(1) Michael A. Rothman accuses Fandom of disillusioning his teenage sons.
I took my kids to WorldCon to expose them to Fandom and I’ve consciously shielded them from any of the politics of the kerfuffle associated with the literary “sides” that were in play.
When we attended, we had good seats and they were excited to see if some of their choices would make it.
Let’s just say that my boys ended up being exposed to some of their categories being utterly eradicated from eligibility due to this thing that I’d shielded them from.
They couldn’t understand why their short story choice evaporated into something called “NO AWARD.”
As I briefly explained, the audience was cheering because of that decision and the MC made a point of saying that cheering was appropriate and boos were not.
My kids were shocked.
Shocked not by not winning but by having an entire category’s rug being pulled out from under it and then having all the adults (many of which were old enough to be their grandparents) cheering for something my kids looked at as an unfair tragedy.
I’ll admit to having feared this outcome – yet this was my children’s introduction to Fandom.
We are driving home and they are of the opinion that they aren’t particularly interested in this “Fandom” thing.
I find that a great shame – and I blame not the people who established the ballots to vote for (for my kids enjoyed a great deal of what they read on the ballots), but as my kids noted – they blame the ones who made them feel “like the rug was pulled out from under me.”
…I’d offered Fandom my boys – my boys now reject them.
(2) Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation – “Sad Puppies 3: Looking at the Results”
…Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professional’s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.
Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. She’s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.
This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isn’t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.
Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (don’t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.
Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs. You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?
By giving 2,496 votes to No Award….
Oh, and all that bullshit you spew about fighting for diversity? Everyone knows that is a smokescreen. You talk about diversity, but simultaneously had no problem putting No Award over award nominated females because they were nominated by fans you declared to be sexist. Wait… So let me see if I’ve got this straight, you denied deserving women like Toni, Cedar, Kary, Jennifer, Shelia, and Amanda, just to send a message, but we’re the bad guys? I don’t think so. Or as one of our female nominees said, this Puppy has been muzzled. http://cedarwrites.com/this-puppy-has-been-muzzled/…
…Here’s something for you crowing imbeciles to think through, the only reason Vox didn’t have Three Body Problem on his nomination slate was that he read it a month too late. If he’d read it sooner, it would have been an RP nomination… AND THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NO AWARDED IT.
(3) Barb Caffrey – “Nightmare at the Hugo Awards: No Award ‘Wins’ Five Times…including for Best Editor Categories”
Look. I understand that the SF&F community has been rent asunder over the past few years. But one thing I thought everyone could all agree on was that books do not produce themselves.
To have a book that reads well, you need not only a good writer with an interesting plot and some excellent characterization, but a highly competent editor to pull the story into its best-possible form.
Why? Well, the best writers in the world can and often do make mistakes, and it’s up to your handy-dandy, trustworthy, hard-working editor to fix them.
The people who were nominated for Hugo Awards all have a great deal of experience as editors behind them. None of them were people who just came in off the street and started editing yesterday; most have edited for at least ten years, and some a great deal more…even the casual fan is aware of Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books and Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books, to name two fine editors who were passed over for “no award” in the long form category, because these two ladies have had long and successful careers as editors to date.
How “No Award” can be voted for by anyone in good conscience over either of them bothers me.
(4) Vox Day on Vox Popoli – “They proved Larry right”
This is the difference between game designers and normal people. We think, we HAVE to think, in terms of consequences, both obvious and non-obvious. We started last year with 1,100 reliable anti-Puppy votes and 160 reliable pro-puppy votes. That meant we were 900 in the hole before we even got started. That’s why I was urging everyone not to adopt the tactics of the other side and mass-mobilize. Last year wasn’t a good test because I wasn’t involved in the organizing and the Dread Ilk really didn’t get involved. There was no point in throwing the full weight of our effort into this year’s awards when we had the chance to see a) what our core forces looked like and b) what their maximal forces looked like.
That’s why I told everyone that this year was about the nominations and the best we could reasonably hope for was to provoke them into voting No Award… which they dutifully did.
Our execution wasn’t flawless. I made two mistakes, one which was fortuitous as it permitted Three Body Problem to make the shortlist and win, and one which was stupid as it cost us a 6th category in novelette. Our discipline could also have been better, although I don’t see that it would have made any difference at all with regards to either the nominations or the awards. But I trust the moderate approach is now sufficiently discredited in everyone’s eyes.
