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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I wasn’t able to check File770 last night (clearly too many of us trying to check), but saw most of the fan award info from Susan Palwick on Facebook before falling asleep……for some reason, I woke up at 2:30 am which meant I could check and see the results for all the categories. And I did.
I was disappointed Goblin Emperor did not win, but believe that TBP is an important winner, both because of the genre and because it is a translation. I’m used to most of my favorite/important books/authors not winning prizes. I’m glad Addison’s work was nominated for the Hugo (and that it won other prizes).
And most important (and this is what some people don’t realize), the book is still here, it’s still here for me to read (and to teach, especially if I can get that “women authors after tolkien” special topics course scheduled), and to talk about with friends (and to read some of the excellent fanfic on A03).
I have been interested in the range of emotional responses to the “No Award” prizes I’m seeing from from people who share the common feature of being against slates: from, yes, extreme happiness and exuberant gloating, through a lot of states inbetween, with the sort of opposite “not happy that it had to be done, but grimily determined that it was necessary.” My ballot was “No Award” over the majority of slate nominations (and nope, I didn’t read them–after having the chance to read multiple reviews of them here and elsewhere, I didn’t see any need because I am against slates of any sort). I didn’t feel any great emotional response–probably because I’m swamped with work (will not mention S word!) and a bit stressed with other things–and this has been going on a while.
But I was glad to see EPH passed, and very glad Helsinki won (and my housemate thinks it would be fun to do Finland in 2017 yay). I don’t see this year as the destruction of the Hugos, or SF, or western civilization blahblahblah (good grief, the whole right wing rodomontade of the communists—–>hippies——>socialists——.cultural marxists ROONING Western Civilization has been slathered all over the educational and cultural spaces wherein I hang out since the 1980s). I do plan to read and nominate and vote in future.
And I am extremely happy at finding the group on File 770 (and your incredible additions to my reading lists). Thank you for that, the great reading, the fantastic filking !!!, and the deft handling of trolls.
Lorcan Nagle –
Woah, that’s way too rational and doesn’t justify any sort of outrage or imaginary offense. Take it back and add some conspiracy theories to it and some passive aggressive insults.
I’m glad to hear people are giving other people The Keys to the Kingdom. What a nice thing to go–I’m not a huge fan of the one or two Garth Nix novels I tried to read, but it’s always nice to share books one loves.
Actually my response to “haha you gave us the keys to the kingdom” is WTF are you trying to metaphor, dude?
You know those days after a party where you wake up with a hangover and there’s someone in your bed whose name you don’t know?
Evidently last night after the Hugo ceremony I resubscribed to Twitter, and followed a bunch of SF&F writers. OK. I can deal with this. After coffee.
Steve Moss on August 23, 2015 at 11:48 am said:
I watched the awards ceremony, looked at the stats, and read this blog.
It’s disappointing that “trufen” saw fit to No Award people like Jim Butcher, Toni Weisskopf, Anne Sowards, etc.
OK let’s have fun with this. Steve, let’s see if you actually thought about this, or if you’re just repeating talking points from another website.
You say Butcher, Weisskopf and Sowards are Hugo worthy? Tell us WHY they are Hugo Worthy. Tell us what they did that was worth awarding them a Hugo. Be detailed, but concise.
Note: Comparisons to other nominees or mentions of sales figures will result in an immediate disqualification.
OK, go!
Well, it’s clearly a conspiracy against cyberpunk authors trying something new. So I’m going to set up a slate: upset mirrorshades. We’re going to make sure every Shadowrun novel that comes out this year is on the ballot next year.
io9 has a list up of what the Hugo ballot would have looked like without slate nominees.
According to the article, Dave Freer would have made the ballot for Best Fan Writer. Mainly, I’m sure the more Rabid of puppies will be happy about who they kept off the ballot. It reads like a who’s who of the puppy enemies.
Stoic Cynic on August 23, 2015 at 10:06 am said:
@RAH
Down the street from a place I used to live there is an elementary school. It frequently got graffiti tagged by the local gangs. And the school kept sanding it down and repainting it.
