[Updated April 23 and May 17. See explanations of changes in Best Fan Artist category below.] The 2017 Hugo ballot released April 4 contains 13 12 11 finalists that were on Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies slate.
While 16 of the 22 entries on his slate (72%) received enough votes to be finalists, three four five were ruled ineligible. So only 59% 54% 50% of his slate has made the final ballot.
Six Seven of 17 Hugo Award categories are Puppy free. (The total includes one category where there was no Rabid Puppy candidate, and excludes the Campbell Award, which is not a Hugo).
Interpreting the voting range statistics published by the committee, it would be reasonable to estimate 80-90 voters supported the Rabid Puppies slate this year.
Here is a breakdown of the slate’s effectiveness by category.
- Items in BLUE were on the Rabid Puppies slate and made the final ballot.
- Items in RED were on the slate and received enough votes to be finalists but were RULED INELIGIBLE.
- Items in BLACK body text were on the slate and failed to get enough votes to be finalists.
RABID PUPPIES SLATE
BEST NOVEL
An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity by J. Mulrooney (Castalia House)
BEST NOVELLA
“This Census-taker” by China Miéville
BEST NOVELETTE
“Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex” by Stix Hiscock
BEST SHORT STORY
“An Unimaginable Light” by John C. Wright (God, Robot, Castalia House)
BEST RELATED WORK
Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie by Ralph McQuarrie (Abrams)
The View From the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline)
BEST GRAPHIC STORY
No slate recommendation
BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM
P. Alexander, Cirsova
BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM
Vox Day, Castalia House
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM
Deadpool
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM
“The Winds of Winter”, Game of Thrones, Miguel Sapochnik, David Benioff & D. B. Weiss – received enough votes to be nominated, but was rendered ineligible because a single show cannot have more than two finalists, and presumably the two Game of Thrones nominees on the ballot had more votes.
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST
Tomek Radziewicz – received enough votes to be a finalist, but was ruled ineligible because of no qualifying publications in 2016
JiHun Lee – likewise, – received enough votes to be a finalist, but was ruled ineligible because of no qualifying publications in 2016
BEST SEMIPROZINE
Cirsova
BEST FANZINE
Castalia House blog
BEST FANCAST
The Rageaholic by Razorfist
Superversive SF
BEST FAN WRITER
Jeffro Johnson (Castalia House blog)
Morgan (Castalia House blog)
BEST FAN ARTIST
Alex Garner [subsequently declared ineligible — see press release here]
Alex Garner
Mansik Yang [subsequently declared ineligible — see May 17 update]
Mansik Yang
BEST SERIES
Arts of Dark and Light by Vox Day
BEST NEW WRITER (Campbell Award)
J. Mulrooney
Update: The post has been corrected to so that it no longer shows P. Alexander as a Best Editor – Short Form nominee, and the percentages have been recalculated. // 04/23/2017: Alex Garner was ruled ineligible by the Hugo Administrator after the artist stated all his 2016 work was professional. // 05/17/2017: Mansik Yang was disqualified by the Hugo Administrators after the artist informed them he did not have any non-professional work published in 2016.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Shouldn’t P. Alexander be in plain text rather than blue?
It looks like Vox was able to place a finalist in categories where the threshold was 91 nominations or fewer, and not in the categories where the threshold was 129 or more. I won’t pretend to understand how EPH might affect the number of raw votes behind those nominations.
Jonathan Edelstein: Shouldn’t P. Alexander be in plain text rather than blue?
No, he was on the Rabid Puppy slate.
Ah, no, you’re right, Jonathan, as he did not make the ballot.
I could have sworn Jeffro got paid for his work on the Castalia Blog. I must have misunderstood or misremembered.
Tick with popcorn.
::popcorn::
oops, sorry for the double post. I kept getting error messages!
Ticky
Tickyticky?
@Meredith
The CH blog counts as “generally available electronic media” so an element of pay doesn’t matter, if I understand correctly.
—-
I’m sure the numbers will get crunched a bit further soon enough, buts MIke’s 80-90 RP voters looks a reasonable ballpark right now.
I mean, they can obviously keep this up for years, but is paying several thousand dollars between them to smuggle a single item onto most ballots, where it will be roundly ignored, actually going to provide them any real entertainment?
