(1) Laura J. Mixon’s Hugo speech and a great deal more commentary at – “Acceptance Speech Online! And Other Post-Hugo Neepery”
Tonight, I honor Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Tricia Sullivan, Athena Andreadis, Rachel Manija Brown, Kari Sperring, Liz Williams, Hesychasm, Cindy Pon, and the many others targeted for abuse, whose experiences I documented in my report last fall. They’re great writers and bloggers—read their works!
Thanks go to those who stood up for them: Tade Thompson, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Pat Cadigan, Sherwood Smith, and Nalo Hopkinson. Read their works too!
Thanks also to those who helped me with my research behind the scenes. You know who you are, and we wouldn’t be here with you, either. Thanks to George RR Martin, who boosted me for this award, and to all who voted for me.
I wrote my report out of love for this community. Out of a rejection of abusive behavior and the language of hate. There’s room for all of us here. But there is no middle ground between “we belong here” and “no you don’t,” which is what I hear when people disrespect members of our community. I believe we must find non-toxic ways to discuss our conflicting points of view. I plan to keep working toward that, in ways true to my own values and lived experiences. And I hope you all will, too. Science fiction and fantasy literature is our common bond and our common legacy. It belongs to all of us. Those who deny that do great harm.
I see our conflict as a reflection of a much larger societal struggle, as Robert Silverberg referred to, and I stand with people from marginalized groups who seek simply to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter. Thank you.
(2) Melina on Subversive Reader – “A Letter To ‘Old’ Hugo Voters from a ‘New’ Hugo Voter”
- We don’t necessarily bring the same schema to our voting as you do
Part of being part of a community for a while means you start knowing the players. You know that Joanne Bloggs edits for that publisher, and Jane Smith worked with those people who love her. As a new voter, you don’t necessarily know that – it’s possible that the new voter is dipping their toes into the inner circle of knowledge for the very first time.
This is where the packet is a brilliant idea – all the information a new voter needs to fairly judge a person or piece of writing against others. Except, in 2015, there were times when the packet just sucked (and I’m not just talking about the writing). Several of the awards ask us to judge a person’s output over a year – best editors, best fan writer, the art awards etc. And while some categories did this well (the art categories) others provided little or no example of what the nominees were achieving.
This is especially clear in the editing categories. I’ve heard a number of commentators complaining that these categories shouldn’t have been No Awarded without any of them acknowledging that the packets were either thin on quality work or pretty much non existent. Additionally, there weren’t a lot of credible commentators advocating that we vote for one editor or another. So how is a new voter supposed to know that we should vote for a certain editor without evidence or advocacy?
- No Award is not a tragedy or unethical
The option to use No Award is brilliant. It allows us to consider the works that are nominated, judge them according to our own criteria and say ‘nope’ when we think the work doesn’t reach the level a Hugo winner should reach. It’s like the perfect anti bell-curve mechanism.
So, when a No Award is awarded, it’s not a tragedy. It’s the voters, as a group, saying yeah, no, none of the nominated work was good enough. We’re not going to lower our standards just because that’s what was nominated. Try again next year.
Standards are fabulous. It makes sure that we’re celebrating the very best. It shows that we really value excellence in the winners.
Yes there were a lot of No Awards in 2015. That’s because the work nominated was not of a high enough quality to win or got on the ballot in a way we do not agree with as a community. Our standards are high and we should be proud of that.
(3) It’s a theory —
https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/637672487317192704
(4) CBC Radio’s news program As It Happens did an interview with Mary Robinette Kowal about the Puppies on August 28, so I’m told. I haven’t listened to it myself. The link to the program is here. Kowal reportedly begins at 16:40.
Hugo Awards flap
A group of angry reactionaries tries to hijack the biggest awards in science fiction and fantasy — but it turns out there’s no space for their opinions.
(5) Elizabeth Bear on Charlie’s Diary – “How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating…”
The Rabid Puppies, though, are self-declared reavers out to wreck the Hugos for everybody. I think their organizer Vox Day has made himself a laughingstock, personally—he’s been pitching ill-thought-out tantrums in SFF since before 2004, and all he ever brings is noise. But he and his partisans seem to be too ego-invested to admit they’re making fools of themselves, so they’ll never quit.
So it’s totally possible that the Rabid Puppy organizers and voters, in the spirit of burning it all down, would nominate a slate consisting of the sort of vocal anti-slate partisans who could conceivably swing legitimate Hugo nominations on fan support, having a track record of the same.
