Genre Grapevine for March 2024
2024 Hugo Award Finalists
The Glasgow Worldcon announced the 2024 Hugo Awards finalists on Friday. Coming after the censorship and exclusion in last year’s awards, Glasgow’s award administrator Nicholas Whyte pledged greater transparency with this year's Hugos. The result is that along with the names of the finalists, Glasgow also released how many nominating ballots were cast in each category plus the names of people who declined their nominations and the specific reasons why three nominees were found not eligible.
There are some excellent works and amazing authors on the final ballot. I'm also thrilled to see translated stories by Chinese authors named as finalists in multiple categories along with works by new authors who’ve never before been Hugo finalists. I look forward to reading all the stories I've missed.
I’m also very happy to see that Dell Magazines, which publishes Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction, allowed Xiran Jay Zhao to be a finalist for this year’s Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Normally new writers are only eligible for the award for two years, but Zhao was wrongly deemed not eligible last year for political reasons. While current Hugo Award rules don’t make it possible to add back in all the authors and works wrongly removed from the 2023 ballot, since Dell Magazines runs this award and sets its rules they decided to correct the one injustice within their power to fix. Good on them for doing this!
As for the three works deemed not eligible for this year’s final ballot, one was the Chinese novel Cosmo Wings by Jiang Bo. The reason for the novel’s disqualification is that it was published this year, meaning it’ll be eligible next year. The other two disqualifications were because the works were nominated in fan categories but were actually professional productions.
Martha Wells declined nomination for her Murderbot novel System Collapse. Wells has previously declined additional award nominations for her Murderbot series so that other writers have a chance for recognition. In addition, Hai Ya declined in the novelette category for “The Far North” and Camestros Felapton for Best Fan Writer. Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood also declined nomination in the Best Related Work category for promotional tweets that pushed This Is How You Lose the Time War onto the bestseller lists last year.
Finally, Natasha Bardon declined a nomination for Best Editor, Long Form, sharing a statement on Instragram that directly referenced last year’s Hugo Awards disaster. “I’m honoured to have made the final list. Unfortunately, given the censorship in 2023, and as a professional working within a field that often feels closed off by gatekeepers, I feel unable to accept the nomination. Though I applaud the transparency of this year’s organisers, I do not feel there has been enough to safeguard this from happening again, nor right the wrongs of 2023. Congratulations to all finalists.”
It’s worth noting that Bardon is R.F. Kuang’s editor. Kuang’s amazing novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, won the Nebula and Locus Awards last year but was kept off the Hugo final ballot for political reasons by the award’s administrators.
While this year’s Hugos appear to be indeed aiming for more transparency, far more needs to be done to fix the award so the 2023 disaster never happens again. To accomplish this, various people in fandom are continuing to discuss how the Hugo rules can be changed to prevent censorship and exclusion in the future.
For example, Paul Weimer, Allison Hartman Adams, James Bacon, and Christopher J. Garcia are seeking submissions for a special issue of Journey Planet focused on what comes next for the Hugos, including “realistic and achievable solutions to prevent a recurrence of what occurred in 2023.” They are actively seeking submissions of essays, articles and possible motions to change the rules governing the Hugos. Submission deadlines are May 5 and May 17; see the guidelines for complete details.
I look forward to seeing what specific proposals emerge and are presented at this year’s Worldcon, where any rule changes will have their first vote. As someone who had a political dossier written about them last year by the Hugo administrators, I also understand why the awards have lost so much trust.
However, it’s also worth noting an important point raised by Cora Buhlert in her excellent analysis of this year's finalists.
As Buhlert said:
The only “reason this scandal came to light at all is because the Hugos are one of the most transparent awards in existence. Meanwhile, e.g. the administrators of the Dragon Awards, administrators whose identities are unknown, have the right to determine finalists without paying any heed to the actual nominations according to the rules of their award. I’m not saying that they do this, but they absolutely have the right. The Dragon Awards have also never released exact voting and participation numbers. And this is just one example. Very few awards are as transparent as the Hugo and yet you have people screaming that the Hugos are finished and that they will never trust them again (including one person who was happy enough to accept a Hugo nomination barely a month after they declared the Hugos tainted forever), when other awards could be doing similar shenangigans behind the scenes (again, I’m not saying that they are – most likely they’re not) and no one would ever know.”
