Pixel Scroll 7/23/17 Whenever We File Out, The Pixels Always Shout, ‘There Scrolls John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!’

(1) TALKIN’ ABOUT MY REGENERATION. The Doctor Who Christmas Special 2017 trailer is online.

(2) A PREVIOUS GENERATION. Meanwhile, at Comic-Con, Harrison Ford still doesn’t know whether he was a replicant: “Blade Runner 2049: Harrison Ford responds to Deckard replicant mystery”.

Moderator Chris Hardwicke couldn’t help but ask Ford if Blade Runner 2049 would address the lingering questions about Deckard’s identity – human or replicant?

After a long pause, the star responded: “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

So that clears that up then.

(3) ACTUAL COMICS NEWS FROM COMIC-CON. NPR observes “Yes, Some Comics Are For Kids — And They’re Big Business”.

Before I left for San Diego Comic-Con this week, I checked in with Lucy Strother, a fourth grade teacher in Philadelphia whose students just love comics. “We have like a comics and graphic novels bin in the library and it’s perpetually empty because the kids are so obsessed with comics and graphic novels,” she says.

Strother says graphic novels are an important way to get kids used to reading longer chapter books with more mature ideas. And for her students, there’s one author who reigns supreme. “The queen of my classroom is Raina Telgemeier.”

“My name does mean queen,” Telgemeier laughs. She’s here at Comic-Con to talk comics and meet young readers; her latest graphic novel, Ghosts, is a gentle, lovely story for middle grade readers, about a girl coming to terms with her little sister’s serious illness.

(4) OPEN FOR CLICKS. The Westercon 72 (and aspiring 2019 NASFiC bid) website has gone live. The con will be in Layton, UT.

(5) OUT OF THE SHADOWS. Clarke Awards administrator Tom Hunter sent out the links himself:

Adrian Tchaikovsky has also been busy reviewing all six books on this year’s shortlist, splitting his reviews into three equal parts.

  • Part one: Faith In The Future covers A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers and Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.

I want to wave a flag for Chambers’ aliens?—?while there is a definite Trek-like philanthropic principle going on, the species are all well defined, and then the individuals are separately defined so that you don’t get the common problem of “all of X species are like this”, and furthermore “X species are basically humans with this hang up and a narrowed emotional range”. Like Planet, Orbit makes a virtue of telling the stories of ordinary people in a multispecies galactic community, with plenty of digressions and diversions that only add to the verisimilitude of the world and the characters.

  • Part two: The Evil That Men Do discusses The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and After Atlas by Emma Newman.

Where this book crosses from the historical into Clarkes territory is the railroad of the title. Now I have a confession here, because my knowledge of this period is limited and my first introduction to the phrase ‘underground railroad’ was in Babylon 5, which utterly baffled me because I thought they were talking about a literal one. And in Whitehead’s book, there is. Instead of the loose network of sympathisers and rescuers, white and black, there is a genuine railroad under the ground smuggling slaves from place to place, constantly in danger of being discovered by the slavers. In this way, Whitehead gives us the southern US as a series of “stations” (3) where different scenarios play out between black and white, slave and free.

Tricia Sullivan is a SF author of considerable repute, with Occupy Me her fourth visit to the Clarkes shortlist (having, I believe, won it in 1999 with Dreaming in Smoke). This is a book about time, space, energy and angels, and it’s going to be relatively difficult to talk about because finding out what is actually going on is one of the chief pleasures of the book. The plot effectively starts in the middle and then unfolds towards the beginning and the end simultaneously, and that is entirely appropriate for the sort of physics that is flying around in the plot. Flying, in fact, is a major theme.

(6) SURVIVING CHILDHOOD. Here are “9 dangerous toys that prove kids were just tougher before 1990”. John King Tarpinian says he had these —

Clackers

Clackers had a lot of fun nicknames: knockers, click-clacks, bangers, knocker bockers or knicker knackers. But by any name, these 1970s toys were dangerous as heck, especially if you got the original acrylic glass clackers that some kids were either strong enough or intent enough to shatter. It was enough to get the attention of the Society for Prevention of Blindness, who issued their own warning, before a 1973 Consumer Product Safety Commission arrived to deliver the country to the coddling culture that condemned toys like clackers (which are available today in safer wooden, plastic or metal varities) and birthed a generation of nervous parents today.

 

(7) CARLSON OBIT. SF Site News reports the death of Jeff Carlson:

Author Jeff Carlson (b.1969) died on July 17. Carlson published the short story “Exit” in 1994? and his next story, “Pressure,” appeared in 2001. His first novel, The Plague Year appeared in 2007 and opened a trilogy, including The Plague War and The Plague Zone….

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • July 23, 1999 — Disney’s Tarzan became the first all-digital film
  • July 23, 1995 The Outer Limits reboot aired “I, Robot” with Leonard Nimoy

(9) WHETHER TO RATIFY. This year’s Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte, writing as a private individual, gives his take on several rules changes pending at this year’s business meeting: “The 2017 WSFS Business Meeting: Deterring Slates”.

Three Stage Voting

I was one of a number of people last year who put our names to another proposal, Three Stage Voting, which is on the agenda as amendment C.4. This would introduce an extra voting stage. After nominations are made, and the top fifteen candidates identified, Hugo voters (members of that year’s Worldcon) would vote on whether or not to accept the top fifteen as acceptable finalists. Voters would choose “Reject”; “Accept; or “Abstain”. Those rejected by at least 60% of the combined total of “Accept” and “Reject” votes, if and only if the number of “Reject” votes is at least the higher of 600 or 20% of the number of eligible voters, would be barred from the final ballot, which would have the top five (or six) vote-getters from the nominations tally minus any that were rejected by the new process. This was passed by the 2016 Business Meeting and must now be ratified by the 2017 Business meeting to come into effect for next year.

