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Pretty Terrible

Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs

August 1, 2020

George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (RageBlog Edition)

Hugo Award LogoAs I said elseweb, I am thoroughly thrilled by all the folks who won Hugos tonight. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until I no longer have a voice to speak: we are living in a golden age of science fiction and fantasy and I’m humbled to be a part of this gloriously diverse community. Science fiction and fantasy–and the people who write and talk about it–are a big part of why I’m still here (necrotizing pancreatitis has something like a 30% mortality rate, friends).

I am so happy for the winners and so many of their speeches were righteously fiery in all the best ways. Many of the presenters were also wonderful, with Mary Robinette Kowal being the standout for me–I loved what she did with pulling out a relevant quotation from each nominated work and I hope it catches on in the other fiction categories.

That said, I have never in my life seen any awards ceremony that, in its whole, was so blatantly disrespectful of the nominees and winners. And I’m including my high school senior awards ceremony where I learned that half the money my family donated to the music department after my mother’s death had been used not for the purpose for which it had been donated in this assessment.

The host for this year’s festivities was George R.R. Martin and he spent an awful lot of time talking about John W. Campbell, noted fascist and racist. Pretty sure that between Martin and Bob Silverberg, Campbell (noted fascist and racist!) was mentioned more than the aggregate of the folks being honored. I aged approximately 67 years during Silverberg’s segment.

We were treated to tales of how Martin is Just Like Us while he was broadcasting from the movie theater he owns for funsies. I lost count of how many times he mentioned that fandom used to be so much smaller that Worldcon was in a hotel and that there was a banquet with rubbery chicken (no one cares).

Because it’s such a goddamn fucking shame that fandom is so much larger and diverse than it was 50 fucking years ago. Because the people nominated for and winning awards aren’t exclusively white and male. The first woman to win a Hugo Award–in any category–was Anne McCaffrey, who tied with Philip José Farmer in 1968 for her novella, “Weyr Search.” The first Hugo Award was given out in 1953. It was fifteen years before a woman won. Four-time nominee James Davis Nicoll has done more work in this area than I have, and I recommend that y’all look very closely at that giant table of doom.

I’ve done a bit of searching–not much–and I can’t find a comparable analysis around race and the Hugos. But I can say that N.K. Jemisin was the first Black person to win the Hugo for Best Novel. In 2016. In 2016.

Speaking of Jemisin, Martin made the decision to first mention her unprecedented accomplishment of winning the Best Novel three years in a row–no one else of any race or gender has ever accomplished a Best Novel hat trick–and then attempt to undermine it by talking at great length the time Heinlein won three Hugos in nine years, culminating in some sort of shaggy dog story involving a white dinner jacket and Stranger in a Strange Land. I’ve forgotten the details because Heinlein is irrelevant to the discussion.

What I haven’t forgotten is this: George R.R. Martin repeatedly mispronounced the names of nominees and, in one case, a publication which was nominated. All the nominees were asked to provide pronunciations for their names in advance. The fact that Martin chose not to use that information is disgusting and racist as fuck, as nearly without exception the names he mispronounced were Black and brown. He mispronounced FIYAH, a publication owned, edited, and written by Black people.

This is thoroughly beyond the pale, especially since those segments were pre-recorded and CoNZealand could have asked him to re-do those segments and pronounce peoples’ names correctly. Names are important. They have power.

There was also a whole segment about the Oscar statuette and its crotch. It was gender essentialist and transphobic. It was so gross I don’t even want to talk about it to be honest. CoNZealand tweeted a non-apology apology about it to people who were offended. I’m not particularly gender non-conforming, but if that segment made me feel gross and unwelcome, imagine how it made not only the trans and other gender non-conforming nominees feel, but also all those who were watching. It was a gigantic “fuck you, you’re not welcome here.”

The proper role of an awards show host is to keep the audience entertained between awards and get the fuck out of the way of the people being honored. Martin did neither.

These were decisions that were made. Made by George R.R. Martin, made by Bob Silverberg, and made by the producers of the awards ceremony. The producers could have edited the pre-recorded statements for length. They could have demanded that Martin re-record all the segments where he mispronounced people’s names (people were asked how their names were pronounced, there is literally no excuse) and if he wouldn’t, they could have found someone with a modicum of respect for other people to present those segments of the productions.

CoNZealand has published an apology, in which they admit mistakes were made–including the decision to “provide an agnostic platform for all the participants, and […] not place restrictions on any speech or presentations.” That was a very bad decision. Editing pre-recorded segments for clarity and length is not a restriction or any kind of censorship. It’s professional.

I think that’s part of what’s getting me here–how unprofessional this whole thing was, from start to finish. I could deal with the jankiness of the livestream production (hey, it’s more than we got from Helsinki! not that I’m still bitter or anything and by the way it took me three years to get my fucking pin), but the jankiness of the content?

Would Martin and Silverberg have felt as free to be gross racist misogynist transphobes if there had been a live audience to contend with? I suspect not.

There was no need for Martin to put all the dolls he has of himself on display or to change his hat in every segment–he clearly put more thought into that schtick than he did into pronouncing people’s names (I am never not going to be mad about that). And the display of books he’d written on his desk in the pre-recorded bits? Well, at least it wasn’t an iPad with a slideshow of all his book covers. And that’s not saying much.

The Hugo ceremony didn’t have to be like this. I don’t know where the breakdown happened–I don’t know if CoNZealand didn’t get the pre-recorded segments in time to ask for re-recording, I don’t know if they didn’t feel like they could edit those segments for length and clarity (based on their apology, it looks like this may have been the case), I don’t know if Martin was just a giant asshole about the whole thing.

