47 thoughts on “Record-Setting Number of Votes for 2016 Hugo Nominations”

1. Wow! Nearly double the number received last year!

2. I’ll get the popcorn…

   Seriously, I have no idea how this is going to play out, but it will be interesting.

3. Cheese and crackers here.
   There were some great recommendations earlier.
   (Glances at calendar which refuses to budge.)

4. Pretzels here.

5. Yay, us nominators! Feels funny to have the puppies to thank for such an enjoyable experience as making my first Hugo nominations.

6. Clearly the Hugo Awards are dead….

7. well, one things fer sure –

   some one may win

8. Reporting live from recovery room. I came through the laparoscopic surgery fine. Thanks everyone for your good thoughts and best wishes. I’m trying to eat hospital food now. I hope to be on later tonight. Further updates to follow later. Try to behave while I’m off line.

9. @Tasha:

   I hope the operative word is “try”, because this particular herd of cats and behavior are on different wavelengths from time to time.

   Thanks for the good news! Good luck on the hospital food!

10. Thanks for the bulletin, Tasha! Take good care of yourself!!

11. “[MidAmericon] is delighted to announce that the finalists […] will be announced […]”

    So they’re announcing that they will be announcing…. It makes sense, but is still somewhat amusing. 🙂

    Also interesting that they’re going to be announcing on Tuesday instead of the traditional Saturday-night-at-some-unrelated-Con. John Scalzi will surely be pleased. I don’t have a horse in that particular race, but I’m glad they’re trying a different approach, to see what happens.

12. So I missed the email. Does the secret nominating cabal meet this Sunday at the usual Sushi joint, or is on Tuesday at the pizza place?

13. Good thoughts, Tasha! The only thing worse than being in a hospital is NOT being in a hospital when there is something that needs one. I bid goodbye to my gallbladder and about 250 gallstones in a hospital almost 20 years ago and I’m not sorry at all. The husband had his out (along with two huge gallstones — he still feels that his two large gallstones are somehow more medically significant than my 250 tiny ones) in a surgicenter where he didn’t even have to stay overnight. Pfffft.

    Eagerly awaiting news of Hugo nominations as I now feel invested in the process with my first noms.

14. So glad surgery went well for you, Tasha!

15. @BigelowT

    Mine had gone septic 🙁 It almost killed me at age 29.

16. Glad the news is good, Tasha.

17. The historic numbers are interesting – year-on-year increases ranging from 8-22% per year for several years, with Loncon then providing a massive 43%. Even before Loncon there’d been a 68% increase over 5 worldcons. Clearly participation has been on the way back up for a number of years.

18. @ Mark

    Now I want to extrapolate that trend out to where nomination votes equal world population.

19. Wow! I figured it would be record setting, but not by this much. Yeah!

    Side note: The Dragon Awards have straightened out their confused eligibility period. It’s now July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016.

    http://awards.dragoncon.org/2016/04/14/eligibility-period/

20. Sucks a bit for those who have nominated works that suddenly aren’t eligible, as it isn’t possible to modify nominations.

21. Tasha: *congratulations* and many wishes for recovery. (And wow, reporting live from the recovery room–awesome!).

22. Also, seems extremely unfair to works published in june.

23. Yes, it’s “unfair” to works published in June. But it would be “unfair” to some works no matter what month was the cutoff month. That’s unavoidable.

24. No. If you have 3-4 months to read books after the eligibility period is over, it is an acceptable time frame. But if the eligibility period is to 30:th june and the nomination period ends the 25:th? If your books was published 26-30:th of june, it is impossible to be nominated according to the rules.

25. Yeah, I’d guess they’ll also change the nomination period to the end of June as well. Still not fair because you can’t really consider anything coming out that week. Also, it is easier to figure out whether something came out during a calendar year rather than if it came out in June or July of 2015.

26. The nomination period ends on July 25th, 2016. Granted, 25 days from the end of the eligibility period is extremely tight and means that, in practice, June of 2016 books probably don’t have much of a chance, but it’s hardly impossible.

27. Ah, you’re right July, not June on the Nominations page. The Fan FAQs page (and probably elsewhere) still says June. And that’s still pretty tight to consider 70,000+ word novels.

