385 thoughts on “2018 Hugo Winners”

1. Jesse H; Can you point to a winner on your list who didn’t *deserve* the win? I mean, personal taste and all that does apply, but can you point to something and accurately say “Not only I personally, but obvious general consensus of the public, would consider this work unworthy.”

   Because what I see is a list of people who have had buzz; past winners, past nominees, a couple of Grand Dames of the field, and promising newcomers. Nobody seems to have arrived and won out of left field.

2. Congratulations to all winners and especially to Mike!!

   @Eric

   Looking through the Detailed Results PDF, I can’t help but notice that the Best Related Work nominations list includes WorldCon 75 restaurant guide.

   I didn’t go to Finland: Was the guide that good?

   Well, I think it’s pretty good (but I didn’t nominate it 🙂 ). The pdf version is still available online if you google for it…

3. @ Jesse: Did you look at a couple of representative years pre-Puppy, such as 2009-2010? (Dates chosen at random.) Or better still, a series of more than 2 years? Because without a baseline for comparison, your claim is meaningless.

4. @John Seavey —

   Which is really, if you think about it, the final proof that they were always full of crap when they said that they were just countering the nefarious SJW influence. In a poll where they are just one of many organized voter blocs, they are unable to make their voices heard at all. The only way the “Puppy bloc” ever mattered was when they were the only people voting as a group.

   Yeah, sucks to be them, don’t it? 😉

5. you look at a couple of representative years pre-Puppy, such as 2009-2010? (Dates chosen at random.) Or better still, a series of more than 2 years? Because without a baseline for comparison, your claim is meaningless

   I’m not Jesse, but I did a quick look (math not guaranteed, numbers only approximate, I’m not a quant):

   2009: Male winners: 6; Female: 4
   2010: M: 11; F: 2
   2013: M: 6; F: 3
   2014: M: 5; F: 9.

   Make of it what you will

6. @ Jesse: Did you look at a couple of representative years pre-Puppy, such as 2009-2010? (Dates chosen at random.) Or better still, a series of more than 2 years? Because without a baseline for comparison, your claim is meaningless.

   Good idea. I went back to 2009-2010 and did as you suggested. Applying the same criteria of only counting awards that went to a single individual and came up with 6 women out of 22 winners for a ratio of 27% women to 73% men. This clearly shows gender bias as well but nowhere near as much that 4% does.

   2009 Hugos
   Best Novel – The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
   Best Novella – “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
   Best Novelette – “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)
   Best Short Story – “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
   Best Related Book – Your Hate Mail Will be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
   Best Editor, Short Form – Ellen Datlow
   Best Editor, Long Form – David G. Hartwell
   Best Professional Artist – Donato Giancola
   Best Fanzine – Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
   Best Fan Writer – Cheryl Morgan
   Best Fan Artist – Frank Wu

   2010 Hugos
   Best Novella – “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace; Orbit)
   Best Novelette – The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)
   Best Short Story – “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
   Best Related Work – This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
   Best Editor, Long Form – Patrick Nielsen Hayden
   Best Editor, Short Form – Ellen Datlow
   Best Professional Artist – Shaun Tan
   Best Fan Writer – Frederik Pohl
   Best Fanzine – StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith
   Best Fan Artist – Brad W. Foster
   Best New Writer – Seanan McGuire

7. @Jesse H:
   That’s not how you study gender bias. That’s just making assumptions after the fact, based on what you want to be true. Look at ALL the years that are available, and notice that it’s been changing for decades.

   *plonk*

8. @Jesse H —

   This clearly shows gender bias as well

   No, actually, it doesn’t. You haven’t presented nearly enough data yet to support anything like that claim.

   Quick and small counterexample: I fill an opaque box with 100 white marbles and 100 black marbles. I can’t see into the box, but I can reach into it. I pull out 10 marbles, one after the other. It is perfectly possible for all 10 of the marbles I pulled out to be white. Does that mean I have demonstrated a “white bias”? No, of course it doesn’t.

   Keep trying.

