230 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/10 Plan Whine from Outer Space”

1. I’m preparing my longlist for nominations, and it stubbornly remains long. One thing I do need to do is sort the short fiction into the proper categories. I think it will be easier to decide what to nominate after the holiday rush.

   Thanks for all the suggestions and reviews!

2. @Nigel: That makes perfect sense. Revelation says the First Beast will “ride out as a conqueror and to conquer.” Obviously, Biblical literalists interpret “as a conqueror and to conquer” as “big fat hippie peacenik” because that’s just straightforward.

3. @Greg Hullender:

   The ravings of the pups of yesteryear are always entertaining, but the thing to watch is issue (9) Puppy Time. They’re getting ready to put together their 2016 slates.

   That means that in the next couple of months, we need to do everything we can think of to encourage people to make nominations–especially in the short-fiction categories that were so easy for the slates to dominate last year.

   People should nominate stuff they like if they’ve joined Worldcon. The true lesson of Hu-ghazi is there’s no point holding yourself to some arbitrary standard of encyclopedic knowledge of works published in the year. And bless Rocket Stack Rank and everyone who has brought visibility to a broad range of work, especially in the short-form categories. That said.

   1. No one has a duty to nominate works for the Hugos.
   2. We are not going to increase the non-slate nominating pool fivefold in one year. And that’s what it would take to counteract a disciplined slate, as has been noted many times. I realize this is a counsel of futility, but it’s also a counsel of don’t be unreasonably hopeful.

4. Second, and what was LC smokin? He needs to stop talkin’ when the spittle starts flyin’.

5. @ Jim – Some Catholics in Ireland are getting weirdly loony and hardline about stuff, particularly abortion. Well, they were always hardline about it but they’re getting even harder and linier.

6. Beth in MA on December 11, 2015 at 7:12 am said:

   ….One thing I do need to do is sort the short fiction into the proper categories.

   This is, in all honesty, one area where the Hugos are showing their age. The distinction between “Short Story”, “Novelette” and “Novella” made a lot more sense when stories had to be physically fitted into a fixed amount of area on a fixed number of pages… these days, it’s an arbitrary-looking subdivision inside a general “short fiction” category, and it’s a bloomin’ nuisance for potential nominators.

   (Given the whole “fixed amount of space inside a single issue” thing, I’d bet it’s a lot easier to look at a physical issue of, say, Analog, and work out which category each story falls in. But I actually can’t remember the last time I looked at a physical magazine… I know it must be less than ten years ago, but the exact date eludes me.)

   I’m not sure what’s to be done about this – it’s certainly the wrong time to be crying out for the Hugos to be revised for the digital age, there is enough Sturm und Drang over them already. But it’s something to bear in mind, I suppose.

7. [7] Good for Rachel Bloom! Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is very smart, very funny and often uncomfortably honest. While most sci-fi people know her for ‘Fuck Me Ray Bradbury’, her entire musical collection is dangerously ear-wormy.

   [8-10] *sigh*

   I would like to see the Hugos either returned to the old worth, or destroyed utterly.

   Again, the Hugos aren’t the national award of sci-fi. They are the award of Worldcon and reflect Worldcon’s views and tastes. If you don’t like it, either get off your ass and start a cultural change by volunteering and attending Worldcon, or go make your own awards delivered by the cons you like and snipe at Worldcon from. That’s the basic fact that I just can’t get over. Their rallying cry is that they want to take the award away from the people who started it and made it prestigious over 65 years so they can have it reflective their own narrow values. Yeah, that’s a moral argument.

8. I think JCW’s logic on “the award I earned” makes sense if you grant him one stipulation, which means it doesn’t make sense. Because the stipulation is that:

   Not only was No Award an invalid vote, but the preferences of those who voted No Award were invalid. Their wishes do not count at any point.

