385 thoughts on “2018 Hugo Winners”

1. I have not read the Jemison books. Perhaps they are wonderful works of science fiction deserving of Hugos every year from now on. But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of ‘identity politics,’ and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances. — Robert Silverberg

   This is a contemptible statement from Silverberg. He hasn’t endured what N.K. Jemisin has endured, and continues to endure, as a SF writer. She’s been a target of vile racists for years.

   Her expression of justified anger does not make her Hugo win “identity politics.” She won because the members of Worldcon — who Silverberg claims to hold in high esteem — thought her work was the best (out of an excellent group of novels).

   Since he admits to have not read her books, he has no idea whether they are worthy or not. For him to cast aspersions on her victory anyway is a low point for him. As a longtime fan I’m incredibly disappointed in his comments.

2. @Laura Resnick

   Do you have a link to that later statement by Silverberg?

3. If that is a real quote from Silverberg (still not sure) I would say that you can win something without using identity politics and yet still talk about identity politics in your acceptance speech. And if that’s “graceless and vulgar,” well, I’d suggest you read some of the comments Jemisin has been subjected to over the years and find out why she brought the topic up.

4. rcade on August 21, 2018 at 2:22 pm said:
   I have not read the Jemison books. Perhaps they are wonderful works of science fiction deserving of Hugos every year from now on. But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of ‘identity politics,’ and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances. — Robert Silverberg

   This is a contemptible statement from Silverberg. He hasn’t endured what N.K. Jemisin has endured, and continues to endure, as a SF writer. She’s been a target of vile racists for years.

   Her expression of justified anger does not make her Hugo win “identity politics.” She won because the members of Worldcon — who Silverberg claims to hold in high esteem — thought her work was the best (out of an excellent group of novels).

   Since he admits to have not read her books, he has no idea whether they are worthy or not. For him to cast aspersions on her victory anyway is a low point for him. As a longtime fan I’m incredibly disappointed in his comments.

   I’m not surprised. I got up and walked out of a panel he was on at Helsinki because he gleefully said “I am using the masculine pronoun to refer to the generic plural, and if people don’t like it they can speak to my agent – or my lawyer.”

   Another friend of mine, who is a recent fan, met me in a queue and told me that she had just heard the most awful old white male making old white male comments. Her husband who is a fan of long standing wobbled from foot to foot a bit and then said “He’s one of the giants, you know”. Three guesses who it was.

5. Greg Hullender on August 21, 2018 at 12:54 pm said:
   …The two big events in that time are obviously Trump and the Puppies, but the best I can do with that is to say that all the people who simply refused to ever nominate or vote for anyone other than a straight white male author probably dropped out during that time, causing the results to move closer to the Goodreads numbers. That still seems weak to me, though.

   Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, and this is a statement totally based on no objective data whatsoever.
   But I wonder whether there are people who were blindly and happily and overwhelmingly nominating or voting for works by straight white male authors without ever particularly noticing it.
   But who then faced Puppies and others explicitly lauding such behavior and, instead of doubling down, got over it?

6. I’m another who came in due to the kerpupple (nominated but didn’t vote this year, due to money reasons). I didn’t know how the Hugos worked before then, but I’ve been plugging my interests since (unsuccessfully, but that’s okay. Which reminds me ouch at 17776). Looking at the breakdown, Crash Override nearly took the award, so w00t Zoe Quinn!

   Regarding the gender breakdown, can’t we just tell any naysayers this is overcorrection that will regress to the mean in x-many years? That’s true and just as much as they deserve.

   Someone suggested stripping identifying information from submissions/nominations. Alas, that wouldn’t work. When the Fireside report came out, commenters brought up other ways of identifying background – who the story is about, for example. If the main characters are chinese-american, for example, and their chinese identity comes into play, I’m going to err on the side of the author being chinese. (It’s not a perfect heuristic. I thought the author of the Rivers of London series was black until I looked it up.)

7. Not surprised at the Silverberg quote. He’s 83, and grew up marinating in the old boys network of SFF fandom. Remember, he’s the dude that mocked people for thinking Tiptree might be female, because *obviously* writing like that was “ineluctably masculine”.

