This seems like the appropriate place for it, so…
A question for you all: What do you think of the various proposed reactions to this situation?
Specifically, how do you think the Hugo voters should treat the nominations for this year’s awards, and what (if any) changes to the rules do you think are appropriate to prevent a recurrence?
Each side should be sent to a parallel Earth where their ideology is the preeminent driving force to society. And I’ll go watch the results on a parallel Earth where Rod Serling is still alive making a new Twilight Zone series.
My opinion is there’s no real way to preserve the desirable features of the Hugo awards through rules brokering.
The way the award process is designed kind of assumes that people are, by and large, honest people have enough personal integrity to avoid excessive gaming of the system. There’s been some gaming of the system in the past but not to this extent. This system has always been vulnerable to somebody dedicated to totally wrecking it.
There are a lot of proposals out there, but the vast majority are basically designed to shut out dissenting voices. And I disagree with that, even if the goal is made with the best of intentions.
In practice, I see two ways to prevent a recurrence, and one doesn’t really count.
One is for people who disagree to organize their own slates, a sort of pre-awards award, and push that over other slates. But that doesn’t really count. All you’ve done is introduced a party system, and that’s just answering like for like.
The other is to somehow get massive groups of the general public to take part in the nomination process. That way the vocal minority is represented in the polling in direct proportion to their actual standing. The SP/RP tomfoolery only really worked because there aren’t that many people voting. There were only about 1000 total people who voted on the nomination slate, of which a significant fraction were SP/RP. Get a few thousand more regular people to vote, and suddenly, they aren’t a significant fraction anymore.
But generating that kind of interest is hard. I’ll give them credit for this: they cared enough to put up the time and money to pull it off, which is more than most people.
Good in theory. In practice, there was one side, since there never really was a dedicated group of SJWs or whatever working towards nefarious goals. Again, if there was an “other” side, nothing would have been allowed to happen in the first place through sheer dint of numbers.
I guess you could arbitrarily say that everybody who wasn’t a member of SP or RP is the “other” side, but they wouldn’t share common goals or ideology or much of anything. It’s kind of like separating the world into Cubs fans and not-Cubs fans. Not a very useful distinction.
I debated an SP supporter who claimed this sort of thing happened before. He pointed out two dubious examples – Star Trek winning Hugos in the 60s, and some movement to keep the Harry Potter books from winning (which clearly failed). When I asked him to point out a case of it – one that caused the SPs to take action – he faded out of the debate.
The SP argument is, basically, “A story I didn’t like got a Hugo nomination. We need to screw the system to prevent stories I don’t like from doing this again.”
Unfortunately, there’s no good solution. Like many things, Hugo voting was set up with the unspoken assumption that everyone would play nice, that people would nominate the stories they read throughout the year that really made an impression on them. Now that people have stopped playing nice, the politics will determine who’s on the ballot.
The only halfway decent solution I’ve seen is to create a panel to throw out block voting ballots. It should be relatively easy to see it – you don’t normally get a large number of voters selecting all the same nominees. If 80 ballots all list Stories A, B, C, D, and E, then collusion is pretty obvious (especially if that’s been listed as a slate by someone). It’s not ideal (and can’t go into effect before 2017), but it’s possible. (If it’s not an entire slate, the votes can count, but that will keep the slate from monopolizing the awards.)
I believe a model for this would be Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Nebula, 1974, Hugo, 1975, Locus, 1975).
Indeed. This is about on a level with “Cultural Marxism.”
I assume that would just lead to the same people gaming the system by randomly choosing one place to differ from the slate (or further altering their vote to whatever the threshold was).
As others said, stuff like this kinda relies on people not actively trying to wreck it. Its pretty hard, if not impossible, to try and come up with enforceable rules that are impossible to game. At some point you’re going to have to rely on people not being dicks.
There would be other signs (they detected this sort of activity back in 1989 and removed one novel from the ballot). But an 80% correspondence with the slate would be enough to disqualify the ballot and you could make a case that a 60% one was collusion, too. Someone would have to do the math.
