Grumbling About the Hugo Awards
The 2013 Hugo nominees have been announced! That means it’s time for the complaining to begin!
First of all, what’s up with John Scalzi getting a Best Novel nomination for Redshirts [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]? That’s two years in a row he’s made the ballot for something humorous. Are we actually taking humor seriously now? Come on, people. Only Deep And Serious stories should be recognized for awards! The next thing you know, we’ll be treating urban fantasy or tie-in authors with respect. WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO???
And then there’s the gender balance. 2/5 women on the Best Novel Ballot? 3/5 in Novella, and 4/5 in Novelette? 2/3 in Best Short Story? IT’S CLEARLY A POLITICALLY CORRECT CONSPIRACY, BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS GIRLS CAN’T WRITE SF/F! What happened to the good old days when we only nominated old white dudes??? Have we lived and fought in vain?
Seanan McGuire made the ballot a record-setting FIVE TIMES!!! This is a Very Serious Problem, people! It’s OBVIOUSLY some kind of voting conspiracy wherein Seanan writes popular, fun, thought-provoking stuff, in addition to helping to create a widely-loved podcast, and in return, people vote for her. It’s a TRAVESTY of democracy!!! WE MUST REVISE THE RULES AT ONCE TO MAKE SURE THE HUGOS ARE A POPULARITY CONTEST WHERE ONLY THE PEOPLE I THINK DESERVE TO BE ON THE BALLOT ACTUALLY END UP ON THE BALLOT!
Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books is on the ballot for Best Long Form editor. How could this happen? Sheila doesn’t have an active blog or online presence, which means she must have gotten on the ballot purely by being an awesome editor. Thanks SO much for completely shattering my understanding of how this process works, Gilbert!
Wait, they let Throne of the Crescent Moon [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Saladin Ahmed onto the Best Novel ballot too? THE PC POLICE ARE RUINING THE HUGOS AND THE WHOLE DAMN GENRE BY NOMINATING AWESOME STORIES THAT AREN’T ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE!!!
Three more Doctor Who episodes made the Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form category. What’s up with that? ALL YOU PEOPLE WHO LOVE DOCTOR WHO SO MUCH AND THINK IT’S WONDERFUL SHOULD ACCEPT THAT YOU’RE WRONG AND STOP VOTING FOR THINGS YOU LOVE!
Look, the bottom line here is that the final ballot for the Hugos doesn’t precisely match my own nominations, and therefore all of y’all who nominated Wrong Stuff are Bad People, and you should feel bad!
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Seriously, huge congratulations to all of the nominees! It’s true the final ballot doesn’t exactly match my picks, but I’m thrilled at many of the names and titles on the list, and I’m going to have a heck of a hard time trying to decide how to vote in many of these categories.
Big hugs to all of my friends who made the list! You’re amazing people, and I’m honored to to know you.
Spriggana
March 30, 2013 @ 5:37 pm
It’s even worse. Captain’s Vorpatril Alliance is both humorous and written by a woman!
Steve Buchheit
March 30, 2013 @ 5:48 pm
I see you decided to beat the rush this year.
Jim C. Hines
March 30, 2013 @ 5:49 pm
My God!!! IT’S THE END OF THE GENRE AS WE KNOW IT!
Jim C. Hines
March 30, 2013 @ 5:50 pm
I’ve got a few other deadlines I should be worrying about, but this just called to me 🙂
Sally
March 30, 2013 @ 6:52 pm
In Reno, 4/5 of the Novel category was women, so you alpha dudebros have fought back!
And at least Ahmed’s a dude, what about when NK Jemisin got her girl cooties all over while also being a PoC?!
Buck up little campers! It’s improving!
(Endless bonus points for “Have we lived and fought in vain?”)
———–
Me, I’m just happy that a lot of works I heard good things about will be coming to me in the voter’s package. Also pleasantly surprised to see that Fringe ep there, it was one of the best chunks of televised SF I’d seen in a while.
Sally
March 30, 2013 @ 6:56 pm
It’s not like this took much time out of your day, anyway.
Rebe
March 30, 2013 @ 7:20 pm
I had some major fangirl squeees for Seanan McGuire & Lois McMaster Bujold. Love them!!!! So excited about the Hugos this year!
Jeff Linder
March 30, 2013 @ 7:31 pm
…and I feel fine!
Steve Tait
March 30, 2013 @ 9:06 pm
Many years ago (35 -40?) I remember reading an article bemoaning that female writers had taken over the genre and the lone male writer of any substance was James Tiptree, Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree,_Jr.
Jim C. Hines
March 30, 2013 @ 9:10 pm
😀
Polter-Cow
March 30, 2013 @ 9:11 pm
The Fan Writer category has a gay PoC and a woman! I will not stand for this sort of diversity on my ballot, consarnit!
Sally
March 31, 2013 @ 1:33 am
Steve, I read that too. Oh, what a laugh everyone had a few years later. I actually read it after the word was out and had a big LOL. (How anyone ever thought “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” were written by a dude is a great mystery.)
Steve C
March 31, 2013 @ 3:44 am
As a white dude without a sense of humor, I find this deeply unsettling. If tie-in authors should ever make the list, I’ll have to stop reading altogether. :p
Elizabeth A. Mancz
March 31, 2013 @ 12:00 pm
I see you decided to anticipate Mr. Beale – good for you. But you forgot (as he would not) to inveigh against the fact that none of YOUR books were nominated for the Hugo. You could then reflect (judiciously, mind you) on the poor taste of the Hugo nominating pool and the derivative nature of just about all the nominated works, in contrast to your own totally original works. Oh well, better luck next time! (Seriously, it was very funny. Thanks for the smile.)
