385 thoughts on “2018 Hugo Winners”

1. A rule to live by that I learned some twenty-five years ago is:

   Never write in an email* anything that you would not want your parent, your child, your spouse, your boss, your best friend, or your worst enemy to see.

   I don’t claim to follow this rule perfectly, but I’ll never have to erase ten years of Twitter, either….

   *also includes blogs, Facebook posts, Tweets, etc.

2. For anyone else feeling outside the “Laura Loop” 🙂

   Laura Resnick said upthread:

   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. ”

   I don’t feel we’re being goaded by VD into “fighting.” We’re just letting someone know that they might want to hitch up their pants.

3. Just popping in to say I am still exhausted, which is an improvement over my earlier being comatose. I finally extricated myself from bed at 4:30 PM. 16:30, yes.

   It was a swell weekend, and I had much fun meeting Filers (I won’t name names b/c I’ll forget someone) at the Thursday meetup and elsewhere during the con. Sorry Mike missed so much of it.

   I got into the Hugo pre-award reception and I have to tell you that Nora Jemisin’s cape is EVERYTHING. We WORSHIPED it. All the beautiful gold embroidery of suns and planets and stars and constellations. I want to give it a Hugo. She pretty much had a circle of women (mostly) ooh’ing and aah’ing the whole time. She said “The dress is nothing special, I didn’t spend on it. But the cape…” and we all made incoherent noises of agreement. She either should be a goddess or at minimum a member of the Wakandan royal family. And that was before her awesome speech.

   Everyone cleaned up really well. Tiaras were the order of the day so I was glad I was wearing one too (Krissy Scalzi complemented me on it, which I thought a high honor since she’s always so gorgeous, as did Pat Cadigan, who remains as awesome as ever). Even Oor Wombat’s trademark hat had added bling. Substantial hors d’hoovers to make a whole meal, all local meats, cheeses, veggies, fruit, lots of random mingling.

   Also I got to go to the Hugo Losers’ Party, which really is that awesome. GRRM rented out a fancy party space, and there were more awesome munchies, two dancing robots (see Scalzi’s blog), three bars and it was all paid for by what George calls his “stupid huge television money”. So thanks to those of you who watch GoT; a portion of the money is going back to fans. George and Parris gave nice speeches, as did Picacio re-introducing the Mexicanx attendees, who were all invited. Pretty good DJ. I vaguely remember doing the “Time Warp” in a big circle with GRRM and everyone else, and dancing along to something else with JJ… maybe “Don’t Stop Believing?” I dunno, it seems ages ago; I do remember falling into and out of an Uber with her on the way. Winners only got slightly mocked upon entering, and the dumb hat was only the cheap plastic green bowlers you see on St. Patrick’s Day. Except someone demanded to wear the chicken hat b/c Wombat wore the chicken hat before. Dublin gave everyone Irish whiskey glasses with their logo.

   Out on the patio, GRRM took over one of the chairs and you’d swear it was suddenly made of swords, he was holding court. Several attractive young ladies were sitting around him and one was going to take photos and I told her I’d take them so she could be in. She said “oh, no, really” and I said “Please, I’ve known George since before you were born. Gimme the phone.” She really looked at me and then I had two of their phones to get them all.

   Earlier on the patio:

   Red Wombat: There are dancing robots in there.
   Me: It’s Silicon Valley. It’s what we do. It’s the future.
   RW: (deadpan) It’s a wondrous place.

   Um… let’s see… the awards were great when I agreed with them and not when I didn’t, but at least I had a good seat. Sorry Mike couldn’t be there. Despite all the festive delights at the Losers Party, there were still people poring over the final voting statistics. Because we are nerrrrrds.

   I only made a little of Scalzi’s 80’s DJ party, but it was really good. He can spin the tunes so that nobody was leaving the dance floor. I danced with Alexandra Erin briefly. Oh, and I met Charon’s giant credential The Big Kahuna, who really is that large and fluffy.

   Also I went to programming which was interesting and saw many old friends.