So yes, we must fix and improve the Hugo Awards. And the award definitely can benefit from even more transparency. But we should also remember that one of the reasons what happened in 2023 came out is because the Hugos are already far more transparent than almost all other literary awards in the world.
Other Hugo-Related News
There will be no Long List Anthology released this year because of the issues with the 2023 Hugo Awards. “With all of the complications of this year’s nomination list, Diabolical Plots has decided not to produce a new volume of the Long List Anthology this year. We do still want to help boost readership for the amazing authors involved, however, so in lieu of the anthology, we have done our best to compile the most comprehensive list of links to the works from this year’s Short Story and Novelette categories that we could.”
The people behind the Hugo, Girl! podcast released this statement on March 10: "Following the Chengdu Hugo Awards, we believed in good faith that we were the legitimate winners of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fancast. We subsequently announced Hugo, Girl’s permanent recusal from the Best Fancast category. We were honored and delighted by the win, and we wanted to make room for others to experience the same. However, with each recent revelation about the administration of the Hugo Awards, we have become increasingly uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as legitimate winners. … “ The statement then states issues related to last year’s Hugo administrators investigating and disqualifying potential finalists “on the basis of assumed politics, queer and trans identity, and an imaginary trip to Tibet” and the elimination of scores of Chinese ballots. “For the foregoing reasons, we have decided to withdraw our recusal from Hugo eligibility, effective in 2025. We hope to have a future opportunity to participate in a fair, transparent Hugo Awards process, if voters decide to honor us again with a place on the ballot.”
An exclusive report on File770 revealed that Dave McCarty, who was last year’s overall Hugo Awards administrator and also has been accused of sexually harassing people, was refused admission to Eastercon in the United Kingdom over the weekend. As the report stated, “When this person then chose to enter the convention the next day, we told them that they would not be allowed to buy a membership and asked them to leave the site. They repeatedly refused to do so. We explained that if they did not leave we would ask site security to escort them out. They did not leave, and security did therefore escort them from the premises.”
As a final note, I’m a finalist for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Thank you to everyone who nominated me for the award. I'm deeply honored that so many people find value in my genre reporting. I'll also be attending this year's Glasgow Worldcon and I look forward to seeing everyone there. I also look forward to witnessing history being made as votes are held on different proposals to fix the Hugo Awards and prevent a recurrence of 2023.
Is NaNoWriMo Soon to Be NaNoMore?
Last month I reported that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) was making changes to the organization after their volunteers revolted over various deeply troubling issues. These issues included scam sponsorships of NaNoWriMo by vanity publishers, "inaction against predators," questions about donations, and much more.
You might think, "That’s good, they’re responding to criticism in an appropriate way." Except, that does not appear to be what happened. Instead, it appears all the organization’s Municipal Liaisons (ML), who are the volunteer coordinators for NaNoWriMo’s regional chapters, have either quit or at risk of being terminated after many MLs refused to sign a new volunteer contract.
On March 11, a writer named Sushi who is also an admin for Wikiwrimo shared a continually updated Google Document titled “NaNoWriMo 2023 controversy summary.” The document claims to tell the entire timeline of what has happened and, under the March 2024 section, both links to and summarizes the new contract (which can be found here).
Quoting directly from the controversy summary document, the new contract required the following:
MLing is effectively a year-long job instead of a few months plus some check-ins during Camp.
The ML contract mentions the identity verification and background checks previously mentioned.
A duty of confidentiality section which, when interpreted literally, disallows MLs from talking to anyone about these ML communications, even other MLs (or their co-MLs).
Placing almost all the liability on the ML with little support in return.
Report participants suspected to be minors, regardless of whether they actually are.
Nowhere in this ML contract does it say under which law this contract is to be interpreted under.
A duty of confidentiality section that, as written, forbids MLs from discussing confidential information with other MLs, which, as written, includes their co-MLs.