   Consider the Novella vote. One Bright Star led the race for Position 1, if you don’t count No Award votes. The reason Flow won the race for Position 2 is that 360 No Award voters picked it as their second choice. But these were the votes of Christ-hating CHORFs who chose Flow not because they considered it the best of a bad lot but purely to spite JCW and lead their gay friends to a life of dissolution and suicide. So their preferences should not count.

   It’s possible to infer what the voting should have looked like without the CHCs by comparing the relative gains between Pass 1 and Pass 4 for One Bright Star and Flow, and adding those to the votes each had in the race for Position 1:

   Flow gains 279 votes (1179 – 900)
   One Bright Star gains 438 votes (1005 – 567)

   Flow goes from 540 (Pos 1 Pass 1) to 819
   One Bright Star goes from 556 (Pos 1 Pass 1) to 994

   One Bright Star wins! This is not really a surprise. Of the other three losing stories, two are JCWs and they broke almost 85% in aggregate for One Bright Star across the passes. Kratman voters didn’t favor Flow over One Bright Star, so in this alternate CHC-free world, Flow never overtakes OBS in subsequent passes.

   So I submit it’s clear why JCW thinks he “earned” a novella Hugo. He won the votes of people he thinks deserve a voice fair and square. Others might view this as motivated reasoning though.

   ETA: The arithmetic for other categories is left as an exercise for the reader.

9. @Dex: Remember, when JCW talks about “the Hugos returned to their old worth”, he’s speaking from a position of complete ignorance. He has loudly and vociferously condemned books like Ancillary Justice while also proudly noting that he hasn’t read them. I recall that when asked, he admitted that he had read almost none of the books that had won or been nominated for the Hugo since 2000. In short, JCW doesn’t know what the Hugos are like now, because he hasn’t bothered to inform himself. He’s just an empty blowhard who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

10. Steve Wright: Yes, it’s a problem. I think abolishing the distinctions wouldn’t be a good idea, because there is such a lot of material in these categories, and indeed a lot of plausibly nominable material, and throwing them together would mean an even greater scattering of votes than exists now. But the existing distinctions seem arbitrary.

    I think there is one meaningful distinction that could be drawn, and it comes somewhere in the middle of the current Novella class, separating the ‘thin book’ kind of novella from the ‘long short story’ kind that would appear in magazines and anthologies. [Insert story about Patrick Rothfuss which I have already told a few times.] But below that, there are just short fictions of various lengths.

    One class with ten nominees and two winners? Or some other principle of distinction? But what? (Certainly not SF v. fantasy; you will keep bumping up against stories which confound that distinction.)

11. Is it just me, or does everything JCW writes read as though it were lifted directly from Ignatius Reilly?

12. [1] It seems to me that there’s a huge individual variance in how spoiler sensitive people are, which could totally wreck your data on a small sample set. I’m extremely spoiler-insensitive. A plot point has to be at the “Luke, I am your father” level before I even recognize it as something that could be a spoiler, so apparently (Paulcarp tells me) I spoil people all the time without even meaning to.

    [8] I have a certain morbid fascination when I see people working SO HARD to construct obviously false narratives about well-known recent events.

    The Puppy initiative “rocked you like a hurricane” — implying that they were entirely successful in their goals, implying that completely dominating the Hugo ballot and annoying the majority of Worldcon fandom was exactly what they wanted to do. Why would anybody want that? Who knows?

    “the CHORFs ran a lying media smear campaign” — “CHORF” is an interesting insult of choice here, because it’s pure Puppy jargon, and using it instantly marks you as one of them. “Running a campaign” suggests central organization, as if there were a self-identified group of CHORFs sending out press releases and the like, but the closest thing to anti-puppy central that they can point to is this blog right here, or possibly Making Light. Which means that this “lying media smear campaign” consists pretty much entirely of providing actual Sad and Rabid quotes, plus links to the source material, and people arguing about stuff in the comments. I’m still waiting for compelling data on how providing a direct quote from someone constitutes lying about them or their positions.