I’m talking about people such as our good host Charlie Stross, John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and myself. Or just, you know, people they hate—the categories overlap. The goal here would be to then attempt to either force us to withdraw or refuse nominations to prove our lack of hypocrisy, or for fandom to again No Award the whole process. This is the Human Shield option, which—in a slightly different application—is what led to the inclusion on the Rabid Puppy slate of uninvolved parties such as Marko Kloos, Annie Bellet, Black Gate, Jim Minz, and so on in 2015.
This possibility concerns me a bit more, but honestly, I think it’s pretty easy to manage. First of all, I’m going to state up front that I will never willingly participate in a slate. If I learn that I have been included on a slate, I will ask to be removed, and I will bring as much force to bear on that issue as I legally can.
Additionally, I’m going to rely on the discretion of readers and fans of goodwill, who I think are pretty smart people. If you see my name on a slate, please assume that it’s being done by ruiners to punish me, and that whoever put it there has ignored my requests to remove it. I have nothing but contempt for that kind of behavior, and I’m frankly not going to do anything to please them at all.
(6) Ann Leckie – “On Slates”
First off, I deplore slates. In the context of the Hugos, they are an asshole move. Just don’t slate.
Second off, I am saying unequivocally that I do not agree to be on anyone’s slate, do not approve of my inclusion in any slate, and anyone who slates a work of mine is thereby demonstrating their extra-strong motivation to be seen as an asshole.
Now, there’s some concern that assholes making up a slate for next year would deliberately include the work of people they hate, in order to force those people to withdraw any nominations they might get. This might be a genuine concern for some writers. It is not one of mine.
(7) John Scalzi on Whatever – “Final(ish) Notes on Hugos and Puppies, (2015 Edition)”
[From the second of ten points.]
The going line in those quarters at the moment is that the blanket “No Award” just proves the Hugo Awards are corrupt. Well, no, that’s stupid. What the blanket “No Award” judgment shows is that the large mass of Hugo voters don’t like people trying to game the system for their own reasons that are largely independent of actual quality of work. In the Sad Puppy case the reasons were to vent anger and frustration at having not been given awards before, and for Brad Torgersen to try to boost his own profile as a tastemaker by nominating his pals (with a few human shields thrown in). In the Rabid Puppy case it was because Vox Day is an asshole who likes being an asshole to other people. And in both cases there was a thin candy shell of “Fuck the SJWs” surrounding the whole affair.
The shorter version of the above: You can’t game the system and then complain that people counteracting your gaming of the system goes to show the system is gamed. Or you can, but no one is obliged to take you seriously when you do.
(8) David Gerrold on Facebook
Given all those different belief systems, any attempt to discuss healing and recovery is likely to be doomed — because it’s no longer about “I’m right and you’re wrong” as much as it is about, “my story about all this is the only story.” That’s not just a difference of degree, it’s an attempt to control the paradigm in which all this is occurring.
Which brings me to the inescapable conclusion — if one person pees in the pool, we’re probably not going to notice it. But if we’re all peeing in the pool, it’s going to start stinking pretty bad.
There is a larger narrative — one that we seem to have forgotten. We are all fans because we are all enthralled by the sense of wonder that occurs when we read a good science fiction story or fantasy. Perhaps we came to this genre looking for escape, but ultimately what makes this genre special is that it’s about all the different possibilities. It’s about who we really want to be — it’s about the question, “What does it mean to be a human being?” Are we slans? Are we transhumans? Are we starship troopers?
As Tananarive said, “There are no final frontiers. There’s only the next one.”
That’s what SF is about — it’s about exploration, discovery, and stepping into the next possibility. Our awards are about excellence, innovation, and merit.
There is room in this community for everyone who brings their enthusiasm. We have steampunk and heroic engineers and fantasy fans and gothic horror and gender-punk and space opera and cyberpunk and deco-punk and alternate histories and utopias and dystopias and zombies and vampires and all the other different niches that make up this vast ecology of wonder.
None of us have the right to define SF — we each define it by what we read and what we write. None of us have the authority to demand or control the behavior of others. The best that any of us can do is recommend and invite. And yes, this is another narrative — a narrative of inclusion that stands in opposition to the narratives of division.
That’s the narrative I choose to live in.
(9) Jeffrey A. Carver on Pushing A Snake Up A Hill – “Sad Sad Puppies Affair – Sasquan Roundup, Part 2”
While I stand firmly with the rejection of the gaming effort of the SPs, I feel for those writers and editors who were hurt by the whole affair. Some innocent writers and editors were unwillingly associated with the puppies slate, because the SPs happened to like their work. Other worthy individuals were kept off the final ballot because of the stuffing. Still, the winning novel, The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu), got its place on the ballot because another author withdrew his work after receiving support from the stuffers. Some say that the Hugo Awards as an institution were strengthened by the voters’ repudiation of the attempt to game the system, and I hope that turns out to be true. But it’s hard to say that there were winners in the affected categories. Those writers who were shut out may get another chance, another year, and then again they may not. Either way, it has to hurt.
