CoNZealand Fringe

[dolorosa_12]

So I think everyone who cares about such things knows at this point that the Hugo Award ceremony for this year's Worldcon (hosted virtually by the team behind the bid to hold the event in New Zealand; the ceremony itself was hosted — with disastrous results — by George R R Martin) was a complete and utter debacle, and no doubt a real insult to the finalists and award winners. (For more details, see Natalie Luhrs's post on the matter.)

I didn't buy attending membership for Worldcon this year, partly because I was burnt out on videoconferencing (since I have to teach people through videoconferencing for my job) and suspected a lot of the live events would stream at inhospitable times for my timezone anyway. The fact that a lot of events seemed to be taking place through Discord sealed the deal: I just do not have the energy to add yet another platform to those I use.

However, one delightful thing to result from the rather shambolic pivot to digital is CoNZealand Fringe — a series of panels, livestreamed and recorded, thrown together at what I gather was very much the last minute, involving Hugo finalists and other pro and fan members of the SFF community, accessible for free.

The organisers of this fringe event put up all the videos as a playlist on Youtube, and as I've had the day off work I've had a great time dipping in. So far I've seen the panels on sensitivity readers, fanfic (a real highlight), and 'problematic faves', and have enjoyed all of them so far (although I'd say the third panel possibly needed a moderator who was stricter about managing the flow of conversation). I'm looking forward to making my way through all the other panels in the playlist, and I recommend them to you if you enjoy interesting panels on SFF and fannish topics.

Comments

[kore]

Oh, I didn't know about this at all! Thanks!

[dolorosa_12]

Glad to pass it on! I hope you enjoy the panels!

[naye]

Thanks for linking the playlist! I'd seen talk of CoNZealand Fringe floating around but this is the first I've actually seen a source.

[dolorosa_12]

I'm glad to help! I only saw the link because people I follow on Twitter were participating in some of the panels and linked to them.

[lirazel]

I actually hadn't heard it was terrible--I just looked up the winners and was generally quite pleased with them. It's exhausting to hear that it was that bad.

[dolorosa_12]

I was delighted with most of the winners! It was the awards ceremony (and specifically the hosting of said ceremony) that was such a disaster. The only good parts were the winners' speeches, and the ceremony itself was an insult to them, and their work.

[aimedatthestars]

Thank you for the Youtube playlist! I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

[dolorosa_12]

You're very welcome! There's lots of good stuff there (or at least what I've listened to so far).

[singedsun]

I kept out of both WorldCon and GenCon this past week. While it's AMAZING to have online opportunities to watch panels and get involved, I'm overwhelmed with talking to people online all day to want to do it at a con right now. It does sound like the there's a lot of good content to be had out there from the Con (despite the awards ceremony's debacle). So maybe someday I can go back to those.

[dolorosa_12]

That's kind of my feeling as well: I'm burnt out with watching/participating in videoconferencing for work, especially live, and don't have the energy to do so in my spare time as well. But it's been nice to catch up with the Fringe panels in a low pressure way.

[merit]

I did buy a ticket pre-pandemic, however several weeks after the virtual con was announced it became blatantly obvious the organisers did not how to organise and were going to struggle deeply with a virtual con, so. I requested a refund and the real fun began. I believe my personal lowlight was when I requested an update after a few weeks and it was explained to me that replying to these sort of emails took time away from refunding people.

What a shambles that Hugo announcement was. Truly a shame for the winners - but hopefully their sales pick up!! Campbell seems extremely odd to mention considering the award was /just/ renamed in the scheme of things. A deliberate choice and an unsettling one.

[dolorosa_12]

Ugh, what a shambles — it sounds as if the organisation was hopeless in every area. I hope you were able to get a refund at last.

The ceremony was awful — such a contrast to the one I attended in person in Dublin last year, which, while not perfect, at least made an effort to highlight the local SFF scene, and had presenters who mostly appeared to be able to pronounce finalists' names. And didn't take three-and-a-half hours! The Campbell thing was definitely deliberate — he also made some rather pointed, insulting remarks when introducing the category in which Jeannette Ng had been nominated (and indeed won) this year, implying that she didn't deserve to be a finalist in this category. I sort of feel that if you cannot handle criticism of creators whose work was super important to you, you need to remove yourself from spaces where those creators are being criticised — something that GRRM was clearly incapable of doing.

