Author Topic: Big drama at the 2015 Hugo Awards - what to do?  (Read 12858 times)

El Barto

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on: April 10, 2015, 09:09:12 PM
Slate recently published a long article discussing how "a group of rightwing activists managed to game the [Hugo] selection process, proposing a fixed slate of nominees and feverishly promoting it."  The result of this is apparently that, "Since small margins are sufficient to secure Hugo nods, what emerged was what many are calling a strange, ideologically driven, and unrepresentative sample of fiction."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/04/08/_2015_hugo_awards_how_the_sad_and_rabid_puppies_took_over_the_sci_fi_nominations.html

Being both a busy and lazy person I like to use the Hugo nominations as a source of great SF to find and read.  But if this year's nominees exclude things I/we might love, what other ways do we have to find out what is great?   

Is anyone holding a separate shadow process perhaps?

And lastly, I actually paid $40 to be a voter in the process, so if anyone wants to encourage me to read and possibly vote for their favorites, I'm all ears.   ;D



Fenrix

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Reply #1 on: April 10, 2015, 10:20:29 PM
There are a substantial number of great awards out there. The Nebulas and Tiptrees are pretty great. Make sure you listen to the Nebula Nominated "When It Ends, He Catches Her" by Eugie Foster that was run over on PseudoPod.

Also, make sure to nominate your favorite podcasts for the Parsec Award.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 10:50:11 PM by Bdoomed »

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ArbysMom

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Reply #2 on: April 20, 2015, 03:41:41 AM
I just found out about this because of Connie Willis' blog post and I'm heartsick. What i'd like to know is whether or not the people on the ballot knew about this in advance. If so, as many people as possible should vote No Award, but then do what it takes to make sure that it can't happen again. If they didn't know.... <sigh> I'm not sure what can be done, to be fair.


Talia

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Reply #3 on: April 20, 2015, 12:41:48 PM
I just found out about this because of Connie Willis' blog post and I'm heartsick. What i'd like to know is whether or not the people on the ballot knew about this in advance. If so, as many people as possible should vote No Award, but then do what it takes to make sure that it can't happen again. If they didn't know.... <sigh> I'm not sure what can be done, to be fair.

From what I've read some may have but some did not. George R.R. Martin has been blogging about it quite a bit. In particular he makes some good points with this post.



kibitzer

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Reply #4 on: April 22, 2015, 12:04:54 AM
At least two authors have withdrawn from the ballot because they didn't know.


UnfulredJohnson

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Reply #5 on: April 23, 2015, 11:23:59 PM
Cripes this sad puppies thing is all over the place. Blogs every where extolling and condemning. What surprised me was how few votes it took to 'hi-jack' the nominations. I mean I thought the hugos was the biggest, most prestigious award going in sci-fi litriture, but apparently it only took a few hundred votes to sway the whole thing.

A few hundred?!? Surely not? Is there some reason for this? I mean sci-fi fandom must number in the millions easy, and here there are a handful of people deciding the nominations, it sounds to me like this award was broken long before the puppies every laid a paw on it.

I think this whole thing will open up the nominations and that can only be to the good.



Talia

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Reply #6 on: April 24, 2015, 02:45:43 AM
A few hundred?!? Surely not? Is there some reason for this? I mean sci-fi fandom must number in the millions easy

The number of fans who purchase a WorldCon membership (required to nominate and vote) is far fewer, though. I imagine the vast majority of fans don't even know nominating is an option.



adrianh

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Reply #7 on: April 24, 2015, 06:28:52 PM

A few hundred?!? Surely not? Is there some reason for this? I mean sci-fi fandom must number in the millions easy, and here there are a handful of people deciding the nominations, it sounds to me like this award was broken long before the puppies every laid a paw on it.


The people who vote for the Hugos are the people who attend Worldcon, or support Worldcon through a supporter membership. That's a number measured in thousands not millions.

The "problem" is more nature of the medium and the voting rules rather than the number of votes. There are lots of novels, short stories, etc. eligible each year. And people have different tastes. So there is often not a single group of clear front-runners that everybody likes. Which is why there is the 5% of ballots cutoff for nominations in the rules.

What the Sad/Rapid Puppy folk did was create a slate — a single group of stories that you voted for in all categories regardless of whether you thought they were the "best" or not. If a relatively small group of people all vote for the same stories then they're almost guaranteed to get on the slate of nominations – because the rest of the population is voting for the stories they like and so their votes get spread around more among the many other contenders.