4. I enjoyed the youtube-casts of the programming from last year, so I’m awaiting this year’s uploads

5. @Lurkertype
   Nora’s cape looked gorgeous on the livestream and should absolutely win a Hugo next year, if only to freak out the usual suspects.

   Regarding tiaras, I have a vintage silver tiara my grandmother wore for her 25th wedding anniversary, so maybe I should bring it along to Dublin.

6. @Cora: I cannot overstress that Nora’s cape was as awesome as her speech.

   I had my mom’s lead crystal tiara from Austria via West Berlin in the early 50s on, because Mom liked SF and also the rare occasions when I dress up. So I’d say if you’ve got a tiara, bring it. Especially for any Hugo-adjacent events.

   My credentials are lecturing us and have been since we got home last night. It’s like nobody ever came in and fed them twice a day at great expense.

7. Rebecca H: I wonder how many Potter/Hunger-Games readers grew up beyond asking for more-of-the-same rather than stepping up to the kind of work that’s been winning Hugos recently, but I don’t know whether a survey of Hugo voters would get enough responses to be valid. Farah Mendelssohn did a general survey relating to entry points, but that was 4+ years ago and I haven’t seen published results.

   @idontknow: the problem with your argument (that new voters are slanting heavily pro-women) is that we are missing data on who the Hugo voters are. We know that there was a huge jump in supporting memberships in 2015, but even for that year we don’t know how many of those were the only-join-when-it’s-nearer fans who were willing to join to wash away the puppy poo, versus being never-before members; I’m not a measure due to not being much on social media, but I don’t recall even hearing about any substantial push to get never-befores to join and vote. I could believe there was some such given ~5000 total voters (IIRC, more people than actually attended the convention), but I don’t know how many only-join-when-it’s-nearer fans there are. (An acquaintance has argued the North American Worldcons have a core every-year membership of ~3000, but that doesn’t address how many OJWIN there are — IIRC N4 estimated over 2000 attending members who weren’t staying at con hotels — or how many of those would be willing to join and vote.) Longer-term, the massive falloff in voting since 2015(*) suggests to me that more of the regular attendees are voting than before, rather than that there is a flood of new people voting.

   (*) in 2018 around half as many members voted as showed up. The number of supporting members is IIRC still higher than it used to be (which could mean that voters and attendees don’t overlap extensively) — but “used to be” is from decades back; I don’t know whether the number has been rising for a long time, or jumped when Hugo packets started coming out, or ….

   @Greg Hullender: ISTM that in comparing RSR, Goodreads, etc. with recent results you are using the wrong numbers; all of the ratings cover fiction, and RSR is specifically short fiction, so ISTM that the ratio to test is 6/6 or 8/8 rather than 24/25 (encompassing all of the Hugos awarded in the last two years, not just fiction.) How does that affect your chi-square analysis?

   I have mostly not been trying to diversify who (as opposed to what) I read; I’ve taken a couple of recommendations from lists of great-not-(cis-het-white-male) authors, but not many. Skimming my log of the last year or so, I’m definitely reading a lot more books written by women than by men. (The set of fiction that I haven’t finished is too small to be a sample. My purely-internal list of never-bother-with-that-author again is similarly small.) No, I don’t have the patience to count, or to figure out why this is.

   I’m much more appalled at a second-rate space opera getting 2nd place — ahead of a fascinating how-do-you-know-what-you-know-and-why-does-it-matter story that to me was a quintessential SF question — than I am at any sudden reversal of traditional ratios.

   I am … unsurprised … by Silverberg’s failure of logic (in connecting the vote to Jemisin’s grievances); he’s struck me as tone-deaf ever since his Tiptree comment. And I wonder whether he was every similarly blunt about male acceptance speeches, such as Freas’s disgusting performance in 1976.) However, I disagree with @Cora about his porn career; he didn’t present that in public. (I’ve read that a number of authors wrote hardcore-for-the-time while they were trying to break in; being able to write at all was a considerable qualification in that industry.)

   @Lorien Gray: some oldpharts stick with what they know; others … don’t. Some people keep growing and expanding their tastes.

