Genre Grapevine for May 2024
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RWA Blames Everyone But Themselves for Bankruptcy
The Romance Writers of America (RWA) filed for bankruptcy on May 29 and essentially blamed DEI, Courtney Milan and everyone else in the world for their self-inflicted problems. Which fits perfectly with how the RWA has been acting in recent years.
As a reminder, back in 2019 the RWA suspended bestselling romance author Courtney Milan for calling out racism in the romance genre. As The Guardian said in a good summary of what happened, “Kathryn Lynn Davis, a white romance author, and Suzan Tisdale, another white author who worked with Davis, filed an ethics complaint against Milan, accusing her of ‘cyberbullying’ and damaging their careers for a tweet thread…” The thread they complained about was one where Milan criticized the depictions of Chinese women in Davis’s novel Somewhere Lies the Moon. RWA ended up both censuring and suspending Milan from the organization.
As I wrote back then, this behavior by the RWA was sadly typical for the organization, which had a long history of trivializing and overlooking racism in their ranks. The RWA’s movement against Milan and others came after these authors had tried to change the organization from within. Despite such change being essential for the organization’s future, especially since today’s romance writers and readers come from increasingly diverse backgrounds and expect the same from the romance genre, the organization’s old guard fought back.
The end result was the RWA’s financial and moral bankruptcy.
There’s obviously a lot more to all this than that. For a deep dive into what happened, I recommend Azteclady’s post “RWA goes bankrupt; it’s not DEI, it’s the bigotry and racism.” In addition, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books also offers an excellent look at all this.
One interesting aspect of the bankruptcy filing is the revelation that the RWA’s membership decreased from 10,000 people in 2019 to around 2,000 today, which is solid proof that 80% of the RWA’s members didn’t like what the organization was doing. And as Courtney Milan pointed out, it's good that some of the media coverage of the RWA's court filing contrasts the organization’s failings with the growing success of the Steamy Lit Con, a romance book convention that aims to celebrate diversity in romance.
Finally, as Julia Ganis pointed out, only "a few months ago (RWA) were promoting a workshop to…checks notes…use AI to write a romance novel. The bar is on the floor; RWA always—ALWAYS!—sinks lower.”
Babel Wins Top Chinese SF Award in Rebuke of Hugo Censorship
The winners of the annual Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction were presented in Chengdu on May 18 by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association (WCSHA). A post on File770, translated by Feng Zhang and the WCSHA, lists the winners for what is the most important science fiction award in China.
Congrats to all the winners and I hope we see translations of these works into English in the near future. However, one winner I’ve already read: Babel by R.F. Kuang, with the Chinese translation by Chen Yang winning the Gold Award for Best Translation.
As File770 stated, “Ironically, the award for Best Translated Work was presented to R.F. Kuang’s Babel in the same hall that hosted last year’s Hugo Awards for which the novel was unjustifiably ruled ineligible by the committee.”
Chris M. Barkley and I described what happened in our report earlier this year on censorship and exclusion in the 2023 Hugo Awards. In summary, Babel was deemed “not eligible” for the award despite having more than enough nominations to make the final ballot, with Western award administrators such as Dave McCarty being heavily involved in researching political concerns related to Hugo-eligible authors and works. These administrators also discussed removing certain works and authors from the ballot for those reasons.
One rationale I’ve heard from people trying to excuse what these Western award administrators did is to imply McCarty and the others were merely protecting their Chinese counterparts. Per this supposed explanation, the Chinese government or other powerful interests might have been upset if certain authors and works made the final ballot or won, so McCarty et al stepped up to bravely protect their Chinese peers.
I personally never believed this rationale. That said, until now it has been difficult to argue against this view because it’s based on some supposedly secret knowledge known only to McCarty and the other Hugo administrators.
But Babel winning the Xingyun Award rebukes any such claim. With this award Chinese fandom and the World Chinese Science Fiction Association have clearly stated Babel was fully deserving of being honored. This also means the people running the WCSHA aren’t worried about their government or other powerful interests getting mad at them for honoring Kuang’s bestselling novel.
Finally, the announcement that Babel received the Xingyun Award just happened to occur in the same place as last year’s Hugos – chef’s kiss!
There is no defending what Dave McCarty and the other Hugo admins did last year. Their actions have permanently stained the award. Babel has now won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the British Book Award, the Locus Award, and the top Chinese SF award for translation.
And with this new award, there’s no way anyone can ever again justify what McCarty and the other Hugo admins did.
Hugo Statues Still Not Delivered to Winners
And segueing from one disgrace to another, many of the people in the United States who won Hugo Awards last year still haven’t received them, despite the statues arriving in the country more than four months ago.
