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. I do not think we have to read JCW or Beale one more time to no award them. Regardless if we do it in 3SV or such as now.

    People have already stopped reading the puppy poo, so there won’t be much difference.

  2. Kurt Busiek on July 24, 2017 at 10:55 pm said:

    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.

    The Pulitzer has exactly the same problem–and it’s a pretty major award. Anyone can nominate, and there have been cases where people called themselves Pulitzer nominees simply because they had nominated themselves.

    Here’s an article about it from The Atlantic, which was one of the first hits I got when I googled “pulitzer nominee”.

    The Oscars and Emmies don’t have open nominations, so WSFS really can’t use their solution (not nominating people who don’t deserve it). Better publicity about the problem is really the only solution. Fortunately, we have the Pulitzers as allies in this effort. 🙂

  3. Crossposting from @Camestros’s blog: I’m really worried about 3SV. I haven’t read the comments in this thread yet, but I’ll go back and read them now.

    I think 3SV a procedure that makes sense for the problem it’s trying to solve, but will have some very serious effects on the award as a whole, and might present some pretty disastrous side-effects and vulnerabilities.

    We get screening for griefers. That’s good and may be a necessary defense mechanism.
    But the price we’re paying is an additional step in an already-complicated process, which adds both difficulty for the voters, and potentially a critical, possibly-toxic feel to the awards themselves.

    Difficulty for the voters, because they have less time to nominate and/or consider the shortlist (OMG, guys, voting on the shortlist is SO. MUCH. READING, it is insane), and because you’re now asking them to make an informed decision about a new element (“So, this piece discussing pedophilia in the SF community; this piece discussing harassment by Requires Hate — do you think these are valid submissions for the shortlist? Take your time; go research; I’ll wait right here”). And a shift in tone, because suddenly you’ve got a “nix something you don’t like” option, and you literally cannot activate that option — or even try to activate that option — without that correlating to public campaigns, which correlate to outrage and toxicity.

    (Just as an example, I’ve seen many people discussing the problematic treatment of gender in Too Like The Lightning, and stating they would be placing it under No Award for that reason. I’m all for those discussions; they’re important. But can you imagine if there was a brief 3SV window and people — even just a small group, with the best of intentions — tried to get it stricken off the shortlist then? Held a public campaign trying to get TLTL 3SV’d, whether or not they were successful? It would be awful.)

    So: 3SV is a huge, award-changing modification. I’m very apprehensive about it, and I don’t think that being singed by Beale — and having weathered that, strengthened the system, and are now pretty much past it — is justification for something so drastic.

    The other thing is: 3SV opens up a huge new vulnerable flank. Yes, it protects the shortlist, which until now is all the flank we had. But it does that by creating a new flank, a pseudo-longlist, which is bigger, much easier to break into, and therefore much more vulnerable.

    If griefers can muster the votes for an entry or two on the shortlist, they’ll be able to capture lots of slots on the longlist. In fact, griefers who can’t muster the votes to hit the shortlist, griefers which we otherwise might be blissfully oblivious too, will be able to capture lots of slots on the longlist.
    If divisive items can promote bitterness and toxicity, imagine how many more divisive items we’ll potentially have with a longlist.

    It’s a lose-lose situation.
    Either 3SV usually goes smoothly and without rancor — and then we have, de facto, a longlist, which is more vulnerable than our shortlist ever was. We’re also wasting a few extra weeks every year on something that isn’t helping that year.
    Or it doesn’t, and then all we’ve done is move the battleground. If we assume a 3SV battle is swift and decisive, that might be an acceptable fix — but dedicated griefers are going to adapt, and I don’t think we want to see how that pans out.

    In fact, I’ve previously discussed a “Hornet’s Nest” approach to attacking 3SV. It goes like this:
    – Prod some hopefuls from various communities, in SF or even outside of it, to take aim at the Hugo spotlight.
    Some of those will be successful enough to be listed in the 3SV phase.
    – When they are not shortlisted, portray this as spiteful action of Hugo voters (whether it is or not)
    – Outrage ensues; each participant goes back to their home community to rally some allies against the awful, exclusionary Hugo fanbase.

    This isn’t hard. This isn’t hard. It’s just looking at the new system 3SV creates, and seeing where it’s vulnerable.

    That’s how I see it. I’m worried about this one, and unless somebody has some very persuasive reassurances for me, I’m gonna stay worried.

  4. @Andrew M:

    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.

    Part of the thing is, this varies wildly by category.

    Short story has no clumping; it’s like herding cats.
    Novellas, OTOH, you only have so many well-publicized ones a year. Subscribers to F&SF might all have a common nominee, no further coordination necessary. An author with a large fanbase putting out a novella might be guaranteed a spot; EPH intensifies that effect.
    BDP:Short, on the other hand, favors fan clubs more without EPH, because there the single fan club is liable to dominate the category with multiple (related) items. EPH makes this much better; the Who fans get their favorite episode, the GOT fans get theirs, and they still aren’t blocking plucky newcomers from entering as well.

