The Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer · 12:47am Feb 3rd, 2019
The Hugo Awards are given each year to honor the best writing in fantasy, science fiction, or horror. To quote from thehugoawards.org:
While the World Science Fiction Society sponsors the Hugos, they are not limited to sf. Works of fantasy or horror are eligible if the members of the Worldcon think they are eligible.
For many years, there's been a category of Best Fan Writer. To quote from the same web page,
- Best Fancast: Awarded for any non-professional audio- or video-casting with at least four (4) episodes that had at least one (1) episode released in the previous calendar year.
- Best Fan Writer: This is another person category. Note that it does not just apply to writing done in fanzines. Work published in semiprozines, and even on mailing lists, blogs, BBSs, and similar electronic fora, can be including when judging people for this Award. Only work in professional publications should not be considered.
- Best Fan Artist: The final category is also for people. Again note that the work by which artists should be judged is not limited to material published in fanzines. Material for semiprozines or material on public displays (such as in convention art shows) is also eligible. Fan artists can have work published in professional publications as well. You should not consider such professionally-published works when judging this award.
To quote the WSFS Constitution, Article 3:
3.3.16: Best Fan Writer. Any person whose writing has appeared in semiprozines or fanzines or in generally available electronic media during the previous calendar year.
3.3.17: Best Fan Artist. An artist or cartoonist whose work has appeared through publication in semiprozines or fanzines or through other public, non-professional, display (including at a convention or conventions), during the previous calendar year.
Those are all the rules governing what the "Best Fan Writer" and "Best Fan Artist" Hugos can be awarded for.
You see where I'm going with this, right?
IF YOU'RE GOING TO WORLDCON, NOMINATE A FAN-FICTION WRITER FOR "BEST FAN WRITER" AND/OR A FAN ARTIST FOR "BEST FAN ARTIST.
(Unless you know someone else who deserves it more.)
Someone might raise a question about nominating a pony pseudonym. But many pseudonymous authors have been nominated for, or won, Hugos.
- James Oliver Rigney, writing as Robert Jordan, nominated for novel in 2014
- Seanan McGuire, writing as Mira Grant, nominated for novel + novella in 2013
- Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, writing as James S. A. Corey, nominated for novel in 2011
- C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, writing as Lewis Padgett, nominated for short story in 1996 (retro 1946 award)
- Carolyn Janice Cherry, writing as C. J. Cherryh, nominated for novel in 1979, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1989, novella in 1986
- Alice Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree Jr., nominated for short story in 1973, 1978, 1983 & novella in 1986; won novella in 1974 & 1977
- Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, writing as Cordwainer Smith, nominated for short story in 1956, novel in 1965
- Alice Norton, writing as Andre Norton, nominated for novel in 1964
- William Fitzgerald Jenkins, writing as Murray Leinster, nominated for novel in 1960
When James Tiptree Jr. won best novella in 1974, nobody except her publisher knew her real name.
… OR FOR ANYTHING ELSE
Seanan McGuire was also nominated in 2013 for best novelette for her free, self-published "In Sea-Salt Tears". In this case "self-published" means she posted it to her website. That's right--there is no requirement for any Hugo to be in a professional or paying publication except for the Hugo for Best Professional Artist. Any non-professional publication is eligible for any other Hugo award.
Not that a fan-fiction has much chance of winning any category other than fan writer, but you never know. There usually aren't a lot of nominations for novella or novelette.
Nominations are made according to rules given here, by every member of the current and previous Worldcon. The nominating period for the 2019 Hugo Awards began on Jan. 10, and ends on March 16, 2019 at 06:59 UTC (11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time on 15 March). Paper ballots must be received by mail by 15 March 2019.
If you aren't already registered for the 2019 Worldcon, it's too late to vote! From www.thehugoawards.org: "Join Worldcon by December 31, 2018 to be Eligible to Nominate for 2019 Hugo Awards."
If you're going to the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland, you may find other fimficcers going there in the Convention Planning group, thread Worldcon 2019, Aug 15-19, Dublin, Ireland. Organizing a voting bloc there to agree on what to nominate might not be a good idea, given recent Hugo history, but I think it would be fine to make "nomination for nominations" that explain why you think one person or work should be nominated.
inb4 WorldCon institutes new rules to keep the "Friendly Ponies" from nominating things WorldCon doesn't like
5006983
That’s why we’ve got to make this year count
I would nominate GaPJaxie but why thrust him into such company?
