Hugo Nominee Recommendations

Well, hello out there, everybody, I'm going to record this anyway. Uh, I have blown my soundboard. So, I am forced to record this by speaking directly into a -- condenser microphone. That's why the sound quality is so poor, I apologize for that. But... on with the show.

[Intro: Alice Anything by Testa Rosa]

Greetings, all my fellow Milwookies, homo-sapiens, and all other sentient lifeforms of the Planet Earth. This is Starship Fonzie, the official podcast of the Milwaukee Science Fiction and Fantasy League. I’m your host, Eric J. Hildeman, and we’re going to let you know what’s going on in the world of sci fi in Milwaukee, and in the SFF world generally.

This podcast is being pre-recorded live from the island city-state of Pabu, where Omega is trying to figure out what’s wrong with the trigger-hand of her recently redeemed friend, Crosshair.

Actually, it's coming to you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or as the rest of the world knows it, that strange place where you get a seemingly freaky early spring all March long, until it’s April and then you get snow.

I mean, seriously? Snow? We couldn’t have gotten that around, I dunno, Christmas?

Well, I ain’t shoveling. That’s all there is to it.

Welcome to the 38th episode of Starship Fonzie. Episode #5 in our fourth year of existence. We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get started:

Let’s start with some news!

Well, here’s an interesting news story. Eastercon, which is the SF convention held in the UK during Easter, had a bit of a dust-up regarding someone who was deemed to be potentially disruptive to the event. 

That person was, by all accounts, Dave McCarty, who was at the epicenter of the huge scandal relating to certain Hugo nominees getting ruled out at Worldcon in Chengdu, China. The convention let him know on Thursday that he would be refused membership. But I believe that by then, Dave McCarty had already taken his flight to Heathrow. So, faced with the prospect that he might have wasted a lot of money on airfare and hotel for nothing, he tried to attend Eastercon anyway. Well, he was refused at the door, made a stink about it and was escorted out of the building by security.

Now, some of the details about this story aren’t clear, especially since Levitation, which is the group that runs Eastercon, issued an official statement about the incident to File 770, and refused to name anyone specifically in that statement. However, enough witnesses were around to know that the person in question was indeed Dave McCarty.

The statement also mentioned that there was one other person flagged as a potential issue, and that person was allowed to attend under specified conditions, which he complied with. Again, no name was mentioned, but it is believed this other person was Ben Yalow.

Filming for the Apple TV series based on Murderbot has begun! I’m really pumped about that one. The cast is led by Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the self-hacking security android horrified by human emotion, who befriends a starship. Filming is taking place in Toronto, Canada.

Oh, and the Hugo nominations are out! I’m pleased with the results. Of the recommendations I made on the blog, 42 of them made the list. I guess that’s all right. Anytime the number 42 comes up that’s a good thing, especially if you’re a Douglas Adams fan (which I am). I was very much surprised by how much more representation from Chinese writers this year’s nominations got. It’s almost as if not having Worldcon in a country which lacks free speech results in a better Hugo Award contest. Hmmm. Go figure.

Did you see that William Shatner turned 93 recently? Yeah. His birthday was March 22nd. And he's still truckin'.

When I saw him live on stage last year, one thing he said was, "The Universe takes care of me." It's hard to argue with that!

Louis Gossett, Jr. Passed away on March 29th. What a shame. He starred in movies like An Officer and a Gentleman, and Alex Haley's Roots. LeVar Burton, who played Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was also in Roots, and recounted how he was brand new to the entertainment world, and that Gossett sort of took him under his wing. To me, though, LGJ will always be the actor who blew me away with his performance in the 80's movie, Enemy Mine, which might be the most passionate sci fi I've ever seen. But he's done other things of genre interest as well. I think the one that stands out for me the most might be this obscure little TV show from the 1970's called The Powers of Matthew Star. 

Other SF related things he's been in includes a Production of The Punisher in the 90's starring Dolph Lundgren, of all people. He also narrated the audiobook version of Twelve Years A Slave by Solomon Northup, the 1853 autobiography that got made into the Oscar-winning film done by John Ridley, Jr.