8. If that is a real quote from Silverberg (still not sure) …

   John Scalzi confirmed it.

9. Do you have a link to that later statement by Silverberg?

   I don’t. I read all statements on Nick Mamatas’ Facebook wall (including statements by someone from the e-list), but it was a friends-only setting on the thread.

10. @Laura Resnick

    Thanks for clarifying. It’s really disappointing to see Silverberg trot out that nonsense, and IMO he needs to realise that just claiming he wasn’t being racist doesn’t fix what he actually said.

11. @Lauowolf
    But I wonder whether there are people who were blindly and happily and overwhelmingly nominating or voting for works by straight white male authors without ever particularly noticing it.
    But who then faced Puppies and others explicitly lauding such behavior and, instead of doubling down, got over it?

    As a data point, my reading habits and appreciation of various works changed markedly once I started listening to Galactic Suburbia, providing me with a different perspective. This pre-dated Puppies by some years, but is an example of the outcome that you conject.

12. Laura Resnick on August 21, 2018 at 1:45 pm said:

    And Robert Silverberg has released this statement:

    “I have no access to Facebook. But I wish someone would let the multitudes hear my statement that I wasn’t being racist, I simply feel that a Hugo acceptance speech should express gratitude, not anger. ”

    So he wants the public at large to know that he thinks a black woman’s acceptance speech was 1. too angry, and 2. not grateful enough.

    But he’s not racist.

    Riiiiiiight.

    [This has been a drive-by statement. Sorry. Have been stupor-busy for quite some time. Congrats to the winners, congrats to Mike, congrats to the Hugo voting community and the SFF community at large!]

13. @Mark-credential:

    Rather a lot of people need to learn that lesson…

14. I’m another woman who was brought into the Hugos via the puppy mess. I’m 42, have read SFF (mostly focused on Fantasy) ever since I can remember, but never paid attention to the Hugos until the first sad puppy campaign. Signed up as a supporting member for worldcon so I could nominate and vote, and have stuck around ever since.

    For the most part, I’ve not changed what I read. The exception to this is short fiction – Short Stories and Novelettes specifically. I never really ran across those, with most of my reading focused on novels & novellas; now with access to digital publications like Fireside Magazine, etc., and because I want to have works to nominate, I seek out short fiction. Short fiction also is a great way to introduce myself to new authors, and see if I like their style before trying a larger work. I did that with Rebecca Roanhorse – first read her (winning!) Hugo short story, then decided to pick up Trail of Lightning based on that read.

15. re: Silverberg’s comments:
    Character is what you show when you think no one is watching.

    Making a slam like that is one thing if you’ve actually read the books, but admitting you have not read the books makes it misogynistic and racist.
    We could always chalk it up to failing faculties and too much alcohol. Unless he’s a teetotaler, in which case we’re back to actual character.

    And, watching her speech, and reading a transcript of her speech, I don’t get the whole ‘graceless and vulgar’ thing. I thought she was amazing, articulate, funny, and accepting of what she had accomplished. Unless Silverberg considers “working my ass off” vulgar.

    Crotchety old guy muttering “get off my lawn!” is the vibe I get here. Very crotchety.

16. @Techgrrl72

    I suppose the ‘raised middle finger’ image was what really raised his cranky old hackles. Perhaps now that VD has splashed his statement everywhere, Silverberg may appreciate just a little more why some people merit a middle finger…it’s astonishing how much abuse of others some people can shrug off as unimportant with an ‘well, he never did anything to ME, so it seems NBD.’

17. If that is a real quote from Silverberg (still not sure) …
    John Scalzi confirmed it.

    Well, that’s pretty appalling. I’d have hoped Silverberg was better than that.

18. Making a slam like that is one thing if you’ve actually read the books…

    And if he had read the books he would realize the extent to which the books come from the very anger he was complaining about. The Broken Earth trilogy is fueled by anger. Not talking about it would be like if Silverberg had accepted his Grand Master award with a speech that carefully avoided all mention of SF.