This has been made more… interesting… by a bunch of the Sad/Rapid Puppy folk actively recruiting outside of fandom. They've turned it into a general political statement rather than one about the quality of the stories. And so the population of fandom is somewhat irrelevant — its the population of griefers who are willing to mess with fandom that is the concern.

There are certainly different ways to organise the Hugos voting — and they all have different upsides and downsides. They're all subject to different kinds of attack, and to be honest I find it hard to see how the Hugos are going to recover in the short term.

The most obvious response is for other fans to organise their own "slates" — but that fundamentally changes how stories are selected and will change things into being much more of a personality driven popularity contest. Which ironically is supposedly what the SP folk are against.

Sigh.




UnfulredJohnson

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Reply #8 on: April 24, 2015, 10:30:38 PM
Having looked into it a bit I was a little shocked at what I found.

Going by the figures here (thanks fenrix)


https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/how-many-puppy-votes-breaking-down-the-hugo-math/
https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/margin-of-victory-breaking-down-the-hugo-math/


The most nominations received for the short story in 2014 was 78 for selkie stories are for losers. 78!!! Out of how many exactly? I know that 10000 plus attended loncon3, but were they all eligible to nominate? And that's not counting the online memberships or whatever, I couldn't find out how many of them were viable at the time.

But even if you just take 10000 as your total number it's still less than one percent of the possible votes. It seems like a bit of a joke. 78 people deciding what the other 10000 should vote on. I don't see how you can say any of the past nominations are a good representation of the taste of the whole, or the fandom, or whatever or the direction of sci-fi as genre and as community.  You just don't know. The other 9000 voters could be into some weird sub-genre of star-trek furry erotica for all we know.

Say whatever you like about the puppies but they raised a huge flaw in the whole system if you ask me. I mean 78 votes? Come on guys. There's something rotten in Denmark, and weather it happened by accident or design or apathy or whatever it should never have been allowed to get that bad. I think this whole controversy could bring some much need energy to whole process.



Talia

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Reply #9 on: April 25, 2015, 04:04:04 AM
Having looked into it a bit I was a little shocked at what I found.

Going by the figures here (thanks fenrix)


https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/how-many-puppy-votes-breaking-down-the-hugo-math/
https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/margin-of-victory-breaking-down-the-hugo-math/


The most nominations received for the short story in 2014 was 78 for selkie stories are for losers. 78!!! Out of how many exactly? I know that 10000 plus attended loncon3, but were they all eligible to nominate? And that's not counting the online memberships or whatever, I couldn't find out how many of them were viable at the time.

But even if you just take 10000 as your total number it's still less than one percent of the possible votes. It seems like a bit of a joke. 78 people deciding what the other 10000 should vote on. I don't see how you can say any of the past nominations are a good representation of the taste of the whole, or the fandom, or whatever or the direction of sci-fi as genre and as community.  You just don't know. The other 9000 voters could be into some weird sub-genre of star-trek furry erotica for all we know.

Say whatever you like about the puppies but they raised a huge flaw in the whole system if you ask me. I mean 78 votes? Come on guys. There's something rotten in Denmark, and weather it happened by accident or design or apathy or whatever it should never have been allowed to get that bad. I think this whole controversy could bring some much need energy to whole process.

Provided it actually motivates people to participate, instead of souring them on the entire process - as I think more likely. But you're correct, of course - more people SHOULD be aware of the process, and the importance of participation.



adrianh

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Reply #10 on: April 25, 2015, 08:27:02 AM
Quote
But even if you just take 10000 as your total number it's still less than one percent of the possible votes. It seems like a bit of a joke. 78 people deciding what the other 10000 should vote on

Not really. There were There were 865 ballots for the short story category.

So 865 people — about 9% of attendees — decided what was on the short story ballot.

I don't see this as a problem. There are lots of short stories. Last year votes were spread over fifteen stories — and they were all very good. You're bound to get low-ish numbers on individual stories.




UnfulredJohnson

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Reply #11 on: April 25, 2015, 09:18:35 AM
Unless your suggesting that those 865 people all voted for the same stories then the actual number of people who decided would be much much lower due to this 'diffusion' of the vote on other stories that did not make the ballot.  I mean the category only had four stories because the fifth one didn't have enough nominations, that to me suggests a great deal of 'diffusion'.