(5) John C. Wright – “Smeagol Nielson Hayden” [sic]
Besides, like me, they came to have a good time and to celebrate our mutual love of science fiction, and applaud in the fashion of good sports what we each severally take to be the best the genre offers. I thought there would be no incident.
I am sad to report that I was mistaken. The Archmorlock himself displayed his courage against the short and girlish figure of my meek and gentle wife.
At the reception just before the Awards Ceremony itself, my lovely and talented wife, who writes for Tor books under her maiden name of L Jagi Lamplighter, and who had been consistently a voice of reason and moderation during the whole silly kerfluffle, approached Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the party to extent to him the olive branch of peace and reconciliation.
Before she could finish her sentence, however, Mr. Hayden erupted into a swearing and cursing, and he shouted and bellowed at the tiny and cheerful woman I married.
(6) John C. Wright – “In Memoriam”
My fans voted for the works of mine they read and judged worthy in record numbers. (In terms of raw votes, my nominated works received more votes than some of the masterworks mentioned above.)
But those who are enemies of all honest men turned out (as expected) in even more record numbers: however, listening to the backstage chatter among voters after the awards, I heard not one comment, no, not one, of someone who said they voted for ‘No Award’ on the lack of merit of the works nominated.
And if you haven’t had a surfeit of John C. Wright’s abuse, it gets a lot more overwrought as he builds up a head of steam.
(7) And Wright passes along a fresh Hitler video about the fate of the Puppies.
(8) Matthew Foster – “The Hugo Results – Don’t Be A Dick”
Fandom said, “Dude, you are way over-thinking this. Those guys are dicks!” And…well…I think Fandom pretty much nailed it.
So, if it was a puppy, Fandom rejected it. They celebrated everyone who got on the ballot fairly (even those in categories where they ended up with zero competition) but didn’t get near any pup nominee. They threw the party-asshole out the door and went back to dancing. This works out better than my way of doing things. I might be more consistent, but there is nowhere to go with mine, and not much fun. Fandom booted the pups, put on blinders to ignore the wreckage, and had fun.
(9) Nicholas Whyte on From The Heart of Europe analyzes the Hugo nomination statistics and points out a few items that almost made the final ballot despite the Puppy deluge.
At the nominations stage, there were also very few near misses, thanks in part to the lock that the Puppies managed to achieve on this part of the process.
- The tightest squeeze for the ballot was in Best Fancast, where The Coode Street Podcast missed by one vote, Verity! by three and The Skiffy and Fanty Show by nine.
- Saga vol 4 missed Best Graphic Story by a single vote (was it eligible?) and the latest Schlock Mercenary by nine.
- Seanan McGuire’s Each to Each missed Best Novelette by three votes, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Devil in America missed it by seven.
- Maurine Starkey missed Best Fan Artist by three votes, and seven others were less than ten below the cutoff.
- The Drink Tank missed Best Fanzine by eight votes. For Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), Agents of Shield: Turn, Turn, Turn missed by nine votes and Game of Thrones: The Lion and the Rose by ten.
- The Book Smugglers missed Best Semiprozine by 10 votes.
- Charles E. Gannon’s Trial By Fire was 11 votes off the Best Novel ballot, and Andy Weir was likewise 11 behind Wesley Chu for the Campbell Award.
(10) John Scalzi on Whatever – “Being a Jerk About the Hugos: Not as Effective a Strategy as You Might Think”
[Lists 10 things Puppies did that he classifies as “jerk moves,” then concludes –]
The Hugo vote against the Puppy slates was not about politics, or cabals, or one species of science fiction and fantasy over another, no matter what anyone would like you to believe — or at the very least, it wasn’t mostly about those things. It was about small group of people acting like jerks, and another, rather larger group, expressing their displeasure at them acting so.
Mind you, I don’t expect the core Puppies to recognize this; indeed I expect them to say they haven’t done a single thing that has been other than forthright and noble and correct. Well, and here’s the thing about that: acting like an jerk and then asserting that no, it’s everyone else that’s been acting like a jerk, is the biggest jerk maneuver of all.
(11) Michael Rapoport in The Wall Street Journal – “No ‘Puppy’ Love at Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards”
In response to the Puppies’ success, thousands of anti-Puppy fans bought Worldcon memberships, enabling them to vote on the final ballot and turn aside the nominees from the Puppies’ slates. According to Worldcon organizers, 5,950 convention members voted on the final Hugo ballot, topping the previous record by more than 65%.
