Best Related Work 2021
Nov. 17th, 2021 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
factitiousBest Related Work is a strange category. Should I be picking which of the finalists does the best job of being related to sf/f fandom, or the one that I like best as a work? I think I'll go with kind of an arbitrary subjective mix of the two, tending more towards the latter.
The one I liked the most on its own terms happened to be very directly about fandom: "The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy," by Jenny Nicholson. I came into it with only fairly shallow background knowledge about bronies. She did a great job of giving me a lot of detail and making me care about it. Despite her obvious love of the subject, and praise for the fandom's high points, she didn't pull any punches when talking about the negatives. I'd happily recommend this to anyone who wants to know what the deal is with MLP fandom, or anyone who wants to watch some good Jenny Nicholson videos. Excellent job being a related work.
I was glad to take this opportunity to read Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf translation. I'd bought a copy for my dad last Christmas, and if it weren't for the pandemic, I'd probably have read at least some of it visiting him. Instead I haven't seen my parents in person for almost two years. But now that I'm a Hugo voter, I got a copy to read anyway!
The way it keeps shifting registers is definitely interesting, but never stopped feeling jarring to me. And I definitely groaned at "Hashtag: blessed." That said, I had no trouble getting through it, and the action scenes were more vivid than in other versions I've looked at. I enjoyed the heavy alliteration; I'm right with Headley when she says in the introduction "the near universally derided line from John Richard Clark Hall's 1901 translation, ‘ten timorous troth-breakers,' delights me." I guess it relates to the field of fantasy, in that it's a translation of a work of fantasy? It does do a good job of presenting it as fantasy, as an exciting story about fighting monsters. My dad, who's read a lot of different Beowulf translations (he's especially into Seamus Heaney's), tells me he thinks it's unusually good in that respect. So I can accept it being a related work, and I'm glad I read it.
"George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)," by Natalie Luhrs, is definitely making points I sympathize with. I think George R.R. Martin's speech at the last Hugos was bad in more or less the ways she identifies, and I'm glad people called him out on that. There's nothing really noteworthy about the quality of this particular callout, though, and I can't imagine it would have much persuasive power for anyone who wasn't already on board with it. Luhrs jumps straight from talking about how Martin kept telling boring stories about early Worldcons to "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," without any explanation of what about his speeches made him come across as anti-diversity. That shouldn't be a hard case to make! I'm ranking this below No Award, but highest of the ones below No Award, for how much of a related work it is.
"I really wanted to like Lynell George's "A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler," but mostly it just made me wish I'd read a more conventional biography instead. The snippets of Butler's life we see here are fascinating, but there are so few of them. Too much of this is the author trying to be poetic and just being vague. Here's a long example:
I think that page of text would have benefited from directly saying what it's actually about. And giving more detail about what it's based on; the book doesn't do nearly enough to cite claims, and the endnotes are all just "OEB Box 180," "OEB Box 58," and so on. I found this really disappointing, even though as a biography of a science fiction writer, it's a related work in the traditional sense.
Finally, two conventions were nominated: CoNZealand Fringe and FIYAHCON. I didn't go to either of them. I can look at some materials about what happened at them, but the cons themselves are what got nominated. If the nominations had been, for example, the FIYAHCON retrospective blog post, or the CoNZealand Fringe panel "Dragons on a Spaceship: The Resurgence of Science-Fantasy and Genre-bending fiction," I'd read or watch those and rank them accordingly, but to me a con is a very different thing from any of those records, and not something that I'm able to assess from outside after the fact. I'll rate them at the bottom, not because I think they were bad events, but because I think they're a type of event that doesn't stand very well as a work. CoNZealand Fringe gets the higher ranking for including videos and transcripts of panels in the voting packet, and thus making more of an effort to present itself as a work I can experience.
My votes: The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy > Beowulf: A New Translation > No Award > George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition) > A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler > CoNZealand Fringe > FIYAHCON
Wow, that's a lot of long titles.
The one I liked the most on its own terms happened to be very directly about fandom: "The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy," by Jenny Nicholson. I came into it with only fairly shallow background knowledge about bronies. She did a great job of giving me a lot of detail and making me care about it. Despite her obvious love of the subject, and praise for the fandom's high points, she didn't pull any punches when talking about the negatives. I'd happily recommend this to anyone who wants to know what the deal is with MLP fandom, or anyone who wants to watch some good Jenny Nicholson videos. Excellent job being a related work.
