Hugo Thoughts: The Editors
Hugo voting has officially begun. It sounds like the Hugo voters’ packet won’t be available until later this month, so I’ll probably hold off on sharing my thoughts on most categories, but I thought I could at least jump in and look at the editors on the ballot.
For those looking for a completely puppy-free ballot, there are zero candidates in these two categories who weren’t on the Sad Puppy and/or Rabid Puppy slates. The (SR) after a person’s name means the individual was on both slates. The (R) by Vox Day’s name indicates that he only appeared on his own slate.
Best Editor, Long Form
- Sheila Gilbert (SR): Disclaimer – Sheila is my editor, and has been for almost a decade. Sheila is one of two senior editors and co-owner of DAW. She was on the Sad Puppy slate this year, but has also made the Hugo ballot twice before without bloc voting or ballot-stuffing shenanigans. I think she could have earned this nomination without canine assistance, just as she’s done in the past. Beyond that, I think she’s a good editor and a good human being. I count myself lucky to be able to continue working with her.
- Toni Weisskopf (SR): Weisskopf took over at Baen Books after the death of Jim Baen. This is her third year on the ballot. Sad Puppies have pushed her nomination all three years. While I disagree with her on some things (the same could be said about anyone), she’s done some excellent work at Baen.
- Jim Minz (SR): Minz is the second Baen editor on the ballot this year. (Trivia: He originally worked for Tor.) He’s edited folks like Larry Correia, John Ringo, Hal Duncan, Eric Flint, Terry Goodkind, Nancy Kress, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Frederik Pohl,and many more. This is Minz’ first time on the ballot, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable for him to be there.
- Anne Sowards (SR): Sowards is an editor at Ace, and her authors include Jim Butcher, Kat Richardson, Kelly McCullough, and others. She’s never made the Hugo ballot before, but like Minz, she’s certainly earned some cred as an editor.
- Vox Day (R): No.
Best Editor, Short Form
Edmund R. Schubert(SR): “My name is Edmund R. Schubert, and I am announcing my withdrawal from the Hugo category of Best Editor (Short Form). My withdrawal comes with complications, but if you’ll bear with me, I’ll do my best to explain…” His full post is very much worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet.- Jennifer Brozek (SR): Disclaimer – I had a story in Brozek’s anthology Human for a Day. Brozek is a hard-working editor and author, and has been making a name for herself in several areas. She edited four anthologies that came out in 2014: Bless Your Mechanical Heart, Beast Within 4: Gears & Growls, Chicks Dig Gaming (non-fiction), and Shattered Shields (with Bryan Thomas Schmidt). This is her first Hugo nomination, and in many ways, I think that’s a shame, because I think she’s been reaching the point where she could have gotten there without the puppies.
- Mike Resnick (SR): Resnick has won at least five Hugos, but he’s never won for his work as an editor, though he’s been nominated in that category twice before. He’s the editor of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, and has edited a number of anthologies over the years, though I’m not seeing any from 2014. (It’s possible I’m just not finding them.) Reading the 2014 issues of Galaxy’s Edge would probably be the best way to get a sense of Resnick’s editorial tastes and skill.
- Bryan Thomas Schmidt (SR): Disclaimer – I’m one of the folks Schmidt denounced as “rotten meat looking for a place to stink” last year. Schmidt has been moving up in the editorial world, including co-editing a couple of anthologies for Baen. That said, I don’t believe there’s any chance he’d have made the ballot at this point in his career without the Rabid and Sad Puppies. I also question his editorial professionalism, based on things like the submission guidelines he posted last year for World Encounters. Among other things, stating “no assholes allowed” and that he won’t bother with anyone who has “slandered [his] name” or “resents [him] for not sharing your views” seems inappropriate to me, particularly when I’ve watched Schmidt’s overreactions to disagreement and seen the kinds of things he characterizes as slander.
- Vox Day (R): No.