The increase in participation in the Hugos is the important thing, said author Brad Torgersen, a Sad Puppies organizer. “If participation grows, the Hugos mean more,” he said before the results were announced. That “goes way beyond which ‘side’ can construct victory narratives.”
But author Adam-Troy Castro, an opponent of the Puppies, wrote in an online post that the results “mean one thing: fandom rose up in revulsion and cried, ‘We don’t want this system gamed with block voting. You want to win a Hugo, win it the way you’re supposed to: by blowing away the readership with such brilliance that people can’t abide the idea of NOT giving you a Hugo.’”
(12) Tegan Moore in Slog on The Stranger – “I Went to the Hugo Awards in SpokaneThis Weekend. Here’s What I Saw”
Surprisingly, the mood in the auditorium was genial and relieved. It was almost over. My illustrious companion and I passed a flask of Scotch. We decided we would drink every time someone said “George R.R. Martin.” The flask was nearly empty before the winners were announced.
The first contested award went to the only non-Puppies nominee on the ballot. My illustrious companion clenched her fists in the air.
“Yes,” she hissed. “That’s the bellwether. They won’t win a damn thing.”
(13) Peter Grant on Bayou Renaissance Man – “A second look at the 2015 Hugo Awards”
My overwhelming emotion in this whole mess is sadness. I’m watching people tear apart one of the great institutions of science fiction, purely because they can’t bring themselves to agree that every fan of the genre has a place within its tent. It’s not one side doing it – it’s both. The SJW’s, who consider themselves ‘true’ Fandom, insist that SF/F is their genre and they alone get to decide who and what belongs to it. Those of a more conservative and/or orthodox bent disagree, and say that political correctness should not be the standard against which works of imagination and literature should be judged – but they can be very disparaging of the other side in how they go about that. (Perhaps that’s not surprising. Mutual tolerance and respect have been largely conspicuous by their absence in this field for many years.)
(14) John ONeill on Black Gate – “Dear Puppies: Your Taste Sucks”
In short, the Puppies insisted that their team had been unfairly shut out of the game for too long, and gamed the system so that their superstars could finally take the field. And when they did, it became painfully obvious fairly quickly that this team simply couldn’t play ball.
The Puppies have stayed in their echo chamber for long months, and to be honest, I don’t expect even this stinging repudiation of their selections to penetrate it. My guess is that they will lay this burden at the feet of another liberal conspiracy, or simply claim that the vast majority of the Hugo electorate voted against their slate without bothering to read it (just as I did).
But when your only defense is to convince yourself that the electorate spurned you because they found what you did to be against the very spirit of the Hugos and your ballot to be wholly illegitimate, then you’re hiding sub-standard taste behind moral bankruptcy.
I’m certain the Hugo vote is just the beginning of the discussion, not the ending that so many fans had sought. But at least, on one topic, we finally have general agreement.
Dear Puppies: your taste sucks.
News Flash: #VoxDay blames Social Justice Warriors for Male Pattern Baldness. #HugoAwards #Rabidpuppies
— Terry Frost -Physical Media Forever- he/him (@terryfrost) August 25, 2015
(15) Milo Yiannopoulos on Breitbart – “Set Phases to Kill! SJWs Burn Down The Hugo Awards To Prove How Tolerant And Welcoming They Are”
The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics.
Worldcon is now designing a Byzantine new rule system designed to thwart a Puppies resurgence in 2016. But anyone who loves sci-fi knows that no matter how air-tight the bad guy’s rules seem, the good guys will find a way through. Does anyone really think SJWs can design anything without leaving an unguarded exhaust vent?
(16) Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt – “Burning Down The Field in Order to Save It”
Turned out I did [care]. Yesterday was even more of a victory to the Sad Puppies than I expected. And I wish it hadn’t been. And I’m absolutely serious about this.
I don’t mean I wish a different set of books/stories had won. That is only to the extent that the DELIBERATE and PARTISAN slighting of such unexceptionable luminaries as Kevin J. Anderson and Jim Butcher (Yes, yes Three Body Problem. Well, I didn’t find it worth it, but I bet you half the people who voted for it voted either under the illusion they were favoring Chicoms OR as a slam against the puppies.But quite beyond that the block voting for the clumsy Ancillary “but pronouns” would have won first place if it weren’t Australian Rules) is a blot on the face of our genre and makes me sigh and roll my eyes.
