World Fantasy Con Guest of Honor Policies
A little while back, author and editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia contacted the World Fantasy Convention about the lack of diversity in their Guest of Honor line-up. Their response said, in part:
“Convention committees select Special Guests and especially Guests of Honor in order to recognize and pay tribute to their body of work within the genre over a significant period of time, usually consisting of decades in the field. Currently we find ourselves in the position of having a limited number of non-white/male authors, artists, agents, and editors to call on to balance the slates. However much we all wish it were different, and however glad we are to see things changing, the fact remains that only recently have a significant number of diverse writers, artists, agents, and editors entered the field.” (Emphasis added)
There’s a lot to unpack in the full letter, but I wanted to focus on this particular idea, that guests of honor had to have decades of experience in the field. So I went through the list of WFC guests of honor and pulled together the year of the con and the year of the guest’s first published book. It’s not a perfect way to measure years in the field, but I think it works pretty well.
Disclaimers:
I’ve posted the spreadsheet for anyone to review. Feedback and corrections are welcome.
I tried to eliminate all but the author guests of honor. Also, some conventions had both guests of honor and “special guests.” In these cases, I did not include the special guests.
There are a handful where I’m not sure about the first novel. All total, I ended up with 93 author guests, from 1975 to 2018.
Data:
ETA: Data and spreadsheet have been updated with corrections.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s take a look at the data.
- Average Number of Years in the Field: 24
- Median Number of Years in the Field: 22
- Least Years in the Field:
45
- Most Years in the Field: 73
- Number of WFC Guests of Honor with less than 10 years in the field:
75 - Number of WFC Guests of Honor with 10-19 years in the field:
2930 - Number of WFC Guests of Honor with 20-29 years in the field:
3435 - Number of WFC Guests of Honor with 30+ years in the field: 23
Conclusions:
The WFC Board said, “Convention committees select Special Guests and especially Guests of Honor in order to recognize and pay tribute to their body of work within the genre over a significant period of time, usually consisting of decades in the field.” I’ve seen others, people not necessarily affiliated with the con, argue that WFC author guests of honor should have at least 30 years in the field.
The latter is obviously untrue. Only a quarter of all guests have been active SF/F professionals for three decades or more.
As for the Board’s statement, it’s true that most guests of honor have had between one and two decades of professional SF/F experience. Most, but not all. WFC has repeatedly shown a willingness to have newer authors as guests or honor as well.
So any argument that WFC has to choose guests with a longer history in the SF/F field is demonstrably untrue.
Other Comments:
1. That excuse also falls flat since we’ve had diverse authors in the field for more than just the past 10 years. Authors of color, for example, were not invented in 2008.
2. Even if that weren’t the case, if you have a screening policy that results in the exclusion of minorities? You change the damn policy.
3. Three authors have been WFC author guests of honor twice. While all three of these authors have impressive careers and are very much deserving of honor and respect, this is another sign we need to look a little more broadly for guests.
4. As for the Board’s statement that, “only recently have a significant number of diverse writers, artists, agents, and editors entered the field,” here are just a few authors off the top of my head who — surprise! — have been around for a while now…
- Samuel R. Delaney (The Jewels of Aptor, 1962)
- Octavia Butler (Patternmaster, 1976)
- Haruki Murakami, (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979)
- Steven Barnes (Dream Park, 1981)
- Ted Chiang (First Nebula Award in 1991)
- Michelle Sagara (Into the Dark Lands, 1991)
- Tananarive Due (The Between, 1995)
- Due is listed on the 2017 WFC web page as a GoH. She was not included on the WFC history page I used to compile my initial list, which is why she wasn’t part of the spreadsheet or analysis.)
- Stephen Graham Jones (The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, 2000)
- David Anthony Durham (Gabriel’s Story, 2001)
- L. A. Banks, (Minion, 2003)
There are a heck of a lot more — my list is mostly limited to American authors, but shouldn’t the World Fantasy Convention welcome fantasy author guests from, well, the whole world? The idea that diverse authors and other SF/F professionals are somehow a new, recent thing is just utterly absurd and asinine.
Do better, WFC.
Errors/Corrections
- The WFC History site listed Mary Robinette Kowal as a 2014 Guest of Honor. She was actually the Toastmaster, and as such, should not have been included in the dataset.
- The WFC History site omitted Tananarive Due, who was a Guest or Honor at the 2017 WFC.
