Worldcon is not far away now, and those of you who cannot get to Reno will be wondering how you can follow events at the Hugo Ceremony. Well, wonder no more, there will be the usual live coverage of the ceremony on the Hugo Awards website.
Your hosts for the evening will be Kevin Standlee and Mur Lafferty.
Not me. Why not? Obviously I won’t be in Reno, but that didn’t stop Kevin and I doing coverage of the Locus Awards earlier this year, which where in Seattle and we were not. Because it will be in the middle of the night my time? Heck no. It’s the Hugo ceremony. Of course I’ll be awake. No, the reason I’m not doing it is that last year a small group of SMOFs decided that my doing such things gave me an unfair advantage in winning Hugos, and have banned me from doing it.
Of course we could do it via SF Awards Watch rather than on the official Hugo website and thumb our noses at them, but we’ll get a much bigger crowd if we do it through the official website so I’m taking a back seat this year.
I think said SMOFs are wrong, but I’m only one voice.
Ah, yes, but you’re a very important voice because you turn up at the Business Meeting and vote. You can do that this year. Two of the five people who forced Cheryl out (and incidentally turfed me out of the Chairmanship) are up for re-election this year. There are likely to be more than three candidates for the three vacant seats. Elect more progressive members and we’ll see fewer events like what happened last year, I think.
(As I’ll say whenever I can, the five MPC members did not act illegally. Everything they did was by the book and I raise no procedural objection. While the MPC has 14 members, only eight were present, and that’s a quorum, at which a majority can take action. But while their action was legal, I don’t think it was wise.)
Wow, that’s bizarre – they do realise that by the time you commentate the winners, the results can’t actually be changed, right?
Sadly this is a very familiar story – there are some people who can’t stand seeing others praised or rewarded for, you know, pouring their time and energy into the community. Boggling!
I hope you put your feet up with a nice big drink and get some entertainment at least from watching the results come in.
Oh, I don’t think anyone actually believes that it had any effect. This was just an excuse. The primary objective was to stop me doing any work on marketing the Hugos because I’d been too effective in getting more people to take an interest in them. The secondary objective was probably to “put an asterisk against” my wins in the Hugo record to suggest that they had been dishonestly obtained, and that’s more about their dislike of me than about any actual evidence.
Very similar to what happened with the Ditmars earlier in the year! Funny how people who get awards are also people who do lots of stuff! Totes suspicious!
People suck sometimes. Your work to promote the Hugos has been inspiring.
Your work to promote the Hugos has been inspiring.
I think that’s exactly what they were upset about.
Paint me puzzled, but why would anyone object to interest in the awards being heightened given it is/is meant to be one of the world’s foremost awards for science fiction? And live feed only adds to the ‘shine’?
Oh, that’s easy. If you give the awards too much publicity then the “wrong sort” of fans might vote, and the “wrong sort” of works might win. Some people are much more interested in keeping control of who votes than in promoting the awards.