Withdrawing Your Hugo Nomination
Gary Farber
"thinking," and I contemplated "3.2.5: In the written fiction
categories, an author may withdraw a version of a work from
consideration if the author feels that the version is not representative
of what that author wrote."
That's fine and good, and is there because of the historic differences
often present in the past, and sometimes till today, in multiple
publication of the same work. I think this is a Good Thing.
Then there's "Section 3.9: Notification and Acceptance.
Worldcon Committees shall use reasonable efforts to notify the
nominees, or in the case of
deceased or incapacitated persons, their heirs, assigns, or legal
guardians, in each category prior to
the release of such information. Each nominee shall be asked at that
time to either accept or decline
the nomination. If the nominee declines nomination, that nominee
shall not appear on the final
ballot."
Could someone remind me when the last two sentences of 3.9 were adopted,
and what the reasoning was? Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing attempts
to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
"spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
Is there a good case to be made for strategic withdrawal purely to
increase one's likelihood of winning a Hugo, any Hugo? Is this the
spirit we want to give Hugos in? Or is there an aspect I'm missing to
this, with a better justification for allowing such withdrawal?
I can kinda see the argument along the lines of "you guys may love that
work, but I don't know what I was thinking when I created it, it appalls
me now, and you shouldn't be allowed to give it an award against my
wishes." I can imagine cases where that attitude would be entirely
reasonable.
On the part of the creator.
But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not the
creator.
I think the award is more important as an expression of the judgment of
the voters than it is in what it means to the winner, frankly. Nothing
forces anyone to accept or acknowledge an award if they so desire not
to. Nothing can stop a nominee from urging voters not to vote for
it, or can force a winner to other than ignore or badmouth an award.
But it's not clear to me that allowing the creator a veto over the
expression of the views of the voters -- particularly when we've *seen*
it far more often put to a use that I, at least, think is harmful to the
Hugos -- is a greater good.
I'm not sure that we've ever seen a case of a Hugo nomination withdrawn
because the creator disavowed the work for creative or similar reason.
Have we? If we have it all, it's sure infrequent, whereas strategic
withdrawal has been done years in a row.
Discuss?
--
Gary Farber New York
gfa...@panix.com 2000
garyf...@juno.com
gfa...@my-deja.com
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Nancy Lebovitz
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not the
>creator.
>
>I think the award is more important as an expression of the judgment of
>the voters than it is in what it means to the winner, frankly. Nothing
>forces anyone to accept or acknowledge an award if they so desire not
>to. Nothing can stop a nominee from urging voters not to vote for
>it, or can force a winner to other than ignore or badmouth an award.
It's more important as a judgement of the voters, but I don't think
the interests of the writers should be totally ignored. After all,
writers (especially those who care enough about the Hugo award to think
that some work of theirs shouldn't get it) are part of the community,
too--and it seems kind of obnoxious to insist on giving a writer an
award that really offends them.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Kevin Standlee
> Then there's "Section 3.9: Notification and Acceptance.
> Worldcon Committees shall use reasonable efforts to notify the
> nominees, or in the case of
> deceased or incapacitated persons, their heirs, assigns, or legal
> guardians, in each category prior to
> the release of such information. Each nominee shall be asked at that
> time to either accept or decline
> the nomination. If the nominee declines nomination, that nominee
> shall not appear on the final
> ballot."
>
> Could someone remind me when the last two sentences of 3.9 were adopted,
Proposed and first passed at ConFederation, 1986
(http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/Reference/fandom/WSFS/pre-1998/w1986.htm);
ratified at Conspiracy, 1987
(http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/Reference/fandom/WSFS/pre-1998/w1987.htm).
The minutes of these meetings indicate little dissent.
> and what the reasoning was?
Although I wasn't there (I didn't start regularly attending Worldcons
until 1989), I think it was a reaction to Judy-Lynn Del Rey receiving
the Best Professional Editor Hugo, and then having Lester Del Rey refuse
to accept it on her behalf. The idea was that we shouldn't nominate
someone who doesn't want to be nominated.
Since then, several people have declined nominations for themselves and
for specific works they've authored, and not always for the "strategic"
reasons you mention below. Boris Vallejo, for instance, declined
nomination for Best Professional Artist a few years ago.
> Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
> reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing attempts
> to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
> nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
> "spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
> times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
And I exchanged several messages with him attempting to convince him
that he was doing the wrong thing, and that he was not actually
improving his chances, but he clearly doesn't understand how our
balloting works, and may apparently think it really is a "Mark a single
X by one and only one candidate" system. (Incidentally, if we did use
such a system, and then took whoever had the most votes -- almost
certainly not a majority -- then strategic withdrawals would definitely
be the right thing to do if you were trying to maximize your chances of
winning.)
> Is there a good case to be made for strategic withdrawal purely to
> increase one's likelihood of winning a Hugo, any Hugo?
No. Given the transferrable preferential ballot system, in my opinion,
withdrawing your nomination is a foolish thing to do if your goal is to
win a Hugo for any of your works. All you end up doing is reducing the
chances that something you authored will win.
> Is this the
> spirit we want to give Hugos in? Or is there an aspect I'm missing to
> this, with a better justification for allowing such withdrawal?
Such withdrawals are being done, in my opinion, generally due to
ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
punishment.
> But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not the
> creator.
I agree with asking nominees to accept nomination, and with allowing
them to decline for any reason they wish. There is no point in us
granting an award to someone who doesn't want it.
Nevertheless, in the discussions over extending the eligibility of works
published outside the USA, the Hugo Eligibility/Rest of the World
(HEROW) Committee agreed that no work should get extended eligibility if
it qualified for the ballot in their first year of eligibility,
regardless of whether or not it actually appeared on the ballot. This
is to give nominees no incentive to do a strategic withdrawal in their
first eligibility year on the bet that they'll have a better chance of
winning in their second year.
Incidentally, note that the Business Meeting this year passed a one-shot
extension of eligibility resolution. Nearly everything published
outside of the United States of America (including works first published
in Canada, the UK, and Australia) for the first time in 1999 that didn't
see first US publication by January 31, 2000 has been granted an extra
year of eligibility.
My friend Cheryl Morgan was discussing this with one of her friends in
the UK, who said, "Oh, I thought the Hugo Awards were only for American
books." Sigh.
> I'm not sure that we've ever seen a case of a Hugo nomination withdrawn
> because the creator disavowed the work for creative or similar reason.
> Have we?
Boris Vallejo said that he doesn't want awards for his work,
approximately. I'm not sure that's the same as what you said.
> If we have it all, it's sure infrequent, whereas strategic
> withdrawal has been done years in a row.
I wouldn't worry. People doing strategic withdrawal are actually
hurting their chances. It may not be obvious, becuase the works left
behind have won, but it's very likely that the same work would have won
anyway (unless the other work by the same author won instead) had the
other work(s) been left on the ballot.
--
--------------------------------------------------
Kevin Standlee <stan...@plato.lunacity.com>
Fast / Accurate / Cheap (Pick Any Two)
--------------------------------------------------
mike weber
<stan...@lunacity.com> typed
>Boris Vallejo said that he doesn't want awards for his work,
>approximately.
Well, that's good, because i wouldn't want to give him any, precisely.
--
"It's not what you don't know that can hurt you -- it's the things that
you do know that AREN'T true..." ("The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"?)
================================================================
mike weber kras...@mindspring.com
half complete website of Xeno--http://weberworld.virtualave.net
Ed Dravecky III
<snip>
> I note that Lester del Rey had no trouble whatsoever in rejecting
> Judy Lynn's Hugo. No one was confused about his message, were
> they? No one got the idea that he was actually accepting the
> award, and was happy?
I'm sure there's a fascinating story here. Why the rejection?
--
Ed Dravecky III (ed3 at panix.com)
Webmaster of http://www.deathsheep.com/
Brad Templeton
Kevin Standlee <stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
>> Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
>> reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing attempts
>> to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
>> nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
>> "spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
>> times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
>
>And I exchanged several messages with him attempting to convince him
>that he was doing the wrong thing, and that he was not actually
>improving his chances, but he clearly doesn't understand how our
>balloting works, and may apparently think it really is a "Mark a single
>X by one and only one candidate" system. (Incidentally, if we did use
>such a system, and then took whoever had the most votes -- almost
>certainly not a majority -- then strategic withdrawals would definitely
>be the right thing to do if you were trying to maximize your chances of
>winning.)
Kevin, I think that Strascynski's actions imply he understands the
voting system better than you do, and you've been around it a lot.
The australian system *in theory* makes it possible to not split your
vote by having two or more entries on the ballot, but only in theory,
assuming particular behaviours to the voters.
In practice, this is not true, and I think that Babylon 5 was an excellent
example, and it's entirely possible that he won one of his Hugos because
he withdrew all but one work, and wouldn't have won if he had kept them
all, though of course we can't know that.
Here's one example of how the difference between theory and practice can
indeed be larger in practice than it is in theory.
Let's assume that Babylon 5 has a "fandom" as a series, and the fans of
the series want to award a Hugo to it. They can't vote for it as a series
so they need to vote for a single episode. Posit, for a moment, that
while B5 is a great series, that most of the time the single episodes,
when judged on their own, are not better than movies that have 20 times
their budget and twice their length. However, posit that the fans love
the series so much that they will vote for such episodes over movies
that they actually felt were better, as a stand-alone unit. They judge
the series episodes in the context of the series they love, not as a unit
the way the instructions tell them to do.
So say there are 3 Babylon 5 episodes and two movies. One of those
movies is the best spaceflight drama ever made, and the fans have decided
that while it's not fiction, it still qualifies. It gets more nominations
than any of the B5 episodes.
Well, the B5 fans want B5 to win so they list their favourite of the 3 B5
episodes first on the ballot. Then they look at the other two episodes
and compare them to Apollo 13, and say "you know, I love B5, but
was 'The Fall of Night' really better than the Apollo 13 movie? No, it
wasn't. So they put Apollo 13 2nd, and the other 2 B5 episodes 3rd and
4th.
Now what happens? As you see, they have not ranked their 3 series
episodes together as a block. Only if they rank them as a block is it
impossible to "split your vote."
They don't all pick the same of the 3 for 1st place. But enough of them
pick Apollo 13 as their 2nd place choice that as the lesser episodes are
eliminated, their votes transfer not to another B5 episode but to
Apollo 13 -- and it wins.
However, if the creator withdraws the nomination of all but one episode,
the fannish loyalty focusses entirely on that episode. The fans of the
series pick it for #1, and if there are enough such fans, it wins.
This is why it should not be possible for authors to withdraw nominations
for some of their works. They should be allowed to withdraw the nomination
for *all* of them -- ie. like Lester del Ray -- or none of them.
This is because there are fandoms for authors and for series, and fandoms
don't consider items independently.
Of course, if we did change the rules this way, the word could still get
out among the fans "Joe wants you all to pick episode X, or if not, to
make sure you put the episodes together as a block." But at least that
would be explicit, and not sanctioned by the rules!
--
Brad Templeton http://www.templetons.com/brad/
P Nielsen Hayden
Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
>This is why it should not be possible for authors to withdraw nominations
>for some of their works. They should be allowed to withdraw the nomination
>for *all* of them -- ie. like Lester del Ray -- or none of them.
I can't imagine what you mean by bringing Lester del Rey into this.
Lester declining the Best Professional Editor Hugo on behalf of his
recently-deceased wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not an example of
"withdrawing the nomination"; he declined the actual award, at the
ceremony. And it's deeply weird to use it as an illustration of your
"all or nothing" notion, unless you mean that Lester declined the Hugo
on behalf of 100% of his recently-deceased wives.
--
Patrick Nielsen Hayden : p...@panix.com : http://www.panix.com/~pnh
Vicki Rosenzweig
>Is there a good case to be made for strategic withdrawal purely to
>increase one's likelihood of winning a Hugo, any Hugo? Is this the
>spirit we want to give Hugos in? Or is there an aspect I'm missing to
>this, with a better justification for allowing such withdrawal?
>
>I can kinda see the argument along the lines of "you guys may love that
>work, but I don't know what I was thinking when I created it, it appalls
>me now, and you shouldn't be allowed to give it an award against my
>wishes." I can imagine cases where that attitude would be entirely
>reasonable.
>
>On the part of the creator.
