While I was in an elevator leaving the Hugo ceremonies, Frank somebody looked me in the eye and said “How’d you like that. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it,” in a surly voice. Since he was being rude I told him to get off my case.
But let me answer Frank’s question now. The whole situation is a tragedy. It would have been a worse tragedy if any of these slate nominees had been rewarded with a Hugo. For that reason, yes, the outcome was what I voted for.
That should not detract from the accomplishment of Hugo ceremony hosts David Gerrold and Tananarive Due in pulling off a ceremony that was often funny, rich in creativity, and somber when appropriate (Gerrold was reduced to tears by seeing Nimoy on the in memoriam list).
Things began with a giant grim reaper figure lumbering onstage accompanied by an evil assistant. Three Star Trek redshirts, led by Due, battled with them and the lone survivor, Due, cleared the stage so that a reluctant David Gerrold could follow her out.
Some other highlights were Robert Silverberg’s “blessing of the Hugos” — a reminiscence of the “tension, apprehension and dissension” that plagued the 1968 Worldcon, including intermittent clouds of tear gas drifting up from downtown Berkeley, and to dispel similar tensions in 2015 he ended by taking out a tambourine and performing the Hare Krishna chant sung by street-roaming initiates back then.
Later, Connie Willis took a turn on stage, talking about her experience being bitten by a bat, and a mild concern about possible vampirism. Then she reassured Gerrold and Due about the challenges of emceeing the Hugos, remembering half a dozen things that have actually gone wrong at Worldcons, and suggesting a couple more that haven’t gone wrong yet but could, all of which despite being comedy seemed to leave Gerrold and Due a little more shaky than before she started.
During the introduction, Linda Deneroff of Sasquan’s WSFS Division laid the foundation for Hugo voters exercising the no award option. And it came up several times in the pro categories, as you know, though at the beginning there was a whole string of fan categories which had winners and the night seemed darned near normal for a little while.
TAFF delegate Nina Horvath was the presenter of all the fan categories. Gerrold personally handled most of the categories where there was no winner (though not ONLY those categories, so it wasn’t entirely a tell.) And for the dramatic categories he was assisted by a lifesize Dalek, which provided considerable amusement.
The acceptances were fun, best of which was Pat Cadigan reading Thomas Heuvelt’s speech from a tablet, with her characteristic asides and humorous timing. Campbell winner Wesley Chu obviously enjoyed himself, spontaneously falling to his knees before the bearer of the Campbell tiara so it could be placed on his brow.
Although I had a press seat in the balcony, the house lights were so low I couldn’t see a screen or write a note. Thus the File 770 Hugo coverage was provided by commenters watching the livestream — you all did a hell of a job, and extra credit for finding links to the voting stats and other commentary!
Definitely buying a tablet or something before I tackle another Worldcon though. This hotel computer is so limited — can’t edit or post photos, can’t copy between windows, etc. etc. But I will recharge my Kindle and be back at work in the morning.
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Meredith, you know what you said. It’s up to you if you want to have a conversation or not.
@Mark
No, its fine. More the merrier.
@Brian Z
I think you should provide the quote.
You know, we talk about how the Puppies could just go off and create their own awards. It just hit me that they could have done it this time. Specifically, they could have done their own Alfies. That very night. The possibility of a massive No Award sweep was always there. Hell, they spent months telling everybody it would be no fair at all if it happened, so they clearly recognized the strong possibility. Someone on their team could’ve taken the responsibility to have something ready on the spot to give out to the top finishers in NA categories to recognize their relative success and buck up general morale among the nominees. You know, provide actual leadership. But all any recognizable Puppy honcho did for the troops was fly JCW in so he could be present for the greatest humiliation of his life.
These authors were used and discarded and most of them seem unwilling to recognize it.
@Jim Henley
Yup, but they want the shiny with the history.
Yup, but they want the shiny with the history.
It’s their third try: that means they’ve had at least three years to get it figured out. (They could have had three years history for their own shiny. Granted, it isn’t 60-some years, but the Hugos didn’t start with a history either.)