9. That’s not how you study gender bias. That’s just making assumptions after the fact, based on what you want to be true. Look at ALL the years that are available, and notice that it’s been changing for decades.

   I would agree that the 2 year stat I provided is not a comprehensive gender bias study. The only conclusion I presented in my first post is that with a ratio that out of balance that gender had a moderate impact on voting. Do you disagree with that statement?

   I would also agree with the position that SF&F community has had a bias against women for decades compared to this small blip of 2 years.

10. Congratulations to all the winners!

    Special shout-out to Mike Glyer of File 770 and Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books–very well deserved!

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12. @Paul King

    I do have to say that I am surprised that Ruin of Angels was too short to allow the Craft Sequence a place in Best Series.

    The rules are 2 installments totaling 240,000 words, the intent being to not have a series simply being nominated every year.

13. @Jesse H —

    The only conclusion I presented in my first post is that with a ratio that out of balance that gender had a moderate impact on voting. Do you disagree with that statement?

    Again, you haven’t presented nearly enough data to support your claim.

    Remember — correlation does not imply causation. That’s one of the first lessons we learned in my first stats class way back when.

14. Congrats on the win, File770!

15. Having viewed the video, that’s quite an acceptance speech from Jemisin, who is evdently a powerful in person presence as well as a strong and original writer.

16. Yes, just watched the Jemisin speech as well – powerful with occasional attacks of hilarity – “stop texting me!”

17. Towards the Genderdiskusion: For best novel the second place went to Scalzi, and this is not the only case where we have female winner, male runerup.
    (Saga in Graphicnovel, John Picacio in Profesional Artist just the once I can identify very quickly)
    Yes we can say that at the moment women are doing well.
    We also have 2 cases that are statisticly outliners. (Bujold who won 2 awards in a catagory newly created, would have propably won those if the new series had exist before some time ago and Jemisin who won 3 times in a row)
    So 2 years aren’t enough data to say there is a bias, I echo the question who is undeserving? (I mean I don’t think that on that level for me what is the better book the gender of the writer doesn’t play a role in how I would rank them)

18. If you don’t want video, Jemisin’s speech is available in text form here.

19. I suspect women are getting a slight boost* lately in a lot of people’s minds for various reasons. I imagine the socio-political landscape of 2018 could give women a boost* in nominations when the nominators are largely left-of-Pinochet. It also seems likely that the SP/RP campaigns, along with the GG and now CG campaigns, have backfired, boosting* the profile of female creators. Add to that the major factor working against men right now in gaining awards – the number of excellent works by female creators – and these results aren’t surprising. This isn’t to say men aren’t doing great things, but it’s a very competitive field.

    That is my very unscientific take on it and could, for all I know, say more about how I think than how any other Hugo voter thinks.

    * To be very clear, I’m talking about excellent works getting more buzz and causing more excitement among readers because of these various factors – the idea that eg. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is not Hugo-worthy is laughable.

20. Congrats to all the winners, especially Mike, one of the very few people I’ve nominated to actually win.

    @Jesse H, Contrarius
    Assuming that men and women were equally likely to win Hugos, the chances of getting 24 women and 1 man is just under one in a million, per the binomial distribution. This does not mean that the voters are biased against men; but there is clearly something going on here and it’s reasonable to ask what, and why? I read a lot of SF short fiction this year and most of my nominees were women, most of whom didn’t make the final ballot, so it seems to this old white male that most of the best SF & F being published today is by women. That’s quite a lot more surprising than the historical male bias which to a large extent was clearly due to SF up until 1977 mostly being written for adolescent boys, mostly by former readers. Which is not to question the well-documented and rather obvious fact that there was actual bias against the minority of women in the field as well. It’s telling that in an era when Bob Dylan, Stan Lee and many others changed their names to sound less “ethnic”, SF writers had no such problem, but many women went out of their way to disguise their gender.