I signed this last year, but I no longer support it, for the following reasons….

Whyte gives four reasons. When it comes to 3SV, Whyte and Dr. Mauser (quoted yesterday) have some common ground.

(10) PUMP UP THE VOLUME,  A different kind of Apple Music — “Sing Different: Steve Jobs’ Life Becomes An Opera”. Chip Hitchcock says, “It’s in an appropriately tech location; you can see the lights of Los Alamos from the theater site.”

Even Campbell was initially skeptical of the idea, which came from 40-year-old composer Mason Bates. Bates was convinced that in Jobs’ “complicated and messy” life, he’d found the right subject for his very first opera.

“He had a daughter he didn’t acknowledge for many years; he had cancer — you can’t control that,” Bates says. “He was, while a very charismatic figure, quite a hard-driving boss. And his collisions with the fact that he wanted to make everything sleek and controllable — yet life is not controllable — is a fascinating topic for an opera.”

The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs shifts back and forth in time over the course of 18 scenes. Its fragmented, non-linear narrative was a deliberate choice by Campbell and Bates, who wanted to reflect Jobs’ personality and psyche. “Steve Jobs did have a mind that just jumped from idea to idea to idea — it was very quick,” Campbell says.

(11) WONDER WOMAN. Marcus Errico of Yahoo! Movies, reporting from Comic-Con, in “WONDER WOMAN II Offiicially Confirmed at Comic-Con, Script ‘In The Works Right Now”, writes DC “to the surprise of no one’ officially green-lit Wonder Woman II, but they’re still working on the script and Patty Jenkins is not yet attached to the project.

Every mention of the film, star Gal Gadot, or images of the Amazonian princess in action during Warners’ Saturday presentation in Hall H was an applause line. And when the simple Wonder Woman II graphic appeared at the end of a sizzle reel, the crowd went wild.

Gadot entered the Hall arm in arm with her Justice League co-star Ben Affleck, joining cast mates Jason MomoaEzra Miller, and Ray Fisher onstage to show off a new trailer for the Nov. 17 release.

(12) AND YOU THINK YOUR CON HAS TECH PROBLEMS. Pokemon Go event overloads: “Refunds as Pokemon fest beset by glitches”.

As many as 20,000 attendees at a Pokemon Go festival in Chicago are being offered refunds after technical glitches meant fans were mostly unable to catch anything – let alone “them all”.

Disappointed fans will also be offered $100 in the form of the app’s in-game currency, Pokecoins.

The event on Saturday had been touted as a chance for fans to come together and catch some of the rarest monsters on the hugely successful app.

But fans booed and chanted “fix our game!” and “we can’t play!” as executives from Niantic, the game’s creator, attempted to explain the problems.

At one point a bottle was thrown at a presenter on stage – it missed.

(13) FLORIDA MAN. The Orlando Sentinel reports a hometown fan (and File 770 reader) is headed for Helsinki.

Juan Sanmiguel’s affinity for intergalactic storytelling has taken him around the globe.

Next month he’ll check off a new country as he’s off to Finland for the annual Worldcon and Hugo Awards — which are known as the most prestigious for the science-fiction genre. The awards are scheduled for Aug. 11 in Helsinki.

For the past 25 years, he’s made the annual trek to the convention in countries such as Australia, Scotland, Canada and England.

“I haven’t missed one since [1992],” said Sanmiguel, who has attended the convention a total of 27 times. “It’s still prestigious … the biggest one so far was the one in London three years ago.”

Also president of the Orlando Area Science Fiction Society, Sanmiguel briefed members of the club Sunday on this year’s nominees, which include mainstream filmed works such as “Stranger Things,” “Deadpool,” “Ghostbusters” and two episodes of the acclaimed “Game of Thrones” series.

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Nicholas Whyte, JJ, and Tom Hunter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Barrett.]

151 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/23/17 Whenever We File Out, The Pixels Always Shout, ‘There Scrolls John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!’

  1. JJ, there’s no point in “he said, he said”, but the protests targeted at 3SV have an entirely different tone than those against EPH; for EPH, pups essentially said “won’t stop them”; the crap this year against 3SV is more along the lines of “please don’t do that”.

    There is also, I think, a fundamental difference in argumentation when it comes to final results: under EPH alone, inappropriate works on the ballot still get to be labeled as “Hugo Finalist”, and, if ending below No Award, they get to argue that the cabal once again yada yada yada; with 3SV, the do not get to claim Hugo Finalist status and, while they can still make the cabal arguments, they are tremendously watered down by the very high bar needed to remove them.

    Putting it more simply, with 3SV, the greifers won’t even get a wooden asterisk.

    And of course there is the VERY strong argument that it also potentially prevents them from keeping other, non-gamed works off the final ballot which is, I think, the best reason for voting this in.

  2. Just a piece of pleasant gossip: Eric Flint reports on Facebook that his medical outlook is pretty good:

    I saw my oncologist today. The results from the PET scan were what we hoped for. (I don’t want to say “positive” because in medicine that’s usually bad news, but “negative” just sounds too, well, negative.) There’s no sign of any malignancy remaining, so the chemotherapy program seems to have gotten rid of the lymphoma…

    It’s not a done deal, but it’s looking a lot better than some (including myself) had feared.

  3. Thanks to Kevin Standlee for the correction. But that means that 3SV could more easily fail to remove an offensive work from the ballot. All it takes is enough members voting for it, and not enough voting against. 3SV is not magic.