28. Nomination ends june 25:th according to the FAQ. Not july.

29. They really aren’t good at proofreading.

30. Yes, they’re slow on getting changes made, but the Nominations information page does, in fact, say July 25, 2016, not June 25, 2016.

31. You know, now that I’m aware last year was a very small bump up, I’ve got a strong hunch the big bump this year is going to be actual Hugo voters and not firestarters.

32. It would probably be advisable for any Dragon Award voters to wait until the rest of the corrections come out. For example, the explanation for “Best Episode in a Continuing Science Fiction or Fantasy Series, TV or Internet” still says, “Nominate a series as a whole, not a single episode.”

    I expect them to fix this eventually, but submitting nominations for this category right now would seem ill-advised.

33. You know, now that I’m aware last year was a very small bump up, I’ve got a strong hunch the big bump this year is going to be actual Hugo voters and not firestarters.

    Well, you have two competing groups

    – The Puppies that little Teddy Beale had but did not use last year when he was making his grand push plus those who have joined in since due to the magnificent success of that effort…

    – The sf fans who didn’t bother with the Hugos before, but are pissed off with said hijacking of the nominations last year.

    I know which I think is larger, but as to whether it’s large enough to overcome slating, I dunno/.

34. The bump in voting members last year were all actual Hugo voters, whether they were also trying to start fires or not. And the vast majority of them were mobilizing to defend the Hugos, not sabotage them.

    The voting pool is automatically much smaller than the nominating pool. This year especially, I would think.

    A) The site selection for 2016 was not seriously contested (Beijing received 70 votes). Only 758 people voted and received automatic supporting memberships for MidAmeriCon II.

    B) The site selection last year was a hotly contested 4-way race. There are 2625 people who voted in site selection at Sasquan. All those people have memberships to both Sasquan and WorldCon 75 and could nominate; but many of them won’t also be members of MidAmeriCon II and thus can’t vote.

    C) MidAmeriCon II is charging $50 for a supporting membership. That extra $10 won’t matter to a lot of people but it’s bound to turn others off from purchasing a membership.

    If the puppies end up with a lot of nominees, I suspect many people will buy memberships this year to vote them down, as happened last year. But right now there are comparatively fewer people who can vote this year. (I don’t know how many. MAC2 last updated their membership list in January.) 3794* members of MAC2 on the public list as of April 7 (and more that aren’t on that list).

    *Assuming my calculations are correct: 42** names per page x 90 pages plus 14.

    ** Of course there are 42 names per page.

35. ULTRAGOTHA: B) The site selection last year was a hotly contested 4-way race. There are 2625 people who voted in site selection at Sasquan. All those people have memberships to both Sasquan and WorldCon 75 and could nominate; but many of them won’t also be members of MidAmeriCon II and thus can’t vote.

    Good insight. I’m impressed.

36. @Tasha

    Yay! So glad to hear it.

37. Ed Green: So I missed the email. Does the secret nominating cabal meet this Sunday at the usual Sushi joint, or is on Tuesday at the pizza place?

    The info is in invisible ink at the end of this comment.

38. Thanks, Mike.

    I suppose I should add D) the people who joined Sasquan last year to defend the Hugos are eligible to nominate but that will not automatically translate into them paying another $50 to vote this year. Kinda implied in C.

    I do hope that a lot of the people who joined last year to vote in Site Selection will *also* vote in site selection in 2017. It’s only an extra (probably) $40. Even participating in WorldCon every other year would be an improvement in nominating and voting numbers.

39. Ed Green: So I missed the email. Does the secret nominating cabal meet this Sunday at the usual Sushi joint, or is on Tuesday at the pizza place?

    Mike Glyer: The info is in invisible ink at the end of this comment.

    Dammit, I’ve already got something else scheduled at that date and time!
    < runs off to try to reschedule >

40. Xtifr: Also interesting that they’re going to be announcing on Tuesday instead of the traditional Saturday-night-at-some-unrelated-Con. John Scalzi will surely be pleased. I don’t have a horse in that particular race, but I’m glad they’re trying a different approach, to see what happens.

    They didn’t have a choice, this year, because Easter came so early on the calendar — so the usual Eastercon and Norwescon simultaneous announcements weren’t an option.

