2018 Hugo Winners

The winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced on Sunday, August 19, 2018, at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention.

The administrators received and counted 2,828 valid ballots (2,810 electronic and 18 paper) from the members of the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention.

The Hugo Awards are the premier award in the science fiction genre, honoring science fiction literature and media as well as the genre’s fans. The Awards were first presented at the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia (Philcon II), and they have continued to honor science fiction and fantasy notables for well over 60 years.

The winners are:

2018 Associated Awards (not Hugos)

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

  • Rebecca Roanhorse

The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book

  • Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)

2018 Hugo Awards

Best Fan Artist

  • Geneva Benton

Best Fan Writer

  • Sarah Gailey

Best Fancast

  • Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace

Best Fanzine

  • File 770, edited by Mike Glyer

Best Semiprozine

  • Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Julia Rios; podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky

Best Professional Artist

  • Sana Takeda

Best Editor – Short Form

  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas

Best Editor – Long Form

  • Sheila E. Gilbert

Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form

  • The Good Place: “The Trolley Problem,” written by Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan, directed by Dean Holland (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television)

Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form

  • Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs, directed by Patty Jenkins (DC Films / Warner Brothers)

Best Graphic Story

  • Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)

Best Related Work

  • No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Best Series

  • World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Harper Voyager / Spectrum Literary Agency)

Best Short Story

  • “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Best Novelette

  • “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)

Best Novella

  • All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

Best Novel

  • The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

385 thoughts on “2018 Hugo Winners

  1. And the women who complained when they had no winners were a certain type of eternal whiners?

    Nah, it just means I am in no way going to do anything but point and laugh at people who are suddenly frantic and pontificating about ‘bias’ because oh my, women have dominated for a couple of years. When those people apparently had no concerns about *decades* of male authors dominating.

  2. Tavella:

    “Nah, it just means I am in no way going to do anything but point and laugh at people who are suddenly frantic and pontificating about ‘bias’ because oh my, women have dominated for a couple of years. When those people apparently had no concerns about *decades* of male authors dominating.”

    You also like to point and laugh at women complaining about awards where they do not have significant representation? Why do you think it is fun to point and laugh at people? You sound like the puppies.

    Try to enjoy the winners instead.

  3. @ avery: But is there a 50:50 expected distribution? What’s the actual ratio of published male to female science fiction writers, as opposed to the general population?

    @ Xtifr: I agree strongly with your #2. Given a choice between a work that strikes me as formulaic and one of equal quality that does something different, I’ll choose the latter to nominate or vote for. And in recent years, a lot of that ground-breaking work seems to be coming from female authors.

    @ Hampus: Also consider this: one of the known places where budding authors hone their skills is in writing fanfic. And women are still the vast majority of fanfic writers. We may be seeing the effects of a long-term pipeline.

  4. @avery abernethy

    Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad.

    Change the record, airboy, you’ve worn this one out.

  5. “Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad.”

    Being one sad person writing one sad comment complaining about 2,500 voters is even more sad.

  6. That George RR Martin guy throws a hell of a party! I’m still tired.

    A good time was had by all, winners and losers.

    Red Wombat to me: There are dancing robots in there.
    Me: It’s Silicon Valley. It’s what we do. We’re in The Future.
    Wombat: (deadpan) It’s a beautiful thing.

  7. Oh everybody has had the discussion about bias versus statistical bias already. Yes, the proportion of women winning is unlikely to occur by chance, so it is reasonable that it occurred for a *reason* other than chance. Some sort of overarching deep-rooted historical bias in favour of women is something we can immediately rule out though.

    We also can’t conclude that this is a long-term trend. Nor can we conclude it was due to irrational choices and indeed we can quickly reject that people voted for works solely based on gender by noting the high quality of what won.

  8. I note that the report has messed up the 25% test again. The 25% figure should be compared against ballots in the category excluding those with first choice no award. It doesn’t make any difference this year, Helsinki got it right last year, but in 2016 related work and fancast should have failed the test. Both went no award anyway.

  9. @Hampus:

    You also like to point and laugh at women complaining about awards where they do not have significant representation?