(17) Mytheos Holt on The Federalist – “The Hugo Awards: Why The #WaronNerds Is A War on Art”
The Hugo Awards have shown us that this is impossible. The Social Justice Left will not be satisfied unless it has complete control over the spaces it infiltrates. If it cannot control a space, it will burn it down and salt the earth. If they could, they would probably torch every script of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for being anti-feminist, every score of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for its unflattering depiction of its one mulatto character, every print of Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene for catering to the male gaze, and every other work that portrays, or was written by, someone with objectionable politics. This book burning bonfire of the vacuous would be large enough to be seen from space, if the satellites weren’t taken down for being too phallic.
What Nerds Can Teach The Rest Of Us
Nerd communities have seen proof that social justice politics cannot be tolerated, because it will sooner immolate the very institutions it inhabits than tolerate the existence of disparate elements. The utter destruction of the Hugo Awards is a warning not just to nerds, but to Western Civilization that social justice is anti-social, anti-justice, and anti-just about everything else. It is to the body politic what an autoimmune disease is to the human body.
(18) Amy Wallace on Wired – “Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, And Why It Matters”
After midnight, Martin announced that for the first time (and hopefully the last) he was bestowing his own awards—dubbed “The Alfies” in honor of Alfred Bester, whose book The Demolished Man won Best Novel at the first-ever Hugos in 1953. “This year all of us were losers,” Martin said, explaining that the Alfies, each made from a streamlined 1950s hood ornament, were his attempt to take a little of the sting off.
Late Saturday, Worldcon released data from a parallel universe, one in which the Puppies hadn’t intervened. That let Martin give trophies to the people who would have been on the ballot, as well as some extra winners decided “by committee, and that committee is me,” Martin said.4 Sci-fi writer Eric Flint got an Alfie for his “eloquence and rationality” in blog posts about the Puppy kerfuffle. So did legendary author Robert Silverberg, who has attended every Worldcon since 1953, just for being himself.
The biggest cheers, though, broke out when Martin honored two people—Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos—who’d been first-time Hugo finalists this year until they withdrew their names. The new data showed Bellet would’ve been on the ballot anyway; the Alfie clearly stunned her. “I want these awards to be about the fiction,” Bellet said, “and that was important enough to me to give one up.”
The final Alfie of the night went to Kloos, a German-born writer (now he lives in New Hampshire), for turning down his Puppy-powered nomination and making room for the winner, The Three-Body Problem. “I may get nominated again,” he said after shaking Martin’s hand. “But knowing why I got this and who gave it to me—tonight, this beats the shit out of that rocket.”
(19) Damien G. Walter on The Guardian – “Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo awards”
While we can write off the Sad Puppies as the clown show they proved to be, we should also give them a tiny thank you for the result of their actions. For many years, it was possible for sci-fi fans to thoughtlessly dismiss their diversity failure. When the sci-fi imprint Tor UK published (statistically incomplete) data blaming the lack of diversity in genre on a shortage of submissions, many hundreds of fans took to social mediaf to voice all the commonly heard excuses (“women just don’t write science fiction” and so on). The real problem for writers from any excluded background is not the extreme chauvinism of people like the Sad Puppies. It’s the general apathy to the entire issue of diversity which so often silences new authors from different backgrounds.
So. Thank you Sad Puppies. You have woken sci-fi fandom from its slumber and proved that diversity in sci-fi really is a problem. There will never be another WorldCon or Hugo awards where diversity is not addressed. Diversity will now be carried to every new world and parallel dimension we visit. And sci-fi writing will be all the stronger for it. The future of humankind is global and many-hued. By reflecting that reality, sci-fi makes itself a fit literature for and of the future.
(20) Andrew Wheeler on Comics Alliance – ‘Ms. Marvel’ Wins at Hugo Awards Dogged by Politics
The sci-fi and fantasy prose fiction that dominates the Hugos and the WSFW has experienced a steady progressive evolution in recent years, with more diversity in both talent and output — a phenomenon that may feel familiar to comics fans. Sci-fi has always provided intellectual refuge for liberal-minded writers and fans, but only recently have those writers made serious inroads into the sci-fi establishment.
The Sad Puppies exist as a reaction to that shift, but while the gradual liberalization of sci-fi has been organic and rooted in fandom, the conservative backlash was deliberately orchestrated to place politics first. The balance of the final ballot shows there was no organized liberal bloc vote equivalent to the Sad Puppies’ efforts, with several popular minority writers surprisingly absent.
