193 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/3/16 The Transatlantic Taste Gap – Hurrah!”

1. With apologies to Madonna

   I made it through the internet
   Somehow I got round those blocks
   Didn’t know how sad I was
   Until I found Vox

   I was beat
   Incomplete
   I’d been had, I was sad n bad
   But you made me scroll
   Yeah, you made me scroll
   Pixelated and new

   Hoo, like a pixel
   Scrolled for the very first time
   Like a pixel
   When your cursor blinks
   Next to mine

   Gonna give you all my hate, boy
   My logic is fading fast
   Been saving it all for you
   ‘Cause only puppies can last

   You’re so fine
   And you’re mine
   Make me rabid, yeah then we’re all bold
   Oh your hate thawed out
   Yeah, your hate thawed out
   What was sad and old

   Like a pixel, hey
   Scrolled for the very first time
   Like a pixel
   With your cursor
   Next to mine

   Whoa
   Whoa, ah
   Whoa

   You’re so evil
   And you’re mine
   I’ll be yours
   ‘Till the end of Hugos
   ‘Cause you made me feel
   Yeah, you made me feel
   It’s OK to hate

   Like a pixel, hey
   Scrolled for the very first time
   Like a pixel
   With your cursor
   Next to mine

   Like a pixel, ooh ooh
   Like a pixel
   Feels so bad inside
   When you blog me
   And your cursor blinks
   And you blog me

   Oh oh, ooh whoa

2. I think novelisation style shows very clearly in Robert Crais’ mystery novels featuring his recurring characters of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike vs his stand alone thrillers. The overall goal in the Cole/Pike series is to tell these characters’ stories more than the mystery plots themselves. The writing there is more memorable, less generic. But he has a couple of stand alone novels (Hostage and Two Minute Rule) that fit this style exactly and really read as if the main point in writing them was getting them picked up for movies (and Hostage did get turned into a decent cop movie with Bruce Willis).

3. On Long Way…. it was too fluffy and nice for me. Not every character in a book needs to be VD, but come on, lets have some dramatic tension – everyone was nice and understanding and drinking tea* This is the point where I gave up

   Gur guvat gung svanyyl znqr zr guebj vg nfvqr jnf gur Pncgnvaf fhccbfrqyl “gnobb” eryngvbafuvc jvgu gur nyvra zrepranel – fb jura gur fuvcf zrrg hc, vg gheaf bhg 2 bs ure perj nyernql xabj. Fb “gnobb” pyrneyl zrnaf fbzrguvat qvssrerag va gur sne shgher…

   *OK, not tea, but similar.

4. I’ve been annoyed before by action scenes that go: Ship A fired and hit X, then Ship B fired and hit Y, then Z ran to the control room etc. I’ve even had the thought that “this would be better on a screen rather than a book” but put it down to the inherent nature of action scenes, hadn’t considered that it might be a choice of writing styles.

5. All this poetic activity is making my hopeful for my new ambition: inspiring some fan of the Alpennia series to actually write and produce the opera “Tanfrit”** that features in Mother of Souls. (Which, as of yesterday afternoon, is ready for the beta-readers, which has me feeling uncharacteristically at loose ends. At least for the rest of today.)

   **Mystical effects optional

6. @Chris S
   yeah, same here
   There was a discussion on here about fanfic a while back, and how it appeals to the reader’s desire to spend time with characters. A Long Way… brought that to mind, because it seemed to be all about writing characters who are lovely and nice and don’t you want to imagine living with them? they are so interesting, and accepting, and they’d love you too!

7. Yeah that was a thought-provoking post. I don’t know if “novelization style” is the best name for it — that’s naming the phenomenon after what you believe to be the cause of it rather than just describing it.

   Theoretically a novelization could have lots of rumination, interiority, and essay-like discussion, and might be the better for it, who knows!

8. Has the Scroll mentioned that a real life Three Body Problem has been discovered, and I’ve just missed it?

   https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/04/04/it-turns-out-this-planet-has-three-suns-in-its-sky/

9. Novelisation style:

   First gen SF writers only had literature to go by
   Second gen had the pulps, radio and some television to go by
   Third gen had television that looked half-way decent (sometimes)

   I think there’s something to be said for the media environment the writer grows up in.