    In the absence of slate voting, 5&6, EPH and EPH+ make the nomination process more inclusive. They increase the chance that at least one of your choices will make it onto the final ballot, while reducing the chance that all of your choices will make it. That’s a really good thing.

    In the absence of slate voting, 3SV burdens the members and administrators with extra process. It provides no value unless there skate works to exclude.

    If 3SV has sufficient thresholds to protect it from being gamed, those thresholds make it harder to remove offensive nominations from the final ballot. Make it more effective, then it’s easier to game and it will be used to remove deserving nominations. Either way, it is a burdensome process that will deliver little or no value for all the work it will require. It’s just not the right concept.

  4. Either way, it is a burdensome process that will deliver little or no value for all the work it will require. It’s just not the right concept.

    I don’t see how the concept is flawed. In effect it’s a longlist/shortlist/winner model, which has delivered a lot of value with the Man Booker and other literary awards.

    Do you doubt that Stix Hiscock would have been dropped at the first stage if 3SV was already in place? Keep in mind how well No Award did in 2015 at the final stage to reject the slate-imposed nominees.

  5. (6) We had clackers, moon shoes, lawn darts and various versions of Mattel’s ThingMaker including Creepy Crawlers. Of those, the Thingmakers probably did the most damage as they got really hot and the means of transferring the mold to the cooling tray was poorly designed for impatient children.

    I recognize the possible dangers from lawn darts and clackers, but we mainly avoided injury. (Clackers even when used properly are especially frightening.) Moon shoes were sort of sad and never quite as exciting as you imagined.

    We also had realistic toy guns and I would think today those would be even more dangerous than anything on this list.

  6. @Tom Becker: those are exactly the reasons why I am so much in favor: it will really only single out the most outrageous and obvious; the less it is invoked, the better off we all are.

    It’s not designed to reflect taste and simple offense, it’s meant to give everyone a second chance to decide whether or not a work was gamed onto the ballot and, if so, whether or not that should count against it.

  7. People do use ‘longlisted for the Booker’ in advertising. 3SV would not stop slaters getting something to boast of: in fact it would make it easier for them, since they would just have to get into the top 15 to have something to boast of.

    It is true that Wikipedia etc. would not list them as finalists, but they would list them as on the longlist. It’s only in the last couple of years that ‘finalist’ has become the significant term anyway. They could say (truthfully) that they were nominated for a Hugo, and, unlike the people who say that now because a friend nominated them, point to an official document to prove it.

    I still think that 3SV has the potential to cause massive disruption to the process (and help slates), by shortening the time available for nominations. The question is whether the advantage it may confer is worth the disruption it will cause. I still haven’t seen a definite estimate of the time it will take out of the process, and I really think we need that if we are to make an informed judgement of its merits.

  8. @5: Interesting reading; his description of the Sullivan in particular makes me wonder who’s in an alternate reality (vs some of the slamming from the Sharkes). I’m almost tempted to read it despite difficulties with at least one past Sullivan, but I’m also not sure whether I’m up to that level of complication.

    @Nicholas Whyte: since you object to reading-of-intent, I’d use your words — but rcade has already done this. I’ll add that I find your summary of what “fans in general” feel to be, at least, impractical; I doubt that anyone has standing to make such a global assertion.
    However, I’m not clear on @OGH’s contention that there are overlaps between Whyte’s reasons against 3SV and Mauser’s; I’d welcome specifics.

    @JJ: if there are enough homophobes or avengers in fandom to 3SV a work off the ballot, I’d rather know about it so I can leave.

    @Arkansawyer: I have no taste for Flint’s fiction but I’m glad to hear his prospects are looking up; too many people I know of have lost too much to cancer.

  9. Meanwhile, I am actually more concerned by what Nicholas Whyte says about EPH. I’m glad that it’s being accepted that EPH is liable to make a difference in non-slate years – a systematic one, rather than just a slightly different outcome in the case of near-ties. I have seen people saying in the past that it could not possibly make a difference of this kind, and that it would actually work against single-issue campaigns; it seems now to be agreed that this isn’t so. But Nicholas does not see this as a problem, while I think it could be. Basically, the issue is that EPH favours fan-clubs and single-issue campaigns, because it disfavours clumped votes, and while organic votes, from people surveying the field and picking out what they see as best, are less clumped than slates, they are more clumped than fan-clubs and single-issue campaigns.

    A while ago Greg Hullender pointed to what he saw as a nifty feature of EPH, that voters will be represented to the same extent whether they divide or combine their votes.. If three hundred people all vote for the same three things, they will get as many places on the ballot as if they divided their votes between three things, with a hundred votes each. And I felt that while from one point of view this is a nifty feature, from another it’s rather disturbing. When three hundred voters (non-conspiratorially) agree in nominating the same three things, that is evidence that they are good. And when a hundred different people nominate each of them, that is not the same evidence that they are good.

    I think there is a very serious difference between Hugo voting and political voting here. Political voting is not primarily a judgement on the candidates’ virtues; it aims to find people who can represent the voters, people who share their values. There, it’s an unequivocal good that as many voters as possible should be represented. In Hugo voting we are looking for the works that are best, and if convergence is a sign that something is best, that aim may conflict with that of representing as many people as possible.

    I think it’s already a feature of the Hugos that some people get shortlisted a lot because they have large followings, but at the moment they have to compete with those who can command convergence. EPH strengthens the first group and weakens the second. If Joe Smith has two hundred loyal followers who always vote for his latest work, he will get on the ballot quite often, but not always. If there is a new work which can get three hundred votes, it will get on the ballot ahead of him. Under EPH he may get on the ballot ahead of the person with three hundred votes, if those votes come from people who read more widely and are surveying the field, and therefore display more convergence.