8. @Lurkertype
   Your credentials sound like they’re behaving normally. (Mine would spend time telling me how mistreated she was, and I always knew she was lying to get my sympathy and skritches – well, she’d get the skritches anyway, because I was Her Person.)

9. @PJ: Yes, they roundly ignored us when we first got home, then insisted on being fed, then sniffed all our luggage, and today have been alternating sleeping and yelling at us for being Bad Hoomans and leaving them for a whole 5 days.

   Oh and for tiara application (literally; it was sewn into my braids) I must thank Lauowolf and her kid for an hour in my hotel bathroom and All The Bobbypins.

10. Calling the speech was “vulgar” is absurd. Jemisin made a sly and funny allusion. If a man did the same thing at the Hugo podium it likely would be regarded as clever.

    The fact that Silverberg memorialized Harlan Ellison at the same con where he called that vulgar is rich irony.

11. @Lurkertype: Our feline overlord was willing to be bribed into recognising our existence again by provided adequate tributes of fresh turkey, with the understanding that those were to be consumed while being Her Felinity would be petted gently but consistently. And a binding commitment for treats to be required at a later time.

    (Mind you, we daytripped this one from Chez Moen in West Menlo Park, so our offence was accordingly lesser than yours.)

    ETA: @rcade: Of course (purportedly) calling out (I guess?) the rocket joke as ‘vulgar’ was absurd. Eye-rolling.

    It was a stirring speech, and a stirring occasion.

12. @ Lorien Grey:

    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 think there is a lot to what you say. In fact, the generation following the baby boomers are influential middle-aged people now, and another generation after that, the Millennials are (I keep reading) the biggest generation in American history. What’s published in sf/f (and also what’s published in other genres) has changed enormously in my lifetime, with corresponding changes in who acquires and publishes books, who buys and reads books, and how books are marketed, engaged with, and viewed.

    Star Trek was obscure geek stuff when it originally aired on TV, barely able to survive 3 seasons back when there was no internet and only 3 TV channels to choose from. Now sf is popular mainstream stuff in media, gaming is a widespread hobby among all ages rather than something that only the nerdiest of teenagers do, and the scope of what’s published as an sf/f novel or short story has expanded dramatically from when Baby Boomers were the driving force of mainstream culture and of sf/f publishing, fannish culture, and sf/f community norms.

    It’s probably worth remembering, as we ponder “where did this sea change come from?” that the famous enfant terrible of sf actually died of old age this year; Harlan Ellison was 84.

    Time has been marching on while we were busy doing other things.

13. rcade – The fact that Silverberg memorialized Harlan Ellison at the same con where he called that vulgar is rich irony.

    In the interest of accuracy, I was at that memorial and in no way did Silverberg attempt to erase any of Ellison’s many warts. And his last words were…not praise. So, perhaps less irony is involved than you imagine.

14. @ Chip Hitchcock:

    I’ve read that a number of authors wrote hardcore-for-the-time while they were trying to break in; being able to write at all was a considerable qualification in that industry.

    This is true. It was a way for people who wanted to make a living writing to actually do so, and to make quite a good living, while continuing to pursue the writing careers they actually wanted. Pornographic tabloids and books were big business 40-50 years ago. There are many fiction writers, and also some fiction publishers, who started out in the porn field.

15. @Lee —

    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.

    This is the sort of thing I was referring to earlier when I referred to a threshold effect. Sometimes change will build up slowly over a long period of time until it reaches a critical mass or threshold and then appears to “suddenly” change in a major way. Like a water reservoir slowly building up until it eventually reaches the top of the dam and spills over, gradual changes that may be hidden or underappreciated lead to something that’s perceived as a sudden change. Another analogy you’ll often hear of is the “overnight sensation” music star who has actually been plugging away for years, gradually acquiring more and more fans until “suddenly” they break into the big time.

    TL;DR — changes that appear to be sudden are often rooted in long-term trends.

16. @Chip Hitchcock: “…some oldpharts stick with what they know; others … don’t. Some people keep growing and expanding their tastes.”