    My general impression is that we have much more of a problem of fragmentation and nobody reading everything, than we do of universally-lauded works being shunted out in favor of fringe picks. That means EPH’s value is great, and its cost is low.

    Remember, also, that EPH totally allows for a runaway hit or two per category. If one book is loved by OMG EVERYBODY, that’ll maybe penalize some clusters’ other picks, but not that one.

    Really your only problem is if you’re saying, “No, I’ve got a really big cluster of ~300 fans that really likes all three of these books.” And if all 300 have nominated all three and also nobody outside the 300 nominated any of them, then… then that 300 sounds like a naturally-occurring voting bloc. They have their favorites, and they should get to influence the shortlist in proportion to their numbers. EPH does, really, exactly what I’d want it to.

    Unless you’re assuming the voting body is composed of many one-issue fan-clubs (which you’d like to see generally ignored) and also a cohesive group of “good,” widely-read nominators (who all come to similar, highly-clustered conclusions, which should be the most influential). But then you’ve got much, much bigger issues :-/

  5. Hampus

    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.

    As far as I can see, that doesn’t contradict what I said. If three hundred people concentrate their votes on three things, they can’t be guaranteed to get all of them on the ballot. And if they divide their votes between three things between three things, they also can’t be guaranteed to get all of them on the ballot (in fact it is very unlikely that they will). .

    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.

    No, but Nominee Diversity deals with that (and it is in fact Nominee Diversity, not EPH, which ensured we didn’t get a takeover by Game of Thrones this year).

  6. Kevin:

    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
    .

    I have answered this point repeatedly, but let me try once more: the significant period, which is in danger of being damagingly shortened, is not the nominating period, i.e. the period during which nominations can be sent in. It is the period between the close of eligibility and the close of nominations. We don’t need more time to send nominations in. We could all send them in on the same day if we had to. We need time to read the stuff.

  7. @Andrew @Kevin:

    We don’t need more time to send nominations in. We could all send them in on the same day if we had to. We need time to read the stuff.

    Hear hear. Quoted for truth.

  8. Chip Hitchcock:

    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.

    Well, of course it’s not likely to actually happen. But for that reason, EPH isn’t likely to make a major difference to the outcome. In the absence of either deliberate slates, or natural slates such as are formed by Doctor Who fans etc., the degree of convergence is, in all likelihood, too small for EPH to make a difference. (Except possibly in BDP Long. I think EPH has the power to cause serious upsets in that category – where it hasn’t actually been tested. But that doesn’t seem to have happened this year; the obvious suspects have all been shortlisted.)

    Still, if there were convergence of that kind, I think that this would be very powerful evidence that the works in question were good, and I think it would be paradoxical to reduce the value of the votes because they converged.

  9. Standback:

    Unless you’re assuming the voting body is composed of many one-issue fan-clubs (which you’d like to see generally ignored) and also a cohesive group of “good,” widely-read nominators (who all come to similar, highly-clustered conclusions, which should be the most influential). But then you’ve got much, much bigger issues :-/

    I believe that there are people who read widely – where ‘widely’ doesn’t mean ‘an enormous amount’; it means that they join in discussions and follow recommendations and look for the most interesting things. And I believe that there are people who sign up in order to nominate a particular thing. I believe this because I have seen them say so (plus the evidence JJ pointed to). I don’t believe that the first group reaches highly clustered conclusions; on the contrary, its members often come to (metaphorical) blows about the merits of various works. But it is, necessarily, more clustered than the second group.

    Again, I don’t think it’s actually likely that EPH will make a significant difference in this respect – organic voters aren’t clustered enough. But if it did make a difference, it would be favouring the second group over the first, and I think that would be odd.

    I mean, obviously if the main body of voters became very clustered – hundreds of people all nominating the same five works – something would have gone wrong. There would be not point in an awards process in that case; if you valued these people’s opinion you could just ask them to write down a list. But I think there’s another possibility, that the core body of voters remains the same vague medley it is now, while more people sign up with the aim of promoting particular authors or works, and the system favours them because they are even less clustered.

  10. Andrew M: I will forego the traditional rude answers to “if”, and just affirm that my years of reading and of making music lead me to conclude that “good” is such a nebulous quality that the odds of a work being universally seen as good are not worth worrying about. I think this is a measure of how good the field as a whole is (similarly to Gould’s evolutionary explanation of why we haven’t had anyone hitting .400 in over half a century); there’s no likelihood of even one work being so widely approved, unlike the weaker state of media (where we’ve had 4 first-ballot winners in the last ~30 years).

    @JJ: TFTR. Based on what you did and didn’t like in 2016, I figure our tolerance levels are somewhat similar; I’ll pass on the Sullivan.

  11. Chip Hitchcock: Based on what you did and didn’t like in 2016, I figure our tolerance levels are somewhat similar

    Do you find the same with PhilRM? Because I’ve noticed that his tastes align to a great extent with mine.

