Hugo Finalists 2021

Best Related Work: Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley

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Maria Dahvana Headley is a relatively new writer, who’s put out a respectable body of work over the past decade (looking over her ISFDB entry, I recall liking her short story “A Girlfriend’s Guide to Gods”, but she’s done a lot more than that.) Now she’s turned her hand to translation, and taken a crack at the Old English epic poem Beowulf, a foundational text for modern fantasy, in that it lurks under Tolkien’s myth-making and therefore under every Tolkien imitator who’s ever produced a brick-thick tome about elves and stuff. And we’re talking about a lot of tomes there.

I suppose I should do some as-you-know-Bob stuff about Beowulf, not that my erudite if minuscule readership will need it; Beowulf is one of the few surviving complete literary works in Old English, an epic poem in 3,182 lines, in which the hero Beowulf arrives at Heorot, the hall of King Hrothgar, to fight the monster Grendel who is oppressing it. Beowulf kills Grendel, and when Grendel’s mother turns up to wreak vengeance, follows her to her home beneath a mere to kill her too; he becomes a king in his own land and rules for many years, finally dying in a mutually fatal fight with a dragon. All this in Old English, which (asyouknowBob) is not the old-fashioned Early Modern English of Shakespeare, or even the Middle English of Chaucer, but a different language entirely, a Germanic tongue spoken in England during the second half of the first millennium CE. It has its own grammar and vocabulary, and also its own poetic conventions, so Beowulf is written in what’s called alliterative metre, paired half-lines linked by stressed syllables starting with the same speech sound. So translating the poem is not an exercise to be lightly undertaken.

A fair few people have undertaken it anyway, of course – Tolkien himself, both in verse and prose; ur-fantasist William Morris, producing a very flowery and fulsome version indeed; numerous others, the most prominent recent effort being Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s version. I’ve read a fair few different translations, and can even fumble my way through the original, though I admit my Old English is very rusty these days. So, what does Maria Dahvana Headley bring to the table then?

Plenty, it turns out. Headley’s translation is almost aggressively modern in tone, but it’s still faithful to the original in one essential way; Headley captures the epic’s energy, the thumpity-thump rhythm, the beat of the language that drives the poem and powers the reader through from start to finish. It’s in plain modern English, it’s easily relatable, but the core of the poem, the essence of the epic, is still there and coming through clearly.

I suppose I could quibble with some of it. The translation is a little looser than, say, Seamus Heaney’s, and I do feel sometimes that that’s because there has to be room to slip the modernisms in. And some of those modernisms don’t work, for me at least. Take the very start of the poem, where Headley translates the all-purpose attention-getter “Hwæt!” as “Bro!”; the Old English is at least less gender-specific. Then there’s the scene with the coast guard, which bothers me a bit – the coast guard challenges Beowulf and his men on their arrival, trying to ascertain their intentions. It’s a tense scene, and there is a definite sense of violence hovering in the air, which – given that the coast guard is severely outnumbered, and is only a nameless extra in Beowulf’s epic anyway – is liable to be messily fatal to the coast guard. But he sticks to his guns and does his job anyway. He’s a brave man, and I fear that putting lines in his mouth like “Don’t you know there’s a dress code?” makes him look unfairly ridiculous.

But this is just quibbling. (We all know I like quibbling.) Basically, this is a fine translation, one which makes the original text freshly accessible, while also showing why it’s worth doing. I’m glad to have this one along with all the other translations of Beowulf on my virtual shelves.

Best Related Work: “The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy” by Jenny Nicholson

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Jenny Nicholson takes to YouTube to deliver an overview of the Brony phenomenon – adult male fans of the TV cartoon and toy line My Little Pony. Over the course of an hour and eleven minutes, she charts the history of this particular fandom, from its inception on various message boards, to the last fan convention in 2019.

I have to admit, I’m looking at the bronies very much from the outside – I’m not sure the cartoon was even shown in the UK, and even if it was, it was a long while after I was watching cartoons; I’m a product of an earlier generation, before the marketing people got quite so obvious about using kids’ telly to hawk pieces of plastic tat. The original My Little Pony toys were simple one-piece plastic figurines, with brightly coloured brushable manes. The associated cartoons were equally brightly coloured, with simple, easily identifiable characters and straightforward stories. The target market was, pretty clearly, young girls.