A clause which requires the ML to self-disclose if they engage in conduct that results in an arrest or conviction. As written, this is overly vague and does not necessarily mean the ML’s own arrest or conviction.
The response to the contract from MLs was overwhelmingly negative. As Reddit user WandaSykesStanAcct said,
“In a normal organization a volunteer agreement would not be shocking. It would be boring. It would not come with a confidentiality clause holding the volunteer liable if they speak out, and forbidding them to talk to other volunteers. It would not come with a mandate that these volunteers report anyone in their communities that break any kind of supposed rule to HQ (including, literally, use of profanity). It would not come with an obligation that these volunteers report other volunteers and participants for violations of the literal written letter of local laws (including places where being queer or speaking against the government is a crime). It would not make those volunteers swear to listen first to Nano HQ for directions in case of a public health emergency (instead of, you know, government health agencies). It would not hold volunteers legally liable for everything that happens in their regions, giving the HQ that's telling them what to do and when to do it a free pass. And yet, that is exactly what this agreement does.”
Today was the deadline for MLs to accept the new contract. And keep in mind these are volunteers we’re talking about. It’s difficult to see how the organization can move forward without the very volunteers who helped make NaNoWriMo what it is today.
And as if that's not enough, an X-Twitter user named Arumi Velociraptor on March 28 wrote a widely-shared thread about why “NaNoWriMo never investigated reports of child predators exploiting minors in their organization.” The thread mentioned leaked messages by NaNoWriMo staff members discussing all this. While screenshots of the messages weren’t shared, the thread suggests there’s more that may come out about NaNoWriMo in the future.
As Sushi said in a later tweet, what’s happening is awful all around. “But there's one thing I like to remind myself of: NaNoWriMo isn't the headquarters. It's the community, and we built NaNo into the wonder that it once was.”
Awards
The finalists for the 59th annual Nebula Awards. Voting for the awards is open to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) members through April 15.
SFWA announced Tanith Lee is the recipient of the 2024 SFWA Infinity Award. The award posthumously honors genre authors who passed away before they could be considered for SFWA’s Grand Master Award. The first Infinity Award was presented last year to Octavia E. Butler.
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs won the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award while a special citation was given to The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera won the 2024 Crawford Award.
The shortlist for the 2024 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour.
As reported by Arthur Liu, Sanfeng Zhang and Shaoyan Hu on File770, the Chinese Science Fiction Database released its 2023 recommendation list.
It’s worth noting that when the Bram Stoker Awards final ballot was released, Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle was listed as a finalist in the novel category. However, on the award’s preliminary ballot the novel was included in the young adult novel category. In a statement, the Bram Stoker Awards Committee said the novel “is not a young adult work. After careful discussion and review of the Preliminary Ballot voting, the Awards Committee has moved Camp Damascus to the Novel category, where it should have originally been included, resulting in six finalists in Novel. In the Young Adult Novel category, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron has now been added as a finalist. This ballot adjustment has been made to allow for proper recognition of works in the Young Adult Novel category and to observe the overall results of votes on the Preliminary Ballot.”
Chuck Tingle wrote an excellent thread about all this, pointing out that “as much as CAMP DAMASCUS works as young adult book, i believe it works as ADULT HORROR book too. this was done with intent.”
In a related thread about the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, which is presented alongside the Hugo Awards, Alex Brown asked "Why is it that the Lodestar is the only category that is vibes based? ‘I feel like this book that was not written, marketed, sold, or shelved under YA is YA bc it has some teens in it.’ Oh, I know, bc the nominators don't actually have any interest in teens, teen readers, or YA." Later in the thread, Brown added “We go through this shit every year with nearly every genre award. At least the Stokers and Tingle were gracious enough to fix it when it happened earlier this year with their horror award. And Locus moved an adult book out of their YA category this year, too.”
Book Banning Update
According to the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, “The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by OIF. The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship.”
It’s become so acceptable in parts of the USA to ban and destroy books that, according to The Gothamist, "Hundreds of new books featuring characters of color and LGBTQ+ themes were (recently) found by the trash at a Staten Island elementary school." In response, the group Authors Against Book Bans released a public letter to the New York City Department of Education. Publishers Weekly has more, including a link to the letter.