Obviously the blame is on the school for declaring war on the taggers, right? If they only would have left the graffiti in place, on a building the taggers owned as much as any other member of the community, none of the unpleasantness would have been necessary, right?
Is that really the mindset you’re reaching for?
@Jack Lint
According to the article, Dave Freer would have made the ballot for Best Fan Writer.
I doubt it. Oh, I doubt that sincerely. Even with the support of one of the slates behind him, he only got three more nominating ballots than Mixon.
And the Rabid Puppies alternative, Dave Enness, finished behind four other candidates below the cut.
On the other hand, 70 votes would have been enough to keep all of the Fan Writer also-rans other than Mixon off the ballot.
Beale can maybe do it next year, depending on how many people stick around for the next volley of his culture war. If he does, EPH is a shoe-in to be ratified in 2016 and then the slate problem goes away.
Regarding editors: I think there is a real problem here. It’s clear that we can’t actually assess what the editor does. Now that actually applies to short form editors as well, and there we normally just evaluate the product, the magazine or anthology (if we have a copy of it, of course, and if it isn’t a co-edited anthology where it’s impossible to know what each editor did). We take it that we can hold the editor responsible for the whole thing, the selection of material as well as the actual editorial input.
On that basis, the best Long Form editor would be the one with the best list. Only – you’d have to read an enormous amount to know who had the best list. I agree with those who say it can’t just be the editor of the best book – you might have edited the best book while another editor massively outshines you overall. But then, how can we assess it? Particularly well-read people may be in a position to nominate, but at the voting stage we aren’t all able to read enough.
I feel the editor awards are what Geoff Pullum of Language Log would call nerdview – they assume an insider point of view, as if we all knew one another. That’s true even of Short Form Editor; the appearance of a list of names, with no indication of what they do, gives a feeling of ‘but surely you ought to know!’. But there the problem is quite easily remedied; with Long Form editors, not so much.
My feeling is that Short Form Editor should be split into Best Magazine and Best Anthology, and I’d support cmm’s idea of turning Long Form Editor into a different kind of award.
@RAH
What would be the alternative for WC voters, really? Pretend that what the Puppies nominated was really great work? That would do more to encourage their bad behavior than the drubbing they received this time around.
It’s entirely possible for the Puppies to sweep the nominations next year as well. However, EPH was voted in so after that there will generally always be a few legitimate nominees besides the Puppy nominees. So we’ll dig around the damage and vote for those people. The Puppies can keep voting for their friends and other bad work as long as they can stand the criticism and embarrassment but the Hugos will go on without them.
@Andrew M
I’d support cmm’s idea of turning Long Form Editor into a different kind of award.
Curiously, in previous years there was a category for Best Publisher.
On the editor awards: It’s been a while since I participated in the Hugo process, and the “long form/short form” distinction is after my time, but its first iteration was just Best Professional Editor (changed in 1973 from Best Magazine), and for years it would go to whomever was running the most popular magazine–which generally meant either Analog or Asimov’s. With the introduction of the long/short divide, Long Form started going to people who were known to be senior editors at major publishing houses. I suspect that the perception was that these people were somehow responsible for the overall quality of Tor or Ace or DAW–not an unreasonable idea–though I notice that the winners have also all been fairly (or very) active and visible at conventions and thus known to fandom as editors.
But just what constitutes a Best Editor? I’ve been hanging around the professional end of the field for a long time, and I’ve seen the job of the editor change. The hands-on-the-manuscript part has shrunk in order to make room for not only more acquisition activity but all manner of other in-house processes–an editor is a book’s or a writer’s “champion,” and I’ve been told of endless meetings with art and marketing people.
And as a reviewer, I’ve seen books that I thought could have used a stronger editorial hand. I once remarked that a book I rather liked by a writer I follow could have used another editorial pass, and the senior editor (a long-time acquaintance) replied, rather hurt, “But that’s one of the ones I did edit!” I suspect that the more senior an editor becomes, the less time there is for hands-on guidance and revision of any given book, even as more effort must be devoted to overseeing the whole line and development of the artist-as-product.