I’m fine with discussing things with anyone, but when the someone is twisting things, deliberately misunderstanding, dropping threads entirely once they run out of ways to twist or misunderstand, pretending they can’t possibly make an effort (e.g. look for a specific thread) while being very willing to ask other people to do work for them, and has been doing the same schtick for months… I’m going to start bouncing it back until it feels like equal effort and equal good faith.
Re: Giving out their own awards
Ah, but then there wouldn’t be an enemy, and I’m not sure the Puppy group would survive that. They agree on so little else.
Baen very recently created an award for best MilSF and space opera, so I would expect to see the Puppies bigging that up as “the real award” in the not too remote future. That said, they won’t stop attacking the Hugos because in their minds this is a chance to stick it to the other side in this idiotic little culture war. These days, that’s all that the US conservative mind and its adherents requires in the way of an idea or a cause. Some people have been pearl-clutching about whether the Puppies are conservative, but it really shouldn’t be a debate at this point. Their rhetoric, behavior and attempts to rig the system in favor of a minority of angry white men are absolutely standard issue GOP/Tea Party material, just applied to a more obscure cause than usual.
@SIW
If you’re referring to the other thread, no: People are not pearl-clutching about whether they’re conservative. People are saying not all conservatives are like that. Quite different. A=B, but not all B=A
@Meredith
Even if I agreed with your characterization of the phenomenon, it remains an exercise in making distinctions without a difference The Puppies and their rhetoric are absolutely typical of the way self-identified US conservatives behave these days. No doubt well-intentioned people will attempt to make claims about what the mythical true conservative looked like, but it’s about as meaningful as debating the song of the dodo.
@SIW
We have conservative regulars, and you know perfectly well none of them behave like Puppies. Hardly mythical.
Since I was the one to start that particular line, I think I’d know what I thought, and what I thought was: Puppies might be right-wing, but not all conservatives act like reactionary idiots.
It is devoutly to be hoped that the non-Teabagger segment of conservative US politics can manage to re-assume the position of pre-eminence they once enjoyed with respect to US conservatism. Sadly, the Teabaggers are the ones in the driver’s seat of conservative US politics, and will continue to do so for at least the immediate future. I wish the non-batshit segment of US conservatism all the good fortune in their attempts to take US conservatism back from the Teabaggers.
@Meredith
Every election season, hell, every time the Republican party or its hangers-on do something egregiously crass or bigoted, we find, without fail, a very small group of “true conservatives” who pop up to insist that the overwhelming majority of self-identified conservatives can’t possibly be true conservatives. It is a remarkably silly exercise that proves, if it proves anything, that this well-intentioned little group have a severely outdated understanding of how political terms shift over time as well as their own importance in the political landscape. If you buy Corey Robin’s thesis, they are also utterly deluded as to the basic DNA of conservatism, which, sayeth Robin, was ever reactionary, bigoted and violent. We can play the game a round or two more if you like, but it won’t change the political reality of what US conservatives as a group overwhelmingly say and do, given a chance. The Puppies fit squarely into that configuration, use the same language, tactics and media outlets (hello, Breitbart!). That’s the reality against which the squeaks of ineffectual protest by self-appointed true conservatives need to be measured.
Ready, Player 2?
@SIW
Which is still not the point. No-one is saying the Puppies aren’t conservative, true or otherwise. People are saying that there are conservatives who aren’t like that and talking about all conservatives as if they are isn’t accurate. It is a damn good way to make conservative fans on fence think there might be a grain of truth to Puppy claims of prejudice against conservatives. I prefer not to give them material, personally. I also prefer not to give insult to regulars who haven’t done anything wrong.
@meredith
Perhaps you could argue with the points I made, rather than the case you have developed in your own mind? I am happy to have a discussion of my views, but the ones you are creating seem quite pointlessly trivial and aimed only at being personally offensive.
@SIW
Well, since your original statement decided the way I thought, and you continue to insist that what you thought I thought was what I thought instead of what I’ve told you I thought, I don’t see where we can go from there.
@Meredith
We can stop the No True Conservative game anytime you like. It’s been my position all along that it was a silly game and not worth playing, which is why the US media can never resist it.
