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File 770
Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
Fans are welcome to share their Hugo nominating ballots in the comments.
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Mark-kitteh: either Charles Payseur’s # of noms is wrong or his ranking is wrong
His count is correct, I’m just tired and didn’t get the list sorted properly.
Mark-kitteh: Also @JJ thanks for all the tallying
Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? The claimed massive convergence of Filers’ nominations doesn’t actually exist. Filers had a few runaway favorites, but every category had a huge long tail of single noms from a lot of people nominating their individual preferences.
I hope Kevin Standlee blows the dust off of these proposals:
https://kevin-standlee.livejournal.com/1495246.html
Removing the categories for Semiprozine and Editors. Adding Professional Magazine (anything not a fanzine), Publisher, and Anthology or Collection.
He was going to bring it to MidAmericon II, but then there were too many other things to deal with.
For me, Editor – SF would be pretty much equivalent to Pro Zine. It would be kinda weird to nominate a Publisher rather than Editor – LF, but a heck of a lot easier. And then Anthology/Collection would honor short form editors that don’t do magazines. Changing semiprozine would help with pro vs. fan artists too. Not sure I’m completely on board with all of them or how well they’d go over at the Business Meeting, but I would like to see something along these lines looked at.
Regarding category cleanup: there is a committee working on this. Throughout the time the YA committee was working you saw voices raised saying ‘There ought to be a YA Hugo! Why has no one thought of this?’. Now it seems to be happening again.
It’s quite a difficult task because the definitions are all interlocked, and changing just one of them is likely to have unforeseen consequences (and indeed that’s a large part of how we got into the current situation). For instance, semiprozines are mentioned in the definitions of fan writer and fan artist, so abolishing semiprozines would mean we would have to rethink them.
As for the artists. I’m not convinced there is that much of a problem here (not, certainly, as much as there is for writers or zines). Pro Artist is for illustrators – that’s explicit – whose work appears in professional publications. It isn’t relevant how the artist themself makes their living. Fan Artist, is, most of the time, for people who produce SFF-inspired art in other contexts, including public display. The only problem is the line about ‘non-professional display’, which was created quite recently, and sneaked in as an amendment to a proposal that was really about something else. Unfortunately, ‘professional’ isn’t defined for display. In practice, people who are professionals by any reasonable criterion are shortlisted for this award. But if someone worked out a coherent interpretation of this clause and then enforced it, the people excluded would not become Pro Artists (since they aren’t illustrators), but be disqualified entirely.
As a practical rule-of-thumb, I consider “Best Pro Artist” to mean “Best Cover Illustration” (or, in rare cases, internal illustrations in a book) and “Best Fan Artist” to mean “Best every other kind of art”. I don’t take into account the professional or non-professional status of the artist; a sculpture cannot be cover art (a photo of the statue can be, but that’s a different thing) so it’s fan art, even if the artist is the next Rodin.
Hugo administrators may or may not agree with me, of course.
Cassy B: I think that, really, that captures the intention of the awards. As I keep saying, the awards are by and large fine; it’s just the names that are confusing.
I think it might actually be a good idea to drop the pro/fan distinction, since on its current definition it can’t be drawn without asking embarrassing personal questions, and I don’t know of any better criterion that has been offered; the older one, in terms of circulation, made more sense, but has been made obsolete by the internet. Fan Artist and Fan Writer are both for distinctive kinds of work, which can be recognised without worrying about professional status, so they could be renamed while keeping more or less the same content. The only problem comes with zines, where it’s not clear you can infallibly distinguish a pro magazine from a fanzine without asking about payment; there are marks that will tend to put a publication on one side of the divide or the other, but mixed cases are certainly possible.
Andrew M on March 23, 2018 at 6:20 am said:
Yup, I mentioned earlier here that I’m looking forward to the suggestions they bring back this year.
For me one of the main issues is semiprozine. From a reader prospective I don’t see much reason to seperate them from pro. Former semipros get on the long list because people don’t know they’d no longer qualify as finalists.
In 2017 I found that the art I liked best from past pro artist finalists Galen Dara and Julie Dillon were for semiprozines Strange Horizons and Uncanny….technically fan art. That doesn’t seem right. (I didn’t end up nominating them for either.)
My husband actually doesn’t much care for the art in the Best Professional Artist category; he finds it boring. He’s a photographer (his work has been in a few gallery shows) and he frankly prefers edgier artwork; cover art is, by definition, commercial art. He understands this, mind you, and I’ve told him to judge it based on its own merits operating under those constraints, but he still much prefers the Fan Artist category.
