Camestros Felapton

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Looking for Fan Writers 2: People writing non-fiction & things

[Update: Thanks to everybody who has made suggestions. Don’t forget that you can add names to the Hugo Spreadsheet (link below) and the Wikia (link below) also. The list has been updated with an extra 14 names!]

My first thought (a historical list) was too intractable and unwieldy and probably unhelpful. So I’m skipping past that and going with the second approach: who are the people listed somewhere as possible fan writers?

I’ve used three sources:

  • The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom set up by Renay from Lady Business: here
  • The Hugo Nominees 2019 Wikia: here
  • Cat Rambo’s collated eligibility posts: here

Of the three the Hugo Spreadsheet is the most relevant to Fan Writer currently. However, while there was lots of overlap, there are names that are unique to each one (because it is still early days).

Cat’s round-up of eligibility posts is not split between fiction and non-fiction and many people write both. I went through each of the entries and looked for people pointing to non-fiction they wrote. I didn’t do any deep checks on eligibility. Also, it is a long list and I may have accidentally skipped some people or not noticed if they had some non-fiction writing listed in a post mainly about fiction.

With the list in general, I did remove the people who have withdrawn from consideration (Mike, Abigail Nussbaum and some bozo). I didn’t check eligibility, particularly when an essay was published in an magazine, I didn’t check if it was pro v semi-pro. As people have noted, there are several people pointing to things they’ve written at Tor.com or B&N — I’m mainly dodging that question but if they had a link to something written elsewhere I used that.

I also haven’t checked whether people want to be nominated (aside from what I noted above). Even those people I listed from the eligibility post round-up did not necessarily say “Hugo fan writer” — some just pointed at non-fiction they wrote.

Lastly, this is just a start. The question is “who is missing?” as in who should be considered who isn’t already listed. Suggestions welcome and encouraged.

  • A.C. Wise | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Adam Whitehead | links:here and here | Source:CF
  • Adri Joy | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Aidan Moher | links:here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Alasdair Stuart | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Alex Acks | links:here and here | Source:CF
  • Alexandra Erin | links:here | Source:CF
  • Alexandra Rowland | links:here and here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Austin Gilkeson | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Bogi Takács | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Bonnie McDaniel | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Brandon O’Brien | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Bridget McKinney | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Charles Payseur | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Chris Barkley | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Claire Brialey | links:here | Source:CF
  • Cora Buhlert | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Dahlia Adler | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Doris Sutherland | links:here and here | Source:CF
  • Elizabeth Fitzgerald | links:here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Elizabeth Minkel | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Elsa Sjunneson-Henry | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Forestofglory | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Foz Meadows | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Gavia Baker-Whitelaw | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Guy H Lillian | links:here | Source:CF
  • Ingvar | links:here | Source:CF
  • Ira Gladkova (justira) | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • James Davis Nicoll | links:here | Source:Hugo Wikia
  • Jeff LaSala | links:here | Source:CF
  • JJ | links:here and here | Source:CF
  • Joe Sherry | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • John Hertz | links:here | Source:CF
  • John Purcell | links:here | Source:CF
  • John Wiswell | links:here and here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Kate Heartfield | links:here and here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Keith R.A. DeCandido | links:here | Source:CF
  • Leigh Butler | links:here | Source:CF
  • Mari Ness | links:here and here | Source:CF
  • Mark Plummer | links:here | Source:CF
  • Michael Livingston | links:here | Source:CF
  • Nilah Magruder | links:here and here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • O. Westin (MicroSFF) | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Olav Rokne & Amanda Wakaruk | links:here | Source:CF
  • Paul Weimer | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Rich Horton | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Robin Sloan | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Ruth EJ Booth | links:here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Sarah Gailey | links:here and here | Source:CR’s Round Up
  • Susan Dennard | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Tracy Townsend | links:here | Source:Hugo Wikia
  • Ursula Vernon | links:here and here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet
  • Vanessa Fogg | links:here | Source:Hugo Spreadsheet

camestrosfelapton

14 responses to “Looking for Fan Writers 2: People writing non-fiction & things”

  1. Steve J Wright

    This link is to only Paul Weimer’s work at Skiffy and Fanty. Also Paul has way more actual Fan Writing work at nerds of a feather than at the B&N Blog. (the nerds website unfortunately has a big problem in that they make use of almost no metadata tags, which makes their site unlinkable for specific types of content, rather than individual posts)

    Like

    • I did propose to the team that we change that. The team is amenable to the change. I know I am going to do it going forward, and start editing old posts along that line.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. And this list shows just how disconnected old-skewl fanzine fandom is from the rest of fandom. There’s a couple folks from over there that I think have done excellent work, but finding them is hard to do. A couple of them are still mostly of the paper-only type (John Hertz, Claire Brialey, Mark Plummer), and a couple have electric fanzines on efanzines.com (John Purcell — Askance #43, #44, and #45; Askew #23-#27 are the 2018 entries and Guy Lillian — the name links to his Worldcon 76 trip report, but he also does a nifty fanzine review zine called The Zine Dump.

