Another busy Saturday morning, Friday evening, and time for another missive sent out to the interwebs. Gary and I jumped (well strolled) into the pod without any set plans on what to discuss and ended up talking about L. Ron Hubbard, movies, Fringe, the evils (or inconveniences) of PDFs, and lots of other stuff.
On a serious note, we also discussed Tehani Wessely’s After the Flood Queensland Flood ebook. Please do support it, and the Queensland flood victims, by donating $A10.00 and getting a copy of the ebook. Also, if you like the book give some thought to going back to Fablecroft’s site in April and buying the physical book too.
I appear to have been summoned again. Or at least you guys have managed to touch on dark corners of Hugo lore than I can perhaps illuminate a little.
The issue of audiobooks is one that people have discussed for some time, particularly with reference to Metatropolis. There’s basically a division here between people who want the Hugos to be only for written work — meaning that the Dramatic Presentation categories reward the script, not the acting, production and so on — and those who want the dramatization rewarded.
As you rightly note, this is intrinsically tied in with the concept of publication, and again there is a division within WSFS between those who think that “publication” implies “appeared on paper” and those who are happy to allow ebooks, podcasts and so on into the awards.
With Metratropolis what I would have liked to see happen is that the 2009 nomination for the audiobook would have gone to the producer, Steve Feldberg, and director, John Scalzi; and that the individual stories would have been eligible the following year when the paper book was published. However, the Montreal Hugo administrator took a very different view which appears to hold that an anthology can be eligible as a single work, with all of the contributing authors and editors being Hugo nominees, if and only if it is published as an audiobook.
Since then WSFS has adopted language changes that make it explicit, rather than potentially implicit, that the medium of distribution is not relevant when a work is being judged. Quite how this applies to stories issued in audio first is not clear, though I note that manuscripts and ARCs do not count as publication so there are clearly ways in which paper books can be read by some before the work counts as being published.
I also note that there has been talk this year of a motion to ban podcasts and audio from the semiprozine and fanzine categories. The person suggesting this does want to create a separate category of fan audio-visual production, so he’s not an exclusionist, but it will still provoke some interesting debate.
Would a podcast ban apply this year, or to the following one in Chicago?
Any ban on podcasts would have to be ratified in Chicago, so the earliest it could take effect is 2013.
Just as an addendum, the name Gary half-remembered who sounds like a Paul Di Filippo character was Kyril Bonfiglioli, a British writer and fan. He also edited Science Fantasy magazine from 1964 to 1966.
But I loved Robot Jocks!
Great espisode though.
Just read ROCKET TO THE MORGUE by Tony Boucher. It is not set in any part at a convention Worldcon or other. It does concern sf writers and uses a real group of them the Manana with fake names. Leaned about the book from the new Heinlein bio.
Thanks for the correction, Robert (and to Ulrich Elkmann, who also pointed out the error). I hadn’t read the book in decades, and misremembered the group of writers you mention as a convention. I’ll try to remember to correct this on the next ‘cast. And thanks for listening that closely!
And yeah, Fringe is really good – only show that I want to watch as soon as it is obtainable, so to speak.
(Seems this likes blogspot.com url more than strandedinoz.com url, which is weird)