    No, it’s pointing and laughing at the hypocrisy of crying over a statistical imbalance only when it doesn’t support one’s personal sense of superiority. Nora Jemisin talked about this in that marvelous speech.

  10. I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it best: “When I’m asked when there will be enough women on the Supreme Court? And I say ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

    I have a longer answer that involves social media, online publication and the network effect, but in this case I think shorter is better.

  11. I’d just like to join in and congratulate all the winners, and especially our host.

  12. Rail:

    “No, it’s pointing and laughing at the hypocrisy of crying over a statistical imbalance only when it doesn’t support one’s personal sense of superiority. Nora Jemisin talked about this in that marvelous speech.”

    And you know for a fact that the person “crying” about the statistical imbalance (if mentioning should know be known as crying) never has mentioned/cried about the balance when it has been women on the losing side?

    Because why would it otherwise be ok to point and laugh at people or, to use puppy words, make heads explode and make duck noises?

  13. @Hampus: Do you really want me to waste time going back through each comment in this thread and analyze it for you? Because that’s what you’re asking for.

    Instead, perhaps you should go back to the original comment that brought up the subject and ask yourself what you missed about it that’s pushing women’s buttons.

    Sorry, I have lost patience with this “you shouldn’t criticize if you can’t read their minds and determine their TRUE FEELINGS!” argument. I’m pretty confident that that you’re falling into a Geek Fallacy trap, but that’s a common right-wing derailing tactic.

  14. @avery abernethy: “Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad. Participants can pat themselves on the back “for a job well done” but the self-selected group voting is tiny compared to total readers.”

    You say this as if you expect anyone here to be shocked and/or outraged at the revelation that the nominating and voting pool for Worldcon’s awards only numbers in the thousands and is limited to those who actually purchase some level of membership to a Worldcon. If that’s true, wait’ll you find out how the Oscars are awarded…

    @Contrarius (to Greg): “I think it’s a very bad idea to use the word “bias” in this context, because it is so loaded with connotations that don’t fit your usage of it. I think “imbalance” works better here.”

    “Bias” is the correct term, because it’s the term used in the field of statistics and Greg took care to note that specialized technical usage.

    @Hampus: “And the women who complained when they had no winners were a certain type of eternal whiners?” et al.

    Please don’t tell me you’re seriously treating the long period of male Hugo dominance as equal to a couple of years where women mostly swept the awards. Entire power structures have changed over the last half-century, and they’re still not at a point where everyone has a truly equal opportunity to get published.

    @Greg (to PhilRM): “Why do you think that [random processes are not a good model for explaining votes for works of fiction in any particular year.]?”

    I can’t answer for Phil, but I think that’s a poor model because creativity is not random, and neither is its expression. Some ideas are better than others. Some authors are better at their craft than others. Some stories get more exposure than others. (I could go on.) None of that is random. Why should we expect the outcome of so many nonrandom factors to approximate a random result?

  15. “I can’t answer for Phil, but I think that’s a poor model because creativity is not random, and neither is its expression. Some ideas are better than others. Some authors are better at their craft than others. Some stories get more exposure than others. (I could go on.) None of that is random. Why should we expect the outcome of so many nonrandom factors to approximate a random result?”

    You’re absolutely right, Rev. The processes by which the works get on the ballot are not random at all and neither is the selection of the winners, so I would expect this sort of result to continue for quite awhile, taking into account all of the factors, but most prominently the makeup of the typical Hugo voter.

    The typical Hugo voter (rightly or wrongly) believes that women writers are treated poorly, are disadvantaged in ‘breaking-in,’ and have historically been treated unfairly in the distribution of these sorts of writing awards. Those messages are reinforced at every opportunity by most of the bloggers they read and at most of the websites they visit and the bearers of any message to the contrary usually carry themselves like a bunch of unlikable asses at best and loathsome hate mongers at worst. So, to me at least, it isn’t surprising at all that they nominate women and then they vote for women. Sure, it’s reached the level where it borders on ludicrous, especially when they do it and then do everything they can to try to argue that they aren’t doing it and that the women are just better than than the men 96% of the time, but hey, whatever.