    Absolutely! And I like to consider myself one of the ones that keep expanding their tastes. I find the new directions in fiction very exciting, but there’s no doubt that the new stuff is coming as quite a surprise to people who’ve been sticking to what they’ve always known.

    I don’t want to point fingers or cast aspersions on older readers. Speaking as a member of the olds, it can be way too easy to lose a decade listening to the oldies station on the radio, and reading only the names you’re familiar with from when you were young, while outside your bubble everything has changed without you noticing. There’s nothing inherently bad in losing track of time. It just makes change seem more sudden than it might otherwise seem.

17. @Contrarius @Lee
    I recall seeing gradual changes on the Hugo ballot at least since 2010/11. There are more women and the occasional POC on the ballot, the same old names gradually start disappearing (except for those like Mike who’ve changed with the times), as new voices appear. I suspect that if someone were to dig into the longlists, you’d see the changes beginning even earlier.

18. I also was one of the people brought in by the puppies. I read mainly fantasy and have since long concluded that the best new fantasy books are written by women. For some reason I still read more SF by male authors, but as that is a clear minority of what I read, it doesn’t change much.

19. Speaking as a kinda-old, I just want to note that the last time I lived in San Jose, the FM radio was always playing Van Halen, Pat Benatar, and Michael Jackson. Four decades later and I’ve acquired some experience points and gray hair, and entire blocks of San Jose have been razed and rebuilt (like how the Marriott is on top of the lot that used to be the main library), and now science fiction is ruled by women of color instead of letches like Harlan Ellison. And the FM radio is still playing Van Halen, Pat Benatar, and Michael Jackson.

20. Ugh, Lurkertype’s comments are making me further regret not making this my first Worldcon. It just couldn’t work out for me, schedule-wise. Sounds like a great time, all together.

    I’ve probably said this before, but re new member stats or whatnot – I first contemplated joining in, I think, 2014, because of the Hugo packet. A friend of mine who is a fan of many years explained the voting process and the packet to me, as she knew I’d been reading Wheel of Time. I was shocked to find out it was so simple and easy to vote for the Hugos. I’ve always seen the Hugo award as a sign of quality (not necessarily a sign of something I’ll like, but mostly an indicator of quality). I ended up being too lazy to join in 2014. I’d heard increasing rumbling from what would eventually become the alt-right about “leftist” influence in SFF, and had read about Correia’s vanity campaign and thought it was funny. That was also the first I’d heard about trollish pseudo-nazi Vox Day (who I knew well from his old political columns during the Bush regime) had entered the SFF ring. I joined WSFS for the first time in 2015, when it seemed possible that the SP/RP campaign could corrupt the Hugos. That was a brutal year – my first time voting and I felt it very important to read everything and judge it honestly (well, after a few JCW works, I decided I’d got the jist and could ignore the rest). Since then I’ve nominated and voted every year, though I have a hard time keeping up with all the reading and still working on catching up with stuff I’ve missed in the past few hundred years. So, I’m one of the people who was on the utter outskirts of fandom – a lurker at best – sucked into the Hugo voting/nomination process because a bunch of clueless reactionaries attempted to make it their playground.

21. Just a couple of miscellaneous added data points —

    I am yet another woman who was induced to start voting in the Hugos by the pups. I had been vaguely thinking about it for a few years, but those pups bit me in the ass and got me going.

    As for my reading gender ratio — a couple of years ago I spent an entire year reading only female authors (aside from continuing series by male authors and just a couple other exceptions). That was an interesting and educational experience, but it certainly hasn’t led to me reading exclusively women in general. So far this year I have 11 books published in 2018 on my TBR shortlist (meaning I actually own them already). Of that 11, 7 are written by men. Of course I’ll eventually be reading a lot more 2018 books than that; I usually start getting serious about current works around November or December. And on my general sff TBR shortlist (meaning books published in any year), 36/51are male.

    As for my Hugo nomination list this year, 5/18 fiction-category nominations were men.

22. Greg:

    In mathematical terms, the gender of award winners should be random and binomially distributed in a way similar to the set of popular works as a whole.

    Rev. Bob:

    You assert this as an axiom. I do not accept it as one. Can you support it?

