My newest published story (the first of many this year!) is in the winter 2026 issue of The Colored Lens.
It’s part of my growing opus of time travel-related works (all of which are interlinked), and I had lots of fun adding my own spin to some of those old tropes.
This story is about the ethics of changing – or not changing – the timeline on a grand scale. It’s about the secret origin of Valkyries. It’s about cold calculations compiled into a cruel-seeming codex. It’s about the third and final chances…
The opening line: “When you’re a time traveler, every hour is a happy hour.”
Typing this up from a capsule hotel in Tokyo’s salaryman district, Shimbashi. Not something I possibly could have anticipated a year ago, but life can be wild like that, eh.
This was one strange, eventful year – more so than usual. The biggest disappointment was having had to cut short my Continental Divide Trail thru-hike which I’d started in April. Partly because my legs weren’t entirely up to it, partly because it was so soul-crushingly lonely (walking four days without meeting anybody else was considered normal), partly because it involved long stretches of walking on the highway… It did not meet my definition of a nature trail.
An odd experience, that: anticipation, a long journey, a glorious and multifaceted failure… An unusual set of sensations. Might use that in my fiction someday.
The other big thing was the end of the relationship that lasted almost three years – my personal best. I tried. The stress of her daily life only kept rising. The first year was wonderful. It was for the best.
That was also my last tie to Quebec City, which is how, after about four years, I finally packed up and moved to Montreal. In a matter of speaking, that is. All my things are in a storage unit, my address is a PO box, and I’m technically homeless as I roam the world, trying to catch up on all the adventures I’d put on the back burner. (See my “Feral Artist Nomad” posts for more on that.)
Perhaps because of my failure to hike the CDT, my creativity went wild to overcompensate, to make this year meaningful in any way whatsoever. Wrote dozens of new stories. Sold quite a few of them. Of the ones that got published, my absolute favourite was “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze.” It was inspired by someone I once knew and loved, written during the stretch of 40 days and 40 nights when I cared for her: a difficult though rewarding experience, and I believe the story shows that.
This was also the year I got agented! Finding a literary agent was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life – and it involved writing a whole new novel, as one does. Brandy Vallance of BBLA is excellent, and my dystopian YA sci-fi novel, “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes,” is currently on sub, pending with a few editors. It may have been inspired by my Siberian childhood…
My filmmaking side keeps competing with the writing side: my second-ever film festival was Dam Short Film Festival in February, near Vegas, and it was the single greatest week of my adult life. The entire Boulder City came together to organize an event where every visiting filmmaker was treated like royalty, and it was cool beyond all words. I’m currently awaiting their decision for the upcoming festival in seven weeks: I should know within 48 hours. I hope they liked my new sci-fi offerings.
I made four more short films in 2025 and sent them off far and wide… That got me into three consecutive film festivals in the US in October (yay free hotels!) and might result in some more adventures in the coming months… Unless I repeat my Pacific Crest Trail thruhike, which is a very real possibility, seeing as I already don’t pay rent and have all my stuff packed up. (Strategy, eh?) We’ll see.
One definite success was getting my first-ever creative award: my film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” got the second place in the comedy sci-fi category at the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and that little prize alone can open up a lot of new doors for me… Incidentally, funny sci-fi is a remarkably underutilized subgenre. Hmm.
One of this year’s odder adventures began with too much beer. I was browsing FilmFreeway and applying to all the $5 festivals I could find (always an odd mix, those cheapest festivals) when I stumbled on the first-ever Worldcon sci-fi film festival. That annual convention is typically all about books, not movies, so of course I applied. And got accepted! And decided that if I attend, I may as well go for the entire week, not just one day. Seattle is always a fun town to visit, and that week was beautiful… But during the closing ceremony, the two hosts were so woefully unprepared that they didn’t merely mangle all the foreign names – they giggled while doing so.
Five days had passed with zero condemnation from any VIPs from the SFF community, and so I took it upon myself… As they say in Russia, “If not me, then who?” (“Yesli ne ya, to kto?”) And thus was born “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident” – the single most impactful thing I’ve ever written. It went viral. The organizers of the 2026 Worldcon in Los Angeles – a different crew – have vowed to do better. (Hard to do worse.) Some interesting conversations and debates took place…
And all of that was because once upon a time, I had too much beer, too much time (but that’s nothing new), and applied for an odd little film festival. A five-dollar bill, a click, and then a long and improbable series of events. Life can be funny like that.
I may be missing some other big 2025 developments, but I believe I’ve covered most of them. As the year ends, I’m sitting on nine sold but not-yet-published short stories and an almost-finished new novel and a few pending grant/residency proposals, and more than a few dreams. Once I finish typing this and crawl out of my oh-so-comfy capsule (it is currently 11:36am), I’ll slither over to the nearby cyber-cafe and use their computers to open a government PDF and submit a cyberpunk-ish short story for a writing contest organized by the Canadian military. My life is very strange: I have tried the traditional path; I have found it lacking.
I may go back to school and get my second Bachelor’s degree – in Physics this time. (The only anglophone universities in Quebec are in Montreal.) I may try some other fun stuff and see where that takes me. The horizon is open and vast.
And just for archival and historical purposes… Briefly: this was the year Donald Trump got inaugurated for the second time. Elon Musk gave not one but two Nazi salutes at the inauguration. It all went downhill from there, with ICE rounding up random people and sending them off to foreign concentration camps, with masked vigilantes harassing Americans without any fear of consequences, with massive protests that are nonetheless ignored by 97% of population. The AI bubble looks like it’s about to pop at long last. The US military has just destroyed its 30th fishing boat near Venezuela, as per the alcoholic Defense Secretary’s illegal orders.
…you can see how one would bury one’s head in fiction, eh?