Joe Selby
March 31, 2013 @ 1:21 pm
Yeah, I didn’t even notice the gender breakdown. I only saw that Bujold was nominated and said, Yay!
Zadi
April 1, 2013 @ 6:52 pm
CAN you imagine? The women didn’t even use gender-disguising pseudonyms! What is the world coming to?!?
(Awesome post. You rock.)
Peter Ahlstrom
April 1, 2013 @ 10:28 pm
Hehehehe. This is my favorite Hugo noms reaction post.
Benjamin
April 1, 2013 @ 11:30 pm
Regarding Seanan McGuire being nominated five times, I’m not bothered so much about the number of times she was nominated, though I’ll freely admit she’s not my favorite author, but rather that she was nominated twice in the same category of novelette. That doesn’t really seem fair to me. There plenty of stories that are worthy of a chance to win, but McGuire will have a bit of an advantage.
The same for the Dr. Who episodes. 60% of the short form dramatic are from the same show. I think there should be a rule change that there can be only one entry per author or work in a category. In the case of a tv show, if there’s more than episode that makes the final ballot the show needs to nominated as a whole. I just think it makes things a little more fair.
Steve Tait
April 2, 2013 @ 11:59 am
Actually, with most award programs, it seems to me, that it is more likely that multiple entries from one show tend to split the vote and cause them all to lose. If there were just one Doctor Who episode, most, if not all, Whovians would vote for it. Now their votes will be split three ways.
Benjamin
April 2, 2013 @ 1:34 pm
Except that doesn’t seem to be the case. I went and looked at the Hugo winner history and in both 2011 and 2010 there were three Dr. Whos on the final ballot and each time it won. 2009 there was only one and it lost. 2008 and 2007 there were two and three respectively and Dr. Who won again.
Splitting the vote makes sense logically, but it looks like the voters just pick the favorite episode.
John
April 2, 2013 @ 4:44 pm
In a single transferable vote system (aka “instant runoff”), vote splitting doesn’t happen at all. When a entry is eliminated, votes are redistributed on the basis of second/third/etc preferences.
Laura Resnick
April 2, 2013 @ 6:07 pm
What next? Dog can cats living openly together! Mass panic in the streets!
ULTRAGOTHA
April 2, 2013 @ 8:18 pm
What John said. The Hugos use instant runoff voting (I wish we did in US politics!)
Those who complain about what gets nominated should join a Worldcon and nominate. And encourage all their friends.
My LonCon3 membership gets me nomination privileges in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Cheap!
Andrew Trembley
April 2, 2013 @ 9:20 pm
The Hugos are voted using an instant-runoff ballot. Vote-splitting is impossible.
Hugo Thoughts (Part Two) » The Hysterical Hamster
April 3, 2013 @ 6:37 am
[…] a lighter note, these rants, for lack of a better word, have become so common place that Jim Hines decided to take the piss out of them before they started appearing on the […]
Kevin Standlee
April 3, 2013 @ 1:34 pm
Steve: As Andrew Trembley said, it’s effectively impossible for vote-splitting to damage multiple nominees in the same category, aside from the mathematically-possible-but-unlikely scenario of (in this case) the three Doctor Who nominees perfectly splitting the vote three ways and somehow ending up in a three-way tie for last place, in which case they all get eliminated simultaneously. That’s because with Instant Runoff Voting, votes are never “wasted.” Assume for this purpose that all people who prefer Doctor Who divide their vote preferences (1 for most favored, 2 for next-most, etc.) 1-2-3 among the three episodes, and there’s not a perfectly even split. At the end of the first round, assuming nobody on the ballot (like the Game of Thrones episode) scores a “knockout” (absolute majority), then the lowest-placed work’s votes are redistributed among the other nominees. Once the lowest-ranked DW episode drops, its votes get redistributed to one of the other two episodes. The same thing happens when the next-lowest-ranked episode drops. Consequently, the three nominees’ votes all converge on one of the three nominees and they all can be treated as a bloc.
Now of course this makes certain assumptions about the voters. For instance, some voters may love one of the DW episodes and hate the other two, so their votes will redistribute differently. However, in general, having multiple nominations in the same category by the same series or author increases the probability that the series/author will win the award, approaching 100% of course if all of the nominees are in that series/by that author, as happened in the Best Dramatic Presentation category in the 1960s when all five nominees in the (single) BDP category were episodes of Star Trek.
Hugo Nomination Reactions or Why the Fuck is this Controversial? | Cora Buhlert
April 4, 2013 @ 12:18 am
[…] Jim Hines, last year’s winner of the best fan writer Hugo, actually preempts the sort of outra…. The most shocking thing about this is how eerily similar Jim’s parody was to the actual “The Hugos are broken – the books I like did not get nominated” posts that popped up a few days later. […]
Nolly
April 4, 2013 @ 2:07 pm
Don’t forget Seanan contributed to two of the BRW candidates, too! Have the Hugos become the “Best Seanan McGuire” contest??? 😛
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
April 8, 2013 @ 12:40 am
“Have we lived and fought in vain?”
Well played, sir. Well played…
Breaking down big numbers | imwastedpotential
April 10, 2013 @ 6:17 pm
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