Sasquan Sets New Hugo Voting Record

Sasquan logoSasquan received a record­ 5,950 valid ballots for the 2015 Hugo Awards, surpassing the mark of 3,587 votes set last year at LonCon 3.

Nearly all voters cast their ballots online – only 36 were mailed in.

Sasquan had the highest level of participation in the past decade with over 57% of eligible members voting.

Most of the votes were cast in the final week before the deadline, over 3,000. (Approximately 2,900 votes had been submitted as of July 24.)

The new vote total record is a 65% increase over LonCon’s record.

The Hugo Award winners will be announced Saturday, August 22 at a ceremony hosted by authors Tananarive Due and David Gerrold. The ceremony will be livestreamed free of charge at http://www.ustream.tv/hugoawards. There will also be a text stream available on the Hugo Awards webpage at http://www.thehugoawards.org.

Sasquan will release the final runoff vote counts and report the nominating votes through its website at the conclusion of the ceremony.

89 thoughts on “Sasquan Sets New Hugo Voting Record

  1. @luagha: The thing about the famous Pauline Kael quote is that it identifies a phenomenon that crosses ideological boundaries over time. Kael’s particular experience was inhabiting a liberal bubble. But that’s not the only kind of bubble. Famously, in 2012, it was conservatives who fell prey to Pauline Kael Syndrome. Google “unskewed polls” if you didn’t experience it at the time. Apparently, Mitt Romney and his team were genuinely shocked when he lost by pretty much the exact margin all the professional pollsters predicted, because his team was so sunk in the right-wing bubble. Also google my friend Julian Sanchez’s article on “epistemic closure.”

    Ex ante, I don’t think it’s wise to be sure who is really locked into their own little world when it comes to this year’s Hugo vote. But I note that the Puppy side includes Peter Grant making estimations about the effectiveness of the Tor “boycott” that are as confident as they are laughably wrong.

  2. I do find it remarkable that I couldn’t find a single blogger out of around 50 who was voting for The Dark Between The Stars, and only three who were voting for Skin Game. Of course, even some of the Puppies swung towards The Three-Body Problem.

  3. Jim Henley, the reaction on some conservative (non-political) blogs that I saw in the days after the election indicated they were smoking from the same stash. I actually felt sorry for them…they REALLY thought Romney would win.

    As for the Hugos — I’m hoping No Award takes a lot of categories, but I’m not going to make a prediction.

  4. Ex ante, I don’t think it’s wise to be sure who is really locked into their own little world when it comes to this year’s Hugo vote.

    I’m basing my thinking on the subject on what happened last year. Many Puppies confidently predicted that the surge in Loncon voters was due to Puppy supporters turning out, and that Warbound would win easily. Others predicted that a flood of Wheel of Time fans would push that to the trophy. The reality turned out to be very different. I don’t see any real reason to think that this year will be substantially different. I just don’t see a huge surge of Puppy voters happening, and I don’t see a huge influx of Butcher fans pushing him over the top.

  5. The other thing about the famous Pauline Kael vote is that she knew her circle of friends and acquaintances wasn’t representative. That’s the point she was making.

    I don’t think the Puppies realize that.

  6. I thought about buying a supporting membership and voting and doing the reviewing thing. In the end, I decided to start reading the Culture novels instead. I can’t convince myself I made a bad choice in use of my leisure time.

  7. Wow. I had predicted 5,500 but thought that I was being overly optimistic. I am very glad to see this kind of turnout.

    I hope that this sort of large participation will be the start of a long-term trend.

  8. Lori said ” the reaction on some conservative (non-political) blogs that I saw in the days after the election indicated they were smoking from the same stash. I actually felt sorry for them…they REALLY thought Romney would win.”

    Teapuppy types tend to construct their own reality. But remember we had those like Nate Silver cranking data, so all of us in the real world knew that Romney winning was less than a 5% shot.

    There isn’t much data out there on this. I have no idea what will happen.

  9. but as far as I can tell the non-Puppies have no issue with any fans liking any sort of SF;

    Really? I found getting told I should not be reading cis white males this year got old pretty fast.

    But unless your branding people who agree with the puppies or happened to like one of the puppies nominations as actual puppies then I would think most are overestimating puppy numbers.

  10. It’s sorta splitting hairs, but… technically didn’t EVERYONE vote at the last minute, as the ballots weren’t finalized until the stroke of midnight?

  11. Really? I found getting told I should not be reading cis white males this year got old pretty fast.

    Was anyone actually saying it was wrong to like SF by white males? I certainly didn’t see that.

    I saw people suggesting that choosing to read other voices than white males for a while would widen one’s horizons, but no one that I saw was saying that white male writers were a priori bad, or that no one should like them.