- Jeff VanderMeer’s first book has been corrected to Dradin, In Love, first published in 1996.
F
November 25, 2018 @ 7:07 pm
LA Banks has passed away. Otherwise: accurate.
Renee
November 25, 2018 @ 7:21 pm
Octavia Butler of course sadly died some years ago. Tananarive Due was a GoH last year at San Antonio’s WFC, and Jones has been announced as a GoH for WFC 2020 in Salt Lake.
Quick question because I wasn’t sure from your comments above – are you including Toastmaster as an author GoH? I think that is a category that, like Special Guest has at times been a little more fluid than the more traditional GoH spot (and being TM does not typically preclude being asked as a GoH at some future date).
Celestine Nox
November 25, 2018 @ 7:28 pm
Well said, as usually, Mr. Hines.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 7:34 pm
Renee:
Tananarive Due is not listed on the WFC Guests page, which is why she wasn’t included here. But I do see her listed on the 2017 WFC website. Possibly an error of omission on that first site.
I am not including Toastmaster as an author guest of honor, no.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 7:37 pm
F: Yes, as has Octavia Butler. I wasn’t proposing those authors as a list of potential WFC guests so much as a quick sampling to show that diverse fantasy authors hadn’t just magically sprung into existence in the past few years.
Renee
November 25, 2018 @ 7:45 pm
Jim: thanks for pointing out the oversight. That will get fixed.
JJ
November 25, 2018 @ 8:33 pm
Your spreadsheet data is bad, and needs to be re-done. You’ve only counted first novels, and not first professional publications. This makes the careers of your dataset much longer.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 8:36 pm
::Facepalm::
Yes, as I noted in the blog post, I went with first published novel. I also noted that this wasn’t a perfect measure, but I believe it works pretty well. (I did make exceptions for a couple of authors who wrote primarily short fiction with few/no novels.)
Feel free to take the spreadsheet and develop your own dataset if you’d like.
JJ
November 25, 2018 @ 8:40 pm
It makes a *huge* difference.
Kaaron Warren’s first publication was in 1993, not 2009. Kowal’s was in 2004, not 2010. Even if you don’t count Jeff VanderMeer’s early stories in amateur and semipro mags, his pubs still go back to at least 1992, not 2003.
I don’t need to make my own spreadsheet. I’m pointing out that you’re using bad data to make a point about WFC guest career length which seems increasingly invalid.
If you want to make your argument, then make it a good one.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 8:50 pm
JJ: My first publication was in 1997. Is that when my career started? If so, I should be up for WFC GoHship, right? I mean, I’ve got a 21-year career!
Although really, I started working to be an author back in 1995 or so. Is that when my career started? Make that a 23-year career, right?
Except that’s bullshit. It took another decade after that first sale before I had anything approaching a career as an author. If you asked me, I’d tell you I’ve been an active fantasy author in the field for about 12 years now.
I don’t know what arbitrary measures WFC uses to determine the start date for an author’s career. Neither, I suspect, do you. Because one way or another, it *is* arbitrary.
The arbitrary choice I made was to go with first published novel. You have a different arbitrary definition. The nice thing is, if we go with your as-yet-undefined arbitrary definition, I suspect we’d get even more minority authors who should be included.
JJ
November 25, 2018 @ 8:54 pm
Jim, you’re supposed to be one of the good guys. This is really disappointing. Most authors’ careers don’t begin overnight, or at the publication of their first novel. According to your metric, Ann Leckie’s career only started 5 years ago — which is patently ridiculous.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 9:17 pm
JJ,
In your first comment, you announced, “Your spreadsheet data is bad, and needs to be re-done. You’ve only counted first novels, and not first professional publications.” like it was something I hadn’t already clearly stated right there in the blog post. So not only did you miss or ignore where I explained that, you decided to tell me my data was bad, and that I needed to redo it.
In your second comment, you continued to tell me how my data was bad and my argument was invalid, while at the same time demonstrating the murkiness and arbitrariness of any standard. (When you say, “Even if you don’t count Jeff VanderMeer’s early stories in amateur and semipro mags…” Why wouldn’t you count those, JJ? Why are you suggesting we exclude some of Jeff’s writing? It’s because you know as well as I do that there’s no clear-cut answer here.)
