Lottery Fantasy: Cash Prize for Hugo Awards

[kevin_standlee]

What with half-a-billion dollars up for grabs in the MegaMillions draw, one starts to think of things one could do with the money, even if (as I would) you opt for the NPV rather than the annuity

Comments

[johnnyeponymous]

I have already set-up my plans for when I win the lottery (and I will!)

1) Buy BASFA the HUGE Victorian in Santa Clara as the Clubhouse!
2) Fund the Christopher J Garcia Awards for Achievement in the Field of Excellence (The Rules and Areas of Recognition will change annually at my whim)
3) Start my Museum of Games
4) Start a free printing and distribution system for zines!
5) New episodes of Outsourced...
Chris

[kevin_standlee]

My plans do of course include buying my own private railroad car. And offering grants to Worldcons to get the membership costs down to levels competitive with other comparable events.

[beamjockey]

Are you going to bring your private railroad car to Worldcons? Will you be throwing a swanky party aboard for a select few guests? May I be invited?

[kevin_standlee]

1. If I can acquire it in time, yes. I wouldn't want to rush such an acquisition. Besides, I already have tickets for the California Zephyr out and the Texas Eagle back.

2. Oh, definitely, circumstances permitting. (It'd be easier in St. Louis, where there's a private-car "marina" at the old Union Station, I think.)

3. Certainly!

[bovil]

Can we require that Christopher Priest rant about the results every year in order to generate media attention?

[kevin_standlee]

Good idea!

[petrea_mitchell]

I would never want to win a prize that big (see here for cautionary tales), and if a pile of cash like that suddenly dropped into my lap I would want to immediately give nearly all of it to some outfit like the Gates Foundation that knows what the heck to do with that kind of money.

But I'd keep a little bit for the year-of-conventions project, of course. Any unused budget from that would go to the fan funds.

[kevin_standlee]

I recognize the potential perceived inequity, but if you try to make the prize different for each category - a privately-endowed fund independent of WSFS could do so - you face a different inequity.

Furthermore, for some potential Hugo winners in BDP, $1000 would actually be pretty significant. Think about the Bradbury video or Lucas Back in Anger. I rather expect that the big studios would either pass on the prize or redirect it to some charity, but that doesn't bother me.

When considering such things, there is no single "right" or "fair" answer, so you get to pick which inequity is less bad. So far, equal amounts per category seem more fair than trying to decide how much more Best Novel should get versus Best Fan Artist.

[rono_60103]

On the idea itself: my big concern would be dealing with the foundation to administer the funds. I suspect that there would be some at the business meeting afraid of this just because it would sound too much like "Worldcon, Inc

[kevin_standlee]

Yeah, as I build this castle in the air I thought of that. Personally, I don't think I'd need WSFS's permission to create such a foundation, unless I used some of the IP of the organization in the name or something like that. Give it a sufficiently generic name that doesn't use one of the service marks and simply announce that the foundation would award $N to every Hugo Award winner and I don't see what the Business Meeting could do about it. And remember, I think about this from the other side as the WSFS MPC Chairman.

WSFS owns the service marks, which means it can control certain misuses. What it can't do is tell you not to use one of the service marks to legitimately describe the Worldcon or the Hugo Awards. (In fact, we like people to do that; it strengthens Worldcon's service mark the more people use it to describe the World Science Fiction Convention.) I think attempting to order a hypothetical Standlee Foundation to not award money to Hugo Award winners would make WSFS look completely absurd, and couldn't be stopped anyway,