Supporters of the Sad Puppies effort have indicated that the failure of their nominees to win any awards vindicates their belief that the Hugo Awards put politics ahead of quality, but of course, it demonstrates the reverse; the Sad Puppies nominees were chosen because of their politics first, and the voters were right to reject them.
(21) Vox Day is getting to work on next year. But then you knew that.
“Of this, that, and the other thing”
All right, a few things that require addressing. First, the Closed Brainstorm meeting to discuss the 2016 strategy will be Thursday, August 27th, at 7 PM EST. Annual and pre-existing monthly members only, since we don’t want to share our thoughts with the SJWs. No decisions will be made, this is simply what it’s called, a brainstorm session. I’ll also share some information about the No Award vote that has been brought to light; still working on documentation.
(22) Stephen Wise – “Hugo Awards and Politics”
The backlash against the Bad (and Rabid) Puppies resulted in 5 awards going to no one. Did the authors who were nominated for Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form deserve the nomination? Perhaps. Was cheating the cause of them to be nominees in the first place? That’s the public perception. So by voting No Award, the 5950 members of World Science Fiction Society essentially said that they didn’t want politics in play for the Hugos. But it’s unfortunate that there may have been deserving authors who were cheated out of this recognition thanks to the maneuverings of a few individuals. Would I have voted the same? Probably. Because once an award is contaminated, there is no rightful winner. And once you start playing political games, then the award itself becomes invalid.
(23) Foz Meadows on Shattersnipe: Malcontent & Rainbow – “Hugos & Puppies: Peeling The Onion”
I guess what I want to say is this: despite what the Puppies think, the rest of us aren’t interested in diversity without quality, and as we’re all acutely aware, the failure mode of diversity is stereotype, which concept isn’t exactly on handshake terms with quality in the first place. That we want to celebrate historically silenced voices and perspectives doesn’t mean we’re doing so purely to spite you, or that we’ve lost all sense of judgement: if our tastes extend to seeing in fiction those versions of ourselves you’re disinclined to write, then who are you to tell us we aren’t entitled to our preferences? Nobody is saying you can’t tell your stories; we just might not want to read them, the same as you evidently have no desire to read ours. That’s not the genre being attacked – it’s the genre changing, and whether you change with it or not, we’re still going to like what we like.
Stop fighting the riptide, Puppies. As any Australian could tell you, it’s the surest way to drown.
(24) Space Squid – “The Squiddies Quiz”
[Question 5 of 12.]
Are you on your game? Do you have all the right high-fashion cosplay accessories? Do your boardgaming moves bring all the boys to the yard? Warning: If you’re not up on the 2015 Hugos dustup, you might want to bing up “hugo is sad in 2015” before daring the rigors of the quiz.
- You’re the Hugo Awards czar. After your awards got disgraced, it’s time to pick a new award design to replace the shiny silver rocket. Your best choice is: a) a shiny silver rocket encrusted with poop b) a bronze sculpture of an imaginary multi-ethnic group of scifi writers holding hands around the earth c) a shiny silver rocket ejecting certain unnamed persons into space d) a gold-plated carjacking diorama
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus and Editor D for some of these links.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
You can vote for anyone for any reason you want. But that’s not what was intended.
A minute ago you were all for scrupulously upholding the letter of the law.
I am. And if people didn’t vote for nutty reasons like “I like Mike Resnick’s short stories from 2004 so he must be the best short fiction editor in 2014” I wouldn’t have to be.
That wouldn’t have any bearing on whether he deserves an award as an editor.
The rules simply don’t say that you are not supposed to take editors’ past work into account when voting. I can’t find any document stating that was the intention either.
The rules don’t say you’re not supposed to take into account how fuckable you find the various writer-nominees either. Let’s start trawling for hot tub pics from Worldcons past!
The achievement of a great editor is taking one’s editorial vision and applying it consistently over a period of time with a noticeable positive impact on the field. We don’t say David Hartwell deserves a Hugo because his editing of one particular book in 2014 was technically very good.
That’s like saying John W. Campbell should have gotten a Best Editor award for the April 1950 issue of Astounding.
No, but we should, or eliminate the category and make it one of those special awards, like the one Schmidt got after retiring.
That seems closer to the original Best Professional Editor award then. If you want to make sure it is a special one-off award then specify it cannot be given to the same person twice.