Isn't the Hugo Awards still super political/identitarian these days? As in, you wont win anything unless you are wheelchair bound Bengladeshi transgender woman, writing about how terrible Space Patriarchy is? It was last time I checked, around four years ago. I would be pleasantly surprised if the situation has changed.
5007040
It got worse. And that was before they handed out the awards.
5007040 It's true that the odds of a randomly-chosen author winning one of the big Hugos (novel .. short story) are, empirically, much greater if the author is female, POC, and/or LGBTQ than if it's a straight white male. A year or two ago, I went through Tor's list of all the novels they'd published in the past 5 years, and found that the odds of winning a Hugo if you were Asian were 100%--every Asian who published anything with Tor (there were 3 of them) won a Hugo. The Hugo and Nebula awards in the past 10 years have been given to very few white males, even though white males still write about 70% of all science fiction & fantasy. Some people in the industry justify that by saying that women are just better writers than men are.
But it's also true that the Hugos are nominated and voted on by those who attend Worldcon. How can a small group of people control the outcome? And the gender balance of authors published by Tor--suspected by puppies of being the key manipulator--is much closer to 1/1, which wouldn't be the case if Tor were the cause of the imbalance in the awards [EDIT: This isn't true anymore--I just checked; the gender ratio is now 4 females for every 1 male]. And the gender balance of recent Clarion classes, who I think dominate the Hugos even more than Tor authors do, is close to 1/1.
These two sets of facts seem to be incompatible. If Worldcon attendees represent fandom--and I don't see why they wouldn't--then maybe fandom really does want fewer white males.
Anyway, fan writer and fan artist aren't hotly-contested categories. Plus, their names don't give away race and sex.
I'd like to see the whole representation issue addressed by an online publication system that didn't require authors to reveal their race or genders. Like we've got here. Make people argue about what they write instead of what bins they fall into.
5007085
5007102
Sigh... I miss Meritocracy.
Maybe the reason I haven't heard a peep about the Hugo awards for four years is that an award based on race/gender/sexuality, rather than quality, has no value.
5007102
The issue of the Hugos being easily gameable was a known issue for decades. Harlan Ellison yelled about it back in '95:
Prior to the Sad Puppy campaigns, very few people bothered to nominate works, so it was absurdly easy for a small group to control the ballot. After years of ineffectively griping about it, the Sad Puppies campaign demonstrated this by forcing their way onto the ballot.
After the Sad Puppy campaigns, Worldcon implemented new voting systems explicitly designed to disfavor works with mass popularity. It was even internally tested against the voting data for the Sad Puppy years to ensure it gave the "correct" results prior to implementation.
5007215 Interesting. EPH seems like an interesting idea, but EPH+ really goes too far. If there really are works of especially good quality, then we would expect that people who read a lot of F&SF, and have good taste, would agree on some of them. If person A nominates 5 novels for best novel, and only 1 of them makes the final list of 6, person A either doesn't read much SF, or has peculiar tastes. For his stupidity, A is given more voting power than person B, who nominated 2 works that made the list, and person B gets more power than person C, who nominated 3 works that made the list. This will make it difficult for good or popular works to make the list.
It may also make it difficult to give race-based awards. If some people nominate based on race & gender, they're likely to nominate the same works.
On the other hand, this makes it easier for a group to get one person on each slate, by agreeing to each nominate the same 1 person for every award.
3SV is strictly bad. There are only 2 circumstances in which it could be effective:
5007102
There's a selection bias, though. To "make the cut" if you're underprivileged you need to stand out more to be noticed in the first place, so the Asians who actually get into TOR are more likely to be high-quality authors than Asian writers in general. The proportionality might be an indirect result of bias against these groups in publication in the first place rather than an intentional bias toward them by attendees.
5007293
This holds true for Asian authors who were picked up by Tor after becoming popular in Asia. As far as I know, there's only one of those.