    (I realise, of course, that the voting system can’t actually tell whether people are voting conspiratorially or not, and so there is no actual way of working against slates while not working against convergence on quality. But I still think that it is not an advantage of the system that it works against convergence on quality, and it would be problematic if this happened on a large scale.)

    Now, I’ve been taking it that there isn’t actually likely to be a major change in outcomes here. EPH was tested on the 1983 results to determine if it would perturb things significantly, and the evidence from that study was that it wouldn’t. From the more recent results that have been tested, the outcome has generally been similar – that it wouldn’t have made a serious difference except in its effect on slates. There would have been some changes in the case of near-ties, but it’s unreasonable to complain about EPH making a difference when someone getting up a bit earlier that morning would also have made a difference. There was one bigger change – Graphic Story in 2015, with Schlock Mercenary replacing Sex Criminals – and that’s an example of the kind of thing that worries me, a work with a loyal following triumphing over convergence on (perceived) quality. But this change was cancelled out by 5/6. And if things stay like that, there’s nothing to worry about. EPH has clear advantages in the way it deals with slates, and there’s no point worrying about hypothetical problems. But if it turns out that it produces bigger changes, I think we do have a problem, and should be looking at ways of dealing with it.

  10. People do use ‘longlisted for the Booker’ in advertising. 3SV would not stop slaters getting something to boast of …

    That began because Man Booker called it a longlist and made a big deal out of its release. If the Hugo Awards don’t, that’s less likely to happen. The first stage doesn’t have to be treated as an accomplishment. Hugo organizers and voters can still emphasize the ballot and the winners.

  11. if there are enough homophobes or avengers in fandom to 3SV a work off the ballot, I’d rather know about it so I can leave.

    The Hugo voters consist of anyone who signs up. They don’t have to be in fandom in any meaningful sense.

  12. @Chip – I disagree with rcade, but at least he hasn’t put words in my mouth. All I can offer about the centre of gravity of fannish opinion is my own perception, which is that voters have taken a less hard line in the last couple of years than I personally did. I recognise that, and have adapted my preferred course of action accordingly.

    As to my supposed points of agreement with Dr Mauser – I share your bemusement by this remark of OGH’s. though perhaps it’s a reference to Dr Mauser’s statement that 3SV will “allow any sufficiently large cabal to de-nominate anything they don’t like”. That’s obviously true, and it is one of the things I don’t like about 3SV. As JJ said upstream,

    it is open to abuse as a way to quash a legitimate work by an author who is not popular in some quarters. Can I see a work by a person of color or a LGBTQ being voted off by a large-enough number of people who are racist or homophobic? Or even a work by a white man being voted off by people trying to get even for past wrongs? Absolutely.

  13. But as 3SV is currently set up, the negative votes would have to exceed 20% of the eligible voters. Not 20% of the actual nominators. 20% of those eligible. As Kevin Standlee says, that is a high bar given the usual turnout. I don’t think it’s a likely outcome.

  14. Andrew M – you raise some very good points, in particular your distinction between Hugo voting and political voting, which is very wise.

    My question is, have the Hugos perhaps shown a bit too much convergence in the past? I used to think not; now I’m not so sure; and I also feel that smaller groups of activist enthusiasts (or “fans” for short) should be encouraged to try and put their favourites on the ballot, where they will then have to contend with everyone else’s choices. If they choose rubbish, they will lose.

    To pick up on your specific example: personally I think Schlock Mercenary is rubbish, but I have to admit that it has a devoted following. I thought Sex Criminals was much better, but the evidence is that my tastes are not widely shared; it came 4th out of 5 in 2015, and the 5th was a slate candidate which finished below No Award.

    Would the ballot as a whole have been broader and more interesting with Schlock Mercenary on it, rather than Sex Criminals? The answer is surely yes; Schlock Mercenary would have been the only webcomic, apart from the unreadable slate nominee. I’d still have voted it rather low, but a lot of other people wouldn’t.

  15. Lenore – this is another problem I have with 3SV. If it is the case that its provisions will hardly ever change the final ballot, are we meant to see this as a strength? Why are we thinking of vote though massive changes to the process for a reform that in general isn’t going to make a difference?

    And how confident can we be that the thresholds chosen are the right ones? (And what does “right” even mean in this context?)

  16. In problems like 3SV, there’s usually a wide range of thresholds that will work; it’s not actually necessary to find the optimal one. I’m not too worried about that aspect at the moment.

    The fact that in most years, no one will bother to vote in the 3SV round because it won’t make any difference is a feature, not a bug. Ideally, it would never get used at all because the threat of it would keep future would-be slaters from even trying.

    But in the event of a repeat of 2015 or 2016, people wouldn’t be helpless to act. With sufficient outrage, the fans could remove slated items.

    Finally, as for writers trying to market their works as “Hugo Longlist,” does anyone do that today? The longlist does get printed after the awards are handed out, so there’s nothing that stops someone from using it in their advertising. If they’re not doing it now, why would we think they’d start doing it in the future?

  17. My interest in participating in the Hugos, as a fan, are sharing what I think is cool and finding out what other fans think is cool. The latter is super important to me. If my ranking of the field were definitive I would be very disappointed. I don’t think anyone else’s ranking is definitive either. The field is too big and noone has enough time to read everything good. I want the Hugo ballot to draw on the interests of the widest and most diverse range of fans. There is a place for the consensus ranking of the best works; it is the final voting.

  18. Greg Hullender: The fact that in most years, no one will bother to vote in the 3SV round because it won’t make any difference is a feature, not a bug. Ideally, it would never get used at all because the threat of it would keep future would-be slaters from even trying.