So here is to a new year. Perhaps not a better one, but a new one nevertheless. Stay safe, my friends.
I aim to move from here to Montreal (or at least move my things) four days from now, at the very end of September. And yet… Uhaul is unsure whether it can rent me a one-way intercity truck. The person taking over my apartment lease broke every deadline and will technically move in before her application is fully processed. And the landlord, who outed himself as a xenophobic racist and sexist when I finally cornered him at the sketchy, unmarked office, has made every excuse in the book and blamed everyone but himself for his company’s rather impressive lack of customer service.
Splendid, eh.
I’ll get out of here one way or another, even if that means pulling a cart full of stuff all the way from here to Montreal, but damn, the escape velocity this move demands is really something.
I’ve lived in Quebec City for four years and one month: longer than I’ve lived anywhere since college. Too long…
When, somehow and at some point, I finally stash my things in a nice, heated storage unit in the big city, I will be technically homeless for quite a bit: a few days at a hostel, a couple of big, fancy parties (the kind that only Montreal can offer!), and then I’ll kick off my two-week film festival tour: a daisy-chain of three festivals in Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. The first will involve crashing at my sister’s basement, while the other two provide free lodging to their filmmakers, huzzah! So many new friends, new experiences, new memories to bury the old…
That fortnight-long adventure will end on October 20th, after which (barring last-moment acceptance letters from the last two festivals in November), I’ll have absolutely nothing on my agenda for about four months, which means I’ll step wayyy out of my comfort zone and give Workaway a try. It’s a fun little setup: you find a host, pay for your plane ticket and insurance, work about 20-25 hours a week, and get a free place to stay and free food, as well as tons of natural beauty (or urban hustle, if that’s more your style). I’ve just sent an introductory message to an absolutely amazing farm in Ecuador, and if they actually reply… That’ll be amazing. (Giant-sized turtles! Organic fruit! Perfect night sky!)
And if they don’t, in fact, reply – well, my carefully curated list of favourite Workaway hosts (all based in South America, because these winters are getting to me) will set me up with more adventures.
Sometime around February, I’ll fly back to hit up more film festivals. Over the past few weeks, I’ve applied to about a dozen writer-in-residence openings and grants. (That involved typing up a chapter from my creative non-fiction proposal in record time, and then submitting it literally five minutes before deadline!) Frankly, no idea if I’ll get any of them. The odds are stacked against me, but aren’t they always? Can’t win if you don’t try. I figure that my list of film festival screenings (seven so far, with more on their way!) and published story credits has me firmly in the “emerging Canadian writer” category, and that ain’t nothing.
…but if I do not, in fact, secure any of those coveted writing/filmmaking opportunities, then there’s a very very good chance that, come April, I’ll open up my storage unit, drop off my stuff, pick up a carefully pre-packed backpack (tactics, eh), and fly out to San Diego to repeat my Pacific Crest Trail adventure. Unlike the one in 2022, hopefully it’ll involve a whole lot less yelling at my accountant every few days and a bit more fun. (Might even join a tramily!) In that particular eventuality, I won’t rejoin civilization until late August-ish, or just in time for the 2026 Worldcon. We’ll see.
I’m getting over the big breakup, but – as always – in my own way. For some reason, this month had quite a few deadlines for short story anthologies… So I went ahead and wrote a short story for each of them. All 10 of them. The grand total was roughly 26,000 words. Wordcount aside, this has been the single most productive month of my life, because my brain was in desperate need of a distraction. When you feed your subconscious mind 10 different prompts and tell it to get on it, the end result can be pretty amazing. I followed Charlie Jane Anders’s advice on writing: transmute your feelings into art, let them pass through you, and create something beautiful… Or something, in any case. Realistically, I expect at least three of those stories to get accepted. Almost certainly won’t get all 10. Five or more acceptances would be amazing.
Quite a few of my stories (three? four?) are coming out between now and New Year’s: the publishing industry’s schedule works in mysterious ways. I will, of course, share the links here with all y’all.
In another world, where my luck was a bit better, I would’ve finished the Continental Divide Trail thruhike right about now, give or take. That would’ve resulted in a very very different year… For one thing, my relationship would still be intact, though every bit as doomed. My short story portfolio would’ve been much smaller. I wouldn’t have attended the 2025 Worldcon, wouldn’t have written this essay that’s gone viral, and that, in turn, wouldn’t have opened some rather interesting doors for me… On the other hand, I would’ve had a whole lot more experiences and adventures and new friendos.
On some level, I’m pretty sure that all the stories I’ve written (and sold!) over the past four months have been an attempt to overcompensate, to do something worthy and productive after my much-anticipated hiking adventure ended far too soon. My life is quite a lot different now, because of everything I’ve done since my return from the desert, and my 2026 will be quite different as a result of that.
The other me, the one who (hypothetically) finished the CDT, would be gearing up to do the Appalachian Trail, aka every introvert’s nightmare (it’s where the entire east coast comes to hang out), and would be making a fair bit less art. Maybe. Possibly. Hard to tell for sure.
These last few days of September are filled with giddy anticipation: I want to fast-forward through the remaining time, to jump straight to September 30th, to get it over with, to start my new adventure. The type of giddiness and impatience that every nomad knows…
But meanwhile, I need to get ready for a little going-away party with my local friendos – one tonight, another one tomorrow. A fun way to pass these last few evenings, before embarking on my Feral Artist Nomad adventure of uncertain duration.
I’ve recently found myself burdened with an inordinate amount of free time and utter lack of responsibilities of any kind. I’m choosing to use this opportunity to tap into my creative side, to a point. Last week, I wrote two new short stories for upcoming anthologies. (There were quite a few anthology calls with September deadlines!) I’ve also submitted my earlier short stories to 14 different submission calls. (Huzzah for simultaneous submissions, eh?) And just now, mere minutes ago, I sent an application for my first-ever fellowship. It feels existentially terrifying, though I suspect everyone secretly feels the same way: fake it till you make it, put on your big-artist face, push on, and persevere. Or push on, in any case.
