Some days it is challenging for me to think of something to talk about. I didn’t have that problem tonight. As soon as I saw the discourse, I knew what I was going to say.

Personal News

There’s this project I’ve been working on at work that is complicated and difficult to test. Worse, it’s something I don’t see us ever actually using, and the main reason I pushed forward on this thing was to give one of my fellows some training. Was this project successful in helping my guy? It’s difficult to say at this point. We’ll see.

In any event, it passes all the unit tests and it’s checked in. We’ll see what my contemporaries have to say about it.

Upcoming Events and Such

Nothing new to report over what I stated yesterday. Boskone is coming up quick. Norwescon is after that, and I still haven’t made all the arrangements. I still need to make decisions about a number of other events this year.

The Topic: More Thoughts on The Hugos

This last year, WorldCon took place in China. WorldCon is where The Hugos are given out each year, and I didn’t have a lot of exposure to any of it. I didn’t follow it. I didn’t vote. I was a bad fan.

In recent years, there has been a lot of drama around The Hugos. The Sad Puppies. The Rabid Puppies. George R. R. Martin completely bombing parts of the presentation. Drama.

Some rules were adjusted to deal with voting blocks and some of the shenanigans that went during the feral puppy era. The other sorts of drama that cropped up seemed minor in comparison, and ultimately forgettable. But this last year, we have a fresh new hell to contend with.

Stories that should have been eligible were ruled as ineligible. It looks like the head volunteer responsible for administrating the awards may have futzed with eligibility rules himself. Or maybe the Chinese government was involved. I haven’t looked that closely into the situation, and I sort of don’t want to. Yesterday, when I talked about getting away from Doomscrolling, this is what I meant. This is the sort of thing I’m trying to avoid.

I don’t know much about what went down, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. At least one of the stories ruled ineligible won the Nebula and Locus awards.

No one has stated this explicitly on any of my feeds, but it sounds like the stories ruled ineligible may have contained LGBTQ+ content. If this is the reason why they were left off the ballot, then this sucks all around.

A number of people more informed and more eloquent than me have talked about this online. I’ll leave it to them to go into the finer details. I do have one potentially different take, which I will share.

I really don’t see much difference between books containing LGBTQ+ content and books containing polyamory. I hope that statement isn’t going to get me in trouble. The reason I’m making it is because my guy, Robert Heinlein, winner of many Hugo awards, saturated many of his stories with polyamorous relationships. Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo award, contained polyamorous content. If we could handle polyamory in 1962, we should be able to handle LGBTQ+ content in 2023 and beyond.

I feel like I’m being clumsy while trying to make the point that The Hugos historically have been capable of being progressive and challenging societal norms, and censoring these stories from the ballots today should not be tolerated.

In my heart, I still want to earn a Hugo. I want to have that connection to Robert Heinlein. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein told a story about the audacity and power of love, a theme that creeps into most of my own stories.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that.