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Aug. 1st, 2020 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretWorldcon Day 4
I got home from work, cooked Shabbos dinner and watched a livetweet of the shortest WSFS business meeting in history, then I figured out how to cast the Hugo Awards ceremony to my TV and settled in to watch. I followed the main chat on the discord and also had open a chat window withcahn and got ready to enjoy myself for the first hour, only to have the slowly dawning realization that the awards were a disaster.
It wasn't the technical issues. The virtual ceremony was a mixture of live streaming and pre-recorded video, and people were concerned beforehand about problems with execution, but while there were a few problems, for the most part the video stream was just fine.
The problem was George RR Martin, serving as emcee in his role as ConZealand toastmaster. His pre-recorded segments were rambling and ill-judged, full of self-aggrandizement and false modesty, and even more damningly, full of encomiums to racists, fascists, and sexual abusers like John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, and Harlan Ellison. He refused to use the name Astounding Award and instead offered at nauseating length a series of fawning stories about the way that Campbell had influenced himself and the genre. After I signed off, the Hugo electorate gave Jeannette Ng a second Hugo for her speech last year in which she reminded everyone that John Campbell was a fucking fascist and it was wildly insulting to the young, diverse voices in the SFF community to give them an award with his name on it. Clearly Martin was okay with continuing to insult those young voices. Clearly he wanted to, because this was a prerecorded segment and the whole thing was premeditated. And clearly ConZealand was okay with it, because it was prerecorded and they must have had an opportunity to veto those segments that they didn't approve of.
The internet doesn't seem to be giving it quite as much attention, but Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov were sexual predators and the way Martin spoke about them without mentioning that was offensive as well.
It's startling to imagine Martin thought he could pass this off. If he were doing it live, the boos would have drowned out his speech within the first ten minutes, it escapes me why he thought that the virtual audience meant he could get away with it.
I just... I wish I weren't so invested in Worldcon, because it gives me so many reasons to give up on it and try to invest more of my time in fannish communities that aren't so frequently disappointing.
I got home from work, cooked Shabbos dinner and watched a livetweet of the shortest WSFS business meeting in history, then I figured out how to cast the Hugo Awards ceremony to my TV and settled in to watch. I followed the main chat on the discord and also had open a chat window with
cahn and got ready to enjoy myself for the first hour, only to have the slowly dawning realization that the awards were a disaster.It wasn't the technical issues. The virtual ceremony was a mixture of live streaming and pre-recorded video, and people were concerned beforehand about problems with execution, but while there were a few problems, for the most part the video stream was just fine.
The problem was George RR Martin, serving as emcee in his role as ConZealand toastmaster. His pre-recorded segments were rambling and ill-judged, full of self-aggrandizement and false modesty, and even more damningly, full of encomiums to racists, fascists, and sexual abusers like John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, and Harlan Ellison. He refused to use the name Astounding Award and instead offered at nauseating length a series of fawning stories about the way that Campbell had influenced himself and the genre. After I signed off, the Hugo electorate gave Jeannette Ng a second Hugo for her speech last year in which she reminded everyone that John Campbell was a fucking fascist and it was wildly insulting to the young, diverse voices in the SFF community to give them an award with his name on it. Clearly Martin was okay with continuing to insult those young voices. Clearly he wanted to, because this was a prerecorded segment and the whole thing was premeditated. And clearly ConZealand was okay with it, because it was prerecorded and they must have had an opportunity to veto those segments that they didn't approve of.
The internet doesn't seem to be giving it quite as much attention, but Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov were sexual predators and the way Martin spoke about them without mentioning that was offensive as well.
It's startling to imagine Martin thought he could pass this off. If he were doing it live, the boos would have drowned out his speech within the first ten minutes, it escapes me why he thought that the virtual audience meant he could get away with it.
I just... I wish I weren't so invested in Worldcon, because it gives me so many reasons to give up on it and try to invest more of my time in fannish communities that aren't so frequently disappointing.