Understanding the world science fiction convention | Hacker News Reader

Understanding the world science fiction convention

antipope.org

144 pointscstross52 comments

Fun fact: antipope is not an anti-catholic name, according to the site (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html)

"What sitename do you want?" he asked.

I'd been posting on usenet under the alias "AutoPope -- pontifications by email". (If you don't know what the long word means, go look it up.) So I said, "How about autopope.uucp?"

"Okay." Hic. Burp.

And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp

Historically being an antipope didn't mean that you were anti Catholic, it meant you believed yourself to be the true Pope in opposition to the Pope in Rome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope

My fun fact: Some antipopes resided in Avignon France, and a (delicious) wine from that region (allegedly, I'm not a wine guy) is called Châteauneuf-du-Pape (House of the New Pope) for this reason.

> Châteauneuf-du-Pape

That reads more like "[The] Pope's New Castle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teauneuf-du-Pape_AOC

In fact, Avignon was the site of the Apostolic See and indeed, seven canonically-accepted Popes resided there, plus two antipopes. https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/avignon

This period also featured Italian antipopes! It was dramatic! https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/western-schism

This is correct, thank you for clarifying! The information was relayed from an intoxicated man to an even more intoxicated man, so I didn't get quite all of it. Time to get reading!

It's actually a great example of how we just associate French names with 'fancy'. If you saw a bottle of an alcoholic drink for sale under the name "Pope's Newcastle" you'd be forgiven for assuming it was a down-to-earth real ale.

Newcastle United's goalkeeper is called Nick Pope. Perhaps he should go by the name Pape-du-Châteauneuf.

cf also the Frank Black song "New House of the Pope" which talks about a pub.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsb0PSPhcbo

I've seen more than a few of these kerfuffle happen now. Other commenters have mentioned other times in other directions that the voting has come out weird.

All I can say is that while yes, these awards do matter, they don't have to matter as much as you think. At best, all the outcome tells you is what someone else thinks is worth reading. Consider it a starting point. It follows that any given list of nominees is way more important, in terms of gathering a list of books with neat ideas and execution, than a list of winners.

They matter as a signal of quality for reading recommendations. As someone who has read many/most of the previous Hugo (and Nebula) winners, it used to be a high quality signal for good sci-fi stories.

And, while it's always been a popularity contest at it's core, I can't help feeling some disappointment at seeing it descend into whatever nonsense it has become.

So really I guess I miss them as the high quality signal it used to be and it's on me to find new signals

The world of book writing is an iceberg, and with thousands of works being released a year that not just go unreviewed but unread there is little chance the awards are inclusive of the genre.

We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984 and as a new author myself this makes me so sad.

> We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984

I think we're there already, no? Amazon is being flooded with AI-written novels, including "fun" ones like a guide to foraging mushrooms; Clarkesworld had to stop accepting submissions for awhile due to AI-generated garbage flooding their inboxes.

> The world of book writing is an iceberg...

and like icebergs while melting, rolls over every now and then, so what was up is down and down is up, and not in a regular way but in a chaotic way

This article answers one of the questions I had about this year's Hugo awards.

R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!

I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.

I just looked at the votes - and Babel would not have won in any case. It was ranked #7 when it was disqualified.

Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.

The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.

People are talking about them miscounting nomination votes to eliminate Babel. It is very strange that the #3 position would lose to #7. Like there would have to been no ballots that ranked Babel in lower position. The only thing makes sense is that they disqualified it early and stopped counting votes.

Although Babel was removed during the final vote count, here is what the interim vote count looked like. It looks like it would not even be on the short list.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25245686/h...

People have been pointing out the numbers are bogus [1]. Notice that huge drop in votes between #7 and #8, that doesn't happen with normal voting. It can happen with slate voting but this would have to be pretty extreme. Also, the weird votes are only for some awards like novel.

I don't know what the score means, but notice that for Babel it starts lower and never changes, while the others increase presumably from lower ranks being added to score. I think the only way Babel happens if there were no ballots who put it lower only top position. It is also suspicious that it goes out at the seventh position, just losing out to the lowest slate.