    Vote for whoever you want to vote for for whatever reason you want to vote for them. In the end, it’s nothing more than a genre fiction award.

  16. Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad.

    If you didn’t think the Hugos were important, you wouldn’t have dropped into this discussion to attempt to discredit them.

    The attention paid to the awards in the media this year suggests their cultural footprint has grown since you puppies tried and failed to destroy them. Jemisin’s historic win was even reported on CNN.

  17. Theodore Beale posted a fake quote from Robert Silverberg on his blog to attack Jemisin. Here’s what he claims Silverberg said:

    I have not read the Jemison books. Perhaps they are wonderful works of science fiction deserving of Hugos every year from now on. But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of ‘identity politics,’ and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances.

    One of his minions posted it in the comments to Jemisin’s speech.

  18. I do think there’s some catching up going on. Some of us have made an effort to seek out voices from non-dominant communities. We have then discovered that many such voices have a sufficiently different perspective on life that many of their stories are different too. That makes them interesting. And when we discover how interesting they are, we keep reading them.

    I think that will even out over time. But to me it’s no surprise that people from non-dominant groups (that is, not straight white cis men) might have an easier time writing things that imagine change, or look at the world in a way that highlights things we have taken for granted. Not all do, and straight white cis men can, but a trend that way doesn’t surprise me.

  19. Rail:

    “Instead, perhaps you should go back to the original comment that brought up the subject and ask yourself what you missed about it that’s pushing women’s buttons.”

    I’m well aware of what is pushing womens buttons, but when the imbalance is so large as it is, I do think discussions should be had without creating a new type of fragility.

    These are worthy winners. They can be defended without using arguments we know aren’t accepted when the balance is in the opposite direction.

    Rev. bob:

    “Please don’t tell me you’re seriously treating the long period of male Hugo dominance as equal to a couple of years where women mostly swept the awards. “

    I am not.

    Lenore Jones:

    “I do think there’s some catching up going on. Some of us have made an effort to seek out voices from non-dominant communities. We have then discovered that many such voices have a sufficiently different perspective on life that many of their stories are different too. That makes them interesting. And when we discover how interesting they are, we keep reading them.”

    Thank you for putting words on what I was thinking on how to formulate. I absolutely agree.

  20. @avery
    Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad. Participants can pat themselves on the back “for a job well done” but the self-selected group voting is tiny compared to total readers.

    Well, every popular book award in the entire world is tiny compared to total readers. As a statistician, you of course realize that, for example, the Dragon Awards, too, have a self-selected group that is tiny compared to total readers.

    Also, too, the popular award that Mr. Del Arroz recently won is a small self-selected group. But I am going to guess you wouldn’t piss on the legitimacy of his award, now would you?

  21. Re: Hugo awards and women winning fiction categories the last couple of years:

    I’ve made an effort to read more works by women in the last 10 years, so a lot of what I nominate and vote for skews in that direction. I feel that I should only nominate what I read, and so that’s what gets nominated by me.

    Also ” “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, …backwards and in high heels.”

  22. PhilRM:

    But in your example with the marbles, there is only 1 chance in 1024 of drawing 10 white marbles in a row from the box: this is exactly like flipping a coin and getting ten heads (or tails) in a row.

    This is entirely beside the point and just added because I’m persnicketty that way, but I believe that in the situation that was given (100 white marbles, 100 black marbles, 10 marbles drawn randomly and without replacement–or is that just my own assumption?), it’s slightly less, 0.000771026, or about 1 in 1297. (Hypergeometric distribution.)

