12 Years Ago

I was working for a dot com in Silicon Valley and woke to a typical mid-Bay morning, sun, blue skies etc...  wandered to the kitchen, got some cereal, turned on the TV to see where there was a cat stuck up a tree in the Bay Area and saw the news.  I called to M to come into the living room, which she grudgingly did, moaning that it had better be important.  It kinda was.

The immediate impact on us was Atlas Ventures invoked the Material Change Clause in our funding and pulled the remaining $4.5m trance of funds which led to us going home within a few weeks.  The impact on the world has been somewhat more extreme.

In other news: my cold, which I thought was better when I woke up, has decided to have another go.  Bastard.

Virtual Life...

Several of the comments on the thread on Staffer's about awards have been rattling around my head.  There's a set of people whom I've discussed things with before who don't actually like Conventions, I think one of them described the idea of meeting up with people as a bit creepy.  Several others have suggested that replacing a convention with a giant Google hangout would be really cool.

Hmm...  I guess.

So here's the thing.  Back in the dim, dim, dim distant past of the internet, back in the late 1990s where I was a newly divorced person living in London on a shoestring - seriously, I had about 10 quid a week spare money - I had a bad internet chat habit.  I was a regular on several online chat systems, most usually Yahoo Chat, which would have as many as 1200 people on at a time before it crashed...  I met a lot of people that way including my wife.  I did a lot of time on chat.

And then I stopped.

I'm not really sure why.  Saying I grew out of it is probably wrong, the nature of the chatters changed, more interesting things came along, and as I got older and had more money I found more interesting things to do with my spare time, like go to the pub and go out for nice dinners.  Plus there was the whole thing of having an SO to whom I had to pay some attention.

I see Google Hangouts in the same way, have fun and all, but I'd rather be in meat space chatting to people.  I did my time online.  We didn't have all the whistles and bells (webcams!  hah!) but it felt very real and important, but the feeling that it was something new and special passed.  I tried Second Life and felt the same way, it was an interesting concept, but in the end it was just a bit too detached to hold my attention on an ongoing basis.

Over on the thread about awards, in the sub-thread about the suggestion that they create an SFF Bloggers Association and create awards from them, I asked what was actually going to stop them turning into the WSFS, or at least how they see the WSFS, in 20 years.  I suspect the real answer is nothing.

20 years from now whatever replaces Blogging will be hammering on the weirdos who Blog and looking at the the same way that the Bloggers look at those who still want to hand crank a mimeograph machine for their fanzine.

The trick about change is actually not adapting to everything new thing that comes out.  In the short term you're likely to be Betamax and in the long term VHS.

Gaming the Hugos

kevin_standlee got kicked off a blog for arguing that he didn't think there was much evidence of gaming in the Hugo Awards.  The thesis being presented, mostly to explain how John Scalzi won, was that Tor, by stint of being a large publisher who pay for a lot of people to go to the Worldcon, are able to effectively block vote their preferences.  Now, apart from this being, on the face of it, one of the most fucking stupid ideas I've heard in a long while, I did decide to go and look at the data.

So, trawling back through the last decade I was curious to see if there was any real evidence that Tor being able to send 60ish people to a Worldcon had any impact on their ability to win.  And...  tl:dr - no, not really.

Ok, so my problem with your thesis is this. If I go and look back at the last decade of Hugo winners I see the following:

TOR (with their house advantage) – have won 4 times in the last decade from 11 nominations – RotP have won 8 from 29 – similar win to nomination ratios there. There’s a lot of different sizes in imprint there but if the scale of the Tor House effect is real I’d expect to see more evidence.

Alternatively I can look at the winners from Tor and see if there’s a pattern:

Spin 2006 – I’m a bit ‘meh’ on Spin, I voted for Accelerando, but Charlie Stross was less well known in the US then and probably only made the ballot because of left over Brit nominations from 2005.

Rainbow’s End 2007 – no question in my mind best book of the batch and the year.

Among Others 2012 – Wasn’t a fan, but a weak field. I voted for Feed because nothing really grabbed me from the list

Redshirts 2013 – Weak field, weak book. Didn’t vote this year, but couldn’t finish 2312, and I wouldn’t vote, normally for sequels or series.

Years Tor lost…

2003 – strong field, didn’t much like the winner, actually voted for KSR that time

2004 – didn’t vote, not big on any of them, dealers choice

2005 – Ian McDonald got steamrollered by the Bloomsbury Publishing machine… the vote was close, so I’ll give you a point for this being a year that the publisher skewed things

2008 – big field, Neil Gaiman won… I expected that to go to Anathem, but big year, hard to call

2010 – tie for first, Boneshaker, which I thought was crap, lost

2011 – Tor didn’t make the ballot

So the one year where's it's possible that there was a publisher effect is 2005 where Ian McDonald lost out by a narrow margin to a book from Bloomsbury which had a stunning, if rumour was to be believed, marketing budget.  That said, I do know people who liked Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel, I was not one of them.  I thought Ian was robbed.  Apart from that there isn't really all that much of a pattern there that I can see.  Nothing that suggests that Tor have some strong lock on the Hugo and the year's they've one have seemed to be books that people did think highly of.

Anyway.  Facts.  Damn them eh?

Four Yorkshiremen of Fandom?

I should be doing more work today, but I still have a cold and it's slog work.

A comment on one of my threads about the way older Fen are opressing younger ones got me thinking of how there really could be an intra-generational 4 Yorkshiremen of Fandom thing going on at the moment.

As a young SF fan back in the 1970s, I was limited to what my local library had - really NOT a lot, and even in the 1980s, the selection at Hoddesdon library couldn't have had more than 100 books in it.  I didn't learn about Fanzines until I got to university.  TV basically was Dr Who, Space 1999, Star Trek, Blakes 7 and a few others...  There were 5 of us at school who played D&D and that was pretty much it until university.  I suppose the idea of growing up without lots of genre stuff on TV, without access to pretty much any SFF you wanted in an instant, and the ability to communicate instantly with like minded people anywhere on the planet sounds pretty weird.

Skip back another block of time and there was less genre stuff than that.

I'm going to think more on this and leave you with, "When I wer't kid.  We watched the same episode of Space:1999 over and t'over again and we bloody loved it!"