(10) Adam-Troy Castro – “These Are Not Reasons to Vote For Me For a Hugo”
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because you’re my friend on Facebook.
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because you’re my friend in real life.
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because we shared a great time at a convention.
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because I’m politically liberal and you like what I stand for.
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because my strongest opposition is politically conservative and you wish to oppose what they stand for.
Please don’t nominate me for a Hugo because it’s “my turn.”
(11) Adam-Troy Castro – “While I’m At It”
“I am among the finest writers working today.”
That, my friends, is the kind of statement that immediately casts doubt on itself.
(12) Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt – “I’ve Been To The Desert On A Horse With No Name”
Which brings me to: congratulations. You probably achieved at least half of your objective — to drive out the people who don’t think/act like you and aren’t part of your groups. It is heartily to be hoped you won’t live to regret it, but don’t bet on it.
So, the show over, and once I’d gotten over being both mad and sad but mostly sad, we started discussing (Kate and Amanda and I) operational details for next year. Stuff like how many noms, where do we get recommends, do all three of us have to read something before we recommend it, and oh, yeah, logo? patches? t-shirts? Incredibly threatening stuff like that, you know? Since Kate, Amanda and I routinely PM and send each other scads of emails everyday (otherwise known as being ‘thick as thieves’) including on all important topics such as “that cute thing the cat did yesterday”, it barely rose above the ambient noise.
So imagine our surprise when Kate got hacked on facebook, not once, not twice but three times in a 24 hour period and her account started spamming sunglass adds. Coincidence? I don’t know guys. One time, maybe. But three times, when Kate has pretty d*mn good security? Bah.
(13) Cedar Sanderson on Cedar Writes – “Muzzled Redux”
I still wholeheartedly support the idea of reclaiming the Hugo Awards for excellence above ‘connections’ and even more, the idea of making the Hugo Awards back into a ‘Best of’ rather than a tiny super-minority. I do support the idea of a diverse nomination pool. A really diverse one, where you don’t have to be ‘approved’ by the right people to be included. So it’s not that I was shut out.
Rather, due to full-time (plus some) school and family obligations that need my attention, I cannot afford the time to be slandered right now in public, and this is what will happen. Yes, I have to fear that from the people who are running the show right now. Doubt what I say? One of the people in the front lines, a Latina woman, was accused by a milk-white woman, of using an ethnic slur. Which confused the accused woman, since English is not her first language, maybe it meant something she didn’t know? No… it’s a standard identifier that had been used extensively in the military since the 1950s. The accuser was making up mud to fling and try to make it stick. You can see the inherent hypocrisy, and the reason I have to avoid the poo-flinging monkeys. The Sad Puppy movement supports me, knows what is happening in my life, but the other side? They wouldn’t care, and would no doubt use it as a tool to try and destroy me.
Pat Patterson in a comment on Cedar Writes
You know the scene in Henry V about the feast of St Crispan? I like the kenneth Branagh version, personally.
Well, on every instance of the Hugo awards, however long they last,
you will be able to strip your sleeve and show your scars and say “These wounds I had as a nominee for the Best Fan Writer Hugo,”
Old dogs forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But you’ll remember, with advantages,
What words you wrote this year. Then shall the names,
Familiar in your mouth as household words-
(14) Steven Brust on The Dream Café – “Who Really Runs the Hugo Awards?”
In a surprising development, the dispute among “Trufans” “SMOFS” “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” has produced a result: We now know exactly who runs the Hugo Awards. It turns out to be Mrs. Gladys Knipperdowling, of Grand Rapids, Iowa.
Mrs. Knipperdowling, 81, came forward yesterday to reveal that she has personally chosen all Hugo winners and nominees since 1971 when her aunt Betty “got too old and cranky,” as she put it in an exclusive interview. “I wouldn’t have said anything about it,” she added, “but then I heard there was all of this trouble.”
Asked about the people usually accused of picking the Hugo winners, Mrs. Knipperdowling became confused. She claimed never to have heard of the Nielsen Haydens at all, and when John Scalzi was mentioned, she asked, “Is he the nice young man in the bow tie?”
(15) Dysfunctional Literacy – “I Am No Award!”
I’ve never heard of anybody named No Award, and I’ve never read anything by No Award, but No Award must be awesome.