BTW, the notion of having editors submit work samples assumes that 1) the entire range of work actually done by an editor is sample-able and 2) a miscellaneous population of lay persons will be able to judge the quality of, say, a marked-up manuscript. I gotta say, I have serious doubts.
(While I was composing this, Andrew M posted an interesting view, particularly his last paragraph.)
“Jim Henley on August 23, 2015 at 9:59 am said: @AIrboy: How many different blogs are you posting that identical comment to? I count two so far, but I’m not doing a systematic survey.”
I think 4. I’ve had a bit of time to study the No Award votes. So I’m providing the update below.
The SJWs slate voted “No Award” 2,674 votes in protest of people they don’t like slate voting. Why 2,674 slate SJW votes?
Skin Game: No Award: 2674 (Butcher has no big fan connection)
Mike Resnik editor: No Award 2672 (Resnik has won many times before)
Totaled: No Award 3,053 (spoken of highly even by SJWs)
Toni Weisskoph: No Award 2,496
An objective analysis would suggest that there were anywhere from 2,496 to 3,053 hard core, SJW “no award everything as a slate vote” for people we dislike who slate nominated someone.
So approximately 2,500 to 3,050 slate voted “no award” because they were not part of the SJW clique.
And once again for people who wish to vent their spleen without knowing any objective facts. I’m a first time Hugo voter who read all of the nominees and voted what I liked. I also did not participate in nominating.
I find it incredibly rude and bullying to cheer “no award” when potential winners are in the audience. But mob mentality can easily creep up on crowds of like thinking people. That is just nasty behavior.
@Airboy: You don’t have standing to call other people rude when you throw around terms like “SJW” in a public forum. If you rein in that petulance, we can discuss the merits of your interpretation of why people voted the way they did. But until you do that, you’re just a guy pasting up the same flyer over and over on other people’s walls.
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Airboy, or, just maybe you could listen to people who said that they voted against them because they were part of a slate.
Of course crazy ass conspiracy theories about how it’s all a plot to keep out people that fandom doesn’t like are WAY more reasonable, right? I mean there’s no way that you could be making factually inaccurate statements.
Because, funny thing, Toni Weisskopf sure has a lot of hugo noms for someone fandom doesn’t like. Hell, Mike Resnick has more Hugo award noms than ANYONE. EVER. You going to tell me that the fen dislike MIke?
Nope. Said it yourself. Because of the slates. Quite simple, actually. And democratic.
And I bet the puppies were predicting we’d be sore losers.
“And I bet the puppies were predicting we’d be sore losers.”
No, quite a few of them were predicting this outcome. Maybe not the applause, but the outcome.
@Drew – I’m finding puppy interpretations of the outcome veering wildly into all sorts of strange and unpleasant places.
@Rose: You know those days after a party where you wake up with a hangover and there’s someone in your bed whose name you don’t know?
Evidently last night after the Hugo ceremony I resubscribed to Twitter, and followed a bunch of SF&F writers. OK. I can deal with this. After coffee.
Promiscuous following on the internet! Mercy on us! (I tend to rss feed blogs because I tried The Twitter, and The Twitter broke me, but it’s the same thing.)
Emotions running high, I see a lovely phrased entry, and BAM, I feed that baby.
It’s actually fairly easy to access what the *short form* editors do. We judge that on how much we like a particular SF magazine or anthology. If you think that Lightspeed is publishing the best short sf around today then you vote for the editor of Lightspeed. If you think that the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is publishing the best short SF out there today, then you vote for the editor of F&SF. Original anthologies can be evaluated this way too. It’s all a question of what source for short fiction the Hugo voter enjoys most.
Drew on August 23, 2015 at 1:41 pm said:
True, but… is there any outcome which the Pups didn’t predict and/or claim as a Puppy ‘victory condition’?
I am somewhat bitter over Invisible edited by Jim C. Hines not making the “Best Related Works” list because slate.
Nigel,
No more strange and unpleasant than some of the interpretations about their motivations.