   I also think there’s something to be said for what has felt – for me – for a while like genre authors trying to make their novels accessible for the Hollywood treatment.

   Now more than ever with studios and networks seemingly hungry for properties they can pervert.

   But in general, yes, I have noticed that over the years many works seem to come from script-writing school rather than novel writing school.

10. I still haven’t gotten a final confirmation ballot from the Hugos; all my artist picks were missing from the most recent ballot.

    So I emailed them, with my final ballot choices attached in a text document, and got this nice note from them:

    With the load, e-mail receipts hit an issue that has caused extreme delays, so what you are seeing is a receipt from earlier in the process. I just checked your ballot, and I have a full set of nominations for you. We apologize for any confusion this has caused.

    Can’t say fairer than that.

11. Novelization doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. For instance David Gerrold’s Voyage of the Star Wolf started as a show bible for a TV series that was never made. Then it became a novel. You can still see it’s show bible roots though.

    http://www.amazon.com/Voyage-Star-Wolf-David-Gerrold/dp/1932100075/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459785442&sr=8-1

    Personally a favorite light read (though it looks like the Amazon reviews are all over the place. YMMV significantly).
    —

    I do wonder if media effects are impacting modern writing. I know a lot of dialogue and description in newer books just read flat to me.

    Example: I finished Slow Bullets over the weekend and started The Last Unicorn (OMG, Good! but everyone else apparently knew that already based on the Brackets). The difference in description, dialogue, and characterization is just night and day. One note versus lush.

    Before I’m accused of not appreciating spare writing: it’s not that. For instance I’d rank Dashiell Hammett right up there in my top authors. It’s not spare I’m seeing, it’s just flat and it feels more common than it used to be.

12. @Elusis

    Has the Scroll mentioned that a real life Three Body Problem has been discovered, and I’ve just missed it?

    I went ahead and read the article, and I don’t think it’s describing the same thing as we read about in the Three-Body Problem.

    Stable multi-star configurations are almost always a hierarchy of pairs. That is, a hierarchy is either a single star or it’s a pair of hierarchies which are far enough apart that we can treat each one as if it were a single point (in gravitational terms).

    In this case, the planet orbits a single star, and then very far away there’s a close pair. That’s a stable hierarchy. The distant pair would look like stars (they’d be too far to show disks), although they’d be very bright at night.

    Alpha Centauri is another stable hierarchy. A and B, are a relatively close pair, with Proxima in a million-year orbit around them.

    Epsilon Lyrae has two pairs in a monstrously long orbit (~100,000 years), each pair has an ~1,000-year orbit, and one of the stars has a companion with a 10-year orbit. Again, a stable hierarchy.

    There are lots of systems with up to a dozen stars, all organized this way.

    What made the system in the Three-Body Problem interesting was that it was an *unstable* arrangement of three stars. I don’t think anything like that has ever been discovered–with or without a planet. They tend to either expel one of the stars or (less likely) two of the stars collide.

13. Re: Dashiell Hammett and “spare” style. Have you read The Glass Key, his least-known book? There he never says what anyone’s thinking, or uses phrases like “he said grudgingly”; he just describes facial expressions in detail, eye-wrinkles and lip-curls. It’s an odd experiment and I don’t think it works at all, but a writer’s welcome to try something unusual now and then. Was he influenced by cinema or, more likely, just consciously trying to eliminate shortcuts to interpretation of the exterior action?

    Earlier, Roger Martin du Gard wrote a novel, Jean Barois, which he intended to be documentary style, with the fictional parts being in the form of a script (no interiority) and with actual historical documents included. The effect is the opposite of action-packed! There must be other such literary experiments.

14. @Vasha:

    Re: Dashiell Hammett and “spare” style. Have you read The Glass Key, his least-known book? There he never says what anyone’s thinking, or uses phrases like “he said grudgingly” he just describes facial expressions in detail, eye-wrinkles and lip-curls. It’s an odd experiment and I don’t think it works at all

    Variant Mileage Report: It’s one of my very favorite books. 😀

15. I can definitely say I have read books in this novelization style (I think I disagree a little that Three Parts Dead is one, even as I kind of agree with him regarding some of its weaknesses. I know I have read screenplay based books (Syd Field, not Save the Cat) as part of my how to write (part of it is that I struggle hard with making the sort of rigid orderly structure some people consider the ideal in commercial fiction*)

    I like the essay so far, although I definitely argue that there is space for books in that style, because sometimes some readers need a book that explicitly invites them not to think. The fluffy book, be it Clancy or (I don’t know my romance authors well enough to pick one that’s the equivalent generic, not the equivalent to Bujold).