No Award won so many honors because Hugo voters are in a big argument over stuff that non-Hugo voters don’t care about. Science fiction fans have always liked to argue about stuff that other people don’t care about. Before I was born, it was Jules Verne vs. H.G. Wells or Flash Gordon vs. Buck Rogers. When I was a kid, it was Star Wars vs. Star Trek or Marvel vs. DC. Today, science fiction fans are divided between social justice warriors and sad puppies.
[Thanks to Mark Dennehy, another Mark, Danny Sichel, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Regarding the Retro-Hugos:
a. But surely Heinlein couldn’t get a Hugo today?
b. Last year we had to read The Legion of Time in a later edition (it referred to Los Alamos, which Williamson could only have written in 1938 if he had been a genuine time-traveller); so using a translation when assessing ‘Orbis Tertius’ doesn’t seem unreasonable.
c. Also, wow! The wealth of material in 1940 is quite striking. Last year we had Smith, a precursor of the golden age; Burroughs, a survivor from an earlier tradition; Clarke and Bradbury’s early, fan-published works; and so on. By 1940 the golden age seems really to be getting going; the rapidity with which it happens is surprising.
‘Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics’
Given that Beale himself writes religious fantasies about elves (does he actually write any SF?) I’m sort of bemused about his claim that it’s WOMEN who “can’t hack the physics”.
Is he self-aware enough to realize that every one of these …whatever the hell they are…. that he puts out – betrays his claim to be advocating ‘manly-man’ SF?
@Wildcat:
The MENSA of wicked commenting.
High school algebra should be accessible to anybody in, you know, high school. If they are poor in it they might just have had poor teachers. There are levels of mathematical reasoning that are not accessible to anybody, but high school algebra isn’t one of them. Hell, I was competent at it and I am no math genius let me tell you.
Strong truth.
I have gone from being extremely unsocial to a social butterfly. I remember what it meant to be at a party and feeling humiliated and bored. Nowadays I go to a party and start talking randomly and frantically with people. I have a much better time but not everybody can do it, and I think a few people think I should shut my gob now and then.
Point being (sorry about the wavering point, I have a horrible headache) that large gatherings of people are hard. Volunteering helped me a lot getting into fandom – if nothing else, it gave me a sense of belonging and of being useful. Also people are grateful, which is nice. And may I namecheck here Mr. Dave Lally, who was welcoming and kind and lovely to a scared foreign volunteer at Intersectiion ’95, and who had remained the first person ever I meet at a British con, every single time.
this
Because they get praised constantly for their physical appearance and come to be dependent on it.
And they probably sense that the moment they step out of line they will be whipped into their places by a well-placed dig at their physical attractiveness.
@snowcrash: Burnside does a reasonable job of talking the gosh-I’m-only-concerned-about-an-unjustly-neglected-subgenre-of-SF game. The question is, does he honestly & genuinely hold that concern, or is he faking it on account of he’s drunk the Puppy Flavor-Aid? His seemingly-uncritical use of Pup-friendly tropes is not a good sign; on the other hand, he does come a lot closer to non-Pup consensus reality than your average Pup partisan ever manages. Mixed signals, basically, and I’ll reserve judgement until such time as Burnside’s behavior provides any reason to conclude which way he’s chosen to jump.
“Honestly”
Frankly, that makes me wonder if the other parts weren’t so honest.
UncannyValley: “[Mensa] is also helpful in publicly dispelling myths about people with higher IQs (yes, there is discrimination there – especially for the younger ones)”
Please take this as a genuine (if skeptical) question: what exactly does Mensa do in that regard? I can’t say I have ever in my life encountered any kind of public anti-discrimination message like that from Mensa, and as a child and adolescent I was certainly someone who might’ve benefited from such (precocious reader, placed ahead in school and enrolled in “gifted” programs, but very socially awkward and the target of a lot of “Einstein”-themed harassment). And a search of Mensa’s online materials (both the US and international sites and the Mensa Foundation) just now turned up no mention of anything like that.
Or do they mean “discrimination against people who go around talking about their high IQ scores”?– something I wouldn’t know about, since I didn’t take any version of Stanford-Binet until my twenties (and did well but not remarkably well).
It takes a special kind of disconnect to try and convince people of how smart you are while telling them that you can’t perform tasks that children are required to do in order to graduate high school.
This betrays his framing pretty strongly — as assumption that there is, in fact, something wrong with the Hugos that needs fixing, even if he kinda-sorta recognizes that the bad puppy initiative wasn’t the right way to try to fix it.
