I'm enjoying reading George R R Martin's take on the drama that is the 2015
Hugo awards. I'll link to the boingboing summary as
a launching page not because I think Cory has a clear-eyed, unbiased view of the situation (he doesn't, even though I
agree with him), but because it also links to an interesting set of blog posts by Bruce Schneier's posts on voting
systems, and I kinda love that stuff.
I'm a one-time Worldcon member who didn't vote for the Hugos. I'm occasionally tempted to join as a voting member
because you get free ebooks of all the nominees, but then I remember I never bother to read the pile of books I already
own.
The Hugos are a clique. The clique is Worldcon. People who are popular regulars at Worldcon by and large get the
nominations and win the trophies. But the Hugos are Worldcon's. It's their award. It's weird to be in the room where
they're handing them out, because you kinda feel like you've crashed somebody else's prom when they're handing out prom
king and queen awards. If you don't go to prom or even to that school, I don't really see how you'd expect to win those
particular popularity contests.
I mean, they nominate stuff like video tapings of the previous year's Hugo awards ceremony. Everything except for the
fiction awards is kind of a joke. A good-natured joke, generally, but I'm not going to be looking to the Hugos to tell
me what's a good comic to read or movie to watch.
Now, you could argue whether the "most prestigious science fiction literature awards" should go to the prom kings and
queens of Worldcon, but Worldcon is the hub of science fiction book fandom. Very good writers go there. If you're a
serious science fiction writer and you're not going there, one has some justification to question your dedication to the
field. And they do care about the quality of the work. And the Worldcon people do actually take the fiction awards very
seriously. So I feel a bit sad that they've had this happen to them. Because the people rushing in to vote don't care
about the Worldcon community or history or whatever. They're doing it for the lulz.
I'd love to endorse some school board candidates, but I have to admit I'm not well-enough informed to publicly commit to
endorsements. School board is really important and I wish I had time to dig into it. Good, critical evaluation of
candidates would also be really valuable because it's so hard to come by. But I don't have it. I suck, basically.
As if to contradict myself, I have some less well-informed opinions of other races around the region. If you're
interested in them, check out
my Sticking My Oar In section.
So on [[wiki:Kill the Moon|this week's Doctor Who episode]], the Doctor asserts a couple times that the moon is 100
million years old. This, along with a lot of other Jack Kirby-esque science nonsense, irritated a great many viewers.
Like this respected and lovely local author on Twitter:
Speaking of the moon, if you are doing a science fiction story in which the mass and age of the moon are plot points, LOOK THEM UP, Moffat.
In our universe, the moon is about 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million--there's still some
debate. That information isn't hard to find. However, I assert he did look it up.
The Doctor Who universe isn't our universe. In the Doctor Who universe, the arrival in the moon in orbit around the
Earth is a specific and important historical event. It did two things: its sudden appearance in the sky convinced the
Silurians (aka Homo Reptilia. SCIENCE!) to go into hibernation to avoid the impending doom it almost certainly
portended (see: Doctor Who and the Silurians), and it
destabilized the fragile Earth-Mondas twin orbit, sending Mondas drifting into
interstellar space (see: The Tenth Planet and, in
particular: Spare Parts).
Putting it at about 100 million years makes some sense for the Silurian timeline (moreso than the Doctor Who History of
the Universe's assertion that the Silurians' ancestors survived and evolved 20 million years after
the Earthshock extinction event that killed the dinosaurs). And it suddenly
appearing as described in those stories is nicely in line with what is revealed about the moon in Kill the Moon.
So yeah, the age of the moon, to me, was a delightful callback to previous adventures. The nonsense about the increased
mass of the moon was a bit more irritating, but I'll give them a pass for not wanting to pay for all that wire work.
Update! 2015-05-05 Writer Peter Harness confirms on this
week's Radio Free Skaro,
episode 474, that the 100 million year age of the moon was, in fact, a deliberate reference to Doctor Who and the
Silurians. Validation!
![[Peter Capaldi on the moon]](/img/Lu1rY0gmlr-644.webp)
![[The History of the Universe]](/img/rNKc3fWy3H-335.webp)