  23. I have a few thoughts on why more women are getting nominated, and then winning. First, while the number of people voting for Hugos is relatively small, there is a correspondence between what is nominated for Hugos and ratings and reviews among much larger pools of readers. It’s worth looking at data on book-buying as well as book publishing. It has been true across all genres, that women & girls make up a significantly larger proportion of book-buyers and readers than men & boys. This piece from over ten years ago describes women as 80% of the total book-buying public: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14175229
    According to Goodreads data, most people also tend to read a majority of authors of their own gender, with women reading books by women and men reading books by men. If this is true, it would suggest that more women would be winning book awards across genres, and in fact, this is the case: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/17/margaret-atwood-female-writers-dominated-2017s-literary-bestsellers-figures-show
    (and note that Atwood is often considered an SF writer, so you can see the increase in SF/literary crossover as well)
    Even if this had always been true in literary fiction and other genres, however, SF (not F) has been largely a male fandom, as many of you have noted. However, I believe that what is happening in SFF fandom now is the outcome not of a grand conspiracy but of the impact of a generation who grew up on a series of very popular works: 1) Buffy 2) Harry Potter 3) the Hunger Games. These fans have wanted more things *like* what they read before – thus more stories featuring strong female characters, which often means more stories by female authors. Another thing that has changed the fannish environment is the growth of book blogging, book twitter, book podcasts, and general youth-driven book commentary, which comes from this “Harry Potter” generation. Uncanny’s shout-out to their Space Unicorn followers captures the spirit of this milieu. I see the same kind of thing with the community built around Book Riot, which promotes a good deal of SFF along with literary fiction and other genres. BR is run by millenials, and has a popular book recommendation podcast. Take a look at social media readathons where you can see the majority of people reading SFF literature, (if you include paranormal romance and YA) and the majority of participants are young women.(one just started yesterday and goes for a week – it’s the Bout of Books). A lot of these young readers are very interested in reading books by authors of diverse racial backgrounds as well. TL; DR- Harry Potter fans grew up and they are still reading.

  24. sorry about the above, I conflated awards for women with an article about best-sellers. It has been true in literary fiction that women have sold well, and bought a lot, but that men won the big awards (Pulitzers, etc) and that men also dominated all the major literary reviewing publications. Thus, even when women were selling more books and women were reading more books, this didn’t have an impact on literary recognition. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous quote about the “damned mob of scribbling women” expresses the general distaste for popular female-dominated genre fiction for most of the history of books in America.

  25. @Hampus:

    They can be defended without using arguments we know aren’t accepted when the balance is in the opposite direction.

    And there’s your problem. It’s not a defense; it’s a refusal to engage with what looks on the surface like a trolling technique many of us are sick of. One that usually ends with “I’m just saying….”

  26. My thoughts on the preponderance of women winners: we’re in a time when a lot of factors have converged to make people aware of the historical biases against women – ironically enough, one of those factors would be the Puppies and their “MRA” fellow-travellers, whose antics at least served to make people a) aware of the issues and b) perfectly clear which side all the assholes were on. So people know there’s been bias against women writers, and many of them are primed to do something to redress the balance a bit.

    This has coincided with a year in which a number of women writers have produced some kick-ass SF and fantasy stories. In a climate where people are disposed to recognize women, here are some women who’ve done something genuinely worth recognizing.

    I think it’s likely to be a statistical blip in the long run – the nominees were plenty diverse, I can think of male nominees, m/f couples, m/m couples, at least one non-binary person just off the top of my head. But, this once, we’ve got a situation where the worthy winners – let’s emphasize that, the worthy winners – happened mostly to be women. I have to say, I don’t see a problem with that.

  27. @Hampus (Missed you at WorldCon!)
    I understand what it is to be part of a persecuted minority and to see people wielding statistics against me as a weapon. I don’t blame anyone from looking at this suspiciously–particularly when the people who first brought it up clearly did so in bad faith. In this case, though, the numbers are so strong that we shouldn’t ignore them. It’s a cinch other people won’t ignore them, and we’ll need a good answer for them.

    You also make the excellent point that all of the winners are worthy stories. That’s something to be proud of, and it certainly reduces the urgency of figuring out why women seem to be sweeping (or almost sweeping) the fiction categories.

    @Rebecca H

    First, while the number of people voting for Hugos is relatively small, there is a correspondence between what is nominated for Hugos and ratings and reviews among much larger pools of readers.

    Well, that’s the scariest thing; I’ve compared the Hugo results with a) Rocket Stack Rank‘s list of “Outstanding SF/F” for short fiction b) The most-recent 20 SFF books on Amazon c) the 20 best-average-reviewed SFF on Amazon and all the rest are within statistical error of 50%. There is not a correspondence with anything I looked at. Tell me which lists you looked at, and I’ll do a quick chi-squared test for you.