I don’t agree. There’s nothing wrong with the Hugos (except for the hackable nominating exploit EPH is trying to fix), and there’s not a “literary dispute” that anybody needs to have a dialog about. There are just whiny babies who can’t deal with the idea that their tastes might not reflect the majority in fandom.
Indeed. “I am smart because I am a MENSA member!” is right up there with “I am a NICE guy!” and “I am an HONORABLE man!” as one of those things that seems to be said because you already know it’s not a conclusion anyone would draw based on your behavior.
This reads to me like they’re trying to pull the “I’m smart because I’m in MENSA!” card and the “I’m a regular person who’s bad at math!” card at the same time. That’s pretty special. But I still don’t know why people who are admittedly bad at math keep insisting they know how to interpret Hugo voting results.
My impression is a little different. Everyone I ever talked to was totally anti-slate from the beginning — what we weren’t sure of is what we wanted to do about it.
The first time I heard about the slates — as a rumor during Norwescon, which was Easter weekend, when the announcements were first made — I was having lunch with three people, and one of the three was advocating “no award on all-slate categories” while the other two were saying “no, there are some good people on there, we have to consider everything.” The fourth person, me, was saying “I have to find out more about it, because I’m not sure what I want to do.” I think there was a fannish reluctance to punish good work just because of how it got there — which was the stance GRRM was very vocal in recommending.
Assuming the highly scientific sample of the fans I happened to be having lunch with during Norwescon is typical, there was always about 25% who were never going to vote for anything on the slates, 50% who might have voted for sufficiently good work, and 25% who tried to be fair and make an informed decision, but ended up voting ALMOST a straight no award ticket. I think it was the combination of bad behavior and bad nominees that caused me to break for no award anywhere I was on the fence.
I do think the bad behavior created a much bigger media profile (media LOVES controversy), and that increased participation. So, maybe the people brought in later upped the percentage of straight anti-slate voters.
And this is going to convince people of the rightness of their cause how, exactly? I mean, has Donald Trump’s political career made people think that the way to fame and fortune is to spend all their time experimenting with exciting new ways to act like gigantic assholes?
Act 1: I am nominated for an award. Yay! They like me, they really like me!
Act 2: Wait, I didn’t win? YOU ASSHOLES! I’LL SHOW YOU! CHOKE ON THESE NOMINATIONS! BEFORE THIS IS OVER YOU WILL ACCLAIM ME AS YOUR RIGHTFUL KING!!!!!!
Act 3: Wait, I didn’t win? YOU ASSHOLES!
Laura Resnick on August 31, 2015 at 4:13 am said:
I’ve been trying to figure out anti-feminist women since I was a little kid and Phyllis Schlafly (seemingly) single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. I can’t say I really understand them. But I can observe that they seem to reserve the right to consider themselves a special snowflake exception to anything that’s supposedly true of women in general, and the men they align with seem happy to grant them that status.
Just as with Ms. Schlafly, who made a career out of traveling the country speaking out about how other women should stay home and cook — as long as you affirm the correctness of the ideology, you can totally get away with ignoring it in your personal life. Only the evil SJWs will dare to suggest you might be kind of a hypocrite.
Our new slogan!
On failing algebra, I definitely blame their teachers. I took my first algebra class in 8th grade and my teacher was terrible. After explaining something in class, he would ask for questions. If anyone asked a question, he would demean them in front of the entire class and accuse them of not paying attention because he just gone over that material. We all learned not to ask questions. So then EVERY DAY he would yell at the entire class and tell us that if we failed, it was our own fault, because this was the time for asking questions, and if we didn’t ask any, it was on us.
I think Antonelli and Hoyt behave terribly, but I still have compassion that they had teachers that made them feel stupid instead of helping them learn. It is very hard to get past pain inflicted by teachers.
@Weary World:
A good teacher can make all the difference. I barely passed trig in high school, because I had a teacher who had been teaching the exact same thing, word for word, for decades. He’d spend 30 minutes writing out something on the board in a monotone.
If any of us asked a question, he would simply erase the board and begin the exact same lecture over again, word for word. No deviation.
When I took calculus in college, the professor spent 15 minutes reviewing trigonometry for those who hadn’t taken it. At the end I was like “oh, that’s all [trig] is? That’s easy!”
An entire year of pain and suffering in which none of us learned anything except how to regurgitate the right degree from a chart in 3 seconds or less (failed the oral quiz otherwise), when all it would have taken is 15 minutes from a *good* teacher.
So true. I wish we took that, as a society (I live in the US) more seriously. Instead we have a major political coalition that seems determined to portray teachers as the lazy, entitled villains in some morality play about the battle for the soul of our children.