    “handed out wooden butt holes” — this is a gross and willful misrepresentation of the intended meaning of the asterisks. I’m still not sure that the asterisk joke was appropriate, but it was an obvious reference to the asterisk as it is used in sports, to denote a record or victory that is questionable because of possible corruption or drug abuse or the like.

    “while block voting No Award” — if there’s nothing wrong with bloc voting during the nominating process, there’s equally nothing wrong with bloc voting No Award. If there’s something wrong with bloc voting, then this is a tacit admission of wrongdoing. Make up your mind.

    “to keep out barbarian Wrongfans having Wrongfun” — self-important melodrama, obviously, but what could it actually mean? The absolute extent of a No Award vote means “no, you don’t get a Hugo.” There’s just no reasonable way to spin that as some kind of injustice or insult. Most people haven’t won a Hugo and never will.

    [10]

    I am not sure if we can sweep the nominations again, but I would like to see the Hugos either returned to the old worth, or destroyed utterly. Leaving them in the clammy webbed hands of Christ-hating America-hating, Science-hating, Literature-hating Morlocks is unimaginable to me.

    Make note, any apologists who want to try to claim that dominating the ballot was an accident, and not their intended outcome.

    Taken with [8] above, I remain astonished at how eager our lead Puppies are to directly insult and alienate such a large swath of their potential readership. It seems as if, even now, they must still imagine that the Worldcon fans who voted No Award are some tiny insignificant minority (of people who hate Christ AND America AND science AND literature, because of course that’s the only reason anybody would ever hate JCW’s work).

    Math: not a Puppy strong point.

    [13]
    @Cat

    I suppose there are people who collect pens who will treasure such an item and be happy to make the exchange.

    Oh, you have no idea. Specialty fountain pens get up into the $50,000 range at the high end, and $1,500 is routine.

    [17] Very helpful, thank you.

13. As far as I can see the Puppy thing is has 3 main components: (1) careerist self-promotion by a few writers; (2) US political culture war tribalism; (3) miscellaneous disgruntlement about the Hugo Awards and the state of fandom on the part of various people who gravitate to the “opposition”. The first 2 are the most important. It’s the writers who organize the slates and the tribalism that keeps people fired up.

    Fwiw…

14. 2. We are not going to increase the non-slate nominating pool fivefold in one year. And that’s what it would take to counteract a disciplined slate, as has been noted many times.

    Jim, that is not the only thing that will help. Lots of people leave blank spaces on their nominating ballot, because as you mention they are not as widely read as they would like and only wish to nominate the best of the best. If those people (that is to say, me) fill up the ballot by whatever means they feel is ethical and appropriate, the power of block votes will be reduced.

    What constitutes ethical and appropriate in filling out the ballot this year is a question for another day.

15. Taken with [8] above, I remain astonished at how eager our lead Puppies are to directly insult and alienate such a large swath of their potential readership.

    It seems like it has become accepted by the Pups that the people they are insulting and alienating don’t actually read, despite all evidence to the contrary. They’ve gone from asserting that no one actually likes the books that they vote for in awards voting, to asserting that no one actually reads them, to asserting that people who are voting simply don’t read and just vote per the instructions of some imaginary cabal. They aren’t worried about alienating readers, because they don’t think they are doing so. They’re dead wrong, but being dead wrong has never stopped the Pups from living in a fantasy world of their own creations before.

16. @Jim Henley

    We are not going to increase the non-slate nominating pool fivefold in one year. And that’s what it would take to counteract a disciplined slate, as has been noted many times.

    I think a factor of two would do it. Chaos Horizon’s numbers suggest something along those lines. I think a couple of other things will work in our favor this year as well:

    1) People will decline the puppies’ invitation to be on their slate. Maybe they’ll switch to slating works without asking the authors, but in the past they made a big deal of the fact that everyone on their slates had accepted the invitation. That may make it a lot harder for them to get complete slates.

    2) The Sad pack seems to be at pains to distance itself from the Rabid pack. As Chaos Horizons observes in the same article, the puppies are most effective when the two packs work together, so they’re giving up a lot of their power with this.