When Eric tried to set up a web page showcasing fan art two years ago, we took cover art from all the magazines at efanzines, and it was crystal clear to us what the award was really meant to recognize. When you see artwork in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, or Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it’s all professional-quality work. The work in the fanzines, by contrast, is plain, simple, and amateurish. Some of it is quite clever, and people definitely put work into it, but there’s no way it can withstand comparison to professional work.
Flip through the list of pictures and see if you don’t agree. The stuff from the semi-prozines puts everything else in the shade.
The best way to clean up these awards (I’d claim) would be to replace them with an award for best professional cover (magazine, semiprozine, or book) and a separate award for best fanzine cover. The Hugos are at their best when they award works, not individuals, and when the space of eligible works isn’t overwhelmingly large.
There’s definitely impressive but still distinctly fan art out there. Take a look at the #2017BestFanArtist tag at the Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists) tumblr:
http://hugoeligibleart.tumblr.com/tagged/2017BestFanArtist
I do like Cassy B’s way of splitting it…cover artist/illustrator and other sff artist. And, as Andrew M said, that may very well be the intention. As for making it specific works rather than artists, there was briefly a Best Original Artwork category in the 90’s. I thought I remember hearing it didn’t get much voter participation. Of course, that may have been partly due to the fact that they still had artist categories at the same time.
updated totals:
Novel
Provenance – Ann Leckie 15
The Stone Sky – N.K. Jemisin 14
Six Wakes – Mur Lafferty 10
New York 2140 – Kim Stanley Robinson 9
Raven Stratagem – Yoon Ha Lee 9
Borne – Jeff VanderMeer 6
City of Miracles – Robert Jackson Bennett 6
Amatka – Karin Tidbeck 5
The Bear and the Nightingale – Katherine Arden 5
The Stars Are Legion – Kameron Hurley 5
Winter Tide – Ruthanna Emrys 5
Clockwork Boys – T. Kingfisher 4
In Other Lands – Sarah Rees Brennan 4
Seven Surrenders – Ada Palmer 4
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. – Neal Stephenson/Nicole Galland 4
The Will to Battle – Ada Palmer 3
Jade City – Fonda Lee 3
An Unkindness of Ghosts – Rivers Solomon 3
Terminal Alliance – Jim C. Hines 3
The Moon and the Other – John Kessel 3
Amberlough – Lara Elena Donnelly 2
The Tiger’s Daughter – K Arsenault Rivera 2
The City of Brass – S.A. Chakraborty 2
Artemis – Andy Weir 2
Noumenon – Marina Lostetter 2
Under the Pendulum Sun – Jeanette Ng 2
The Power – Naomi Alderman 2
Barbary Station – R.E. Stearns 2
The Last Good Man – Linda Nagata 2
Bannerless – Carrie Vaughn 2
(43 others received one nomination each)
I actually find all the discussion of omitting the editor Hugos kind of insulting. All the books and stories you read and love, they’re all brought into the world because of an editor. Editors work really hard, and carefully curate and edit books, and without them, most of the books and stories you read would be a lot weaker. I think it’s a really good idea to recognize the contributions of editors to our field–without them, the field would be drastically poorer.
I totally get that it can be a challenge to figure out who edited what, and who’s the right person to nominate for best editor, especially long form. But does that mean the category should be eliminated, simply because you find it personally difficult to figure out what to nominate? Clearly enough people are comfortable nominating in this category to keep nominees on the list, and there’s no rule that says every person must nominate in every category.
Most books these days credit the editor in the acknowledgments anyway, and lots of editors talk about their books a whole bunch on social media, so it really can be pretty easy to find out who edited your favorite books. I realize it’s not as simple as “which book did I like this year”, but come on people, it’s not rocket science either.
I usually take my best novel nominees, find out their editors, and nominate them. They’re not always acknowledged though, and I don’t know for sure if they have the required 4 ssf books. If I can figure out who they are, I nominate them anyway. If they get enough votes to make the ballot, they probably do. If not, it’s between them and Hugo admin to sort out. I really wish publisher imprints would make the info more readily available. A page on their website listing editors and the authors they work with would be wonderful.
I don’t imagine the editor categories will go away. I think there’d be a lot of resistance. Even though I brought it up, that’s the part I’d be reluctant to change myself. I certainly agree that they’re important and worth honoring. I would like to see semiprozine opened up to include pro mags though.