…two and a half years is a pretty good run for a relationship. She had promised to change. That was a lie. It was for the best…
As I wrote in my shiny new author thread on the Codex message board (you should join if you’re in the biz! It’s mighty active, and their archives are amazing), my filmmaking side and my writing side are in a constant competition. Funny, that, considering my foray into filmmaking had started out as a way to stay sane while querying literary agents. As it stands right now, my filmmaking forays outweigh my writing ones, even if you include the recent viral essay. It took very little time to procure a list of the five most recent screenings and honours. (No prizes yet, but quite a few “finalist” laurels.) And thus the fellowship application was for my filmmaker self, not the writer self. I have this interesting idea for a crowdsourced sci-fi-esque mockumentary, and all I really need is a big ol’ external hard drive and a few weeks of uninterrupted time with no cellphone reception. (An anathema to most Millennials, I know.)
…she was incredibly particular about her water. I always made sure to carry a bottle of her favourite brand in my backpack. Most times, she didn’t even touch it. Now I have 20 of the damn things left in my fridge. Forcing myself to drink them because when I break my lease and move out, it would be beyond foolish to pack them…
I’d sent out my very first agent query in March 2024. Completed my first short film in June 2024. My first screening: October 2024. My first red carpet with adoring fans shouting my name in the darkness: February 2025. My first viral essay (which opens up a lot of possibilities…): August 2025. Things are accelerating, and I don’t think there’s a way to get off this ride, much like a rollercoaster which takes your initial consent and terrifies you the entire way down, up, and down again, over and over, until you finally reach the end. There is no way to leave before the ride is done. No good way, anyhow. I hadn’t realized these aspects of myself had even existed. And now, as any self-respecting gamer, I want to follow that progression tree all the way to the end. How far can I proceed? Is there an end at all? A whole new universe – two of them, actually – both with a nearly infinite amount of shiny and delicious knowledge to consume, absorb, enact.
…she was the last reason for me to stay in this beautiful tiny town. The big city to the west has far more parties, and more cultural events, and a gigantic airport that would not require me to carpool twice and dedicate an entire day just to get there and back. I’ll break my lease any day now. I’m curious about spending November-January doing light Workaway labour in some tropical country, or more than one. I’m curious about many things…
I believe that certain actions permanently alter your personality. There is a version of you before and after losing your virginity. Before and after having your first drink, first drug, first communion. (If ever, that is.) This morning, I’d been the sort of artist who had never applied for a grant or a fellowship of any sort. Here and now, just a few hours later, I can no longer say that.
It’s January 22, 2017, and Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway coins the phrase “alternative facts” during a TV interview while defending Sean Spicer’s blatantly false claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. The phrase goes viral. Within a week, the sales of Orwell’s 1984 go up by 9,400%. Conway gets mocked, becomes a meme, shrugs it off, and lives happily ever after.
It’s August 16, 2025. The two hosts of the annual Hugo Awards ceremony mangle many non-anglophone names, and giggle at least once while doing so.
It’s August 20. Host #1 makes a Bluesky comment, saying “For context I was high as a kite on pain meds.”
It’s August 21. My essay on the Hugo incident unexpectedly goes viral: 13,000 views and counting.
It’s September 2: 17 days after the awards ceremony, 12 days after the essay. The Seattle Worldcon Chair and the two hosts issue simultaneous non-apology apologies. They are… odd.
The easiest way to kill a lot of weeds or unwanted plants is to cover them with a tarp to cut off their sunlight. For best results, wait a week. Or two weeks. Or 17 days.
When you take 17 days to craft an apology, one would expect a masterpiece to rival Abraham Lincon’s Gettysburg Address, especially when those apologizing are professional writers. We did not get a masterpiece.
The Gettysburg Address was 271 words long. The hosts’ non-apology was 1,283 words long. The Chair’s non-apology was 401 words long. We are to believe that, on average, only 23.6 words of that statement were written every day.
Here is the shortest possible apology: “I’m sorry. I screwed up. How can I possibly make this better?” This took me 13 seconds to write. At this pace, working eight hours a day, for 17 days straight, my resulting apology would have been 451,938 words long, or only 6% shorter than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A few hours ago, Jess Nevins posted an excellent Bluesky thread about the lost art of apologizing. Just like me, he chose not to name the hosts.
I rather enjoyed his point #4:
“#4) I’m truly surprised I have to type this one, but….
DO NOT EVER SAY ANYTHING THAT CAN BE REMOTELY CONSTRUED AS ‘WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME OR YOUR LYING EYES/EARS?’
It happens all the time that the offender and the offended remember events differently.”
This bit was also quite good:
“Because if you make your living crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters and entire books, you don’t need time to gather your thoughts or to articulate your apology correctly. You write for a living: putting together an apology shouldn’t be difficult for you or take much time.”
The non-apology from the hosts begins with, “We’re truly sorry that our work hosting the 2025 Hugo Awards Ceremony has caused anyone distress.” That is an unusual way to start, and is synonymous with “we’re sorry you got upset.”
The letter goes on to claim there’d been confusion with the pronunciation guides, all caused by the Worldcon staff, and that there’d been no time to rehearse the names. (But I suspect they’d found the time to rehearse the Hugo song. Priorities…)
Perhaps most interestingly, the apology states that host #2 (the younger of the two hosts) did not giggle while reading any names. Well, of course she didn’t. That was host #1. (For what it’s worth, I too hate watching videos of myself and have a hard time recognizing my own voice.) For posterity’s sake, here is that giggle once again. There were thousands of us in the audience. We all heard it. We all reacted instantaneously, turning to our neighbours, asking, “Did that just happen?”