Louis Gossett, Jr. He will be missed.

Looks like the SPSFC, the self-published science fiction competition, has come down to two finalists:

Children of the Black by W. J. Long III

Woe to the Victor by Nathan H. Green

Both are space opera, which is interesting. Maybe that means that the judges happen to prefer space opera to other subgenres, or maybe that just means that the two best books of this past year just happen to be space operas. Either way, we're seeing the SPSFC trophy going to a militaristic, interstellar battle. Stay tuned.

And I need to talk about an anthology from last year that slipped under my radar. It's a horror anthology, and one which came out very late, like, October of 2023, but it's worth noting. The book is called "Out There Screaming," and it's edited by Jordan Peele. And I've gotta tell ya, Jordan Peele is becoming the premier progenitor of black sci fi and horror, whether it be Lovecraft Country, Nope, Get Out, or They Cloned Tyrone. As such, seeing an anthology like this edited by someone that big in Hollywood, that definitely caught my attention. But it did so late, and I apologize for that.

Vernor Vinge, the great Vernor Vinge, passed away this past March 20th at the age of 79.

I gotta tell ya, this one hurts. Vernor Vinge was a true hero to me. The only other sci fi author death in recent memory I can think of that even comes close to this was the passing of Ray Bradbury in 2011. I first heard of Vinge when I heard various people talking about the upcoming Technological Singularity, and so many people cited him as a founding father of that prediction. Well, that led me to his novel, Rainbow’s End, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much that novel meant to me.

For those who don’t know, Rainbow’s End is the story of an old, famous poet who develops Alzheimer’s. And the disease nearly kills him. Fortunately, a cure for Alzheimer’s is found in time, and he recovers. But much of his memory has been lost, and he needs to go back to high school as an old man to re-learn the things he’s forgotten. What’s more, he’s lost his muse – he can’t write poetry anymore. And he’s desperate to get his muse back. So desperate that he makes a shady deal with some very shady people.

But all that is just the plot structure. The part that stood out for me was the fact that Vinge depicted a world in which Alzheimer’s was curable. And that meant the world to me at the time. This was around 2011. My mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and had completely lost the ability to speak. And just to have – something, some measure of hope for her, for anybody that’s ever had to go through something like that – it just meant the world to me. I so needed to hear a story like that. Rainbow’s End gave me hope. At a time in my life when I needed it most.

He's also a local hero. He originally hailed from Waukesha, Wisconsin.

So you know what I’m going to do about that. It’s time to give Professor Vinge a proper send-off. Let’s pour him a Cold One!

[Beer Pour Sound Effect]

A retired professor of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at San Diego State University, Vernor Steffen Vinge had been writing science fiction for quite some time before making it big in the cyberpunk era. Originally from Waukesha, WI, and at one time married to fellow sci-fi writer Joan Vinge, he might easily have been considered a New Wave Era author, except that: 1.) he more or less took a break from writing during the 1970’s, and 2.) his true stature as a great author was not fully realized until the 1980’s.

His first short stories came during the early 1960’s and a few of them were developed into his first novels. He began teaching during the 1970’s and only wrote sparingly during the summer months. During this period of his life, his literary work trailed off considerably.

He made his mark with a cutting-edge novella titled, True Names, published in 1981. Although not as touted as that of some other writers such as Gibson, Bethke and Sterling, it has since been recognized as one of the earliest and most clear-cut cyberpunk stories, being the first to clearly depict a kind of cyberspace. This helped make Vinge into a highly recognized name.

He then wrote two novels, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Both these novels were nominated for Hugo awards, but Vinge found himself in direct competition with the likes of Orson Scott Card and William Gibson, so he didn’t win. Today, these books are available as a single volume (along with one additional novella) called Across Realtime.