After all, he was infamously put out by Hugo losers being upset and angry about being excluded from a party which was ostensibly being thrown in their honor last year (in which he talks about a number of bad decisions made by his team, including not hiring a local event planner familiar with local occupancy regulations and contingency planning not that he admits these were bad decisions), and this whole mess just reeks of bad faith on his part.

In conclusion, let us shoot George R.R. Martin and Bob Silverberg into the sun where they shall bother us no longer.

One positive thing you can do is to use the works listed on voting stats data as the start to a really kick-ass a reading list.

I would like to give a shoutout to both Jay Wolf and Nibedita Sen for their inadvertent but essential assistance in clarifying my thinking; their commentary on this shitshow is well worth reading.

And if you’d like to watch the Hugo Awards ceremony with less George R.R. Martin bloviating, then TheReadingOutlaw has you covered:

P.S. Why wasn’t there anything about New Zealand SFF fandom? It was a weird and curious omission and I’d have loved it if there had been some segments about that instead of what we got.

P.P.S. This post is all Didi Chanoch’s fault. He encouraged me.


Corrections and addenda:

  • Olivia Waite points out in the comments that while McCaffrey was the first woman to win the Hugo for fiction, the first woman to win any Hugo was Elinor Busby in 1960 for co-editing Best Fanzine, Cry of the Nameless. So seven years.
  • Multiple people have pointed out that it wasn’t only BIPOC folks who had their names mispronounced, plenty of white folks did, too. As someone whose name is often mispronounced, I can’t believe I didn’t mention that.
  • While the convention claims to have provided an agnostic platform, at least one attendee had their Zoom background censored for showing support for Black Lives Matter and opposition to the Uighur genocide happening in China.
  • I am hearing rumors that George R.R. Martin was asked to re-record the mispronounced names and refused. Can anyone corroborate this beyond a comment on File 770 or a tweet?
  • My deepest apologies to Nibedita Sen for misspelling her name. It has been corrected.
  • I also managed to deny James Davis Nicoll two of his losses; he has lost four times, not two.

I’ve turned off comments as I’m tired of dealing with tone policing, personal attacks, and abuse (the latter of which I have not been putting through, but it’s a special kind of mean to wish death on someone who survived an illness with a 30% mortality rate).

Filed Under: Opinion Natalie Luhrs

July 1, 2020

I can’t even with my pancreas

 

So I apparently cursed myself with my last post–I landed in the hospital last Wednesday evening and didn’t get out until Monday afternoon.

[Read more…] about I can’t even with my pancreas

Filed Under: Personal, Sick Natalie Luhrs

June 22, 2020

“Hello, I’m sorry, I lost myself”

blue jay perched on a branch

So, um, hello!

I know, it’s been a while. Life happened. This got long, so the update is under the cut.

[Read more…] about “Hello, I’m sorry, I lost myself”

Filed Under: Personal Natalie Luhrs

January 9, 2020

January 2020: State of the Natalie

The current state of the Natalie is…not great. More below the cut.

[Read more…] about January 2020: State of the Natalie

Filed Under: Personal Natalie Luhrs

October 14, 2019

Weeknotes 12 – 2019-10-14

 

[words]

Reading/Watching/Listening

Not so much reading this week, but I finally finished listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast about Spiro Agnew, Bagman, and listened to a few episode of Debbie Millman’s Design Matters.

Making

And the reason I spent so much time listening to media instead of reading or watching is–I’ve started painting again! Like in a way that I’m finding really soothing and helpful for calming my brain weasels the fuck down. I’m still not into sharing what I’m working on on social media, but here’s a peek:

I’ve been working my way through the exercises in Josie Lewis’s The New Color Mixing Companion and it’s all rainbows and mixing colors together interspersed with essays about flow and it’s great. Just what I needed to kick start painting again.

Medical

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. I really need a win, y’all.

I had a paracentesis on Tuesday and they pulled 6.5L of fluid out of my abdomen. The doctor was great and listened to me when I said that I needed to have plenty of numbing and the longer needle; she used two vials of lidocaine and the longer needle and I didn’t feel a damn thing. I was supposed to get some intravenous albumin because more than 5L of fluid were removed, however, the nurses–including an IV nurse–were unable to get an IV started and they tried 5 separate times.

And I’ve got a rash on both my arms and back that I’m pretty sure is eczema and I’m itchy and miserable and have spent what feels like a small fortune on various lotions and unguents. I’ve messaged my primary care doctor to see if there’s anything else I can do.

I have an appointment with my surgeon tomorrow afternoon, where I will be kept waiting for at least 30 minutes in his waiting room even if there are no other patients, and where the result will be a fatherly pat on the arm and the declaration that nope, no surgery for me.

The lone bright spot in all this is that the team at Penn requested copies of my images and my GI doctor hand-delivered them himself late last week. Fingers crossed and candles lit, y’all.

Productivity

I’m doing a pretty good job at keeping up with things at work, despite some jaw-dropping stupidity on the part of some of my co-workers. Like forwarding an email to me with the subject line “Your project has been approved” to ask what the approval status of the project is. I’m spending way too much of my time dealing with the garbage project approval system and not enough time working on other things.

I’m headed to Des Moines at the end of the month for a team meeting, which I’m looking forward to, even if it does mean way too much time on airplanes and in airports.

Filed Under: Weeknotes Natalie Luhrs

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Hello! I’m Natalie Luhrs. I write about books and culture and whatever else strikes my fancy. I have so many opinions.

I was a nominee for the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2017.

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