On-topic: I foung the confrontations and unethical behaviors on-line and at Worldcon both distressing and disappointing. The nominees are fellow human beings and the Golden Rule applies, but sadly was not. Mr. Resnick, Mr. Anderson, and my friend and young talent Ms Kary Fisher deserved better. They are all Hugo worthy.
Off-topic: My appreciation to Standback for reading my story recently published (July 2015) in Giganotosaurus.org .
Respectfully,
Dr. Bob
This:
Sounds like dyscalculia to me. By all means, point out the silliness of claiming sooper smarts, but mocking someone for not grasping something that they may have a perfectly legitimate and not at all intelligence related issue (the teacher issue mentioned above counts, too) with learning specific things, that’s a bit much.
That being said, pride in being bad at maths is a very odd thing for someone in science fiction fandom. Especially people who are part of a group that likes to claim all of logic and the sciences to themselves.
The existing Best Editor Short Form category is (effectively) the descendant of Best Magazine, in that Best Professional Magazine morphed into Best Professional Editor on account of the feeling that anthology editors were being overlooked, so BPE was intended to be a category mostly for magazine and anthology editors. It appears to me that so much time has passed that nobody remembers or cares about any of this anymore. Possibly it’s time to do the following:
Delete the following categories:
Best Semiprozine
Best Editor Long Form
Best Editor Short Form
Add the following categories:
Best Magazine (includes semi-professional magazines, but not Fanzines)
Best Publisher
Best Anthology
I’m thinking this might align better with what Hugo voters can actually identify for voting purposes.
I’m willing to compose the wording to do this if people are interested in backing it. I expect that it would be easier to do as three separate changes, though. Trying to pack too many changes into a single amendment usually results in a failure, as you get a majority of people opposed to at least one of the changes in the laundry list, so the whole thing dies.
@Kevin,
Gov willing and the crick don’t rise, I will be at MAC II. I would be more than willing to support such an amendment by showing up at the business meeting.
@Kevin Standlee
I have my reservations about Best Publisher (someone said something about Tor winning Locus’s best publisher every year since dot?), but I would happily back and put my name to any of those if you need or want it.
Kevin, like your idea very much!
Kevin, I’d support such a change. I don’t know if I’ll make it to MAC II…
I have reservations about Best Publisher as well, at least at the present time.
… I should mention that my support would be in the capacity of supporting member, since the next Worldcon I’ll have a chance to get to will be Helsinki, and that depends on how much I can save between now and then. #UKFan But I’d still like to sign my name to it if it’s wanted or needed.
Sarah Hoyt’s husband warns people that if they go up against her they will fail because she’s in Mensa?
That’s completely unecessary because anyone who disagrees with her is a Marxist and Marxism is stupid so they must be stupid and therefore they will fail.
I’m pretty sure Aristotle wrote something about that.
—-
‘As You Know Bob’ – Given that Beale himself writes religious fantasies about elves (does he actually write any SF?) I’m sort of bemused about his claim that it’s WOMEN who “can’t hack the physics”.
From memory. back on the Making Light thread that started it all(tm), it was someone pointing out to him that his physics didn’t work that made him switch from SF to Fantasy. I seem to recall that he also explained that most men can’t hack the physics, but there were at least some of them.
(I’ll note that twenty years ago on my Physics Degree the students were approximately 60:40 Male to Female. One of the women helped me pass my General Relativity course after I failed to understand Tensor Calculus.)
High school algebra should be accessible to anybody in, you know, high school.
Or they can visit their local community college or its equivalent. (I understand that sometimes all you need do get it is to be a year or two older, because brain.)
Yep Best Publisher is going to be the most difficult one to support.
There are also issues with Orbit and Tor. Tor UK does not publish the same list of books as Tor Books (US) does (although there is a fair bit of overlap). The same for Orbit.
This is likely to lead to problems with people just listing Orbit or Tor as their nomination. The administrator then has an unenviable task. They have to either throw those nominations out or do a lot of mind-reading to decide if the member meant UK or US (I don’t think that it is a safe assumption that a UK nominator will always nominate a UK publisher or US fan will always nominate a US publisher).
Way way back, like in the early 1970s, the categories were Professional Magazine and Amateur Magazine. (Amateur Magazine is now called Fanzine.)
@NelC:
And, of course, a lot of them ARE. Most modern SF&F writers were fans long before they were writers.
Heck, I remember seeing J. Michael Straczynski on the Compuserve comics forums back in the mid to late eighties. Sure, he was already a published author and playwright by then, but he certainly acted mostly like a fan.