However, as often happens, the Internet took a hand; out of message board chatter, a community emerged, of mostly young men who genuinely enjoyed the show, and never mind the target market. And, the Internet being what it is, the whole thing snowballed; there was fanfic in vast quantities, there were cosplayers, there were conventions. Within the social bubble of the fandom, people associated with the show, or even with the unofficial spin-offs from the show, became celebrities – Jenny Nicholson herself, the creator of an unauthorized video parody, fell into this category; she’s presenting this from the perspective of an insider.

There’s a lot to cover, and Nicholson gets through it at a brisk pace. We get to consider the transgressive nature of the bronies, and see a teenage fan agonizing about how he’s going to tell his conservative father that he’s a brony, as if it’s some weird sex thing. We get a brief glimpse of the people for whom it is a weird sex thing. There’s a discussion of the way brony fandom influenced the marketing of the toys themselves, with new versions of the pony toys being made more as action figures than simple decorative things. There’s a look at a previous documentary, featuring John de Lancie, who was one of the many voice actors on the show – Nicholson turns out to hold less than favourable views of both de Lancie and the documentary.

And then we get to watch it come to an end, as declining attendance at the conventions prompted an announcement that the 2019 Bronycon would be the last… and, at least, it allowed this particular Internet fad to go out on a high note. Nicholson speculates that the hard core of bronies will eventually merge with the larger subculture of furries, where there’s already, in her view, a high degree of overlap. I wish I was more convinced by her statistics – she tosses out numbers like 40% of bronies started as furries and a further 30% were converted to furries, but she doesn’t say where those numbers are coming from, and I think they’re entirely subjective, and I wouldn’t rely on them.

There are things I would have liked to see examined in more detail, most notably the “transgressive” nature of brony fandom. One has to remember that this thing arose in some of the sinkholes of toxic performative masculinity, the same places on the Net that gave us things like GamerGate – subcultures which are very big on conformity, even when boldly proclaiming themselves to be rebels. In groups like this, it’s more of a big deal than it should be, when a guy, y’know, likes stuff that’s, like, for chicks, and very young chicks at that. The sometimes flamboyant nature of the brony fandom comes across as rather defensive, in the end; if you’re going to breach the rigid lines of acceptable masculine behaviour, you have to really commit to it, excuses like “well, I know it’s not marketed at me, but I just happen to like it” won’t do it, you have to flaunt your brony-ness. It would be interesting to ask further questions here, like who defines the rigid lines of acceptable masculine behaviour, and wouldn’t we all be happier if we told those people to naff off, but that is, perhaps, outside the scope of Nicholson’s documentary.

As a documentary, it’s pretty decent, on the whole – Nicholson is engaged with her subject, even enthusiastic about it, and that sort of enthusiasm is infectious. It is, perhaps, prone to some of the vices of the amateur YouTube production – there are some video clips, but most of it is a straightforward “talking head to camera”, and Nicholson’s cheery monotone is, still, a monotone. But at least it’s an articulate and informative monotone. I do feel, though, that this is another case of Fandom contemplating its own navel – which seems to be rather a theme in Best Related Work this year. But, well, it’s articulate, informative, entertaining, thorough (within the limitations of time constraints, I guess)… none of these is a bad thing.

Best Related Work: “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” by Natalie Luhrs

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With DisCon III taking place so late in the year, I’m taking a slightly more leisurely approach to Hugo reviewing (though I’m still planning to get everything more or less covered, in accordance with immemorial tradition dating back to 2015.) So I’m starting now, with one of the more contentious finalists, in the fond hope of getting any controversy out of the way before I go back to some nice boring book reviews.

The contentious aspect of this one… should be apparent from the title. Indeed, much of the discussion about it concerns the title, specifically. I’ve got my own opinions, and I’m going to present them, with the usual caveat that they are simply my opinions, and not any attempt at being the Word of God on the subject.