I don't have the reference handy, but I'm fairly sure Tiptree
declined a Nebula nomination with a mumbled excuse, because she
felt that she had been given the nomination inappropriately--not
just that the nominators liked the story, but that they thought
the author had unusual insight into women *for a man*, and she
wasn't ready to reveal her gender or real name.
It doesn't seem impossible that something similar might happen
in the Hugos.
>
>But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not the
>creator.
In that particular case, what the voters thought was, in some
meaningful sense, wrong: not that it wasn't a good story, but that
it wasn't a male insight into female character.
<snip>
--
Vicki Rosenzweig | v...@redbird.org
r.a.sf.f faq at http://www.redbird.org/rassef-faq.html
Brad Templeton
P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
>By comparison, Michael Swanwick had three stories on the final ballot
>in 1999, and two in 2000 -- and, being a smart lad who clearly
>understands the preferential ballot system, didn't withdraw any of
>them.
>
>Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
>1999 and 2000. How about that.
I think the effect is less likely to show in short stories. If it does,
it will be in series stories.
Here's an example of why it can make sense to withdraw if you have a series
with fans. I am doing a very simple example with 3 nominees, 3 voters.
Top nominees:
1) High Quality Movie (HQM)
2) Episode A of Very Popular Series (VPS-A)
3) Episode B of Very Popular Series (VPS-B)
4) Lesser Movie (LM)
In the normal case, LM would not make the 3-entry ballot. Now let's look at
3 voters. 2 are big fans of VPS and want to see it win an award. Everybody
likes HQM, however.
Voter 1: VPS-A, HQM, VPS-B
Voter 2: VPS-B, HQM, VPS-A
Voter 3: HQM, VPS-A, VPS-B
In this case, VPS-A is eliminated 1st round, and HQM wins the award.
Now let's say the producer asks taht VPS-B be withdrawn from the ballot.
LM goes on the ballot.
Voter 1: VPS-A, HQM, LM
Voter 2: VPS-A, HQM, LM
Voter 3: HQM, LM, VPS-A
And of course VPS-A wins the award!
Why? The first 2 voters are fans and want their series to win an award,
so they put their favourite episode on first. Voter 2 actually liked HQM
more than VPS-A, but he likes VPS as a series better than HQM. So if asked
to chose just between one representative of VPS and HQM, he may well pick
VPS-A over HQM in spite of the individual preference. Why? He's voting
as a fan, not on independent episodes.
This can also happen for series and popular authors. Fans of a given author
or series who really would like him or her (or it) to win a Hugo even
though the work nominated isn't the strongest in their opinion might also
follow this pattern.
Of course, when it comes to Michael Swanwick, he has often gotten my vote,
but he got it by being the best.
Tom Galloway
>recently-deceased wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not an example of
>"withdrawing the nomination"; he declined the actual award, at the
>ceremony. And it's deeply weird to use it as an illustration of your
Out of pure curiosity, anyone know what happened to the physical Hugo Award
that was thus declined?
tyg t...@netcom.com
Kevin Standlee
>
> On Wed, 13 Sep 2000 07:09:43 GMT,
> Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> >In article <39BF12BF...@lunacity.com>,
> > Kevin Standlee <stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
>
> >> ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
> >> actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
> >> think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
> >> punishment.
> >
> >straightforward in such matters, and I think your proposed implied
> >"revenge" is both too subtle and too unreliable, I'm afraid.
>
> First, Kevin wasn't "proposing" anything; what he describes is the
> status quo -- it's how the system works.
True.
> Second, Kevin didn't use the term "revenge" at all, so it's unclear
> why you have it in scare quotes.
I suppose it could be taken that I implied it in the way I wrote it,
which amounts to saying "if you're dumb enough to withdraw works when it
actually hurts your chances to win one, that's your problem, not mine."
But I agree that "revenge" is a little strong.
> Third, I'm sure Kevin "prefers we be honest and straightforward" too,
> you know;
That's for sure! Truthfully, I don't want obscurity and complexity for
its own sake. (Here I differ from some other Business Meeting regulars,
who seem to delight in baroque constructions.)
I work as hard as I can to explain WSFS technical issues, and when I
write rules, I try to write them as straightforwardly as I can.
Sometimes it's not possible to define something both precisely and
simply (PI to 100 decimal places is precise, but not simple; PI defined
as 3.2 is simple, but not precise), in which case I try to include
explanations.
> what you're having is a rather abstruse technical argument,
> not a giant clash of values.
Agreed.
Kevin Standlee
Brad Templeton wrote:
> Here's an example of why it can make sense to
> withdraw if you have a series with fans.
> I am doing a very simple example with
> 3 nominees, 3 voters.
[Example snipped]
I think that the main reason it works is due to the small sample size.
In my opinion, the larger the electorate, the less likely that such
artifacts will happen. The only way I think it could happen is if the
fans themselves are deeply polarized over which of the two episodes is
better, to the extent that one bloc thinks A is wonderful and B is
awful, while the other bloc holds the opposite opinion, in which case
they will manage to cast ballots in a way that effectively cancel each
other out. But in such a case, then it's likely that neither episode
really deserved the award, anyway.
It's been mathematically proven (I can't cite it; ask Seth Breidbart)
that you can't design a perfect voting system, but our system is pretty
good for what it is we're asking it to do, if you ask me.
Kevin Standlee
>
> In article <8ppa0q$d...@dispatch.concentric.net>,
> b...@templetons.com (Brad Templeton) wrote:
>
> [. . .]
>
> > The withdrawl rule was cited as being prompted
> > by Lester del Ray's desire to refuse the award
> > for his late wife, that he should have had the
> > opportunity to do so prior to the voting to
> > avoid the unfortunate refusal at the
> > ceremony.
>
> Which makes utterly no sense to me. Of course he had the opportunity.
> He was notified of the nomination, as is the norm, months before the
> con. If he had simply wanted to quietly refuse, he could have written a
> letter saying he was refusing.
Technically, in that year, you were not allowed to decline a
nomination. The current version of the rule hadn't been ratified yet.
Gary Farber
[. . .]
> > Could someone remind me when the last two sentences of 3.9 were
> adopted,
>
> Proposed and first passed at ConFederation, 1986
>
(http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/Reference/fandom/WSFS/pre-1998/w1986.htm);
> ratified at Conspiracy, 1987
>
(http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/Reference/fandom/WSFS/pre-1998/w1987.htm).
Thanks. I suppose I could have read through the posted minutes -- I
frankly momentarily forgot they're now available on the web -- but
you've save me a bunch of time. :-)
> The minutes of these meetings indicate little dissent.
>
> > and what the reasoning was?
>
> Although I wasn't there (I didn't start regularly attending Worldcons
> until 1989), I think it was a reaction to Judy-Lynn Del Rey receiving
> the Best Professional Editor Hugo, and then having Lester Del Rey
> refuse
> to accept it on her behalf.
That jogs my memory a bit. I was at Confederation, but I think I
managed to sleep through most, if not all, of the BMs that year. I
wasn't able to get to Conspiracy, alas.
> The idea was that we shouldn't nominate
> someone who doesn't want to be nominated.
>
> Since then, several people have declined nominations for themselves
> and
> for specific works they've authored, and not always for the
> "strategic"
> reasons you mention below. Boris Vallejo, for instance, declined
> nomination for Best Professional Artist a few years ago.
Do we know why? (Just curious.) Not wanting the genre label for either
artistic or commercial reasons? Or what?
> > Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
> > reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing
> > attempts
> > to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
> > nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
> > "spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
> > times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
>
> And I exchanged several messages with him attempting to convince him
> that he was doing the wrong thing, and that he was not actually
> improving his chances, but he clearly doesn't understand how our
> balloting works,
Oh, yeah, we went at this at great length with him on the b5.moderated
newsgroup at the time, and it was also discussed here, and as usual, he
Knew What Was Right and refused to hear anyone tell him different.
> and may apparently think it really is a "Mark a
> single
> X by one and only one candidate" system.
I'm not sure he was quite *that* confused -- I didn't get that
impression -- but he seemed to not take the time to listen to
explanations of why strategic withdrawal would not actually help, and
would probably actually at least mildly lessen his chances.
> (Incidentally, if we did use
> such a system, and then took whoever had the most votes -- almost
> certainly not a majority -- then strategic withdrawals would
> definitely
> be the right thing to do if you were trying to maximize your chances
> of
> winning.)
Obviously.
> > Is there a good case to be made for strategic withdrawal purely to
> > increase one's likelihood of winning a Hugo, any Hugo?
>
> No. Given the transferrable preferential ballot system, in my
> opinion,
> withdrawing your nomination is a foolish thing to do if your goal is
> to
> win a Hugo for any of your works. All you end up doing is reducing
> the
> chances that something you authored will win.
Sorry, apparently I was unclear. I wasn't asking about case for the
strategic wisdom of the act. I meant to be asking if there was a good
*moral* case, a good *fannish* case, a good case for why this was
defensible insofar as it reflects what we want the Hugo to be, what we
want our community to be, what behavior we want to encourage and approve
of.
> > Is this the
> > spirit we want to give Hugos in? Or is there an aspect I'm missing
to
> > this, with a better justification for allowing such withdrawal?
>
> Such withdrawals are being done, in my opinion, generally due to
> ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
> actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
> think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
> punishment.
I appreciate your spirit here, but I prefer that we be honest and
straightforward in such matters, and I think your proposed implied
"revenge" is both too subtle and too unreliable, I'm afraid.
> > But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not
> > the
> > creator.
>
> I agree with asking nominees to accept nomination, and with allowing
> them to decline for any reason they wish. There is no point in us
> granting an award to someone who doesn't want it.
This is the case that the primary purpose of the Hugo is that it gratify
the recipient. Implicitly, surely you must then also believe that there
is no point in granting an award to someone who has died, right? If
not, can you explain what that point is?
I note that Lester del Rey had no trouble whatsoever in rejecting Judy
Lynn's Hugo. No one was confused about his message, were they? No one
got the idea that he was actually accepting the award, and was happy?
So where was the harm? He rejected her award. Anyone can reject their
award. They can denounce it, they can physically toss it in the
garbage, they can give it away, they can treat it with contempt, and
they can ignore it.
But that doesn't change what the voters thought, and it never can.
Am I missing a way in which Lester (let alone Judy Lynn) was actually
hurt in some serious way by that Award?
All changing the rules did was make it possible to *hide* what the
voters think. That seems a not-good to me.
I've never understood the Hugos to be about making the recipients feel
good. That's incidental. The Hugos are supposed to demonstrate what
the voters of WSFS think is, as best as can be determined in an
imperfect way, something resembling "the best" of the year. They're
not primarily intended to be ego-boosters, wonderful as they may be at
that.
But that rules changed changed that. I'm questioning that, quite
belatedly, admittedly.
[. . .]
> My friend Cheryl Morgan was discussing this with one of her friends in
> the UK, who said, "Oh, I thought the Hugo Awards were only for
> American
> books." Sigh.
Not so unusual. The UK has only a comparatively small number of fans
who pay much attention to the Worldcon, for understandable historical
reasons. It's only in recent years that many at all could afford to
travel to one, and it was simply irrelevant to most of their fanac, and
seen, understandably, if not entirely accurately, as largely a North
American Thing. This is still a pretty common attitude in UK fandom,
where there's an occasional tendency, more on the part of those not
hyperactive than on any of those who *are* very active -- but the former
are always larger in number than the latter, everywhere -- to not always
make the most charitable assumptions about American fandom and things
American.
> > I'm not sure that we've ever seen a case of a Hugo nomination
> > withdrawn
> > because the creator disavowed the work for creative or similar
> > reason.
> > Have we?
>
> Boris Vallejo said that he doesn't want awards for his work,
> approximately. I'm not sure that's the same as what you said.
Not knowing his reason, I have no idea.
> > If we have it all, it's sure infrequent, whereas strategic
> > withdrawal has been done years in a row.
>
> I wouldn't worry. People doing strategic withdrawal are actually
> hurting their chances. It may not be obvious, becuase the works left
> behind have won, but it's very likely that the same work would have
> won
> anyway (unless the other work by the same author won instead) had the
> other work(s) been left on the ballot.
You're missing my point entirely, though. I'm not worried, at this
time, about the Hugos *being* successfully manipulated much. I'm
worried about the long-term creeping effects of saying we don't *care*
and that it's acceptable.