His next triumph came in 1992 with A Fire Upon The Deep. In it, the most amazing idea for overcoming light-speed is put forth with the “zones of thought.” In Vinge’s fictional universe, the further one moves away from the center of a galaxy, the higher the level of thought-complexity one can achieve. Thus, if one is on the outer periphery of a galaxy, complex calculations necessary for faster-than-light travel can be done, and so this feat is achieved. On the other hand, close to a galaxy’s center is “The Unthinking Depths,” where even human-level intelligence becomes impossible. Earth is between the two in the “slow zone,” where intelligent life can exist, but faster-than-light travel is impossible. In addition, Vinge provides some amazing aliens, such as the scrode-riders, a race of plant-like beings who gain mobility by use of motorized carts, and tines, which are wolf-like creatures who are sentient via a shared mental-link consciousness of (usually) three to five members. This collective consciousness can then have two or more Tines work in tandem to make items that one Tine alone wouldn’t be dexterous enough to manufacture.

A Fire Upon The Deep gave Vinge another nomination for a Hugo in 1993. Again, it looked like he would lose out by being unlucky enough to have some pretty daunting competition. Also nominated that year was Doomsday Book by the incomparable Connie Willis. This time, it ended in a tie between them both, and Vernor Vinge finally had his first Hugo Award. A Fire Upon the Deep went on to inspire a series of video games based on Tines and the Zones of Thought.

Vinge’s landmark essay, The Coming Technological Singularity, came out that same year. It detailed his ideas about how A.I.’s will someday advance to the stage where they can design and build upgrades of themselves. This, in turn, transforms the landscape of engineering allowing immense leaps in technology in very short order. Immortality, perfect memory, and the ability to re-engineer humanity into homo sapiens 2.0 will quickly become realities, and what the world will look like after that point will be anybody’s guess. In this prediction, he echoes other brilliant minds, such as inventor, Ray Kurzweil, and bio-medical entrepreneur, Juan Enriquez. Sci-fi authors took note of this theme, and decades later, people still look to this essay by Vernor Vinge for ideas on what the next science fiction novel should look like, thus setting the stage for one of the major features of the Transhumanist Era (roughly the 20-aughts through the 20-teens). In this way, he became not only a science fiction author, but also the founding father of a whole new sub-genre of science fiction. Robert J. Sawyer, in the second volume of his WWW Trilogy even quotes from Vinge’s essay as a plot point. Today, the essay is easily available on the Internet from multiple sources.

A Deepness In The Sky (1999) was a prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, and explored some even more interesting themes. It won Vinge his second Hugo Award in 2000, and it was in that year that he decided to retire from his teaching position at San Diego State to concentrate on writing full time. It was a good career move. His subsequent novellas, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2003) won Hugos in 2002 and 2004. Exploring similar themes in novel-length, he wrote Rainbow’s End (2006), in which a conspiracy to hack into the human brain was unleashed, and then uncovered. The novel once again won Vinge the Hugo, bringing his total up to five, and making him one of the most frequent Hugo winners of all time. Oddly enough, he has never yet won a Nebula, in spite of numerous nominations.

Vinge is quality, not quantity. His novels are carefully constructed, and he weaves mind-blowing ideas together with vivid characters into a tapestry which is worrisome, yet hopeful, of the things to come. He is an elder author, but he has nevertheless understood the potential future better than all his peers (and damned nearly better than all his young contemporaries!). Vernor Vinge didn’t live long enough to see his future predictions come to pass, though he came close. A.I.’s and chatbots are emerging with greater and greater complexity. But with luck, perhaps we will see his name rise to be as ubiquitous with science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke. He would certainly deserve it!

For all this and more, Vernor Vinge, YOU deserve a Cold One!

[Beer Pour Sound Effect]

Let’s talk about the sci fi stuff that’s happening in Milwaukee:

Remembering Gene Wilder is coming to Milwaukee! The documentary film will be featured at the Milwaukee Film Festival, with one showing on Saturday the 13th at 3:15 PM, and another on Tuesday the 16th at 12:30 PM. I can’t tell you how much I want to see this film! Gene Wilder, of course, beloved comedian, is definitely someone who qualifies as a local science fiction hero with his performances in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Young Frankenstein. He was originally known as Jerome Silberman, and graduated from Washington High School near Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood.

It means so much to me that this documentary film is being shown in his home town.