Non-SF fans, SF fans who’ve been living under a rock for the past few months (which, come to think of it, is quite a few of us in these days of plague), and generations yet unborn may require some context. In 2019, Jeannette Ng won what was then the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and used her acceptance speech to point out that Campbell was a fascist and a racist who preferred to keep people like her out of SF entirely. It was widely felt that she had a point; the award was renamed the Astounding Award as a consequence; Ng’s acceptance speech was itself a finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2020, and it won. It was clear, then, that moods were changing in SF fandom – that the legacy of the SF pulps in general, and John W. Campbell in particular, was no longer something to be revered; that diversity and the arrival of new voices were things to be welcomed.

It was not, therefore, an ideal time for George R.R. Martin to spend more than three hours, as MC of the 2020 awards ceremony, reminiscing over how wonderful things had been in the good old days.

Martin’s performance merits at least a mention whenever the topic of massive errors of judgement crops up. George R.R. Martin made his first professional SF sale in 1970; he’s won multiple Hugo Awards, he’s created several much-loved books and TV series, he’s been an active presence at SF conventions for decades, organizing things like the Hugo Losers’ Party. True, he’s made the occasional mis-step along the way, but by the time of ConZealand’s awards ceremony, he’d been building up respect and goodwill in fandom for half a century. And he managed to burn all that respect and goodwill in less than four hours. (I know it seemed longer.) I think it’s fair to say that he was helped to make this mistake by the virtual nature of the ceremony – if everyone had been physically present, he would have been able to read the room and note the negative reactions he was getting (signals in the traditional fannish manner, like stony-faced absence of laughter at his little quips, frowns when he mispronounced a finalist’s name, pointed glances at wristwatches, people feigning nosebleeds and running screaming from the room – the usual fannish stuff.) It’s still his mistake, though, and he should own it.

There was an immediate and widespread backlash against Martin’s performance, and Natalie Luhr’s essay is part of it. (It’s online, I should probably link to it, here it is.) Luhrs is a fan writer with a substantial and well-deserved reputation, a Hugo finalist herself in 2017, and her essay is articulate, forceful, and persuasive; it details, and castigates, Martin’s performance very effectively indeed. If nothing else, it’s a useful summary of the prevailing reaction at the time. Strongly written, yes – Luhrs is often a passionate, but rarely an intemperate, writer. Does George R.R. Martin deserve such criticism? Yes, I fear he does – see “massive errors of judgement”, above.

The main sticking point, it seems, is the choice of language in the title, which has raised questions about its compatibility with DisCon’s code of conduct (and resulted, among other things, in a discussion on File 770 which – unusually – wound up generating rather more heat than light.) Basically, the problem is that the DisCon CoC aims to provide a welcoming environment for all, and if George R.R. Martin turns up, and sees himself invited to “fuck off into the sun” every time he looks at the finalist list, he may just possibly feel a little less than welcome.

I think the con committee can legitimately plead that they are victims of force majeure here – they have no power over what fans choose to nominate, they can’t disqualify things except on specific grounds of ineligibility, they have no authority to demand or impose a change of title, they do have a requirement to publish, accurately, a list of the finalists. (I suppose they could, in theory, refuse to include Luhrs’s post in the Hugo Voters’ Packet, something over which they do have authority. Since the post is freely available online, this would be a purely symbolic gesture, and the distinction between “purely symbolic” and “totally futile” is often a fine one – but, hey, it’s an option, and they could at least say they’d done all they could to uphold the CoC, as in “not very much”.)

The boundaries of civil discourse are often subjective, context-dependent, and elastic… but I’m having a hard time seeing them as elastic enough to stretch over “fuck off into the sun”. So… Natalie Luhrs was angry enough at Martin’s behaviour that she transgressed the boundaries of civil discourse. Well, this happens – I’ve done it myself from time to time; sometimes, incivility is warranted (especially with the sort of trolls who will try to use civility against you). Does Martin’s behaviour merit this level of anger? Another way of phrasing that question would be “How angry is Natalie Luhrs allowed to be?”, and I think we can all see there’s a problem with that one. Luhrs was that angry, this essay (and its title) is the result; we readers and voters need to base our decisions on what it is, not what we think it should have been.