    Why would you think “no one will bother to vote”? If you had said voter participation will be small unless there’s an obvious stinker, I would buy that. As long as 3SV is in the mix, there will be a bunch of voters who’ll see that as a way of putting a knock on a work they disapprove of, whatever that reason may be. The 3SV stats will be released, and there will be the shadow they cast on it, and that will be talked about.

    Even the way it worked before the recent epidemic of slating, people would (OK, I would) scan the final counts looking for significant cases where No Award got a lot of first or second place votes.

  19. There is a colossal difference in publicity impact between publishing a long-list months before the awards, and publishing it immediately after the winners have been announced & when the final ballot has been known for months! I don’t know why anyone would think that the long-list announcement would be simply ignored!!!

  20. I love the idea behind 3SV — keeping any manifestly evil and/or terrible works off the ballot. I’m not sure about the process, timing, implementation.

    It would sure be swell not to get that crap in the Packet and to have it go off into deserved obscurity, leaving room for more worthy entries. Both 3BP and Cat Pictures only got on the ballot b/c decent people did the decent thing, and they won.

    Not allowing crap to get onto the ballot (and posterity) at all, prohibiting gaming the integrity of the award — these are all great things.

    But I don’t know how the process would work, timing-wise for the voters and administrative-wise for the admins. Do we have enough time, and would the high bar of votes needed be effective?

    Not being at the con this year, I am trying to put it in the category Other People’s Problems. This comment shows I’ve failed. 🙂
    ——————
    Good news about Eric Flint; I’m not a big reader of his work, but he seems a good chap and I’m always glad to hear positive news about a cancer patient.

    We never went for lawn darts, because it’s obvious that shit would kill you. I used to have bruised forearms thanks to Original Heavy Crunchy Clackers. When those hit the edge of your radius, yow.

  21. Is there too much convergence? Well, the simple answer is that we don’t know, because without seeing the individual ballots, we can’t tell which results are the consequence of convergence and which aren’t. We can compare the actual results with the results under EPH for a few years, and ask if the system which penalises convergence would produce a better result than the system that rewards it; but so far, the results seem to be much the same on both systems.

    But I think that it’s certainly possible that convergence could produce better results. I’m taking it that the voters are a fairly disparate bunch, so the things that command a wide interest among them are not all the same kind of thing; they are things that stand out in some way, things that have cross-group appeal, that are not just typical of their author or their subgenre. I think that the Hugos are at their best when they find things like this, and at their worst when they reward authors who keep recurring because they have a loyal following. I think EPH might (and I realise this is as yet completely unproved) favour the latter kind of author.

    As I said a long time ago, I think there is more than one kind of diversity, and one may be an enemy of another. In one way the kind of results that EPH favours are more diverse because they represent more voters. But in another way they may be less diverse, because they favour authors or series which have loyal fans, and so favour typical works of those authors and series, works that are like a lot of other works that we already know. Another difference from political voting is that in the Hugos, there are people actually seeking diversity; voters aren’t just committed supporters of a particular kind of work, always voting for that. And it would be paradoxical if voters seeking diversity, coming up with a list of distinctive works each of which stood out in some way, ensured that they could not all be shortlisted. (This was actually taken into account when EPH was created; the simple SDV system on which it was based would, as I understand it, have penalised convergence much more, and it was agreed that wasn’t desirable. What’s not clear is whether the changes made were enough.)

    So while representing more voters may lead to our discovering interesting new things, it may equally mean that we get more (than we would otherwise) of the same old things. I think the one case where there has been a serious perturbation so far is an example of this. Schlock Mercenary was a Hugo regular, which had been nominated every year it was eligible. Sex Criminals was something new and distinctive. It clearly appealed to a lot of the same people as the other finalists, but it wasn’t like them. So that seems to me a case of convergence producing diversity.

    (And of course complete convergence would be terrible. But that isn’t going to happen, whatever the voting system is; there are more than five interesting works in a year, and voters’ opinions will differ as to which are the best.)

  22. I like the idea of knocking eg. Stix Hiscock off the shortlist so non-troll works can get a nomination slot. The remaining *Puppies will love 3SV because it will seriously boost their persecution complex (What? They rejected Castalia House’s latest expose proving Scalzi was at Christ’s Crucifixion and that his last name was originally Pilatus? Cabal! Cabal!).

  23. I don’t know why anyone would think that the long-list announcement would be simply ignored!!!

    The question isn’t whether it would be ignored; it’s whether it would be important.

    If the Hugo Awards don’t put a promotional push behind the first stage, how is it going to become a big deal to the public? Calling yourself a Hugo winner is an accomplishment. Calling yourself a Hugo nominee is an accomplishment. Calling yourself a Hugo pre-nominee? That’s pretty thin gruel as far as bragging goes, particularly since almost all of them will be able to call themselves Hugo nominees.

  24. Andrew M: Is there too much convergence? Well, the simple answer is that we don’t know, because without seeing the individual ballots, we can’t tell which results are the consequence of convergence and which aren’t.

    This is not exactly true.

    Last year, longlist statistics were provided to the Business Meeting which showed how things would have shaken out if EPH had been in play. One of the things these statistics did was to indicate the presence of mini-slates.

    I’m not talking about slated Puppy works; I’m talking about cases where Joe Author persuaded all his friends and family to purchase supporting memberships and nominate his work in a given category, or where fans of Jane Fanzine/Podcast/Webcomic creator got together in their dedicated fan forum and encouraged each other to join up and nominate.

    While it’s not a foolproof indicator, the closer that the ratio between EPH points and Nominations is to 1:1, the more of an indication there is that bullet nominating (a group of nominators who all had only the one same thing on their ballot) was going on.