19. jayn on August 21, 2018 at 3:55 pm said:
    @Techgrrl72

    I suppose the ‘raised middle finger’ image was what really raised his cranky old hackles. Perhaps now that VD has splashed his statement everywhere, Silverberg may appreciate just a little more why some people merit a middle finger…it’s astonishing how much abuse of others some people can shrug off as unimportant with an ‘well, he never did anything to ME, so it seems NBD.’

    Maybe. But she didn’t literally raise a middle finger. She used a metaphor, and picked up the Hugo and waved it. For Silverberg to find that ‘vulgar’ is beyond stupid.

    Double standard all the way. I worked in a male dominated (98%) industry for 34 years. I used the f-word, just like everyone else. To say that the men were into ‘locker room talk’ is being kind.

    But I wasn’t being ladylike.

    Once when I was passed over for a promotion in favor of a quite incompetent, openly misogynistic man, my boss explained that I intimidated his boss. His boss was the CIO and regularly dealt with Wall Street and the BOD and the Management Committee. I look like a sofa pillow on a good day. Short, round, and plump.

    So excuse me for being skeptical about Silverberg’s excuses. And also excuse me for laughing at any attempt to explain the current crop of award winners as anything other than quality finally being allowed to shine.

20. @All: I particularly dislike Theo B. ‘Let’s you and him fight’ gambits, and think it foolish to dance when he tugs that string.

    That aside, I’m unconvinced the public at large should care about a purported privately expressed — and then maliciously disclosed — Silverberg opinion. If accurately reported, it’s his crotchety get-off-my-lawn personal opinion, with which I politely disagree but see zero reason to get worked up about.

    As it happens, Nora deservedly got carte blanche to say pretty much anything on her mind. If Bob prefers future Best Novel winners hew to his preferred style of expression, all I can say is (quoting Paul & Storm) ‘Write faster. Write like the wind.’

21. @Techgrrl72
    Oh, I quite agree that his excuse is bull. And absolutely a double standard. As I understand it, Silverberg participated in a memorial panel for Harlan Ellison, so I’d venture to guess his tolerance for ‘graceless’ ‘vulgarity’ is quite a bit greater coming from some people than others.

    ITA that Jemisin fully deserved her awards.

22. By his own admission, Robert Silverberg wrote erotica for the money in the 1950s/early 1960s, a gig he got via Harlan Ellison. So I cannot imagine that the word “ass” and a metaphorical middle finger would shock him.

    Otherwise, I agree that this is extremely disappointing from him.

23. I agree a lot of women won the past couple of years. I think it’s probably a statistical blip, and even if it isn’t, I don’t see it as any big deal; the works that won were very impressive and strike me as worthy of the honor.

    But it’s very handsome of whoever brought it up first to concede that the wide gender imbalance in the 1960s and later was wrong, and I wouldn’t want to be outdone in handsomeness, so if whoever it is will mark their calendar for 2058 we’ll revisit the issue then. If we are both still alive, and interested.

    I will say that I’m 54 and I’ve been reading SFF since I was 9 or so, and read mostly male authored books with male characters until about a decade ago, and only started making a serious effort to find female and PoC authored books or books with female/PoC characters in the past few years, so I think I could continue my current pattern for pretty much the rest of my life without being unfair, overall, to straight white male etc authors. Books authored by women aren’t 100% my jam, and I have a few male authors I like so much I buy their books right when they come out, but female-authored books are less likely to jam some sexist nonsense up my nose while I’m trying to enjoy a good story and PoC-authored books are more likely to have some interesting society structure or alternate history I never gave a passing thought to before and I like those things. So if I’m trying a new author probably the book both sounds interesting and either 1) has been recommended by several friends who share my tastes or 2) is authored by a woman / non binary person / person of color / some combination and/or has a main character of that description.

    People tend to assume most people are like them. Maybe I’m doing that. But surely I’m not the only SFF reader / Hugo adjacent person to have these attitudes.

24. I agree totally with Rock Moen that this is indeed a Beale “let’s you & him fight” stunt, and it should definitely not be humored.