@SIW
Since it wasn’t the game, as I have pointed out multiple times now… You are, again, insisting you know what I thought in the face of me telling you, flat out, you were wrong.
Meredith, I agree that US conservatism does indeed possess a non-zero number of non-Teabaggers. The thing is, those guys aren’t in charge. The people who are in charge of US conservatism, very much do possess the Teabagger nature—or, to whatever extent they don’t truly possess said nature, they’re damn sure not making any observable efforts to oppose the Teabaggers, and in most/all cases, are actively coöperating with the Teabagger agenda.
I get that non-Teabagger US conservatives don’t like it when people equate “US conservatism” with Teabaggery. If I was a conservative, I wouldn’t like it myself. But given the demonstrable fact that Teabaggers just plain are setting the agenda for US conservatism, and non-Teabaggers are pretty much ineffectual… well… why does anyone still self-identify as a US conservative? Do you see any reasonable possibility of taking US conservatism back from the batshit Teabaggers anytime soon? If you don’t, what’s the point of self-identifying with a political movement which has evolved into a horribly toxic thing that really doesn’t match your political beliefs any more?
As somebody once said, “I didn’t leave the Republican party—the Republican party left me.”
@Cubist
And my feeling is: Puppies don’t get to claim that they’re the representatatives of conservatism in fandom. Acting like they are is doing them a favour. I don’t intend to do them any favours.
In this specific conversation, I mainly object to SIW repeatedly claiming they knew what I thought and meant better than I did. Not so much.
I certainly have no problem agreeing that the Puppies are somewhere in the mainstream of the movement conservatism that dominates the conservative side of US, British, Aussie, and other politics. But they don’t dominate the spread of conservatives in sf/f fandom, and they very definitely don’t get to declare who else is or isn’t properly conservative. In a bunch of nations’ federal and regional politics, their movement has a chokehold on parties and institutions. Fandom, however, is not part of that. It matters a lot to me to name names properly (rectification of names! endorsed by Chinese dynasty founders since before 212 BC!).
@Bruce Baugh
Exactly.
Does the discussion of whether puppies are the right or dominant kind of conservative address the question of why Baen editors were no-awarded or how anyone’s thinking on this has changed?
@Meredith and Bruce: Agreed. Hell, I still have good friends who are libertarians and the one that I know to have been paying attention was anti-Puppy.
Jim: Both of the libertarian friends who comment regularly on my FB/G+ traffic are likewise as unfriendly to the Puppies as I am, and for substantially the same reasons at that.
@BrianZ I No-Awarded Weisskopf, because I’ve read an awful lot of Baen books, and for years whenever I recommend them to a friend, I admit that the books need an author with a stronger hand (except for Drake and Bujold). That’s been especially true lately with their mid-listers and new authors- It’s sad how many times I’ve run into a misused phrase, or word confused with its homonym, etc.
Not Hugo quality work, and the award is not for ‘lifetime achievement’.
Doh! He got me again! After posting that, it occurred that while following the conversation, I had not seen anyone writing what Brian claimed they were and went to verify-
Surprise! The link just went back to one of Brian’s own posts, where he is responding to a post by Nickpheas that does not at all contain the statement that Brian claims it does.
Sometimes I am a bear of very little brain. I can’t believe that I actual assumed that Brian might be telling the truth and responded to him in good faith.
Before Brian gets here with his sealioning- it is the part where he is claiming that people judged Weisskopf based on the short stories. The post he was responding to was very clearly not saying that.
I agree on #NotAllConservatives. My favorite libertarian lawyer/blogger is not a Puppy and has publicly mocked VD with quotes from Star Trek.
Also, saying that the Tea Party has taken over the Republican Party is not quite correct. They came close, but are being fought off by the establishment. The most obvious recent example are Trump v Fox News and the truly Torgersenian amount of work that people are putting into coming up with new ways of saying that each other aren’t ‘real Republicans’.
Maximillian, yes, I see where my writing was clumsy. I was distracted and on a tablet and should have waited and composed my thoughts better. Sorry.
NickPheas thinks voters judged Weisskopf on the poor quality of the short fiction and related works in the packet. (And JCW.) He is partly right.