@Penny J: Should editors be recognized? Okay, but that doesn’t mean the Hugos are the correct venue for doing so. Not every concept needs or even deserves a Hugo category. This is a pet peeve of mine, that just because something is SFF-related or SFF-adjacent, it must! have! a! Hugo! . . . no, it doesn’t.
Anyway, the problem is not just “who edited what,” but “how do I compare editor A with editor B, since I have no clue what they did, how the works improved thanks to their work, etc.” This has been talked about at File770.com before, but I don’t remember if it was mentioned upthread. It’s the major issue, to me, though; finding who who edited what [ETA: which books] isn’t as easy as you make it sound, but to me that’s the minor issue.
That said, I’m fine with the categories. I wouldn’t miss them if they were gone, though. And I understand why some would like to remove or replace them. The Hugos aren’t a good fit for editor recognition. Most readers are not well-positioned to determine who was a good editor; all we see are the end results, not how they got that way. I may like books or samples thereof that list Editor A as the editor; that doesn’t mean they’re a better editor than Editor B, of course. All I see is the finished product – not who acquired it, who worked (or didn’t) with the author to improve the diamond-in-the-rough, etc.
Anyway my two cents, as someone who nominates and votes in these categories. 😉 TL;DR: I’m find with them, but they’ve got obvious problems.
More specifically regarding Best Editor Short Form: I like the idea to replace Best Semiprozine and Best Editor Short Form with a Best Magazine award. This is basically what what we have, minus a handful of magazines, in Best Semiprozine. We compare the content and the award goes to the editors anyway.
This leaves editors of anthologies and collections out; see my previous comment re. how it’s impossible for me as a reader to actually tell who the best editor is. (I don’t want to have a Best Anthology or Best Collection award, though that’s one of the ideas out there. See my previous comment re. not every concept needing to have a Hugo, etc.)
That is a valid point I think but I also don’t think it is a good defence of the editor categories as it is not clear to me that they do functionally recognise the contribution editors made.
File 770 folks got 5 out of the 6 novel nominees most voted for best novel. That’s some correlation! (I counted two votes for Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire).
Provenance – Ann Leckie 15
The Stone Sky – N.K. Jemisin 14
Six Wakes – Mur Lafferty 10
New York 2140 – Kim Stanley Robinson 9
Raven Stratagem – Yoon Ha Lee 9.
Not as accurate for novellas (nominees are in bold).
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (28)
And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (26)
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages (12)
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire (7)
17776 by Jon Bois (4)
Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor (4)
The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch (4)
The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois McMaster Bujold (4)
The Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang (4)
Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan (3)
Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire (3)
In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle (3)
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey (3)
The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang (3)
@Warner Belanger: Interesting; thanks for posting that.
For Novelette, three nominees from the File 770 top 10:
The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer (12)
A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (8)
Extracurricular Activities by Yoon Ha Lee (6)
The Dark Birds by Ursula Vernon (6)
Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics by Jess Barber and Sara Saab (4)
Wind Will Rove by Sarah Pinsker (4)
Come See the Living Dryad by Theodora Goss (3)
Making Us Monsters by Sam J. Miller and Lara Elena Donnelly (3)
The Worshipful Society of Glovers by Mary Robinette Kowal (3)
To Us May Grace Be Given by L.S. Johnson (3)
I counted no votes for “Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” by Aliette de Bodard and two votes for “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by K.M. Szpara.
I didn’t tally Best Short Story so I don’t know how many votes that “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” by Fran Wilde got, but here is the tallied list for File 770 with nominees in bold.
Short Story:
Fandom for Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (9)
Sun, Moon, Dust by Ursula Vernon (9)
The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata (7)
The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom by Max Gladstone (6)
Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ by Rebecca Roanhorse (6)
Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance by Tobias S. Buckell (5)
Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue by Charlie Jane Anders (4)
Paradox by Naomi Kritzer (4)
Carnival Nine by Caroline M. Yoachim (3)
The Library of Lost Things by Matthew Bright (3)
@Warner re: Novelette
You forgot “Extracurricular Activities” by Yoon Ha Lee.
@Bonnie Dangit, I sure did. Thanks for pointing that out. I fooled around with the bold option too long.
@Warner
Thanks for that. I did a similar analysis last year which showed a similar strike rate.
The item that seems to have had the most popularity here without making it to the final is Passing Strange by Ellen Klages with 12 in the straw poll. I really liked it but it was very light on SFnal elements, which may be why it didn’t get traction among the wider voter base.
