I have a hard time splitting my attention sufficiently to blog during a convention -- I often barely remember to post on social media. But now that it's Monday and I'm having breakfast in my hotel room with a couple hours before I need to be at the train station to go home, let's see if I can remember enough details.
Conventions
Blog entry
Planning to be at Seattle Worldcon? Want to know what I'm doing there? Check out my schedule!
After the flurry of postings in the last month, I'm taking a brief break for the holiday weekend. In fact, the "On the Shelf" podcast episode will be delayed probably until Tuesday, since I'm not going to try to record it in a hotel room. (I'm currently at BayCon/Westercon.) If you're at the con, make sure to find me and say hi.
The Hugo Award finalists were just annouced, so I can finally go public. In the category of Best Related Work, the essay "Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics" by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones received enough nominations to be on the final Hugo Awards ballot.
More details to come.
Purpose
The recent announcement from the Glasgow Worldcon committee about some unexpected patterns in Hugo voting ballots, the conclusions made about those patterns, and the actions taken in response, have naturally raised interest in the nomination process for this year. As readers may remember, both the nomination process and voting process in 2023 had clear anomalies that cast severe doubt on the validity of the outcome and generated a great deal of concern among the SFF community.
ETA: See also Part 1, link to the combined Camestos Felapton/Heather Rose Jones analysis.
See also: Part 2, link to the combined Camestos Felapton/Heather Rose Jones analysis.
Hey, so I'm going to be at Worldcon in Washington DC next week and I'll be on some programming. (See the event link.) If you happen to be there, look me up to say hi. The convention is being quite careful about Covid precautions. (Everyone must document vaccination, no exceptions. Required masking in all convention spaces.) I know we were all hoping that greater vaccine distribution and fergoodnessakes common sense precautions would have made the pandemic much less of an issue by now.
This will be the last session I blog for this year—and just in time because the recorded sessions will be going off the web in a day or two. In the past half dozen years I’ve been delighted at how many papers there are on the history of magic, across a wide variety of cultures and practices. One of the pitfalls in writing historical fantasy is being insufficiently imaginative regarding magical elements. We get so much of our exposure to historic magic filtered through popular culture, which has all the hazards of anything picked up from popular culture.
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