But no, dear reader. No. Do not believe your lying eyes and ears. What good have they ever done to you? Don’t worry your pretty little head. Do as you’re told instead.
The non-apology apology goes on to say that neither of the hosts had felt comfortable insisting on a full run-through rehearsal, because they’d never hosted an awards show before. That said, they’ve both offered their advice and guidance to the future Worldcon organizers. Generous.
Their statement does not mention host #1 being “high as a kite on pain meds.”
Their statement does mention omitting Kamilah Cole’s name, but that section ends rather oddly: it says that host #2 has apologized to Cole, and that host #1 “needs to do that as well!” (I have not altered their punctuation.) That reads like an odd first draft. That does not read like a professional statement that had taken two writers 17 days to prepare.
I often wonder about the ratio of “time spent rehearsing the Hugo song” to “time spent rehearsing the names,” but it’s bad luck to divide by zero.
In their non-apology, the hosts repeatedly say that the pronunciation guide was either missing or incomplete. That is objectively false.
On April 6, 2025, the Seattle Worldcon released this video where professional announcers read out almost every name. They read those names without giggling. If you’re curious what the giggle-inducing name is supposed to sound like, here you go. (Egbiameje Omole, I do not know you, but I am so sorry.)
The list of the finalists was not secret. It had been released more than four months before the Seattle Worldcon took place. The full video is 22.5 minutes long. You could play it almost three times in one hour at normal speed. You could practice the names multiple times per day.
If you cared, that is.
That pronunciation video is cleverly concealed. To access it, one must go on YouTube and type in such secret, esoteric words as “2025 Hugo Awards.”
Verily, I say upon thee: there was no way for anyone to find it.
In their non-apology, the hosts complain that the title of Darcie Little Badger’s YA novel, Sheine Lende, also wasn’t in their pronunciation guide. It might not surprise you to learn that the title was also in that pronunciation video, just 78 seconds in.
The hosts chose to release their non-apology in a rather unusual format: not as a blog post, or a press release, or even a PDF. No, it’s a shared Google Doc file. Fun thing about those files: they cannot be archived by the Wayback Machine, and the people who own the document can go in and alter it at any time.
The internet is a complicated and chaotic place. It’s possible that something unexpected might happen to that file within, let’s say, a year. It’d be a shame if it disappeared. A real shame.
As someone who cares about the preservation of historical documents, I’ve gone ahead and saved a PDF copy. It’s timestamped and tamperproof. If some tragedy ever befalls that Google Doc, I’ll attach my copy of the PDF to this essay. Please, no need to thank me.
How to issue a slightly longer apology:
Don’t start with “Sorry you got upset” or some variation thereof. Is it attention-grabbing? Oh yes. Is it conducive to your purposes? Oh no.
Consider starting with a brief and honest summary of what had happened. E.g., “During the most important awards ceremony many of the finalists may ever attend, we…”
Accept responsibility. E.g., “At least 50% of us were high as a kite. We did not prepare.”
Acknowledge the other party’s pain. E.g., “I can’t begin to imagine how that felt” – but not “Sorry if our work has caused anyone distress.”
Provide an objective judgment of your offense. E.g., “We failed at our main task” – but not “The staff failed us, and we were too shy.”
State your regret. E.g., “We’re truly and deeply sorry. That will not happen again” – but not “[Host #1] needs to apologize as well!” Alternatively, depending on your mood and desire to shake things up, you may say “Yeah, I’ll probably do it again.” Not recommended, but hey – that’s an option. Free speech and all.
Describe your future actions. E.g., “We will triple-check every name we’re not 100% sure about in the future.” Saying “we have a list of suggested remedies to pass along to the events team based on our experience” might not have the most impact.
Perhaps the most subtle aspect of this incident is the silence of the A-listers. Of all the bestselling authors I follow, to the extent of my knowledge, only Elizabeth Bear spoke about this entire incident. There were bloggers, of course: Cora Buhlert has made an excellent (as always) post on the nature of the two non-apologies. File 770 wrote about it here and here, though at one point the anti-name-manglers got referred to as “woke folk.”
There were many bestselling authors who sat in the same audience, and in better seats than the rest of us, probably, and who heard the mangling and the giggling, and then chose to say nothing. My best guess is that they didn’t want to make waves, didn’t want to upset their friends. Smile and clap and move on.
I suspect that by writing the previous essay, as well as this one, I might be sabotaging the odds of publishing my YA sci-fi novel, as well as any follow-ups.
Perhaps. But even if so…
Worth it.
When properly pronouncing people’s names becomes woke, only the woke will properly pronounce people’s names.
The non-apology from the Seattle Worldcon’s Chair, Kathy Bond, is much shorter – a mere 401 words. It’s quite good, and it almost passes for a true apology if you don’t look closely enough. It sure seems to follow the traditional format.
And yet… It has no mention of host #1’s odd admission of being high during the ceremony. It does not mention that host’s giggling while reading a non-anglophone name. It suggests creating a centralized “organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names” (or, in simpler terms, “name team”) without explaining why their own pronunciation guide video got ignored by all.
Perhaps the strangest part is that neither of the two non-apology letters even mentions the r/fantasy nominee for the Best Related Work. When the two hosts got to that slide, they saw the list of 20 or so names (as well as Reddit nicknames), and they both laughed in unison as they skipped it. That was not an ambiguous giggle. That was laughter. Was it nerves? Was it the same kind of classism that the AO3 folks experienced not long ago when the very nature of their platform wasn’t deemed serious enough? We’ll never know.
What to do if you didn’t rehearse any of the names and are faced with an unexpectedly long list of them:
Read out the title. (Good job!)