But why no-award someone if you haven’t looked at their work? If a publisher fails to include a novel in the packet, should you no-award that too? Can voters holding the quality of the short fiction against Weisskopf articulate what was wrong with the Baen short fiction in the packet, or was it a purely knee jerk response?
Meredith says she no-awarded Weisskopf and Minz but not other non-Baen editors, but now she has changed her thinking. She doesn’t say what she would have done differently, but fine. What’s the solution? Get rid of entire categories when people can’t voluntarily restrain themselves from ranking things they haven’t read and know very little about?
The Hugos function on a loose honor system that if you haven’t read something, you don’t rank it, and No Award is generally only appropriate when you are sure that none of it is worthy of the award.
I’ve protest voted against the Fancast category. I’ve protest voted against fandom’s failure of imagination in nominating dumb blockbusters and endless TV episodes for dramatic presentation. But if people protest vote because of a nominee’s politics, I don’t see how the system can work.
Well, I’m not surprised that you ignored the entire post I wrote answering your question about how I voted in Editor… But just for the record, I’ll note that you are being obviously and clearly dishonest (again/still).
My vote, as I explained, was based on the quality of the editing work I’ve seen out of Baen. Unlike with the posts Meredith wrote that you refuse to read, this was actually in the same thread and even on the same page.
Maximillian, I wasn’t criticizing your individual decision. If you look at my back and forth with Mamatas earlier, you’ll see I think that we should be able to vote for editors based at least in part on their past work, not just what they had that came out in the year of eligibility. Personally, no-awarding an editor without looking at anything that came out in the year of eligibility at all seems extreme, but you’ve explained your reasons.
My question is, if thousands are uninterested in keeping to the basic honor system of generally not ranking things they haven’t read, how can the system function?
“…no-awarding an editor without looking at anything that came out in the year of eligibility at all seems extreme, but you’ve explained your reasons.”
Well, it might be, but that’s not what I did, as I just explained. You are lying again. Obviously, blatantly lying, when the original post is just a scroll or two up the screen.
Why do you feel the need to do that? Do you feel that it’s okay to lie to people you disagree with? Do you have some kind of subconscious filter that twists things for you?
Don’t you ever ask yourself, “why do I need to lie so much to support my opinions?” Have you ever considered choosing opinions that would not require lying? I know you aren’t going to answer this question (again), but I urge you to ponder it.
OK. We were talking earlier about voters who hadn’t read Baen books from 2014. You said you no-awarded after reading Baen books “for years” and finding them to be badly edited, so perhaps I jumped to conclusions. If you meant “including those from 2014,” then I misunderstood and I apologize for not characterizing your views correctly.
One: Making Light is not the WSFS Business Meeting, so again I say: there is no way such a proposal could “pass” since it was never submitted to WSFS. I know certain puppyminded believe in a massive chorfganization of SFWASTORSJWSFSCALIGHTNHZI, but alas, fandom at large has not gotten their collective act together as of yet.
Two: I encourage you to expand your horizons and your creativity, if that’s seriously the “only reasonable supposition” you can come up with as to why multiple nomination rounds did not find favor with an internet crowd. How about voter shedding, lack of efficacy, upped administrator workhours, or timelines? Speaking of “only”s, I spotted another on my way down to the comment box so I might as well scoop that one out of the box as well:
Or when you don’t think the category should be an awarded category at the Hugo Awards. Or when you believe there was a discrepancy with the nomination process. Or when you think there was a particular work more deserving that year that didn’t become a finalist, and you use No Award as a protest vote. Et cetera.
But I’m pretty sure we’ve explained this before. Many times. *yawn*
Wildcat, I just said I made protest votes this year. Look at my ballot.
You say so, and I believe you did. And yet however fine you are with your own protest votes, you question others’ votes:
I think it’s fair for anyone to no award because of background politics or lack of information on a work or any other justification that makes sense in their own mind. It’s their vote. They can do whatever they like with it. Maybe I won’t agree with their reasoning that led them to choose No Award, but I’m not going to criticize them purely for making that choice when the option of No Award is a valid part of the Hugo voting process.
