Now that I’m no longer involved with the WSFS process this year, I can tell you what I think about the two consultative votes that are running on proposed changes to the WSFS Constitution. The votes are open to all WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon, and run until today week, 31 May. We ran the equivalent exercise much later in the summer last year, so in part this is an experiment to see how big a difference the timing could make.

The votes themselves are purely consultative, of course; the Business Meeting alone has the power to decide the fate of the proposals. The point of the exercise is to see how a consultative vote actually works before anyone starts hardwiring it into the Constitution.

Last year’s Business Meeting passed a total of nine constitutional amendments which must now be ratified by this year’s to take effect. Some of these are minor and/or technical. The two that were felt to be most interesting for the public were the proposed abolition of the Retro Hugos, and language to tighten up the definitions of the Professional Artist and Fan Artist categories. I do have views on all the others, and will come back to them in due course.

I do not love the Retro Hugos. I wrote in Uncanny Magazine earlier this year:

I used to really like this idea [the Retro Hugos], but I went off it after running the Retro Hugos in 2019 and 2020 when it became clear that winners and finalists did not really reflect the spirit of Worldcon as it has become, that voters were voting on the future reputations of the nominees rather than their work in the year in question, that the heirs of the winners were difficult to track down to send the awards to, and that participation was declining.

I don’t strongly feel that it’s of vital importance to ban future Worldcons from running them, but since my opinion is being solicited, I will vote to abolish them.

The other proposal causes me more reflection, not least because I have been calling for these two categories to be reformed for years, and I think that some of the current proposed wording is actually mine, emerging from the Hugo Awards Study Committee in 2022.

I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the Hugo Awards Study Committee that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.

The definition now proposed makes the mistake of concentrating purely on the economics of the transaction – if the art is paid for, it would be considered professional art; if not, it would be considered fan art. It’s my mistake and I have to admit it. It’s the wrong line. The Hugo for Best Professional Artist recognises, and should recognise, art created as part of the professional enterprise of science fiction and fantasy, and the Hugo for Best Fan Artist recognises, and should recognise, art that is created as fannish activity.

The current definitions are much closer to the spirit of the awards and to the expectations of voters than are the proposed new definitions. They do need to be updated to include the new means of publication of Professional and Fan Art, but the fact is that a lot of Fan Art is paid for, and the point about Professional Art isn’t that it’s paid for but that it’s created in relation to the wider industry.

So I don’t think the current proposal is the right answer, and I’m voting against it.

More on the other proposals at a later date.