Words for Worlds - Issue 76
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of Words for Worlds.
Last week, I’d written about the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman, and the relative silence in the industry around it. In the intervening week, two more women have come forward, with testimonies that make for bleak reading.
I think it’s important for those of us who publicly write about SF (no matter the size of the platform) to continue to follow up on this, as it does appear that the relative silence is continuing: other than a brief report in this month’s Locus magazine, I haven’t seen much by way of institutional response (although more people are certainly tweeting about it now).
I’m not entirely sure what that institutional response might look like - perhaps a joint statement by prominent writers? Some action by the literary agency/publishing houses? In the meantime, though, we can try and mitigate the risk of this being buried through non-reportage.
I do try and minimise awards chat in this newsletter, but as you’ve probably guessed, it’s Hugos season (WorldCon starts tomorrow), and that means that it’s time for the annual Hugo Kerfuffle (TM).
A couple of weeks ago, Glasgow WorldCon released a statement, stating that it had found some discrepancies in voting patterns in one category. Following this it “received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.” Glasgow WorldCon stated that this was in violation of the WSFS Constitution, according to which only “natural persons” could vote. It accordingly disqualified 377 ballots (this has since been reported in The Guardian).
All this would sound quite reasonable. The only wrinkle, however, is the default Hugo voting process. The Hugos are neither a jury award (such as the Clarke or the World Fantasy Awards), nor a public choice award (such as the Locus or Goodreads Awards). They are, rather, quite literally, a pay-to-play award. To vote in the Hugos, you must either buy a full attending membership to WorldCon (this year, that’s 230 British Pounds) or a WSFS membership, which only gives you voting rights (this year, that’s 45 British Pounds).
Of course, most reasonable people with reasonable incomes would not wish to stump up 45 GBP to vote for the Hugos, so what ends up happening is that in substantial part, the people who vote in the Hugos are those who attend WorldCon, and whose voting rights come along with the attendance package. These are overwhelmingly individuals from the US and other Global North countries. Needless to say, this invariably skews the ballot.
That being the case, I find it bemusing that Glasgow WorldCon has disqualified votes on the basis that A paid B’s voting membership, following which B cast a vote as A wished them to. The Hugos’ voting system is literally “whoever can buy a vote, has a vote.” If I’m entitled to pay for my own vote, why can’t I pay for others? It’s a different matter that in all these years, nobody has cared enough to spend 21000-odd dollars on 377 voters, but that is neither here nor there. And how can it be said that the people who voted were not “natural voters” when, according to the information provided to WorldCon, they were actual, human voters?
The basic problem, of course, is that the Hugo voting process is the starkest example of the SF industry being embedded within capitalist social relations (can you think of anything more capitalistic than “pay-to-vote”?), which is in deep conflict with contemporary SF’s curated self-image. This leads to a strange situation, where WorldCon disqualifies votes that reflect nothing other than taking the Hugo voting process to its logical end-point: the one who has the most money, wins.
And this is not to say that the Hugos have never had instances of organised voting with a view to influence results: the “Sad Puppies” from a decade ago are the most famous (and most laughably incompetent) example, but “slate voting” exists, and once again, those who can be a part of it are those who can, and are willing to pay, the membership fees. So even from this perspective, conduct that WorldCon has found worthy of disqualification appears more to be a difference in degree than in kind from the existing voting process.
So perhaps, at some point, Hugo Award administrators may want to think a little deeper about a model where the most prestigious annual genre awards are based on money determining votes!
What I’m Reading
I just began reading The Trinity of Fundamentals, which - after last week’s The Tale of the Wall - is another book written by a Palestinian prisoner. The Trinity of Fundamentals is a novel (albeit a thinly disguised memoir of the author’s life), and so it’s style is different from The Tale of the Wall, but one thing that immediately struck me was how strong the imagery of the wall (i.e., the prison cell’s wall) is in both books. In The Tale of the Wall, it was an organising theme, but even here, in the first few chapters, you come across multiple instances where the wall is almost personified.
The other interesting thing I came across was the method by which books of this kind were smuggled out of prison - on paper rolled up to fit within medicine capsules! I cannot even begin to imagine the effort - and the dedication - needed to smuggle an entire book-length work out through that method, and then to reconstruct it outside prison.
More on The Trinity of Fundamentals once I finish it.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
We released our second special issue of the year - on body horror and SF! - in the fifth week of July. If body horror (or horror in general) is your thing, check it out! See especially the essay on fetal imagery and the maternal in SF!
The Indian Scene
No new Indian work this past week, but here’s a nice article in Mid-Day about the rise of Indian SF, and featuring the IF SF anthology that I’m editing. Our open call goes on till November, so if you have - or want to write - a story, now’s your time to submit! And it’s double-blind editorial review, so please don’t self-reject.
On this photo: I was in Bangalore over Sunday and Monday, and I was delighted to see at Champaca (my first port of call every visit, direct from the airport) something I’ve never seen before in an Indian bookshop: a shelf dedicated to Indian SF (see above), including Amal Singh and Aditya Sudarshan’s 2024 books from Flame Tree Press.
I also loved seeing this because The Wall (2020) and The Horizon (2021) are now firmly backlist, and for obvious reasons, I don’t come across them in too many bookshops; but as long as they’re curated in this way, there’s always a chance that they’ll keep finding new readers, even as the years go by.
And this is just another reminder to support your local independent bookshops, because - among 10,000 other reasons - nobody really goes to bat for local authors like they do!
Also, I don’t recall if I’ve shared this in a previous newsletter, but the great Blaft Publications (you may know them through Kuzhali Manickavel’s work) are presently fund-raising for an anthology of anti-caste SF, which looks fantastic, so if you can spare some change, please consider donating here.
Recommendations Corner
Our science fiction reading circle is reading Ninefox Gambit this month, so what better occasion for recommending it! The book is not quite the lesser-known work that I generally cover in this section, but I have noticed that it’s not really available in Indian bookshops, and not very well-known here (it’s also been a while since it came out).
So that said, I’d definitely recommend it - one of my favourite novels. It’s terrifying vision of “consensus reality” - that is, reality is what everyone believes it to be - and what it takes to maintain that consensus and prevent it from breaking down (“calendrical rot”) feels perennially relevant to our times.