    3) I think it’ll be a harder sell for them this year. Last year they told people that if they could just get “good” stories on the ballot, the members would vote for them. This year, they’re trying to sell “vote for things you know will lose, just so there won’t be awards this year.”

    Finally, even EPH needs a certain number of nominations to work. Even with EPH, the puppies would have swept the novelette category this past year. Think about that. We really do need a strong campaign to urge people to read and nominate.

    And, as you say, don’t hesitate to nominate just because you didn’t read 600 stories this year. If you read it and you loved it, that’s all it takes.

17. Steve Wright on December 11, 2015 at 7:35 am said:

    Beth in MA on December 11, 2015 at 7:12 am said:

    ….One thing I do need to do is sort the short fiction into the proper categories.

    This is, in all honesty, one area where the Hugos are showing their age. The distinction between “Short Story”, “Novelette” and “Novella” made a lot more sense when stories had to be physically fitted into a fixed amount of area on a fixed number of pages… these days, it’s an arbitrary-looking subdivision inside a general “short fiction” category, and it’s a bloomin’ nuisance for potential nominators.

    It’s also been pointed out that the Hugo standards for the minimum wordcount to be considered “novels” (40,000 words) is barely half the length of the shortest SFF novels these days (authors are sometimes advised to never write fewer than 75,000 words, and the average novel length today goes up to 120,000 words, almost twice that for fantasy).

    In other words, the nominating categories are very heavily skewed towards shorter fiction, which is minutely parsed in terms of length, but the category “novels” contains a vast range of story lengths, starting at the low end with stories shorter than any published novel today.

18. (1) SPOILERS SPOIL
    I’d really like to read that study, I don’t trust press releases, they have a tendency to go for the hype. I, personally, am fairly neutral about spoilers and I don’t consider that I “have a low need for cognition” or even a neutral need for cognition.

    PUPPY NEWS
    Meh, same old, same old. I wonder if they’ll finally get around to actually discussing stories when they do their pre-nomination nomination slate for the Hugos.
    Correia and Wright are playing their characters exactly as written with little artistry or creativity. Fairly wooden interpretations. Sad.

19. I belong to a science fiction reading group and have talked to a couple people there with the intention of urging them to nominate. One guy just said “Hugos, so what” (a valid point of view, of course). Another guy has been following Puppy news with interest and indignation, but is sure that slates will completely lock up the ballots again this year, so isn’t going to bother nominating.

    We have a meeting on Monday (discussing Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink) and I’m thinking of mentioning it there, maybe trying to get people together for a separate discussion. Any ideas for trying to get people involved? I’m not going to ask people who are completely uninterested to plunk down $50, but if undecided…

20. I’ve been rereading a chunk of Laden Universe books to recover from some of the dark stuff I’ve read lately. If anyone hasn’t read it, they should – it’s action oriented books written in a comedy of manners style.

    In book 2, Scouts Progress, there is a discussion of the best way to respond to a public insult. One character suggests ignoring it to conserve energy for more important matters. Another says that will be seen as a sign of weakness and lead the opponent to make a more serious attack next time and possibly also attract attack from a third party. Just reminded me of the discussion here.

21. @Greg Hullender

    Maybe they’ll switch to slating works without asking the authors, but in the past they made a big deal of the fact that everyone on their slates had accepted the invitation

    Paulk mentioned early on that whomever ends up on their ballot will not be asked and will not be removed if requested. I believe the quote was ‘we’re going to nominate who we want and that’s it’.

    I firmly believe the Rabids will have a few of the favourites from the opposite side of the argument on, with it being Beale’s ‘clever outflanking’ to try and make them withdraw or something.

22. Meh, same old, same old. I wonder if they’ll finally get around to actually discussing stories when they do their pre-nomination nomination slate for the Hugos.

    Of course not. They will just whine about how they aren’t treated as conquering heroes and scream at anyone who votes a different way from what they demand.