Three-Body Problem is not a Puppy pick. Puppy picks almost kept Three-Body Problem off the ballot, and it only made it on because Marko Kloos isn’t an asshole.
Or need a lot of space for equipment (wheelchair, crutches, etc.).
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
I was hoping also for “there are definitely 15-20 Hugo-quality translators working probably [language]-English (because voting pool)” because as I understand it that’s what you need before a category can be introduced. At least, I think that’s why we don’t have a Video Game Hugo.
Nick, I read “Let’s start trawling for hot tub pics from Worldcons past!” and immediately thought, “OH NICK MAMATAS NO!”
rrede:
I’m still not sure who the “we” is here—but I don’t think I have seen anybody saying [EPH is] the perfect solution—and I’m also not sure if there’s only one problem.
I have seen several people, generally in passing in the course of discussing something else, say things like ‘in 2107 EPH will be in place so we won’t have to worry any more’. It may not be people actually close to EPH who are saying this, but I think the lack of vigilance this may foster is still dangerous.
However, my original point remains: what other possible solutions are even being discussed seriously?
None, that I know of. So we must search for them.
(And we don’t have to wait for 2017. Sure, we won’t know till then what the actual effect of slates under EPH will be, given that both the introduction of EPH itself and the passage of two years in the life of the Puppies will make a difference to how things turn out; but simulations can help us assess possible effects.)
I am sure Mike Glyer has an extensive private collection of such “research materials” that would be open to discriminating connoisseurs for a very reasonable fee…..
You can find anything you need at this splendid blo *cough choke* semipro thorazine er…. fanzine!
Kilo:
I can, however, see a scenario (though an unlikely one) where we had dozens and dozen of truly Hugo-worthy works in a category, each nominated by just a few people. In that situation, I’m not sure how you’d pick a valid winner in any case. None of them are really better than any other.
Isn’t that the actual situation in the short fiction categories? By voting to abolish the 5% rule, WSFS has effectively said that it doesn’t see this as a problem; the fact that a work has a low percentage of support does not mean it does not deserve an award. And certainly you can have a situation where there are dozens of works about which people disagree wildly as to which is the best, but the vast majority agrees they are all much better than anything on the slate. That isn’t even improbable.
As I mentioned in the debate, bullet voting (and I’m assuming you are voting solo and not colluding) doesn’t really help your favorite enough to matter.
Is that assumption justified, though? Suppose someone on the Joe Smith fans’ message board says ‘Joe’s new book is eligible for a Hugo this year! Everyone sign up and nominate it! Be sure you do not nominate anything else in the same category!‘. Then we might have lots of bullet voting. Would it make a serious difference in that case? (I don’t know.)
The odds of your 4/5 point being what’s needed to put your favorite in 4th place are really, really small — and you gave up the chance to nominate something else that you liked.
That assumes that there is something else you like. If you became a Hugo voter specifically in order to get one thing on the ballot, this may not worry you. (There are people who do this, but currently, I would think, not very many. Might EPH lead to more people doing it? Again, I don’t know.)
On translators:I think it would be unwise, now, to introduce a Hugo for something that was not very widely known, and for which the way of assessing it was not very perspicuous.
Anna:
Well… I think it would encourage people to read translations. There are enough conscientious Hugo voters that they would seek out the nominations and read them.
Are you thinking of final voters here, seeking out stuff that has already been nominated? But then who would do the actual nominating? I would have thought that the number of people qualified to do so was quite small. Once again, I wouldn’t see that as a problem in normal situations, but when we need thousands of nominators to beat the slate….
(Actually, in a more ideal situation, I think it might be better to have an award for Best Translated Work – as Japan does, I think. But again, numbers.)
Oh, the other thing I’ve seen people mention is that a category can’t be introduced in order to persuade people to consume a particular thing, it has to be introduced because a lot of fans already are.
In what possible sense is 3BP not a “Puppy pick”? Vox Day published his recommended final ballot under the title “Hugo Recommendations” and 3BP was number 1 on the list and in fact a lot of “puppy voters” did rank it #1. If you don’t call it a puppy pick, it could seem like you are defining that to mean whatever is most convenient at the moment.
I have to say it astounds me that the World Science Fiction Society has not yet found solutions to accommodate members who are unable to attend the meetings in person. How hard could it be to allow paid-up members to log on to a website, watch a live stream of the meeting and vote electronically? Or to get a damn committee working on solutions for those without easy access to the needed bandwidth? At this rate, we might as well just ask Dr. Heywood Floyd to type up the bullet points of his briefing on a typewriter before taking a call in the Howard Johnsons phone booth on the way to Clavius Base while we’re at it.