    @Ferret Bueller

    (Hypergeometric distribution.)

    My God, we’re nerds here, aren’t we? 🙂

    @Paul Weimer

    I’ve made an effort to read more works by women in the last 10 years, so a lot of what I nominate and vote for skews in that direction. I feel that I should only nominate what I read, and so that’s what gets nominated by me.

    I love this explanation so much it scares me. 🙂 It says that in the effort to address the historical bias against women, many people made an effort to read women authors. That bias appears to have ended (yay us), but we now have a large cohort whose favorite authors are almost all women, which has pushed the bias the other way. (In other words, we overshot, but entirely in good faith.) If so, we need do nothing (other than declare victory and focus on different kinds of bias from now on) and it should even out in time.

    I just have trouble convincing myself this effect is really strong enough to sweep the awards two years in a row.

    @Lenore Jones

    We have then discovered that many such voices have a sufficiently different perspective on life that many of their stories are different too. That makes them interesting. And when we discover how interesting they are, we keep reading them.

    I’ve thought about that too, but, as you say, it’s a tendency, not an absolute. It could explain a result of 70% women, maybe, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain what we’re seeing. Also, for the things I personally like in stories (strong plots, strong characters, cool settings), I don’t see any real difference between women and men. I expect there are lots of other readers like me, further diluting the strength of this effect.

    @Rev Bob

    I can’t answer for Phil, but I think that’s a poor model because creativity is not random, and neither is its expression.

    Here we have a confusion between the mathematical idea of “random” and the popular idea of it. In mathematical terms, the gender of award winners should be random and binomially distributed in a way similar to the set of popular works as a whole. If it is not something must be causing it. E.g. if Hugo voters just have utterly different tastes from everyone else. Or if the awards are rigged. I don’t think either of those is the cause, of course.

    @Camestros Felapton

    Some sort of overarching deep-rooted historical bias in favour of women is something we can immediately rule out though.

    Yep. 🙂

    We also can’t conclude that this is a long-term trend. Nor can we conclude it was due to irrational choices and indeed we can quickly reject that people voted for works solely based on gender by noting the high quality of what won.

    I agree, with one caveat: we have seen this two years in a row now, and it is an extremely strong effect. That’s troublesome because a) we have no idea what’s causing it and b) we believe the awards are scrupulously fair.

    @Lee

    But is there a 50:50 expected distribution? What’s the actual ratio of published male to female science fiction writers, as opposed to the general population?

    I’ve tried computing it several different ways, and everything I do comes to within a statistical error of 50%. If you have a favorite source, let me know, and I’ll run the numbers for you.

    I’ll stop here; this is already way too long. If I missed an important point from earlier in the thread, please let me know.

    tldr: Lots of great ideas, but I don’t think any of them explains the near-sweeps we’ve seen two years in a row. It’s not an urgent problem because great stories are being nominated and are winning, but it is something we ought to try to understand. We need to be able to say something to our enemies, and, unlike them, we do believe in fairness.

  28. @Ferret Bueller: (shakes fist) Bueller!!!!
    Yeah, you’re absolutely right: to keep it simple, I ignored the effect of the finite number of marbles.

  29. Trying to shake something loose. I posted a longish comment, it didn’t appear. I attempted to repost it, it says I already said that. I was not told I went into moderation or anything. SO. Trying a new comment to see if it appears, and if not, repost the old one.

    ETA: It did not appear. I revised it slightly, reposted it, and it vanished again. Setting a copy aside in word for now so I can get some work done.

  30. @Rev Bob —

    “Bias” is the correct term, because it’s the term used in the field of statistics and Greg took care to note that specialized technical usage

    It is the technical term. But we are not having a technical discussion, and it is often unwise to use technical terms in a nontechnical context — especially when the technical term is so heavily laden with objectionable connotations. It becomes a distraction and an opportunity for misunderstandings.

  31. @Hampus:

    They can be defended without using arguments we know aren’t accepted when the balance is in the opposite direction.

    And there’s your problem. It’s not a defense; it’s a refusal to engage with what looks on the surface like a trolling technique many of us are sick of. One that usually ends with “I’m just saying….”

