conventions

Yet another Hugo Award scandal

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Someone tried to buy a Hugo Award by buying a bunch of Glasgow Worldcon memberships and having them vote. Fortunately, the attempt was brain-dead stupid and the Hugo administration team caught it. Details are on File 770.

The stupidity consisted of using obviously fake names for the fake members. “These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.” 377 votes out of 3,813 were disqualified. The nominee that was being pushed did not win, and the Glasgow committee says there’s no reason to believe that the nominee was responsible for the campaign.
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An update on the Glasgow Worldcon code of conduct 2

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In an earlier post, I discussed the Code of Conduct of the Glasgow Worldcon. There have evidently been some changes since I wrote the article, perhaps in response to criticisms. My post quoted and criticized the following statement in the code: “In particular, exhibitors should not openly display sexualized images, activities, or other material, although this content may be kept out of sight and offered based on a customer’s inquiry, in keeping with the Indecent Display (Controls) Act 1981. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.”

That text isn’t currently present. Instead, there is this:
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Buffalo NASFiC code of conduct 1

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Continuing my irregular series on convention Codes of Conduct, here’s one on the North American Science Fiction Convention, coming up this month in Buffalo. Compared to some others, the problems of the NASFiC code of conduct are minor. There’s nothing like “Don’t say anything negative about anybody” or “Don’t offend anybody.”

BUFFALO in all caps means the convention, not the city.
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Bigots set rules for CRIT awards

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Not being an active gamer, I hadn’t heard about the CRIT awards before today and don’t know if they’re of any importance or just a fringe group of nuts. But they’re in the periphery of SF fandom, and I’ve made a specialty of analyzing Codes of Conduct. CRIT has the worst one I’ve seen yet.

They’re described as “an awards group dedicated to recognizing talented creators in the Tabletop Gaming space.” They were going to have an award ceremony at GenCon, a major gaming convention. They have pulled out as a result of widespread outrage at their code of conduct.
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Vancouver Comics Arts Festival is looking worse

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged books Canada conventions fandom on by

In an earlier post, I discussed the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival’s exclusion of Miriam Libicki for, in effect, being Israeli. Today I found a newly published interview with Libicki that makes the convention look still worse. Based on what she says, the convention’s motivation was more a matter of book-banning.

She characterizes the disruption which allegedly endangered the convention as “screaming.” As described, it might be grounds for restricting or expelling the person responsible, but there doesn’t seem to have been any threat to anyone. At one point, security removed some people for being disruptive. The “screaming” person was objecting to Libicki’s books without having read them. Subsequently the convention demanded a review of Libicki’s writing. Libicki was asked for digital copies of her books, which she couldn’t readily provide.
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