Our culture of fandom becomes more diffuse every day, and it sometimes
seems as if the centre cannot hold, and much falls apart. Heck, no
offense, but more and more people who are even active Worldcon runners
have little knowledge of fannish history and culture and ethics (*not*
you, Kevin). Call me foolish, but it's important, in my view, for those
of us who value the fandom we've spent our lives in, and who wish to
preserve the values of that fandom that have made it a place we've
*wanted* to spend our lives in, to draw lines in the sand from time to
time, even if it means looking the fool in Viewing With Alarm and
Raising Questions.
Thanks for your response.
Ray Radlein
>
> Boris Vallejo said that he doesn't want awards for his work,
> approximately. I'm not sure that's the same as what you said.
Haven't other artists also withdrawn their names from consideration?
ISTR either Whelan or Eggleton at one time or another, as well as Brad
Foster in the Fan Artist category (but I don't feel up to Farbering
for the actual answer at 4:00 AM).
- Ray R.
--
**********************************************************************
"LOS ANGELES: A city of millions; thousands more are born each day.
Some in maternity wards, some in creche incubators. The Artificial
ones don't have civil rights, but they still need the law. That's
why they turn to me. My name is Friday. I carry a badge."
-- Robert A. Heinlein's "Dragnet"
Ray Radlein - r...@learnlink.emory.edu
homepage coming soon! wooo, wooo.
**********************************************************************
Kip Williams
>
> Kevin Standlee wrote:
> >
> > Boris Vallejo said that he doesn't want awards for his work,
> > approximately. I'm not sure that's the same as what you said.
>
> Haven't other artists also withdrawn their names from consideration?
> ISTR either Whelan or Eggleton at one time or another, as well as Brad
> Foster in the Fan Artist category (but I don't feel up to Farbering
> for the actual answer at 4:00 AM).
Don't trouble yourself, Ray, I'll do it.
HEY, GARY! ...
--
--Kip (Williams)
amusing the world at http://members.home.net/kipw/
P Nielsen Hayden
>Gary Farber wrote:
>> Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
>> reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing attempts
>> to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
>> nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
>> "spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
>> times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
>
>And I exchanged several messages with him attempting to convince him
>that he was doing the wrong thing, and that he was not actually
>improving his chances, but he clearly doesn't understand how our
>balloting works, and may apparently think it really is a "Mark a single
>X by one and only one candidate" system.
By comparison, Michael Swanwick had three stories on the final ballot
in 1999, and two in 2000 -- and, being a smart lad who clearly
understands the preferential ballot system, didn't withdraw any of
them.
Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
1999 and 2000. How about that.
>Such withdrawals are being done, in my opinion, generally due to
>ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
>actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
>think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
>punishment.
Precisely.
P Nielsen Hayden
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>In article <39BF12BF...@lunacity.com>,
> Kevin Standlee <stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
>> Such withdrawals are being done, in my opinion, generally due to
>> ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
>> actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
>> think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
>> punishment.
>
>I appreciate your spirit here, but I prefer that we be honest and
>straightforward in such matters, and I think your proposed implied
>"revenge" is both too subtle and too unreliable, I'm afraid.
First, Kevin wasn't "proposing" anything; what he describes is the
status quo -- it's how the system works.
Second, Kevin didn't use the term "revenge" at all, so it's unclear
why you have it in scare quotes.
Third, I'm sure Kevin "prefers we be honest and straightforward" too,
you know; what you're having is a rather abstruse technical argument,
not a giant clash of values.
--
Katie Schwarz
>Quoth Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> on Wed, 13 Sep 2000 03:05:05 GMT:
>
>>work, but I don't know what I was thinking when I created it, it appalls
>>me now, and you shouldn't be allowed to give it an award against my
>>wishes." I can imagine cases where that attitude would be entirely
>>reasonable.
>>
>>On the part of the creator.
>
>declined a Nebula nomination with a mumbled excuse, because she
>felt that she had been given the nomination inappropriately--not
>just that the nominators liked the story, but that they thought
>the author had unusual insight into women *for a man*, and she
>wasn't ready to reveal her gender or real name.
I think I've read that too... [dig, dig...] here it is: yes, she
declined the 1974 Nebula nomination for "The Women Men Don't See" for
that reason, according to the introduction by Ursula Le Guin to
Tiptree's _Star Songs of an Old Primate_.
--
Katie Schwarz
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"
Gary Farber
na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
[. . .]
> It's more important as a judgement of the voters, but I don't think
> the interests of the writers should be totally ignored. After all,
> writers (especially those who care enough about the Hugo award to
> think
> that some work of theirs shouldn't get it) are part of the community,
> too--and it seems kind of obnoxious to insist on giving a writer an
> award that really offends them.
As an aside, it may be worth noting that of the twelve regular Hugo
Award categories, only four are for fiction. One is for "Best Related
Book," which generally is not fiction, and which is often an art book,
or work difficult to classify. Of the remaining seven awards, only one
is for writing, Best Fan Writer. So it's a bit odd to generally call
the collective winners "writers," when only a minority of the awards are
for writing.
Gary Farber
> > Judy Lynn's Hugo. No one was confused about his message, were
> > they? No one got the idea that he was actually accepting the
> > award, and was happy?
>
Oh, it was a typical Lester "I"m Trying For The Title Of Worst Temper In
SF-dom" del Rey diatribe -- although I agree with at least part of his
point. Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
prior magazine editing experience). I think Lester was entirely correct
in judging that she won as kind of a make-up, sympathy, aw, gee, ain't
that a shame, we think overall she had an important career, darn, let's
honor her now that it's the last time we can Award.
And Lester thought that was crap, and when he came up to "accept" her
Award, he did a Marlon Brando (mind, this is all a very broad
paraphrase from my unreliable memory), denounced the voters as
hypocrites who, if they really liked her work, should have given her the
Award while she was alive, and said he was refusing it.
It was a colorful speech, as Lester was a colorful, and deeply bitter,
man, who suffered from writer's block for most of the last forty years
of his life, to the point where most any fiction you saw published under
his name since the late Fifties was ghosted for him by someone else,
which earned a bit of talk among insiders, as you might imagine (if
_The Runaway Robot_ was a beloved work of your childhood, sorry), as did
his tendency to throw fits of temper at people, and generally be deeply
mean (though not always, of course). On the flip side, I deeply
sympathise with his frustrations and resulting pain. He was a brilliant
man, and he found himself unable to do what he really wanted to do.
It's understandable that that would leave him pissed off in general.
I have no quarrel whatever with his point, and think it was generally
well-taken. I think refusing the award was a perfectly valid thing for
him to do, and that it made his point. Frankly, if he hadn't been able
to make his speech, but only got to write a diatribe and have it
published somewhere, and just refused the nomination, it would have been
far less dramatic and memorable, and served his cause far more poorly.
I don't see that he or Judy-Lynn would wind up better served under the
current system.
Gary Farber
p...@panix.com wrote:
[. . .]
> By comparison, Michael Swanwick had three stories on the final ballot
> in 1999, and two in 2000 -- and, being a smart lad who clearly
> understands the preferential ballot system, didn't withdraw any of
> them.
>
> Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
> 1999 and 2000. How about that.
He's also honorable, and so far as I know, not interested in trying to
"work the system," even if he thought he could.
> >Such withdrawals are being done, in my opinion, generally due to
> >ignorance of how the system works. Inasmuch as strategic withdrawals
> >actually have approximately the opposite of their intended effect, I
> >think that letting people do such withdrawals is its own best
> >punishment.
>
> Precisely.
I'm sorry, I must have missed how the system, in awarding JMS two Hugos
in a row, punished him. Mind, I'm not saying he didn't, in fact,
necessarily otherwise deserve those awards; while the individual
episodes are not necessarily Great Works For The Ages, they were
excellent tv sf, and I greatly enjoyed, overall, B5 the series; what I'm
pointing out is that this "best punishment" for blatantly attempting to
manipulate the system was in fact, utterly non-existent and imaginary,
back here in reality.
Brad Templeton
> Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
>
>>This is why it should not be possible for authors to withdraw nominations
>>for some of their works. They should be allowed to withdraw the nomination
>>for *all* of them -- ie. like Lester del Ray -- or none of them.
>
>
>I can't imagine what you mean by bringing Lester del Rey into this.
>recently-deceased wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not an example of
>"withdrawing the nomination"; he declined the actual award, at the
>ceremony. And it's deeply weird to use it as an illustration of your
>on behalf of 100% of his recently-deceased wives.
Sorry this wasn't clear. When I say all or nothing, I include withdrawing
one nomination as withdrawing all of them if one is all you have.
Put another way, "You can refuse a nomination, as long as you refuse all
your nominations."
The withdrawl rule was cited as being prompted by Lester del Ray's desire
to refuse the award for his late wife, that he should have had the opportunity
to do so prior to the voting to avoid the unfortunate refusal at the
ceremony. I gave it as an example by saying that he would still have
the right to withdraw her nomination, as he would be withdrawing "all"
her nominations.
Of course this is a curious situation, as one could also debate whether
heirs should or shouldn't be able to decline awards or nominations the
way actual candidates can, since one can't really be heir, in this case
to a body of editorial work. But that aside, my point was that a rule
saying you must withdraw all or none would still have satisfied the reason
this rule was created.
Brad Templeton
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>In article <8pmu9h$k...@netaxs.com>,
> na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>[. . .]
>> It's more important as a judgement of the voters, but I don't think
>> the interests of the writers should be totally ignored. After all,
>> writers (especially those who care enough about the Hugo award to
>> think
>> that some work of theirs shouldn't get it) are part of the community,
>> too--and it seems kind of obnoxious to insist on giving a writer an
>> award that really offends them.
>
>As an aside, it may be worth noting that of the twelve regular Hugo
>Award categories, only four are for fiction. One is for "Best Related
>Book," which generally is not fiction, and which is often an art book,
>or work difficult to classify. Of the remaining seven awards, only one
>is for writing, Best Fan Writer. So it's a bit odd to generally call
>the collective winners "writers," when only a minority of the awards are
>for writing.
Not really. It's obvious, if never said explicitly, what awards people
care the most about. They are listed first, and usually presented last.
More people *vote* for dramatic presentation than any of the others, because
more people have seen the nominees, but I think it's not much disputed that
fans care most about Best Novel and the other fiction awards.
Nancy Lebovitz
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>In article <8pmu9h$k...@netaxs.com>,
> na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>[. . .]
>> It's more important as a judgement of the voters, but I don't think
>> the interests of the writers should be totally ignored. After all,
>> writers (especially those who care enough about the Hugo award to
>> think
>> that some work of theirs shouldn't get it) are part of the community,
>> too--and it seems kind of obnoxious to insist on giving a writer an
>> award that really offends them.
>
>As an aside, it may be worth noting that of the twelve regular Hugo
>Award categories, only four are for fiction. One is for "Best Related
>Book," which generally is not fiction, and which is often an art book,
>or work difficult to classify. Of the remaining seven awards, only one
>is for writing, Best Fan Writer. So it's a bit odd to generally call
>the collective winners "writers," when only a minority of the awards are
>for writing.
>
Gary Farber
> people
> care the most about. They are listed first, and usually presented
> last.
>
> More people *vote* for dramatic presentation than any of the others,
> because
> more people have seen the nominees, but I think it's not much disputed
> that fans care most about Best Novel and the other fiction awards.
I surely would not dispute it. It's why I occasionally point out the
facts. Cue Paul Harvey for me, wouldja, Kip?
(Heck, most often, when people list "the Hugo Winners" for the past
year, they just disappear Best Fan Writer, Best Fanzine, Best Fan
Artist, amongst others. Poof. Who ever heard of these people, anyway?)
Gary Farber
na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> In article <8pp54s$q0$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
> >In article <8pmu9h$k...@netaxs.com>,
> > na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> >[. . .]
> >> It's more important as a judgement of the voters, but I don't think
> >> the interests of the writers should be totally ignored. After all,
> >> writers (especially those who care enough about the Hugo award to
> >> think
> >> that some work of theirs shouldn't get it) are part of the
> >> community,
> >> too--and it seems kind of obnoxious to insist on giving a writer an
> >> award that really offends them.
[. . .]
> OK--but what about my actual point?
Thanks for contributing it. I thought I already addressed it, several
times, in my other posts.