    Or Just Asking Questions. Agreed with Rail that the particular phrasing of the posts in question don’t (to me) appear to have a desire for genuine conversation. They appear to be a combination of indicating that women can only win since voters are biased and (hence) diminishing these awards.

    For me, I didn’t vote on several categories and didn’t vote for an all-female slate but it does seem that most of the groundbreaking work is from women of diverse backgrounds. I would normally put people of diverse backgrounds but NK Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, Tomi Adeyemi are all women. Interestingly, the other series with new ideas that recently rocked my world is by Robert Jackson Bennett (not female, not of diverse background etc). I don’t care particularly if there is a strong female protagonist but I do care if women are absent (unless there are in-story reasons of course).

    However, I’d caution the statisticians on extrapolating too much for several reasons. I agree that, right now, it seems that more women are doing interesting things and Hugos appear to reward that. I’d also add that claiming an all-female bias only works if each individual voter only votes for women because they are women.. I also think that the Hugo voting population may have permanently changed after the Sad Puppies. I’m a new voter due to the Pups for example and it doesn’t take too many people who expect diversity in cast to change the awards.

    Finally writers like Bujold, Cherryh, Le Guin, Norton and so many others have always been with this field; I do think they’ve had to be better to be viewed as merely equal. We reach true equality when there is a mass of average female writers who have the same sales and credit as a group of average male writers. (I started listing a few but didn’t want to get into arguing about each author!)

  32. I need to go back and reread my Joanna Russ to see if she covered this, or if we need to add “she wrote it, but she only won because people felt sorry for her” to her famous summation.

  33. @Greg Hullender, when I say much larger pools of readers, I don’t mean the “most massive pool of readers”. I just mean that more than 2000 people like the books. Based on a quick glance at RSR, it seems like you are basing rankings primarily on recognized SF publications, which makes sense, but there may also be a number of people participating in Hugo voting/World con, who are participating in different fan networks, not all of which are exclusively SFF related. While it wouldn’t necessarily explain a 100% sweep, there is an overall decline in the number of boys and men who buy and read books *in general* – combined with an increasing and sustained female readership for SFF. I have speculated that this corresponds to the fact that the same people who read Harry Potter twenty years ago now both continue to buy SFF books and comics and are also blogging, doing pdocasts, writing fanfic and beginning to write their own books. it may also be, as others have said, that women writers were the ones that people preferred for reasons other than gender – something that we also understand to be true when men win. final note: It would also be worth looking at the Clarion Writers’ workshop as an influence.

  34. (Attempt three at the same post.)

    Hampus: There are things I am willing to speculate on, and things I am flat not interested in.

    I am curious about what changes have led to two years where women have dominated a previously male dominated award. I am however, not interested in doing so at the prompting of someone (the first poster, not you) who appears to want to blame it on a bias against men, or a bias towards women, in a manner which implies those awarded are the recipients of affirmative action or anti-puppy action with no consideration of their actual merit.

    If affirmative action is the accusation, then the counter question IS “Which of these has no merit besides gender?” or possibly “Which male-penned work is *more* worthy?” Because to prove affirmative action is a mover in a negative light, you have to prove a woman is being promoted over a *worthier* man, not an equally worthy one, and certainly not over a less worthy one.

    In the case of historic bias, the second question was far more important than the first (“Which female-penned work that was passed over is *more* worthy?”) because nobody was arguing that the works which were winning were outside of the norm or pushed on by conscious choosing of gender over merit.

    (Can someone correct me if I’m wrong, but do the multiple-time award winners contain a larger percentage of women than the overall awards? IE, women who did break through the wall of men historically are blatantly exceptional writers – eg, Bujold and Willis and le Guin and now Jemisin. Because this would definitely be an argument for “The same thing backwards and in high heels” as a longtime standard, with added implications for why the numbers now skew the other way; I mean, Bujold, Le Guin, and Jemisin take three slots this very year.)

    (I also note that removing group efforts also removes nine male names but only 5 female ones, if my very fast count is right. Which doesn’t make a balanced total but definitely has its own implications in trying to make the data look even worse.)