Consider reading the names.
Consider asking for help.
Consider treating the nominees with respect and dignity.
What not to do:
Don’t laugh.
Don’t goddamn laugh.
In my first essay, I asked the Seattle Worldcon these seven questions:
How many times did they rehearse the Hugo song?
How many times did the announcers rehearse the names?
Was there ever a pronunciation guide?
If not, why?
If yes, what happened to it?
Was there ever, at any point of the planning process, a voiced objection, or even a concern, that the popular awards presenter would not be able to pronounce foreign names?
If so, what was the reaction?
I suspect the Worldcon people saw them while drafting their short non-apology. Only one of those questions got addressed, and even then, very briefly: “We provided insufficient organizational plans at the podium, including an inadequately designed pronunciation guide and other poorly designed materials.”
Translation: “We didn’t prepare.”
That admission is as much as you and I deserve, my friends.
If anyone ever decides to make a Fyre Festival-style documentary about this mess, it’d be pretty entertaining. I bet there’s at least one insider who doesn’t agree with the party line. I bet there have been some interesting Discord chats or text messages or even emails during those 17 days.
I bet I’m not the only one who likes to save things for safekeeping.
My blog will not fall prey to digital decay. I’ll keep it accessible for as long as I live – and then some.
You may be reading this in the future, in a year far beyond 2025. No, not you with the cat – you with the cyber-glasses. I hope you’ll find this essay useful, whoever you are. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re insatiably curious. Maybe you’re working on a book (do you still have books in the future?) about the history of Hugo awards.
Perhaps, in whatever future you’re reading this, be it a week, or a month, or a decade from now, you’ll have more answers and more context and more clarity.
But meanwhile, here and now, in this slice of the time-space amber, this is the best bad truth that we mere mortals are allowed by our betters.
It’s August 16, 2025, Worldcon, Seattle, and the main presenter of the annual Hugo awards butchers almost every foreign name on the list. When trying to pronounce an unusual African name, the presenter giggles.
It’s 1934, and Frank Lloyd Wright designs his masterpiece, Fallingwater. The beautiful house sits over a waterfall. To an outside observer, it’s a marvel of architecture, a fusion of engineering and nature. To the people who actually live there, it’s an endless nightmare of leaking roofs and cracked concrete. Fallingwater’s owner nicknames it “Rising Mildew.”
The 2025 Worldcon had hundreds of panels and thousands of attendees. It had fantastic freebies and fanfic fans and fun filking. It had authors and poets and filmmakers and podcasters. It had five full days of genre celebrations, of coming together as one.
It also failed at its most basic, fundamental purpose.
The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.
And then… Then the esteemed Hugo awards host (as well as the secondary host) mispronounces non-English names, over and over. (Even Denis Villeneuve wasn’t spared.) They skip one of the nominees altogether, making the audience shout in unison, after which there is some awkward fumbling. (“Did we miss one? Oh no! Why aren’t they on the list? … Clearly they have to win because they were on the second page.”)
(That nominee did not win.)
The skipped nominee was Kamilah Cole, a Jamaican-born woman, whose only fault, it seems, was having her name on the second side of a page. (Typing on both sides of the page is a brand new technological development. Very few people have heard of it. We cannot expect mere Hugo awards hosts to keep up with such groundbreaking inventions.)
A house is supposed to keep you safe and dry, even when – or perhaps especially when – it doubles as a work of art. If it can’t do that bare minimum, it becomes worse than useless. It turns into a liability.
Likewise, an annual awards ceremony that fumbles that most basic of all tasks – pronouncing the finalists’ names – fails at its most basic purpose.
It’s May 2004, rural Nevada, high school graduation. The kind of school where many students get pregnant before they get their diploma. The kind of school where the biggest scandal of the year is the video of two boys kissing at a house party. The kind of school where the History teacher stops in the middle of a joke, chuckles, and says, “I’ll finish it later” when he realizes one of the school’s three Black students is sitting in the back of the class. The kind of school where all the students get lined up against the wall every few weeks, while a gigantic German Shepherd sniffs each crotch, presumably seeking drugs, and its handler, a gun-wielding cop, smirks.
It’s that kind of school. In a small desert town with one big street, one Walmart, and more casinos than libraries.
And as the graduation ceremony approaches, I worry that the announcer will butcher my name, just like most of my American classmates have during my sole year with them. The big day comes, and I’m beyond amazed when the announcer makes sure to ask each senior how to pronounce their name – and then gets all of them right, including mine.
Beneath the bright lights, on that stage, I get the ceremonial piece of paper and hear my true name. Few people clap: they’re so used to mangling my name that they literally can’t recognize me. No matter. I exit, stage right. Less than three months later, I leave for college. I never return.
The Hugo awards ceremony features a somewhat elaborate song number, with multiple people (including the awards presenters) singing in unison, at length, repeatedly. At one point, they even get the audience to join in.
There’s a very good chance they’d spent more time rehearsing that song than the names of the finalists, for whom this awards ceremony may well have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
During the ceremony, both of the main announcers say – repeatedly – that they don’t have a pronunciation guide for the names.
Five days later, there is still no official statement from the organizers. The announcer who giggled at the African name is silent on social media.
Aside from a Bluesky post by Elizabeth Bear, there has been no discussion, no articles, nothing beyond social media rumours. This is being relegated to the dustbin of history. An unfortunate faux pas. An oopsie.
I shall not let it fade away.
In the global forum that is the internet, I rank just slightly above a street preacher with a megaphone. I don’t expect this essay to be seen by more than a few dozen eyeballs. But my blog will live on for decades, and so will this contemporary record.