I was glad to take this opportunity to read Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf translation. I'd bought a copy for my dad last Christmas, and if it weren't for the pandemic, I'd probably have read at least some of it visiting him. Instead I haven't seen my parents in person for almost two years. But now that I'm a Hugo voter, I got a copy to read anyway!
The way it keeps shifting registers is definitely interesting, but never stopped feeling jarring to me. And I definitely groaned at "Hashtag: blessed." That said, I had no trouble getting through it, and the action scenes were more vivid than in other versions I've looked at. I enjoyed the heavy alliteration; I'm right with Headley when she says in the introduction "the near universally derided line from John Richard Clark Hall's 1901 translation, ‘ten timorous troth-breakers,' delights me." I guess it relates to the field of fantasy, in that it's a translation of a work of fantasy? It does do a good job of presenting it as fantasy, as an exciting story about fighting monsters. My dad, who's read a lot of different Beowulf translations (he's especially into Seamus Heaney's), tells me he thinks it's unusually good in that respect. So I can accept it being a related work, and I'm glad I read it.
"George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)," by Natalie Luhrs, is definitely making points I sympathize with. I think George R.R. Martin's speech at the last Hugos was bad in more or less the ways she identifies, and I'm glad people called him out on that. There's nothing really noteworthy about the quality of this particular callout, though, and I can't imagine it would have much persuasive power for anyone who wasn't already on board with it. Luhrs jumps straight from talking about how Martin kept telling boring stories about early Worldcons to "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," without any explanation of what about his speeches made him come across as anti-diversity. That shouldn't be a hard case to make! I'm ranking this below No Award, but highest of the ones below No Award, for how much of a related work it is.
"I really wanted to like Lynell George's "A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler," but mostly it just made me wish I'd read a more conventional biography instead. The snippets of Butler's life we see here are fascinating, but there are so few of them. Too much of this is the author trying to be poetic and just being vague. Here's a long example:
DON'T MAKE IT HAPPEN. Let it happen. Arrange it. Then permit it.
Thumb back, way back, to the image of a little girl, quiescent, fixed near a worn chain-link entry gate on an elementary school blacktop. She's the little girl Octavia has tried to rub away like an imperfect sentence, a ghost of an unfinished thought, the little girl you want to forget. She's still there, hovering close: the child who struggled daily, the one who lingered before a gate that wasn't locked, on the cusp of freedom, frozen.
She will not budge. She will not take flight because she hasn't the vaguest scheme that might carry her forward. Some unnamable swirl within her gut is a vast, murky moat, separating her from desire and action.
She does know with certainty what's at the root of her inaction. What would she do with such freedom? What place or possibility might entice her. She deduces, even back then, that the choices are narrow. The reality is as poignant and true as the anguish is sharp and fresh.
Looking from a distance, from the outside in, her hesitancy might appear as lack of gumption, but really it is nothing less than tragic: this immobility is an ingrained lack of confidence. Estelle deliberates: how do I break free of that open cage? That vague ghost image has resonance. Estelle's mind holds her back. It had never been a lack of desire, but lack of a clear destination. How do you gather courage? How will you make the journey? Can you articulate your dreams? What shape do they take if you have no model, no sense of possibilities? Possibilities begin with daydreams.
I think that page of text would have benefited from directly saying what it's actually about. And giving more detail about what it's based on; the book doesn't do nearly enough to cite claims, and the endnotes are all just "OEB Box 180," "OEB Box 58," and so on. I found this really disappointing, even though as a biography of a science fiction writer, it's a related work in the traditional sense.
Finally, two conventions were nominated: CoNZealand Fringe and FIYAHCON. I didn't go to either of them. I can look at some materials about what happened at them, but the cons themselves are what got nominated. If the nominations had been, for example, the FIYAHCON retrospective blog post, or the CoNZealand Fringe panel "Dragons on a Spaceship: The Resurgence of Science-Fantasy and Genre-bending fiction," I'd read or watch those and rank them accordingly, but to me a con is a very different thing from any of those records, and not something that I'm able to assess from outside after the fact. I'll rate them at the bottom, not because I think they were bad events, but because I think they're a type of event that doesn't stand very well as a work. CoNZealand Fringe gets the higher ranking for including videos and transcripts of panels in the voting packet, and thus making more of an effort to present itself as a work I can experience.
My votes: The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy > Beowulf: A New Translation > No Award > George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition) > A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler > CoNZealand Fringe > FIYAHCON
Wow, that's a lot of long titles.