    I’m not sure I’d call it an axiom; it’s how you define the null case in statistical significance testing: There is no association between the groups, or alternately, the treatment has no effect, or looked at another way, the filtering between the population of all people or of published authors has no effect on the gender distribution of the group of Hugo winners. Fleshing that out in this case, in which the null hypothesis is tested against the data with a chi-square test, means that the null case is defined such that the gender distribution is the same in the two populations. The obvious question, of course, is which population is best to take as the “untreated” or “non-filtered” group (you should strive to find the group that is the same in every way except for the treatment you’re interested in; that is, only one process is involved in going from that population to the population you’re testing), and it sounds like regardless of which group Greg has looked at (the general population, the population of SF fans, or the population of published SF writers; the treatment would then be “Hugo voting”), the chi-square test indicates that the null hypothesis does not hold, and therefore there’s a factor involved that somehow does affect the gender distribution of Hugo winners.

    Rev. Bob:

    Are you claiming that p is a constant across all samples?

    I seriously doubt it. As he stated, “As the number of authors in a sample goes to infinity, the proportion of male authors in that sample will converge on a number, p.” That value depends on the sample chosen, of course–that’s part of the most basic foundations of probability theory! However, it is certainly true that it will so converge to some definite value of p (the Law of Large Numbers); this is the fact that allows us to perform statistical analyses in the first place, and I might add, the fact that he’s running statistical significance tests at all means that pretty much by definition he does not expect p to be the same from sample to sample.

23. @Lurkertype – Thanks for your mini con report! Very fun!

    @Khitty Hawk – I don’t think any Worldcon panels will be appearing on YouTube. Last year’s were live streamed, and as far as I know, that was the first time anything but the Hugo ceremony was available online.

    @Chip Hitchcock – Just my own observation, no idea how generally it applies…The BookTubers I watch are mainly young women who grew up with Harry Potter and are definitely reading Hugo winning stuff now. Rachel, whose YouTube channel Kalanadi was on the Fancast longlist, is definitely one whose recommendations end up on my nominations list.

    I’m a not-so-young woman who thought about participating in the Hugo process for several years. I remember Scalzi starting up the Hugo Packets and being very tempted. I finally voted in 2014 and was prompted to start nominating by the pups in 2016. I love it and plan to keep it up from now on. I remember someone (maybe here?) during Peak Puppy saying that the most rewarding part is the nomination stage. No matter what happens with the final ballot, no one can spoil the fun of that — finding and talking about stuff you love with others.

    I don’t know if I’ll ever actually make it to a Worldcon. It always sounds amazing but exhausting to this introvert.

24. I’m sad this thread appears to have turned into a justification rather than celebration of new voices being heard. Why is this being framed in the context of settling into parity with men? Why not – is this repeatable for other minority groups?

25. @Viverrine: To repeat it, we should understand how it happened, no?

26. Sure – but I’ve seen a bunch of suggested factors and no mention of trying to replicate them to see if they have an impact or can boost others. They’re mentioned to explain women sweeping the awards and compared to men’s stats in that category. For example, networking sites run or contributed to mostly by woman was pointed at as a possible factor. No one mentioned looking at the current participation rate of other minorities or how to actively involve them so that stories getting buzz in their communities can be discovered by those outside it.

    Repeating experiments is one way to prove theories, yes?

27. I’m happy about women’s near sweep and not too curious why – especially not concerned about justification to Hugo detractors. But I hadn’t thought about the possibility of encouraging it in other directions. There were some efforts to get more deverse groups involved at Worldcon — the Mexicanx and LGBTQ Initiatives — off the top of my head.

28. To look at just one category, N. K. Jemisin is not only the first author to win three best novel Hugos back to back to back, she currently *all by herself* holds the record for the longest period that female authors have won the best novel Hugo with no male authors winning, at three years running. (In contrast, the record for male authors winning the Hugo for best novel with no women winning stands at 17 years.)

    Statistically speaking, the last two years really *should* be happening/have happened/happen at some point. And from my point of view, the books and stories that have won over the past couple of years are the ones that should have won, quality-wise. They’re by and large the ones I would have voted for if I voted in the Hugos.