Wildcat, I’m fine with anybody’s protest vote, including Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s. But I wouldn’t want to see thousands of people join Worldcon for the purpose of making a no-award protest vote against Best Fancast either. And if the motivation for the protest votes is political… 2016 is a US election year. Start digging your trenches.
Then you’re not fine with anybody’s protest vote, are you?
It isn’t a matter of what people can and can’t do. It is a matter of what they want to see come out of all this. Should those who answered the call to no-award each ask three friends to come do it again? Those who didn’t have the votes should go raise four or five times as many? If lockstep voting is expected now, should people who plan to force their professional enemies off the ballot start working on even dirtier tricks? Then what? Even with a technical solution preventing a sweep of a major category – if it works – difficult/obscure categories like Best Editor Long Form will be vulnerable. And if N. Ward Esquire keeps winning, why would any editor/etc. even agree to stand?
Brian Z, other than Vox Day, who expects lockstep voting? Not Joe Average Fan. There wasn’t lockstep voting this year. There were people voting their principles (no slates!) and people voting their preferences (this shit sucks!). I defy you to tell one category from the other with any degree of accuracy.
Brian Z, you’re flailing.
I applaud Baen’s decision to include the entire anthology the short story was a part of in the Hugo packet, but that does nothing to support anyone’s nomination for Best Long Form Editor.
Toni Weisskopf, and the other nominated Baen editors, pointed to nothing they individually had specific responsibility for that was published in the relevant year, 2014.
No one judged, or has said that they judged, Toni or any other Baen editor on the short fiction nominees. NickPheas said, and I think he’s right, that reading through all the crap nominated in the short fiction categories used up people’s patience and charity by the time they got to the editor categories. They were by that point less inclined to give anyone the benefit of the doubt–and the Baen editors nominated didn’t point us to anything they could be judged on, individually or collectively.
When a nominated novel isn’t included in the packet, we still know its title and author, and if we haven’t already read it, we can find it elsewhere. None of the Baen editors gave us those pointers.
Sheila Gilbert told us what she worked on, and even included sample chapters. The other nominated long form editor, whose name I am blanking on right now, told us what she worked on.
The Baen editors didn’t. And many people had no patience or charity left to give them the benefit of the doubt. Why should they not have been voted below No Award? They didn’t bother to make a case for themselves at all.
Really, if you write, “Here, all of our books are team-edited,” that practically compels the follow-up, “so it would be absurd for me or any of my co-workers to win a best individual editor award. Therefore we are withdrawing our names from consideration.”
Or if you’re not the EIC but also on the short list, you write, “Here, all of our books are team-edited, so I’m withdrawing my name from individual consideration and urging everyone to vote for my boss. Treat her name as a placeholder for the whole group of us. She will consider a win for her as a win for all of us.”
Contrariwise, what the Baen editors actually said and did amounts to incoherence.
@Jim Henley
Or if you’re not the EIC but also on the short list, you write, “Here, all of our books are team-edited, so I’m withdrawing my name from individual consideration and urging everyone to vote for my boss. Treat her name as a placeholder for the whole group of us. She will consider a win for her as a win for all of us.”
You know, if Baen (or anyone else) had done that for their leading editor, I’d have given it real consideration. When judging Best Editor I don’t have to care whether the majority of books they work on are to my taste or not, and there’s no doubt that Baen do a good job of producing the stuff their readers want. With an appropriate packet submission I’d have given that a fair hearing.
(That leaves aside the question of whether that’s really in the spirit or letter of the Hugo rules, but as it’s totally hypothetical I’m going to ignore that)
Lis Carey,
Well, NickPheas said reading all the short fiction biased people against her, so I said, surely you must mean the Baen short fiction? The point is that no editor in history got more than a few hundred first place votes, and now M. Ward gets 2500? When you explain that she was no-awarded simply because people felt irritated by the time they reached her category, are you condoning that behavior? Is it reasonable? Why?
Your argument about the packet is very dispiriting too. What did Hugo voters do for the more than five decades when there was no packet? Stamp their feet and throw a fit if an author didn’t mail them free copies? No, the opposite: distributing copies and all forms of campaigning was heavily discouraged. Authors started arranging to have free copies mailed only recently, and it was taken over by the Worldcon even more recently than that, yet we have somehow already arrived at a culture where if voters don’t get exactly what they want handed to them on a platter, they can they lash out like spoiled children. Are you defending that? Why?