I’ll be voting No Award over at least some of the candidates here. Others, in my opinion, have earned some recognition through their work in the field. It annoys me that I can’t support any of them without in some way also supporting or validating the slate-voting mechanism that got them there. It’s a problem I expect to have in most of the categories.
Basically, is my desire to vote for a handful of these candidates stronger than my desire to vote against the bloc voting and other destructive crap?
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
May 6, 2015 @ 3:42 pm
Thanks for the link, Jim. Of the people on the long-form ballot, I probably know Sheila Gilbert’s work most. She’s edited quite a few people I know, and has really been under-recognized in the past. (Also as a disclaimer: Mike Resnick has been one of my editors.)
Avilyn
May 6, 2015 @ 4:54 pm
Can I ask how “No Award” voting works, exactly? I bought a supporting membership this year so that I could vote in the Hugos, but I haven’t participated much before, so I’m a little confused as to how it all works. If you have editors A, B, C, D, & E, and you think A, B, & C are Hugo-worthy, but D & E aren’t, do you vote 1. A, 2. B, 3. C, 4. No Award, 5. ? Or are you supposed to fill in the 5th slot with either D or E? Does it make a difference one way or the other?
Jim C. Hines
May 6, 2015 @ 4:56 pm
Kevin Standlee has a very good write-up at http://kevin-standlee.livejournal.com/1440530.html
--E
May 6, 2015 @ 5:06 pm
Good post, Jim. Yep, I think the four long-form editors could have easily been on the ballot legitimately. They probably weren’t (or at least not all of them), but at least each is a plausible candidate. [That fifth individual isn’t an editor. He is a vanity publisher. :dismissive wave:]
If any of those four win over No Award, I would consider it a legit win, since they’re up against actual competition from three other longstanding, respected, successful editors.
Of the Short Form editors, I think Resnick is the only one who might legit have gotten on the ballot without slate support. (Brozek may be promising, but there are at least a dozen other folks who I’m confident are more well-known and popular, and therefore would likely have finished ahead of her in any non-gamed year.)
If Brozek wins over No Award, it’ll be an asterisked win, the Hugo-award equivalent of having been found doping to improve performance. That she didn’t do the doping wouldn’t change the illegitimacy any more than a racehorse is responsible for an unscrupulous owner. If she’s a decent human being, I have great sympathy for her being in this awful spot.
Yet I don’t think it would do even Resnick a favor to win this one. “Oh, look, veteran editor wins category over a bunch of unknowns and ballot manipulators.” That would be equivalent to winning while running unopposed. Nothing to be proud of there.
--E
May 6, 2015 @ 5:22 pm
Avilyn, in general you can leave off anyone who you think doesn’t deserve the win at all.
So in your hypothetical, I would put candidates in order A, B, C, No Award, and then nothing at all.
But if you would be willing to see an award going to D, but not to E, then you might put A, B, C, No Award, D, and leave off E. That way if it comes down to D vs E in the end, your vote might make a difference.
By way of practical example, using the candidates here: I am planning to include some of the long form editors above No Award, because regardless of slate, I think they could easily have been on the ballot legitimately and I do like their work. I may put one or two below No Award, because I don’t really think they would have been here but for the slating; yet they are legit editors and I won’t think it terrible if one of them ultimately wins.
But I will be leaving VD off the ballot entirely, because I don’t think there are any circumstances other than gaming the system that would get him on the ballot, and I would rather see a ball of goblin toejam win this award than him.
Marie
May 6, 2015 @ 5:37 pm
I’m very glad I’m not forced to make your decision. I didn’t vote at my Worldcons because I wasn’t familiar enough to say. I resent that this has been explicitly moved further away from voting for the best pieces and a hoorah into nasty partisan politics. That removes legitimacy and makes it just another marketing campaign and crusade instead of being about the stories that were the best. While most of these candidates have shown their editing chops, how long can the Hugo remain the biggest award if it gets gamed? How long until a rival award will rise, either from those who don’t want politicking or those who lose this dispute? While SFF is a larger genre than it once was, disbanding into little like minded ghettos is not the answer.