Other than that, "underprivileged" authors have an advantage in being published in the first place, as shown by the fact that for every category of underprivileged, the percentage of published authors who fit that label is much higher than the percentage in fandom at large. Just for starters, women submit only 1/3 as much SF&F as men do, but the M/F ratio among published authors is closer to 1/1. That means they have a threefold advantage in getting published in the first place. That advantage is higher for other categories of underprivileged--except, I think, for gay authors, who are now out of fashion.
Also, in 2016 I had a subscription to Locus magazine, to read the solicitations for anthologies. MORE THAN HALF of the anthologies being prepared for publications said, in their solicitations, "White males need not apply."
So stop talking about this theoretical discrimination when the discrimination against straight white males is not just clear in the statistics of who is published and who wins awards, but openly and proudly proclaimed in every issue of Locus, and at and after every Hugo and Nebula award ceremony. The discrimination is undeniable. The only question is who is responsible.
Yes, I am angry. I've always wanted to be an author, and the science fiction establishment speaks with one voice in saying that I need to go to the back of the bus for being a straight white male. And to add insult to injury, they discriminate in the name of non-discrimination, and enforce monoculture in the name of diversity. War is peace, lies are truth, Big Brother loves you.
Back in the 1960s, when Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney were AFAIK the only blacks writing science fiction, they both were nominated for, and won, many awards.
5007293 5007238 And I have to retract my statement that Tor.com discriminates less than the awards. Checking the first page of their 15 most recently published novels, only 3 are by males, giving a F:M gender ratio of 4:1. Only 2 of them are by white males.
5007375
In other words:
Why be realistic?
Don't wake me from my dream.
I was individualistic
They kicked me off the team...
P.S:
images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/intermediary/f/d0a92046-89ac-4a64-a6f8-9acab846a49c/db0r00x-7031382c-7de3-4164-a7c7-2f6698fc4631.png/v1/fill/w_728,h_1098,q_70,strp/dance_of_the_batponies___cover_by_stuflox_db0r00x-pre.jpg
We're livin' with bats. What's good about that?
5007530 I don't know what you're trying to say. Who's being unrealistic and living in a dream?
5007537
I was striving for a delicately ironic metaphor to express my dismay at the whole lousy mess the fandom has made of itself.
This was after I made and deleted two pithier but meaner posts.
Better to ask: who lives in a dump? Answer: we all do now. Better to continue dreaming.
"We are all in the gutter but some of us..." No. That's hackneyed. More like Solzhenytsin: "A zek will sleep the whole clock round, if he can."
Furthermore and in conclusion: batponies. Because batponies.
5007238
For the record, 3SV was rejected. EPH passed.
"explicitly designed to disfavor works with mass popularity" is a hilariously poor summary. EPH still ensures that the most-voted-on work will make the ballot; it just spreads the downballot nominees around more broadly.
The principle of EPH is simple. If voters have overlapping tastes, EPH maximizes the chance that at least one of the works each of them likes is a finalist, and minimizes the chance that their preferences completely dominate the ballot at the expense of people with broader tastes.
It can't overcome an order-of-magnitude difference: 100 votes which slate A, B, and C, D, and E still beat 10 votes each for F through J. And even in a degenerate scenario — like 100 ABCDE versus 21 F, 21 G, 21 H, 21 I, and 21 J — the way the math is applied means that A through D are still on the ballot, so EVEN IF the story quality plummets after E, voters still have a choice of several of the most popular works as well as several they wouldn't otherwise have heard of. In exchange, if a vocal minority is determined to drive junk to the ballot, their votes get channelled into fewer slots, and the majority has other choices in the finals. And it very neatly solve the "huge bunch of feuding pluralities" problem that everyone's been insisting is a problem throughout all of Puppygate. If the ballots show 33 ABCDE versus 32 FGHIJ, I think it's a MUCH better outcome to have A, B, F, G, and some competing opinions from other nearly-as-big outgroups than it is to have ABCDE.
Honestly though, it sounds like you're assuming there are only 5-10 SFF novels worth reading in a given year. The field is so huge at this point that EPH is unlikely to change the math of the basic selection effects one way or the other; and the most likely result is that finals voters choose between Objectively Best Stories™ # 2, 6, 12, 19, 31, and 58 rather than 3, 5, 11, 14, 22 and 44 (or some such subset generating meaningless heat while not changing the things the heat is being generated about).