@Mark
I saw your analysis last year, which was the inspiration to do a few categories (and to help my reading!). I thought Passing Strange was wonderfully researched and written but like you say, the SFF elements were so light that at the end I wondered why they were there at all.
I thought it would be good to see how well we predicted the outcome in other categories. I’m listing the top ten in each case, with sometimes more than ten because of ties.
Beginning with other prose fiction categories:
Best Series
Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan 11
Divine Cities by Robert Jackson Bennett 11
Vlad Taltos/Dragaera by Steven Brust 7
The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemison 8
Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells 6
World of Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold 5
Indranan War by K. B. Wagers 4
Foreigner by CJ Cherryh 4
Xuya Universe by Aliette de Bodard 3
Fitz and the Fool by Robin Hobb 3
The Queen’s Thief by Megan Whalen Turner 3
Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer 3
Five out of six there – the one that’s missing (and not even on the F770 longlist) is InCryptid.
Best YA Novel
Weave a Circle Round by Kari Maaren 5
In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan 4
The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman 4
Dreadnought by April Daniels 3
Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor 3
A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge 3
Arabella and the Battle of Venus by David D. Levine 3
Shadowhouse Fall by Daniel Jose Older 3
Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore 2
The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller 2
Want by Cindy Pon 2
Thick As Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner 2
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater 2
The Glass Town Game by Cathrynne M. Valente 2
Warcross by Marie Lu 2
Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray 2
Not a very large sample here, but we do manage to get five out of six in the top ten: I take it Summer in Orcus is absent because we all believed it wasn’t eligible.
Campbell Award
Katherine Arden 11
Vina Jie-Min Prasad 11
Rivers Solomon 7
K.B. Wagers 6
Rebecca Roanhorse 4
Jeannette Ng 2
G.V. Anderson 2
Sarah Kuhn 2
S.A. Chakraborty 2
April Daniels 2
Sylvain Neuvel 2
Laurie Penny 2
K Arsenault Rivera 2
R.E. Stearns 2
Six out of ten here!
The results so far confirm that we reflect the field quite well, and are not a narrow faction: also that the shortlists do for the most part reflect broad appeal, rather than factions pushing their favoured works in.
Here’s Dramatic Long. Dramatic Short and Graphic don’t seem to have been tabulated.
Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form
Wonder Woman 20
Star Wars: The Last Jedi 15
Logan 10
The Shape of Water 8
Thor: Ragnarok 7
Get Out 6
Blade Runner 2049 6
Spider-Man: Homecoming 4
Guardians of the Galaxy II 4
War For the Planet of the Apes 3
Coco 3
The high degree of convergence here is not surprising, this being a category where nominations do converge a lot: the most striking thing is Logan , which did very well here but not in the wider voting body.
Andrew M, in a sideways sort of way I *did* nominate Summer In Orcus; I nominated the illustrator for Best Professional Artist and cited Summer In Orcus as the reason. I don’t know if the Hugo Committee folded those sorts of nominations into the eventual total or not, but I believe (I am not certain) that they would have been well within their rights to do so.
Here’s Related (rearranged now that the eligibil8ty question has been answered):
Best Related Work
Luminescent Threads edited by Alexandra Pierce & Mimi Mondal 6
Crash Override by Zoe Quinn 5
Iain M. Banks by Paul Kincaid 3
Don’t Live For Your Obituary by John Scalzi 3
Sleeping with Monsters by Liz Bourke 3
No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin 2
Invisible 3 edited by Jim C. Hines and Mary Anne Mohanraj 2
Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix 2
Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift by Erin Horáková 2
Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Francesca T Barbini 2
Five out of six here again – it’s striking how well we reflect the field even with small samples. The Ellison biography is the one we didn’t get.
Andrew, there are tallies for almost all of the categories on the previous page of comments.
Andrew M,
We also missed The Stormlight Archive in best series. The Broken Earth isn’t a finalist in best series — just The Stone Sky for best novel.
Andrew, there are tallies for almost all of the categories on the previous page of comments.
There are tallies for how we voted. (How do you think I created these things?) There are no tallies for how well we predicted the result.
We also missed The Stormlight Archive in best series. The Broken Earth isn’t a finalist in best series — just The Stone Sky for best novel.
Ah, you are right – sorry about that. It does seem to me that in the cases we missed (so far: don’t know if it will last), there is a likely explanation in terms of an author having a large and distinctive following.