It’s been an…interesting few months to be sure, and the next few months aren’t going to be any better either.
airboy:
You say that the vote for “no award” was because the candidates weren’t part of an “SJW clique”. Does that mean that every candidate who was voted above No Award were SJW:s? How then do you define SJW to be able to say this?
I just looked at Tobias Buckell’s alternate Hugo ballot and nerd raged.
City of Stairs was my favorite book out of all the ones I read this year. That means I liked it more than Perdido Street Station, Dreamsnake, The Three-Body Problem, and the Inheritance trilogy. It’s that good.
GAAAAAHHH
@Drew – er, no. The stated motivations of the puppies were strange and varied and unpleasant, so it was pretty difficult not to interpret them as such.
(I did see a tweet from Nick Mamatas observing puppy nominees behaving in a very sporting manner after the ceremony, so good for them.)
Any thoughts on what the Hare Krishna thing meant? I can imagine a lot of interpretations.
@rrede – “I’m not a huge fan of the one or two Garth Nix novels I tried to read, ”
Wait, what? Really?
You name is Wrongfan and I claim my five pounds!
Or, alternatively, do you remember which ones you tried? I felt the ‘Days of the Week’ series was good, but not great, and felt more aimed at the YA end… But Sabriel et al were AMAZING. Loved sharing those with my little girl.
Slate doesn’t mean “single thing that lots of people independently decided to vote for” – its a deliberate campaign, usually involving multiple candidates. The only slates were Puppy slates.
If you want to have a discussion, stop labelling people with silly acronyms. Listen to what they say and watch what they do rather than making shit up and then saying it applies. Stop shoving a large group of people with disparate politics into a box and insisting it must apply just because they didn’t like you behaving undemocratically and rudely.
Honestly.
Cubist,
Once the initial nominations were announced and the backlash began? No, I don’t think so.
That was a situation where if they won some categories, they won. That type of “Victory” may have had more meaning, if there is such a thing.
I think once it became clear there was a large group of voters out there who weren’t going to read any of the works and were voting No Award over everything, or were only reading non puppy works and then no awarding everything else, that became a different sort of victory.
I don’t think any of the myriad sides involved this year have anything to be proud of really.
Whym –
I would’ve voted on it. Plus it’s chock full of action and the kind of good old fashion fun missing from the Puppy nominees.
Meredith,
“Listen to what they say and watch what they do rather than making shit up and then saying it applies.”
Otherwise those old, male, white, misogynistic, racist, Nazi’s who marry a person to use them as a shield to hide their true feelings might take what your saying the badly?
That sort of “Honest”?
Or a different type?
Tron Guy has written a post at Black Gate about how conservatives aren’t welcomed in sci-fi in response to the earlier Dear Puppies: Your Taste Sucks.
It’s basically nonsense and what he said earlier over at GRRM’s blog. Though if that’s how many conservatives will react, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
@Andrew
I’m sure you’ll have a citation available for when I said any of those things. I’ve commented here a fair amount. If not, I don’t see the relevance when someone did, in fact, turn up right here spouting what I was criticising, unlike your straw man.
@Maximilian: The Abhorsen series. Vaguely remembering–the first focused on a female protagonist, and I didn’t much like the character or the world, but the shift to male in a later one (very vague) made me grumpy-faced.
@Jay Maynard doesn’t have an argument in his piece. He just has feelings. It’s like a conservative’s parody of how they think left-wing “victimology” works. Except he really means it.
@Andrew: Tell you what. I’m happy to grant there’s been some heated rhetoric on both sides. So what of it? What’s your point?
Well we have seen a lot of Affective pro-puppy arguments but not any Effective ones.
Curiously, in previous years there was a category for Best Publisher.
Are you sure? I know that Locus has one.
I actually think Best Publisher would be even more problematic. One would need to read even more to make a fair assessment; and there would be fewer publishers for it to go round. Doesn’t the same publisher always win the Locus award? One can imagine what the Puppies would make of that.
As I understand it, BELF exists because it’s felt that book editors, as people, deserve an award. I agree that they do; but I’m doubtful that the Hugo voters are the best qualified people to give them one.
Please can everyone try not to use an unadorned ‘conservative’ label, that is buying into the puppy rhetoric IMO.