    I thought Jemisin’s speech was powerful, worth saying, and worth listening to and thinking about. But t’s not my favorite Hugo speech. My favorite Hugo speech was probably John Picacio in Chicago, 2012, when he talked about the great sf/f artists over the years, including those whose work had influenced him, who’d never even been nominated, let alone won an award. I liked the encompassing, whole-picture view of that speech, the humility it evinced, and the way it put awards into their proper (IMO) perspective. Years ago, I sat through a Hugo speech I thought was so BAD, I started giggling uncontrollably (and people around me glared and poked)–but I remember someone else afterward talking about how fantastic they thought that speech was.

    We get to choose how we react to Hugo speeches, but we don’t get to choose what the winner says. And just as they reveal a lot about themselves by what they say at the podium, I guess we reveal a lot about ourselves, too, when we opine on what they’ve said in those moments.

25. Oops, I see I wrote Rock Moen. (LOL!)

    Actually, that works…. Maybe you should change your name?

26. @tavella wrote
    Not surprised at the Silverberg quote. He’s 83, and grew up marinating in the old boys network of SFF fandom. Remember, he’s the dude that mocked people for thinking Tiptree might be female, because *obviously* writing like that was “ineluctably masculine”.

    That’s gratuitously false and insulting. What Silverberg actually wrote was “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.” That language doesn’t mock anyone, and is carefully phrased as Silverberg’s subjective perception.

27. @Laura, will take it under advisement.

    I’ve also been known to answer to my Cheap Detective Name, courtesy of /usr/bin/wordplay (anagram generator) on my Linux server: Nick Rome.

28. Scalzi’s post about the Hugos had a link to Jemisin’s acceptance speech and Wow, it was a corker! Made me cry, but happy tears.

29. That aside, I’m unconvinced the public at large should care about a purported privately expressed — and then maliciously disclosed — Silverberg opinion.

    I don’t think it matters where he said it once it becomes publicized. All that matters is he said it.

    We talk often on File 770 about comments made on friends-only Facebook posts. The authors of those comments have no more realistic an expectation of privacy than someone making a comment to a subscribers-only mailing list. If you tell a group of people something in easily reproducible electronic form it might get reproduced.

30. @rcade:

    I don’t think it matters where he said it once it becomes publicized.

    It matters if you care about being (rather flagrantly) manipulated by Theodore Beale. As I said, I particularly object to being his monkey, and am astonished how many people keep falling for that.

    (I hope you’re not thinking I was suggesting private comments, once disclosed, should be immune from comment. In case you were, no, sorry, not what I said, not what I meant.)

31. A comment made on a mailing list is not private. Access is limited, but it’s not an exchange between two people in confidence in an intimate setting. It’s more like having a conversation in a crowded restaurant.

    Either Silverberg didn’t know one of Beale’s fellow travellers was on the list – which puts the lie to the idea it’s all that private – or he didn’t care that a chum of Beale, and the rest of the list, heard him say things to delight a racist fascist’s evil heart.

    Either way, the sentiments expressed are disgraceful, and should be loudly condemned. There should be no place in any community for demanding a black woman, already subjected to years of vile abuse and discrimination within and without the community, be ‘grateful’ for winning an award—against the weight of long-standing prejudice—that she worked her arse off for.

    The only people ‘rehearsing grievances’ are Robert Silverberg and his ilk, standing firmly on the wrong side of history.

32. It matters if you care about being (rather flagrantly) manipulated by Theodore Beale.

    If a source you do not trust shares information that is independently verified to be accurate, no one has been manipulated.

    John Scalzi is the reason I’m talking about the quote. Am I his monkey too?

33. I’m one of the people who came back to voting and nominating for Hugos in recent years (I had nominated and voted before in the late 1990s and very early 2000s).

    The vast growth of new markets for SF (and the new ease with which I can follow recommendations (if someone says that Clarkesworld or Uncanny, or DailySF had a great story I should read, I don’t have to haunt the newsstands or special order something – I can just follow the link)) has greatly broadened my horizons and found me lots of new authors to read – and since the markets I previously stuck with were dominated by men, the percentage of women I’ve read lately must have increased _sharply_, which has (not surprisingly) affected my nominating and voting.

34. @rcade:

    If a source you do not trust shares information that is independently verified to be accurate, no one has been manipulated.