    It does also help to name it and label it so one can point it out when it does go bland, and to know it is not either the only or even the ideal way to write a commercially attractive book — according to READERS**

    Oh and Implied Heinlein = Foghorn Leghorn cracked me up.
    _______________

    *I have structure, but it’s very … organic. I’m aspiring to make it more like this or this but realistically, I might manage this or, if I’m really honest, this. In any case, whatever it is, it ain’t three act or five act or Celtic knot or chess game.

    **Writers will always argue there’s a market for their writing that the gatekeepers just don’t see — unless they are of the kind that likes to claim they are just too unique and special snowflake to ever be comprehended or even bother sending out their stories and poetry to market to find out.

16. @Vasha

    I think I’ve read The Glass Key. I can say with certainty it’s on the bookshelves at home. Oddly, I can’t remember a single thing about it? Maybe a TBR that fell off the radar and I’m misremembering as read? I’ll have to put it on the TBR pile now.

    Looking at Jean Barois on Amazon and it looks interesting (Dreyfus Affair!). I’ll have to check it out.

17. Andrew Hickey said:

    A link that many people here might enjoy — or find infuriating — Wesley Osam’s series of posts on a style of writing he finds infuriating in recent SFF, what he calls “novelisation style”

    Thanks for that link! That was some good reading, and a useful new term.

    I have my pet peeves about movie-like writing, too, particularly these:

    1) Pages and pages of repetitive dialogue because authors can’t even bear to paraphrase things like characters catching each other up on stuff the audience already knows. Even if they’ve just explained everything to the one character who just walked in, then they rendezvous with another and get to explain the whole thing again in realtime dialogue with interrruptions and arguments and those two characters that the author thinks is cute to have sniping at each other going through their routine for the fourth time in this book and ARGH.

    2) Comedy novels which consist of “let me describe this funny movie which is happening in my head”. I’m usually indifferent to prose, but if you’re going to make me laugh, you will need to use your words in a way that makes me notice them.

18. I have a lot of sympathy with Osam: I think both that people do write in a ‘novelisation style’, and that there are audiences who expect it, who respond to writing as they would to film or TV. He mentions ‘show, don’t tell’, but I don’t think he quite brings out the way that phrase has developed; it seems to me to have shifted meaning. Originally it meant ‘don’t tell the reader what to think’ – e.g. don’t say ‘this character was very nice’, but describe her doing nice things. But it has come to mean ‘don’t report any events without writing an action sequence to illustrate them’; you can’t just say ‘Tom had been an orphan since his mother was eaten by a bandersnatch’, but have to describe the bandersnatch eating her.

    The language people use is illustrative; ‘we never see this happening! We just get statements by the author!’ – as if the whole book did not consist of statements by the author. (In extreme cases, there is the idea that we cannot really believe anything unless we see it – if the author is just making statements, they might be lying.)

19. Hammett’s a huge favorite of mine. I regularly re-read him (as I do Chandler, who is the Ravel to his Debussy, or maybe the other way round). I especially like the Continental Op tales, and Red Harvest most of all. I’d say his least prominent book is The Dain Curse. The Glass Key caught on pretty big and was made into a very good movie, which in turn got more than one radio adaptation.
    Hammett pretty much always showed, rather than told, and only in extreme circumstances did his anonymous narrator (the Op) give much of an indication how he was feeling inside. One time he put in a simile, and I was almost shocked. (Describing a hotel employee at whose business someone has just been killed, “He took the this-is-unheard-of-but-not-really-serious-of-course attitude of a street fakir whose mechanical dingus flops during a demonstration.”) He doesn’t need to, though. Simply reporting on the right detail makes everyone’s mental state pretty clear most of the time. When it doesn’t, he’s probably putting one over on you.
    I like the feeling I get from him that much of what he’s telling is similar to something that happened to him in his career as a Pinkerton detective. The nuts and bolts are convincing. In one story, he holds the power of an entire kingdom and disposes of it, then goes back home to argue over five- and ten-dollar items on his expense account.
    And even with that, he can throw an emotional lightning bolt. While the ending of Chandler’s story, “Red Wind,” is perhaps the most stunning finale (and one I revisit more often than his other works), the last lines of Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal” comes mighty close, and cuts to the soul of the stolid little fat man who shares so little of himself.