  12. My understanding was that 3SV is likely to take roughly the same amount of time as the current gap between the nomination period ending and the nominees getting announced, since much of the post-nomination pre-announcement labour could be done concurrently, and therefore wouldn’t reduce the time to read for voting/ranking by very much. Did I misunderstand?

    I don’t suppose someone mathy wants to put together numbers for what it would take to get five troll-works onto the 3SV longlist..?

    @Andrew M

    I’m not sure why we should be concerned about a scenario that you admit is highly implausible. 🙂

  13. 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 guess I should be more precise, but I’ve been using the terms “nominee” and “finalist” interchangeably when talking about people and works that reach the Hugo ballot. The idea that anyone is calling themselves a nominee because one person submitted their work as a nomination is so cheesy I have trouble regarding it as a concern.

    Can anyone cite examples of SF/F authors doing this? It seems like a great way to open yourself up to ridicule.

  14. Meredith:

    My understanding was that 3SV is likely to take roughly the same amount of time as the current gap between the nomination period ending and the nominees getting announced, since much of the post-nomination pre-announcement labour could be done concurrently, and therefore wouldn’t reduce the time to read for voting/ranking by very much

    The prediction made at last year’s Business Meeting was two months. The gap between close of nominations and announcement of finalists this year was about three weeks. ‘Two months’ isn’t authoritative, but we don’t have anything more authoritative. Whenever the question just how long it will take is raised I see a lot of handwaving. I’m beginning to think the time it takes should actually be written into the rule, as the effect of the change so massively depends on it.

    (I’m a bit puzzled, by the way, by the idea that the second stage voting period can be used to verify eligibility and check authors’ acceptance. Surely if the works on the longlist are not eligible or the authors refuse nomination, they are not the top fifteen nominees?)

    I’m not sure why we should be concerned about a scenario that you admit is highly implausible. ?

    The extreme case – works being excluded because of massive convergence – is highly implausible. (Though I didn’t invent it. I was responding to an argument meant to show what a good thing EPH was, and suggesting it didn’t show that so decisively.) The case that does worry me is one where even the mild convergence that actually happens disfavours a work compared with fan-clubs and single issue campaigns.

  15. @Andrew M:
    I think if you actually try to come up with a scenario where there’s “overwhelming” support from widespread readers for a cluster of books, you’ll find it either looks exactly like a clique, or else that it’s much less overwhelming than you’d imagine.

    A few simple observations, assuming you’ve got several fandoms doing bullet-voting, and a big group of “wide readers” with some popular favorites:

    – The “wide readers'” most popular favorite will make the shortlist, unless its drowned out by 5-6 fandom-bullet-votes — which would beat it in First-Past-The-Post as well.
    – For the “wide readers'” second-favorite to be knocked off, either the number of “wide readers” is not appreciably larger than the number of members within the specific fandoms, or else the correlation between “favorite” and “second favorite” is so strong as to significantly weaken the wide-readers’ vote.
    — For example, to weaken the wider readers’ influence by half (for “their” second “choice”), you would need them all to have chosen both.
    — If only half the people voting for “second choice” also voted for “first choice,” their influence shrinks much less — effectively, when “second choice” is up for shortlisting/elimination, their vote weight is at 75% of maximum – so they only need to be one-third more numerous than the next competing fandom-bullet-bloc to get in.

    If your number of “wide readers” agreeing on a “second favorite” work is not significantly larger than the next-biggest fandom-bullet-bloc, then it doesn’t look to me like a “well obviously this group should be more influential, and EPH is holding it back.” Alternatively if they’re so in-sync with the “first favorite” that it really is a serious hit to voting weight, I think that they’re functionally behaving as a bloc, and EPH should penalize them accordingly.

  16. rcade:

    The idea that anyone is calling themselves a nominee because one person submitted their work as a nomination is so cheesy I have trouble regarding it as a concern.

    Can anyone cite examples of SF/F authors doing this? It seems like a great way to open yourself up to ridicule.

    I don’t remember the name, but yes, I’ve seen this. I think it was scrolled here as well. Some author had gotten an email or social media comment from a fan about “hey, I liked your book so much that I nominated it for the Hugo Award”, whereupon the author wrote a happy blog post and made a banner for his website calling himself “Hugo nominated author”.

  17. Andrew M on July 25, 2017 at 7:39 am said:

    No, but Nominee Diversity deals with that (and it is in fact Nominee Diversity, not EPH, which ensured we didn’t get a takeover by Game of Thrones this year).

    Nominee Diversity helps, but still allows three big fanclubs to take over all six slots. EPH increases the chance we’ll get some alternatives to those fanclubs’ second-place picks (which probably wouldn’t win anyway, since they were second).

    (It’s important to remember, when considering all these different systems, that it has been mathematically proven that no perfect voting system exists. There are desirable attributes which are mutually exclusive. See Arrow’s Theorem for details.)

    As for 3SV: yeah, I’m still undecided. I suppose it’s worth at least a try, but I kind of think it might be good to make it easy to cancel if some of the potential, minor-looking problems turn out to be worse than expected.