It’s 2015, Seattle, tech industry. Many of my coworkers are from India. Their culture fascinates me, as do their names. I take great care to memorize each arrangement of syllables, to commit to memory the names I’d never before encountered. Suyash, Vairavan, Srinivas, and many others. The sole Indian woman on my team is named Vijayalakshmi Deverakonda, and I’m in love with the melodious sound of her name, the way the syllables cascade off my tongue.
The rest of my white coworkers don’t share my respect for people’s names. They routinely call her “Vijay,” which is a male name, and more than a little insulting.
Within two years, Vijayalakshmi and I become workplace rivals. Afterward, we don’t stay in touch. But for a few months, I knew I’d made a fellow immigrant happy because I’d gone the extra mile to learn her true name, to treat her like a fellow human being.
Every failure can be explained by one of these two fundamental explanations: evil or stupidity. Malice or ignorance. It’s often hard to determine which of the two is the main factor. When people make assumptions, and when they build further assumptions on such shaky foundations, their ultimate conclusions diverge from reality.
I make no assumptions. I can believe that a celebrity of the literary world, the main announcer chosen by the 2025 Worldcon committee far in advance, was merely ignorant, and maybe nervous, but not evil.
I say this to myself, and then I remember that giggle in the middle of that unusual name.
Here is how to pronounce “Grigory Lukin.” The first name rhymes with “story.” It has nothing to do with the name “Gregory.” The last name rhymes with “win.” It does not at all sound like “looking.”
For the purposes of brevity, this essay will not cover the pronunciation of my consonant-rich patronym.
It’s 2017, Seattle, the same stressful tech company where white and Indian employees mingle but don’t mix. In a work chatroom, a fellow white guy makes a dirty joke about an Indian woman whose first name is Sukdeep.
I submit an HR report, as do several of my Indian workers. They’re surprised that I would care. To me, that’s a matter of fundamental human decency.
My white male coworker is a successful programmer. He gets a chat with HR, but suffers no further consequences.
The Hugo awards presenter is neither white nor male nor a programmer. But they are successful.
I live in Québec these days. Either here or in America, I can pass for a local, as long as I don’t open my mouth or show my ID. My Russian accent will never truly go away, and for as long as it stays with me, changing my name to something more Western-sounding would be futile. I shall always be The Other.
We rarely speak of this – we who have made a life for ourselves in the West, we who have fully integrated, we who have found a niche in this world. We rarely voice that deep-seated anxiety: do our new compatriots actually accept us? Or are we still viewed as The Other? Do they chuckle and mock our names when we’re not around? Do they bother to view us as fully human even as they enjoy our writing, our films, our art?
We’ll never know for sure. It shall forever be unknowable. Probably paranoia, nothing more.
And then the host of the most prestigious sci-fi and fantasy awards ceremony giggles while reading a foreign name, and the deep-seated anxiety flares up, and I think that maybe it’s not paranoia after all.
The importance of names is an ancient concept, perhaps even eternal. Even today, some cultures give their children a fake name to ward off evil spirits. Religious Jews don’t pronounce the four-letter name of God written in the Torah. Some cults insist on changing their followers’ names to separate them from their past. Many cultures automatically change women’s last names to those of their husbands. Residential schools were infamous for changing Native American children’s names as part of the forced assimilation process. In fairy tales around the world, through the ages, a villain could be defeated only if the hero learned and pronounced their true name.
And at the annual Hugo awards ceremony, the host giggles when they read an unusual name during the highlight of someone’s professional career.
Most issues can fit on a spectrum from one to ten.
Refusing to rehearse foreign names and then mangling them during an awards ceremony is more serious than a playground microaggression.
At the same time, it’s far less serious than a large-scale cultural genocide.
At the same time, it’s still on the spectrum.
Things you should do if you’re overwhelmed and nervous while presenting the most prestigious annual science fiction and fantasy award:
1. Take a few seconds to refer to your pronunciation guide.
1a. If a pronunciation guide is not available, demand one. Have the singers come back on stage to fill the gap until the guide is procured.
2. If the pronunciation guide doesn’t exist, take a few more seconds to summon somebody (perhaps even one of the singers!) to help you.
3. Apologize to the audience, invite every finalist to join you on the stage, and have them pronounce their own names into the microphone.
4. Apologize even more profusely. Admit your nervousness and lack of preparation. Give the microphone to somebody more qualified. Walk off the stage. Don’t return.
Things you should not do:
1. Don’t giggle.
2. Don’t goddamn giggle.
You may mock this essay, as is your right. In these turbulent times, as the planet gets ever hotter, as war crimes get more horrific, as genocides get swept under the rug, this is what people complain about?
And yes, sure, you’d be right. Saving even a single starving child from a sniper is infinitely more important than this issue, now and forevermore. And yet, if your first reaction was to scoff, consider this: is your name conventional? Do people ever giggle when they see it? Are you aware of the concept of microaggressions? Would you say you believe in equality, that racism is wrong, that diversity is important? When you claim to be an ally to those different from yourself, do you accept (both intellectually and emotionally) that they have certain issues which you cannot comprehend but should believe?
If there’s ever an apology letter from anyone involved, it’ll probably blame stress, and anxiety, and growing up in a social environment that didn’t have such linguistic diversity.
Over the past five days, there has been no such letter.
I’m prepared to accept that the main announcer (and their helper) was an anxiety-ridden human being, with human biases, with imperfections. I understand. There are eight billion people in this world. Quite a few of them have sins that are far worse than laughing at foreign names.
I don’t demand perfection. I demand basic competency.
This essay isn’t about the Hugo awards announcers. It’s about the stunning incompetence of the ceremony’s planners.
Here are some things I’d love to learn, but doubt I ever will:
How many times did they rehearse the Hugo song?
How many times did the announcers rehearse the names?
Was there ever a pronunciation guide?
If not, why?
If yes, what happened to it?