20. @Cmm: “Rolling in the Deep Mira Grant Subterranean Press”

    …as opposed to the shallow Mira Grant Subterranean Press? 😉

    (Don’t mind me; I’m easily amused.)

21. @Andrew M. Some of what you say resonates with my complaints about “modern film”: no more fireworks out the window for us, we’re going to SHOW you every sweaty bead of the sex act in living color. No monsters hiding in the shadows – we spent 5 million dollars creating it in CGI.

    The reader/viewer is no longer encouraged to participate with their own imagination.

    It’s almost like sensuwunda has alzheimer’s….

22. Rev. Bob said:

    @Cmm: “Rolling in the Deep Mira Grant Subterranean Press”

    …as opposed to the shallow Mira Grant Subterranean Press?

    Sounds like someone needs to be introduced to the term “Jack Dann-ism”!

    There’s an explanation here (along with some other fun games):

    This leads inexorably to Jack Dann-isms, unexpected phrases formed when a book’s title and author meet without any intervening comma. These are named for that early discovery, The Man Who Melted Jack Dann. Likewise we learn that The Puppet Masters Robert Heinlein, while Moving Mars Greg Bear, and there’s always the nasty experience of Dying Inside Robert Silverberg. And what exactly is The Power That Preserves Stephen R. Donaldson?

    Dannisms can get dubious: And The Devil Will Drag You Under Jack Chalker, or Where Time Winds Blow Robert P. Holdstock. The rules forbid mucking around with apostrophes, disallowing ugly scenes of violence like Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone J.K. Rowling.

    There’s an old but sizeable compendium of Dann-isms here (warning for lurking Puppies: heavy Tor content).

23. @Petréa:

    Like I said, I’m easily amused… especially by wordplay.

    In other, completely unrelated news, it looks like my fight with a certain flash-media company may be coming to an end. It seems that the product I purchased a couple of years ago (and which started misbehaving a month ago, after some Windows updates) has been end-of-lifed and thus is no longer being maintained. That’s a shame, as one of the product’s best features IMO was that it used microSDXC cards instead of having built-in memory, and the replacement gizmo does not. However, at least the new gizmo doesn’t spontaneously disconnect from the OS every few minutes, as the old one had started to do. Given the option, I kinda have to go with the new gizmo over the old.

    So, I’ll be keeping the new 128GB stick and returning the old 32GB and 64GB units, after I test it on my netbook and make sure everything stays good. I’ll do some speed tests along the way; maybe the new version’s faster than the old.

    It still boggles me that thirty years ago, I was storing 140K of data on fragile actually-floppy disks that I had to stash inside the covers of textbooks to protect while traveling between classes. Today, I have about a million times that much in a package that resembles a pack of gum, and if I press the button on the side, anyone with the password can access its contents from across the room.

    Like, technology, man. Far out.

24. A thought: Are we going to have a smaller than usual number of finalists to vote for at this year’s Hugos?

    I expect that we’ll get more people than usual nominating this year, and going by the diversity of nominator taste, will enough works get over the 5% threshold to fill the final ballot? (The Five Percent Solution won’t be in effect this year as it, like EPH, still needs to be ratified before going into effect next year)

25. @Soon Lee

    It’s certainly possible, but equally the various efforts to publicise recommendations may have helped put good stories in front of the potential new eyeballs, and so have the diversity be no worse than normal. It’ll be interesting to see if free online sources do better than usual this year as well.

26. Soon Lee: I was worried about that.

    I fear the simple answer is no, because there will be a group of voters who, even if they don’t dominate things as some fear, will consistently get more than five per cent.

    Setting that aside, might there be so much diversity that, in the absence of slates, there would not be five candidates passing the five per cent threshold? I suspect we need not worry too much, because Filers – who have been making a major effort to find new stuff – are probably more diverse in their choices than the voting body as a whole. Where there is unity here (not explained by local circumstances) – Penric’s Demon, Letters to Tiptree, much of the BDP Long Form ballot – that’s a sign. When there isn’t, not so much.