  18. rcade on July 25, 2017 at 8:55 am said:

    Can anyone cite examples of SF/F authors doing this? It seems like a great way to open yourself up to ridicule.

    The Atlantic article I linked to earlier had examples of people doing this with the Pulitzer. (And, yes, basically ridiculing them for it–but it still happened.)

  19. rcade on July 25, 2017 at 8:55 am said:

    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.

    Okay, pretend for a moment that you are President of WSFS Inc. You have unilateral authority to run the organization without having to ask anyone else’s permission. You are in charge of WSFS service marks like Hugo Award. Presented with one-vote wonders calling themselves “nominees” and laughing in your face when you try to stop them, what do you do?

    If your answer is “sue them,” go back to step 1, because you just blew WSFS’s money on a lawsuit you will lose based on the “plain meaning” of the word “nominee,” as “someone who has received a nominations,” which is manifestly true of even the one-vote wonders.

    Andrew M on July 25, 2017 at 9:39 am said:

    (I’m a bit puzzled, by the way, by the idea that the second stage voting period can be used to verify eligibility and check authors’ acceptance. Surely if the works on the longlist are not eligible or the authors refuse nomination, they are not the top fifteen nominees?)

    Because the Administrator does not have to contact the top 15 and ask for acceptance. They’re not finalists. They are potentially finalists, but the rules only require us to give the finalists a chance to decline. They find out that they are potential finalists when the top-15 list comes out, just like the rest of us.

    Another added benefit of 3SV is that it’s no longer possible for a finalist to leak their ballot status before the formal announcement. (This is moderately common, and impossible to prevent in the current system where the Administrator is trying to contact people as quickly as possible and ask them to stay quiet.) That’s because you will have given them their chance to decline during the new first stage. They won’t know whether they are a finalist until all of the finalists are announced. And I expect that a several-week first-stage vote should be enough time to decide whether you will accept or not, especially as the request is in the form of “if you don’t decline by [date], you are assumed to have accepted.”

    Johan P on July 25, 2017 at 1:07 pm said:

    Some author had gotten an email or social media comment from a fan about “hey, I liked your book so much that I nominated it for the Hugo Award”, whereupon the author wrote a happy blog post and made a banner for his website calling himself “Hugo nominated author”.

    And because I monitor this stuff for the Mark Protection Committee, I have seen the newspaper articles about one-vote wonders getting publicity from the papers by touting themselves as nominees for the Hugo Award.

  20. I was skeptical about 3SV when it was initially being discussed here along with a couple other similar ideas. However, I ended up being fairly convinced that it was the best one to try. In the end, I do trust Worldcon membership as a whole to get this right. In general I think we’ve used the extremely negative tool which is No Award responsibly, and I believe that would be the case with 3SV as well.

  21. JJ:

    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.

    And that’s how you wind up with a legally-defensible solution to a message problem that fails at the messaging.

    Kevin:

    Okay, pretend for a moment that you are President of WSFS Inc.

    That was me, not rcade. So I get this mighty power. Me!

    You have unilateral authority to run the organization without having to ask anyone else’s permission. You are in charge of WSFS service marks like Hugo Award. Presented with one-vote wonders calling themselves “nominees” and laughing in your face when you try to stop them, what do you do?

    At a guess: Change the name of the nominee list, so it’s called something that doesn’t correspond to what most of the public sees as a synonym for “finalist.” Use that term consistently, so you’re soliciting “rankers” or “considerees” or whatever, as noted earlier.

    Have the finalist list called something like the Official Nominee List or the WSFS Official Hugo Award Nominee list, or whatever, and protect that.

    Let the one-vote wonders be the ones who try to explain why they’re not on the Official Nominee List, but are on the Consideree List and how that’s really the same thing as a nominee by dictionary definition, honest, rather than trying to bear the burden of trying to get people to change their perception of what “nominee” means.

    Provide Official Nominees with a snappy-looking nominee logo that the poseurs can’t use. Let their water get muddy.

    If your answer is “sue them,” go back to step 1, because you just blew WSFS’s money on a lawsuit you will lose based on the “plain meaning” of the word “nominee,” as “someone who has received a nominations,” which is manifestly true of even the one-vote wonders.

    I guess it’s a good thing that wasn’t my answer.

    As noted, it wasn’t up to me, so my preferences don’t have any weight, but I think the WSFS’s solution was a poor one, because it’s a messaging problem addressed with a response that basically surrenders on the message front in favor of a protectable mark that people don’t use much, because they think and say “nominee” instead.

    It doesn’t stop anyone from calling themselves a Hugo nominee, and it doesn’t and won’t change the general understanding of the word “nominee,” as past battles over “sci-fi” and “comic book” have demonstrated.

    I don’t know that my solution would work better, but it’s at least about trying to win on messaging, rather than trying to figure out a court-based solution that doesn’t accomplish the goal.

    “Yeah, he’s not an Official Nominee” is simpler to understand than “Well, what the Oscars call nominees we call finalists, see…”

    [And yeah, it’s unfortunate that it’s not a simple fix, and there’ll still be poseurs, but they’re going to be there either way, so better to muddy their water than your own.]

