File 770
Issue 143: July 2004
The "Long List" is the Worldcon runners' name for that, well, long list of past Worldcon chairs, GoHs, locations and attendance numbers in the Souvenir Book. That historic compilation seems eternally cursed by problems of human error and forgetfulness, and a tendency for each year's committee to adjust certain entries to reflect its fanpolitical leanings. (One litmus test for this is to see whether Gary Farber has been listed as a co-chair of Iguanacon, as demanded post hoc by several leading fans.)
Noreascon 4 formed a Long List committee to put together a complete and accurate list of Worldcon and ancillary data which is free of typos and other trivial mistakes. The results will be posted on a web page and made available as Word documents. The same committee has been officially deputized for the purpose by the World Science Fiction Society. Presently doing this good work are Mark Olson (Chairman), Kevin Standlee, George Flynn, Joe Siclari, Rich Lynch and Craig Miller.
Worldcons also publish a list of all the past Hugo winners and the current nominees. In theory. In 2001, MilPhil's Souvenir Book left out six of the year 2000's Hugo winners, while in 1994, Conadian omitted the list of its own Hugo nominees. The Special Committee Awards given by L.A.con III have yet to appear in any con's Hugo Awards summary. The NASFiC historical list was not compiled until 1999, and has made only a couple appearances since, even though NASFiC is a WSFS convention, despite the wishes of a loud minority.
The same committee is working on canonical versions of all the other lists, too. Standardized lists will be a valuable resource for people doing Worldcon publications. The work-in-progress can be found on a Nesfa website:
http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/
The committee's philosophy for dealing with controversy is: "When multiple interpretations of a piece of data (who chaired a convention, what its name was, where it was held, etc.) exist, our policy is to have the Long List include the version which in our judgment best reflects the facts as understood by the people involved, and to document whatever variations or details we have discovered in the notes. We will respect historical judgments as long as they are not clearly in error, and we will attempt to objectively verify any corrections or notes we add."
The work in general is good, earnest historianship, except where the committee allowed itself a minor self-indulgence. While looking over the explanatory notes on the NASFiC Long List on the site I found: "1990 - ConDigeo. The convention's name was occasionally spelled 'ConDiego'."
Difficult as it is to keep history entertaining, this probably is more fun than they ought to be having at the expense of San Diego fandom. Though it cannot be denied that the typoed version of the 1990 NASFiC's name truly is used more often by the cognoscenti, so much that I am reminded of Ed Green's story about the dog-handling MP in the Air Force who swore at his dog so routinely that his dog stopped answering commands when called by his real name.