It's also kinda obnoxious to ever say something negative about anyone's
work, or to disagree with them, so we should probably stop doing that,
too. (There goes Usenet.) That's a lot more disagreeable, by most
considerations, after all, than a mass of people saying that, oh, the
offense, such and such is the best work/creator of the year.
We could always send some finger guards along with the Hugo, so
recipients have the option of *cleanly* sticking their fingers in their
ears while chanting "nanananana, I can't *hear* you saying you love what
I did, nanananananana, you horrible people, you!"
P Nielsen Hayden
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>prior magazine editing experience).
Seriously wrong. The previous year, 1985, Terry Carr won. And Terry
won again, posthumously, in 1987.
It is noteworthy that the Hugo has been won by a _living_ book editor
only once -- by Terry in 1985.
I would belabor the point by mentioning that it took me only 7.36
seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
straight out of memory.
Gary Farber
b...@templetons.com (Brad Templeton) wrote:
[. . .]
> The withdrawl rule was cited as being prompted by Lester del Ray's
del Rey.
> desire
> to refuse the award for his late wife, that he should have had the
> opportunity
> to do so prior to the voting to avoid the unfortunate refusal at the
> ceremony.
Which makes utterly no sense to me. Of course he had the opportunity.
He was notified of the nomination, as is the norm, months before the
con. If he had simply wanted to quietly refuse, he could have written a
letter saying he was refusing. I'm not aware that anyone put a gun to
Lester's head to make him go to the auditorium to be present, either.
He had all the opportunity he could have wanted to write a letter,
and/or to not show up. Perhaps someone close to him survives who can
speak with authority as to exactly how he felt, but it certainly *looks*
to me like he *wanted* the opportunity to get up on the stage, and
denounce people. If he hadn't *wanted* to do that, why on earth would
he have done it?
[. . . .]
Gary Farber
> won again, posthumously, in 1987.
Oh, darn, how embarassing that that slipped my mind. That's what I get
for not jogging my memory by checking.
> It is noteworthy that the Hugo has been won by a _living_ book editor
> only once -- by Terry in 1985.
Yes, very noteworthy, which was the point of my aside.
> I would belabor the point by mentioning that it took me only 7.36
> seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
> straight out of memory.
Mine is a bit excessively random access at times, though fortunately it
has not yet reached the point of being read-only.
mike weber
>Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
><snip>
>> I note that Lester del Rey had no trouble whatsoever in rejecting
>> Judy Lynn's Hugo. No one was confused about his message, were
>> they? No one got the idea that he was actually accepting the
>> award, and was happy?
>
>I'm sure there's a fascinating story here. Why the rejection?
>
"=You people wouldn't have even thought of giving this to her if she
hadn't *died* last year...=" was, i seem to recall, the gist of it.
--
"It's not what you don't know that can hurt you -- it's the things that
you do know that AREN'T true..." ("The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"?)
================================================================
mike weber kras...@mindspring.com
half complete website of Xeno--http://weberworld.virtualave.net
mike weber
>In article <slrn8s01f...@pnh-0.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
>P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
>>Lester declining the Best Professional Editor Hugo on behalf of his
>>recently-deceased wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not an example of
>>"withdrawing the nomination"; he declined the actual award, at the
>>ceremony. And it's deeply weird to use it as an illustration of your
>
>Out of pure curiosity, anyone know what happened to the physical Hugo Award
>that was thus declined?
>
Dunno -- but i might be able to find out...
Hmmm -- who to ask...
Mike Scott
<stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
>It's been mathematically proven (I can't cite it; ask Seth Breidbart)
>that you can't design a perfect voting system, but our system is pretty
>good for what it is we're asking it to do, if you ask me.
Your thinking of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and it depends on your
definition of "perfect". Some of the assumptions made need not actually
apply to real-world voting systems.
--
Mike Scott
mi...@plokta.com
David Dyer-Bennet
> By comparison, Michael Swanwick had three stories on the final ballot
> in 1999, and two in 2000 -- and, being a smart lad who clearly
> understands the preferential ballot system, didn't withdraw any of
> them.
>
> Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
> 1999 and 2000. How about that.
Wow. And if you can manage *five* stories on the ballot....
--
David Dyer-Bennet / Welcome to the future! / dd...@dd-b.net
Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/
SF: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon/
Gary Farber
Kevin Standlee <stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
> Gary Farber wrote:
> >
> > In article <8ppa0q$d...@dispatch.concentric.net>,
> > b...@templetons.com (Brad Templeton) wrote:
> >
> > [. . .]
> >
> > > The withdrawl rule was cited as being prompted
> > > for his late wife, that he should have had the
> > > opportunity to do so prior to the voting to
> > > avoid the unfortunate refusal at the
> > > ceremony.
> >
> > Which makes utterly no sense to me. Of course he had the
> > opportunity.
> > He was notified of the nomination, as is the norm, months before the
> > con. If he had simply wanted to quietly refuse, he could have
> > written a
> > letter saying he was refusing.
>
> nomination. The current version of the rule hadn't been ratified yet.
I'm sorry, Kevin, but I see I wrote in a way that was easily
misunderstandable. I should have said, more clearly, I hope, "of course
he had the opportunity to refuse the award for his late wife," etc. And
that he had, so far as I can see, no interest in the slightest in
"avoid[ing] the unfortunate refusal at the ceremony," since he had all
the opportunity necessary to not have done so, should that actually have
been his desire.
But while I may be wrong, it seemed clear to me that Lester very very
much *wanted* the opportunity to make use of that podium, to give his
refusal *at* the ceremony, in the most dramatic, and loud, way possible,
else why would he have done that way, as opposed to all the
alternatives availble to him?
This may have been painful for some fans, but I don't recall ever
hearing that Lester del Rey in fact felt that we should change the
rules.
Nancy Lebovitz
don't like their work, there's something weirdly and personally
inconsiderate about overriding an author's wishes because you *do*
like their work.
David Goldfarb
David Dyer-Bennet <d...@gw.dd-b.net> wrote:
>p...@panix.com (P Nielsen Hayden) writes:
>
>> By comparison, Michael Swanwick had three stories on the final ballot
>> in 1999, and two in 2000 -- and, being a smart lad who clearly
>> understands the preferential ballot system, didn't withdraw any of
>> them.
>>
>> Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
>> 1999 and 2000. How about that.
>
>Wow. And if you can manage *five* stories on the ballot....
Anyone remember the nominees for Dramatic Presentation in 1968?
(I'm fairly sure it was '68, I might be off a year in either direction.)
--
David Goldfarb <*>|"Why, look, Ted, it's a meeting of the new
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | community leaders."
aste...@slip.net | "Oooh! A town meetin'! Does we gits'ta vote?
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | I jes' loves ta vote!" -- _Bone_ #5
Stevens R. Miller
> Perhaps someone close to him survives who can
> speak with authority as to exactly how he felt, but it certainly *looks*
> to me like he *wanted* the opportunity to get up on the stage, and
> denounce people.
Thanks for posting that anecdote about del Rey, Gary. First I've ever
heard of it. Even though I'm glad you shared the info, the story itself
saddens me, a bit. My first encounter with fandom, in any substantive
sense, was at Discon II. Isaac Asimov let me shake his hand when I
marched up to him in a snack bar and said I was his biggest fan. He put
his arm around me and said that his biggest fan would repeat what he
said. So, word by word, he had me recite, "I have never heard of Lester
del Rey." Mr. del Rey was sitting at a table about one foot away from
me, which Asimov revealed with a huge grin. del Rey was grinning, too.
And that picture of him, in my memory, is the only one I have of Lester
del Rey, the man. In my mind, I can still see him, laughing at Asimov's
joke. It's sad to learn he was so troubled, particularly because it's
so hard to imagine that happy fellow I met for two seconds being the
same one you wrote about.
Thanks for telling me more of his story.
Steve Miller
fia...@cpcug.org
One slight correction here. Lester was not at ConFederation (the 1986
Worldcon, where that Hugo was awarded). The non-acceptance speech,
presumably written by Lester, was read by somebody else (whose name I
can't remember).
One other thing to consider -- the award was to Judy Lynn del Rey, not
Lester del Rey. What right did he have to reject it in the first place?
Rich
====
MIMOSA web site: http://www.jophan.org/mimosa
James Nicoll
> Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>>prior magazine editing experience).
>
>
>Seriously wrong. The previous year, 1985, Terry Carr won. And Terry
>won again, posthumously, in 1987.
It's been more than 13 years since he died? It seems like yesterday.
ObSomething: Michael Swanwick's essay in _Moon Dogs_ on the wave
of deaths in the late 1980s. Watching old fans and authors flicker away
in the last few years has been rather similar.
James Nicoll,
In no way implying he knew TC, but that he misses him anyway.
--
Much apologies but my return path is temporarily broken. Please
use jdni...@home.com instead.
Ben Yalow
<snip>
>It's been mathematically proven (I can't cite it; ask Seth Breidbart)
>that you can't design a perfect voting system, but our system is pretty
>good for what it is we're asking it to do, if you ask me.
Arrow's Theorem -- IIRC, we had a discussion about it here in 97
(discussing TAFF ballots), and 99 (discussing Hugo Award voting).
>--
>--------------------------------------------------
>Kevin Standlee <stan...@plato.lunacity.com>
>Fast / Accurate / Cheap (Pick Any Two)
>--------------------------------------------------
Ben
--
Ben Yalow yb...@panix.com
Not speaking for anybody
Ben Yalow
<snip>
>Then there's "Section 3.9: Notification and Acceptance.
> Worldcon Committees shall use reasonable efforts to notify the
>nominees, or in the case of
> deceased or incapacitated persons, their heirs, assigns, or legal
>guardians, in each category prior to
> the release of such information. Each nominee shall be asked at that
>time to either accept or decline
> the nomination. If the nominee declines nomination, that nominee
>shall not appear on the final
> ballot."
>Could someone remind me when the last two sentences of 3.9 were adopted,
>and what the reasoning was? Because while 3.2.5 is eminently
>reasonable, I'm not clear that there's a good case for allowing attempts
>to strategically manipulating the voting via 3.9, by withdrawing
>nominated works purely to not, in the mind of the nominee, at least,
>"spread their vote," and lose, which has self-evidently been done at
>times, such as the case of Mr. Strascynski in recent years.
<snip>
>But the Awards are the demonstrations of what the voters think, not the
>creator.
>I think the award is more important as an expression of the judgment of
>the voters than it is in what it means to the winner, frankly. Nothing
>forces anyone to accept or acknowledge an award if they so desire not
>to. Nothing can stop a nominee from urging voters not to vote for
>it, or can force a winner to other than ignore or badmouth an award.
>But it's not clear to me that allowing the creator a veto over the
>expression of the views of the voters -- particularly when we've *seen*
>it far more often put to a use that I, at least, think is harmful to the
>Hugos -- is a greater good.
>I'm not sure that we've ever seen a case of a Hugo nomination withdrawn
>because the creator disavowed the work for creative or similar reason.
>Have we? If we have it all, it's sure infrequent, whereas strategic
>withdrawal has been done years in a row.
The history has already been discussed, as well as the likely futility of
strategic withdrawal.
But I'd like to discuss why I feel that it's correct to allow a nominee to
withdraw.
The reason is in the phrase, "It's an honor just to be nominated." And,
to me, that's an expression of the purpose of the Hugo Award -- to honor
those people who have added to our field in the prior year, either by
awarding them one of the "people" Hugos, or by them being the creator of
one of the "work" Hugos.
And if they don't feel it's an honor, then there's no reason to force it
on them.
I may think it's an honor, but I try not to force my opinions on those I
wish to honor.
(I also note that it had been done in the past, before the clause was put
in, during the period when the rules were followed less strictly. For
example, two years after inventing the Fan Hugo categories, Ted White
withdrew from Best Fanwriter at St. Louiscon.)
>Discuss?
>--
>Gary Farber New York
Ben
Brad Templeton
Kevin Standlee <stan...@lunacity.com> wrote:
>
>
>Brad Templeton wrote:
>
>> Here's an example of why it can make sense to
>> withdraw if you have a series with fans.
>> I am doing a very simple example with
>> 3 nominees, 3 voters.
>
>[Example snipped]
>
>I think that the main reason it works is due to the small sample size.