29. @Charon D: And the FM radio is still playing Van Halen, Pat Benatar, and Michael Jackson. Funny radio in your area? Boston a few years ago had 6 largely-oldies stations, with some degree of individuality; e.g., one was more inclined to 1950’s and 60’s rather than later. At least 4 of those are now (from what I could tell before I gave up on them) substantially different formats; I have only 2 still preset on my car radio, and I haven’t listened to either for some time. I’m more upset about the crunching of classical music: one of the two interesting non-profit part-time CM stations bought the commercial CM station after its massive new owner (Clear Channel?) said it would change the format — but that meant dropping all their own CM and keeping the much more limited programming(*) of the formerly-commercial station. And the coverage is worse, because before selling the station the owner swapped formats between the CM station (which was central and powerful) and a lower-power country station ~30 miles north of Boston.

    (*) A Copland ballet at least once a week, the “New World” symphony at least once a month — either they threw out a Sagan of vinyl and CDs or there’s a huge collection gathering dust somewhere.

30. I’ll add my anecdata to the personal Hugo histories here.

    Back in the late ’80s early ’90s I went to Worldcons sporadically, but didn’t involve myself in Hugo nominations or voting (much…I may have voted once?) for a conjunction of reasons. My finances were such that I didn’t buy books in hardback, which meant that by the time I read them, they were often past their eligibility. I wasn’t much of a short fiction reader and the major SFF periodicals didn’t offer much that pinged with me. And my involvement in “fannish culture” was mostly limited to filking, so the fan writer/fanzine/fan artist categories were a mystery. I might look at the ballot, but mostly it was choices between things I wasn’t familiar with.

    In the later ’90s and early ’00s I was in grad school and then edging back into the workforce and my budget and/or vacation availability didn’t allow for Worldcon trips. (I bracketed my grad school years with attending Con Francisco in 1993 and Con José in 2002, which didn’t involve travel.)

    But as the first decade of the 21st century progressed, two things happened. I became more established in my current job and started having a budget that could support adding Worldcon to my regular event rotation. And I became much more integrated into online fandom, which resulted both in being part of more conversations about new SFF but also becoming at least more literate about other fannish concerns. And many of those fannish connections were international, making Worldcon a decidedly attractive addition to my otherwise-eclectic convention schedule. Plus…in 2014, my own first novel was published and, mangling the familiar lyric, I wanted to “be in the con where it happened.” I still regret not making the effort to get to LonCon in 2014 because I think I would have had a blast meeting some of the friends I’d been making online. At that point, I pledged myself to attend every Worldcon for as long as my budget would continue to support it. The next Worldcon, of course, was Sasquan. But we’ll get back to that.

    Back in my pre-grad school days, I read SFF voraciously and, if not entirely indiscriminately, let’s say very broadly in terms of themes and authors. During my decade in grad school, I found myself doing so much reading for my academic work, that I became unable to immerse myself in the sorts of SFF I’d enjoyed previously, and I shifted to reading other genres that I could engage with differently (largely historic mysteries and historic romance). Coming out of that period, I found that several things had happened to my SFF reading habits. A lot of the authors and series that I’d been following previously had left me behind and were no longer auto-buys, either because I felt I had no hope of catching up (*cough* Foreigner *cough*) or because the themes were no longer as attractive. I found I had less reading time than earlier in my life (or rather, much of my reading time was spent online instead) and as I became pickier in what I chose to spend that time on, I found myself increasingly focusing on female authors.

    The simple dynamics of the field had meant that my early reading years (i.e., starting out in grade school) had been unbalanced toward male authors, and I justified that even if I read only non-male authors for the rest of my life, the overall balance was likely to be equal. But I wasn’t focusing on female authors to redress that balance, it was because I found that the books I enjoyed most happened to be written by female authors, and it seemed like a useful filter to get more of that enjoyment more efficiently. But also, my online fannish activity gravitated toward spaces that were not actively hostile to women (funny thing) and those spaces often were filled with people whose reading habits were gender-aware in a variety of ways, both in terms of the authors they discussed and in terms of critical analysis of misogynistic themes in fiction. And those discussions were another input into which books I chose to try.