Sally
May 6, 2015 @ 5:56 pm
Perfectly stated in all paragraphs.
LongStrider
May 6, 2015 @ 6:08 pm
Do the Hugos (or anyone else for that matter) publish a list works that nominees edited & published in 2014?
Jim C. Hines
May 6, 2015 @ 6:20 pm
I haven’t seen anything online, but I’m guessing that kind of info will be part of the Hugo Voter packet.
Cat Sittingstill
May 6, 2015 @ 6:38 pm
I’ll be voting No Award ahead of anything or anyone on a slate this year.
Next year the Puppies will start putting people we all know they hate on their slates and then I will laugh at them and decline to be manipulated, but that’s next year.
That said, I do intend to rank people after No Award and I will bear in mind what you have said.
Dela
May 6, 2015 @ 6:59 pm
I first became aware of Bryan Thomas Schmidt when he posted an open submissions call a year or two ago that seemed *so* unprofessional (it may be the same “no assholes” one you’re referring to, Jim), I initially thought it was either a joke/prank or else is was just some delusional whim by an amateur vaguely thinking about a Kickstarter campaign. Reading on, it became clear that he has prior editing credits and some professional writers–names I recognizes–committed to this anthology. I found that really surprising and peculiar, because his whole pitch came across as so completely unprofessional.
The next time I became aware of him was when he started publicly complaining that not enough people were congratulations him for getting on the Hugo ballot this year–as a Sad/Rabid Puppy pick. His comments about this again struck me as completely unprofessional (also professional tone-deaf, totally failing to recognize how ambivalent people felt about what to say to someone who’d gotten on the ballot that way–and who (I agree with you, Jim) seemed extremely unlikely to get on the ballot -without- the Puppies putting him there.)
In other words, Schmidt has made such a thoroughly bad impression on me on how he conducts himself =as a professional editor= that I don’t even want to read what he edits.It’s enough to know that he has absolutely no idea how to communicate or behave in public in his professional capacity (much like the Puppies themselves, who put him on the ballot).
Avilyn
May 6, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
Thanks!
Avilyn
May 6, 2015 @ 7:23 pm
Thanks for the explanation! And I love (and agree) with your last sentence especially. 🙂
D. D. Webb
May 8, 2015 @ 9:33 am
I have to say, it’s been a few of years since I quit paying close attention to the Hugos; I was jarred out of my complacency by their choice of Best Novel a while back, and subsequently I’m not certain about the value of an award that honors literary merit in theory and personal popularity in fact. This Puppy nonsense is a big fat case in point.
If my own measly opinion is worth anything, though, this blog deserved the recognition it got. As, assuredly, did many of the works that have received Hugos. As an institution, though… I dunno if I can consider it an asset to the genre.
Harmon
July 26, 2015 @ 11:39 am
It appears to me that the Puppies campaigns have merely put out in the open what has probably been going on all along, only excluding non-favored groups, these days being mainly white men and conservatives. There’s a saying in politics that a wink is as good as a nod. One side has been winking, the other side has started nodding. I asked Jerry Pournelle if he had any comments about the slating. He responded that there have always been campaigns for nominees, & didn’t see anything new about it.
So my bottom line is that both “sides” have been slating – one has been doing it sub-silentio for several years, and the other has brought it out into the open. I won’t penalize anyone for being on the P slates.
But my view, as a neutral bystander not deep into fandom (except for having read & enjoyed SF for more than 60 years) is that the ad hominem and often fact-free nature of much of the reaction to the P slates has gone a long way towards showing that the P’s are right in their perception.
I’ve been reading my way through all the nominees. Some of them are decent, some are crap. I’ve read nothing that I regard as a must-read, although Three Body Problem comes close. The explanations above about the use of No Award are helpful in dealing with the crap.
My main problem has been dealing with the short & long form editor nominations. Frankly, I think those categories should not be the subject of popular voting by anyone other than writers. So I’ve been surfing around looking for what the writers think, which is what brought me to your blog. Your observations are very helpful.