  35. Rebecca H on August 21, 2018 at 6:36 am said:
    I have a few thoughts on why more women are getting nominated

    One thing to remember is that the Hugo voting population is hugely conservative. Though not especially Conservative. I do think there’s a degree to which NKJ (and probably Red Wombat) get nominated because people remember that they engorged reading them last year and so look out for them this year.
    This is especially true in categories like Pro Artist (only 11 nominees over the period 2000 to 2010) but there nothing like winning a Hugo to get you an in due the following year.
    Since more vote than nominate then there’s a fair assessment of the shortlist. And please, please, done think I’m saying that Stone Sky wasn’t a stonking book and a justified winner.

  36. @Rebecca Hill

    While it wouldn’t necessarily explain a 100% sweep, there is an overall decline in the number of boys and men who buy and read books *in general* – combined with an increasing and sustained female readership for SFF.

    I think that’s probably true, but that would only matter if women overwhelmingly read stories by other women while men read some mix of both. Do you really think that women would predominantly read/nominate stories written by women, ignoring stories by men? The conventional wisdom used to be (for YA stories) that girls would read stories about boys but boys wouldn’t read stories about girls. I would hope that has changed, but I’d be astonished to learn that it had flipped.

    Do you see that much of a difference between stories written by men vs. those by women? For example, if most men wrote stories that were upsetting to most women (or even just uninteresting), then it would make sense that most women wouldn’t even look at a story by a man, but I hope that’s not even remotely true.

  37. @Greg: The problem with looking at lists like the 20 best-average-review on Amazon is that it doesn’t take subject matter into account. I don’t spend a lot of time searching and filtering Amazon, but the most obvious route to such a list (Books -> Science Fiction & Fantasy -> sort by review) includes several books that will never get a Hugo nomination. Normally. *cough*Dr. Tingle*cough* I’m sure they absolutely deserve their 5-star reviews from fans of their subgenres; they’re just not subgenres that the Hugos are typically drawn from. An awful lot of zombie apocalypse series installments and fantasy romances.

    Which leads me to wonder how much of this is a gender divide over what books were being read 20 years ago.

  38. @Greg Hullender, if you read my longer post above, you’ll see that at least based on a Goodreads poll, most people tend to read things by people of the same gender. link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/25/readers-prefer-authors-own-sex-goodreads-survey
    I agree that it is unusual for 100% of winners to be women in a general fan award, but I don’t think it’s a grand conspiracy or people voting for people because they are women. I didn’t manage to nominate OR vote this year, but I would have voted for Jeff Vandermeer’s _Borne_ which was one of the most beautifully written books in any genre that I’ve read in a long time, and which I was sorry to see wasn’t a finalist. I don’t read SF short stories as a general rule, and I’d imagine that category is much more limited to hardcore fans. when I read the finalist packet stories, I didn’t know the gender of a lot authors I was reading, partly because of format on my tablet, for which titles were clearer than for authors.

  39. @Rail
    Yeah, I noticed some odd things whichever way I selected a list. However, all the lists I produced were within statistical error of 50% male/female. It really does suggest that the battle to get equal representation for women in SF/F has been comprehensively won. Perhaps it really is time to declare victory and hold a party.

    At least, based on the lists I looked at.

    Do you have particular lists you’d favor? If you can point me to one, I’ll happily do the analysis.

  40. @Greg Hullender: In mathematical terms, the gender of award winners should be random and binomially distributed in a way similar to the set of popular works as a whole.

    Averaged over a sufficiently long period of time (i.e., over a sufficiently large number of works of fiction) we expect that to be true. But in any given year (or even a couple of years) that can break down.

    Your analysis above (50/63 vs 1/24) assumes that every one of those stories was equally likely to be a Hugo winner. Even if they were all of equal merit*, there is another factor, which I’ll call ‘discovery space’. Works of fiction get weighted wildly differently in discovery space**. It’s scarcely a surprise that the concluding volume of an enormously popular and acclaimed trilogy is going to receive a tremendous amount of attention. (Of course, Jemison was the only person who could make that book Hugo-worthy.) Apparently in contrast to a fair number of other people, I wasn’t at all surprised that Bujold won for Best Series: she has a very large and devoted readership, and this was a chance for them to reward what they see as an outstanding body of work.