Was there ever, at any point of the planning process, a voiced objection, or even a concern, that the popular awards presenter would not be able to pronounce foreign names?
If so, what was the reaction?
I’ve been a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. I can go to great lengths to suspend my disbelief. But if you expect me to believe that a racist, homophobic, rural high school in one of the poorest states can find a professional name announcer, while a giant annual convention held in one of the most prosperous cities cannot… I’m sorry. Even I cannot suspend my disbelief that much.
Was the awards presenter chosen on the basis of friendship and connections and good vibes? Were they chosen because they had decades of experience in speculative fiction? Was there no one else available who had a richer linguistic and sociopolitical background?
Would it be fair to say that even if any concerns had been voiced at all, the overall sentiment was to dismiss them and hope for the best? Let’s just do it and be legends, man. We’ll do it live. Fingers and toes crossed. YOLO, eh. What’s the worst that can happen?
A system that awards top jobs based on seniority and connections rather than competency related to the job at hand ceases to be a system. It becomes a joke.
This essay is not about the US politics.
Throughout history, one of the worst and most unusual punishments was to have your name struck from historical record, as if you never existed at all.
Call it petty. Call it poetic. Call it neither, or both. I deliberately choose not to mention the name of the giggling name-mangler in this essay. Likewise for their co-host. It’s a bit ironic, since neither of them had actually introduced themselves when they started the ceremony. (Nice song, though.)
The announcer’s name will probably live on through all their many written works, but this essay will do them no such honour.
Names have power. Deleting them, even more so.
Someday, I hope to be a Hugo finalist. I’ve got about 35 years left; 40 if I eat my veggies. If I ever do get that honour, when my turn comes, will the announcer mangle my name? Will I be afforded the most basic human respect of an identity?
In this genre of dragons and werewolves and rocketships, this is my wildest, most improbable hope: that someday, we shall have awards ceremonies where people with unusual names will be treated as individuals.
“I’m looking for my cheat-sheet before I say something that is difficult for me to say… Let us see… I don’t know if I have any pronunciation guides. Okay, I’ll just – I’ll be corrected when I’m wrong, okay?” https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=_7rZwfn-l5988LjF&t=6061
“And this – I do not know how to say this, but you know how to say this”
Related to the topic of names: a very beautiful short film about a rural woman and an eccentric foreigner with a hard-to-pronounce name, and their resulting friendship. “Meeting Mr. Oscar” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbPCcpzQ1I
Most advice comes in parables. The kind that doesn’t is straightforward: “don’t eat the yellow snow” or “use the bathroom before going outside.” Anything more complex than that, though… Parables. Lots and lots of parables.
You may have heard the same damn piece of advice dozens of times before, but someday it’ll sneak up on you, shaped and phrased and packaged as something entirely new, novel, and unexpected – and before you know it, you’re looking at the same problem from an entirely different perspective, and everything clicks in place.
Ever since finalizing the edits on my YA sci-fi novel “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes” in April, I’ve been more or less procrastinating on writing my next novel. (Also sci-fi, but – for once – without any time travel whatsoever! I know, I’m just as shocked as you are.) The last three months haven’t been unproductive, mind you. I’ve written tons of new stories, attempted (and then quit) a huge hiking adventure, and joined the SFWA. (Huzzah! The screening process took just two days.) But despite assembling an impressive collection of factoids, cool epigraphs, and citations for my next novel, I never actually sat down to write it…
A blank page is perfect by default: it is pure, unsullied by substandard words, and filled with glamorous potential. But you can’t make a novel out of blank pages. You must sit down and actually write.
Not long ago, I was procrastinating by reading the writing advice from some of the best writers of our time. Among them was Octavia E. Butler, whose work ethic was legendary: she treated writing as a job, and wrote four hours a day, every day. (By my guesstimate, that puts her in the top 1% of writers or thereabout.) This page of advice had a section called “Don’t Prettify Your First Draft.” It had this very interesting bit of advice: “To her, the first draft wasn’t art. It was a raw material dump. Only after that could real craft begin. She followed what they call ‘vomit drafting.'”
The phrase “vomit drafting” was so over-the-top vulgar, obscene, and hilarious, that it got past all of my mental shields, all the laziness and procrastination. We’ve all thrown up at some point. A highly unpleasant and purely physical sensation, that. When you link that simple, brutal word with “writing” (an activity that has more mystique and unmet expectations attached to it than just about anything else) – well, the juxtaposition is nothing short of hilarious.
And that’s what did it for me. I’d read lots of different variations on the theme before: the first draft’s job is to exist, every first draft sucks, etc, etc. But this simple, plain, funny brutality – “vomit drafting” – was what ultimately worked for me.
And so… I pretended to turn off the part of my brain responsible for shame or self-esteem, and I sat down, and I just started typing. The codename for my novel is “Inhuman Insurance Inception” (the actual title is much snappier, I promise), and it’ll feature two different points-of-view, as well as lots of interesting, world-building interludes. (A bit like in “The Watchmen” graphic novel.)
I started writing 11 days ago, on July 22. Haven’t missed a day thus far. The total wordcount (the first POV + the interludes thus far) is 15,146 words, which is pretty damn great. (I’ve also managed to knock out at least one new short story along the way. Yay side quests!)
I’ll leave for Worldcon in 10 days and I’m not exactly sure whether I’ll be able to maintain my writing streak of 1,000+ words per day, but I know I’ll add at least a few new words to ye olde manuscript. And the entire time I write, I’ll imagine the late, great Octavia E. Butler sitting in the same room, typing on her own computer, the two of us vomiting our first drafts onto the hitherto pristine – and pure, and empty, and therefore unsellable – pages.
