated.

The nomination presents a fascinating problem for WorldCon. We knew about 10% of SFWA members voted for him to be their president before he was kicked out of the group. Now we know enough WorldCon members are willing to vote in his work, and it feels like there's a reactionary element here, hoisting him up in retribution for his booting.

But what do we do about this? Kick out anyone who votes for him? Go make a new club that doesn't let "the wrong kind" of people in? For all the negativity flowing right now, I don't see any reasonable solutions proposed.

Five Reasons I’m Glad I Joined Reddit

1. Better Conversation

In my social circles, Reddit has a terrible reputation for being full of trolls and backbiters. This isn’t my experience at all, though more nasties probably lurk in other sub-reddits. I've only registered on forums of interest – r/Fantasy, r/Books, r/Science, r/Anime, r/WorldNews – all of which offer bouquets of content that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen, as well as meeting authors and getting valuable publishing advice. And then there are the conversations.

Some of the best literary chats I had from March-May were among the comments on r/Fantasy, about how Horror and Fantasy can overlap, why Fantasy tends to stall in the first hundred pages, and even reflecting on the works of Gene Wolfe. Jerks tend to get isolated, called out, and most refreshingly, reasoned with until they’re disarmed. It’s actually deeper and nicer than most of conversations I've seen on Facebook walls, though I haven’t visited r/Politics yet.

2. Mary Robinette Kowal is my Editing Pop Idol

People say Seanan McGuire is amazing with her fans on Twitter, and she is, but I’ve never seen anyone interact with their readers like Mary Robinette Kowal did on r/Fantasy.

A reader linked to her article about revising old works to weed out idle prejudices and colonial attitudes, from both wording and plotting. It takes amazing guts to admit your mistakes in public. More amazing: when users questioned her motives or practices, she responded in considerate fashion and was open enough to change her mind on at least one edit. Twitter is too brief, and too easy to read as glib or hostile, for these sorts of exchanges. Here we had an author inviting people into her process and producing work she preferred thanks to the interaction.