    All six of the nominated novellas were written by women (a mildly improbable result if we assume there were an equal number of meritorious novellas written by men and women in 2017) – but 5/6 were published by Tor.com. Is this the result of some kind of conspiracy? Of course not – Tor is a major SF publisher (with a very active online presence) and their Tor.com line is the highest profile set of novellas in the field today. And although I don’t quite have the love for Murderbot that a lot of the people around here do (I thought All Systems Red was perfectly serviceable, but that was about all), it was the recipient of a lot of promotion by Tor – in fact, they gave it away for free last April. In the last few years we’ve also seen a significant shift away from print magazines towards online magazines at shorter lengths, which – independent of any consideration of quality – has, I think, been spurred in part by the ease of access to online fiction.

    The plural of anecdote is of course not data, but: a couple of months back I read an amazing, massive novel titled New People of the Flat Earth by Brian C. Short, which I came across while browsing in the SFF section of my local Barnes & Noble. Although I don’t think he quite stuck the landing, it was an amazing journey getting there. On the day I bought it in-store, both Amazon and B&N’s own website denied that the book even existed. That’s not exactly a fine-tuned PR machine in action. (It’s from Repeater Books, who seem to be an ambitious but very small press.)

    Things have changed enormously from the days when everybody could read some large fraction of all the SFF published in any given year; the downside of the boom era that we live in is that it’s very easy for fine fiction to get lost in the shuffle.

    *Of course, “merit” is in the judgement of the reader: let’s pretend that averaged over the pool of Hugo nominators/voters there is some kind of consensus – which is a statistical issue in itself. Works of fiction aren’t interchangeable widgets, no matter how much Jeff Bezos wants them to be.

    **This is the bane of self-publication: the weighting of self-published fiction in discovery space is, on average, vanishingly small.

    P.S. Completely off-topic, but autofill is no longer working on any of my machines. At least now things are consistent.

  41. @Greg, something else that occurred to me is that many of us are using things like the Spreadsheet of Doom to help focus our efforts. Is there a tilt in recommendations from the community that compiles it and the Hugo wikia? Where else are voters discussing the good stuff?

    I think you’ll find that most of those communities are run by women.

  42. @PhilRM:

    Works of fiction aren’t interchangeable widgets, no matter how much Jeff Bezos wants them to be.

    Depends on what you’re reading. What passes for military science fiction these days pretty much is interchangeable widgets.

    autofill is no longer working on any of my machines

    It’s a WordPress thing that I first noticed when they changed the code to comply with GDPR. It’s happening on every WP blog that I spend much time on.

  43. @Greg —

    I think that’s probably true, but that would only matter if women overwhelmingly read stories by other women while men read some mix of both

    I think it would distort reality if we insist on narrowing down the current gender disparity to just one cause. It’s most likely to be a combination of several contributory causes, some of which have already been mentioned.

  44. The real reason Mike Glyer is in the hospital is to have a sex change, so that the winners will be 100% female and the penis will indeed be obsolete.

    This is, of course, snark, but I expect the puppies will think I’m serious.

  45. “All six of the nominated novellas were written by women (a mildly improbable result if we assume there were an equal number of meritorious novellas written by men and women in 2017) – but 5/6 were published by Tor.com. Is this the result of some kind of conspiracy? Of course not – Tor is a major SF publisher (with a very active online presence) and their Tor.com line is the highest profile set of novellas in the field today.”

    Probably a more interesting exercise would be how many novellas were even published that were written by men during the period under consideration. From what I can tell from Goodreads, at least 42 of the first 50 listed novellas out of their 160 ‘popular’ list were written by women. If that sort of percentage holds true across other platforms, then it isn’t much of a surprise that all 6 nominees were women.

  46. Oh, P.S. — I personally would love it if we could avoid the issue altogether by stripping identifying info from the stories, but of course with published works that’s not possible. Anybody wanna fund a nice big study in which we first commission a bunch of unpublished stories and then submit them for voting anonymously?

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