>In my opinion, the larger the electorate, the less likely that such
>artifacts will happen. The only way I think it could happen is if the
No. The sample size has little to do with it. In the simple 3-nominee
case study, there are only 6 possible votes to consider. I polarized
that into 3, but it's not hard to examine all six, come up with plausible
percentages of the ballots that will vote those six, and still have it
make a difference whether the person withdraws all but one nominee or keeps
them in.
>fans themselves are deeply polarized over which of the two episodes is
>better, to the extent that one bloc thinks A is wonderful and B is
>awful, while the other bloc holds the opposite opinion, in which case
>they will manage to cast ballots in a way that effectively cancel each
>other out. But in such a case, then it's likely that neither episode
>really deserved the award, anyway.
No, this is my scenerio. If the producer wisely withdraws episode B,
then some, though perhaps not all, of the fans of the *series*, will vote
for episode A, even though they loved B, to give the series the Hugo they
think it deserves. And there definitely were net threads about efforts to
get B5 the Hugos *it* deserved, rather than Hugos for the episodes.
The real truth is more likely to be they love episode A, and think slightly
less of episode B, but love the series most of all. This is what series
fandom means. However, if you sat them down in a room and said, "As
a unit, without considering your love of the series, which did you enjoy
more, this one episode, or RGSFM (Really Great SF Movie)" they might well
pick the movie. However, instead they ask themselves, which do they want
to give a Hugo to more, the *series*, or the movie, and they answer the
series, and they vote for the one representative of the series that is
on the ballot.
Forbidding JMS's nomination withdrawl would tell people they are not voting
for the series, they are voting for episodes, and it is possible for this
to change the voting.
Which is all I'm saying. You've been advising people they have no reason
to withdraw extra nominations. This is bad advice -- though better for the
Hugos. They *do* improve their chances of winning by leaving only their
best choice on the ballot, in some situations. They may also hurt it,
either be allowing onto the ballot something else, or by removing the only
episode that some fans truly loved. But the point is that it is NOT a
neutral act, as you have been telling people. It is only a neutral act
if people vote the episodes as a block, and they might not do that.
JMS was wise to withdraw his extra nominations.
>
>It's been mathematically proven (I can't cite it; ask Seth Breidbart)
>that you can't design a perfect voting system, but our system is pretty
>good for what it is we're asking it to do, if you ask me.
Actually, it's only proven, as I recall, that you can't have a perfect system
if you are unwilling to accept certain types of ties. If you open yourself
to ties when the answer is indeterminate, the system does reflect your
goals.
For example, I have proposed a better system, which is:
Build a matrix for each pair of nominees, listing whether the
first nominee ranked ahead of the second on more ballots or vice
versa. A winner is a work that beats all the others. If no
work beats all others, there is a tie between the one that beats
the most others and the works that beat it.
In the current system you can have 3 candidates, A, B and C. The voters
can prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A. In the current system a
false "winner" is chosen. This should be viewed as a tie.
Avram Grumer
> I would belabor the point by mentioning that it took me only 7.36
> seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
> straight out of memory.
What's the URL for that?
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
"Some people need to learn that the Internet changes everything.
And some people need to learn that it doesn't." -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Morris M. Keesan
...
> Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>prior magazine editing experience).
Terry Carr, 1985 and 1987.
Unless Terry edited a magazine that I've forgotten about.
See http://www.worldcon.org/hc.html#pe .
(I don't remember what Shawna McCarthy was editing in 1984).
--
Morris M. Keesan -- kee...@world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~keesan/ -- newest baby pictures added 9/13/2000
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
> It was a colorful speech, as Lester was a colorful, and deeply bitter,
> man, who suffered from writer's block for most of the last forty years
> of his life, to the point where most any fiction you saw published under
> his name since the late Fifties was ghosted for him by someone else,
> which earned a bit of talk among insiders, as you might imagine (if
> _The Runaway Robot_ was a beloved work of your childhood, sorry),
Yo.
I thought it was a wonderful story. In the sixth grade, I illustrated it
for a school project.
If memory serves, Clute and Nicholls say that the book was ghosted by Paul
Fairman. I'll have to try reading some of Fairman's work under his own
name, one of these days.
--
"Do you know the asteroids, Mr.Kemp?... Bill Higgins
Hundreds of thousands of them. All
wandering around the Sun in strange Fermilab
orbits. Some never named, never
charted. The orphans of the Solar hig...@fnal.fnal.gov
System, Mr. Kemp."
SPAN/Hepnet: 43009::HIGGINS
"And you want to become a father."
--*Moon Zero Two*
Erik V. Olson
>In article <slrn8s0gd...@pnh-0.dsl.speakeasy.net>, p...@panix.com wrote:
>
>> seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
>> straight out of memory.
>
PNHT://left-brain/storage/hugos/BPE/history/winners.mem
Of course, that won't be useful until Patrick makes a public release of his
browser, and publishes the RFC for the PNH transport, but there you go.
--
Erik V. Olson: er...@mo.net : http://walden.mo.net/~eriko/
P Nielsen Hayden
>One slight correction here. Lester was not at ConFederation (the 1986
>Worldcon, where that Hugo was awarded). The non-acceptance speech,
>presumably written by Lester, was read by somebody else (whose name I
>can't remember).
Good gracious, you're absolutely right. I was _there_ -- as a
nominee! -- but so many people have been talking about Lester
rejecting the award that my mind has made up a false memory of him
doing it in person.
In fact, as I now dimly recall (hoping this isn't another exciting
memory hallucination), Lester's brief rant was read to the multitudes
by Del Rey executive Owen Lock.
>One other thing to consider -- the award was to Judy Lynn del Rey, not
>Lester del Rey. What right did he have to reject it in the first place?
Well, that's actually a reasonably good question. And if your answer
is "because he was her husband," your (using the general "you" here)
next exercise should be to consider the question "Can you think of
some reasons why allowing living spouses to decline awards on behalf
of their recenty-deceased partners might not actually be optimal?"
P Nielsen Hayden
Morris M. Keesan <kee...@world.std.com> wrote:
>Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>...
>> Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>>prior magazine editing experience).
>
>Terry Carr, 1985 and 1987.
>Unless Terry edited a magazine that I've forgotten about.
He was briefly editor of the Bridge-sponsored TO THE STARS, but I
don't recall that it ever actually published any issues. I'm sure
what got him the Hugo in 1984 was the release of the first several
books in the revived Ace Specials, all of which said "Edited by Terry
Carr" on the front and which included such minor, low-impact, nothing
first novels as THE WILD SHORE, GREEN EYES, THEM BONES, and
NEUROMANCER.
Which is to say: Terry deserved several Best Professional Hugos, imho,
but he particularly deserved one that year.
>See http://www.worldcon.org/hc.html#pe .
Also see the new Locus index to SF awards, with many handy tools for
this kind of research: http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/index.html.
>(I don't remember what Shawna McCarthy was editing in 1984).
IASFM. She followed Scithers and preceded Gardner. Sheila Williams
edited some issues in there too, I think.
P Nielsen Hayden
> Morris M. Keesan <kee...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>>...
>>> Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>>>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>>>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>>>prior magazine editing experience).
>>
>>Terry Carr, 1985 and 1987.
>>Unless Terry edited a magazine that I've forgotten about.
>
>
>He was briefly editor of the Bridge-sponsored TO THE STARS, but I
>don't recall that it ever actually published any issues. I'm sure
>what got him the Hugo in 1984
I meant, of course, 1985. For work done in 1984.
>was the release of the first several
>books in the revived Ace Specials, all of which said "Edited by Terry
>Carr" on the front and which included such minor, low-impact, nothing
>first novels as THE WILD SHORE, GREEN EYES, THEM BONES, and
>NEUROMANCER.
--
David G. Bell
b...@templetons.com "Brad Templeton" wrote:
> In article <slrn8s01f...@pnh-0.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
> P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
> >On 13 Sep 2000 22:28:22 GMT,
> > Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
> >
> >>This is why it should not be possible for authors to withdraw nominations
> >>for some of their works. They should be allowed to withdraw the nomination
> >>for *all* of them -- ie. like Lester del Ray -- or none of them.
> >
> >
> >I can't imagine what you mean by bringing Lester del Rey into this.
> >Lester declining the Best Professional Editor Hugo on behalf of his
> >recently-deceased wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not an example of
> >"withdrawing the nomination"; he declined the actual award, at the
> >ceremony. And it's deeply weird to use it as an illustration of your
> >"all or nothing" notion, unless you mean that Lester declined the Hugo
> >on behalf of 100% of his recently-deceased wives.
>
> Sorry this wasn't clear. When I say all or nothing, I include withdrawing
> one nomination as withdrawing all of them if one is all you have.
>
> Put another way, "You can refuse a nomination, as long as you refuse all
> your nominations."
>
> The withdrawl rule was cited as being prompted by Lester del Ray's desire
> to refuse the award for his late wife, that he should have had the opportunity
> to do so prior to the voting to avoid the unfortunate refusal at the
> ceremony. I gave it as an example by saying that he would still have
> the right to withdraw her nomination, as he would be withdrawing "all"
> her nominations.
>
> Of course this is a curious situation, as one could also debate whether
> heirs should or shouldn't be able to decline awards or nominations the
> way actual candidates can, since one can't really be heir, in this case
> to a body of editorial work. But that aside, my point was that a rule
> saying you must withdraw all or none would still have satisfied the reason
> this rule was created.
Should this all-or-nothing principle be limited by category in any way,
or apply to related categories, or to all?
Hypothesis: Tall Writer from Reading is nominated for fanzine, fan
writer, related book, short story, and novel. (I think we know of
somebody who has written a set of works qualified for nomination in all
these categories.)
If TWfR thinks that the short story was rubbish, should he be required
to refuse _all_ the nominations, just the short story and novel
nominations, or should he be able to merely refuse the short story
nomimation?
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
Copyright 2000 David G. Bell
The right to insert advertising material in the above text is reserved
to the author. The author did not use any form of HTML in the above text.
Any text following this line was added without the author's permission.
Brad Templeton
>The reason is in the phrase, "It's an honor just to be nominated." And,
>to me, that's an expression of the purpose of the Hugo Award -- to honor
>those people who have added to our field in the prior year, either by
>awarding them one of the "people" Hugos, or by them being the creator of
>one of the "work" Hugos.
>
>And if they don't feel it's an honor, then there's no reason to force it
>on them.
Indeed, but I think it should be possible to allow people the right to
decline the honour without allowing strategic withdrawl of some, but not
all of a set of related works.
One could define that related works must be withdrawn as a set or not at
all to get technical, but I think the odds of an author having two unrelated
works on a ballot and wanting to pull one and not the other are low enough
I would rather not get into defining related.
Even if you believe, in spite of scenaria I have described, that there is
no strategic value to pulling all but one of the nominated works in a
related set, it's clear that some people do believe it and will act on it.
I don't think JMS pulled his other episodes because he felt them unworthy
of Hugos or was declining the honour of nomination for them.
While it is true in part that their nominations were contributed to by
internet campaigns to get B5 fans to nominate particular episodes, getting
three on the ballot is still an honour that I doubt he would turn down
if he didn't think (correctly) that choosing just one would improve its
chances.
David Dyer-Bennet
> Well, that's actually a reasonably good question. And if your answer
> is "because he was her husband," your (using the general "you" here)
> next exercise should be to consider the question "Can you think of
> some reasons why allowing living spouses to decline awards on behalf
> of their recenty-deceased partners might not actually be optimal?"
Well, hypothetically, consider the case where the living spouse was
known to have murdered the recently deceased spouse. Would you want
that spouse sending a letter from jail declining the nomination? Or
rather, would you want the administrators bound to honor it?
(HYPOTHETICALLY. So far as I know this bears no resemblance
whatsoever to any real-world event, and if it did I probably wouldn't
have mentioned it even as a hypothetical.)
Demian Phillips
>> Michael Swanwick is the winner of the Best Short Story Hugo in both
>> 1999 and 2000. How about that.
>
>He's also honorable, and so far as I know, not interested in trying to
>"work the system," even if he thought he could.
I'd be willing to attest to this.
