Hugos

[owlmoose]

The Hugo Ceremony was today. Some amazing winners, some powerful speeches -- and it's all been overshadowed by the astOUNDingly craptacular performance of ConZealand toastmaster and Hugo MC, George R. R. Martin.

He spent almost three hours bloviating about Hugo and Worldcon history, with the old white dudes of the golden age heavily featured. He referred to Robert Heinlein as "the dean of science fiction" four times in one ten-minute segment. He brought up the greatness of John Campbell so many times it started to feel like trolling. His repeated praise of Robert Silverberg definitely felt like trolling. Between awarding the Astounding Award and the Hugo for Best Fancast, he spent SEVENTEEN MINUTES talking about the history of the Hugo rocket, including a "hilarious" bit where he kept mistaking thing like a juicer and a hood ornament for an older form of the Hugo. He mispronounced many, many names, almost entirely the names of people of color, including the title of Best Semiprozine finalist FIYAH, which is dedicated to promoting the work of Black authors. And worse, the vast majority of his presentation was pre-recorded, which means that 1) he had every opportunity to correct his mistakes with multiple takes and 2) there is every chance that other people watched these videos and said "yep, this is all fine! What a great way to honor an amazing and diverse slate of forward-thinking creators and welcome new people into fandom!"

So that's three hours of my life that I won't get back, but I can recommend a couple of things. As I mentioned, there were a number of wonderful speeches, but nothing set the tone better than R.F. Huang's Astounding Award acceptance speech. It was recorded in advance, but in her words about how to better welcome young new writers of color to fandom, she predicted nearly every damn thing that happened in the ceremony, including the mispronunciation of her name. I have rarely seen a better inditement of fandom. If you have more time, anoutlawlife has performed an important public service by creating an edit of the ceremony that cuts out most of GRRM but preserves all the acceptance speeches and gets the ceremony down to a much more manageable hour and 40 minutes.

I hope ConZealand and GRRM apologize, although I'm not holding my breath. I also hope future Worldcons learn from this. I have a little more hope for that, but not much. With all the big public failures that have happened this year, I'm starting to wonder if Worldcon is worth saving. I hope it is. But it's getting harder to hold on to that hope.