    That is a non-sequitur conclusion. If you cannot see that you’re being manipulated, then I will not pursue the point, and we’ll have to agree to disagree.

    John Scalzi is the reason I’m talking about the quote. Am I his monkey too?

    To my knowledge, John merely confirmed, in response to someone raising the question, that the quotation on Mr. Beale’s blog is mostly accurate. Is that not correct? If so, in no way does that IMO qualify as a John Scalzi ‘Let’s you and him fight’ gambit.

    I think my upthread point about Mr. Beale was fairly clear. If you don’t like it, oh well. if you disagree, fine, your privilege. Beyond that, I’m not clear there’s anything to debate, here.

35. Since I haven’t seen anybody mention it yet: earlier, PhilRM wrote, All six of the nominated novellas were written by women…

    In fact, my understanding is that at least two authors of 2018 novella finalists, JY Yang and Sarah Gailey, are nonbinary.

36. That aside, I’m unconvinced the public at large should care about a purported privately expressed — and then maliciously disclosed — Silverberg opinion. If accurately reported, it’s his crotchety get-off-my-lawn personal opinion, with which I politely disagree but see zero reason to get worked up about.

    With all due respect, it is not up to a cis het white male to decide that Silverberg’s hateful, petty little rant is no big deal.

    And I don’t care if it was maliciously disclosed: as Techgirrl72 said upthread, character is how you behave when they don’t see you. Besides, he’s been around enough to know that a mailing list is not a private forum. Hell, email isn’t.

37. I may be too late to add a comment to the discussion of the gender disparity of the awards, but I wanted to add something I hadn’t seen considered yet. We may be looking at an age-related influence (in other words, a generational influence) having an impact. The baby boomer generation here in the USA has had a massive influence on culture for decades now. Even when they had aged out of the young adult age group considered most desirable by advertisers and marketers, their tastes still wielded a large effect. It is only now that their tastes are beginning to wane in influence. I don’t know if it is because their group is shrinking in numbers (sadly due to the inevitability of death), but I think we are beginning to feel the influence of the tastes of other generations. (See, for instance, the articles about the death of mayonnaise…) I believe it’s been established that the younger generations are more open to diverse stories and world views and we are seeing this in lots of areas beyond SFF. This may also explain the seeming suddenness of the change as well.

    I’ve always been a fan of SF because I like new ideas, perspectives and voices, so this recent shift in culture is extremely welcome to me. I’m also seeing a greater influence from the various international SFF communities, too, which makes me very happy.

38. @Anna Feruglio:

    With all due respect, it is not up to a cis het white male to decide that Silverberg’s hateful, petty little rant is no big deal.

    With all due respect plus a dollop extra for good measure, I didn’t ‘decide Silverberg’s purported view is no big deal’, that being (obviously) not up to me. I said merely that I politely disagree but see zero reason to get worked up about it.

    If I got worked up every time an old SFF writer harrumphed some IMO rather stupid and blinkered personal opinion without some compelling reason, I’d waste a lot of time better IMO spent on practically anything else.

    And I don’t care if it was maliciously disclosed

    Or by whom. Or why. Yes, my point exactly.

39. Rick Moen on August 21, 2018 at 5:47 pm said:
    @Anna Feruglio:

    With all due respect, it is not up to a cis het white male to decide that Silverberg’s hateful, petty little rant is no big deal.

    With all due respect plus a dollop extra for good measure, I didn’t ‘decide Silverberg’s purported view is no big deal’, that being (obviously) not up to me. I said merely that I politely disagree but see zero reason to get worked up about it.

    And yet you have written a half a dozen messages telling everybody that you don’t care and can’t get worked up and suggesting that those that do are playing somehow in the hands of VD.

    Well I for one am really tired of hearing how people who are not affected by sexism or racism can’t get worked up about them. What can I say, good for them.

    Do I care if VD is happy about causing trouble? you’re the one who keeps talking about VD. I couldn’t care less about him and I think he’s, like most fascists, far less intelligent, wily and clever than he fancies himself, and generally an irrelevance and all-round failure.

    The same cannot be said of Silverberg.

40. @Anna Feruglio

    And yet you have written a half a dozen messages telling everybody that you don’t care and can’t get worked up and suggesting that those that do are playing somehow in the hands of VD.