--
+---------------------+-------------------------------------------+
|^_^ |Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty |
|Demian Phillips |five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I |
|PGP KEY ID 0x5BC4FCB4|finally won out over it. - Elwood P. Dowd |
Beth Friedman
> It was a colorful speech, as Lester was a colorful, and deeply bitter,
> man, who suffered from writer's block for most of the last forty years
> of his life, to the point where most any fiction you saw published under
> his name since the late Fifties was ghosted for him by someone else,
> which earned a bit of talk among insiders, as you might imagine (if
> _The Runaway Robot_ was a beloved work of your childhood, sorry),
I don't remember reading _The Runaway Robot_ but I suppose you're
going to similarly disillusion me about _Tunnel Through Time_, which
was.
--
Beth Friedman
b...@wavefront.com
Alison Scott
>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:38:39 GMT,
> fia...@cpcug.org <fia...@cpcug.org> wrote:
>>One other thing to consider -- the award was to Judy Lynn del Rey, not
>>Lester del Rey. What right did he have to reject it in the first place?
>
>
>Well, that's actually a reasonably good question. And if your answer
>is "because he was her husband," your (using the general "you" here)
>next exercise should be to consider the question "Can you think of
>some reasons why allowing living spouses to decline awards on behalf
>of their recenty-deceased partners might not actually be optimal?"
Hmm. Once you've got your head round that one, you might try this.
"Can you think of some reasons why *not* allowing living spouses to
decline awards on behalf of their recently-deceased partners might not
actually be optimal?" I think, on the whole, that there's not really
an easy option, and that this one would be worse.
--
Alison Scott ali...@kittywompus.com & www.kittywompus.com
Please remember that I was probably sleep deprived, or weirdly hormonal,
when composing this post.
Del Cotter
Avram Grumer (Time Travellers for a Better Yesterday) wrote:
>p...@panix.com wrote:
>
>> I would belabor the point by mentioning that it took me only 7.36
>> seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
>> straight out of memory.
>
>What's the URL for that?
http://www.torbuilding.com/floor6˝.htm
And for anyone who's popping round to see Patrick about 4pm tomorrow -
give us a wave, will you?
--
. . . . Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk . . . .
JustRead:ars:JohnBarnesApocalypses&Apostrophes:MichaelConeyHelloSummerGoodby
e:WalterMMillerJrStLeibowitz&TWHW:IainBanksWhit:DorothyDunnettTheGameOfKings
ToRead:SMStirlingAgainstTheTideOfYears:HBeamPiperSpaceViking:VernorVingeADee
P Nielsen Hayden
Yup, that's the one.
This has been well-known and discussed in print for at least twenty
years, actually...years before Lester del Rey's death, in fact.
Morris M. Keesan
P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:38:39 GMT,
> fia...@cpcug.org <fia...@cpcug.org> wrote:
>
>>Worldcon, where that Hugo was awarded). The non-acceptance speech,
>>presumably written by Lester, was read by somebody else (whose name I
>>can't remember).
>
>
>Good gracious, you're absolutely right. I was _there_ -- as a
>nominee! -- but so many people have been talking about Lester
>rejecting the award that my mind has made up a false memory of him
>doing it in person.
>
>In fact, as I now dimly recall (hoping this isn't another exciting
>memory hallucination), Lester's brief rant was read to the multitudes
>by Del Rey executive Owen Lock.
Astonishing. Even before people started discussing it here
recently, I think I had a clear memory of Lester's physical
presence and voice, rejecting the award. I may have heard
the non-acceptance speech in Lester's voice, in my head, even
as it was being read by someone else.
I trust my memory of events less and less, these days, as more
things get stored in it.
mike weber
Nicoll) typed
> It's been more than 13 years since he died? It seems like yesterday.
A friend and i were reminsicing about a mutual friend who passed away
at the '81 WorldCon.
And i had to admit that, even nineteen years after, occasionally i
*still* find myself stuck on some musicological question or obscurity
and think "I'll call Dave -- *he* would know!"
And then i remember that i don't know the area code...
--
"It's not what you don't know that can hurt you -- it's the things that
you do know that AREN'T true..." ("The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"?)
================================================================
mike weber kras...@mindspring.com
half complete website of Xeno--http://weberworld.virtualave.net
mike weber
>One other thing to consider -- the award was to Judy Lynn del Rey, not
>Lester del Rey. What right did he have to reject it in the first place?
>
Ummm -- husband, co-editor and executor of her estate?
Brenda Daverin
(David Goldfarb) wrote:
> Anyone remember the nominees for Dramatic Presentation in 1968?
> (I'm fairly sure it was '68, I might be off a year in either direction.)
Taking you literally for those who might be wondering what you mean, I
have this list thanks to a quick Farber:
Star Trek: City on the Edge of Forever (TV) <--winner
Star Trek: Amok Time (TV)
Star Trek: The Doomsday Machine (TV)
Star Trek: Mirror, Mirror (TV)
Star Trek: The Trouble with Tribbles (TV)
--
Brenda Daverin
bdav...@best.com
Del Cotter
P Nielsen Hayden (fwa) wrote:
> fia...@cpcug.org <fia...@cpcug.org> wrote:
>>One slight correction here. Lester was not at ConFederation (the 1986
>>Worldcon, where that Hugo was awarded). The non-acceptance speech,
>>presumably written by Lester, was read by somebody else (whose name I
>>can't remember).
>
>Good gracious, you're absolutely right. I was _there_ -- as a
>nominee! -- but so many people have been talking about Lester
>rejecting the award that my mind has made up a false memory of him
>doing it in person.
Apparently, some really amazing percentage of people can remember the
shock of seeing Kennedy's assassination on television, though the film
wasn't released until months after the event.
Robert Sneddon
<kras...@mindspring.com> writes
>On 13 Sep 2000 23:52:38 GMT, t...@netcom.com (Tom Galloway) typed
>
[Re: Judy-Lynn del Rey's Hugo]
>>Out of pure curiosity, anyone know what happened to the physical Hugo Award
>>that was thus declined?
>>
>Dunno -- but i might be able to find out...
Don Cook has it.
--
Robert Sneddon
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>p...@panix.com (P Nielsen Hayden) writes:
>
>> is "because he was her husband," your (using the general "you" here)
>> next exercise should be to consider the question "Can you think of
>> some reasons why allowing living spouses to decline awards on behalf
>> of their recenty-deceased partners might not actually be optimal?"
>
>known to have murdered the recently deceased spouse. Would you want
>that spouse sending a letter from jail declining the nomination? Or
>rather, would you want the administrators bound to honor it?
>
>(HYPOTHETICALLY. So far as I know this bears no resemblance
>whatsoever to any real-world event, and if it did I probably wouldn't
>have mentioned it even as a hypothetical.)
I have the impression - probably from reading mystery novels, that excellent
source of all legal advice - that convicted murderers aren't allowed to
profit from their crimes, and are therefore barred from inheriting the assets
of the people they killed.
In which case, the (convicted and imprisoned) living spouse probably doesn't
have the right to decline the Hugo, but the (probably court-appointed) executor
of the estate does.
If the trial hasn't happened yet and the living spouse is jailed or on bail
awaiting trial, then I don't know what the deal is. The presumption of
innocence probably means that the awards committee honors the request of the
living spouse. However, the fairest thing all around is probably if the
records say ("Award won by Jane Deadwoman, refused on her behalf by widower
Joe Livingspouse, who was later convicted of her murder.")
(The difference, I suppose, between declining nomination of a work that would
win, and declining the award after a work has won, is that in the first case
somebody else gets the rocketship and in the second case nobody does.)
-- Alan
===============================================================================
Alan Winston --- WIN...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056
Physical mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 69, PO BOX 4349, STANFORD, CA 94309-0210
===============================================================================
Brad Templeton
David G. Bell <db...@zhochaka.org.uk> wrote:
>Hypothesis: Tall Writer from Reading is nominated for fanzine, fan
>writer, related book, short story, and novel. (I think we know of
>somebody who has written a set of works qualified for nomination in all
>these categories.)
>
>If TWfR thinks that the short story was rubbish, should he be required
>to refuse _all_ the nominations, just the short story and novel
>nominations, or should he be able to merely refuse the short story
>nomimation?
>
works for "strategic" reasons. (Whether you think their strategy is valid
or not, _they_ think it is.) This does not apply over categories.
Richard Horton
>Apparently, some really amazing percentage of people can remember the
>shock of seeing Kennedy's assassination on television, though the film
>wasn't released until months after the event.
I have an odd "memory", which I thought was real until I analyzed it
when I was maybe 10 or 12, of seeing Kennedy's assassination.
I can still dig up this memory, though I know now it's entirely false.
It's set on an airport runway, with a rifleman shooting at President
Kennedy from some distance. It's all black and white. For a long
time when I was a kid (I had just turned 4 when JFK was shot) I really
thought this was something I saw on TV.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
Lenny Bailes
He did write "For I am a Jealous People" didn't he?
If not, who did?
--
Lenny Bailes | len...@slip.net | http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~lennyb
Gary Farber
er...@mo.net wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 13:01:26 -0400, Avram Grumer <av...@bigfoot.com>
> wrote:
> >In article <slrn8s0gd...@pnh-0.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
> >
> >> I would belabor the point by mentioning that it took me only 7.36
> >> seconds to find this information on the Web, but in fact it came
> >> straight out of memory.
> >
> >What's the URL for that?
>
I'd look under
PNHT://left-brain/storage//Terry/poignant/bittersweet/hugo, myself.
> Of course, that won't be useful until Patrick makes a public release
> of his
> browser, and publishes the RFC for the PNH transport, but there you
> go.
[. . . .]
--
Gary Farber New York
gfa...@panix.com 2000
garyf...@juno.com
gfa...@my-deja.com
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Gary Farber
kee...@world.std.com (Morris M. Keesan) wrote:
[. . .]
> Terry Carr, 1985 and 1987.
> Unless Terry edited a magazine that I've forgotten about.
> See http://www.worldcon.org/hc.html#pe .
> (I don't remember what Shawna McCarthy was editing in 1984).
Asimov's, says my memory, which doubtless means someone should check.
;-)
It's worth a footnote that Terry had accepted the job as editor of the
Scientology-owned magazine-to-be, _To The Stars_, and ISTR (again,
we've seen how reliable that is, on its own) that that condition
sputtered along for years, but the magazine never actually was
published, which I understood, to be sure, to be entirely Scientology,
er, Bridge Publications' responsibility.
Those of us who have never been happy about Bridge, et al, mixing into
our field, which was particularly extensive from the late Seventies
throughout the end of the Eighties, and discussed the problematic
aspects of this association with Terry tended to forgive him that his
lifelong dream had always been to edit a prozine, and no one else had
ever offered him the chance. It's the sort of Faustian offer I'd hate
to be tempted by, myself.
Gary Farber
> P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
> >On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:38:39 GMT,
> > fia...@cpcug.org <fia...@cpcug.org> wrote:
> >
> >>One slight correction here. Lester was not at ConFederation (the
1986
> >>Worldcon, where that Hugo was awarded). The non-acceptance speech,
> >>presumably written by Lester, was read by somebody else (whose name
I
> >>can't remember).
> >
> >
> >Good gracious, you're absolutely right. I was _there_ -- as a
> >nominee! -- but so many people have been talking about Lester
> >rejecting the award that my mind has made up a false memory of him
> >doing it in person.
> >
> >memory hallucination), Lester's brief rant was read to the multitudes
> >by Del Rey executive Owen Lock.
>
> Astonishing. Even before people started discussing it here
> recently, I think I had a clear memory of Lester's physical
> presence and voice, rejecting the award. I may have heard
> the non-acceptance speech in Lester's voice, in my head, even
> as it was being read by someone else.
>
> I trust my memory of events less and less, these days, as more
> things get stored in it.
I take feeble comfort that I never quite said that I remembered seeing
Lester do this, but that's not much; I take at least faintly greater
comfort from both messages above that at least I'm not the only one who
can put together more distinct memories with less distinct ones, in his
mind, when the necessity arises.
Incidentally, it occurs to me, after a day, that I think I sounded
unduly harsh about Lester del Rey. I'm not going to write an essay on
all his accomplishments and virtues here, to compensate, but I will
mention that I also saw him be fun to be around, that he was
frighteningly brilliant, that he mentored a tremendous number of
writers, both informally, and then formally in his days as editor at
Ballantine; we all have our problems, and Lester del Rey, no matter his,
made a huge contribution to our field, and is best remembered for that.
Gary Farber
p...@panix.com wrote:
> Also see the new Locus index to SF awards, with many handy tools for
> this kind of research: http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/index.html.