(also, looks like the F770 server is creaking under the strain, I’m getting database errors etc)
Adjusting for the effect of EPH (using the mean deflator for the top-5 from last year’s numbers) and ignoring the “hostages,” I estimate no fewer than 70 puppies and no more than 85. I’ll write that up later.
Note that he had a guaranteed floor of 66, based on the hard-core fans who vote for him for Best Editor every single year. This suggests that his supporters who weren’t already fans before this whole thing started have deserted him utterly.
I looked so y’all don’t have to: VD is pretty upset about not getting that Best Series Nomination.
Thanks again to everyone who gave up their weekend mornings to sit in Worldcon business meetings for longer than they otherwise would have, in order to minimise the effect of this nonsense this year. You’ve made a lot of people (including yourselves, I hope!) much happier today.
@Arifel
Oooo, VD’s grapes must be sour.
Those 15 minutes really dragged out, but now we can wave Teddy off to his normal levels of obscurity
I suspect that Gaiman, Miéville, and Deadpool would all have made the ballot even without Beale Boost. The rest … meh.
I’ve had (online) personal interactions with a few of the RP nominees, and they left me disinclined to vote for them.
I hope the 80-ish number is accurate. I also wonder how many of them are going to continue spending money for no effect. Their nominees (other than the three listed above) are probably not going to win – and some of them will (as usual) finish below Noah Ward. Again. It’s hard to get people to keep throwing money at a losing proposition just for the LOLs. Especially when there are fewer and fewer actual LOLs to be had.
Also: Beale is encouraging his fans to vote for The Obelisk Gate (that’s an archive.is link, so Beale won’t get your click for it). Probably so that he can claim to have impacted the final outcome if it wins (and it might – it was solid).
I mean, they can obviously keep this up for years, but is paying several thousand dollars between them to smuggle a single item onto most ballots, where it will be roundly ignored, actually going to provide them any real entertainment
Good question, especially considering that Beale is also urging his fans to spend money on stunts like Corroding Empire. I think there’s a limit to the entertainment value in angering the right people year after year. We’re here because we love the Hugos. That’s easier to sustain than a protest campaign. His followers probably have a lot of things they’d like to be mad about. Beale is bogarting their outrage time.
Arifel: I looked so y’all don’t have to: VD is pretty upset about not getting that Best Series Nomination.
It’s hilarious. The commenters are all celebrating the fact that Chuck Tingle made the ballot for Best Fan Writer because they’re too clueless to realize it was for his epic trolling of Puppies.
I am confused. Teddy is upset that there are so few White Males in the lists, but isn’t he a Native American? Or is it a Mexican this week?
So it looks like EPH delivered on its claim, that while they can’t keep the slate out entirely, no single category is dominated by the slate.
I suspect a more sinister notion to Beale championing Nora. She might be convinced to withdraw rather than let Beale claim to have had a positive impact on her voting. Thereby silencing a woman of color who is also one of the top SF writers today.
@ rcade: Beale is bogarting their outrage time.
You owe me a new keyboard! There seems to be tea all over this one.
@rcade
The problem is that it relies on having an cohesive opposition to rail against. Despite his periodic nonsense here and against Scalzi, the rest of the fight is against a vague threat that exists only in their heads. Once that starts to falter, there’s no win he can bait his followers with.
Also, he seems to think that Hugo voters only vote for Jemisin for political reasons and that regular fans (the kind that he is so in tune with) will therefore think less of the Hugos if she wins.
I’m not sure he’s being entirely objective and rational with that one.
@Jon Baker
Beale only tried to nominate one thing per category, so EPH may or may not have delivered – but at the very least it changed the Rabid Puppy tactics. And – honestly – I’m okay with them having a voice in the final ballot. I just wish they wouldn’t waste it on such obviously terrible works.
@rob_matic
I don’t know if that’s what he thinks or if that’s what he wants his followers to think. Which, really, is the same comment I’d make for any demagogue. Personally? I think he’s jealous of both her success and her ability to write.
Job Baker wrote:
So it looks like EPH delivered on its claim, that while they can’t keep the slate out entirely, no single category is dominated by the slate.
As far as I can tell, the Rabids blinked* and conceded the math by nominated only one or two entries in each category. Were I an evil super genius, I would have nommed a varying amount from one to six per category to at least stress test the Hugo’s defenses. All we have now is run-of-the-puppy-mill collusion, moustache-and-glasses-level disguising a personal vote-begging campaign for VD.