    Example
    Rank-Noms–Pts
    #1 –   153 – 98.53 – Work A
    #2 –   127 – 83.76 – Work B
    #3 –    76  – 74.25 – Work H
    #4 –   119 – 72.38 – Work C
    #5 –   108 – 70.62 – Work D
    #6 –   103 – 68.55 – Work E
    #7 –    95  – 66.46 – Work F
    #8 –    89  – 62.76 – Work G

    In this example, the works in 7th and 8th place on the ballot had more nominations than the work in 3rd place, Work H. But all of the works except Work H have a much lower ratio of EPH points –> Nominations, because their nominations were mostly on ballots which included a number of works (convergence of opinion among a significant number of members). Work H has a ratio which closely approaches 1, because most of their nominations were on ballots which listed only 1 work.

    The reason this sort of analysis isn’t foolproof is that once works with fewer EPH points and nominations get eliminated, the other works on ballots which included that work each gain the points redistributed after that elimination. But it does still give a very good indicator of where bullet nominating occurred.

  25. rcade: Calling yourself a Hugo pre-nominee? That’s pretty thin gruel as far as bragging goes, particularly since almost all of them will be able to call themselves Hugo nominees.

    They won’t call themselves “pre-nominees”. They’ll call themselves “Longlisted for the Hugo Award”. And given the current rash of self-pubbed authors promoting themselves as “Hugo nominees” because their mom bought a Supporting Membership and nominated them, you can bet your sweet bippy that there will be a lot of authors doing this — and there isn’t a damn thing that the Hugo Mark Protection Committee can do to stop that.

    There is a real cachet to being recognized by the Hugo Awards, and a lot of authors will do whatever they can to grab some of that cachet.

  26. JJ; Thanks, that’s interesting. I think it’s significant that you call these mini-slates, because from the point of view of voting systems theory they are the very opposite of slates; RP-type slates involve more convergence than regular voting, while this kind of thing involves less. Yet I do instinctively feel that at some level they are the same kind of thing; they both distort the result in some way.

    So, by looking at last year’s EPH figures you can see what the result would have been like with less convergence, and so you can form an estimate of whether less convergence would be better. But as I understand it, there was no non-puppy-involving case last year where EPH would actually have made a difference, so we still don’t have data (beyond one case) for the question whether a less-convergent result such as EPH might actually bring about would be better.

  27. They won’t call themselves “pre-nominees”. They’ll call themselves “Longlisted for the Hugo Award”

    What the griefers call themselves doesn’t matter. They’re a lot more successful at breaking things than building themselves up. The people who decide whether being a pre-nominee is a big deal are the Hugo organizers, voters and SF/F fans who care about the awards.

  28. @Tom Becker: If my ranking of the field were definitive I would be very disappointed.

    If my ranking of the field were definitive I would stand up and announce, “Finally, you people got it right!”

  29. 6) So does the author of this piece of claptrap also insist on driving everywhere without a seatbelt? Does he go caving without ropes and a first-aid kit and an outside contact who knows where he went? Does he ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet and (at night) reflective gear? The main thing those “dangerous toys” prove is that for a long time we were willing to accept a number of preventable injuries and deaths for children every year without doing anything to address the situation. Anyone who describes basic safety equipment/precautions as “coddling culture” has lost all credibility on the topic right there.

    (I had a Creepy Crawlers set in the 4th grade, when the critters produced thereby were a form of currency in my class. I didn’t burn myself, but I remember that several of my classmates did — it was tempting to grab the molding plate before it had cooled to a safe temperature. And I had already wondered about the “toxic fumes” issue, as an adult with more awareness of such things, before I ever saw the article.)

    (I also made fried marbles, another really cool thing that should not be done without safety goggles. You drop transparent marbles into a dry metal frying pan, heat them on the stove, and then dump them into ice water. The result looks a lot like crackle beads. The safety issue is because if there’s any minor flaw in the marbles, they can shatter explosively either during the heating phase or when dropped into the water, sending shards of glass everywhere.)

  30. Re 3SV: I don’t have much to say because I don’t get a vote on this — I can’t go to Helsinki. But I am generally in favor of 3SV, for many of the same reasons Hampus offers. I will reiterate here something that I’ve said before: it’s a grave mistake for us to make our choices based on how we think the griefers will react, because that cedes them control over us that they do not merit. I would encourage people to make their decisions based on what you think 3SV will do for us, not what you think the griefers will do if it passes.

    @ John A: That’s good news. Best wishes for Flint that things continue in this vein!

  31. @Nicholas Whyte: “If we adopt 3SV, we potentially still get that on the long list (with a much much lower threshold), and people will say, “Oh, look, more dinosaur p0rn is up for the Hugos” even if it’s not on the final ballot.”

    What people will say that? Those who are aware of the longlist are most likely in the loop enough to know about the Puppies. The casual fan never even sees the longlist.

    @Hampus: “But they will not be listed at Wikipedia or other such pages as Hugo nominees.”

    I do feel obliged to explicitly point out the shift from “nominee” to “finalist” when speaking of the voting ballot. Yes, the longlist works are indeed “nominees,” but considering that the term has previously been used to refer to what made the ballot, a smidgen of disambiguation can be useful. Only one person has to nominate a work for it to technically be a “Hugo nominee” – it doesn’t require a slate.

    @Nicholas again: “If it is the case that [3SV’s] provisions will hardly ever change the final ballot, are we meant to see this as a strength?”

    Change from what, though? As I understand it, that aspect of 3SV is more properly stated as “in an organic, non-slated scenario, it will have little to no effect” – which I think is the whole point. It’s like the provisions for runoff elections in close political elections: most of the time, they have no effect, but when you need ’em, you really NEED ’em.