Even still 9% is still a low number. 865 is a very low number and 74 is a joke of a number. The hugos is supposed to be a fan judged contest but to me it's closer to a judged contest or the nebulas then an actual test of what the fandom likes. The whole thing needs to be blown wide open I think. And it probably will be.

This probably will sour a lot of people, but then I think it was necessary for things to change. I don't think it will effect the popularity of the award though, at least until something better comes along. 




Fenrix

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Reply #12 on: April 25, 2015, 02:44:54 PM

Say whatever you like about the puppies but they raised a huge flaw in the whole system if you ask me. I mean 78 votes? Come on guys. There's something rotten in Denmark, and weather it happened by accident or design or apathy or whatever it should never have been allowed to get that bad. I think this whole controversy could bring some much need energy to whole process.


A different observation would be to point out how significantly technology has changed in just the past 10 years. Steve Eley started up Hugo Month at Escape Pod to get the short story nominees into the ears of move voters. At the time, e-readers were not a thing, nor was mass electronic distribution of the voter packets. If short story listeners had to go out to find five different back issues of a print magazine to make a fully informed vote, you're going to get less participation.

It might be more fair to say that due to technological advancements, evolution needs to occur for the award to remain viable.

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adrianh

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Reply #13 on: April 26, 2015, 09:16:14 AM
The hugos is supposed to be a fan judged contest

For me the Hugos are what Worldcon attendees award. Who are fans — but not all of fandom. Just like the Locus is what Locus readers award. Who are fans — but not all of fandom. I'm very much in alignment with what George R.R. Martin writes about the Hugos here http://grrm.livejournal.com/417521.html.

That's what the Hugos have been for the last sixty years anyway. And I'm completely fine with that. There are lots of awards out there. If folk don't like the Hugos I'd much prefer they go make their own awards, rather turn the Hugos into something completely different.




UnfulredJohnson

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Reply #14 on: April 27, 2015, 10:40:49 PM
You don't think the awards would benefit from opening up the nominations process? It's just that 78 votes to get your story up there seems waaay too cosy to me. But hey, different strokes and all that.

I take your point that the hugos are just a world-con thing, but in my mind there were always something much, much bigger. Like the oscars for sci-fi. Then when I saw how few votes it took to get nominated my reaction was that it shouldn't be THAT easy. But perhaps I just misrepresented the hugos...er... to myself or something.

I'm sure a lot of people would like if all the sad puppies up and left to create their own awards, but realistically I can't see that happening. I think they should lower the price of the on-line membership and get more people involved. If enough people vote it will nullify whatever 'slates' the puppies put forward.



eytanz

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Reply #15 on: April 27, 2015, 11:31:52 PM
You don't think the awards would benefit from opening up the nominations process? It's just that 78 votes to get your story up there seems waaay too cosy to me. But hey, different strokes and all that.

They are open - the only requirement is that people pay the membership fee and bother to nominate. Note that since the amount of actual voters far exceeds the amount of nominators, it's not the fee that's the issue - it's the fact that most people aren't particularly motivated to nominate. I'm guessing that, after the events of this year, this will change, at least for a while.

Quote
I take your point that the hugos are just a world-con thing, but in my mind there were always something much, much bigger. Like the oscars for sci-fi.

The oscars are voted for by a group with restriced membership - you can't just join the MPAA if you're part of the audience, and you can only nominate in your own branch if you are part of the MPAA. According to a google search, the best actors, for example, were nominated by a maximum of 1176 people last year (there are no public stats on how many actually nominated the winning actor) - that sounds like a lot more than 78, but when you compare the size of movie audiences to the size of SF readership, I don't think it's a significantly higher proportion.

The Oscars are actually more comparable to the Nebulas than the Hugos, because the nebulas are also not votable by the general public. But all big awards generally involve a small amount of people voting and/or nominating compared to the size of the audience who is interested in the awards.

Quote
I'm sure a lot of people would like if all the sad puppies up and left to create their own awards, but realistically I can't see that happening. I think they should lower the price of the on-line membership and get more people involved. If enough people vote it will nullify whatever 'slates' the puppies put forward.