Also, why would they the disqualify it if it had been eliminated. It makes sense to disqualify at the beginning or end of nomination. Also, there is no final vote count, there is nomination count and the final vote. It was removed before the final vote.

1: https://alpennia.com/blog/comparison-hugo-nomination-distrib...

That looks like a compelling argument.

I think HN may be interested in another recent instance of the Hugo awards running into difficulties because of its rules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

TL;DR: A conservative block of voters swept the nominations for certain categories. At final voting, members voted to not give awards at all in those categories.

Is there any summary of what happened from the side of the proponents? Given Wikipedia's track record when it comes to certain topics, it'd be very nice to have some points of comparison here.

https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/06/a-letter-to-the-s...

notice this from article!

>Go through our list of nominees for yourself. You’ll find that we have liberals, conservatives, moderates, and question marks who’ve kept their politics to themselves.

Over the years since, I think the primary characteristics you'll find from their slate are either "quickly disavowed the Sad Puppies movement when they found out they were endorsed" or "have in the years since turned out to be just fine with people being pricks in shared spaces."

You think it’s biased because it’s using words like “right-wing” and “anti-diversity”? I’ve usually found such terms to be right on the mark, even if some don’t like it pointed out

I assume that "right-wing" and "anti-diversity" are correct labels here, that's not really my problem. It's frankly less about bias, and more about the fact that the Wikipedia article is pretty sparse, and all I could see is the link to Correia's blog.

This is completely disconnected from my own politics, really. I don't need to read articles on how a "right-wing voting campaign got owned at the Hugo awards". That story writes itself. The other side of the story is more interesting.

Thanks for explaining your reasoning. That sounds more reasonable than I’d assumed. I stand corrected

IIRC they swept because Hugo membership is open and they made a coordinated effort to join and sweep those categories. The idea of a coordinated anti-diversity effort pissed off a lot of people. For a few friends of mine who are lifelong sci-fi nerds, it was motivation to finally join Hugo so they could vote “no award”.

They swept for of the same reason the Chinese worldcon was a mess: we are used to operating much of society by an unwritten set of rules that assume everyone is pretty much a good actor. Sure, they may have an axe to grind, and might stretch things, but no one will deliberately find loopholes at scale to abuse. This worked for several millenia. Whole countries used to not have written constitutions, just unwritten agreements on how to behave.

But in the age of the internet, it's much easier to find communities that you can break this way. These systems are resilient to a few people who are bad actors, but totally fall apart if there are coordinated actions.

It's exactly what the Republican party is doing in the US now. And what Trump supporters plan to do if he's elected with Project 2025.

Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.

You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.

Sad Puppy 2015 slate: https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/sad-puppies-3-announces-...

Patterson biography, volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Dialogue-Century-1948...

The only fun thing that came out of that mess was that Chuck Tingle was nominated for a Hugo Award.

The nomination of Space Raptor Butt Invasion in 2016 was a Sad Puppy footgun.

He disavowed their coordinated campaign and then engaged further:

Satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle's massive troll of conservative sci-fi fans, explained

    Right-wing sci-fi writers tried to delegitimize the Hugo Awards by nominating a writer no one took seriously. Here's how he took them all by surprise.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11759842/chuck-tingle-hugo-awa...

Also people who don’t take him seriously have not been paying enough attention. Chuck Tingle is a master craftsman.

I would agree that a group swept the nominations. (and I don't agree with them)

Having attended a couple conventions, including a worldcon just before this happened, I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story.

The sad puppies effort was more mutually assured destruction than really trying to win. They know their books are pulp. But they also believed that nobody actually read those other books.

I've been to conventions biased one way or the other and they have one thing in common: nobody seems concerned with whether a story is good or not. This is probably why we keep getting superhero movies.

> I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story

Which undeserving stories/authors exemplify this?

Of the winners, I've only read The Three Body Problem, which I liked for a number of reasons.

