Musings on Boskone

[xiphias]

Next year's Boskone, the GoH is going to be Orson Scott Card.

In Massachusetts. By that point, gay marriages will have been legal for some time. And at least a few people running Boskone will be married because of that fact.

This past Boskone was basically a relaxicon, because everyone's focused on the upcoming Boston Worldcon, so we can discount that. But the year before that, David Brin was the GoH, and managed to insult every single person at the con, personally. Well, I think he missed a couple people who were in the gaming room, but he insulted them by proxy.

So, my question is. . . who can Boskone possibly get for 2006? I mean, around here, a fair number of people LIKE Harlan Ellison, and, in any case, "abrasive" does not equal "offensive", not in the way that Brin and Card manage it.

(Besides, we should have someone whose last name starts with "D", then we can have Ellison for 2007.)

Any suggestions?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

is a person allowed to hope that card's liaison will not only be a) queer, b) married to someone of the same sex, but c) be either so flamy or so butch that no one, not even card, could miss those two facts?

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Let's appoint Buzz and Noel, jointly :-)

[gingicat]

Hee!

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

Dave Sim?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oooh! GOOOD choice!

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Aw, man - that is exactly what I was thinking.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to pour a Coke over Card's head. (Pity his religion no longer considers the stuff unclean.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'll buy you a beer or a shot of whiskey to pour, if it will make you feel better about it.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Pour? Why not just throw it in his face?

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

I think the only person who could possibly follow Brin and Card would be Ann Coulter. She doesn't write science fiction, due to an insufficient grasp of logic, but I consider most of her work to be a particularly bizarre brand of fantasy, so you might be able to sell it that way.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I don't know about guests of honor, but I'm sure a panel run by Piers Anthony on gender and sex in SF would be well-recieved.

[ckd]

Piers Anthony and John Norman.

Moderated by Ursula LeGuin.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I like your style.

[gingicat]

And Jack Chalker.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Oh man yes. :D

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Hmm. We could get Jerry Pournelle and Eric S Raymond for a panel, but who else could we get to make it INTERESTING? Noam Chomsky isn't a fan that I know of. . .

[cheshyre]

Newt Gingrich is an SF fan and wrote an alternate history novel...

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

You know, if I ever entertained any thoughts of attending next year's Boskone, they're gone now.

Why boycott Boskone?

[cheshyre]

[Note, this is springboarding off of bikergeek's comment to ask a more general question, and is not an attack on what he wrote or believes.]

There's so much more to most SF cons than the GOH, that I don't entirely understand this notion of boycotting the con to protest OSCard's appearance.

I hate to see a fannish organization being penalized because their GOH demonstrated a homophobic asshole nature after they already extended the invitation.
I don't think they can uninvite him, because that would be a huge mess (notifying everybody who registered that the GOH has changed, refunding memberships to those who were attending for that reason, finding a new GOH, trashing and replacing all the publicity materials, etcetera)

I'm sure there will be both protests and positive counterprogramming, so what good does it do to hurt NESFA in this way?

I'm not accusing you of anything, bikergeek. As you say above, you weren't planning on attending anyway, so it's really no change. I'm just trying to understand the reasoning.

Re: Why boycott Boskone?

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

their GOH demonstrated a homophobic asshole nature after they already extended the invitation
Did they invite him years ago? I first heard a homophobic asshole Card story from supergee in 1994, I think. And I'm not really in fandom at all.

Re: Why boycott Boskone?

[lysana.livejournal.com]

His fiction's been ragingly homophobic for years. I stopped reading him when I noticed every gay character he had was socially reprehensible in some manner unrelated to ther orientation and excused same away with a bullshit story about it being Nature's way to eliminate the genetically damaged from the breeding pool.

Re: Why boycott Boskone?

[avram]

I hate to see a fannish organization being penalized because their GOH demonstrated a homophobic asshole nature after they already extended the invitation.

What? Card’s “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality”, in which he calls for using laws against gay sex to scare gays back into the closet, was published in Sunstone magazine in 1990. I remember seeing copies of it handed around at the ’91 Worldcon. The man’s been out as a bigot for well over a decade.

Re: Why boycott Boskone?

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

As others have remarked, his homophobic opinions have been known for years. It's an opinion he's expressed in speeches and essays before. This isn't something that was discovered after he was selected as GoH.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

How about Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Crichton doing a panel on How to Write SF?

[cheshyre]

Don't forget Margaret Atwood for that panel?
[If I'm guessing your intentions right]

[lysana.livejournal.com]

If she's in the "oh, no, I don't write science fiction, I write literature" camp, you guessed correctly.

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

Due to an unfortunate typo, Boskone 2006 invites David Duke instead of David Drake to be their Guest of Honor...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Okay, I like that one.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Hell, invite me out; I can act either as a provocateur or as a pallative.

Don't havethe "D" thing going on though.