  32. Mm, No Award doesn’t and shouldn’t make a big difference in most years. I don’t think that’s a strong argument against 3SV.

    (I have no idea whether I like 3SV enough to vote for it, but luckily for me I don’t have to make up my mind because I won’t be in Helsinki.)

  33. Rev. Bob: I do feel obliged to explicitly point out the shift from “nominee” to “finalist” when speaking of the voting ballot. Yes, the longlist works are indeed “nominees,” but considering that the term has previously been used to refer to what made the ballot, a smidgen of disambiguation can be useful.

    Good observation. Even though I know that, I had not been applying it when reading this discussion.

  34. Nicholas Whyte: As to my supposed points of agreement with Dr Mauser – I share your bemusement by this remark of OGH’s. though perhaps it’s a reference to Dr Mauser’s statement that 3SV will “allow any sufficiently large cabal to de-nominate anything they don’t like”. That’s obviously true, and it is one of the things I don’t like about 3SV.

    Yes, that was all I really meant by my comment. The juxtaposition seemed a lot more amusing to me 24 hours ago than it does today. I apologize if it was annoying.

  35. @Andrew M:

    When three hundred voters (non-conspiratorially) agree in nominating the same three things, that is evidence that they are good.

    The recent disagreements here, and the range of number of nominations to get a given category on the ballot, suggest to me that the odds of that happening (non-conspiratorially) are infinitesimal.
    And I’m quite aware the Hugos are technically open to anyone who signs up; that’s what got us into this mess. However, everything I see indicates that in practice most voters are fans; if the Hugos ever attract the kind of mass prejudicial interest described, I want to disappear from their ken and find something else to keep me busy, because that (not the failure of Puppies to win) will be the point at which I think the Hugos are dead.

  36. Chip Hitchcock: his description of the Sullivan in particular makes me wonder who’s in an alternate reality (vs some of the slamming from the Sharkes). I’m almost tempted to read it despite difficulties with at least one past Sullivan, but I’m also not sure whether I’m up to that level of complication.

    I read Occupy Me, and I really, really wanted to love it. It’s an SFFnal mystery with an interesting protagonist and worldbuilding.

    But I didn’t think that it really quite worked.

    I found it interesting enough that if a sequel comes out, I may try re-reading the first book and then read the second.

  37. Lenore Jones / jonesnori on July 24, 2017 at 11:55 am said:

    But as 3SV is currently set up, the negative votes would have to exceed 20% of the eligible voters. Not 20% of the actual nominators. 20% of those eligible. As Kevin Standlee says, that is a high bar given the usual turnout. I don’t think it’s a likely outcome.

    In egregious cases (such as 2015), it should be sufficient. We set the thresholds based on the 2015 election.

    For those worried about “time being removed from the nominating process:” There’s a pending amendment this year that will have the effect of starting the nominating period one month earlier. In addition, I think that a number of the things that eat up time between the end of nominations and the announcement of the finalist will happen during the “semi-final” stage. Because the long-listed works are not “finalists,” Worldcons don’t need to give them a chance to decline. While voting happens on the long list, Admins can be looking up the nominees (I’m using this word deliberately here) and checking to see whether they will accept if they clear the first round and had enough nominations to be a finalist.

    Furthermore, you get a chance to “crowdwource” the eligibility checking. During the longlist voting, it’s almost certain that people will discover works that were ineligible. Eligibilty checking is one of the very difficult parts of Hugo Administration, even more so because you can’t ask for help because otherwise you’re tipping who are the finalists. Being able to confirm eligibility and get finalist acceptances “in public” rather than having to rush to do so secretly before stuff starts to leak strikes me as a benefit to the Awards.

    As it stands now, there is a several-week gap between the end of nominations and the announcement of the final ballot. I think that with 3SV it should take less than a week, becuase nearly all of the work to confirm eligibility and acceptance will be done. The Admins already know who the candidates with the most nominations are; the only question is if any of them are eliminated. It’s only the mechanical aspects of issuing the announcement after counting the votes that would have to be done. (Oh, and I would not see the finalist announcement saying whether any works were eliminated by 3SV. This, like the nominations counts, would be on the post-Hugo-Ceremony details.

    Greg Hullender on July 24, 2017 at 12:54 pm said:

    Finally, as for writers trying to market their works as “Hugo Longlist,” does anyone do that today?

    I’ve never seen anyone do so. (I placed 11th for Best Fan Writer in 1995, incidentally.)

    rcade on July 24, 2017 at 2:43 pm said:

    Calling yourself a Hugo winner is an accomplishment. Calling yourself a Hugo nominee is an accomplishment. Calling yourself a Hugo pre-nominee?

    Due to abuse of the use of “nominee” to mean “I wrote my name on the ballot” or “one of my fans nominated me,” WSFS deprecated the term. “Finalist” is an accomplishment. “Nominee” is so trivially easy that I hope we see people being ridiculed for using it as if it meant a major accomplishment.

    Lee on July 24, 2017 at 6:23 pm said:

    Re 3SV: I don’t have much to say because I don’t get a vote on this — I can’t go to Helsinki. But I am generally in favor of 3SV, for many of the same reasons Hampus offers.

    And furthermore, when the Griefers hit us, there were a lot of people who insisted that the Hugo Adminsistror Must Be Strong and demanded that the Admins strike from the ballot works that were “obviously slated.” In other words, they wanted a single person or small group to make subjective decisions about whether a given finalist was “worthy.” Any Administrator I’ve known would run screaming away from that responsibility. 3SV allows every single member of Worldcon to weild the power that some were demanding the Administrator use: to disqualify works for subjective reasons. If enough people demand the work be struck from the ballot, they get their way. And it doesn’t leave it in the hands of a single individual. It makes it a collective decision of the membership. This is much more in keeping with the ethos of the Hugo Awards in my opinion.