Possibly just a glitch of my hookup, but I found that
<http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/> worked, whereas the above did not.
[. . . .]
Gary Farber
> Also see the new Locus index to SF awards, with many handy tools for
> this kind of research: http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/index.html.
Oh, and besides, what use is all this when it doesn't include the Big
Heart and Doc Weir Awards?
;-)
Dorothy J Heydt
Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>I can still dig up this memory, though I know now it's entirely false.
>
>It's set on an airport runway, with a rifleman shooting at President
>Kennedy from some distance. It's all black and white. For a long
>time when I was a kid (I had just turned 4 when JFK was shot) I really
>thought this was something I saw on TV.
It almost sounds as if you had seen _La Jetee_ and some point and
combined it with other matters.
I remember hearing about the assassination on the radio, sitting
in somebody else's office in Tolman Hall. Of course I was 21 at
the time, makes it a little easier to remember.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
James Nicoll
Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
><d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Apparently, some really amazing percentage of people can remember the
>>shock of seeing Kennedy's assassination on television, though the film
>>wasn't released until months after the event.
>
>I have an odd "memory", which I thought was real until I analyzed it
>when I was maybe 10 or 12, of seeing Kennedy's assassination.
>
in winter and freezing because I only had short trousers, that being
the style for young boys in the UK at the time.
Pity my passport is stamped for August, eh?
--
Much apologies but my return path is temporarily broken. Please
use jdni...@home.com instead.
Beth Friedman
>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 14:53:30 -0500,
> Beth Friedman <b...@wavefront.com> wrote:
>>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Gary Farber wrote:
>>> It was a colorful speech, as Lester was a colorful, and deeply bitter,
>>> man, who suffered from writer's block for most of the last forty years
>>> of his life, to the point where most any fiction you saw published under
>>> his name since the late Fifties was ghosted for him by someone else,
>>> which earned a bit of talk among insiders, as you might imagine (if
>>> _The Runaway Robot_ was a beloved work of your childhood, sorry),
>>
>>I don't remember reading _The Runaway Robot_ but I suppose you're
>>going to similarly disillusion me about _Tunnel Through Time_, which
>>was.
>
>Yup, that's the one.
>
>This has been well-known and discussed in print for at least twenty
>years, actually...years before Lester del Rey's death, in fact.
Well, I guess I never happened to encounter it. So who did write it?
I'm actually not particularly devastated; I read it as a child, and it
was more the interesting experience of being familiar with del Rey's
name later in life, and realizing that he'd written something I was
fond of as a child. Except he hadn't.
I had pretty much the same experience with _Revolt on Alpha Centauri_,
where I later realized it wasn't written by just some guy, it was by
by Robert Silverberg -- and realizing that the character named Harl
Ellson (or something like that) probably wasn't a coincidence.
--
Beth Friedman
b...@wavefront.com
James Nicoll
>years, actually...years before Lester del Rey's death, in fact.
Huh. And until today I had never heard this.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Nicoll) wrote:
>In article <8prt87$2fqa$1...@newssvr05-en0.news.prodigy.com>,
>Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>>
>>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 22:45:24 +0100, Del Cotter
>><d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>Apparently, some really amazing percentage of people can remember the
>>>shock of seeing Kennedy's assassination on television, though the film
>>>wasn't released until months after the event.
>>
>>I have an odd "memory", which I thought was real until I analyzed it
>>when I was maybe 10 or 12, of seeing Kennedy's assassination.
>>
> I had a distinct memory of getting to Montreal in 1966
>in winter and freezing because I only had short trousers, that being
>the style for young boys in the UK at the time.
>
> Pity my passport is stamped for August, eh?
But that could be merely conflation. I arrived in Philadelphia in
September of 1964, when it was quite muggy . . . with only my
California clothes. I still only had California clothes when it
got to be winter -- they said it was the coldest winter since
mumble -- and it wouldn't be hard to remember that as "I got to
Philadelphia and I froze because I had no winter coat."
Holes in my shoes, too. I hate snow.
Lucy Kemnitzer
P Nielsen Hayden
>On 14 Sep 2000 21:22:52 GMT, p...@panix.com (P Nielsen Hayden) wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 14:53:30 -0500,
>> Beth Friedman <b...@wavefront.com> wrote:
>>>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Gary Farber wrote:
>>>> It was a colorful speech, as Lester was a colorful, and deeply bitter,
>>>> man, who suffered from writer's block for most of the last forty years
>>>> of his life, to the point where most any fiction you saw published under
>>>> his name since the late Fifties was ghosted for him by someone else,
>>>> which earned a bit of talk among insiders, as you might imagine (if
>>>> _The Runaway Robot_ was a beloved work of your childhood, sorry),
>>>
>>>I don't remember reading _The Runaway Robot_ but I suppose you're
>>>going to similarly disillusion me about _Tunnel Through Time_, which
>>>was.
>>
>>Yup, that's the one.
>>
>>This has been well-known and discussed in print for at least twenty
>>years, actually...years before Lester del Rey's death, in fact.
>
>Well, I guess I never happened to encounter it. So who did write it?
Paul W. Fairman, same person who wrote THE RUNAWAY ROBOT. As most SF
reference books will tell you. This is not a state secret.
Dorothy J Heydt
>
>He did write "For I am a Jealous People" didn't he?
>If not, who did?
Yes, he did; just looked it up in my battered copy of _Star Short
Novels_ (which I file under S for Sturgeon's "To Here and the
Easel").
Gary Farber
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
> In article <39C19D...@slip.net>, Lenny Bailes <len...@slip.net>
wrote:
> >
> >He did write "For I am a Jealous People" didn't he?
> >If not, who did?
>
> Yes, he did; just looked it up in my battered copy of _Star Short
> Novels_ (which I file under S for Sturgeon's "To Here and the
> Easel").
Dorothy? Although so far as anyone knows, no one has any reason to
doubt that he wrote that and the rest of his short stories, since we've
been discussing the fact that just about all the later work published
under his name wasn't written by him, it's unclear to me how it is that
you feel you're establishing that he's written something because his
name is on it.
Dorothy J Heydt
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>In article <G0xIx...@kithrup.com>,
> djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
>> In article <39C19D...@slip.net>, Lenny Bailes <len...@slip.net>
>wrote:
>> >
>> >He did write "For I am a Jealous People" didn't he?
>> >If not, who did?
>>
>> Yes, he did; just looked it up in my battered copy of _Star Short
>> Novels_ (which I file under S for Sturgeon's "To Here and the
>> Easel").
>
>Dorothy? Although so far as anyone knows, no one has any reason to
>doubt that he wrote that and the rest of his short stories, since we've
>been discussing the fact that just about all the later work published
>under his name wasn't written by him, it's unclear to me how it is that
>you feel you're establishing that he's written something because his
>name is on it.
OK, valid point, I sit corrected.
However... the publication date on _SSN_ is 1954. Do you have
any data on whenabouts the massive writing block hit, after which
his authorship is suspect?
Gary Farber
> OK, valid point, I sit corrected.
>
> However... the publication date on _SSN_ is 1954. Do you have
> any data on whenabouts the massive writing block hit, after which
> his authorship is suspect?
Later. More to the point, there's no reason to suspect any of his short
work: he asked other people to write novels for him after he had
contracts because there was, like, money in it for both of them. You
don't get contracts in advance to do short stories, as you well know.
No one has ever suggested, so far as I know, that stories such as "For I
Am A Jealous God," or "Helen O'Loy" were written by anyone but the pure
quill Lester: they bear his inimitable style, and established it.
RR, nostalgic for it as I am, like many of my generation, was, oin the
other hand, a bit of fluff written for Scholastic, not exactly a
prestige outfit in the sf field in those days. (I say this having
earned a reasonable amount of money from Scholastic in the past, myself,
doing non-sf low-grade editorial work.)
Those STAR anthologies of Fred Pohl's were great stuff, by the way,
weren't they? I'm very fond of them, and wish I hadn't lost the vast
majority of my old book collection, through fire and other losses, weep
wail. I'm tremendously nostalgically fond of practially all of the
Fifties and Sixties paperback lines.
But STAR was one of the best original anthology series ever, and seminal
in the day, as you well recall, I know.
James Nicoll
My grandfather grew up in Hawaii but found work in Pennsylvania.
He hated the climate rather a lot.
Unfortunately for my memories, we moved to Waterloo within
a week of arriving in Montreal, which was merely the port our ship
docked at.
I still have memories of my aunt's convent, which put us up
for the time it took us to arrange transport to Waterloo.
Demian Phillips
>In article <slrn8s0gd...@pnh-0.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
>P Nielsen Hayden <p...@panix.com> wrote:
>>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 00:31:32 GMT,
>> Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Judy-Lynn only won a Hugo for Best Editor in the year after she
>>>died (and, see other discussion of this Award, remains, I think, the
>>>only person to win the award for book editing, though she did also have
>>>prior magazine editing experience).
>>
>>
>>Seriously wrong. The previous year, 1985, Terry Carr won. And Terry
>>won again, posthumously, in 1987.
>
> It's been more than 13 years since he died? It seems like yesterday.
>
> ObSomething: Michael Swanwick's essay in _Moon Dogs_ on the wave
>of deaths in the late 1980s. Watching old fans and authors flicker away
>in the last few years has been rather similar.
>
When he talks about that aspect of getting older and the passage od
time is about the only time he seems less cheerful/happy then what I
consider normal.
--
+---------------------+-------------------------------------------+
|^_^ |Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty |
|Demian Phillips |five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I |
|PGP KEY ID 0x5BC4FCB4|finally won out over it. - Elwood P. Dowd |
Brad Templeton
Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 22:45:24 +0100, Del Cotter
><d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Apparently, some really amazing percentage of people can remember the
>>shock of seeing Kennedy's assassination on television, though the film
>>wasn't released until months after the event.
>
I read a professor did a study that found that most people's memories
of the "big events" like the Kennedy assassination, are false, in spite
of the fact that people swear they are some of the most vivid memories
they have.
He had to wait a long time to do his study. When Challenger exploded,
he go all his students to fill out a description of the circumstances
when they heard about it.
Then, a year later, he had them fill out a description again. There
were significant discrepencies, from what I recall, in over half the
reports.
So in spite of your vivid memories of where you were when you heard
Kennedy was dead, or John Lennon, or Princess Di, or the Shuttle, or
any other such event, in spite of the fact you will swear this isn't
true for you, there is a good chance your memories are wrong.
Lennon: Roommate told me in the morning, in the hallway
Kennedy: I was 3, gimme a break.
Di: Connie Willis told me in the hallway at a worldcon party
Shuttle: Turned on TV after employee E-mailed me he had gone home to
watch the shuttle (without saying why...)
True? Who knows?
Lenny Bailes
>
> In article <G0xMo...@kithrup.com>,
> djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
> [. . .]
>
> > OK, valid point, I sit corrected.
> >
> > However... the publication date on _SSN_ is 1954. Do you have
> > any data on whenabouts the massive writing block hit, after which
> > his authorship is suspect?
>
> Later. More to the point, there's no reason to suspect any of his short
> work: he asked other people to write novels for him after he had
> contracts because there was, like, money in it for both of them. You
> don't get contracts in advance to do short stories, as you well know.
>
> No one has ever suggested, so far as I know, that stories such as "For I
> Am A Jealous God," or "Helen O'Loy" were written by anyone but the pure
> quill Lester: they bear his inimitable style, and established it.
I asked because you said "since the late '50s." "Helen O'Loy" was lots earlier
than that, wasn't it? "For I Am a Jealous People" made a big impression on
me during my Golden Age of Science Fiction (age 12).
Ed Dravecky III
> Not really. It's obvious, if never said explicitly, what awards
> people care the most about. They are listed first, and usually
> presented last.
>
> More people *vote* for dramatic presentation than any of the
> others, because more people have seen the nominees, but I think
> it's not much disputed that fans care most about Best Novel and
> the other fiction awards.
I think your first point is valid...and that's why Chicon chose to
juggle the lineup as they did. Putting DP next to last worked for
me and a lot of other people watching the proceedings.
--
Ed Dravecky III (ed3 at panix.com)
Webmaster of http://www.deathsheep.com/
Sharon L Sbarsky
Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
>
>So in spite of your vivid memories of where you were when you heard
>Kennedy was dead, or John Lennon, or Princess Di, or the Shuttle, or
>any other such event, in spite of the fact you will swear this isn't
>true for you, there is a good chance your memories are wrong.