And there is a new convention starting up in Lake Geneva. EGG Con, is being spearheaded by Heidi Gygax Garland, Gary Gygax’s daughter, and will take place from July 26th through the 28th. For moreinfo go to eggcon.fun.

Something else of recent local interest: TAFF, the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, which is a fund to help destitute people attend Worldcon who might otherwise not be able to, just announced the winner among those nominated to receive this fund. The winner is Sarah Gulde. And why is this of local interest? Well, the co-administrator of the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund is the person who made the announcement. And that person was… Mike Lowry. Yes, Milwaukee’s own Orange Mike. Well done sir!

And don’t forget, Concinnity is coming up! The sci fi convention takes place at the Milwaukee School of Engineering from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM on Saturday April 20th. We will be there tabling for the Milwaukee Falcon, and hopefully will have a panel as well where we talk about what things we have planned for the project. I hope you’ll be there.

It's time for an episode of The Stupid Files

[Dum Dum intro]

This week, Detective Monday delves into scientific research. Because it seems a study done in 2017 which found reading science fiction “makes you stupid” have conducted follow-up research and discovered that in actual fact, it is only bad sci-fi that worsens people's ability to read.

[Dum Dum]

Two years ago, Washington and Lee University professors Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson published a paper in which they revealed that when readers were given a sci-fi story peopled by aliens and androids and set on a space ship, as opposed to a similar one set in reality, “the science fiction setting triggered poorer overall reading” and appeared to “predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading – or what we might term non-literary reading”.

But after critics suggested that merely changing elements of a mainstream story into sci-fi tropes did not make for a quality story, Gavaler and Johnson decided to revisit the research. This time, 204 participants were given one of two stories to read: Both had the same title, and only differed by one descriptive word that qualified it as sci fi. 

In what Gavaler and Johnson call “a significant departure” from their previous study, readers of both texts scored the same in comprehension, “both accumulatively and when divided into the comprehension subcategories of mind, world, and plot”.

The presence of the word “robot” did not reduce overall objective comprehension scores. Yet in their previous study, these had been reduced by the sci-fi setting. They attributed the difference in results to the differences between the two texts which were used. 

Gavaler said he was “pretty startled” by the result.

[Dum Dum]

The scientists now concede that their first study didn't reveal much about sci fi generally, but rather a difference between literary vs. non-literary sci fi. Literary sci-fi was used in this second experiment, and it didn't trigger poorer reading comprehension at all. The text even had an introductory paragraph describing it as non-literary, but readers simply ignored that description and fully engaged with the text anyway. It seems that literary fiction and science fiction are not necessarily separate categories.

[Dum Dum]

The paper, titled The Literary Genre Effect, is due to be published later this year in the journal Scientific Study of Literature.

And that concludes this episode of The Stupid Files.

[Dum Dum Outtro]

Well, politics and sci fi don’t often mix, but they did when Candace Owens got into a big fight with Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper. It’s such a convoluted situation that I think we’ll need a little bit of help to parse this one out. We need someone with experience in deep conspiracies and hidden agendas. We need someone like Agent 770!

Agent 770 began his investigations into the fight between Candace Owens and the duo of Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper, by establishing their backgrounds. Quinn and Harper are both veteran victims of the Gamergate controversy of 2014 and 2015.

For those who don’t know, Gamergate was a campaign of targeted online harassment and doxxing, launched mostly by misogynistic white males against a gaming culture they said was too progressive and leftist. Zoe Quinn was especially targeted for harassment, and is co-founder of the Crash Override Network, a group that acts as an advocate and resource for online abuse victims. She details her ordeals in her book, “Crash Override.” Software developer Randy Lee Harper became involved in Gamergate by starting the "Good Game Auto Blocker" or "ggautoblocker", an expanding list of known Twitter accounts that were tied to the Gamergate hashtag which could be automatically blocked, therefore reducing the degree of harassment received.

Candace Owens, by contrast, is the black right-wing politico who has been a rising star within the Trumposphere. Her screeds against liberalism on social media have been notorious in recent years. On April 12th, she launched a Kickstarter for Social Autopsy, which bills itself as a way to catalogue the abuses of trolls and cyberbullies.