    For short fiction, I’d largely shifted to reading online magazines, and even more so, to consuming short fiction in audio form. And as a general trend, it feels like the prominent online/audio SFF venues are more open to featuring non-male, queer, and progressive voices.

    (Another odd dynamic in my reading was that when I first started working seriously on my own writing, I found myself avoiding stories that were too similar to my own, not because I was worried about being influenced by them, but because reading similar works “bled off” the drive to write, and I very much wanted to write. That aspect has faded now and doesn’t really affect my reading any more.)

    So when Sasquan came around, I was primed to be very invested in Worldcon culture, which included Hugo nomination and voting. I was consuming SFF of all lengths more immediately after its release (and thus within award eligibility). I was consuming work primarily by female authors for reasons unrelated to awards. I had become more immersed in fannish culture of a wider scope, thanks to online culture. And finally (not primarily, but certainly as an amplifying factor) I was outraged at the Puppy antics and determined to do my bit to counter their attempt to hijack the Hugos.

    Nobody else is going to have that exact same combination of life factors that led me to contribute my woman-centered nominations and votes to the Hugo process at precisely the start of the Puppy Wars. But other people’s life factors are likely to be equally complex and multi-layered. Any analysis that looks for a simple “reason” for the results of the last two years is going to be wrong precisely because of those complexities and layers.

31. @Viverrine: This is the “our prediction doesn’t reflect the real results, review the datasets for errors and bad assumptions, posit revisions to the hypothesis” phase. Which, honestly, is where it will probably stop in this thread, because most of the people talking are analysts by nature and/or already busy with other approaches.

    It’ll take someone with a lot more spoons that I have to go beyond kibbitzing. I’d love to see the various places people are getting recommendations collected. Galactic Suburbia was mentioned above; I’ve gotten some interesting recommendations from Writing Excuses. We have a permalinked recommendations thread here that I pass around on occasion.

    Beyond that, I’ll say that short fiction publishers have learned that you have to explicitly say that minority voices are welcome. Something for people managing groups that would like to expand their reach to think about….

32. I’m not too too fussed about Silverberg’s comment, because he was already in my mind a notoriously conservative old white dude (but, several people would insist, an old school conservative, not the current GOP craziness.) Which is of a piece with what he said.

    I’m disappointed, though. And more disappointed that it wasn’t a fabrication of VD’s invention, but it fits his general reputation. Old school conservatives often have that thread of half-conscious or willfully subconscious prejudice, and excuse themselves as not racist because they don’t *intend* to be, never mind that they did not ever look closely at their own knee-jerk reactions and work to change them.

    (by the way, did anyone else who held their breath and peeked at VD’s blog notice his intentional mangling of Jemisin’s speech? He removed all the punctuation and capitalization and added in every um and uh and other verbal tic. You could make any piece of writing or speech look bad by transcribing it thus — more so when it’s now available on at least two other places online as written.)

33. Since when are women a minority?

34. by the way, did anyone else who held their breath and peeked at VD’s blog notice his intentional mangling of Jemisin’s speech? He removed all the punctuation and capitalization and added in every um and uh and other verbal tic.

    Yep. To make her look bad, he copied the computer-generated transcript created by YouTube for the video I posted of her speech. Here is a real transcript.

35. @Hampus —

    Since when are women a minority?

    It may be a quirk of American English that any historically disadvantaged group is often referred to as a “minority”, regardless of actual numbers. It’s just convenient shorthand for “disadvantaged group” or “disempowered group” or something else similar.

36. @rcade

    To make her look bad, [VD] copied the computer-generated transcript created by YouTube for the video I posted of her speech.

    To be fair, that is not too dissimilar from the quality of editing he provides for his own authors…

37. It is a quirk as Contrarius says, frequently mocked by noting things like the fact that white men in NA are technically a minority (IE, less than 50% of the population) and white people were vastly outnumbered in Apartheid South Africa.