We all know there are lots of conservative people out there who did not follow the puppy’s barkers-in-chief. We all know that there are conservatives out there who do not want to treat certain subsets of humanity as lesser than they are. Finally we all know that there are conservative authors who we often seriously consider (and vote for) in the Hugos.
Personally I would prefer to describe the problem as far-right with or without a conservative suffix.
@Jim Henley:
That is what bugs me so. He just asserts, e.g. claiming that the Puppy Slate is representative of conservative taste. Pretty much nothing he says is true or backed up at all.
It’s just so, so petty and stupid. And tbh unintentionally suggests he is in fact racist, sexist, and so on by claiming that unnamed folks have won awards primarily because they are part of “an oppressed minority.”
Camestros Felapton on August 23, 2015 at 2:43 pm said:
Well we have seen a lot of Affective pro-puppy arguments but not any Effective ones.
Call the burn unit!
@Andrew M
Curiously, in previous years there was a category for Best Publisher.
Best SF Book Publisher. Ace won it in 1964, Ballantine in 1965. It may have been short-lived but it was a thing.
This is the ideal outcome for rabid puppies. Their logo from long ago shows the award getting blown up and that is what happened.
The message to moderates is that leftists are totalitarians who will countenance no ideological diversity. Rabids understood what the moderates did not.
You SJWs (and I mean this that in the most derogatory sense) are not winning the way you think you are. People are just dropping out, checking out of society completely.
SF/Fantasy sales have collapsed:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–y1o0h0GN–/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/18bwtk9xpocmfpng.png
You know what has shown the opposite trend? Gun sales. Gun sales are up by a factor of 10 since 1985 (8% compounded for 30 years!) I am a pacifist who does not own a gun, but what does it say when there are more guns sold (17mm/yr) than all SF/Fantasy books combined (13mm/yr)? In a healthy society, the numbers would be 100 to 1 in the opposite direction.
Trust in all institutions is at an all time low. Social capital is far less than it has ever been in my memory. Americans have already stockpiled enough stuff to wage war for a thousand years if guns are banned tomorrow.
The building of institutions, the providing of true goodwill gestures, true sharing, needs to come from the left. The left dominates the institutions while trust and respect for institutions (courts, media, government, universities) is at the lowest level in American history.
In your little field, you had the chance to show some goodwill. The guy who led the sad puppies was a really decent guy. Way better than most us. While you were busy collecting votes to no award everything, he went off to fight ISIS. In other words he is fighting actual practiced intolerance of every stripe. I feel ashamed before a great man such as Brad Torgersen although I hardly know him.
Wikipedia says there was a Best SF Book Publisher Hugo from between 1964-1969
@Jack Lint
sfadb only shows it for 1964 and 1965
Glad EPH passed. It’s a partial solution, at best, until there are more people making nominations. The time until the Hugos recover is basically dependent on two things:
1) How long that dickweasel VD keeps gaming the system
2) how much in lockstep his lickspittle minions are
Looking at the numbers, EPH won’t actually help that much if VD
Unfortunately, I see a bunch of No Awards stretching into the future in the smaller categories – he hasn’t got the votes to No Award it himself, but he can still ram the ballot full of shit and have the same outcome.
Maybe he’ll find a more constructive hobby, like pulling the wings off flies?
@Jack Lint
Wikipedia says there was a Best SF Book Publisher Hugo from between 1964-1969
Well the Hugos site doesn’t show any nominees after 1965. Not that I would ever doubt the word of Wikipedia on anything, mind you.
That is a sticky point, isn’t it? A bunch of the Puppies associate with conservatism but the actual movement doesn’t follow those principals. For example, if the Puppies cared about quality work being recognized they would simply nominate it and not whine when it wasn’t awarded based on merit. If they thought the Hugos were biased they would work to create an award that recognized quality rather than try to hijack the Hugos. Instead, they blame others for their failures in quality and try to use Hugo rules to get recognized instead of producing quality work. That suggests that the Puppies are just too lazy to create their own award and want to steal prestige from the Hugos rather than do something to recognize their own work.