Back when the Hugo Awards were "pure"

When a certain high-profile author and others organized a vote-campaign to place certain stories on this year's Hugo Award ballot, one complaint I heard from people across the ideological divide is that stories were no longer being considered for the Hugo based solely on their merit.

Which, of course, was total BS. Most Hugo voters vote for what they consider to be the best stories. In addition, as Rose Lemberg so amazingly said, the controversy was about much more than simply which stories "merit" being on the award shortlist.

But another issue which didn't receive a lot of discussion back then was how truly "pure" the Hugo Awards selection process actually was in the olden days. 

Well, here's an interesting tidbit which definitely casts doubt on the awards ever being a paragon of SF/F purity. On October 18th File 770, a six-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, published an article titled "How The Lucite Was Won."

The article discussed the 1967 Worldcon and raised a fascinating point about how the Hugo Award finalists were selected that year. The history lesson was presented by Andrew Porter, who was the 1967 Worldcon Secretary.

Want to read about this fascinating bit of genre history? Well, you can't, at least not on File 770. The article was published on Oct. 18 and removed later that same day, with the following note being published instead:

"1967 Hugo Story Withdrawn. The story from Andrew Porter I published earlier today about the 1967 Hugos was denied by Ted White, chair of Nycon 3 and will receive no further attention here."

Fortunately, Google cached the page here. Check the page out before it disappears. 

I can't vouch for the accuracy of what Andrew Porter said. But since he was an active participant in that year's Worldcon, his account obviously merits some attention. And if his account is true it would call into question any belief that the Hugo Awards were ever "pure."

When authors stalk

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my outrage yesterday over author Kathleen Hale's Guardian essay about stalking one of her online critics.

Yes, the bad reviews Hale received from this Goodreads critic were way more than simply bad — they were hateful. But that's still no excuse for stalking someone. And that's what this was. Hale repeatedly uses the term almost as if she doesn't truly know what it means.

  • "So instead I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking..."
  • "I absent-mindedly returned to stalking Blythe Harris..."

Hale uses the term stalking in a light-hearted way, almost as if she believes laughing about her actions makes them okay. And this wasn't only online stalking — Hale lies to get the critic's home address and runs a background check on her before showing up at the critic's house and contacting her at her workplace.

Perhaps my horror at what Hale did was influenced by my personal situation — I've been stalked before by a fellow author. But I wasn't the only one outraged by what Hale did.

I'd hoped the backlash against both Hale and the Guardian over this article would force them to realize the wrongness of what Hale did. But unfortunately, some people — both authors and readers — have come out in support of Hale. I won't link to their support, but it's out there.

 

What Mikki Kendall says is very true. I also suspect part of the reason some people applaud Hale's stalking is they support the ongoing Stop the Goodreads Bullies campaign, which I wrote about a while back. Many of the authors behind STGRB have been targeting their Goodreads critics, so obviously some of them have no issue with taking this stalking to the next level.

Perhaps Hale will realize the wrongness in what she's done. But with her receiving some praise and support, this appears doubtful. So I hope other authors will take note of this and avoid doing as Hale did. I also hope readers will remember that not all authors are like Hale, and also note which authors supported her.

After all, why should readers support an author who might show up at your house if you ever say something bad about her book?

The lesson in all this — aside from never stalking anyone —  is to not be so consumed by the haters of the world that you become a hater yourself. Authors need to focus on their writing and not on those who hate what you are writing.

 

 

 

Goodbye, Yahoo

We are gathered here today to bury Yahoo!, which now joins MySpace and AOL as examples of WWW pioneers which couldn't change as the world evolved around them. 

What can we say about Yahoo? In it's time, Yahoo was groundbreaking. Yahoo was the web portal every other portal wanted to be when it grew up. Yahoo was the hip kid everyone turned to for tips on the best the web had to offer. Remember when the Cool Site of the Day was actually cool? Well, back then Yahoo was cooler than that. Yahoo was the king of cool.

But cool is no longer cool. No one cool says cool anymore. Except for the people at Yahoo. Which is majorly uncool.

As the world changed Yahoo struggled to remain relevant. Unable to create their own halfway decent search engine, they used Google's until realizing that might not be a solution to their coming death spiral. Once a pioneer in webmail, they allowed Yahoo Mail to be eclipsed by Gmail.

And now Yahoo is the living dead of websites. While they're still visited by more people than almost any other site in the world, it's doubtful these people actually care whether they're visiting Yahoo or some other generic website. No, they visit out of rote habit, returning day after day because it's what they've done for years and they might as well visit one more time.

But that's not a recipe for success. Yahoo has become the web's equivalent of an outdated strip mall on the rundown edge of suburbia. People still visit but the visits are joyless and slightly disturbing. Everyone knows that any day now the bulldozers will arrive and flatten this piece of ugly, pointless nostalgia. But until that happens they figure they might as well keep coming.

I've known for many years that Yahoo was dead but I couldn't bring myself to bury the poor bastard. Even though I preferred my Gmail account, I'd had my Yahoo Mail account for so long that I couldn't stop using it. For the sake of nostalgia I ignored the continually intrusive updates and poorly thought out designs, all reflecting Yahoo's greater and greater desire to turn me into someone who cared about their products. I also ignored the hateful news stream on Yahoo's homepage, which highlighted the worst crackpot articles and rants and theories you could find online.

But yesterday, I finally stopped caring and buried Yahoo. I arrived as I usually did to find Yahoo forcing me to change my password. Sure, they'd say this was for security reasons but I knew that once I changed it everything would go bad. And it did. Yes, I could log in and see my emails, but every email I sent bounced back to me as undeliverable. Except for a few which didn't. There was no sense to the pattern.

But there hasn't been sense to anything about Yahoo in years.

Goodbye, Yahoo! Goodbye Yahoo Mail, which could no longer be trusted to actually deliver your mail. Goodbye Yahoo Messenger, which opened your life to hordes of spambots and unwanted strangers. Goodbye Yahoo defunct services, of which there were so very, very many.

Goodbye, Yahoo! I would say we'd miss you. But we won't.

2014 storySouth Million Writers Award notable stories

Here they are: the 2014 storySouth Million Writers Award notable stories. Thanks to all the editors and readers who nominated stories, which storySouth's preliminary judges then used to create this list. All of these stories were originally published in online magazines and journals during 2013. 

Right now the three final judges (full disclosure: I'm one of them) are reading through the stories below, so expect the top ten stories—and the public vote for the overall winners—in a few weeks.

If you'd like to donate to this year's prize money, click on the "donate" button on the main Million Writers Award page. Obviously this award doesn't work without everyone who supports it.

And that brings me to something I want to throw out to the literary world—the notable list below first emerged through nominations from readers and editors of online magazines. If you're wondering why your favorite story or favorite online magazine isn't listed, it's likely because no one nominated them. So next year nominate stories for the award!

2014 storySouth Million Writers Award notable stories

Update: The following stories were added to the notable list on Oct. 17: "Dirwhals!" by Ethan Rutherford, "Distance" by Susan Tepper, and "Melt With You" by Emily C. Skaftun. A year ago these three stories were accidentally named to the MWA notable list of 2012 stories even though they were actually published in 2013. At that time it was decided they'd be added to this year's notable list.