In the sense that the Puppies did not pick it as one of the works they wanted to see on the shortlist? That would seem the obvious interpretation. I realise that Teddy’s claimed it as a personal victory, but he claims everything as a personal victory.
@Kilo,
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing the results when you put this year’s raw data through EPH. As to my questions and thoughts, I’m going to shut up about them for a little while and actually go do them. I’ll ping you when I’ve got something of worth to talk about; until then, I have some interesting questions, some data and an algorithm…
In what possible sense is 3BP not a “Puppy pick”?
In the sense that it appeared on neither Puppy slate. In the sense that it was originally kept off the ballot by the works that were on the Puppy slates. In the sense that it was only put on the ballot because Marko Kloos withdrew his Puppy-slated nominated book to howls of Puppy protest. In the sense that Beale only threw his support behind it after it got put on the ballot despite the best efforts of the Puppies to keep it off.
You know, in every sense that people who are connected with reality can see.
NickPheas, that’s your interpretation. It is the kind of SF he says he likes so it is credible that he might really like it, and it was published in mid-November 2014 so it is probably true that he hadn’t gotten around looking at it before February 1 2015 when those “slates” were published.
You probably didn’t nominate 3BP, not having read it within three months of its publication. I didn’t. If we say we recommend it, is that insincere too?
@Brian Z
Puppy pick = on a Puppy slate. That hasn’t changed at any point. Three-Body Problem only made it onto the ballot because Kloos is an honourable man and withdrew. Puppies can, on an individual basis, vote for whatever they like but that doesn’t make it a “Puppy pick” it just means a fan voted for it honestly (yes, even VD).
Puppies do not, ever, as a movement, in any way shape or form, get to take credit for things that they attempted to block from getting on the ballot.
A couple of points:
Brian Z, I did not mean to imply that you yourself were calling me a sheep, or whatever. Sorry if it came across that way. Regarding puppies, I personally would not say that they simply followed marching orders when it came to the actual vote. But I think they treated the nominating process differently (and in a way that seriously violated longstanding community norms). I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times before by others, but again, since I was a first-time Hugo voter, my rationale may be of some interest.
Regarding this:
I think you seriously underestimate the costs associated with providing a service like this at this point in time. I’m involved in some small professional organizations funded by member dues, and holding any kind of large-scale real-time online meeting is prohibitively expensive for us. It’s not that the technology and infrastructure don’t exist, it’s that the institutions that control access to the tech and infrastructure charge through the nose for the use of it.
Such solutions are already available; there are a number of companies that provide online video conferencing services. For a price.
Despite the rest of the world’s fascination with the Hugos, the primary purpose of a Worldcon is not to give out awards, but for fans to meet each other in person. If the people running these events don’t want to allow folks who never actually show up to tell Worldcon volunteers what they ought to be doing, I can’t rightly complain.
But I haven’t spent the last few months leading a campaign to undermine the awards.
What did I nominate… The Girl With All The Gifts was my particular favourite. Sad that didn’t get anywhere.
spellproof,
I didn’t think you were. But really, I don’t think the “puppies” have a problem with what you say you did either. If you caught this part, even Vox Day said that he had no problems with people who sincerely read and evaluated the work on merit.
It really is, thank you.
If the costs were passed on to a membership of over 10,000, since Worldcons already contract to use a streaming service on the same weekend, and already use a web platform to tally votes – there might be potential for, you know, synergy, at reasonable prices.
I thought popular ratification was a decent compromise or first step. But the problem of physical access to the business meeting is a sort of social justice issue, in a way, too, isn’t it?
It would be expensive and would lead to higher membership fees. Thus throwing poorer people out from the possibility to vote for Hugos. This for making it possible for a very small group to vote.
If you want this to happen, I think the best would be if you took the idea to Worldcon and offered to head a committee that looked into the problem and came with an economic proposal.
Oh, actually I think you should research this anyhow and bring it up here on File 770. I would be very interested to see how your factual proposal would look, what the cost would be and how you would get the money.
I myself will vouch for Brian in this committee. Brian Z, lets meet at Kansas and discuss this if you want it to happen. If you are not interested in yourself putting down the time needed to implement this, I’m afraid it will not happen.