You continue to ignore the points I’ve made that *any* standard of when an author’s career begins is an arbitrary one, and now you’re doubling down — not only is my data bad, but you’re also demoting me from the “good guys” because … because of what, exactly?
Look, you’ve made it clear you’re not interested in doing the work to do your own analysis. That’s fine. You’ve demonstrated in your own comments that you realize there’s no clear, easy answer as to when an author’s career starts.
I mean, when exactly did Ann Leckie’s career begin? Was it in 2006 when she had her first story published in Strange Horizons? Does one short story make a career? Was it in 2013 when her first novel was published? Obviously she’d been writing before then, sure. Does it make a difference if she published 100 short stories between 2006 and 2013? What if she published 0, and only started publishing consistently after 2013? What if that 2006 story won a Nebula and a Hugo?
You seem unwilling to acknowledge that there’s no one Right Answer here, or to address any of the questions or points I raised to that effect. Mostly at this point, you just seem interested in telling me how disappointed you are in me, and how bad I and my data and my arguments are.
Well, congratulations – you’ve made that very clear.
Bill
November 25, 2018 @ 9:25 pm
Just a couple of factual corrections for your database. Mary Robinette Kowal was Toastmaster in 2014. Kaaron Warren’s first professional sale was 1993 which gives her 25 years.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 9:27 pm
Bill,
Thank you – the WFC history site has Mary Robinette listed as a Guest of Honor, not as a Toastmaster. I’ll check into that, and into Kaaron Warren.
ETA: It looks like Warren’s first short fiction sale was 1993, but her first novel came out in 2009. There’s no clear-cut rule on when an author’s career begins (see the back-and-forth in the comments), but I went with first book as an arbitrary definition for this. As I said, it’s not perfect, but I think it mostly works. There are exceptions, though…
JJ
November 25, 2018 @ 9:42 pm
Jim C. Hines: “Look, you’ve made it clear you’re not interested in doing the work to do your own analysis. That’s fine. You’ve demonstrated in your own comments that you realize there’s no clear, easy answer as to when an author’s career starts.”
This attempt at deflection is really unworthy of you, Jim.
You’re the one who’s trying to make an argument — and I think it’s a worthy argument to make.
Yes, it would have taken you a lot more time and effort to make that argument well. But making it poorly and sloppily is not the way to go about it. That’s on you, not on me.
And because you chose to make it this way, you’ve left your argument open to criticism by everyone including the people you actually want to persuade — which detracts from the point you wanted to make, that there are minority authors with lengthy careers who have been eligible as WFC Guests of Honor.
Jim C. Hines
November 25, 2018 @ 9:46 pm
JJ,
You might have nothing better to do than spend the night judging me, but it’s gotten really old. And yes, not only are you criticizing my argument, you’ve been merrily judging me in the process.
“This attempt at deflection is really unworthy of you, Jim.”
“Jim, you’re supposed to be one of the good guys.”
You continue to ignore most everything I’ve said in response do you, suggesting there’s no point to continuing to respond.
So you’re done on this post. Go find something else to do with the rest of your night.
MF
November 25, 2018 @ 10:26 pm
Kaaron Warren’s first published novel was Slights in 2009, but her first published *book* was the story collection The Grinding House in 2005 and her short stories had made regular appearances on award and recommended-reading lists since the mid-90s.
Jeff VanderMeer
November 26, 2018 @ 8:56 am
Jim, I support the effort here, but my first published book, a novella, not self published was in 1994 or 95 and by then I had edited anthologies, which I was also known for. I want to be accurate data. 🙂
Jim C. Hines
November 26, 2018 @ 10:26 am
Thanks, Jeff – I had your entry marked with a question mark because I wasn’t entirely sure.
Was that novella Dradin, In Love?
Gene Breshears
November 26, 2018 @ 2:58 pm
Than you so much for doing this.
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
November 26, 2018 @ 3:42 pm
This was clearly a great deal of work, and, for what it’s worth, I appreciate your doing it.
Because a number of “older” authors, like me, as well as some younger ones, started out with short fiction, your spreadsheet likely understates the length of time many authors have been active in the field. I’m NOT nitpicking; you stated clearly your benchmarks, and from a practical point, it would have an even more massive, and likely less comparatively accurate, job to research “first publication,” although in many cases, as you and others have pointed out, the length of contribution to the field would certainly have been much longer for the majority of WFC GOHs. In my own case, my first story was published nine years before my first novel.