>
>
>Lennon: Roommate told me in the morning, in the hallway
>Kennedy: I was 3, gimme a break.
>Di: Connie Willis told me in the hallway at a worldcon party
>Shuttle: Turned on TV after employee E-mailed me he had gone home to
> watch the shuttle (without saying why...)
>
Kennedy: I was in third grade in a special "speech" class when someone
came in with a note to the teacher ans then announced on the school
speaker system.
Di: At Worldcon.
Shuttle: co-worker told me, then I went home to watch the news broadcasts.
Moon Landing: At summer camp in a field with a small b&w TV.
I think the fact that some of the details are vivid and others are fuzzy
gives a better chance that the vivid ones are accutate.
Sharon
Morris M. Keesan
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>In article <G0wBJ...@world.std.com>,
> kee...@world.std.com (Morris M. Keesan) wrote:
>> Astonishing. Even before people started discussing it here
>> recently, I think I had a clear memory of Lester's physical
>> presence and voice, rejecting the award. I may have heard
>> the non-acceptance speech in Lester's voice, in my head, even
>> as it was being read by someone else.
>>
>> I trust my memory of events less and less, these days, as more
>> things get stored in it.
>
>I take feeble comfort that I never quite said that I remembered seeing
>Lester do this, but that's not much; I take at least faintly greater
>comfort from both messages above that at least I'm not the only one who
>can put together more distinct memories with less distinct ones, in his
>mind, when the necessity arises.
It disturbs me that, even though I now believe that Lester wasn't
at ConFederation, I *still* have a clear memory of hearing and
seeing him there. I sincerely hope I'm never called as a witness
in any court case.
--
Morris M. Keesan -- kee...@world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~keesan/ -- newest baby pictures added 9/13/2000
Kevin J. Maroney
>"=You people wouldn't have even thought of giving this to her if she
>hadn't *died* last year...=" was, i seem to recall, the gist of it.
"You had many opportunities to honor her while she was alive; now that
you've chosen to honor her for her death, I will decline to accept
it."
--
Kevin Maroney | kmar...@ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
<http://www.nyrsf.com>
Sharon L Sbarsky
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>Which makes utterly no sense to me. Of course he had the opportunity.
>He was notified of the nomination, as is the norm, months before the
>con.
I'm pretty sure I remember that it wasn't always the norm for nominees to
be notified. And some nominees finding out that they were on the ballot
when the ballot showed up in fanzines and newszines. I don't remember if
this was the case in 1986 or not.
> If he had simply wanted to quietly refuse, he could have written a
>letter saying he was refusing. I'm not aware that anyone put a gun to
>Lester's head to make him go to the auditorium to be present, either.
>He had all the opportunity he could have wanted to write a letter,
>and/or to not show up. Perhaps someone close to him survives who can
>speak with authority as to exactly how he felt, but it certainly *looks*
>to me like he *wanted* the opportunity to get up on the stage, and
>denounce people. If he hadn't *wanted* to do that, why on earth would
>he have done it?
You know sometimes "acceptance" speeches that never get said from the
podium remain unsaid. IIRC, Michael Whelan "withdrew" in advance of any
nominations for the following year during an acceptance speech saying that
it was so that other Artists would have the opportunity to win. IMO, if he
didn't win that year, he might not have made a public speech about
withdrawing. (according to Laurie's AwardWeb, that also happened in 1986)
I know of another similar example of an unsaid acceptance speech.
If Judy-Lynn didn't win, we don't know what would have happened. He may
have muttered that the fans couldn't even award her a post-humous Hugo
(despite what the speech said when she did win); or he may have published
the speech anyway; or he may have just remained quiet on the issue and let
whoever did win enjoy their honor. I never really met the man so I don't
know what may have happened, perhaps someone else does, it's just possible
that he didn't know that he could have quietly written a letter refusing
the nomination.
Sharon
David G. Bell
b...@templetons.com "Brad Templeton" wrote:
> Lennon: Roommate told me in the morning, in the hallway
> Kennedy: I was 3, gimme a break.
> Di: Connie Willis told me in the hallway at a worldcon party
> Shuttle: Turned on TV after employee E-mailed me he had gone home to
> watch the shuttle (without saying why...)
>
> True? Who knows?
I don't recall Lennon or Kennedy, though I have a grainy black-and-white
flashback of the Kennedy funeral -- transatlantic TV?
For Di, I logged on to a MUCK on the Sunday morning, and had a look at
the main notice-board, and then went to check the BBC.
Challenger was putting on the TV, a little before 5pm, since there was
special coverage on the BBC, and I remember seeing the smoke trails (but
that last detail may be misleading).
For the first Post-Challenger launch, I know I was listening to BBC
radio, live, while sitting in a tractor, and I know they sent their
political correspondent down to the Cape, who went on and on and on
about the politics. The space correspondent handled the last of the
countdown, and the first few seconds of flight. and then the politics
took over. If it hadn't been for the NASA commentary on the
loudspeakers in the background....
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
Copyright 2000 David G. Bell
The right to insert advertising material in the above text is reserved
to the author. The author did not use any form of HTML in the above text.
Any text following this line was added without the author's permission.
Dorothy J Heydt
Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
>
>Lennon: Roommate told me in the morning, in the hallway
>Kennedy: I was 3, gimme a break.
>Di: Connie Willis told me in the hallway at a worldcon party
>Shuttle: Turned on TV after employee E-mailed me he had gone home to
> watch the shuttle (without saying why...)
Lennon: Damfino, I suppose I saw it in a newspaper headline,
perhaps as much as one or two days after it happened.
Kennedy: I was working in my boss's office in Tolman Hall (UC
Berkeley's Education/Psychology building) when we heard
excited talk in the hallway. We went down the hall a few
doors to someone else's office, who had a radio on. A
newscaster doing the verbal backing-and-filling they do
when they know something's going on and people are
listening but they have no information to give 'em.
Five or six of us packed into a tiny office (crowded with
bookshelves), hung around listening till the newscaster
said, "The President is dead." Then we all went home.
Diana: Hal heard it on the car radio late Sunday evening; we
had been camping out in the boonies all weekend. Would
that have been one or two days after the event?
Shuttle: Turned on the telly once Hal was off to work, to see how
the launch had gone. Expected small-scale bulletins.
Got that dreadful pillar of smoke with the two tails,
and a newscaster voice-over backing-and-filling, see above.
Dorothy J Heydt
Gary Farber <garyf...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>Those STAR anthologies of Fred Pohl's were great stuff, by the way,
>weren't they? I'm very fond of them, and wish I hadn't lost the vast
>majority of my old book collection, through fire and other losses, weep
>wail. I'm tremendously nostalgically fond of practially all of the
>Fifties and Sixties paperback lines.
>
>But STAR was one of the best original anthology series ever, and seminal
>in the day, as you well recall, I know.
Oh, true.
I only just recently found my copy of _SSN_--you must understand
that we moved from a large house to a medium-sized apartment in
1993, and some of the books are only now getting found, now that
it's just Hal and me and there's some room for what the computer
folk call swapping.
I was glad to find it because I wanted to reread "To Here and the
Easel," and was amused to discover that I still knew maybe 50% of
it by heart.
Nowadays, OTOH, I cannot remember a phone number long enough to
dial it.
Irina Rempt
> Lennon: Heard on the radio, no other details remembered.
> Kennedy: I was in third grade in a special "speech" class when someone
> came in with a note to the teacher ans then announced on the school
> speaker system.
> Di: At Worldcon.
> Shuttle: co-worker told me, then I went home to watch the news broadcasts.
>
> Moon Landing: At summer camp in a field with a small b&w TV.
Lennon: Probably read it in the paper.
Kennedy: Came home from infant school and my mother was sitting at
the kitchen table crying.
Di: Don't remember. I do remember that I didn't hear until the next
day.
Shuttle: On TV news at my parents' house.
Moon landing: My mother got me out of bed in the middle of the night,
"they're going to walk on the moon!" I'm eternally grateful to her
for that. I've woken up my own kids to see the Hale-Bopp comet and a
lunar eclipse because of that example.
Irina
--
ir...@valdyas.org http://www.valdyas.org/irina
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| Tomorrow, you can be anywhere. |
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Alison Hopkins
Irina Rempt wrote in message <8pu3gi$5ec$1...@news1.xs4all.nl>...
>Sharon L Sbarsky wrote:
>
>> Lennon: Heard on the radio, no other details remembered.
>> Kennedy: I was in third grade in a special "speech" class when someone
>> came in with a note to the teacher ans then announced on the school
>> speaker system.
>> Di: At Worldcon.
>> Shuttle: co-worker told me, then I went home to watch the news
broadcasts.
I was sitting at my desk, a colleague came haring in and told me, knowing
I'd be interested, to say the least.
>>
>> Moon Landing: At summer camp in a field with a small b&w TV.
we'd flown back from Rimini that day, no sleep for 24 hours, I set the alarm
for some ungodly hour, got up, and watched it in black and white, barely
awake. My parents slept through the whole thing.
Apollo 13 - working as a summer waitress, carried a radio around for three
days. Wept when they got AOS after the re-entry, and you saw the chutes
open. I was sitting having dinner, watching the BBC when that happened, and
it still makes me gulp at the thought. I snivelled through the film.
>
>Lennon: Probably read it in the paper.
I was at a hotel in the New Forest, they announced it on the radio. A very
cold day, I recall.
>
>Kennedy: Came home from infant school and my mother was sitting at
>the kitchen table crying.
At my grandmother's. It was announced on TV, and I went running in to the
kitchen to tell her. Dunno that I knew who JFK was.
>
>Di: Don't remember. I do remember that I didn't hear until the next
>day.
Dave had gone to an airshow. He phoned me, and said that something weird had
happened - this was early, they weren't sure if she was dead. I went down
and made a cup of tea, caught if with it on TV, and listened on and off all
day. The overwhelming reaction on my part, was one of sorrow for her sons'
loss which I still feel - and an odd one of, too young, too soon. Not a lot
to do with who she was, though. I went to Washington two days later, and
caught the US reaction as well.
Ali
Kip Williams
>
> In article <8ptk2v$g...@dispatch.concentric.net>,
> Brad Templeton <b...@templetons.com> wrote:
> >Lennon: Roommate told me in the morning, in the hallway
> >Kennedy: I was 3, gimme a break.
> >Di: Connie Willis told me in the hallway at a worldcon party
> >Shuttle: Turned on TV after employee E-mailed me he had gone home to
> > watch the shuttle (without saying why...)
> >
> Kennedy: I was in third grade in a special "speech" class when someone
> came in with a note to the teacher ans then announced on the school
> speaker system.
> Di: At Worldcon.
> Shuttle: co-worker told me, then I went home to watch the news broadcasts.
Lennon: Don't remember. Remember feeling sorry for him.
Kennedy: I was in second grade. No recollection of hearing about it,
though I seem to remember hearing my first conspiracy theory in
grade six.
Di: Beats me.
Shuttle: I was working at a research facility full of scientists and
other people who personally knew members of the crew. The launch
activity was playing live on a large monitor in the break room. I
heard it on the radio in the room I was in, and drifted into the
break room to see it happen again a couple of times.
--
--Kip (Williams)
amusing the world at http://members.home.net/kipw/
Kip Williams
Big event.
I also stayed up late and made an audio tape of Prince Charles'
Investiture. Not as big, but he was a likeable kid.
Mary Kay Kare
Templeton) wrote:
> So in spite of your vivid memories of where you were when you heard
> Kennedy was dead, or John Lennon, or Princess Di, or the Shuttle, or
> any other such event, in spite of the fact you will swear this isn't
> true for you, there is a good chance your memories are wrong.
>
>
Lennon: Car radio on the way to work.
Kennedy: Math class in 6th grade (As I've said before, I have a very
vivid memory of watching his funeral sitting on the living room floor of
the house we lived in on Cherokee Blvd. The only problem there is that we
moved out of that house in June 1962. So I do have a vivid false memory
connected with it.)
Princess Di: Behind the sales table at our bid party at the San Antonio
worldcon
Shuttle: Was home sick that day and didn't talk to anyone or turn on tv
or radio. The next morning on my way out the door to work I picked up the
paper and it felt like someone punched me in the stomach.
MKK
--
Stamp out tin toys!