Pingback: Steel and Onions
Yeah, it’s really too bad that a specter of all that can go wrong with people from the internet swamping a vote process loomed over the proposal. Kevin Standlee and others put a lot of work into it. But from the moment the RP slate (in particular) sprang up and tried to get people who were otherwise uninterested in Worldcon to lock up the award nominations via an internet campaign, popular ratification was doomed. And I think it will probably take a while for that particular specter to fade from the WSFS members’ memories.
@Wildcat
Proof of bad faith actors manipulating from without isn’t going to help with that sort of policy, no.
Given the VD-infected RP movement, popular ratification would be a disaster. I fully expect Brian Z et al to argue ad nauseum for it in the upcoming year. If Brian Z really wants it, he no longer has the last tiny hair of credibility as a puppy-sympathizing semi-neutral outsider – he’s outing himself as a Rabid Puppy at that point.
@Kathodus
My feeling is that the sour grapes comments during and immediately after the ceremony outed him as a Puppy, but I doubt he’s a Rabid one (bear in mind that the Sad’s think they’re the hidden majority and the Rabid’s don’t – who would think they’d benefit most?). That being said, he clings to neutrality like a limpet, and there is always an element of doubt. I try to keep it in mind.
@Meredith
Yeah, maybe I’m being too harsh. It seems a given to me that, if the opportunity arose for the RPs to spend a few thousand bucks a couple years in a row and morph beyond recognition and/or dismantle the WSFS, VD would do it in a second. That’s assuming he still has a lot of spare money lying around (which seems like a safe bet). Which is when Brian Z starts to seem to me less like a puppy-sympathizer and more like a Rabid Puppy.
@Kathodus
My suspicion is that part of the rush for VD is getting people to spend their own money to do what he wants them to, and that spending his own wouldn’t be at all the same for him. The puppet master feels are just as important (if not more so) than success.
“Seriously, FWB, go die in a ditch!”
Part of the reason I’ve been telling people for the past four months that I thought File 770 was the place for reasonable people of all stripes to talk was that it didn’t go out for statements like that.
The line is approached from time to time, but when you ask to be taken seriously, I’m seriously going to tell you I think it’s seriously a problem, no matter whom you’re saying it to. I’m not OK with it no matter what corner it comes from.
I’m going to read the subsequent comments at this point and hope that I find many refutations and disapprovals.
@Meredith (and @Standback and @Rick K)
Apologies to all. I shouldn’t have been posting that late. I was particularly grumpy given the amount of concern-trolling, and was not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.
@Kathodus
Tempers can run high. 🙂
Will R, right on, 100% agreement.
The ditch comment got semi-rolled back fairly quickly, so I think most people focused on the lack of apology that lead to it. I don’t think anyone was covered in glory.
@bruce Thank you.
To be totally fair, he also said that he liked it.
@Meredith thanks. I did notice you sounded a caution over it (as you have in the past), which I appreciate.
@Will R
I’m a little cross with myself over the note I hit, honestly, but thank you.
*blinks*
Well over 1000 comments.
And thanks to Aan, Tegan, Snowcrash, and Rail, I don’t have to worry about reading Certain People’s (who shall be blanked) Posts.
Hamptus,
You can’t expect Brian to actually do anything. He’s an ideas man. He just badgers people who aren’t interested hoping they will do all the work for him.
When Patrick Nielsen Hayden described what an editor does, I remarked that in the software industry we called that a Project Manager. He agreed that Project Manager sounded descriptive of an editor’s job, but we didn’t discuss details.
Mark Dennehy, please tell me you speak at least a LITTLE Irish, or I (as a (part) Irish-American) will have to go back in time and switch your infant self with mine, so YOU grow up in Michigan where no one at all even knows that Irish is a language! (I’m mostly kidding.)
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, did the Italian translation have all the articles made feminine? English really only has gender in pronouns and a few nouns (all recent borrowings), but I’m curious how that was handled in Italian.
Re WisCon, we’ve had a rough time the last year and a half, and a lot of it was our fault, but I think we’ve pulled it back together. Even most of the people who left the ConCom still attended the convention, and they were (mostly) getting ready to step aside anyway.
Most of us have cupla focail, but generally you learn it in school and then spend the rest of your life trying to forget it.
(He said, as the tram he’s riding on announces the stops in English and Irish)
Pingback: Amazing Stories | AMAZING NEWS of FANDOM: 8/30/15 - Amazing Stories