Because the Hugos are supposed to be about fans coming together to honor their authors and editors and give them a gift. Not about demanding authors and editors give us what we want.
Shall I assume, then, that the terrible things Brian Z implied I said about the Baen editors (“you know what you said”) was just my voting order, which of course he couldn’t quote as evidence because I also put Totaled, Triple Sun, and Ashes to Ashes under No Award, three stories that I’ve explicitly praised in this very thread and therefore couldn’t possibly have a “very low opinion” of?
For the record, for any observing: If it was listed on my ballot at all, I did not have a “very low opinion” of it. The Baen editors in question were under No Award because, unlike the ones who were not, they made it very hard to vote for them at all. Jim Henley’s excellent comment above says it better than anything else I’ve seen or written so far.
From now on, Best Editor Long, at least, is going to go under No Award and any amendment to remove it entirely and replace it with a special award given out as the proverbial gold watch, as Nick Mamatas suggests here, will get my support.
I have not yet decided about Best Editor Short. That seems to me to be substantially easier to judge, but I think I would prefer “Best Magazine or Anthology”, either as a combined award or two separate ones, to be awarded to the Editor(s) responsible. If any such proposal comes up, again, it will get my support.
@Brian Z
No, you didn’t. We can read your comments, you know.
I also find your focus of Weisskopf (and, sometimes, Minz) interesting. There were other editors on the ballot.
Meredith, thanks for elaborating. No awarding the entire category because you just want to get rid of it is fine. But is that necessary? It is a tradition with decades of history – should it just be thrown out? Another reasonable possibility is voters like you and me who don’t know what to do with it can leave it blank and let people who have an opinion vote in that category. But I’m afraid that may not be possible any more in this charged atmosphere.
I do consider ranking something low, especially lower than No Award, to be having a low opinion of it. If I ranked one another story higher than another, I would say I had a higher opinion of one and a lower opinion of the other. If I feel I couldn’t assess some items fairly, I’d just leave them, along with No Award off the ballot. Of course that is a cultural attitude and rule of thumb that is informed by my history and outlook. It is a common one for a lot of Hugo voters, since I believe the instructions even say that you aren’t supposed to rank things you haven’t read. You of course have your own attitude informed by your history and perspective. These things can’t really be legislated, and of course there is no technical fix for it, but at least it can be talked about.
Why is it useful to keep hammering at a point that I’m not even making? I’ve said what I think. If you think I didn’t argue that point well, fine. I’ve already said I was out and was on a tablet and shouldn’t have typed something in a hurry. I even apologized. Would you like me to apologize again?
What does that mean? Is it a code? I’d hate to willfully misread it. 🙂
I didn’t know how to vote in the editor categories so I punted. I certainly think Weisskopf can be commended for her editorial vision and service to the genre and she deserves to be a serious contender. Anything wrong with that?
@Brian Z
Best Editor Long doesn’t even have one decade of history. It was introduced in 2007.
Your assumptions about my opinions were easily disproved by reading this thread.
Meredith, by all means, get rid of Long Form and go back to one simple Best Editor award – I’m all for that.
It seems very interesting that some believe ranking things implies having a higher opinion of one than another and others don’t see it that way. Does it imply we don’t agree on the meaning of ballot itself?
Brian Z, as per your usual practice, you ignore what I really said, and lie to claim that I said something else.
With individual works, whether fiction or non-fiction, we always have the title and author, and if the work isn’t in the packet, we can go find it elsewhere. The packet is nice, a real benefit, but it’s not necessary for us to be able to judge those categories.
Best Editor Short Form is similar. It’s an easy matter to determine what magazines or anthologies a nominee has edited in a given year.
But with Best Editor Long Form, we don’t know what books an editor has worked on, unless they tell us. And since the Hugo category of Best Editor Long Form is more recent in origin than the Hugo packet, it’s no use your whining about “what did voters do before”.
Nobody cheated Toni and the other Baen editors out of a fair shot, except Toni and the other Baen editors.