One Scoop of Ice Cream: Hugo If True

Hello!

Long time no talk! I've been busy... mostly busy trying to get my head to behave, so I can continue working on more important things than trying to get my head to behave. But in the interim, many wonderful things have happened! I'm here to talk about one of those things!

Here's your tea!

Poetry and Rocket Science

As you are reading this, the voting period for this year's Hugo Awards are now open. Huzzah!

This is a big deal to me for two reasons. This is only the second time that Best Poem has been a special category at the awards, and I am incredibly excited to see it return, and to see it ratified in this year's Business Meetings in late July and early August. Speculative poetry has been having a wonderful moment, and I hope that the reception to this category continues to be strong evidence of the value of awarding the art form in genre.

As for the other reason...

I'm nominated for a Hugo Award?!?

Thank you to everyone who nominated any of their favourite poetry of the last year in this category. Thank you to everyone who has congratulated me since the announcement. And of course, congratulations to my fellow finalists: Mari Ness, Elis Montgomery, Theodora Goss, Angela Liu, and Jennifer Hudak!

I'm obviously very excited. I am beyond honoured to be nominated—the Hugos are a big deal not merely because of their prestige within fandom, but because they're a fan-nominated and fan-voted award, so it fills me with a lot of joy to know people enjoyed 'Landing: Seattle' enough to nominate it. But being nominated for this category in particular, and sharing this shortlist with some outstanding work by several brilliant poets, is a dream come true in so many ways, and I literally struggle for the words to express my gratitude.

Serving as Poet Laureate of Seattle Worldcon was a grand experience, and 'Landing: Seattle' was one of the many things that came out of that experience. Every moment I spent that weekend felt like I was being reassured by my peers that poetry is an undeniable core element of our genre that people wanted to learn more about and experience more deeply, and that feeling coupled with the interesting culture and vibe of the Seattle area (which I surely didn't even get to experience enough of) and the already renewing atmosphere of being among fellow fans and being excited about SFF overall, made me feel like I was always bursting with joy that had very few places or very little time to let out of me. Hell—reading the poem in the first place was the result of me taking a few minutes before the opening ceremonies even began to distill the experience of simply being free to roam the streets near the city in the few days before the con began, and holding on to that thread that binds any place's unique culture to the ways we are allowed to revisit our hopeful pasts and reimagine our potential futures, just as that year's committee used the imagery of the Century 21 Exposition to ask how that past imagined the potential of Seattle's present, and gave room for transformations yet to come.

I remain excitedly hopeful that moments like this continue to be a part of Worldcon's culture, and continues to find value in being awarded here and elsewhere in fandom, for years to come. I hope that more Worldcons in the future have Poet Laureate Guests of Honour, and are excited to give poets more opportunities to celebrate what the art form has to offer in the genre. Of course, I hope to see the Best Poem category become permanent, and in so doing pay some homage to the role that verse plays in the very history of speculative writing.

I am full of boundless joy from being on this ballot, alongside some of my favourite poets and some of the neatest poems of the last year. Now I just want to see if I can actually make it to LA this August to share in this moment with them.

I won't lie—it would obviously rock if I won. I hope that if my poem resonated with you, you will vote for it now that voting is open. I hope even more that if any poem resonated with you, you will vote for any of them at all—I want this year to prove that readers can and do care about poetry and want to see it rewarded in genre from this point onward.

Tasting Notes

Of course, this is me reiterating that Hugo Awards voting is open, and if you have at least an Attending, Virtual, or WSFS membership for LACon V before close of voting on August 8th, you can exercise your fannish duty! Which means that if you weren't aware of that before, here is your invitation to register for this year's convention. Not only do all members get a packet with several of the nominated works in it so you can read before you vote (which essentially makes membership a deal: six novels, plus six novellas, plus six novelettes, plus dozens of other things, or just about that much in any case, for as little as the price of five paperbacks on Amazon), but at the lowest membership level you get to join us at the Business Meeting and vote on the ways Worldcon and the Hugos can hopefully be more efficient, more accessible, and more inclusive, and for just a little bit more (seven-and-a-half Amazon paperbacks' worth) you can attend the con virtually and get some of the same value right from your computer room.

I love Worldcon, despite its foibles, and I want as many people to experience as much of the joys it has to offer as possible, so if you're seeing this and you already read a lot of science fiction and fantasy but all of this is new and even daunting to you, I think I am speaking to you in particular when I say that if you have the means you should definitely become a member and definitely partake in as much of it as your membership will let you, including voting. I am not just saying this from the biased position of being nominated, or from the biased position of rooting for the Best Poem Hugo Award being ratified as permanent—I am saying this from the biased position of really enjoying Worldcon at its best and also being an old-ish man(-ish) who thinks that Worldcon is better when more, newer, diverse, and especially younger fandom voices are part of its community.

Today's Tunes

Creepy Nuts | Fright

New Creepy Nuts, so of course I had something to say. I dig it a lot sonically—just the briefest moments of some of the decisions in the chorus alone are some of my favourite vocals of anything I've listened to in the last few months—but the lyrics are yet again an example of how delightfully curious and precise R-Shitei can capture the commingling of success and doubt in verse, all wrapped around what I think is a simple yet incredibly clever English pun:

Hey, how do you spell 'fright'—L, or R?