    So why now? The sharp swing from male to female is almost coincident with the near-demise of print magazines as the origin of nominated short fiction in favour of free-to-read online magazines, many of which are actively promoting women and minority writers (another hat-trick this year was for Uncanny, who also published six of the short-fiction nominees). There is also a lot more fantasy being nominated, which has never been as male-dominated as SF. Possibly another factor is the increasing professionalisation of SF writing, by which I mean that it seems to me that an increasing number of new writers have formal qualifications in creative writing. Could it be that those courses are more popular with women? I have no idea, does anyone have statistcs?

21. I believe that the absence of an RP slate is officially due to VD’s protest over the banning of Jon del Arroz. (SP had earlier openly said that they were moving on to the Dragons, before disappearing entirely.) It’s possible that if VD had contested this year’s Hugos, he would have managed to get some finalists in the smaller categories, though it is equally possible that he would not.

    I agree with Kathodus that it’s likely women are getting a boost from recent discussions, probably not at the moment of voting, but at an earlier point when people decide what to read with awards in mind. (Women dominate nominations, not just the final vote.) This does not imply any unworthy works are winning, because there are more than one, indeed more than six, worthy works per year.

22. I think it’s interesting that some folks are very interested in gender imbalance over that last couple of years but seem largely unphazed at the representation over the life of the awards

    I’m not too concerned that male writers will never win again. If Stone Sky had not come out this year, Scalzi would likely have won. The Broken Earth is a special work, I would be surprised if we have such clear front runners over the next few years.

23. @Andrew M.

    I think that VD might be able to get one finalist in each of a handful of categories. EPH allows for bullet voting.

    What he can’t do anymore is take more than one slot (maybe two in smaller categories). It’s pretty clear he doesn’t have enough support to win anything. Even at the Puppy Peak, he didn’t have enough support to win anything. So at this point, he’s trying to convince his followers to spend $50 for almost zero effect. And most of his followers don’t care that for $50 they can maybe deprive one deserving author of a spot on the ballot.

    That’s a MUCH harder sell than “If enough of us chip in, we can win us some burn down the Hugos!”

24. Looking back at my nominations they’re predominately from women as well. I suppose that I could have been zapped by the SJW mind control rays, but I prefer to believe that that’s just who produced the work I liked the best last year.

25. I am safely back on my couch, watching the first half of the ceremony. The Big Kahuna is curled up beside me, exhausted from his ordeal. None of my little screens were fit for adequate streaming last night but fortunately Dr. Science and Science, Jr. dropped by with a decent tablet for the last half. I’m kind of glad I was stuck in my room for Jo’s speech on behalf of Mike because I hate crying in public. Very nice tiara.

26. @Eric Franklin

    Looking through the Detailed Results PDF, I can’t help but notice that the Best Related Work nominations list includes WorldCon 75 restaurant guide.

    I didn’t go to Finland: Was the guide that good?

    I didn’t go either, but maybe the food one would obtain without the guide was that bad.

27. @microtherion

    Upthread, @Terhi stated that the PDF version was available online. So I googled it – and found it (PDF link).

    It starts with general information including local dining customs, which is really awesome and something I think that even US Worldcons need to remember to include. There’s an interesting sidebar with some historical context on why many bars claim to be restaurants right up front, too.

    So it’s good. And useful. I just don’t find it Hugo-Worthy. So it’s an interesting curiosity to find on the long list, but I’m glad it wasn’t on the ballot.

28. @Contrarius

    @Jesse H —
    The only conclusion I presented in my first post is that with a ratio that out of balance that gender had a moderate impact on voting. Do you disagree with that statement?

    Again, you haven’t presented nearly enough data to support your claim.

    My statistics are very rusty, and I never did p-value calculations for a living, but I’m pretty sure a sample size of 25, with the distribution as it was, is enough to reject the hypothesis that the gender distribution was random, on any typical significance level.

    Remember — correlation does not imply causation.

    That’s a different question indeed. It’s highly improbably that the gender composition of the winners was a random sample from an evenly matched pool of entrants, but that’s not evidence that gender had an influence on the voting. It could be that male brains simply did not evolve to be fit to the task of SF writing. Or men are rejecting SF as an unmanly pursuit.