(I’m not convinced by some of the attempted justifications in the debate on File 770, though. True, Luhrs is “punching up” at a target of notably greater wealth and privilege; punching up is still punching, though, and arguments like “he’s a big lad, he can take it” are insufficient justifications in my view. True, Martin’s awards speech was, itself, unwelcoming to a wide range of people – basically, to damn near everyone who wanted to celebrate the award winners of 2020 and not those of 1970 – but, as the old adage has it, two wrongs don’t make a right.)

So… all in all, it’s a good piece of writing; yeah, the title is flat-out rude, but flat-out rudeness is not a disqualification. Having said all that: I didn’t nominate this one, myself, and I doubt I will be voting for it, at least not at a high preference level.

My thinking here has nothing much to do with perceived rudeness to George R.R. Martin, it’s more to do with the Best Related Work category itself. More and more, these days, it seems to be changing into a generic grab bag of concepts, a sort of “Best Fannish Thing”… and I don’t think fannish things, themselves, are necessarily worth the level of commemoration that a Hugo nomination implies. We’re talking about a reaction to Martin’s speech, here, which in itself may have been a reaction to the progressive tendencies displayed by Ng’s win… which itself was a reaction against the legacy of John W. Campbell…. Suppose the DisCon committee comes up with a well-reasoned response on the CoC issue, is that going to be eligible for Best Related Work in 2022? This one could run and run… and I don’t think it should; it smacks too much of navel-gazing to me. I didn’t find it hard to come up with five nominees for Best Related Work that weren’t related to a fannish controversy – five things that I think deserve to be remembered when George R.R. Martin’s speech is forgotten. I just feel that Best Related Work should be devoted to things related to SFF, more than to SFF fandom. Yes, it’s important to speak out against Martin’s reactionary behaviour now, but does that really deserve a permanent memorial in the list of Hugo Award winners? I’d rather give the honour to something else, something that you don’t have to be a member of this particular generation of fandom to understand. Maybe I’m wrong – it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been out of tune with the rest of fandom over Best Related Work. But that’s how I feel. So, Luhrs’s essay – well, it’s a fine piece of writing, but it’s not my choice.

Hugo Nominations 2021 are out

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Hugo Awards | DisCon III (discon3.org) for the list. It looks like a pretty strong one, to me. Of course, with DisCon III not happening until December, even a slacker like me will be able to get a full set of reviews done in time for the ceremony. So far, I think I’ve done, err, two of them – Harrow the Ninth, for Best Novel, and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking for the Lodestar.

My own nominations? I got four out of the six in Best Novel, three in Novella (I tried to pick some that weren’t from Tor.com, which turns out to have been a mistake, since – as usual – Tor.com has a really strong novella game this year), a massive zero in Novelette, and all of one in Short Story. Considering the spread of nominations out there, I think that’s pretty good going, really. Four out of six in Series, two in Related Work, one in Graphic Story, one in Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), nothing in Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) – I must admit, I am looking forward, after this year, to never having to watch an episode of The Good Place ever again – three in Editor (Short Form), three in Editor (Long Form), three in Professional Artist, two in Semiprozine. There was some controversy, a few months back, over DisCon III trying to set limits on the number of nominees who could be listed for each entries – Strange Horizons seems to be deliberately trolling these people, here, by listing (by my count) 87 contributors plus “staff members who prefer not to be named”. Gordon Bennett. Anyway. Two in Fanzine, three in Fancast, three in Fan Writer, three in Fan Artist. I didn’t nominate anything in the one-off Video Game category – I didn’t play five modern video games in 2020, it’s that simple. Three in the Lodestar – which is another strong one this year; this is one innovation that’s turning out well – and two in the Astounding. All told, I think I did pretty well, considering the immense range of things on offer out there.

So – plenty of re-reading to do, and also new reading. I already have Opinions on quite a few of the nominees, so I should be able to articulate them. Sometime soon. Fairly soon. I hope.