  22. Standback: I think we are in agreement that cases in which EPH would make a serious difference to the results, in the absence of slates, are rare.

    The kind of case where I think there would be a difference is something like Black Genesis. If we suppose that regular votes don’t display massive convergence, then for something to beat the general fan favourites, despite having fewer votes, it would have to show massive divergence, very little overlap, and that suggests to me a single-issue campaign; a work which simply had a large following within the regular voting community would show some overlap with the fans of other works.

    Now, of course, Black Genesis was shortlisted anyway, but a slightly less well-supported Black Genesis might succeed under EPH when it would fail under the traditional method. And it seems to me this would be a bad thing. We do generally agree that what happened with Black Genesis was a bad thing, and we often instinctively call it ‘slating’, though it’s quite different from slating in the voting-systems theoretical sense. Just why we think it’s bad is a bit hard to say; its success wasn’t disproportionate to its support, as with the puppy-type slates, nor can one even say it didn’t represent a real preference. But I think this shows that we do feel voters should be committed to the process rather than just to a particular work. So while excessive convergence is a sign of one kind of bad actor, excessive divergence could be seen as a sign of another, and ideally we would want a system which didn’t reward either.

    (No, I can’t actually think of such a system. I’m not actually advocating getting rid of EPH right now.)

  23. Kurt Busiek on July 25, 2017 at 2:34 pm said:

    Change the name of the nominee list,…

    I’m assuming you mean the thing we currently call the “nominating ballot,” which is the ballot where members write down up to five people/works that they would like to see on the final ballot.

    …so it’s called something that doesn’t correspond to what most of the public sees as a synonym for “finalist.” Use that term consistently, so you’re soliciting “rankers” or “considerees” or whatever, as noted earlier.

    So in order to maintain the name “nominee” for the list of people who are shortlisted for the final Hugo AWard ballot, you propose changing the name of the ballot that everyone knows as the “nominating ballot?”

    “Yeah, he’s not an Official Nominee” is simpler to understand than “Well, what the Oscars call nominees we call finalists, see…”

    Actually, I’m finding that the change from “nominee” to “finalist” is going much more smoothly than I thought it would. While people with more than a few years experience still will sometime call them “nominees,” the title “finalist” is sufficiently intuitive and plain-meaning that the fact that some other awards call them “nominees” does not strike me as important as it might have a few years ago.

    Andrew M on July 25, 2017 at 2:59 pm said:

    No, I can’t actually think of such a system. I’m not actually advocating getting rid of EPH right now.

    In my opinion, one virtue of 3SV is that would give us the ability to repeal EPH and return to the relatively easy to understand first-six-past-the-post nominating system. People can understand that. EPH has a serious drawback in my opinion in that it’s opaque and also all but impossible to do by hand. Now I’ve spent years explaining how the final ballot works, and there are people who consider it “too complicated” and would replace it with first-past-the-post as well (a terrible idea!), but the final ballot (instant runoff voting) can be done by hand (it’s just slow). After all, we count the site selection using the same instant-runoff system, and I’ve personally counted site selection where there have been four candidates (plus write-ins, none of the above, etc.) and elections that have gone multiple rounds. In my experience, it has never taken more than two hours to do that count. (The 1991 election doesn’t count. Counting the ballots only two hours. It took twelve hours to validate the eligibility of all of the voters because the administrators had not been checking people off the list as they voted.)

    Having an opaque voting system gives critics a valid-sounding basis for their complaints, in that they can say it’s so complicated that mere mortals can’t understand it, and we just have to hope the computer was programmed correctly. Worse, those who say, “Of course it’s rigged so that only [name your conspiracy theory] candidates make the final ballot” are hard to refute because the system is so complicated. Recounting the final ballot isn’t actually that complicated; it just takes a long time to move the pieces of paper around stack-by-stack, which is how you would be able to do a hand recount.

  24. rcade: Can anyone cite examples of SF/F authors doing this? It seems like a great way to open yourself up to ridicule.

    I’ve seen at least a dozen authors doing this over the last year or so. My sense is that they’re aware that the ratio of people who know how the Hugo Awards actually work to people who only know of the Hugo Awards’ prestigious reputation is around 1:100,000 — so they’re going to impress a lot of people for every one that they piss off, and they figure that’s a more-than-acceptable level of win-to-ridicule. And if they’re lucky, none of the knowledgeable people either ever sees their extremely misleading claim or has the temerity to point it out.

    Item #4 in this Pixel Scroll is one such example. That author had a press release which is still posted, as well as a banner proclaiming “the new novel has been nominated for a Hugo Award” in the top of his website pages (which doesn’t render properly in the Wayback Machine, and appears to have been removed now).

    After Kevin Standlee posted a clarification to him, his response and the fact that he didn’t delete or modify either the press release made it pretty clear that he knew exactly what he was doing and was just playing dumb.