    Speaking for myself, I don’t think I spend much time thinking about the gender of the author when voting. In some cases, I don’t even know the gender until after I’ve voted (This year, I did not know Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s gender, last year it was Yoon Ha Lee, and I’m pretty sure I did not know or guess Hao Jingfang’s gender until they came to pick up their Hugo). I can’t imagine that female voters care any more about writer’s dangly bits than I do.

29. @microtherion —

    I’m pretty sure a sample size of 25, with the distribution as it was, is enough to reject the hypothesis that the gender distribution was random, on any typical significance level.

    Remember the example I gave earlier with the marbles. It could indeed be due to chance — or due to a number of other variables that have nothing to do with any supposed gender bias in the Hugo voting population.

    Speaking for myself, I don’t think I spend much time thinking about the gender of the author when voting. In some cases, I don’t even know the gender until after I’ve voted

    Right!

    A personal example: last year or the year before — I forget which! — there were evidently two trans authors on the shortlist. I didn’t even know that until after I’d read the books, and I didn’t know the identity of one of them until after I’d already voted. It was the pups who were obsessing about such things, not the actual voters!

30. Combining nominations for Mike and nominations for File 770, my count is 60 nominations. Don’t have a count for wins.

31. @Contrarius: Remember the example I gave earlier with the marbles. It could indeed be due to chance — or due to a number of other variables that have nothing to do with any supposed gender bias in the Hugo voting population.

    But in your example with the marbles, there is only 1 chance in 1024 of drawing 10 white marbles in a row from the box: this is exactly like flipping a coin and getting ten heads (or tails) in a row. It’s certainly a possible result, it’s just not a very probable one.
    /pedant

    Not that I disagree with your basic point; in any given year I think it’s silly to expect the gender distribution to split uniformly.

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33. @Eric Franklin
    I was at WorldCon 75 and the restaurant guide was very good and extremely useful. In fact, I gave our spare copy to a friend who’s not an SFF fan, but a frequent visitor to Finland.

    I didn’t nominate it for the Hugos, though Best related work is the category for curiosity nominations.

34. @PhilRM —

    It’s certainly a possible result, it’s just not a very probable one.

    Sure. And if the same pattern continues year after year, then you get more and more suspicious that there is something more than chance causing it. So first Jesse needs to show the pattern continuing over the course of several years — two years is more suspicious than one, and three or four years would be even more significant — and while he’s doing that, he needs to gather lots of data so he can rule out all the many other possible causes for the imbalance, all before he can ever be confident in his claim that gender bias by the voters is its cause.

35. Q: Is Rebecca Roanhorse the first to win the Campbell & a Hugo in the same year?

36. According to Nicholas Whyte, Barry Longyear won both the Campbell and the Hugo in 1980, so she’s not the first.

37. Congrats to all the winners (and stop texting Nora during her speech!)!

38. Having fewer than 2,500 votes for a “fan award” in the categories with the most voting is pretty sad. Participants can pat themselves on the back “for a job well done” but the self-selected group voting is tiny compared to total readers.

    Speaking as a statistician (almost all of my coursework for my doctorate), anytime you have a bimodal distribution and have a 24:1 ratio in tests it will be statistically significant.

    There are entire fields of statistics (nonparametrics) and techniques to assess small samples for statistical significance. One can slice it how they wish, but a 24:1 ratio where the category is either A or B is unusual unless the prior probabilities are highly skewed for whatever reason.

    If each years voting is an independent event, then a 24:1 result is highly unlikely in any fair test with a 50:50 expected distribution.

    If each years voting is not an independent event, then that says something about the award system.

39. Dougtron3030 on August 20, 2018 at 2:44 pm said:

    I think it’s interesting that some folks are very interested in gender imbalance over that last couple of years but seem largely unphazed at the representation over the life of the awards

    Oh it’s the eternal whine of certain types of men. When men dominate massively, it’s simply the true and natural state of things. If god forbid *women* dominate, it’s clearly an unnatural thing caused by evil political correctness. So all the many years when every Hugo winner were male elicit nothing from them.