27. Is it 5% of all ballots cast or 5% of people who named something in that category?

28. @Vasha

    Category. There’s also a minimum of 3 finalists that overrules the 5% rule.

29. On Long Way…. it was too fluffy and nice for me.

    Agreed. It was a reasonably fun read, but very light, and very forgettable. And it is interesting that Neumeier thought Kizzy was one of the “best characters ever”, because I thought she was such a tired, lazy cliche that it dragged me out of suspension of disbelief. I once said that she had elements of a manic pixie dream girl, but since the “helping a relationship” aspect isn’t there, leaving only the “having a personality that makes you think that the character might be like Charlize Theron’s character on Arrested Development, if you know what I mean” aspect, I like “manic pixie dream engineer”–which I later saw someone here use–much better. If I had to deal with a quirky flake like that every day in real life, I’d contemplate tinkering with an airlock to arrange an “accident.”

30. @Vasha,

    What Mark said. I prefer to vote on five finalists rather than three.

31. The stats for what people reported on this site are not very informative, because with 50 or so contributors for Best Novel and less for other categories, you only need two or three mentions to make 5%. That’s a dozen at least per category.

32. Vasha on April 4, 2016 at 12:55 pm said:

    Is it 5% of all ballots cast or 5% of people who named something in that category?

    5% of the ballots that named at least one work in a given category. The threshold is thus different for each category and ballots that don’t nominate anything in a category don’t count for determining the threshold in that category.

    The actual rule is Section 3.8.5:

    3.8.5: No nominee shall appear on the final Award ballot if it received fewer nominations than five percent (5%) of the number of ballots listing one or more nominations in that category, except that the first three eligible nominees, including any ties, shall always be listed.

33. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone J.K. Rowling is disallowed from the Jack Dannism game, but The First Wives Club Olivia Goldsmith works.

    (I would say more about the game if I weren’t on a mobile device now.)

34. Darren Garrison: When it comes to A Long Way I could buy into any of these arguments, I just seem to be greatly impressed by the story working through all these relationships in a plausible and affecting way.

    By plausible, I mean the writer’s decision about the outcome might not in every case have been what I’d choose as the most believable, but it was consistent and supported by everything she’d set up.

    As for affecting — people didn’t used to be able to write sf stories where I felt inside of real emotions and thought processes. At most, it would be something sentimental, like “The Cold Equations” (which I’m lucky to have read at the Golden Age of 12, I guess, or I’d share lot of the opinions I read here yesterday.)

    In fact, I used to look at James Michener and wonder how a writer of bestsellers seemed to do in every book something the best sf writers never did.

    So it may be that I like A Long Way not only for its own sake, but for fulfilling a need I had from sf stories back in Ye Olde Days.

35. Elusis

    Has the Scroll mentioned that a real life Three Body Problem has been discovered, and I’ve just missed it?

    Not scrolled, but I mentioned it yesterday in the comments. To expand on something Greg Hullender said (that I was thinking of before I reached his reply–honest!) typical 3-body problems can be reasonably approximated as two 2-body problems because of large differences in masses and distances–for example, the Earth-moon-sun system is a 3-body problem, but for the moon orbiting Earth, the sun’s gravity can be mostly be ignored in calculating lunar orbits. And when calculating Earth orbit of the sun, the moon’s gravity can be mostly ignored. This system is like that–the hot Jupiter orbiting one star can be approximated as a 2-body problem, the binary pair orbiting each other as another 2-body problem, and the unit of the 2 binaries orbiting the hot Jupiter’s star as another 2-body problem.

    The reason you don’t see “true” 3-body problems with closely matched masses/distances in nature is because there are far more ways for those to be unstable than there are ways for them to be stable. In real life, the planet in the book Three Body Problem would have either plunged into one of the stars or have been ejected from the system entirely in a cosmic blink of an eye, long before even the simplest life would have time to evolve.

    Rev. Bob:

    It still boggles me that thirty years ago, I was storing 140K of data on fragile actually-floppy disks that I had to stash inside the covers of textbooks to protect while traveling between classes. Today, I have about a million times that much in a package that resembles a pack of gum, and if I press the button on the side, anyone with the password can access its contents from across the room.