Let that sink in. That school threw away hundreds of new books because their staff considered them too dangerous to be read. And as the ALA’s analysis shows, this problem is happened in many places.
The mere fact that a group like Authors Against Book Bans has to exist in the first place speaks volumes. Every author should be alarmed by this trend and should be speaking out about it.
Other News and Info
Brandon Sanderson has been pushing audiobook powerhouse Audible to give better terms to authors. As he wrote in a recent update, "While video game creators and musicians get 70–80% (88%, in fact, on two major platforms) of a sale of their products in a digital platform, Audible was paying as low as 25%–with the high end being instead 40%. I felt I could have gotten a better deal for myself, but the entire state of this industry was seriously concerning to me. So, I made the difficult decision NOT to release the four Secret Projects on Audible, costing me a large number of sales, to instead try to bolster healthy competition in the space, highlighting some of the smaller Audible competitors." It appears Sanderson’s work on this may be paying off, with Audible considering a new royalty structure for independent writers and smaller publishers and also say it will pay authors monthly instead of quarterly. However, Sanderson says there’s still work to do and that the new deal from Audible won’t give authors the 70% royalty that he and many others think is fair. Read the entire post for details.
A small company named Sweet Baby that consults on narrative development at larger gaming companies is being attacked by a group of self-identified “anti-woke” gamers angry that popular games are featuring more diverse characters. This is happening despite Sweet Baby, as a consulting company, having “no actual say on what makes it into the final game.” As a detailed report in Wired described, “those clamoring for Sweet Baby’s demise are calling it Gamergate 2.0, invoking the online harassment campaign that erupted into a culture war a decade ago. Gamergate formalized the playbook for online harassment used by hate groups and the far right; it inspired figures who would later tap into that outrage and rise all the way to positions of power, such as chief strategist in the White House.”
SAG-AFTRA may strike the video game industry in the coming weeks, with artificial intelligence being one of the union’s major concerns.
A Kickstarter for the New Demons anthology, to be edited by Joe R. Lansdale, Patrick R. McDonough and Keith Lansdale, raised $25,070, far above the initial goal of $5,000. However, the fundraiser and anthology were canceled after authors including Gabino Iglesias and Cherie Priest pulled out of the project over misconduct claims raised against McDonough, who denied the allegations. File770 has a complete report including screenshots.
From Ask A Manager comes this horrifying example of a ridiculous policy at work (see item #11): “I worked for a publishing company that published a variety of print media. One of the senior managers in the books team implemented a rule that marketing material could not use the word ‘book’ or ‘books’. So we had to promote the books without saying they were books. Fwiw, this guy was a classic example of the Peter Principle and didn’t have a clue what he was doing.”
There are only four days left in the annual fundraiser for Locus Magazine.
New Edge Sword & Sorcery's recent crowdfunding campaign for two new issues was a success, raising $34,476, well above their goal of $17,450.
As Tom Gauld shows, cats in space will be a major headache.
Alethea Kontis shares something every cook needs in their kitchen: The Loch Ness Ladle.
Opportunities
The African Science Fiction Society is accepting nominations for the 7th Nommo Awards in the categories of novel, novella, short story and graphic novel. Works published in both 2022 and 2023 are eligible. Deadline April 30. Details>>
Grist’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest is open for submissions. Judges are Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz and the top three prizes are massive at $3000, $2000, and $1000. Deadline June 24. Details>>
The Horror Writers Association is accepting submissions from members for the HWA Poetry Showcase Volume XI. Deadline May 1. Details>>
Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk are seeking submissions for a workers’ rights edition of Journey Planet. "We are interested in a range of topics in various formats, from broad issues such as the depiction of the management class in space opera, to more narrowly focused analysis such as how Star Trek: Deep Space Nine can offer a model for collective action, as well as the real-world practicalities of exploitative labour practices in fandom-related employment. Reviews, short essays, fiction, art — it’s all welcome." Proposals due May 30. Details>>
khōréō magazine, which is a finalist for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, will open for submissions for the themed issue “point of view” on April 15. Details>>