*While the Sads quietly gathered up their toys and went home.
(Jinx, Eric!)
As for the Jemisin nom, I speculate that, given that his nemesis Scalzi no longer bothers to respond much to him (and has thoroughly smoked him in the “living well is the best revenge” department), he hopes that she can be enticed into providing the outrage oxygen he needs.
No way Nora Jemisin would withdraw due to provocation from a toad like Beale. Just saying.
And in this weeks episode of “Christ, what an asshole…”
I won’t pretend to comprehend the mindset behind all the RP shenanigans, I’m especially baffled by the Best Novelette choice. I mean, all it does is remind people how Chuck Tingle humiliated them when they tried to use him to poison the Hugo Awards. It seems less like 5th dimensional chess and more like playing tic-tac-toe with yourself…and losing.
Meredith:
I was wondering about the same last year, but when I tried going back to where I thought I’d read it I couldn’t find anything about money changing hands.
Mark:
The CH blog is a finalist in fanzine, where the rules are stricter. Or at least: A literal reading of the rules suggest a crucial difference between Fanzine and Fan Writer.
Fan Writer requires that (some of) your work is available for free. Fanzine requires that no one involved in the production gets paid. I suspect that once upon a time there was very little practical difference, but current economics of web publishing means that it’s possible to make stuff generally available – so the writers are eligible for fan writer – while still earning money – making the publication ineligible for Fanzine.
@Bloodstone75
He still could have had a majority of the nominations this year, if he’d managed to keep his team together from last year. I figure he’d have gotten no fewer than 45 nominations and no more than 82, or 40% to 75%. However, he’d have needed to double his numbers (from 400 to 800) to entirely sweep any single category (as well as needing to hand out two slates). Even if he had 1,000 followers, he’d only sweep 4 categories. To sweep all categories, he’d have need 7,000 minions.
With no ability to sweep categories, he had no ability to “burn the awards to the ground” and I suspect that reduced his own enthusiasm a lot, not to mention making it harder to retain his followers. He could still nominate porn stories to pollute the awards, but apparently he didn’t think he needed to do that at scale. His 66 followers who really are fans will be enough for him to do that indefinitely.
@Bloodstone75 – “living well is the best revenge” was going to be my take on the current Scalzi approach.
I’m glad the usual impulse to “help” the rabids by pointing out which of their noms were ineligible seems to have reduced the number they got on. If the sooper-genius can’t even be bothered to determine eligibility, it seems he is just going through the motions for his saddest minions.
That number made me grimace because 59% sounds like a lot.
I think a better metric of his stunt’s effectiveness is the percentage of nominees his bloc voters put on the ballot. Out of 108 nominees 13 came from the Rabid Puppies slate, which is 12%.
That’s still too many when he’s engaging in self-promotion and putting works on the ballot just to embarrass the awards, but it’s a better outcome than I expected.
I still hope we pass the reform to give voters a chance to take unworthy choices off before the ballot is released. Having Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex forever on this year’s ballot degrades the awards.
@rcade
It is a lot, but he also nominated things that would probably have made it without his help, too. And there’s no easy way to account for that.
“59% of the things on his list made the final ballot” is entirely different than “59% of the things on the final ballot are only there because of his influence.”
Eric Franklin on April 4, 2017 at 9:25 am said:
@Jon Baker
So it looks like EPH delivered on its claim, that while they can’t keep the slate out entirely, no single category is dominated by the slate.
Beale only tried to nominate one thing per category, so EPH may or may not have delivered – but at the very least it changed the Rabid Puppy tactics. And – honestly – I’m okay with them having a voice in the final ballot. I just wish they wouldn’t waste it on such obviously terrible works.
So it looks as if just the prospect of EPH prevented an attempt at total slate coverage.
So there’s a deterrent effect too.
–It does look as if the more down-ballot categories are still somewhat vulnerable, but even they have escaped puppy saturation.
As is, the ballot we ended up with, with roughly one item out of six per category, pretty much reflects total puppy representation anyway.
When they pay for their memberships, they get a say, I guess.
But now they just get only a reasonably proportionate say.
It does seem odd to bother at all just to push dreck and things that would be there anyway, but then I don’t understand puppies to begin with.
And you’d think people with actual pretensions to professionalism would have more pride than to willingly allow themselves to be used like this, seems immoral and sort of feeble.