Cubist: Have the internets. I’m stealing one from Kyra as I’m new to posting here.
For a basic history of the pups all one has to do is read the initial slate posts for SP1-3 and look in confusion at LC and BT Campbell nominations prior to puppy campaigns.
I was chatting with some fellow fans I’d glommed onto at a convention a few years ago, and the subject got to who does good aliens, and someone said, “How come X doesn’t do aliens, like, at all?” and I said “Well, here they are, now; let’s ask. Hey, X, how come you don’t do aliens, like, at all?” And got an answer, and then they went off to get their real ale, and the other fans were, like, “Dude, you just talked to X like they were one of us!” And I was, like, “Yeah? Aren’t they?”
This also. At smaller regional cons I’ve found myself conversing with any number of authors and editors. At bigger cons it’s not as easy, at least at Arisia, I found they authors/Editors/artist were literally running to get from point A to point B. But even there I had a couple minutes with Seanan McGuire, Daniel Jose Older, and Max Gladstone. I know there were others but these three stood out.
@Kevin
I have reservations about Best Publisher as well, but I’d love to have a Best Anthology category. Especially with all the crowdfunded anthologies coming out lately (including the one I supported and am reading right now, Sisters of the Revolution, which is really good). I would also put my name on such a proposal, along with Best Magazine.
@Kevin
Strong support here for “best anthology” and “best magazine.”
another one not keen on Best Publisher 🙂
Kevin–love the idea about changing the Hugo awards to ax Best Editor(s) and Best Semiprozine, and adding Best Anthology, Magazine, and Publisher.
To those worried about nationality issues for Best Publisher (e.g., whether to rank a vote for ‘Tor’ as for ‘Tor US’ or ‘Tor UK’), surely the ballot could just be altered to require the user to enter a country as well for this one category? So the user would fill in ‘Tor’ in the ‘Publisher’ box and then ‘US’ or ‘UK’ or whatnot in the ‘Publisher’s Country’ box next to it.
Actually, that might even help with international focus. If there’s a huge Chinese publisher of science fiction, for example, then emphasizing that the ballot is looking for international options might motivate fans of that publisher to put it up.
@uncannyvalley
I’d never heard of any of this. Maybe the problem is similar to the way fundamentalists are perceived as jerks in the US – the jerks who use it as a bludgeon are the loudest, whereas the regular members are quiet about it.
@Nowhereman
Except some publishers like Solaris operate both sides of the Atlantic and have the same staff, same list of books etc. AFAIK.
I would think that “Best Publisher” is likely to be functionally equivalent to “Biggest Publisher.” 🙂
@McJulie
My impression is a little different. Everyone I ever talked to was totally anti-slate from the beginning — what we weren’t sure of is what we wanted to do about it.
Your representation seems fair, and is pretty much entirely in line w/ my perception as well. My point, which admittedly might be a little concern-trolly, is orthogonal. It’s pretty well established & agreed that slates are bad, and a lot of people will flat no-award anything on a slate out of principle. Most everyone would probably have always agreed that ‘slates are bad,’ but it wasn’t until the puppies came along and created an effective slate that the question was anything but hypothetical. In an alternate universe where the question of slates was first tested by people w/ more agreeable politics, I posit that some (quite probably small) portion of the folks who are committed no-awarders would have had a gentler response. They wouldn’t have a gentler response now: anybody who’s opposed to slates out of principle will remain consistent in their opposition. I just believe that until the puppies came along, most folks hadn’t given much thought to slates one way or another; the puppies’ general unpleasantness (sometimes loathsome politics being one aspect of that unpleasantness) made it easier to recognize slates as bad. Obviously this is untestable and at this point pretty irrelevant.
@Kevin
Like many others, I’m a little iffy on Best Publisher, but the others sound great to me. Even with Best Publisher on there, I would support the amendment. Unfortunately, I’m unlikely to make it to the con, but I’ll do what I can to spread the word and get feedback for it if you move forward.
@ascholl
I think you’re right that a less antagonistic group behind the slate would have softened the response. Over the months, gentler rankers who comment here (e.g. putting anything that wasn’t totally incompetent over No Award) often ended up taking a harder line after one or other of the Puppy leaders reached new heights of unpleasantness.
Sarah Hoyt, Sooper-genius
http://bit.ly/1KzuOjN
I think you’re definitely right about that (based on the same highly scientific survey of people at Norwescon who I happened to talk to about it.)
Also true. Dishonest slates full of fantastic work, supported by wonderful people, would have created a much more conflicted narrative. As it was, slates = jerk move, slated works = crap, slate-mongers = jerks all tied together into a pretty straightforward story: you guys are jerks who colluded dishonestly to get (mostly) dreck on the Hugo ballot.