    A longer possible alternate would be “A minority among those in power” though “disadvantaged” is the best, and increasingly common, one-word summary.

38. @Andy H.

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

    In the author bio of “River of Teeth”, Gailey is referred to with female pronouns, FWIW (I must admit that I’m insufficiently conversant with the social conventions surrounding nonbinary identity to know whether that’s evidence of binariness or not).

39. microtherion; I know someone who identifies personally as genderfluid and has begun to favour “they” pronouns personally, but chose a feminine nom de plume for their current book and put “her” pronouns in the bio, so that’s not conclusive.

    (Lauren Alder. I have not yet read the book in question, but probably will within the month. I know I was well pleased with their skills as critiquer/content editor.)

40. Sarah Gailey came out as nonbinary earlier this year. River of Teeth was published in 2017, and its author bio reflects Gailey’s pronouns at the time. Their website and Twitter clearly state their current pronouns.

41. @microtherion
    LOL at your comment on VD’s editing!

    Sarah Gailey is now using they/them pronouns. But it’s a recent change (this year?). Look at the bio info here:

    http://www.sarahgailey.com/

42. Hampus:

    While “women” are not numerically a minority in the United States (as opposed to countries where where overt patriarchal control has created a gender imbalance through state laws regarding number of children born and preference for sons over daughters in China and India), they are categorized as such because they do not have equal access and rights as men.

    https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-sociology/chapter/women-as-a-minority/

    As Lenora Rose points out, being in the majority group by numbers does not always correlate with social or institutional power.

    I’ve been following the discussion here with great interest (hope to participate a bit more after I get online courses finalized in new learning management system).

43. @Various: Worldcon 76’s official photos page has been updated (not sure when) with a slew of Hugo finalists/winners photos, grouped by award mostly.

    I can’t see it well, but Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s outfit looks wonderful! [ETA: Look for a pic where she’s wearing her shawl or cape or whatever.]

44. I cringed a little at Silverberg presenting the Fan Writer Hugo to Sarah. He said something like “Oh, here she is.” Not that I would expect him to know or think to use the correct pronoun if he did.

45. @Rail

    our prediction doesn’t reflect the real results

    Are you talking about a general “winners should be statistically the same as the population” prediction?

    I’m way behind on Pixel Scrolls and don’t follow Hugo news outside of what File 770 provides, but I haven’t seen discussion about people particularly surprised these were the shortlist or surprise at who won in the category. The only prediction post I read was Camestros, and he correctly predicted most of the winners (I assume Timothy tipped him off with his insider knowledge). This discussion was started by a post about how statistically skewed the percentages were, not that they were unanticipated.

    @Hampus – Thanks, I had not realized that was an American (or possibly just people-adjacent-to-me) language quirk and will try to use disadvantaged group going forward. Not sure why minority gets used here, but my off-the-cuff guess would be because women fall under and use many of the same programs that minority population groups do, and possibly Lenore’s point that women often are a minority when looking at a particular field or group, even if not population wise.

    ETA: or what robinareid said

46. @Kendall

    Oh, nice! There’s a good pic showing Vina’s whole outfit in the Best Short Story folder.

47. @Laura: Thanks for tracking it down! That’s the photo I was thinking of, but I forgot to snag a link and was in a rush, so I didn’t go back to find it again.

    (And here I am, still at my computer, sigh. Some rush! No, really, I’m shutting down now, I promise.)

48. Contrarius, robinareid, Lenora Rose, Viverrine:

    Thank you for the explanation! We do not use the term for women in Sweden, instead using the longer “discriminated groups”. Now that I understand the American usage, I will remember it in the future.

49. @Viverrine:

    Are you talking about a general “winners should be statistically the same as the population” prediction?

    Yeah. Hence the search for a better population model. It’s when that failed to account for the pattern break that the conversation turned to other possibilities.

50. @Rail – Did I miss when it was established that the Hugos did statistically reflect the population, and that this was stable across multiple years? You can’t break a pattern that isn’t there. Also, the very first possibility proposed was gender bias and the conversation turned from there.

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