23. Jim Henley: All perfectly logical but requires the assumption that Wright would do any math at all before leaping to his desired conclusion.

24. Re: length categories for award nominations

    As I understand it, the current length categories come directly out of traditional market guidelines and market patterns. (I recall some sort of story about how novelette and novella were split because all the nominees seemed to be skewing to one end of the original length range so it was felt to be a non-homogeneous category in some functional sense.)

    It seems to me that any re-evaluation of length-related categories should take into consideration shifts in length-related market forces. For example, my own submissions research has found that the traditional 7500 word length for short stories doesn’t match up all that well with how the majority of online publications define “short story”. (Specifically, there a lot that cap short story length at 5000-6000 words.) Similarly, there seems to be a sizeable gap in the available markets for works at the novelette/novella interface.

    While I’m looking at the question primarily in terms of “where the heck might I be able to submit this particular story?” there are consequences for “which sets of published stories are comparable in terms of reader expectations?” If 7500 word stories are now clustered more with short novelettes in terms of publishing contexts, what does that mean for award categories? If people’s interactive understanding of “short story” doesn’t include the long end of the range, are those stories likely to be evaluated more critically in terms of “how well they work as a short story”? Conversely, I get the impression that e-primary publishing has revitalized the novella market which might previously have included more stand-alone hard-copy publications (before the shift to doorstops) as well as the relatively few works of that length accepted by print periodicals.

    No solid thoughts on this, or even and solid notion that the categories do need to be reconsidered. But I confess that when I had a story sitting on the novelette/novella cusp, I did spend a few brain cells thinking about the competitiveness of the two potential length categories as well as thinking about where the heck I might even submit it in the first place. (Conclusion: save it for the one “new” story in a collection I plan to self-publish next year. Still haven’t entirely decided about which way to tip the length, though.)

25. Greg Hullender says:

    2) The Sad pack seems to be at pains to distance itself from the Rabid pack. As Chaos Horizons observes in the same article, the puppies are most effective when the two packs work together, so they’re giving up a lot of their power with this.

    Doesn’t matter what SP wants, RP can simply repeat what it did this year– copy the most popular items of the SP slate and add some Castalia House publications.

    I agree that SP seems to want to be separate from RP, but for practical purposes it’s simply functioning as an adjunct to RP. SP isn’t giving up their power because they have no power to give up in the first place.

    (ETA: Well, okay, there’s one effective thing SP could do– refuse to be part of it. Halt the campaign entirely for a few years until the RP faction gets bored or implodes.)

26. Peace: It seems to me there is actually a good reason why the Hugo process is skewed towards shorter fiction; we have to read the stuff. This is a problem both for nominators, who have to find a sufficient number of Hugo-worthy works in a limited time, and final voters, who have to read everything that is on the ballot between the close of nominations and the close of voting. Reading fifteen works of short fiction is manageable; reading fifteen novels isn’t.

    I’m assuming there are also more short works than novels, so it makes sense for there to be more awards, to avoid excessive vote-splitting, but I may be wrong about this. I suspect that in any case there are more short works than novels in the central Hugo field – not massive sub-genreific, not ‘fifteenth episode in the adventures of….’., and so on. The fact that votes are in fact more split in the short categories than in Best Novel tends to support this.

27. I’m not sure what’s to be done about this – it’s certainly the wrong time to be crying out for the Hugos to be revised for the digital age, there is enough Sturm und Drang over them already. But it’s something to bear in mind, I suppose.

    I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for word count to be posted at end of story/novella/novelette. This would be a great service to readers for awards. Wouldn’t take up much space. Would give writers a good idea of what a specific magazine/anthology editor really likes vs the posted guidelines.