(cough… Wright… cough…)
Well, all I can say is, I hope it helps keep up the momentum to get 3SV implemented; it seems the “throw out the obvious trolling rubbish” phase is, at least for the moment, needed.
@rcade: I’m not worried about the awards being degraded – Alien Stripper etc. etc. is just an obvious troll, and anyone who looks at the nominations list in future years will know it. The annoying thing, if there is one, is that this nonsense denies a chance at recognition to people who might genuinely deserve it. (Of course, you will find plenty of serious-lit-crit types who will say that the Hugos start out degraded, just by virtue of being the Hugos. Pish and tush on such foolishness.)
rcade on April 4, 2017 at 10:50 am said:
So only 59% of his slate has made the final ballot.
That number made me grimace because 59% sounds like a lot.
I think a better metric of his stunt’s effectiveness is the percentage of nominees his bloc voters put on the ballot. Out of 108 nominees 13 came from the Rabid Puppies slate, which is 12%.
That’s still too many when he’s engaging in self-promotion and putting works on the ballot just to embarrass the awards, but it’s a better outcome than I expected.
I still hope we pass the reform to give voters a chance to take unworthy choices off before the ballot is released. Having Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex forever on this year’s ballot degrades the awards.
Here’s hoping that particular choice helps motivate the membership to pass the reform.
It’s one thing to have the perpetual smug self-promotion, but actual total crap?
(Wait, is that a real distinction? Probably not.)
Eric –
I agree with him that it’s an odds-on favorite. Just disagree as to why, since I feel it’s the strongest of those I’ve read on the list. He’d have more time to read if he wasn’t chasing Scalzi’s shadow.
Still need to read Ninefox and Death’s End. I liked 3BP a lot just never got around to the sequels.
rcade –
I mean if they’d only donated to Infogalactic instead of contributing to the snack fund for the Hugos it could’ve been bigger than Wikipedia already. Priorities!
On that note, the sidebar of his blog states that he’s currently editing a book called Young Man’s War. Do you see what he did there? CLEVER.
rcade
Well I’m one step ahead of him, I’m working on Blue Turtlenecks and Locked Out: Book One of the Where Are My Keys series (gotta get that series money)
Matt Y–
If you ever want to have a quiet chuckle, go to Infogalactic and check out the ‘Recent changes’. It’s not only moving at a snail’s pace, it’s doing so on the stupidest things.
Well, it looks like VD got his 3-Delusional check and mate with this one.
::scalzi-stalk::
kathodus on April 4, 2017 at 11:40 am said:
The Dark Lord Gossage-Vardebedian knows only triumph in all he does.
Because he’s managed to convince himself that losses are a kind of victory. Indeed, a better sort of victory then your paltry ‘winning’.
At some point surely he’ll get tired of this vandalism.
Promoted on a blog called Whichever where pastrami is taped to the back of a ferret and linked to a Twitter account where you put weird things in tacos 🙂
@Camestros
“Promoted on a blog called Whichever where pastrami is taped to the back of a ferret and linked to a Twitter account where you put weird things in tacos “?
I’m assuming this is your joke as this is too self-aware and actually funny to be genuine VD?
Though Scalzi’s “burritos” are a crime against gastronomy.
It’s one thing to have the perpetual smug self-promotion, but actual total crap?
(Wait, is that a real distinction? Probably not.)
No, it is not a real distinction. Everything produced by Beale’s hobby-press is total crap.
I go there regularly to marvel at their progress. I think the high point was a couple of weeks ago, when there were only two active editors in a whole day, and one of them only created two new user accounts. Then again, I bet Wikipedia hasn’t got an entry on Algorithmic Internal Variable Decay
What’s really nice here, IMHO, is that EPH did really well.
In most categories where the RP did venture two nominees, only one got in — Best Related Work, Best Fancast, Best Fan Writer. Means EPH did exactly what it was meant to do — give blocs their proportional due, but not letting them dominate the ballot. (Best Fan Artist did get two RP picks; I don’t know if either is independently popular, or if that category just has really low turnout. OTOH Best Pro Artist didn’t get any RP nominees at all.)
I’m assuming this is your joke as this is too self-aware and actually funny to be genuine VD?
Yes, although now I am wondering what happens if you tape pastrami to a ferret.
Camestros Felapton
You get rabies….and now we’ve come full circle