    (Just as a fun aside, the “Hugo-nominated Novel” in question is fanfic composed using elements of Electric Light Orchestra’s lyrics from numerous songs including Yours Truly, 2095, Ticket to the Moon, Is It Alright, and Mr. Blue Sky.)

    Then there’s this author:
    Self-Published Canadian Author Nominated For Hugo Award

    And this one was promoting themselves as both a Hugo-nominated and Campbell-nominated author…

    … as well as claiming that they were “robbed of their place on the Hugo shortlist” by the Puppy campaigns (and no, they weren’t on the longlist).

    They did have “Hugo-nominated book” on one of their book listings on Amazon, but it looks as though they removed it; however, you can see it on the Amazon screenshot on their Facebook post, which is still there.

    I’ve seen several others, too, but (quelle surprise) don’t remember their names.

  25. I’m assuming you mean the thing we currently call the “nominating ballot,” which is the ballot where members write down up to five people/works that they would like to see on the final ballot.

    I’d mean any reference to that stage — the ballot, the longlist of ballot results, whatever. I don’t think it would be a publicity problem for the nominating ballot to be called something else, because nobody would be confused by it — if they’re using it, they know what it is — but it would muddy the waters for people who tried to make publicity hay by taking advantage of confusion between technically-nominated and finalist, a term known to the wider world of Amazon shoppers and such as “nominee” from more famous uses.

    Back when I worked at Marvel, we had an Order Form and an Ordering Form, and I produced both, every month, but everyone called both of them the “order form,” which resulted in confusion. So I changed them to the Catalog and the Order Form, respectively, and the confusion ended, even though I was changing the name of both at once.

    If I was trying to preserve “nominee” for the stuff that got publicized as making the final ballot, I’d change the term for the other end of the process, since it works with the messaging issue and involves fewer people having to mentally adjust to a new term.

    So in order to maintain the name “nominee” for the list of people who are shortlisted for the final Hugo Award ballot, you propose changing the name of the ballot that everyone knows as the “nominating ballot?”

    No. If I was going to propose it, I’d probably ask you for examples of the right form to write it up in, I’d seek co-sponsors, all that. But as I’ve noted twice, it wasn’t up to me, something else got decided, and my opinion isn’t really relevant.

    But when you ask me what I’d choose if I had all the power, that’s my thought — that’s not me proposing something, that’s me answering your question.

    Actually, I’m finding that the change from “nominee” to “finalist” is going much more smoothly than I thought it would. While people with more than a few years experience still will sometime call them “nominees,” the title “finalist” is sufficiently intuitive and plain-meaning that the fact that some other awards call them “nominees” does not strike me as important as it might have a few years ago.

    That’s cool. I think it’s a tad clumsy and doesn’t really fix the problem, except for insiders who’ll actually be aware of the distinction between “finalist” and “nominee,” but I’m not suggesting anyone back the train up and take another track — a choice was made, and there’s other stuff to deal with.

    I’m just conversing on line. I’m glad it’s going more smoothly than you expected, even if it wouldn’t have been my choice were I appointed WSFS Emperor, with all the powers and honors attendant thereto.

  26. @Kevin Standlee: I’d think that newspapers would be fairly sympathetic, since the Pulitzer, which has the same problem, is primarily a journalism award. There can’t be a reporter in the US who doesn’t understand that “Pulitzer nominee” is meaningless noise…

  27. Kurt Busiek on July 25, 2017 at 6:20 pm said:

    I think it’s a tad clumsy and doesn’t really fix the problem, except for insiders who’ll actually be aware of the distinction between “finalist” and “nominee,”

    More importantly from the Mark Protection Committee’s point of view, it’s enforceable in a way that “nominee” is not. If someone claims to be a Hugo Award finalist who is not, they are objectively abusing WSFS’s service mark. The one-vote wonders who claim to be “nominees” can’t be disproved, and could in fact be easily proven by the person saying, “Sure, I nominated myself,” which isn’t prohibited. The MPC goes after people who claim to be Hugo Award winners who are not (there was one this year, but it appears to have been an innocent mistake and was quickly corrected), and we’ll do the same thing with false finalists.

    Xtifr on July 25, 2017 at 6:49 pm said:

    There can’t be a reporter in the US who doesn’t understand that “Pulitzer nominee” is meaningless noise…

    Same with “Nobel Prize nominee.” But I don’t expect reporters to be sympathetic, and besides, the so called “plain meaning” argument has already been used against the MPC more than once by newspaper reporters who are more interested in the local-interest story. No joke. Isn’t the era of “fake news” wonderful?

  28. If 3SV were adopted and EPH was dropped, I think griefers would go back to 5 per category slates (or more than 1 or 2 anyway). I would like both as well as 5 & 6! I don’t really feel it’s too much of a problem if those who don’t understand EPH think it is rigged. They would certainly believe 3SV is unfair too.

  29. @Andrew M: the answer to Black Genesis — and its ilk, such as the 3 implausible nominees in 1989 — is 3SV; EPH was designed against slates, not bullets.