28. Just found this note by Sunny Moraine about their story eyes I dare not meet in dreams”:

    This one… Guys, this one is weird, and I’m not talking about the story itself – though it is also weird. Cyborgology is not a traditional short story market at all; it’s a group sociology blog run by some friends of mine to which I sometimes contribute. It does do fiction, and I wrote this in a fit of annoyance about the treatment of female characters in fiction and posted it. And it took off a bit on Twitter. I’m immensely proud of it, and in fact I think it’s my favorite thing I published this year, as well as the best. Given its publication place and circumstances, however, I’m a bit nervous about it being overlooked. So if you read and like it, please please spread the word about it. Normally I really get uncomfy with overt campaigning, but I think it might be warranted in this case.

    I do concur that this story is magnificently angry, so I’m passing along the link.

29. @Tasha:

    I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for word count to be posted at end of story/novella/novelette.

    Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and others do do this. Anyway it’s easy to count words online. The problem is anthologies. isfdb usually helps.

30. Vasha on December 11, 2015 at 9:34 am said:
    I belong to a science fiction reading group and have talked to a couple people there with the intention of urging them to nominate. One guy just said “Hugos, so what” (a valid point of view, of course). Another guy has been following Puppy news with interest and indignation, but is sure that slates will completely lock up the ballots again this year, so isn’t going to bother nominating.

    We have a meeting on Monday (discussing Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink) and I’m thinking of mentioning it there, maybe trying to get people together for a separate discussion. Any ideas for trying to get people involved? I’m not going to ask people who are completely uninterested to plunk down $50, but if undecided…

    Tom Sawyer tactic?
    Maybe a discussion asking for advice on what you might nominate this year, giving your thoughts and asking what they’d recommend as the best things they’ve read.
    And keep bringing it up, updating possible choices with them.
    Then later see what the pups recommend, and discuss how it compares with your, and their, suggestions.

31. So I seem to recall some sort of tempest in a teapot over any criticism of Brad Torgerson because he was in the military? And now we’ve got JCW calling…well, whatever imaginary “opposing side” that only exists in his head “Unamerican?”

    I am an Army Veteran who volunteered for service. My father is an Army Veteran. My Stepfather is an Army Veteran who served in Vietnam. I think it’s the most vile of hypocrisies to accuse me of being Anti-American. Sadly, that sort of wretched calumny (see, I can use big boy words too!) is what’s now known as “par for the course” for the Puppies.

32. Dex on December 11, 2015 at 9:40 am said:
    @Greg Hullender

    Maybe they’ll switch to slating works without asking the authors, but in the past they made a big deal of the fact that everyone on their slates had accepted the invitation.

    They lied. Quite a number of their nominees had not been contacted beforehand and did not agree to be on any kind of slate.

33. On ‘what we have to do to beat the slate’:

    1. It depends on what constitutes beating the slate. At one extreme, it could mean stopping them getting any nominees at all. I am sympathetic to this view; if they have any nominees, they are keeping worthy candidates off the ballot (and people who were nominated last have sometimes gone on to win), and they are cheapening the value of a Hugo nomination. Still, with just one slate nomination we still have a workable process. At the other extreme, it could just mean stopping them taking over the whole ballot. But while this is better than the alternative, it leaves us in a situation like Best Novelette this year, which I don’t think anyone found satisfactory.

    2. What it takes to beat the slate – whatever that means – depends not only on how many regular voters there are, but also on how divided they are. They will probably be more divided in some categories than others. In the light of this, I went through the fiction categories for this year to see what would happen if the number of votes for non-slate nominees is doubled:
    NOVEL; three non-slate nominees. (Correia and Kloos’s withdrawal makes no difference; they let Anderson in.)
    NOVELLA; two non-slate nominees.
    NOVELETTE; exactly as now; one non-slate nominee, and only because Wright was disqualified.
    SHORT STORY; one non-slate nominee (Red Wombat!); Wright gets in when Bellet withdraws.

    But of course doubling the number of voters wouldn’t actually double the votes for each non-slate nominee, because it would make the nominations more various.

    These results were also helped by the splitting of the slate. If VD says ‘I endorse the SP slate without variation’ he can beat that.