    I think that’d be an interesting experiment — not one I could bring myself to essay, but then, I read a fair amount that’s not by white males already.

    But unless your branding people who agree with the puppies or happened to like one of the puppies nominations as actual puppies then I would think most are overestimating puppy numbers.

    I haven’t made any estimations about puppy numbers, myself, but I hope they’re on the low end.

  12. I think the puppies last year predicting victory, and folks predicting Wheel of Time victory, were not taking instant-runoff sufficiently into account. A cluster of voters for X means less and less each round, as votes are redistributed, unless those other voters also liked X, and voted it high enough to help before X fell away. /oversimplification

    @Kurt: (nodding vigorously) There’s a big difference between “expand your horizons” (however poorly and click-baitingly written) and “you shouldn’t like X.” But it’s tough to read “OMG anyone claiming they like Y is just lying!” (as various puppies have said of people liking, well, anything Dear Puppy Leaders don’t like). Le sigh. 😉

    (BTW how do people manage to survive the e-mail onslaught of “notify me of comments by email”? No, don’t tell me…I’ll get buried under the replies.)

  13. BTW I’m a bit surprised the # of people voting in the Hugos wasn’t more than that. I guess it’s true that a decent # of supporting members are folks primarily interested in site selection.

  14. I agree with Aaron–I think the Puppy nominees in Best Novel will place behind the 3 non-Puppy picks in that category, and that Best Novella and Best Related Work will both go to No Award.

    I think Best Novelette and Best Short Story might also go to No Award. I also think Laura Mixon is the only nominee with a shot at winning Best Fan Writer, and that it’ll go to no Award if she does not.

    And I think that, regardless of the winner in each category, there are Puppy picks in multiple categories who are likely to place below No Award.

    Given the paranoid accusations and insinuations the Puppies have flung around, I hereby add that I have no insider knowledge, hints, or information. I base my opinion strictly on what I have seen in public online discussions and analyses which are visible to anyone with an internet connection.

  15. Kendall,

    There has always been a pretty large proportion of Worldcon members who don’t cast Hugo votes; they join for other reasons.

    Laura,

    That’s my assessment too. No Award may also have a chance in one or both Best Editor categories.

  16. @Bitty

    I guess a lot of us are pretty fast readers.

    Also some of us read earlier than mmpb publication. For example I had read 3 of the 5 novels before the final ballot was announced*. I don’t normally do so well for the shorter work – and that was especially true this year. Although it was pleasing that some of my nominations in the shorter categories were in Dozois’s Year’s Best anthology.

    * I generally find this is true of the BSFA Award too in which I also vote.

  17. > “I like some MilSF fiction but I don’t think it does not win because of nefarious cabals or affirmative action votes.”

    A MilSF book won best novel LAST YEAR.

  18. @ Ngita: “I found getting told I should not be reading cis white males this year got old pretty fast.”
    Sorry, when was this said, and by whom, other than K Tempest Bradford’s challenge? And of course a challenge is a thing that the recipient may freely decline.
    @Kyra
    Yep.

  19. “Given the paranoid accusations and insinuations the Puppies have flung around, I hereby add that I have no insider knowledge, hints, or information. I base my opinion strictly on what I have seen in public online discussions and analyses which are visible to anyone with an internet connection.”

    Damn it Laura, I thought I was seeing the hidden cabal and finally could be part of the powers that be. So disillusioning.

  20. In the last voting numbers article, PJ Evans supplied some interesting voting numbers by week from LonCon, and I speculated that based on the same pattern we would see 500-1000 more votes. Sometimes it’s exceedingly pleasant to be wrong.

  21. Kendell,I’m not using the notify-by-email; I’m keeping tabs open with the two or three current Pixel Scrolls and checking them regularly. And sometimes looking at the front page to see if I missed something in a different conversation. Not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, but it works for me. For what it’s worth.

  22. Thanks, Petréa! I was puzzled because it echoes the form of some rather obnoxious self-labels from other contexts, and it didn’t seem to be being used that way. That was an informative link.

  23. Mark, not LonCon, but LACon II, in 1984. (Lots of members, but many were one-day non-voting. About 6500 members when the ballots went out.)

  24. Laura Resnick, I know what you mean. You’d think a Hidden Cabal would leave direction signs. Or breadcrumbs. Or something. They’re just too damned well hidden….

  25. I, too, have looked high and low for a hidden cabal to join. I return to my lair discouraged and disappointed.

    I am forming a cabal. It will consist of people who like science fiction and fantasy and have never used the terms “CHORF” or “SJW” in earnest. You are welcome to join.

    Meetings are on Tuesdays.