    I think about MicrosSD cards, which are up to 512 GB. That is a little more than 3,000 times the capacity of the HD in my first Wintel machine, and around 170 million times the capacity of the first hard drive (which stored 5 million 5-bit words and was around the size and vibrateyness of washing machine.) Enough space to hold a million books, and if I wanted to mail it to someone, I could literally stick it under the postage stamp.

36. O fannish boy, the Files, the Files are calling
    From Scroll to Scroll, and down the Pixels float,
    The summer’s gone, Worldcon time’s a-falling,
    Hugos, Hugos, and I must vote…

37. Darren:

    I am reminded of Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which involves (among other things) a planet orbiting a star with truly improbable characteristics, so the human explorers aren’t thinking “is this natural?” but “this is obviously artificial, who set it up and for what purpose?”

38. @Soon Lee on April 4, 2016 at 12:17 pm said:

    A thought: Are we going to have a smaller than usual number of finalists to vote for at this year’s Hugos?

    I expect that we’ll get more people than usual nominating this year, and going by the diversity of nominator taste, will enough works get over the 5% threshold to fill the final ballot?

    @Andrew M

    Setting that aside, might there be so much diversity that, in the absence of slates, there would not be five candidates passing the five per cent threshold?

    We can compute this from the data the Hugo folks give us. (In the absence of organized slates, that is; slates make it harder to predict.)

    For the four fiction categories (novel, novella, novelette, and short story) the number of nominations for a given rank varies roughly as the square root of the total number of nominations in that category. (They’re historically power-law distributions to r^2 fits above 0.95.)

    Extrapolating from the 2015 results, then, If nominations go up by a factor of 4.5, then the #1 nominee for Best Short Story will fail to meet the 5% rule. A factor of 7 increase would do the same to Best Novelette. A factor of 11 would hit Best Novel. And a factor of 16 would hit Best Novella.

    Since the 5% is calculated based on the number of people nominating (not the number of nominations) things may be better than this because I suspect people averaged closer to 5 nominations each this year vs. the historical 3.

    @Mark

    It’s certainly possible, but equally the various efforts to publicise recommendations may have helped put good stories in front of the potential new eyeballs, and so have the diversity be no worse than normal.

    That should be fairly easy to test. When we get the final results, we can subtract out all the votes for “Space Raptor,” since those will be 100% Rabid Puppies. Then we can look at the rest of the votes and see what distribution (if any) they actually fit. And whether they’re correlated with any other sources.

39. And if a large group of people were to only vote for one person in a particular category…

40. I dunno about that “novelization” style. He says he wants keen worldbuilding, then says that the legal arguments in “Three Parts Dead” would be better played as just plain ol’ courtroom scenes. Which are frequently deadly dull in print. Isn’t it much more interesting for wizard lawyers to do something special, like with magical holograms? I mean, if I want legal arguments, I’ll be reading Grisham or tuning in one of the endless “Law and Order” reruns (doink doink!). Magicians grappling on a virtual battlefield is more interesting.

    Maybe he just doesn’t like close third person, changing who the third person is focusing on, and action? He likes literary stuff better. Which is fine as a personal preference, but doesn’t mean “waily, waily, all is dooooomed”. Action Scenes: Threat or Menace?

    But the Heinlein/Foghorn comparison is amusing, and I agree that GRRM does NOT need to write what happens every damn day and every damn meal. Particularly when he switches perspectives every chapter. It’d be fine for him to say “Six months later, Tyrion got a message from King’s Landing that said…”

    I don’t think Aaronovich fits into this paradigm, even though he came from screenwriting. The Peter Grant books are entirely first person, a person who has a very definite life and personality. All the characters speak differently from each other (and from the author himself). Ditto the Cole/Pike novels, which have some beautiful turns of phrase and lovely imagery even in the midst of detecting, shoot outs, and the like.

41. @Jack Lint

    And if a large group of people were to only vote for one person in a particular category…

    If they did it by chance, that’s what the model is predicting.

    If they colluded, then they’d break the model, even the “collusion” was the result of them all reading books from the same recommendation lists. It’s impossible to predict the impact of “accidental” collusion.

    But, of course, a hard slate (where people vote without reading), has the advantage that if you double your participation, you double the votes for each work on your slate. “Organic” voters have to quadruple participation to double the votes for the top organic choices.