    @Laura M: it’s not clear that EPH is necessary with 3SV; there would still be 10 valid nominees after the Puppy Poo was cleared away (unless they were so disciplined that they could get their supporters to divide between two slates, which they have shown no signs of being).

  30. @JJ: I don’t remember PhilRM posting a categorized list; I have yours for reference/annotation. I don’t try to track my reactions to individual reviews. (There is a limit to that facet of my geekness.)

  31. Chip Hitchcock: I don’t remember PhilRM posting a categorized list; I have yours for reference/annotation. I don’t try to track my reactions to individual reviews.

    I found myself agreeing with so many of PhilRM’s opinions that it was pretty memorable — especially since I had noted several people whose tastes seemed to be pretty much the opposite of mine, to the point where it had started to make me wonder if I really was a wrongfan having wrongfun. 😉

  32. More importantly from the Mark Protection Committee’s point of view, it’s enforceable in a way that “nominee” is not.

    Yes, I know. That was already covered.

  33. It just goes to show that Filers are the opposite of a hive mind; JJ and I agree on almost everything IRL, but have completely different taste in books and videos.

    Truly, the cat is a great symbol for us here, because getting us to agree on anything involving personal taste is like herding cats.

    @Kurt: I like your idea for terminology.

  34. lurkertype: JJ and I agree on almost everything IRL, but have completely different taste in books and videos.

    This is because you are a wrongfan having wrongfun. 😉

  35. Pffbbbtttthhhhh. 🙄

    I’ve been at it longer than you, so clearly YOU are the wrongfan.

  36. Laura:
    If 3SV were adopted and EPH was dropped, I think griefers would go back to 5 per category slates (or more than 1 or 2 anyway). I would like both as well as 5 & 6! I don’t really feel it’s too much of a problem if those who don’t understand EPH think it is rigged. They would certainly believe 3SV is unfair too.

    I suggest that nothing will convince some of of the Puppy (& Puppy-aligned) that the award is *not* rigged. I say this based on statements made by various Puppy in recent years. Therefore, we should try to make the Hugos as good as possible (still no trivial task & people of good will don’t agree on the best approach), but the opinions of the Puppies shouldn’t be a factor.

  37. Soon Lee: I suggest that nothing will convince some of of the Puppy (& Puppy-aligned) that the award is *not* rigged… Therefore, we should try to make the Hugos as good as possible… but the opinions of the Puppies shouldn’t be a factor.

    Exactly. They’ve proven again and again that their engagement with the Hugos has been one of self-interest, vituperation, and goalpost-shifting. The only thing that will ever satisfy them is handing them the unearned Hugos they so badly desire.

    I don’t think that it’s constructive to try to make decisions based on what Puppies will think or say about it. The decisions of WSFS members should be based on what they believe is right and best for the Hugos, without considering how the Puppies will respond.

  38. “This is because you are a wrongfan having wrongfun. ?”

    I still have a few ribbons left saying that.

  39. Yeah, the Puppies think an award is rigged if they can’t force people to vote the way they want them to. Their opinions of the rules aren’t worth worrying about.

    I like EPH whether 3SV happens or not.

    I’m really curious to see how the business meeting decides. I think I would vote for 3SV if I was able to attend, since I have yet to see a reasonable alternative and I agree that harassment-candidates are still a big problem*, but I would like to see numbers on how many things could be put on the longlist by trolls under EPH if aiming for the final ballot was no longer possible/the goal. That seems to me to be a valid concern.

    However, it isn’t the only option for how they would decide to go. I think it more likely that what would happen is bullet voting where they had a proper candidate (Neil Gaiman; China Miéville) that would be unlikely to be voted out, and in categories where they couldn’t scrape one up then we would see broader troll candidacy. Even then, finding troll-candidates is work, and I’m not sure we’d often see a full five. They like king-making, too, so that incentivises them to keep the bullet-voting to circumvent EPH. Dropping EPH while implementing 3SV would remove that incentive, because they could have their proper candidate and then also include troll-candidates without compromising their chances of having a thing they actually liked on the ballot.

    It seems to me that the core objections to 3SV are generally well-reasoned, although there’s also been a fair number of less solid concerns (including at least one of my own). Sometimes the difference is what the priorities are and not a matter of absolute right or wrong. I think I would vote for it but I still feel pretty ambivalent. I’ll definitely be hoping for live-commenting of the meeting so I can follow along at home while it is being discussed.

    But it does seem like purpose and timeframe are things that require more clarity in advertising before it will pass.

    *Minor note – I’ve seen a few people say that there have always been bad finalists for the Hugo’s, but I don’t think that’s the same problem at all. There’s a difference in both spirit and reputation-impact between “this finalist was awful” and “this finalist is clearly designed to maliciously lie about either a specific person or a group of people”. The first can be explained by taste or context (and also stands out less at a casual glance – you have to read/watch/see/listen to it to know you hate it), the second is unacceptable.