Other pro categories:
Professional Editor (Short Form):
Scott H. Andrews 6
Neil Clarke 5
John Joseph Adams 5
Lynne Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas 5
Jason Sizemore 4
Lee Harris 3 + 1 under Long Form
Ann VanderMeer 3
C. C. Finlay 3
Jonathan Strahan 2
Sheila Williams 2
Rashida J. Smith 2
Gillian Redfearn 2
6 out of six, though it’s notable our top pick wasn’t shortlisted: it’s perhaps significant that he is a semiprozine editor, and it’s a bit of an anomaly that semiprozine editors are eligible for this award, giving them two bites (though that hasn’t stopped voters in the past).
Professional Editor (Long Form):
Devi Pillai 6
Navah Wolfe 4
Miriam Weinberg 3
Liz Gorinsky 3
Sheila Gilbert 3
Bella Pagan 2
Four out of six: we missed Joe Monti and Diana Pho, but in such a small category I’m not sure that’s significant of anything in particular.
Professional Artist:
Victo Ngai 9
Galen Dara 6
Julie Dillon 5
Jaime Jones 5
Richard Anderson 4
John Harris 3
Yuko Shimizu 3
Reiko Murakami 3
Gregory Manchess 2
Stephen Youll 2
Goni Montes 2
Kirbi Fagan 2
Dan Dos Santos 2
Chris McGrath 2
Victor Mosquera 2
David Palumbo 2
Here we only got two out of six, though the wide spread of votes may mean that’s not very significant; people we missed include the perennial John Picacio and last year’s finalist Sana Takeda, as well as Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme and Kathleen Jennings.
@Cassy B: Sorry, but I can’t imagine the Hugo Administrators turning a nomination in a person category (Pro Artist) into a nomination in a work category (YA Book), or being able to justify it. Especially based on an optional field that IIRC was to help show eligibility (i.e., you’re nominating a person for Pro Artist, not a person+work). They do have some movement powers in a couple of situations, but methinks this wouldn’t be one of them.
Disclaimer: Obviously I’m not a Hugo Administrator. 😉 So, grain of salt, etc.
This reminds me: I just finished Vernon’s nominated short story, which was very good! I listened to the podcast of it was. I’ve enjoyed her short fiction in the past, so it’s no surprise I liked this. 😉
I’m looking forward to the tasty Hugo packet so I can read Summer in Orcus and admire the lovely artwork in context. I admired the images at the link someone posted a while back, but I imagine seeing them in context will be even better.
Missed edit window. Should be “I listed to the podcast of it.” without the “was” at the end. Sigh.
Andrew M: people we missed include the perennial John Picacio
Oh, I didn’t miss nominating Picacio. His art is fantastic — but so is the art of a lot of the people currently producing professional SFF art, and he’s been nominated 11 times, winning twice, in the last 14 years. I would like to have seen some of the other just-as-worthy-if-not-more-so artists be recognized this year, such as the perennially under-appreciated Victo Ngai (but I suppose that’s too much to hope for, given that he’s this year’s Artist GoH; I had kind of hoped that he would recuse himself this year because of that).
Yes, that’s why I left Picacio off too. Much as I also like Julie Dillon, I was glad she wasn’t back again. Glad to see Victo Ngai both this year and last. She was my one pro artist nominee that made finalist this year.
I will say that even though Lecouffe-Deharme’s and Jennings’ work are not necessarily my favorite, their work is nevertheless deserving of their nomination, and I am thrilled that two artists who have never before made the ballot are being honored this year.
Always good to see new deserving names in any category. Not that the names we’ve seen frequently aren’t deserving too.
Yes, I think leaving out Picacio is totally reasonable, but the divergence between Filers and the wider voting body is still interesting. I think there may be something akin to a fan club effect here. Hasn’t he sometimes been shortlisted for years in which he has nothing eligible?
Going on to semipro and fan awards:
Semiprozine:
Uncanny 13
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10
Strange Horizons 10
GigaNotoSaurus 9
Book Smugglers 6
Daily Science Fiction 5
Interzone 4
Shimmer 3
Fireside Fiction 2
( Is Fireside Fiction the same thing as Fireside Magazine?)
Assuming it is, five out of six, though only just. The missing one is Escape Pod.
