Oh, George Martin, no!

I just read GRRM's 'apology' for the Hugos fiasco over on File 770. It opens with (paraphrased) "Anyone claiming I was provided with a pronunciation guide is lying", then admits he thought of asking for one, but never got around to it. And anyway, there's so damn many nominees nowadays he can't be expected to learn them all. And besides, he regularly struggles with the name of one of his own assistants!

So that's all right then.

As we know for definite that ConZealand asked nominees for pronunciation guides for not just their names, but what they were nominated for, this doesn't make GRRM look any better, but does make the con look even worse. Worse still, they apparently asked him for several retakes, which means they knew he was systematically mangling names, and didn't think it was that important. I mean it's not as if people might consider it one of the standout moments of their lives or anything.

As for the rest of it, he thought people outside of America wouldn't know much about the history of SF, and some people liked his stories, so clearly he was right.

And of course this means the con knew that he was going to praise Campbell when Jeannette Ng was nominated for calling him out as a fascist, which people were inevitably going to read as a deliberate attack on her, and didn't see it as an issue.

Ugh, I suspect that GRRM genuinely is utterly clueless as to why people are upset (classic case of Old White Man Syndrome). But there's also a consistent theme between this 'apology' and his 'apology' for what went wrong at last year's Hugos Loser Party (which I hadn't read until yesterday), where he can't be bothered to do anything beyond the minimum and if stuff goes wrong it's other peoples fault and it's utterly unreasonable to blame George (he literally blames Irish law, and the venue not being willing to violate Irish law, and how could he be expected to know, for the Loser Party thing).

And what makes this so annoying is that the headlines should be about stuff like RF Kuang's absolutely devastating Astounding Award acceptance speech:

https://twitter.com/kuangrf/status/1289404961143439361

(And a transcription by @itsamia via @KatjeXia as she's so softly spoken I struggled to hear what she was saying).

"Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who voted, it means a lot. And thank you to my agent, Hannah Bowman, and my editors, David Pomerico and Natasha Bardon, for everything they've done for my career.

Um, just quickly, the Astounding Award is the award for the best new writer. But if I were talking to a new writer coming to the genre in 2020, I would tell them,

"Well, if you're an author of color, you will very likely be paid only a fraction of the advance that white writers are getting. You will be pigeonholed, you will be miscategorized, you will be lumped in with other authors of color whose work doesn't remotely resemble yours.

The chances are very high that you will be sexually harassed at conventions, or the target of racist microaggressions, or very often just overt racism." "People will mispronounce your name repeatedly, and in public, even people who are on your publishing team.

Your cover art will be racist - you will have to push against that. And the way people talk about you and your literature will be tied to your identity and your personal trauma instead of the stories you are actually trying to tell.

And if I had known all of that when I went into the industry, I don't know if I would have done it. So I think that the best way that we can celebrate new writers is to make this industry more welcoming for everyone."