More Hugo Stuff...

Kevin Standlee linked to this piece which, in my opinion, fairly unfairly slams him.  Despite that, it's an excellent piece of writing, and worthy, frankly, of a Hugo nod in London.  But I still think it's flawed, and it exposes what I see as some of the weakness at the heart of the arguments I'm reading online at the moment.  But here's the comment I put there, which loosely pulls my thoughts together.

First of: thought provoking piece, it certainly got me to examine a bunch of my core concepts.  But I've some issues with parts of it.

Background:  I come at this as a Convention attending non-SMOF, not even on the email list.  While Kevin and I know each other and I've met Moshe on occasions I suspect neither could pick me out of a line out.  I am white, middle-class and reasonably well off.  However, I, like another commentator have an issue with invoking privilege in a discussion like this.  I can't help who I am, all I can do is try to consider if it impacts my position on things, and in this case, I'm not entirely sure that it does.

It is singularly unhelpful to invoke white, middle-class privilege in a discussion around an event which carries a relatively high price tag.  Short of divorcing the Hugos and the Worldcon, which I think also misses the point, those things are going to be intertwined.

I'll also point out that I've been involved in online fannish activities since the mid-1990s.  And have had more than a passing involvement in media focused fandom too.

There is certainly a split between 'traditional' fans, as they see themselves, and younger fans who've grown up with a more web and media focus.  And that's been a fight and point of contention for as long as I have been involved in fannish things - 25+ years at this point.  And I think you've done a great job outlining that problem.  Fan groups and conventions were the only way for many of us to interact with other SF fans and the SF club at University was my first experience of other people who actually cared about Science Fiction as much as I did, and meeting those people was a liberating experience, as Jo Walton really points out.

However, you make some specific points that I think are problematic and just as much at the heart of this debate as the comments you directed at Kevin.

1. You seem to sneer at the 'parliamentary' workings of the WSFS meetings.  But the reality is, that's how bodies like that have to work.  Whether it's your government, local council, housing association, sports club, church, work, a standard's body or whatever, there's a reason why there are constitutions  formal meeting structure and minutes that are followed.  Without them, you simply can't function.   In every single situation I can think of where people think there isn't something in that function, you either find that there is, or you find that there's somebody doing that job because if it doesn't get done everything stops working.

If you have an alternative, I'd really like to hear it...  but that brings me to my second problem:

2. You finish with asking for: I want a Hugo Award that is socially, politically and culturally inclusive but I feel that the debate, as it is currently conducted, is not exactly helping anyone to bring this future about.

I want to know what you think that Hugo looks like.  Because I didn't take it away from the piece.  I saw you complain about the people who manage the process and how detached they are from the 'actual' fanbase, and I saw an invocation of privilege.  But I don't actually know what you think a socially, politically and culturally inclusive Hugo looks like and how you'd maintain such a thing without it ossifying into what a 2013 version of such would be.

And that's really at the crux of this.  You and a lot of others talk about 'debate', but to debate you need to have some clarity around the terms of the debate, and not just in a school sense of 'This house resolves that the Hugos are broken'.

Without that clarity, we're going to argue and get nothing done.

Which brings me back to why we have to have people like Kevin who take out the trash while people are shouting at each other or while lazy sods like me are sleeping through the Business Meeting because I was partying until dawn.