40. @Cora: Whyte is correct; I managed Functions for N2 and have vivid memories of those results — Longyear cutting the previous Campbell-to-Hugo record (Cherryh, 2 years, IIRC) to 15 minutes, Carter not showing up to present the SAGA award (Worldcons were a bit slacker then) and Silverberg trying to clown about it, Martin getting 2 successive Hugos and someone trying to hurry the photographer so he could get back on stage…. And in 1984 Macavoy won the Campbell and was 2nd for Novel, which I don’t think anyone has matched since.

    @Mark: thanks for the text; the audio was mostly inaudible on my notebook.

    re statistics: it’s been 40 years since I worked with them, but I’m pretty sure that a result of 24/25 is not big enough to be significant when there are only two possible choices. The nominations are a larger sample set — but aren’t as imbalanced.

41. @Chip Hitchcock

    re statistics: it’s been 40 years since I worked with them, but I’m pretty sure that a result of 24/25 is not big enough to be significant when there are only two possible choices.

    If you assume a natural distribution of 50%, then a 24/25 result is significant even at the one-in-one-million level (binomial test). The question is, is 50% the correct expectation, given the works actually on offer? Counting works in Rocket Stack Rank‘s “Outstanding” list for Novellas, Novelettes, and Short Stories for 2017, I find 50 men and 63 women. Doing a Chi-squared test of 50/63 vs 1/24 (one degree of freedom) I find a bias in favor of women significant at better than one in 5,000.

    So, yeah, the Hugo results for the last two years are definitely biased toward women in a statistically significant way. Note, though, that I only mean “biased” in the mathematical sense.

    We talked about this last year, and my comment at the time was that we should wait for more data. This year we do have more data, and the result is conclusive: this is not the result of chance.

    The question is, what is causing it? It’s certainly true that historically there was bias (in the non-mathematical sense) against women, but I think most/all of us believe that was wrong. Regardless of what happened in the past, we should all want the modern awards to be fair, and to appear to be fair. So I think it’s worthwhile to at least try to figure out what’s going on here.

42. @Greg —

    So, yeah, the Hugo results for the last two years are definitely biased toward women in a statistically significant way. Note, though, that I only mean “biased” in the mathematical sense.

    I think it’s a very bad idea to use the word “bias” in this context, because it is so loaded with connotations that don’t fit your usage of it. I think “ imbalance” works better here.

    There are many possible explanations for this imbalance that would not involve gender bias on the part of Hugo voters — and neither Jesse nor anyone else has presented data to rule any of them out.

43. @Contrarius: I wasn’t arguing that Jesse was correct, I was pointing out that your example was of very low probability.

    My larger point is that random processes are not a good model for explaining votes for works of fiction in any particular year.

44. There are many possible explanations for this imbalance that would not involve gender bias on the part of Hugo voters — and neither Jesse nor anyone else has presented data to rule any of them out.

    What do you have in mind? I have some ideas, but I’d be the first to admit they’re all pretty weak.

45. @PhilRM

    My larger point is that random processes are not a good model for explaining votes for works of fiction in any particular year.

    Why do you think that?

46. @Greg Hullender: I’m interested in seeing what the proposed solutions are. Banning women from receiving awards until we return to historical statistical norms? Perhaps a “Women win too much, vote for the menz!” poster campaign? Maybe we could consider votes “income” and count a vote for a woman at 80% of a vote for a man.

    Or, I know, we could look at the statistical analyses that were done five and ten years ago, and enact the solutions that were proposed to deal with THOSE statistical gender biases. I mean, those analytics were done back then, right? This didn’t just suddenly become a problem when women started dominating the awards, right?

47. I suspect there’s several factors involved in the results–one of which is randomness. I’m not entirely sure what all the others are, but here are a couple of possibilities:

    1. For years, women have had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. For many women, this has probably become habit. And now that things are changing, people are starting to notice.