The other point to be considered is the trade-off between a few recent books [considered at present outstanding] and a long history of solid work. Over the years, I’ve seen more than a few authors be acclaimed early… and then fail to live up to that acclaim.
Kat Goodwin
November 26, 2018 @ 9:12 pm
I appreciate that you made an attempt here, Jim, to show that the WFC board’s response was nonsense. You do that sort of documentation work regularly on these things, when you shouldn’t have to, and it’s helped in a lot of cases.
But we already knew that their response was nonsense. Knew it the first time when the first white author who was WFC GOH with only a few years of experience was pointed out. We also knew it because this is the continual response given when a company, an industry or an organization/institution is called on its skewed discrimination in a field — “we would do better but we can’t find them or find them with sufficient requirements.” That’s the tech industry’s response for the lack of women — after they pushed the women out of the industry — and black and Latino employees. It’s the response we got from big publishers like Tor UK and SFF magazines when they were called on a lack of women in their various offerings (they don’t submit to us — it’s a mystery!) It’s why there are still manels at academic conferences. It’s defense #1: it’s not us, it’s them who is causing the problem, by not existing, or being hidden and quiet, or being somehow really, really new and unqualified even though some of them have been around for decades or have amazing credits.
The problem is the same problem we’ve seen in many convention incidents, from sexual harassment to disability access — a few people who are in charge, who don’t see this as a problem and want it to go away, who don’t follow proper procedures with any consistency, who are deeply out of touch with the current field, and who should step down from running the convention/revolving convention, while everybody else is stuck waiting around for them to figure that out and resign. There’s no easy solution to the issue because you’re not going to get someone to admit that they did in fact lie about why there is a lack of representation in the GOH, no matter how much data you collect and no matter what parameters for career length you use. You certainly aren’t going to get them to admit that they have alienated a large number of non-white, white women and LGTBQ authors from coming to the convention at all as long as they are the people running the convention. But it always comes down to those few people in charge who are not necessarily malicious people but who stubbornly don’t want to deal with discrimination issues in the conventions, no matter if it loses them authors or younger people who might attend or vendors.
So maybe your data will help exert some pressure to deal with the issue; couldn’t hurt. But the “we can’t find them” defense is going to continue to be trotted out for awhile, rather than the people in charge actually dealing with the issue in a logical way, until those people aren’t in charge anymore. Or magically we wake them up; I guess with fantasy fiction, one can hope.
Jim C. Hines
November 27, 2018 @ 4:24 pm
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. – Thank you, I appreciate that. And yeah, it’s definitely not a perfect measure.
I think if I had infinite time, accurate bibliographies, and wanted to do it all over again, I might go with SFWA standards — whenever the author sold three pro short stories and/or one pro novel. Still not a perfect measure, but it might get a little closer to that nebulous “when their career started” idea.
Either way, I hope it makes the small point I was trying to make about inconsistent GoH standards…
Jim C. Hines
November 27, 2018 @ 4:25 pm
Kat Goodwin – Yeah, it’s not going to do a lot to change minds, but hopefully it hits one point of resistance.
Ann T Leckie
November 30, 2018 @ 11:49 am
Since my name has been taken in vain, here–I’m with Jim on this one. Yes, from one POV my career started with my first sale (“Hesperia and Glory,” to Issue 4 of Subterranean Magazine) which appeared in 2006. But let’s be honest, from then until 2013 I might as well not have existed to the people who extend invitations to conventions. My short fiction career existed. It wasn’t miserable–I had several stories turn up in Rich Horton’s years bests–but I wasn’t terribly notable, never came in shouting distance of award ballots, and was mostly only known to my friends and the people who listened to Podcastle. Still, it was technically the beginning of my career. By 2013 I no longer could qualify for the Campbell (Not A Hugo).
But 2013 is a whole different story. Suddenly I was a name people knew. The vast majority of those people who knew my name had no idea of any of my short fiction. People who invited me to conventions then (and now) do so on the basis of my novels, and only rarely know much about that early short fiction. I’d bet real money this will continue to be the case for a long time.
I don’t think it’s mistaken of Jim to choose first novel publication (and/or first major award shortlist appearance). He said he was doing so right up front, and gave his reasons. His data would be bad or dishonest if he didn’t make that statement, or tried to conceal it. There are reasons to choose one or the other as a start–but the question of when one’s career begins is not as clearcut as it might seem at first glance.