What I *am* trying to get at is why their decision to ramble on about Campbell, Lovecraft and their own glory days under the guise of Representing The History Of The Awards And Genre is so goddamn obnoxious: because it assumes a universal entry into SFF that does. not. exist.
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The fact is, there's as many ways to get into SFF as there are SFF fans, and while there's always going to be overlap, telling the same old war stories over and over again doesn't remotely acknowledge the plurality of where the genre has been - or, crucially, where it's going.
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An uncomfortable truth about SFF - which is, I suspect, also true of most other creative niches/fields - is that it's always going to be cliquey. When your peers are your peers because you share an interest that is also your joint profession, friend & professional circles merge.
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It's a feature as well as a bug, which means that, while you can't eradicate it, you absolutely have to be *aware* of it, because while you might not notice Your Circle forming? Everyone on the outside of it sees its circumference lit up in neon.
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So, what do you do with all those circles? Ideally, you try to make them into chainmail, not polka dots: you want connections that links groups together in a way that acknowledges both overlap and difference, not variously-sized, solid-colour blocs broken up by gaping spaces.
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The past is important, but it shouldn't be elevated at the expense of the present, nor lauded to the exclusion of the future. And when GRRM and Silverberg get up and tell the same six stories every year, that's what they're doing: speaking just to Their Circle, the glorious past.
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I don't know what Worldcon will look like in the future, because I don't know enough about conrunning to comment. Can the Hugos be detached from it? Is there an enduring core of people who keep making the same mistakes each year, or is it the lack of same that's the issue?
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All I know is, given that SFF pro/friend cliques are inevitable, we need to aim for chainmail, not polka dots. And right now, I don't think the same old guard of dudes can be trusted to achieve that.
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But even though it frequently exasperates me, I don't want to give up on SFF fandom entirely, either. It matters a lot to me that the writers I grew up respecting welcomed me into the genre - that they were all, unfailingly, polite and kind, even if I only met them for a moment.
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