Fanzine:
File 770 14
Nerds of a Feather 8
Rocket Stack Rank 6
Black Gate 4
Quick Sip Reviews 3
Galactic Journey 3
Lady Business 3
SF Bluestocking 3
Women Write About Comics 2
Book Smugglers 2
Journey Planet 2
Six out of six. If there is local bias, it has not distorted the result.
Fan Writer:
Camestros Felapton 13
Mike Glyer 7
Foz Meadows 5
Cora Buhlert 5
Natalie Luhrs 4
Charles Payseur 3
Liz Bourke 3
James Davis Nicoll 3
Bridget McKinney 2
Adam Whitehead 2
Doris V. Sutherland 2
Paul Weimer 2
Again, there may be local bias in the exact rankings – we will be able to tell after the ceremony – but the result is not that far off. Nevertheless, two names are missing, Takacs and Gailey (neither of whom I follow, so I don’t know what accounts for that).
Fan Artist:
Likhain 5
Jian Guo 3
Laya Rose 3
Leon Tukker 3
Geneva Benton 2
Megan Lara 2
Elicia Donze a.k.a. Euclase 2
Only two out of six here, but in such a small category I’m not convinced that is significant. The missing ones include Spring Schoenhuth and Steve Stiles, which together with Picacio suggests we are less likely to vote for perennials than the wider electorate (when there is a choice, at least: in Semprozine, for instance, it would be hard to avoid). Also missing are Grace P. Fong and Maya Hahto.
Fancast seems not to have been tabulated.
One thing I noticed in the course of doing this is that in most cases where the award is for a person or ongoing entity, last year’s winner is absent – some previous winners may be there, but not last year’s. This is true of both editors, both artists, Fanzine, Fancast and Fan Writer, though not Semiprozine, where the effective field is rather limited.
I’m not sure what to make of this – on the one hand it probably has a good long-term effect, as it prevents the reoccurrence of Best Locus or Best Dave Langford: on the other, the award is meant to be for their work in the relevant year, and those who do the best work in one year are quite likely also to do the best work in other years, and it would be odd if they stopped doing so as soon as they won.
Andrew M: One thing I noticed in the course of doing this is that in most cases where the award is for a person or ongoing entity, last year’s winner is absent – some previous winners may be there, but not last year’s. This is true of both editors, both artists, Fanzine, Fancast and Fan Writer
I don’t think that you can infer anything from that. Last year’s Fanzine and Fan Writer winners withdrew themselves from consideration this year (I don’t remember hearing that Fancast did, though).
And last year’s Fan Artist winner became a finalist after the two Puppy finalists were ruled ineligible; she used to be a Fan Artist but is actually a Pro Artist now (check out her amazing cover for Retrograde, which was sadly not eligible for Best Novel because it had been self-published in an earlier year).
The only years that John Picacio didn’t make the short list since 2005 were 2015 and 2016 when he was just knocked off by puppy nominees.
Laura: The only years that John Picacio didn’t make the short list since 2005 were 2015 and 2016 when he was just knocked off by puppy nominees.
In fact, last year, with the 2 Puppy nominees removed, he had the 7th highest number of nominations. But EPH put him ahead of the 6th place nominee — it appears that he was on a higher percentage of one-nominee ballots, which gave him more points under EPH. That was a bit of a disappointment, too, as the 6th-place artist had never yet been a finalist, and their portfolio of eligible works last year was really strong.
There are a few people who appear to have really, really strong fan bases who would nominate them every year just for their grocery list — Scalzi, KSR, Sanderson, Gaiman, Stross, Bujold, McGuire, Picacio, Heuvelt. And I can’t really criticize that, because I’m sure that they genuinely believe that the nomination is well-deserved, but I have to say that there are times when I’d rather that they reserved that enthusiasm for the years when their favorite’s work really is outstanding.
Heuvelt seems to have disappeared recently. (Perhaps he has told his fans to stop? Or, come to think of it, perhaps they felt they could stop once he had won something.)
But it’s noticeable that a lot of the major divergences between the File 770 result and the actual ballot involve these people. I must admit that I am a bit worried that EPH will give these people a boost – though of course they were doing well enough without the boost, so it may not make a very significant difference. But it will be interesting to see the EPH figures when they are released.
Oh, that is a bit disappointing since mine was one of those 57 ballots for that 6th place artist last year!
Yeah, much as I’d wish for people to expand their horizons and try not to just round up the “usual suspects” — and I’m probably not completely guilt-free there myself — I can’t really complain about people who (a) take time to nominate and (b) do nominate things/people they truly like (instead of what someone else tells them to).