I'm not familiar with any of the other winners.

Which of these are monsters on par with the big winners from the 60's through 90's?

There are a lot of people saying that the current trend is a backlash against sad puppies (which would also be wrong) while simultaneously denying that it was happening before sad puppies.

My experience is they were doing this, the sad puppies blew it up, now it seems to be happening with impunity. There are alternate more conservative cons out there, maybe the two groups have separated entirely.

Putting all the blame on the sad puppies (who, again are wrong, but I have to say this because people like painting anyone who disagrees as right wing fascist) isn't taking in the whole picture.

>> I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story

> Of the winners, I've only read The Three Body Problem, which I liked for a number of reasons.

I may be misunderstanding you, but if you didn't read the books, how did you judge the quality of the stories? Did you perhaps read the nominations, if so, please let me know any that you feel was not deserving and the possibly got nominated based on author's identity.

> how did you judge the quality of the stories?

I haven't read them, I haven't judged them.

I'm reporting to you and anyone else who read it that while in attendance at worldcons pre-sad puppies, there was active campaigning for books based on the identity of the author. Sad puppies did not occur in a vacuum. I'm in no way justifying any stuffing the vote or any other shenanigans.

I will say that the last 10 years of winners are certainly more obscure than any 10 years from 1960-2000. Individually an obscure book may be great. As a trend it seems unlikely.

I may be missing out on something from the last 10 years. But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

I won't read something just because it's written by a woman or minority. -- me

I won't read something if it's written by a minority. -- not me

I won't read something just because it's written by a man. -- also me

I'll read something if it is recommended. -- I may judge the recommender if it is awful

I'll read something if the story sounds interesting. -- very little emphasis of this at worlcon

> But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

I thought it's a rhetorical question, because on its face, comparing award-winners across decades is orthogonal to the question on whether the recent winners deserve to win, and is frankly subjective. If I accept your prior that the winning story in 20xx is not as good as the winner from 1975; that information is insufficient to support the argument that the 20xx winner didn't deserve to win. IMO, the way to prove that would be to name another book from the same year that deserved to win, but didn't. "Everything is now shit" is an indictment of the entire industry - not minority authors whose quality of work is for our purposes, is yet to be quantified (relative to the rest of the contemporary field).

To answer your question about the lack of "monsters"; I think it's a function of the number of SF authors active in a given decade (big fish in a small pond), the number of SF books published, the relative proportion consumers reading books vs competing media (some of the best SF I've experienced are games - which weren't competitive with books as a vehicle for stories until, SystemShock maybe?). People don't read books as much anymore. I am working through my list of Hugo winners, and there are some not-so-great books in there. IMO, several of Ted Chiang's are better stories than a good chunk of the winners 1960-2000.

>I may be missing out on something from the last 10 years. But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

Who are you getting your recommendations from? I get constantly recommended new work. Exordia by Seth Dickinson was released less than a week ago and it's already had people recommending it to me. The people who I know who mostly recommend only classics... stopped reading!

This reads like an extremely one sided take with a myopic US west coast moralising slant. The author seems oblivious to the irony of calling something worldcon, then throwing a tantrum if the world does dare not to prostrate to their idiological microbubble.

You can say a lot of negative things about it, but it's most definitely not a "micro" bubble. The ideological influence of the US West Coast on the world at large during the past century has been de-facto defining much of the global culture, even if you limit it to just Hollywood and the Silicon Valley.

A world that were to shrug off this influence would be, for better or worse, fundamentally different.

Not only am I not Californian, I'm not American: I'm a left-wing Scot living in Edinburgh.

That's what I deserve for just quickly skimming an article on the trone on my phone.

I guess the gratuitous Trump trope succeeded trowing me off a more nuanced reading.

Mb.

What an odd take. I don't see the moralising or the tantrum, just a take on events that happened and the likely consequences. I don't think you're getting a myopic US west coast viewpoint from a British author.

+1 Stross is decidedly the opposite of the stereotypical US west coast sci-fi author.

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