    I guess they could have opted for announcements at OASIS, HavenCon, JordanCon, Congregation, and/or OmegaCon, which all take place the weekend of April 22-24. But I’m glad they’re trying something different, in the middle of a weekday. It will be interesting to see how and if that affects the mainstream coverage it gets.

41. @Tasha Turner,

    You’re back & posting? Yay!

    Hope the food you’re getting is more palatable than the stuff the folk in Dunedin hospital have been getting.

    @Mark-kitteh,
    I’ve been looking at the charts Jed Hartman posted and it’s clear that nominating numbers sat at near the 500 mark for many years, but have been increasing steadily since 2010.

    RDF on April 14, 2016 at 5:18 pm said:
    I know which I think is larger, but as to whether it’s large enough to overcome slating, I dunno/.

    Agree with ULTRAGOTHA that they are all voters. As for how successful slating is this year? Let’s see what happens.

    ULTRAGOTHA on April 14, 2016 at 6:14 pm said:
    I suppose I should add D) the people who joined Sasquan last year to defend the Hugos are eligible to nominate but that will not automatically translate into them paying another $50 to vote this year.

    Puts hand up.

    A Mid-Week announcement for a Mid-Americon Hugo? It just might work! Though I hope the organisers go all out with this experiment & get Press Releases distributed widely to any media outlets (especially mainstream ones) that might be interested so that the publicity can be maximised.

42. Good to hear surgery went well, Tasha. “Enjoy” the hospital food for as long as you need to and keep us posted on your recovery.

43. So if Dragon nominations end July 25th, they’ll have less than a week before the nominees go up on August 1st. And at least some folk think they’ll be getting a lot more nominations than the Hugos. Six days to count (including resolving inconsistencies in how the same thing’s nominated), check eligibility, etc. Probably not enough time to consult the prospective nominees if they want it or not.

    Then, basically you’ll have the month of August to vote…among an unspecified number of entries per category. Not too much time if there’s a significant amount of stuff unfamiliar to one on the ballot to read it. And I’d think a week wouldn’t be near enough time to get permissions for a “Dragon Packet”.

44. My husband and I bought supporting memberships so we could vote as well as nominate this year as usual. I got an email from one of the Hugo admins assuring me more showed on my ballot than the screen showed on my last submit and last email. If I’m up to it tomorrow I may send her what my ballot was supposed to look like & find out what actually made it.

    Too funny – my husband commented from my recovery room and didn’t remember when I asked him if he’d let File770 know I’d made it through surgery. The banana, applesauce, and water were fine. We won’t discuss the thing they called an omelet. *shudder*

    The omelet and hot chocolate my husband made many hours later when he brought me home was great.

45. Darn it, I did not get a chance to misbehave as I was offline longer than Tasha was.

    Anywho, I also hope the MACII publicity machine has its steam boiler/dilithium crystals all fired up to go. Ooh, only 11 days.

    @Tom: Yeah, someone at DragonCon is going to be mainlining energy drinks just to look at all the ballots. No time for contacting potential nominees. And the voters are supposed to read several dozen books, watch the entire season of (let us say) 5 TV shows (some of which might run upwards of 20 eps), and a bunch of movies.

    They really shouldn’t have tried to jam this in this year, but announce and set it up for next. Or just have made the nominating and voting one step — with so little time, people are just going to pick again what they already read/watched and loved enough to nominate. It would have saved them a lot of hassle to have from June or July to the con be the period in which the votes were tallied, data cleaned, anything ruled dubious scalethumbed out — might even give time to contact people.

46. lurkertype: They really shouldn’t have tried to jam this in this year, but announce and set it up for next. Or just have made the nominating and voting one step — with so little time, people are just going to pick again what they already read/watched and loved enough to nominate.

    They could have saved themselves a huge amount of grief simply by making the eligibility period January 1, 2015 – December 31, 2015. That would have given them the ability to set the deadline with plenty of time to normalize and tally nominations before presenting the final ballot. I’m extremely mystified as to why they didn’t do that. Now they are going to look like total numptys if they try to change it in future years.

    But hey, any new awards program is going to have its work-out-all-the-issues period. So good luck to them with making it all work.

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