[merit]

I did - though I maintain they made the process needlessly complicated and hierarchical.

It is strange they didn't highlight the local SFF scene. They had /control/ over that I assume? It would have been a great time to push NZ authors who seldom get thousands of eyes of them.

One suspects GRRM has a rather narrow reading list these days and due to his massive profile (and $$$) rarely faces pushback from people. But even though this was pre-recorded, he needs to read the room. Does he want to make himself irrelevant? How many readers are reading Campbell these days?

[dolorosa_12]

Apparently the NZ author thing was even worse than first imagined: apparently they were awarding local NZ SFF prizes at the same time, and theoretically all Worldcon members (attending or supporting) had the opportunity to read the shortlisted works, and vote on them. However, this was never publicised, and the only way to partake in this was to send a request to the conrunners, at which point they would direct you to an uploaded file on Google Drive which contained all the shortlisted works and voting instructions. But you had to know this to ask for it! Likewise, these prizes were supposed to be awarded during Worldcon, but instead of including them in the Hugos ceremony, they were tacked on to the end of the Retro Hugos, and no one knew about it.

I'm certain GRRM doesn't read widely in current, cutting edge SFF — and that's kind of the problem. I don't feel you should host such things if you aren't aware of the current state of the genre and field, or at least prepared to do some research and read the current crop of finalists. If I had been asked to present even one category, I would have read all the nominees' work (or at least what they made available in the voter packet), and I would certainly have checked how to pronounce their names!

I'd say most readers are not reading Campbell (or Heinlein, or Asimov etc). I know that personally most of the older SFF I read is by authors like Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler — women whose work was in many ways a direct rebuke to the pantheon of 'Golden Age' white men. And I'm in my thirties, and Australian, and my route into the genre was not the same as those 'Golden Age' men who keep being held up as canonical: it was 1980s and 1990s Australian dystopian YA novels (Jackie French, Victor Kelleher, Gillian Rubinstein, John Marsden, Isobelle Carmody), and epic fantasy written by women (Sara Douglass, Juliet Marillier, Kate Elliott, etc), especially Australian women — that is my personal SFF canon, if I even have such a thing. Not all of it stands the test of time, but I list it simply to illustrate that everyone has different routes into the genre, and the idea that there is a single, uniform, unchanging 'canon' is laughable. When people say that you can't be a true, well-read, well-informed fan if you haven't read Campbell, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, etc, my counterargument is that people who claim they're well-read in dystopian literature cannot make that claim unless they have read at least Victor Kelleher. (Honestly, I saw someone claim that no dystopian fiction published more than twenty years ago dealt with the effects of climate change, and I was about to leap through the computer screen and slam the entirety of Australian YA from the 1980s and 1990s on the table in front of them.)

[merit]

If I could insert a facepalm gif, I would.

Yeah, I was still receiving all the Con emails even after I received my refund back (also a con souvenir book well after that cancellation, which is... interesting recordkeeping and I have /no/ memory of hearing about the NZ SFF awards! How utterly strange.

If someone is only reading ol' 'classics' then he wouldn't be my choice for a modern award. There weren't really any 'huge' surprises in the list, with Anders, McGuire and Hurley having published for several years and while Arkady, Harrow and Muir were debut authors, I believe the first two were publishing quite a few short stories before. There's an amazing amount of SFF being published over the last few years. His narrow perspective of SFF limits his own reputation - everyone is going to have different entrance points as you illustrated.

[dhampyresa]

Thanks for the link! Anything you reccomend checking out first?

[dolorosa_12]

I haven't had a chance to listen to everything, as I find it overwhelming to listen to video/podcast panels — I can't just have it on in the background because the spoken words are too distracting, which means I can only listen to things like this when I have no other demands on my time.

Of the panels I've seen so far, my favourite would be the one on fanfic/tropes — it's aimed at an audience already immersed in fanfic, rather than people for whom this is something new and strange, so the assumption is that we all like fanfic, rather than providing some sort of introduction to people who are unfamiliar with the whole thing.

I also liked the 'problematic faves' panel, although as I say I don't think it was moderated very well — the panellists had interesting things to say, but they didn't manage sharing the speaking time equitably very well.

[dhampyresa]

Thank you!