42. Greg:

    It’s too soon to tell (obviously) but I wouldn’t be surprised if people averaged fewer nominations per category. There’s been quite a bit of encouragement to nominate even if you’ve only read/seen one thing in a category that you think is good enough.

    Of course, even if my guess is right, it doesn’t tell us whether having more ballots with only one entry in a category will produce more clustering than usual, or less. We may see categories where the top item or two is on a higher percentage of ballots than usual, and everything after that is more spread out, producing more categories with only 3 or 4 finalists.

43. Greg: I take it, though, that this law is based on specific facts about voter behaviour, and would not apply if voter behaviour changed significantly. Slates are one way it can change, but not the only one. Expansion of the voting body might lead to votes that are either more diverse, or more unified (because more reliant on recommendations). Votes might also become more diverse without expansion, just because people are making an effort to seek out new stuff.

44. Apropos of nothing: There’s a great (older, unfortunately) story Ann Leckie just posted on her website. I wish she’d write more stories in this universe. Dinosaurs on Mars!

    http://www.annleckie.com/the-endangered-camp/

45. @Vicki Rosenzweig and @Andrew M
    I will be very disappointed if this year’s nomination results do not screw the power-law model to H E double toothpicks.

46. I’m worried that I may not have made my earlier point explicitly enough, so let me spell it out; there is no possibility of any categories with fewer than five finalists this year (except BESF), because the RP voters, even at the lowest estimate of their strength, will have five percent. So in any category where there are not enough legitimate finalists to fill up the ballot, they will take the remaining spots.

    If slates remain a thing, then even though the five per cent rule has been abolished, legitimate nominees will in practice have to get five per cent to beat the slates. This is likely to be true even with EPH.

47. @Andrew M

    I’m worried that I may not have made my earlier point explicitly enough, so let me spell it out; there is no possibility of any categories with fewer than five finalists this year (except BESF), because the RP voters, even at the lowest estimate of their strength, will have five percent. So in any category where there are not enough legitimate finalists to fill up the ballot, they will take the remaining spots.

    Concur.

    If slates remain a thing, then even though the five per cent rule has been abolished, legitimate nominees will in practice have to get five per cent to beat the slates. This is likely to be true even with EPH.

    Not quite. EPH guarantees that stories like “Space Raptor” can’t get on the ballot unless the top organic choices are a factor of 5 below it. Otherwise, it ends up competing against some other slate item that was more popular or it ties with another slate item and both get eliminated.

    EPH makes it very hard for a slate to sweep a category, but it doesn’t make it easier for organic results to exclude a slate entirely. If we wanted to do that, we’d probably need to institute something like “down votes.”

    Today you can only “upvote” up to 5 things you like per category. If we allowed fans to upvote up to 5 but also to downvote up to 5, that would make slates impossible. With downvoting, all the strengths of slates would become liabilities. Fans would know exactly which five candidates to zero in on, and their superior numbers would win the day. Of course, slates could use it too, but the diversity of candidates would mean they could only target a few people each year. It might mean John Scalzi would never win another Hugo, although it’s just as likely that the slaters would simply give it up; would you really pay $50 per year to keep a Hugo award from someone who might be nominated otherwise? You sure wouldn’t get any attention for it.

    Anyway, if it turns out that EPH isn’t sufficient, we can probably start talking about downvoting at the 2018 Business Meeting.

48. It occurs to me that the narrator of A Borrowed Man could certainly be brought to bear on the “novelisation style” question.

49. Greg Hullender: Anyway, if it turns out that EPH isn’t sufficient, we can probably start talking about downvoting at the 2018 Business Meeting.

    It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I’d support passing a measure to enable downvoting; in fact, I’d campaign against such a modification.

    That is just so antithetical to the spirit and intent of the Hugo Awards.

50. I like the idea of dannisms, so I turn to my book shelf to see how common it is …

    Rainbows End Vernor Vinge
    The Devil To Pay C. Northcoate Parkinson
    The Black Flame Lynn Abbey
    The ABC Murders Agatha Christie
    Spin Robert Charles Wilson
    Light In August William Faulkner
    The Honor of the Queen David Weber

    … aaaaand that’ll be enough.

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