    3. And of course what we have to do to beat the slate depends on how many slate voters there are. Their number may decline, but bear in mind it increased between nomination and voting; even if it declines it may still be better than last year. Which means doubling from last year may not be enough.

34. Anyone know what the word count is on “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams”?

35. Hypnotosov on December 11, 2015 at 6:59 am said:

    No SF, but lots of fictional science…

    Well it is a sort of parallel universe where the English (I kid you not) are some kind of genetic master race.

    It is basically ‘national character’ = ‘breeding’ style racism. It’s like building your ideology on phlogiston.

36. @Greg Hullender:

    I think a factor of two would do it. Chaos Horizon’s numbers suggest something along those lines.

    Chaos Horizon’s numbers don’t support this. For the short-fiction categories, the numbers suggest that doubling (or a bit more) the nomination total of the top non-slate nominee would prevent a sweep. The two key problems:

    1. Just doubling the nominating pool will not double tally of the top non-slate nominee, because of voter diffusion*.
    2. “Preventing a sweep” is an awfully low bar for success – a single non-slate nominee in a category. If this were a board wargame we’d be talking about moving from Strategic Defeat to Operational Defeat. It doesn’t remotely resemble a victory for the ideal of individuals rather than slates determining the course of nominations.
    3. (“Amongst our problems…!“) Even doubling the nomination pool within a single year is an outlandish hope. Worldcon is not a startup. It’s a mature enterprise with a long history.

    The Sad pack seems to be at pains to distance itself from the Rabid pack.

    I deny this. The Sad pack very occasionally insists that we not regard them as identical to the Rabids. But what passes for their leadership has taken zero material steps to separate themselves from the Rabids strategically, operationally or even rhetorically. Indeed the opposite has happened. Sad leaders have declared that the outcome of the Hugo voting “proved Vox was right all along.”

    ——————————–
    *I’m open to arguments that a power law obtains in nominations such that an increase in the pool will go disproportionately to the most popular options, so maybe you only need to increase the pool by a factor of 3 or even 4 to get a single non-slate entry in the short-fiction categories over the top. See problems 2 and 3 though.

37. Greg Hullender:

    And, as you say, don’t hesitate to nominate just because you didn’t read 600 stories this year. If you read it and you loved it, that’s all it takes.

    Yes. But whenever I see this advice, I get a strong sense that it is not addressed to my condition. I don’t have to read enough to think I have surveyed the field and found the best. But I do have to read enough to find something good, and I can’t guarantee that the first thing I read will be good. That means reading quite a bit to find one nominee in each category, and a lot more to find five.

    So no, I don’t have to read six hundred stories. But to get a plausible list I would probably have to read at least ten. Forty, if there are four categories. And that’s hard. In the normal way of life I would read hardly anything in the year in which it first appeared; I would wait for the paperback, and for award nominations, which give useful guidance. A lot of people don’t regularly read short fiction, or related works. A lot of people don’t know the names of editors, or artists. Nominating is hard, not because one needs to do a comprehensive survey, but because finding anything to nominate is hard.

    In an ideal world this wouldn’t be a problem. A relatively small number of people, who were especially familiar with the field, could nominate, thus bringing works to a wider audience. But in the face of slates that won’t work. I think there are definite limits to an increase in the number of nominators, especially if we have to do it in every category. (Voters, who have a well-defined finite task, can be increased more easily.)

38. @Peace Is My Middle Name

    Anyone know what the word count is on “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams”?

    2,625 words

39. Ridley Kemp on December 11, 2015 at 8:19 am said:

    Is it just me, or does everything JCW writes read as though it were lifted directly from Ignatius Reilly?

    Very much so. I think I’ve made that observation before.

    The format of this dialogue gives away that it is from Confederacy of Dunces but if reformatted as blog comments I think people wouldn’t be sure if it was Reilly or Wright.

    “I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?”
    “Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers.”
    “Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,” Ignatius said solemnly. “Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books.”
    “You’re fantastic.”
    “I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”

    https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/968084-a-confederacy-of-dunces

40. @Andrew M

    It depends on what constitutes beating the slate.