And the core problem with award nomination voting — that there is a small group of highly committed readers who are the only ones bothering to regularly vote, while the general public doesn't read widely enough to have useful opinions beyond contributing to a mere popularity contest — will continue one way or the other. :shrug:
Regardless, I nominated several pieces of fanfic last year, and plan to continue!
5008086
Your "just" is not justified. The purpose of EPH is not to devalue popular works, but to devalue correlated votes. People voting for the same slate are highly (or perfectly) correlated. But people who have good taste are also correlated. EPH therefore penalizes good works.
If people who have bad taste are also highly correlated, then maybe it's not so bad. But there are more ways to have bad taste than to have good taste, so I doubt they're as correlated.
And if you're tempted to say, "Who says there are good and bad tastes?", I'd ask what the point of the Hugos is if there aren't.
Also please note that I never said EPH was bad. I called it "interesting." I only said that I think EPH+ is bad.
5008279
Do you believe that the readers with good taste outnumber the readers with bad taste?
I think that's the only way your math makes sense. Otherwise, a small minority with correlated tastes will tend to see representation with this scheme, compared to the lack of representation that they'd have in traditional first past the post. (Their votes will collapse down to single-point votes for the most popular of their "slate" as the others get knocked out. If they didn't have enough combined votes to get even that one on, then non-EPH voting wouldn't have helped them either.) If readers with good taste are highly correlated but most readers don't have good taste — let's call that "featurebox theory" — then EPH helps good taste get on the ballot in the first place.
Of course, if you believe that readers with good taste are in a majority, then really it's hard to argue against a straight popularity contest. We see plenty of those and those don't seem like a good predictor of quality to me.
Fair enough.
Edit: Though I think part of the disconnect here is that I also disagree on the level of correlation people with good taste would have. The number of good works is too big relative to a single reader's available time.
Pick two random people who you think have good taste on FIMFiction. How many stories do you think their top 10 will have in common? A quick google isn't turning up much on the number of SFF novels per year, but I suspect that the sample size is similar in order of magnitude, not to mention the greater amount of time that has to be devoted to novels wrt short stories.
5008332
In my dreams.
You're tossing out my observation about correlation. If readers with good taste are highly correlated but most readers don't have good taste, then "good taste" would have more chance of getting on the ballot without EPH. This is because EPH punishes correlation, and good taste is (in this argument presumed to be) more correlated than bad taste. A work of "good taste" might still have more chance of getting on the ballot than a random work of "bad taste"--but less chance than it would without EPH. Saying "there are still more votes for the works of good taste" is irrelevant. Each of those votes gets penalized under EPH.
The question is at what numeric level the bad effects of that penalty outweigh its good effects in breaking up slates. My guess is that EPH+ went too far. (Did they approve EPH, or EPH+?)
You might test this by asking the Canterlot Archives readers to name their favorite stories from 2018, checking their answers for any correlation, and checking the popularity of any stories named twice. A problem being that the number of new ponyfics in a year is larger than the number of new SF&F novels in a year.
In 2007, 43,000 fiction titles were published by publishers (not counting print-on-demand etc.) Fantasy & SF & horror account for about 13% of novel sales by copies (not titles, so this isn't really the figure I want, but it's a proxy). That gives us an estimate that 5,600 SF&F novel titles are published per year. [EDIT: deleted wrong observation.] Most of these never make it into bookstores.
A better method for getting this figure might be going to a big bookstore and counting how many SF&F titles they have, then estimating via sampling how many of them were published in the past year.
I'd be surprised if there were more than 20 SF&F books published in a year which were promoted by publishers, sold in bookstores, and great enough to be nominated.
Look over the list of Hugo nominees for best novel from years past, and you'll see a couple of peculiar things. First, most of the books nominated before 1990 are forgotten today, and not considered especially great by those who remember them; each year produced 2 to 3 books still regarded as good enough to read after 30 years. Second, the early nominations, before the 1970s, had a greater variety of authors nominated. I didn't notice that until just now. From 1955-1969, there were 49 nominations shared among 38 authors; each author had an average of 1.3 nominations. From 2000-2018 there were 84 nominations shared among 45 authors; each had an average of 1.9 nominations. So the idea that the larger number of books coming out now leads to a more-diverse ballot is wrong.