    No, I wrote one brief post where I primarily said it’s foolish to be a monkey for one of Theodore Beale’s characteristic ‘Let’s you and him fight’ ploys (that he’d maliciously disclosed a purported private communication for that specific reason, and as an aside added that I also saw no reason to get worked up over the alleged personal opinion of someone who could, if he wanted to put his money where his mouth is, write, y’know, a Hugo-worthy Best Novel, and then give whatever type of speech he preferred. And that Nora had more than earned the right to give whatever type of speech she preferred.

    And then several people including non-responded as if I’d claimed private mailing list posts must not be commented on in public — all but rcade’s specimens of which appeared after I pointed out I’d said nothing of the kind. The consequent waste of time’s pretty much on you, IMO.

41. There’s one possible factor that I don’t think anyone else has mentioned in the gender-balance discussion, and that’s what I call the “critical mass” effect. In my observation, it’s not unusual for there to be a long period of slow-but-steady buildup toward any sort of major social change, and then a point at which enough people are talking about it that suddenly it’s much more noticeable.

    Take, for example, rape prevention campaigns. Until quite recently (say, about 10 years ago), these were always targeted toward women and what they could to to “prevent themselves from being raped”. And for a long time, those of us who kept pointing out that women didn’t control the behavior of rapists and that teaching men about what constitutes rape and how not to be a rapist would be a more fruitful approach felt as though we were shouting into an abyss. And then, quite suddenly as it seemed even to me, discussions about consent and rape-prevention campaigns targeted toward men started happening, and now they’re a large part of the overall conversation. But I’m sure that for people who hadn’t been following the discussion prior to that, it seemed as though all this stuff about MEN being responsible for rape just came out of nowhere!

    Similarly, I suspect that there’s been a long, slow buildup toward more recognition for the writing of women, which has only recently reached that critical-mass tipping point (quite possibly with a boost from the Puppies), and so now it just suddenly seems like this is happening for no apparent reason. If that’s the case, then trying to blame it on EPH is a case of “correlation is not causation”.

    @ Laura: Thank you for providing some context. I am severely disappointed in Silverberg, and would like to share with him one of my own mantras: “If you would be upset or embarrassed to find that a woman or PoC had heard whatever you’re about to say… then DON’T SAY IT. No matter where you are.”

    Also, I knew while listening to that speech that it was going to ignite a huge firestorm of controversy among certain segments of fandom, and I didn’t care because it was an amazing speech.

42. I was disappointed by Silverberg’s first quote but was inclined to let it go…the dubious source, out-of-context, the fact that it was meant for a certain circle of people (regardless of whether he should have known something like that might spread further). Then the second statement which he ASKED to be made public doesn’t make it better. If you feel a need to explain that you weren’t being whatever -ist, maybe you need to be a little more introspective.

43. @Laura: For those of us out of the loop, where/what is this second statement?

44. @Rock (g):

    Scroll back through the messages. I posted it in full here earlier. (And I don’t want to have to go find it again for you.)

45. (Oh! That’s the OTHER Laura. Never mind.)

    (At the cat shelter last night, I was one of 3 Lauras volunteering at the same time. talk about confusion!)

46. @Laura Resnick, thanks. That does indeed seem to ignore the First Law of Holes.

47. @Laura Resnick: I feel your pain. I’m a Jennifer born in the 70s–there’s a reason I use this nick.

48. LOL!

49. @Andy H: Since I haven’t seen anybody mention it yet: earlier, PhilRM wrote, All six of the nominated novellas were written by women…

    In fact, my understanding is that at least two authors of 2018 novella finalists, JY Yang and Sarah Gailey, are nonbinary.

    You’re absolutely right; that was an error on my part. Apologies.

50. I loved Jemisin’s speech. Some of the people sitting in my row did not. They were wrong. So is Silverberg.

    It might be a generational thing, but I can’t get worked up about yet another old man saying stupid stuff on the internet. Is it disappointing? Sure. That nonsense always is. It is not, however, a surprise. Someone was going to do it, because the times they are a changing, and I guess it might as well be Silverberg.

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