    3SV in practice moves No Award voting forward earlier in the process. In general, although No Award will remain on the final ballot, I would be very surprised to see anything ever get No Awarded again if 3SV passes, because a potential finalist so unpopular that it would finish behind No Award would be zapped at the earlier stage.

  38. Rev Bob:

    The casual fan never even sees the longlist.

    That’s true at present, but the whole point of 3SV is to announce the long-list well in advance, and then to solicit votes on the worthiness of its members!

  39. It’s likely that people would pay more attention to the longlist if it was the first thing released, but there’s usually really good stuff in it and I don’t think good works getting a bit more attention is a major downside.

  40. Lenore – this is another problem I have with 3SV. If it is the case that its provisions will hardly ever change the final ballot, are we meant to see this as a strength? Why are we thinking of vote though massive changes to the process for a reform that in general isn’t going to make a difference?

    @Nicholas Whyte, it’s the years when it would change the result that we’d need it. If there’s no griefing going on, then of course it shouldn’t change the result. My point was in answer to the suggestion that griefers might use it to take out worthy candidates because they didn’t like their race, gender, etc. They would need a very large number of people to do it.

    Also, I tried to comment on your blog but failed. Someone talked about not having time to read and rank everything on such a long list. There would be no ranking involved! It would be a simple yes, no, or abstain.

    I still haven’t decided about 3SV myself, but we should not reject it for reasons that don’t actually apply.

  41. Due to abuse of the use of “nominee” to mean “I wrote my name on the ballot” or “one of my fans nominated me,” WSFS deprecated the term. “Finalist” is an accomplishment. “Nominee” is so trivially easy that I hope we see people being ridiculed for using it as if it meant a major accomplishment.

    I kinda think the WSFS went the wrong way on that one. Since “nominee” is what lots of other major awards use to mean what the Hugos call “finalist,” the WSFS can only deprecate it so far. People who know the terms “Oscar nominee” or “Emmy nominee” will think that’s what “Hugo nominee” means even though it doesn’t. So it still sounds impressive, except to insiders, even though it isn’t.

    I think the WSFS should have redefined “nominee” to be something that makes the actual final ballot, and called the list of all the stuff that gets suggested the “initial ranking” or “candidates” or “suggestions” or something that isn’t impressive-sounding.

    That way, if someone boasts, “I’m a Hugo suggestee!” or “My book is a Hugo candidate” or “My novella made the initial Hugo ranking,” then the general reaction, even among outsiders, will be “What does that even mean?” rather than “Oh, is that like being an Oscar nominee? Cool!”

    But it wasn’t up to me, so “what I would have done” isn’t terribly relevant.

  42. Kurt Busiek: I kinda think the WSFS went the wrong way on that one. Since “nominee” is what lots of other major awards use to mean what the Hugos call “finalist,” the WSFS can only deprecate it so far. People who know the terms “Oscar nominee” or “Emmy nominee” will think that’s what “Hugo nominee” means even though it doesn’t.

    I certainly agree with that in principle. However, it’s my understanding from an explanation that Kevin posted previously, The Hugo Awards™ could not legally prevent people from calling themselves “Hugo Nominee” if one person had indeed submitted a Hugo nomination for them.

    Which is why the Mark Protection Committee chose to go with Hugo Finalist™, because it’s something that they can legally enforce if used by someone who was not actually a Hugo finalist.

  43. @Chip

    everything I see indicates that in practice most voters are fans; if the Hugos ever attract the kind of mass prejudicial interest described, I want to disappear from their ken and find something else to keep me busy, because that (not the failure of Puppies to win) will be the point at which I think the Hugos are dead.

    Yes.

  44. Andrew M:

    “If three hundred people all vote for the same three things, they will get as many places on the ballot as if they divided their votes between three things,”

    That is not entirely true with EPH, is it? The item with the least votes will be counted as if it had its votes divided in three. The next as if it was divided in two. And the last as if not divided at all. Which means that this group will get one item on the list, but can’t be sure to press all three items onto the ballot. Which is the whole idea.

    That there is strong support from one group (i.e Dr. Whoians) for a type of work, does not mean that the whole of the electorate should be forced to only vote for Dr Who-items.

  45. Clip Hitchcock:

    ” However, everything I see indicates that in practice most voters are fans; if the Hugos ever attract the kind of mass prejudicial interest described, I want to disappear from their ken and find something else to keep me busy, because that (not the failure of Puppies to win) will be the point at which I think the Hugos are dead.”

    Exactly so.

    The only argument I have heard yet is the chance that harassers could remove works from Scalzi or Jemisin.

    But today they can put harassing items on the ballot (which has happened against Scalzi), devalue the worth of becoming a finalist so there is no honour to becoming a finalist anyway, and they have the same chance to No Award people in the last vote as in 3SV.

  46. Lenore,

    Sorry that you were stymied from commenting over on my Livejournal. I am planning to move platform some time soon but have not yet put time into identifying an adequate substitute.

    Someone talked about not having time to read and rank everything on such a long list. There would be no ranking involved! It would be a simple yes, no, or abstain.

    This raises an important point. Ranking takes very little time, of course; but reading takes a whole lot more.

    Are 3SV advocates:

    1) expecting voters to read all 15 long-listed candidates in all 17 categories (19 if the two new ones pass this year) and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down; or
    2) expecting voters to vote on some or all of the 255-285 long-listed candidates on reputation, ie what they have heard about them from other people?

    I don’t think the first option is realistic, and I don’t much like the implications of the second.

Comments are closed.