In her Kickstarter promotional video, she states: “The age of technology and social media has slowly disintegrated individual accountability, the consequences of which are devastating.” The video then shows news coverage of a series of suicides that may have been caused, at least in part, by cyberbullying. She continues, “We attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. It’s all real, and it’s all researchable. You can still say whatever you want to say on social media, but you have to be willing to stand by your words.”

That seemed to Agent 770 to be something that Quinn and Harper, two frequent targets of cyberbullying, would be in favor of. But that ended up not being the case. A site that allows users to “report” people for entry in a database that will portray them as a troll or a cyberbully has obvious potential for all kinds of abuse, and Quinn and Harper said so. The fact that Social Autopsy advertises itself as a service meant to guard right-wingers against abuse, when it was the right-wing who were the aggressors in Gamergate, didn’t help matters any. And Owens has a long track record of not being able to disagree without being disagreeable.

When Zoe Quinn wrote about her concerns on Twitter, a low-level staffer at Social Autopsy subsequently gave Quinn Candace Owens’ email address. Not long after Quinn wrote to Owens, they contacted each other by phone. It didn’t go well. Quinn actually teared up, reportedly saying that Social Autopsy threatened to ruin everything.

About 45 minutes after Zoe Quinn sent her last email to Owens, Owens began receiving hate-filled messages in her inbox, both at her personal email address and her address at Social Autopsy. Because this happened so soon after the Kickstarter launch, and because staffers at Social Autopsy had clearly been lax about protecting Candace’s personal email (which is how Quinn got it in the first place), Agent 770 concluded that people outside Zoe Quinn’s sphere of influence must have been behind this particular online attack. After all, Owens has frequently been the target of hate-mail from extremists on the Left who should know better. But Candace Owens chose to interpret things differently. She casts all the blame on Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, accusing them of doxxing her email address and rallying their supporters to harass her.

Given that Quinn and Harper have long track records opposing such behavior, this seems highly unlikely. But Owens is adamant that Quinn is not only behind the attacks, but is actually sending some of the emails herself using pseudonyms – an accusation she has no proof of.

Randi Harper, for her part, wrote an article in her Medium account titled “Open Letter to Social Autopsy.” In the letter, Harper tore into Owens for wandering into a situation she didn’t fully understand. She even noted that at one point Owens referred to Quinn as a “Gamergate leader,” which is a little bit like calling Hillary Clinton a Trump supporter.

Owens, however, kept accusing Quinn and Harper, and naturally that led to her discovering the conspiracy theories of the Gamergate community. The Gamergate harassers have long called people like Quinn and Harper “professional victims” who make up or exaggerate the harassment against them. Hardcore Gamergaters even think Quinn, Harper, or both run elaborate ruses to try to convince the world they are under constant online attack when in fact they aren’t.

Agent 770 found these claims to be absurd, as anyone who Googles Zoe Quinn immediately finds a huge trove of obsessive hatred towards her, all of which comes from known sources such as Larry Correia, Vox Day, Ethan Van Sciver, or Jon Del Arroz. Owens herself notes that soon after her Kickstarter launch, a thread was opened up on the right-wing outlet 4chan, accusing her of starting a campaign that would directly target them. Thus, her own right-wingers had cause to send her hate mail.

Of course, Candace will never blame them for anything.

In the mass confusion that this incident has sparked, Candace Owens will brook no other explanation but that this is a targeted campaign of harassment from Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper. She has even come to believe that many of the harassing accounts she sees targeting her on Twitter are sock-puppet accounts set up by one or both women.

In the end, it must be concluded that Owens launched a well-intentioned idea with a naïve expectation of outcomes, not realizing how the power she was asking for could be abused, and placing the blame for its failure literally on anyone else. It was a bad plan with no contingency for backlash accounted for. In a very real sense, it is a metaphor for everything else Candace Owens has ever endeavored.

And with that, Agent 770 rests his case.

That’s our show, thanks for listening! No interview segment this time, hopefully we'll have one next time. So long, everybody.