When Chris M. Barkley and I were working on our Hugo report in early February, he mentioned he still hadn’t received the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer he’d won at the Chengdu Worldcon. An estimated 29 Hugo statues were shipped to the USA and received by the Hugo admins here in late January 2024. However, many of these awards were damaged during shipping, resulting in Dave McCarty telling Chris the Hugo admins were working to get the statues repaired and delivered to the winners.
I joked with Chris that after our report came out, he might never receive his award. Sadly, that joke is now looking like it may turn out to be true. And Chris is not the only winner yet to receive their actual award. Many of last year’s recipients in the USA are in the same category as Chris, with no awards and no word on when or if they might arrive.
In the last two weeks I’ve twice emailed Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow, Joe Yao, and Ann Marie Rudolph – the people who were either Hugo admins last year or vice chairs of the Chengdu Worldcon – asking for an update on the delivery of the statues or a comment about what has happened.
None of them responded to my emails.
Convention Punishes Victim of Harassment
Perhaps “disgrace” is the theme of today’s column, because I have no other way to describe what PenguiCon recently did to Patrick S. Tomlinson.
PenguiCon is a long-running convention in the Ann Arbor, Michigan, area. The convention was held in late April and had originally invited Tomlinson to be a presenter. However, as Tomlinson described in the must-read essay “PenguiCon 2024 Postmortem Or How Not To Handle Cyberstalking,” the convention disinvited him shortly before it started.
As people in the genre already know, Tomlinson has been harassed for years by a group of online trolls, resulting in the author being called the "most swatted man in America." This harassment has easily crossed into terrorism with the trolls making bomb threats against a number of public venues in various states, including a Patti LaBelle concert in Milwaukee where Tomlinson lives.
One thing the trolls do is impersonate Tomlinson and harass other people using his name. According to Tomlinson, this appears to be what happened at PenguiCon, with both convention staffers and guests of honor receiving threatening messages supposedly from him through both fake social media accounts and other means. A post on the PenguiCon website backs up part of this, with one convention staffer admitting they mishandled the “safety concerns" of one of the guests of honor who withdrew.
In his post, Tomlinson describes trying to work all this out with PenguiCon before going public. However, the response from PenguiCon staff was to blame him for threats of physical violence against their guests. Threats which are, again, being made by the people harassing Tomlinson.
A few days after posting about all this, Tomlinson also shared a thread about literary agent Leslie Varney, who had posted a public letter she wrote to PenguiCon urging the convention to not allow Tomlinson to attend. As Tomlinson stated last year, Varney has evidently joined in the ongoing harassment against him. According to a public letter Varney posted in June 2023, it appears the trolls harassing Tomlinson impersonated him and convinced her they were him.
In the letter Varney wrote to PenguiCon, she said one of her goals with getting the convention to not allow Tomlinson to attend was to use "your decision as a precedent" to convince the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle to do the same.
As Tomlinson said in his post:
“To any con runners reading this, I cannot stress this next bit enough. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Excluding the targets of criminal stalking and harassment harms only the victims and helps only the criminals. No one is protected by this decision. No one is made “safe.” Not only does it reward and validate criminal behavior by achieving their strategic goals, it encourages escalation and expansion, endangering attendees and presenters at the next convention on the calendar, your own convention the following year, and every convention thereafter because you’ve taught them to escalate until they get what they want.”
I agree. If the trolls doing this to Tomlinson succeed, this tactic will be normalized and used against other authors and convention guests.
And people in the genre need to know these trolls love having others do their dirty work for them. An example of this took place on May 15, when the trolls posted a fake Craigslist ad that convinced random people to steal handmade chairs from Tomlinson’s backyard. Thankfully, once these people realized they’d been duped, they returned the chairs.
And make no mistake, the harassment of Tomlinson continues full steam. The other night one of the trolls drove down the alley behind Tomlinson’s house and threw a can of paint at his car. On the can were Nazi symbols along with a picture of a gun held to his face.
Short Fiction Worth Reading
Angela Liu recently shared a great point:
“Been thinking about the lifespan of a story and why it often feels like a never-ending grind for the next new work, the next sale. Why it often feels like we have 1-2 weeks to promote a story/poem/essay/etc. and then it goes into the bibliography never to be mentioned again. I love finding stories that are 3-4 years old that I missed or being reminded of a poem from half a year ago that I can look at with a fresh new perspective now. I wish it weren’t so easy to forget past achievements in the search for new ones.”
I agree with Liu on this. I also believe this not only applies to authors promoting their own works, but to readers searching for good stories to read.