Well, using the non-traditional definition of “reel,” but still. I’ve spent the last couple of months building up my army of loyal followers (and book enthusiasts!) over at Ye Olde Instagram. It’s been a quaint little quest, going from roughly 200 followers (lazily assembled over many many years, mostly by accident), to just over 1,500 and counting. That’s not nearly as high as some of the behemoth influencer accounts, but should be high enough to – at the very least – show that I’m serious about book promotion.
Aside from the many handcrafted memes on writing I’ve shared with my new friends, I’ve also been making reels, aka very short videos. For the most part, they’ve been my reviews of different books on writing. (There are so very, very many of them out there!) Yesterday, feeling particularly high on life, I spent altogether too much time to craft this little reel that makes fun of popular book genres. That was the closest I’ve come to making a short film in about four months, and was a ton of fun to make. (And all the little “likes” keep rolling in!)
I already had all the props on account of having accidentally developed a hat collection over the years, across my many travels. (Don’t ask about the lab coat. Long story.) In retrospect, I’m surprised by the five genres I picked – because between them, they fairly accurately represent the five humours of my personality. (There ain’t a lot of Romance in this life, but I’ve still got 35 good years ahead of me.) Incidentally, the “Slipstream” bit is more or less my default mode these days, though my walk through the sunny streets of Quebec City is a bit less over-the-top exuberant than that. (But only a bit.)
It’s an odd art form, these reels. Ditto for the short videos on Facebook an especially TikTok. (I speak not of Pinterest, for that’s a dark, forbidden land beyond my socioeconomic status.) I truly and sincerely hope somebody out there is archiving all those little videos for the future. Some of them are creative masterpieces shot on essentially zero budget, such as this little reel right here. (That was some Rashomon-level retelling, eh?) But then again, I have this intuition that the digital decay will come for them all, that almost all of them will disappear within 10 years. Definitely within 25. Shame.
In any case, here are some reels I’ve made, in case you wanted to see what all I do to build a loyal geeky following. In chronological older, starting with the oldest:
Huh. More reels than I would’ve thought. They sneak up on you!
And with that, it’s time to head back to doing absolutely nothing while, in the background, nurturing my imagination to see what else it comes up with.
Do all y’all have an all-time-favourite reel or short video to share? If so, drop the link in the comments!
I love it when a bunch of things I’m juggling pay off all at once. To outsiders, that looks like magic. To me, that’s the result of a lot of work.
I’ve heard back from a few film festivals, and they want me in! There are a couple I’m not yet allowed to announce (because they give the filmmakers the good news before posting the results online), but the one I can absolutely mention here and now is the 11th annual Ridgway Independent Film Festival (RIFF), held in the beautiful Ridgway, Colorado. Never really been to Colorado (in some alternate universe, I’d be hiking through it right around now…), but I look forward to visiting it! The festival will be in mid-October. If any of you are around those parts, drop me a line – let’s hang out, eh.
Yesterday, I signed the contract for my sixth short story publication, huzzah! The story is “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze” and it’ll run in Bullet Points magazine this October. The title comes from a Biblical allegory that tried to convey how futile it would be for a mortal to comprehend God-level plans. The premise of my story is somewhat similar: what if there was someone so brilliant, so off-the-charts great at integrating and weaponizing different fields of science, that she’d be destined to take over the world? Not only here, but in every single dimension. And what if an assassin sent to kill her found not yet another version of a megalomaniacal tyrant, but… someone entirely different? Wait till October to learn more!
After I signed that contract, that set off the final stage of my internal Rube Goldberg machine, because at that exact moment, I became eligible to join SFWA! (SFWA stands for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, aka the worldwide guild.) To join as an associate-level member, you need to prove you’ve earned at least $100 as a genre writer over the course of your life. Reader, I am very very proud to share that with this new story sale, my lifetime earnings equal exactly $100.78. Right past the finish line, woot! (It would’ve been funnier to land at $100.01, but I’ll take $100.78!)
And so… I filled out the long and detailed SFWA associate application yesterday, at long, long last, after many years of dreaming and planning and writing. It was a bit funny to encounter the “I am not a robot” checkbox during the application process. A very dry sort of pun, considering.
The form requested proof of earnings, of course. My sincerest apologies to the SFWA staffer tasked with reviewing and summing up all six contracts I uploaded. If you’re reading this, my SFWA friend, and if we ever meet, I’ll buy you a glass of water. (The annual membership fee is $100, leaving me exactly 78 cents. Heh. Good investment, though.)
Joining the SFWA will grant me access to what might be the most exclusive message board in the world, with decades-old archives of SFF writers talking about life, writing, and everything else. Also, access to SFWA convention suites. Also also, the ability to nominate (and vote) for the annual Nebula award. Also also also, a not-insignificant level of protection in the event something goes haywire with a writing contract. And much, much more… I hope my application goes through before this year’s Worldcon, which will kick off in just three weeks. As a filmmaker with a short film and a live screening, and as the (hopefully) newest SFWA member, that’ll be one helluva week!
And, to wrap this up with even more good news – I started writing my third sci-fi novel! (This one, in a surprising twist, will feature zero time travel. I know, I know.) I’ll keep the title secret for now, but the working title is… let’s call it “Inhuman Insurance Inception.” That more or less sums it up. It’ll be a multi-POV tale of the ethics of assimilation in general and first contact in particular. Aliens and humans. Hackers and webcams. The so-called civilized humans and the isolated tribes. And more…
So far, I’m 4,000 words in, with an outline and a lot of juicy quotable tidbits already prepared, and I’m going to shoot for 2,000 or so words per day. It’ll be easy, considering the plot has been boiling inside my brain for many many months. Should be fun, eh.
And with that… Gonna sign off, watch some surprisingly poignant reality TV (I know, I know…), and get ready for another day of writing.
Grigory Lukin.com 