Then again, would non-jerks have done such a thing?
@Kevin, conceptually, would Best Magazine re-allow stuff like Locus and/ or io9?
IIRC, one of the reasons for best Semi-prozine was to scope Locus from winning every year, but perhaps there’s more competition now.
I like Best Publisher, but it’s probably important to note that as others have said, globally the same book can be put out by a different imprint – ie what you get as Tor I get as Orbit/ Hachette/ Gollancz.
@Kevin, I’m in support of Best Magazine and Best Anthology, and have reservations about Best Publisher (but am willing to listen to arguments both for and against…my knee jerk is it doesn’t seem necessary or useful to voters, but again that’s just a knee jerk…definitely worth a discussion).
Kevin,
I’m with you on all three changes and will co-sign any such proposal (if that counts for anything).
I think with Best Publisher I’d be happier if a winner one year was disqualified the next. A given winner really isn’t going to win just on the basis of a specific single year – the notion of who is best is going to be more smeared out. After all the books Tor or Baen etc published in 2014 to some extent represents the publishing work they did in 2013 or earlier. Note that you can say the same thing about an individual writer but then the awards go to stories and books and not ‘Best Writer’. I don’t like the notion of a it’s-Muggins-turn award but it is better to incorporate some sort of rule so that voters don’t need to feel that they need to vote for X because it is X’s turn.
The problem with analyzing people’s antipathy towards slates from the actual events is complicated by the amount of sheer dreck on the ballot.
If their entire purpose had been to prove the worst aspects of slate balloting, they could, by and large, hardly have made better(worse) choices.
It was, as has been pointed out, just a big Fuck You list.
If the slate had actually proposed excellent examples of what they claimed to want to draw into prominence, perhaps it would not have been so roundly rejected, and would have demonstrated primarily the level of heck-no responses to a slate.
I suspect it would still have failed, mostly because people really don’t like bullying and underhanded behavior.
Force-feeding them is not really a good route to convince someone that your cooking is tasty.
So even a serious, not Fuck You Guys, Puppy slate would probably have been defeated, and not merely by anti-slate sentiment.
If they actually had proposed, I dunno, books with space ships on the covers and manly men off doing daring deeds, it still might have looked rather ho-hum to the voters.
Tastes have shifted.
Excellence doesn’t tend to hide from current challenges.
But between the dismal nominees, and the trolling behavior of those pushing the slate, it’s difficult to tease out role of sheer distaste for ballot rigging per se in the overwhelming rejection of the slated materials.
I’m not saying that a principled rejection of slate voting wasn’t a major, even deciding, component, just that the whole situation was so entirely filled with ICK DO NOT WANT that it’s hard to separate out any one element in the response.
snowcrash: Actually the category was created to move Locus out of Fanzine, not out of Pro Magazine, so I don’t think this change would make any difference to that. (Though my understanding is that Locus now counts as a pro publication anyway.)
@ Camestros Felapton: I think with Best Publisher I’d be happier if a winner one year was disqualified the next.
Hugos are awarded for something SFnal in the previous year, a book or story or piece of art or fan writing or a related item like a biography. A Best Publisher Hugo would be awarded to a publishing house that had made a real impression on the nominators and voters in respect of the quality of the works they publish for that year and that year only. Certainly a good publishing house might expect to get sequential Hugos if the competition wasn’t attractive enough to WSFS members generally but that’s a feature of the annual nature of the Hugos, not a bug.
I’d vote in a Business Meeting against a Best Publisher Hugo, mostly because I couldn’t rank publishers in terms of quality and I doubt many others could either unless they are business insiders and know a lot about how the publishing business works and specifically how individual imprints or companies perform.
I really like the idea of a Best Anthology/Collection Hugo as the internet, crowdfunding and web-based publishing has led to an explosion of Good Stuff being offered up to us in small-press collections and the like. In these cases we the voters have real product we can make judgements on as readers and purchasers and thus vote in an informed manner. I’m less sanguine about a separate Best Magazine Hugo but there’s nothing to stop an individual issue of a magazine, a themed special issue perhaps, from being nominated in a Best Collection category.
The winners of a Best Collection Hugo would probably subsume the Best Editor Short Form category and it might be time for that category to go away too along with the Long Form Editor Hugo. If nothing else the Editor Hugos are an obvious target for gaming efforts with few non-regimented voters likely to nominate in those categories. My votes in those categories have always been No Award, in part because I don’t agree with them being Hugos and in part because of my lack of knowledge about the candidates.