    Keeping them from sweeping any categories. If they can’t sweep, then they can’t “destroy” the Hugos. That will make it even harder for them to get takers in the future.

    Failing that, draw enough voters to make EPH work properly, once it’s passed.

41. More and more, I realize what the Sad Puppy campaign was – a courtesy. It was all of us U.S. sci-fans way of getting a preview of how the Trump supporters would be talking when he announced his campaign for President, and how how a total lack of logic or evidence behind a movement was no problem to its supporters.

    We got to see the sort of person who would make Trump a thing, six months early. How lucky of us.

42. @Greg Hullender:

    Thank you.

43. @Tasha Turner

    I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for word count to be posted at end of story/novella/novelette. This would be a great service to readers for awards. Wouldn’t take up much space. Would give writers a good idea of what a specific magazine/anthology editor really likes vs the posted guidelines.

    On Rocket Stack Rank, we always estimate the number of words for the stories we review. You’re welcome to use our numbers, if they help you.

44. The thing about Sads v. Rabids is that the Sads started as reasonably successful author nominating own works, plus friends and clients; it transitioned to somewhat successful new author, plus perceived friends and clients; now its…. self-published and minimally published authors and… what exactly? There seems to be a lot more erotica, at least.

    Even if we assume those that voted Sads are comfortable with their movement having women in the Leader role and not just the side-kick role – whole other thing – I kind of think that Vox has the ability to flood the Sads this year, claim that when it matches the Rabids that the people have spoken, and run the whole thing.

45. Jim Henley:

    I deny this. The Sad pack very occasionally insists that we not regard them as identical to the Rabids. But what passes for their leadership has taken zero material steps to separate themselves from the Rabids strategically, operationally or even rhetorically.

    The Sads were essentially fans Correia orchestrated to nominate him for as Hugo, and oh, as long as you have those blank spots on your ballots anyway, put these other names in them. From the moment he refused his latest nomination last year, the Sads ceased to have what little purpose they had. He has broken the back of his own movement by making people wonder “Why did he put us through all this?”

    While for the Sads the Hugo was important in itself — to get one for Larry — for the Rabids gaining widespread attention by manipulating the award and demonstrating their collective potency is seen as valuable within the greater context of the culture wars.

46. @Mike Glyer: Well put.

47. If the puppies nominate people despite being asked not to, then those people will likely withdraw. That would guarantee no sweep in the category, depending on when they withdraw. (I suppose we should urge people not to withdraw until after nominations close.)

    We really don’t know what sort of distribution nominations fall into, and we don’t really know how successful the slates will be this year, but I think a campaign urging more people to read and nominate cannot be a bad thing.

48. re: beating the slate

    I tend to agree with Greg H. here. If we can get at least one non-slate nominee in each category in 2016 so that a Hugo can be presented, I’ll consider that a minimal win, one battle in the campaign. (If we still have to no award one or two categories, that’s not great, but not a total defeat either). That won’t mean I’m happy or satisfied, just a first step in blunting their scorched earth effort. Next is to pass EPH, then get *and keep* enough nominators each year to let EPH work as designed. Final success/strategy will depend on how the next few years play out.

    If we’re lucky, a lot of this year’s pupwarriors will have gotten bored and wandered off. They might not have as many nomination-bots and we might get more than 1 nominee per category. I’m not planning on it, it is a possibility, though.

49. I’m going to be a lot more context-checking when it comes to people who didn’t want to be on Puppies lists this year. I don’t want Puppy trickery driving off people who have a legit base of support outside that. Our ongoing review discussions will be a big help with that.

50. @mike. Yeah, that sounds like a good thumbnail sketch of it all. The Sads were mainly about getting a Hugo for Larry, the Rabids about Culture War. (This dovetails to Christopher’s “aha, you —-‘s ignored her because she’s conservative!” post about Leigh Brackett)

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