My guess is that the larger number of books now causes the less-diverse ballot. This is a phenomenon seen in every field as it grows larger. In the early stages, when a field is small enough for everyone to, say, read all of the SF&F novels that come out, the number of readers of each novel has something like a Poisson distribution. When the field gets too big for that, people read what other people are reading, so preferential attachment dynamics kick in, and that leads to the power-law distribution found in all contemporary mass media, and in academic publishing, in which the top 10-20 people get more than half of the attention, whether there are 100 other authors, or 100,000.
5008495
Let me take a step back and try to say this again, then. Do you believe that the current Hugo nominees are representative of the field's best work? Maybe I'm reading too much into your argument, but the reason I'm saying what I am is that it sounds like the answer is "no" — in which case EPH can only help. If the current ballot is due to a correlation in tastes among the majority of existing (presumably "poor-taste") voters, then their power will be diluted and we'll see a greater chance of good works making the finals. If the current ballot is NOT due to correlation among "poor-taste" voters, then it doesn't matter whether "good taste" correlates or not, because even correlation among "good-taste" voters hasn't had the numbers in recent years to overcome that; meaning "good" works won't get in under either system. In other words, even accepting the correlation argument, I'm arguing that the circumstances under which you're arguing "good-taste" voters get penalized don't actually exist.
I should probably add, by the way: do we both understand that the act of writing down five works doesn'tpermanentlymake each vote 1/5 of a point? Each vote is diluted by the number of other works you listwhich are still in contention. If I vote for Popular Scifi Novel, Middling Scifi Novel and Joe's Hyper-Obscure Fanfic, then the instant they knock out Joe from contention when they prune the list of "works getting less than one vote", my ballot is adjusted so that Pop and Mid get 1/2 vote each instead of 1/3. When they get around to pruning Mid, Pop will go up to the full vote. This is why I'm saying that correlated voting for a bunch of obscure stuff doesn't change the math negatively: once obscure stories 2-6 are knocked out, you're still getting a full vote for least-obscure 1.(Sorry for repeating that. Morning brain.)FIMFic statistics say that around 10,000 stories were published on the site in 2018, 1/3 of which are M-rated. So, yeah, we're in the same order of magnitude — if we remove the porn, it's actually pretty close on the nose.
On the other hand, I note your figure clumps horror and SFF together, so the number's lower than your figures suggest. I actually would have thought horror was the majority of that, but according to this I'm wrong: it's only about 12% of their combined total. (Qualifier: That's in dollars rather than novels, but as you say, it's a proxy.) That brings your 5600 down a little under 5k.
You're probably an order of magnitude too low. Here's a best-of-2018 list with 37 SFF novels and a dozen anthologies. 🤷
Another data point: going through Goodreads' list of new science fiction releases, I had to hit the ninth row before finding a 2018 publication date. It's only a month into 2019. Granted, a number of the listings are for graphic novels or other things we wouldn't count as SFF novels, but even if we cut that number in half, that's about 250 novels per year.
On the other hand, adding "promoted by publishers, sold in brick-and-mortar bookstores" is a pretty huge qualifier, so I don't have as much grounds to dispute your specific statement. But at that point I suspect the power-law distribution you mention pretty much overwhelms any other factor. That, however, suggests a case where EPH helps. If half the people are reading only the 10 most popular works, then the majority's votes will be significantly more correlated than people dipping into the long tail for quality.
… By the way, do you think most people read from bookstores these days? I'm taking these numbers with a grain of salt for the moment, but it sure looks like ebooks and Amazon collectively dwarf store sales. Print is making a resurgence, and even without that it's the majority of sales, but promotions-to-sellers doesn't seem like the elephant it once was.
I'm with you on that. At least I haven't seen any data against that intution.
EPH+ was voted down.
5008547
That is a very good point, with the footnote that independence is independent of prior probability.
Also, EPH could change the rank ordering because reducing the numeric magnitude of the difference between most-popular and semi-popular makes the vote noisier, because the effect of the law of large numbers is being reduced.
BTW, horror works are eligible.
This raises an interesting question: Why is the fraction of movies that are horror movies much larger (I would guess) than the fraction of novels that are horror?
I dunno. There aren't very many bookstores nowadays. The closest decent bookstore to me is nearly an hour away.