I feel like it's deliberate that this song didn't drop until after the duo performed at Coachella as one of the first legs of their North America tour this year, but that's because I feel like I am filling in the gaps in the narrative of two dropouts giving music their all and suddenly discovering a fame that is still somewhat novel to them. It makes me even more excited to see if they're working on any other new stuff this year, and especially if they have another album coming up sometime fairly soon.

MC Frontalot | Common Loot

I'll also add the song that has been on repeat on my Spotify for a week so far, MC Frontalot's 'Common Loot', which I will say very little about other than that I predict it will, fortunately or unfortunately, be the theme song to some core moment in the universe akin to whoever finally won the Kissinger Death Tontine.

You tend to clog the inventory where my feelings go—
unstackable anguishes hogging columns, stealing rows—
but your legacy won't be the great-bigness of whatever-you-did,
rather the quickness you get forgotten once we're rid.

Damn. Talk to 'em, Front.

If you have ten minutes to kill, perhaps the best way to experience this one is by playing the game.

What's On TV?

Watson Season 2

So I guess we're never getting another season of Watson.

I was really digging this one. I am perhaps not as attached to the Holmes canon as others may be, but there is something undeniably captivating about taking some of the more interesting and accessible bits of one of literature's most enduring heroes and making something intriguing and compelling with it in the modern day. I have commented in some other places about how very peculiar and difficult adaptation can be, especially of Holmes, and on this very newsletter about how arresting it can be to pull it off.

The coolest part about this show was what I imagine would be its most annoying for some at the outset: an attempt to adapt Holmes... without Holmes. I was immediately intrigued because that is actually fun as hell—Watson is our point of view in Doyle's fiction, and the setup of someone with an already intense history as a soldier and a doctor before meeting the genius consulting detective only to have a much more complicated personal life in the wake of that chance meeting is a very fruitful place for story. Season One bore that out in spades: even when Moriarty shows up, he is actually far less interesting than the fellows in Watson's clinic; no matter your feelings about Watson and Mary Morstan in the canon or in its adaptations, there is something curious and bittersweet about watching a Mary who is torn between moving on from the man who obviously is still longing for the life of adventure with a man she's never known and still wanting to find the thread of him that obviously is still in love with her; and in exactly the way that House does not, this show thinks highly of its cases-of-the-week, sees them as puzzles not because people are broken or dishonest or weak but because they are vulnerable or conflicted or afraid, and finds the ways in which not just medicine but the act of being genuinely understood can grant them both their health and their dignity.

It was actually very fun to see Morris Chestnut perform a version of John Watson that is not only really committed to and seriously a fan of medicine, somewhat accelerated by the experience of being in the constant presence of a master detective, to the point where he sees medical anomalies as murder mysteries—not because they are puzzles disconnected from the humanity of their patients, but because he is constantly in awe of the fact that medicine is the only trade where he can apply that same curiosity he had on Baker Street to the task of making sure people remain alive. All the other attachments of the canon matter very little in the shadow of that—all we already know or need to know about Watson is still there, but we get to see it play off a whole new cast in a context that is rare in the original fiction.

So I was initially wary when one of the first things that happens in the second season is that he reunites with Sherlock Holmes.

Don't get me wrong—I love Holmes as a character, and I loved Robert Carlyle's performance in the role (aside: while I've never seen the film, I find it funny how this show that is very much cut from the same narrative cloth as Elementary also made the same production choice, namely 'casting an actor from Trainspotting as Sherlock Holmes'), but the very idea of having to close that loop in order to keep audience attention felt like an inability to truly know what the show was doing.

I'm lucky I was wrong—it turns out that the show had something to say with Holmes' presence that was not only far more emotionally and mentally heartbreaking, but at its core incredibly medical (if somewhat cliche in its execution). Suffice it to say that just like Robert Doherty before him in Elementary, Craig Sweeny and his writers' room at some point was deeply interested in the question of what pressure a genius can be put under by their own ailing mind. When everyone else thinks only you can solve a pressing problem on a ticking clock while your own perception is getting away from you, how do you respond? When the smartest and most insightful conversations you have are with the ghost of a man living inside a massive blow to your head, do you share that with the people who trust you? To be fair, the show cared about those questions very early on, when the question was simply whether Watson would get better, but reintroducing it to ask the more pressing question of 'how does it feel to get the man you love back only to learn he's still not there?' is so enchanting in so many small bittersweet ways.

But now that we can never see these other characters again, I have to give my flowers to the rest of the ensemble cast. I have no idea how hard it must be to play twins for 22-episode network television (and I'm already hard to please when it comes to twins in fiction anyway), but from the penultimate episode of Season One all the way through to the last, Peter Mark Kendall had given unique performances to the Croft brothers in ways that I not only noticed but could genuinely feel. Inga Schlingmann is now two-for-two on playing a secondary character I absolutely adore in a show that was canceled after two damn good seasons. Eve Harlow has proven to me in this show alone that she can probably act her way through the gates of Heaven. And Ritchie Coster was given so much more to do in this season that part of why I wish we got at least a third was so we could actually see all of that pay off for Shinwell.

I really think Watson is going to fill in the small-comfort-watch slot when I can't justify having to go all the way through seven seasons of Elementary instead.

The Leaves

So that’s all for today.

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-Fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!