Lowering the price will just make it easier for anyone with a political agenda (puppies, anti-puppies, scientologists, etc.) to recruit non-SF readers to nominate. It might be a good idea for independent reasons, but unless it's paired with a significant change in voting rules, it will just make it easier for a slate war to emerge.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2015, 11:33:36 PM by eytanz »



adrianh

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Reply #16 on: April 28, 2015, 02:13:40 PM

The oscars are voted for by a group with restriced membership - you can't just join the MPAA if you're part of the audience, and you can only nominate in your own branch if you are part of the MPAA. According to a google search, the best actors, for example, were nominated by a maximum of 1176 people last year (there are no public stats on how many actually nominated the winning actor) - that sounds like a lot more than 78, but when you compare the size of movie audiences to the size of SF readership, I don't think it's a significantly higher proportion.

That 1176 number is actually pretty comparable to Hugo nomination numbers. For example last year best novel award got 1595 nomination ballots, best short story award 865 ballots (numbers from http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2014HugoStatistics.pdf).




adrianh

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Reply #17 on: April 28, 2015, 03:08:44 PM
I'm sure a lot of people would like if all the sad puppies up and left to create their own awards, but realistically I can't see that happening.

Sadly I agree.

I think they should lower the price of the on-line membership and get more people involved. If enough people vote it will nullify whatever 'slates' the puppies put forward.

Making it easier for more people to nominate will make the problem worse, not better.  Because it becomes easier to have more people vote for the slate. Slates are a mechanism for an organised minority to overcome a majority. Really the only way to out-compete a slate under the current rules is for other folk to do their own slates — which is yet another change for the worse.

And do we want the Hugos to be a popularity contest? It's easy to find popular. Look at the best-seller lists. There you go. The popular books ;-)

The value of the Hugos to me is the fact that it's voted on by Worldcon attendees. Worldcon attracts very fannish-fans who are extremely well read in the field. They find good shit that often gets overlooked. I don't always agree with what wins, but I always find interesting stuff in the nominations and the winners.

If the Hugos turn into a popular vote it would remove the more egregious rubbish on the puppy's slate (IMHO Vox Day's novels are not going to win a popularity contest ;-) but it would also substantially change how the awards look. Because the most popular speculative fiction books are things like Twilight, Divergent, Disk World, Dan Brown, etc. Not that all of those are terrible or awful. Some of them I'd be happy to vote for myself. But the kind of works that win popularity contests would result in something that doesn't really reflect what the Hugos have been for the last sixty years.



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Reply #18 on: July 27, 2015, 01:24:57 AM
Someone used the Goodreads poll to get an idea of what the Best novel category might have looked like the past six years if it was based on popular opinion.  The Hugos have always been decided by Worldcons members who choose to particpate but for the most part they seem to be well read within the genre.  For the most part I'll take the ballots we've had over any of these!

2010 Best Novel (based on the 2009 Goodreads results)
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Winner)
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

2011 Best Novel (based on the 2010 Goodreads results)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Winner)
Spirit Bound by Rachel Mead
Last Sacrifice by Rachel Mead
Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

2012 Best Novel (based on the 2011 Goodreads results)
Divergent by Veronica Roth (Winner)
Shadowfever by Karen Marie Moning
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

2013 Best Novel (based on the 2012 Goodreads results)
Insurgent by Veronica Roth (Winner)
City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett

2014 Best Novel (based on the 2013 Goodreads results)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Winner)
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Lover at Last by J.R. Ward

2015 Best Novel (based on the 2014 Goodreads results)
City of Heavenly Fire by Cassandra Clare (Winner)
The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
Written in My Heart’s Own Blood by Diana Gabaldon
The Martian by Andy Weir (though since previously self published was actually not eligible)
The King by J.R. Ward




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Reply #19 on: August 25, 2015, 06:31:16 PM
I hate those Veronica Roth novels. The writing was okay but the premise that the worldbuilding hinges on is just ludicrous.

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Chicken Ghost

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Reply #20 on: August 30, 2015, 08:56:02 AM
The Ocean At The End of the Lane won a Hugo?  Really?

That book should have had a white cover with plain black letters reading "NEIL GAIMAN NOVEL." 

It wasn't bad or anything, it was just so typical for him it was almost self-parody. 



eytanz

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Reply #21 on: August 30, 2015, 06:48:22 PM
The Ocean At The End of the Lane won a Hugo?  Really?

No, it did not. The list posted by Kevi_Ohio is the list of the most popular books on Goodreads, not the Hugos.



Chicken Ghost

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Reply #22 on: August 31, 2015, 04:36:23 AM
Derp, nevermind then.

Still; that's a book that succeeded entirely on the inertia of the author's (richly deserved) popularity.