    I’m just offering up recommendations, and I’m sorry I can’t offer up the work of paper-only folk. The world’s changed, and I know a lot of the folks in the fanzine community haven’t bothered to change with it. I’m dancing on the border, mostly because I love the thought of actual paper (even if it ends up mostly pdf these days) — but as I noted, in some ways I’m stuck in a middle — just too young to have been part of the heyday of fanzine fans, just too old to have really caught the wave of the Internet — in the sense I’m hesitant in both environments.

    Dunno if this helps, Cam.

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    • It’s not just the difference in the medium, it’s also the difference in the message.

      I’ve actually spent a considerable amount of time sampling old-school fanzines for various research reasons. I really appreciate the convention reports posted by Evelyn C. Leeper, but a lot of what’s in the classic fanzines leaves me cold: lots of what I call “navel-gazing”, rather than discussion of SFFnal works, lots of pompous pontificating about subjects which are obscure (or even pontificating where the subject cannot actually be discerned — assuming that there actually is one), and LOC sections where the main goal seems to be who can score the most “zingers” against other fans — which, to be honest, seem to be really childish and silly games of oneupsmanship to me. And of course, if I want to find anything relating to current works, the lag time on the old-style fanzines which do actually cover that sort of thing means that they are months or years behind.

      Most of the time the Journey Planet issue topics are not of interest to me, but as a big Star Trek fan, I checked out that most recent one — and apart from the cosplay photos which I really enjoyed, I didn’t find it to be much more than a re-hash of things I’ve read in the past (and the quality of the layout and editing were not what I would have expected, given the current technology).

      What I really enjoy are the book reviews, analysis of worldbuilding, characters, and plotting; and to a much lesser extent, the same for movies and TV shows. (Mike Glyer tells me I am what is called a “sercon” fan.) I find a lot of the Tor.com posts to be very superficial (though some of them are really thoughtful and excellent). I do really enjoy some whimsical posts like Cam’s create-your-own-space-opera-book-cover widget and the Timothy and Susan Show, but a little bit of the political commentary and philosophy musings that so many bloggers in fandom seem to be doing goes a very long way for me.

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      • Obviously, and fanzines aren’t going to be for everyone. I also admit, it’s turned into a bit of a graveyard in some ways — there’s lots of older fans who proudly proclaim they haven’t read any modern SF because it doesn’t hold up to what they were reading when they were young and spry. It’s also a big problem when the youngest fanzine fans seem to be Garcia, James Bacon, John Coxon, and me. With the exception of Coxon (who’s in his thirties), we’re all forty or above.

        I get that times have changed and the internet is the future, but I also hate the fracturing that’s gone on. In the heyday of blogs and LiveJournal (ah, Livejournal), you could find things easier — there were networks pointing to the good things. But now, some is on Facebook, some is on Twitter, some is on Tumblr, some is still on its own blogs — hell, I don’t know how Mike keeps up as well as he does.

        As for Journey Planet’s layout not necessarily being up to what you would have expected, fanzines are generally labors of love, done in whatever free time we can manage. In regards to layout tools, I know just enough about InDesign to be dangerous, but I’m not going to be a professional with it. My layout and editing may not be up to par. This is a disadvantage of old-skewl zines versus blogs — it’s tougher to get it formatted right.

        Anyway, to make a roundabout point — you’re allowed to like what you like, and I can see how fanzines are not exactly your thing. I’m allowed to like what I like, and that’s a bit different. That’s what makes fandom so interesting, we’re all coming at it from all sorts of different directions. Sometimes, unfortunately, this makes communication difficult even at the best of times. I’ll admit that it’s made worse by folks that say ‘This is how fandom used to be, and this is how it should forever stay.’ That’s a *problem*. There are too many old men in fandom that don’t get that things change, and they change for a reason. However, I think that’s also different from saying, ‘Don’t forget your past. Take what is good, and don’t forget those of us who are trying to preserve some of the old traditions.’

        Liked by 1 person

  5. I’m biased, of course, but I’d like to give a shoutout to a couple of my fellow Tor.com contributors who never seem to get the recognition I think they deserve during Hugo nomination seasons:

    Leigh Butler: Has been overlooked for years, I think, with major epic book series and film rewatches: https://www.tor.com/author/leigh-butler/

    Michael Livingston: Medieval Matters: https://www.tor.com/author/michael-livingston/

    Keith R.A. DeCandido: Film rewatches, with historical commentary: https://www.tor.com/author/keith-decandido/

    Jeff LaSala, The Silmarillion Primer: https://www.tor.com/series/the-silmarillion-primer/ This included illustrations! It was awesome!

    (And on a self-serving note, there’s ME: The Pixar Rewatch: https://www.tor.com/tag/pixar-rewatch/ and On Fairy Tales: https://www.tor.com/tag/on-fairy-tales/ which includes book reviews, fairy tale commentaries, the historical origins of Jack and the Beanstalk and a kinda accidental sidepath down into animation history with The Three Little Pigs)

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