But you’re right in that it’s not going to be easy to be sure.
…the Sad Puppies got rolled.
I see a lot of “no awards,” and a lot more folks winning who I don’t recognize (being only a casual fan–I’ve four of the five novel nominees but no almost nothing about any other category). Can you give me a rundown, or point me to a blog post with a post-mortem?
**The Three-Body Problem **would have been a strong contender even without this mess; it already got a Nebula nomination. It’s some very weird hard science speculation, and the opening – dealing with the Chinese Cultural Revolution – is riveting. It’s not a perfect novel, but a lot of its “flaws” are probably due to it being written by someone from a different culture and different standards of storytelling (Cixin Liu is Chinese).
I also read The Goblin Emperor, which is just a Ruritanian romance with next to no fantasy elements (even the goblins are just a substitute for racial differences). Also, the main character spends most of the novel whining over his impostor syndrome. It also got a Nebula nomination.
From what I’ve heard about **Ancillary Sword **, it’s a well done space opera, the sequel to last year’s winner. The Puppies hated it because the author decided to use all female pronouns (everyone was “she,” regardless of gender). Really.
The media categories are all well known.
Laura Mixon won the fan writer primarily for her series ofblog posts exposing an author who was destructive to other writers and the field (and no, it wasn’t Vox Day or any of the puppies).
This article might be a good place to start (I had to look it up too).
Here’s a good recap. Hitler Reacts to the 2015 Hugo Awards - YouTube
Five no-awards, and NA’s ranked highly in several other categories. It’s vanishingly rare to see NA anywhere but in last place, most categories and years.
Have there even been five No-Awards total, prior to this clusterf*ck year?
It’s happened four times in the best dramatic presentation category: 1959, 1963, 1971, and 1977.
The could have been one or two others, but not too many more that that.
How does the “No Award” thing work? Does a title have to get a certain percentage of votes to win, as opposed to just getting the most?
I just got confirmation that there have been five NAs total in the history of the award, no more than one per year. The last was 1977.
Yes, you can vote for “No Award” if you think none of the nominees is worthy.
The Hugos use a complicated “Australian rules” system by which votes are tallied and evaluated on a ranked-vote system from 1 to 5, and “No Award” can win at any level. The voting system leaves much to be desired - and I speak from painful experience - but it’s probably the best system to use when votes can simply be bought by any individual, singly or en masse.
Thanks–that’s great!
I haven’t followed the Hugos religiously in recent years but I heard of this latest controversy. Without going into the personalities, it seemed they were looking back to the Good Old Days when all Science Fiction was Space Opera & all Fantasy was High Fantasy. As it was just a couple of decades ago.
Which is bullshit. Those descriptions are more accurate for the age of Pulps–the 30’s & 40’s. That was even before my time. I grew up on Heinlein, Clarke & Asimov. Some of Asimov’s stuff was a bit simpleminded–he was more into “concepts” than literary style. But Clarke always had a strong intellectual streak & Heinlein, who was not shy about expressing his opinions, was never simpleminded. I discovered Cordwainer Smith, Avram Davidson & R A Lafferty in Galaxy–try fitting them into categories! And Fritz Leiber, who expressed social concerns of the 50’s & 60’s, wrote some harder SF and invented the phrase “Swords and Sorcery.” (Fafhrd & the Greymouser were far more sophisticated than that oaf Conan.)
Seems like these ignorant folks also missed the British New Wave & all those Dangerous Visions. Sure, the first Star Wars films were enjoyable throwbacks to Space Opera–but 2001 blew many a mind & Bladerunner was highly influential.
Glad to see that the losers seem to have lost even more.
From io9:
That Wired article makes Ted Beale look like even more of a dick - but it also seems without a rule change (and changes that are not obvious, at that) that he really is the winner here and the Hugos are the overall losers. He’s set down an ultimatum - the awards will go to people he approves of, or there will be no awards. And it seems that he truly doesn’t care either way.