davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

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.

"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."

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
(Just wrote this in response to a nicely reasonable post over here defending the Sad Puppies, but then realised that with a couple of edits to make it standalone it articulated everything that I've been wanting to say about the Sad Puppies since I first came across them last year)
 
What disturbs me most about the Sad Puppies isn't so much the Hugo aspect as the contempt for other fans. Even the name is an attack on their hated 'social justice warriors'. I'm a long-time fan of military SF, I love Correia's Monster Hunter series, but that's about all we have in common, because I'm also disabled, and the hatred I've experienced just for being disabled, up to and including physical assault by passing strangers for walking while disabled (never mind the calculated hatred that destroyed my career in aerospace) together with the hatred I see routinely directed at disabled friends and acquaintances, mean that I spend my life campaigning for disability equality, and when I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the need for SF/F to get its collective head out of its ass over disability and start talking and writing about it like adults. TL:DR I'm a social justice warrior, I'm proud to be a social justice warrior, and anyone who treats me with contempt for confronting ableism/disablism in our society, and in our genre, is someone who is part of the problem, not part of the cure.

It sickened me the other night to see a Sad Puppy trying to bait TNH and Charlie Stross on Twitter by claiming that it was the Sad Puppies trying to support diversity, not everyone else, and when I challenged him on it he seemed unaware that diversity was anything but ethnicity, making clear that the only interest the Sad Puppies have in diversity is in exploiting minority groups for their own ends. Their attempt to bring in that well-known, diversity-friendly group the Gamers-gaters (you know, the ones trying to drive female voices out of gaming, the ones who hate any woman who dares to speak for themselves, or any man who dares to back them, and who show it through harassment, rape and death threats and the reckless endangerment of SWATting), goes beyond sickening into actually frightening, people are being seriously hurt by the Gamers-Gaters and there's a real chance someone will end up being killed if the SWATting continues. What on earth convinced someone in the Sad Puppy camp that injecting this hatred into SF/F fandom would be a positive step? And why haven't Correia, Torgersen et al tried to rein back this dangerous development? Or is it that they don't see 'social justice warriors' as actual people?

Fandom isn't perfect when it comes to inclusion, our genre isn't perfect when it comes to inclusion, as the fact I need to campaign on making people like myself visible in our writing shows, but fandom is better than most at inclusion, and it's trying to clean up its act in places where there have been problems in the past, by ensuring that cons are safe places for women and minority groups, by ensuring that access provisions for people like me are in place, and so on. Yet everything I see from the Sad Puppies says that they have a massive contempt for those changes, the needs that drive them, and, ultimately, for the right to equality of people like me. Sad Puppy supporters may disagree, but from where I stand the Sad Puppies seem little better than the thugs who attacked me in the street.
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
I saw disturbing hints on the net last night (a thread on the Nielsen-Haydens' forum that had spilled over into twitter) that the US right-wingers who tried to hijack last year's Hugo voting (the self-named Sad Puppies - it's apparently supposed to show how pathetic 'social justice warriors' are) haven't just tried again (nominations are out at the weekend), but are actively trying to drag the Gamers-gaters into it. I don't like the idea of trying to politicise the Hugos to start with, but that isn't actually excluded by the current procedures so we can't object beyond saying we find it distasteful, but trying to drag in non-fans known for abusive behaviour, threats, and reckless endangerment (SWATting), strikes me as destroying what little credibility they had.

I hadn't intended buying a supporting membership this year, but if the story is accurate then I may have to just on general principle.

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davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
David Gillon

March 2025

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