  26. All this talk of cabals reminds me that /r/gamerghazi formed /r/gamerghazi-hidden (or whatever it’s called) purely to feed the preexisting paranoia about Ghazi among Reddit’s Gamergaters.

  27. Laura Resnick, I know what you mean. You’d think a Hidden Cabal would leave direction signs. Or breadcrumbs. Or something. They’re just too damned well hidden….

    Which part of hidden did you not understand?

  28. Puppy success in the nominating always depended upon the diffusion of normal voting over a large field and the existence of VD and Wright to serve as focus for a slate. That’s why they only tended to succeed in categories with fewer outside voters and a large number of potential nominees. At this stage their success is likely to work against them since they have had to decide which puppy work was deserving of elevation, whereas (I suspect) no-pets voters are surely more tightly focused on NA.

  29. JJ:

    I hope that this sort of large participation will be the start of a long-term trend.

    It’s the middle of a long-term trend. Hugo participation has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last several years, starting from before Sad Puppies was a mere gleam in Larry Correia’s eye.

    (In fact I half think the Puppy movements are a reaction to that ongoing growth, started because it was becoming harder and harder to just ignore the Hugos anymore.)

  30. @PJ Evans

    Oops. I’ll claim they were conventions starting with an L or something…

    @Everyone complaining they can’t find the secret cabal

    I you protest too much…

    @Aaron

    Dammit, Tuesdays? I have the Freemasons on Tuesdays.

  31. I’m a member of an actual secret cabal. We meet on Wednesdays and Sundays in a building that looks kind of like a rundown Mafia social club and has been bringing down property values on our block ever since gentrification kicked in. It’s fun and we wish more people would join 😉

  32. C. Wingate —

    Diffusion is not really a relevant factor with IRV. All that matters for whether (for example) No Award wins or not is whether more voters have the works above No Award, or whether more voters have No Award above of the works. The same is essentially true for any given item on the ballot.

    With IRV, a minority cannot (by itself) dominate, whether focused or diffuse. In the nominating process, a focused minority can dominate.

  33. I’d have expected lots of the new supporting members to vote – at least to read the short stories and graphic novels and maybe some of the novelettes or novellas, even if they don’t get to the novels themselves.

    (In the past, it’s been worth getting the reader packet just for itself, so it’s frustrating that this year it was full of puppy chow instead of really good science fiction, but voting’s part of the deal that makes that possible.) Unlike some of you, I’ve almost never read many the nominated novels before the voting packet shows up, because they’re usually released in hardback and don’t show up in paperback until after they’re no longer eligible.

  34. I’ve usually read two or three of the novels which are nominated, but that’s because my local library is good, and my neighboring city’s library has an EXCELLENT SF acquisitions librarian. Imagine my surprise, some years back, to see a copy of the Subterranean Press signed edition of Scalzi’s The God Engines on the shelf. And if those libraries fail me, there are three or four others a short drive away. I am so very very lucky that I not only have multiple libraries (at least one of which has been repeatedly named a Top Ten US Library in its size category), but multiple library systems with their own individual acquisition philosophies (and budgets) in easy reach, all of which accept my library card. How people in library-poor areas manage, I can’t even imagine.

  35. @Cassy B.: I do that (refresh tabs) when I’m at home and read a post earlier in the evening. I I used to do that with other blogs, before notify-by-email became a regular thing . . . but you’ve a great point, that’s really a better way to handle blogs like this. Bookmark or e-mail myself the URL for the comments, and then check it next time I have a big chunk of time. Thanks – I feel like I’m stepping backwards, but it’s really going to be the only way I can keep up, methinks!

    @Kyra: MilSF or Space Opera (Leckie’s novels)? I admit, I’m not clear on the difference sometimes. (Googling both terms brings me to a Scalzi post pointing out that yes, Locus does list/review MilSF & Space Opera. LOL.)

  36. Kendall, I think lots of works fall into more than one genre. I think Leckie’s book could reasonably called Space Opera. But given that it’s about (SPOILERS)

    The AI of a military spaceship that defects from a military space navy when its favorite military lieutenant is killed during a military occupation because of the long-term repercussions of a horrific military battle, it would be really hard to convince me that it is not MilSF.

  37. Makes sense, thanks, Kyra! Yeah I was being a bit too compulsive, trying to put it into one box. 😉

  38. “Jim Henley, the reaction on some conservative (non-political) blogs that I saw in the days after the election indicated they were smoking from the same stash. I actually felt sorry for them…they REALLY thought Romney would win.”

    I saw the unskewed polls guy post a day-after article admitting his error. A few days after that, he was right back on the crack pipe, so to speak. I guess he found which was more comfortable/profitable.

Comments are closed.