    2. Similarly, women may be willing to take greater risks with their work, in hopes of getting noticed. Men may be more likely to stick with the tried-and-true, for the more guaranteed sales. But when it comes to the Hugo, taking risks and trying new ideas wins votes.

    3. Outliers–a few random folks who are just better than the pack–can really skew the results. And I think Jemisin, at least, is one such outlier. And she just happens to be female.

    In addition, the Hugos require strict ranking. In the past, I’ve often flipped a coin to choose between to works I found equally worthy of a particular ranking. (Most commonly when choosing 3rd, 4th, and/or 5th place, but sometimes even for first.) It’s possible that some people have decided to use gender, rather than a coin flip, as the tie breaker. Is that unfair? Maybe, but given history, I can’t find it in me to object. As long as it is no more than a tie breaker, it seems perfectly reasonable.

    Anyway, my personal guess is that #2 was a big factor, at least this year. But I’m not sure enough to debate. It’s just a feeling.

48. @Phil — Yeah, I’m with ya.

    @Greg —

    What do you have in mind? I have some ideas, but I’d be the first to admit they’re all pretty weak

    There are lots of possibilities. A few that come to mind:

    1. What is the sex ratio of sff authors being published in general right now?
    2. What is the sex ratio of sff authors being published in highly awarded publications and/or by highly awarded publishers right now?
    3. Is there a gender imbalance in the types of stories being written by sff authors?
    4. Is there a gender imbalance in the themes of the stories being written by sff authors?
    5. and so on.

    What I personally suspect is happening — and it’s only a suspicion — is a combination of things. First, I suspect there’s a genuine significant increase in female authors getting published in the last few years. Second, I suspect that female authors are tending to write the types of stories that Hugo voters are looking for — specifically stories with strong characters and certain strong thematic elements.

    Sff has always tended to be concerned with current affairs — whether that meant stories with anti-Communist-related themes or anti-Vietnam-related themes or free-sex-related themes or whatever. (Heck, phantom has been bitching recently about the Hugos supposedly being ruined since way back in the 70s because Le Guin’s Omelas story won — talk about message fiction!) And I suspect that right now women are more likely to be writing the sorts of themes that Hugo voters want to read. That is NOT the same thing as a gender bias — if you stripped identifying info from the stories, I don’t think it would significantly change the voting — it’s just a possible imbalance in what’s being produced.

    But, again, these are just my suspicions. I have no real data, so I would not dream of claiming my suspicions to be facts.

    (excuse typos — I’ writing from my phone!)

49. Lenore Rose:

    “Can you point to a winner on your list who didn’t *deserve* the win?”

    Well, that argument can be made for every year where almost no women won too. And still we thought it was a bad thing with no women winners.

    Tavella:

    “Oh it’s the eternal whine of certain types of men. When men dominate massively, it’s simply the true and natural state of things. If god forbid *women* dominate, it’s clearly an unnatural thing caused by evil political correctness. So all the many years when every Hugo winner were male elicit nothing from them.”

    And the women who complained when they had no winners were a certain type of eternal whiners?

    Rose Embolism:

    ” I’m interested in seeing what the proposed solutions are. Banning women from receiving awards until we return to historical statistical norms? Perhaps a “Women win too much, vote for the menz!” poster campaign? Maybe we could consider votes “income” and count a vote for a woman at 80% of a vote for a man.”

    Would this have been a good reply during the years when no women won? How happy would you have been if someone answered with this?

    I agree with everyone that this might only be a blip, that GG and puppies might have affected what people chose to read, that all the winners were deserving. But I can’t really understand why people try to dismiss a statistically significant result or think discussing it is “eternal whining”.

    I think Xtifr got the gist of it though. And I would like to add this thought:

    Women read more than men. Women write more than men. Is it possible that they are also starting to vote more in litterary competitions, even in SFF?

    I can only see that my own reading habits have changed with a lot more female authors the last ten years compared to the years before.

50. Congrats to the winners and nominees (it is an honor to be nominated)! 😀

    (Yes, this is an excuse to Godstalk! the thread. Why do you ask?)

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