To help, from now on in each column I will highlight recent stories I loved and that I urge others to read.
This month’s picks are:
“You Will Be You Again” by Angela Liu, published in Interzone. A thought-provoking and tragic story of immigrants changing their names, the hurts we inflict on those we love, and our eternally screwed up and drug-ridden healthcare system.
“Median” by Kelly Robson, published in Reactor. This strangely realistic story shook me all the way to my core and left me completely unsettled.
Awards
Winners of the Xingyun Awards for Chinese Science Fiction (see section about Babel above for more).
The winner of the 2024 Prix Jacques-Brossard is Alain Bergeron.
The 2024 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award has been awarded posthumously to Jennell Jaquays.
The voter packet for the 2024 Hugo Awards is available to members of the Glasgow Worldcon (login required). The packet is available until the close of voting on July 20.
The Aurealis Awards has launched the Sara Douglass Book Series Award, which goes to a completed series told in two or more books. Nominations are currently open through September 30, 2024, for any eligible series that ended between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2023. Details>>
The Horror Writers Association's Stoker Awards are open to submissions in various categories. Works submitted will be sent for jury consideration and you don’t have to be a HWA member to submit. The deadline is November 30 for works published between January 1, 2024 and November 30, 2024, and December 31 for works published in December of this year. Details>>
Other News and Info
In what Penguin Random House called a "restructure,” two top publishers lost their jobs in May: Reagan Arthur at Alfred A. Knopf and Lisa Lucas at Pantheon Schocken. People in the industry were shocked at the announcement, and Lucas pointed out to the world that “I did ***not**** quit my job.” Lucas also shared a funnier post with a smiling face after the announcement, stating “I have some regrets about spending the weekend working.”
Camestros Felapton covered how Brad Torgersen has been attacking Brandon Sanderson as too "woke" and implying that one of the most famous and bestselling fantasy authors in the world should be excommunicated from the LDS church. This is, to quote Felapton, “A battle on the scale of Bambi’s younger sibling versus Godzilla.”
As covered in File770, the very first Hugo Award ever presented is up for auction. The award was given to Forrest J Ackerman by Isaac Asimov at the 1953 Worldcon and its predicted auction value is $5,000 to $7,000.
RiverFlow, who with Ling Shizhen writes the Hugo Award winning fanzine Zero Gravity, is aiming to release an English-language version in time for the Glasgow WorldCon so people can hear the voice of Chinese fans.
Chelle Parker will step down this summer as one of the editors of Diabolical Plots, with Amanda Helms joining the editorial team.
I totally endorse this message from BrokenFiction: “I am begging everyone to watch Scavengers Reign when it releases on Netflix May 31st. Yes, streaming is the devil but this show is something special and the more eyes on it will not only get to see probably the best scifi animated series ever made but will help get it another season.”
Google recently launched their AI search engine results, which went about as well as everyone expected. Jeremiah Johnson collected some of the best results shared online, including how cockroaches can live in male genitalia, how you should use glue to stick cheese to pizza, and how if you run off a cliff you can stay in the air as long as you keep running and don't look down. That last response strongly suggests someone involved in the creation of Google’s AI is a fan of Looney Tunes.
Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association voted for “a complete ban against using AI-produced work in their publications, and will treat such work as ineligible for its awards.”
As Shane Blackheart shared, “So Storygraph has implemented AI as well now. Not only do they grab lines from actual reviews and smoosh them together for their own summary of your book, your books' ACTUAL summary comes after the AI BS. I'm so fucking tired. You can go to Storygraph and look up your book to see what I mean.”
Loved this Bluesky comment after Trump's conviction on 34 felonies: "The timeline right now looks like an Ewok party after the Death Star exploded."
As Tom Gauld shows in this cartoon, readers can't pass on to the afterlife until their TBR pile stops haunting them.
Opportunities
I’m teaching the online workshop "Writing Tips and Strategies for Neurodiverse Writers Writing Tips and Strategies for Neurodiverse Writers" on July 20. Hosted through Apex Publication's Reach Your Apex workshop series, the session will feature tips and strategies that have helped me as a neurodiverse author while also discussing strategies other neurodiverse writers have shared. Details>>
Diabolical Plots will open to submissions from July 8 to July 22. In addition, the magazine is accepting first reader applications, with a deadline of June 3 to apply. Details>>
Apparition Lit’s “anachronism” themed issue has an extended submission window for BIPOC writers, with a deadline of June 7. The magazine’s next themed submissions is on “harbringer,” with a reading period of August 15 to 31. Details>>