    I don’t think there’s anyFiler who I would consider aligns strongly with my preferences, although I respect the opinions and reviews of all Filers, even if I disagree, and have been extremely pleased with various books that have been rec’d to me. But I don’t really mind; I likes what I likes, and this way there’s always someone else who also likes what I likes, even if it isn’t consistently the same person. 🙂

  40. Soon Lee:
    I suggest that nothing will convince some of of the Puppy (& Puppy-aligned) that the award is *not* rigged.

    Yes, that’s what I’m saying too. So it’s not a reason to drop EPH if 3SV goes forward. I like what EPH does even without slates. And I like the fact that a side benefit of sorts is that it changed the griefer strategy. Then even if the participation in the second round of 3SV was low, EPH with 5&6 gives us a good shot at 4-5 worthy finalists per category (like this year.)

    I would really like to see us try 3SV. I believe it could work as intended. But I don’t think it would make EPH unnecessary.

    I’m more pleased with 5&6 than I expected to be. Last year I felt it was not really needed with EPH. But they ended up complimenting each other well.

    TL;DR: I think 3SV, EPH, and 5&6 would be best in tandem. And I don’t care if griefers think it’s unfair and too complex.

  41. My two cents, worth less than half a penny after conversions, is that EPH is great, 5&6 is ok, and 3SV is problematic for the reasons others have listed.

    However, I have no say in the matter. I just hope EPH stays.

  42. (Just as a fun aside, the “Hugo-nominated Novel” in question is fanfic composed using elements of Electric Light Orchestra’s lyrics from numerous songs including Yours Truly, 2095, Ticket to the Moon, Is It Alright, and Mr. Blue Sky.)

    LOL. I kind of want to read that now.

    Thanks for all the links about nomination tomfoolery. I guess I shouldn’t underestimate the publicity impulses of the desperate author.

    I’m going to start using “finalist” instead of “nominee.” I feel like I’ve given this too much thought to do otherwise.

  43. Yeah, I’ve looked at how EPH works in detail, and I thoroughly approve of it. It may be confusing to those who are scared of the word “algorithm”, but I’m not such a person. To me, it makes sense. I have confidence in it. The test results have matched my expectations. I was even able to roll my own to double-check. It’s good.

    3SV is more of an unknown. It’s not complicated, but it relies heavily on human behavior, which is far less predictable than algorithms. So I can’t really guess how it will work in practice. It has thresholds which are critical for it to perform correctly, but we have no idea what how these should be set for optimum performance, so it boils down to wild guesses. If the participation thresholds are too low, trolls can abuse it; if they’re too high, bad works won’t be removed. And there’s no easy way to test it. A proper test will require both works trolls want to attack and works sane people will want to remove, and it’s not going to be easy to guarantee we get both on the ballot…

    So, I’m strongly in favor of keeping EPH, and neutral/uncertain about 3SV. If we remove EPH, and 3SV doesn’t perform as hoped, we’re screwed.

  44. @Xtifr – So, I’m strongly in favor of keeping EPH, and neutral/uncertain about 3SV. If we remove EPH, and 3SV doesn’t perform as hoped, we’re screwed.

    Right there with you. I think making best guesses about human behavior as an organizational tool is an exercise in optimism, plus has an unknown potential to have noxious consequences, so I probably wouldn’t vote for 3SV, even with a sunset clause.

    I’m a fan of 5/6, even with all the extra reading, although I’m not sure I can articulate why.

    I just bought a book by someone who describes himself as “a Hugo nominated author*” and then explains at the end of his bio why that is both true (he voted for himself) and meaningless.

  45. I like 5&6, too. It compensates for EPH’s occasional tendency to swap the fifth and sixth place even in normal, non-slate years, and aside from Best Series it doesn’t add that much extra reading. Anyway, six finalists just looks nice on the list. Sort of appealing and round. /shallow

  46. Yeah, 5/6 is a definite win. Its effects on slating are minimal, but its side-effects are all lovely.

    I’m neutral on, rather than opposed to, 3SV, because I tend to suspect the thresholds are fine–that there’s plenty of margin for error, where it will still work as intended. I’m more than happy to give it a trial run. But I think EPH is more important and I trust it more.

  47. Question about what version of 3SV is up for ratification.

    The 2017 Business Meeting Agenda shows this:

    3.8.5: The final Award ballots shall list in each category the Qualifiers on the long list from the first Qualifier through the last accepted Qualifier and any Qualifiers tied with it. “The last accepted Qualifier” is the fifth Qualifier on the long list not designated as rejected, providing it exists, otherwise the last such Qualifier providing it exists and is below fifth place, otherwise the fifth Qualifier on the list. No Qualifier on the ballots shall have its rejected status marked.

    Looking through the 2016 Business Meeting notes it seems that that amended wording failed and the following original wording should be up for ratification:

    3.8.5: The final Award ballots shall list in each category the five eligible Qualifiers who received the most nominations in the first stage Nominating Ballot and were not eliminated from consideration in the Qualification Stage. If there is a tie including fifth place, all the tied eligible nominees shall be listed.

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