A modest Hugo Award proposal

I received the following proposal from a long-time genre fan who wishes to stay anonymous. This person cares deeply about the Hugo Awards and, like many people in the science fiction and fantasy field, wants a solution to the current controversy which is threatening to destroy the Hugos once and for all.

After considering all of the alternatives, I think a proposal like this is a solution which could end this destructive fight. Yes, some people involved in Worldcon are already working on rule changes to make it harder to game the Hugo nomination system through block voting. However, it is unlikely anything would be approved until next year's Worldcon because it takes two Worldcon cycles for members to vote and approve significant change to the Hugo nomination process.  This means we could easily experience dueling nomination campaigns next year. And the rule changes being considering are, while needed and long overdue, also unlikely to prevent anything like this from happening again. (For a description of the rule changes being considered, see the proposal below.)

But instead of simply tweaking the Hugo rules, perhaps a better solution is to find common ground and agree to fix the Hugo Awards once and for all.

The proposal below seems like something all of fandom could agree to. And even if this proposal doesn't agree with people, perhaps a different form of proportional nominating would work.

I look forward to hearing people's thoughts. And many thanks to the person who sent this proposal to me.
 

The Proposal

I don't know why I'm writing to you about this, other than that I've seen you post about Hugo nomination rules and potential rumors of changes thereto on Twitter. What I've heard about is a possibility of the "4/6" process, where voters may select 4 titles to nominate, and the nominees list will be at least 6 titles. I actually think this is a step in the wrong direction. (It may — may — help mitigate "sweeps" but an organized campaign can overcome that by simply having 2 (or actually 1.5) "slates" and enough of a push behind them both. But that's not why I don't particularly like it.

Where smaller categories get bogged down and overwhelmed by manipulation — short fiction, related work, etc. — is that there are many dozens of "very good" stories and (since long blog posts are related works now, though another topic would be creating a "short related work" category for that so that book-length related works can have their say, but boy is that a digression) related works, and (with the rise of so many anthologies and small press e-zines that do good work) so many short form editors, etc. That a hundred people like stories ABCDE, and another hundred like AFGHI, and another... so when an aggressive slate pushes VWXYZ everything (except perhaps the "A" that is a majority choice from the get-go) is pushed off. The long tail of good stories is its own defeat.

But! We can solve this with better democracy, in a way that (I hope) even the Sad Puppies would like. The approach is to allow *more* instead of *fewer* nominations per voter, ranked, and counted by a special Condorcet method which preserves proportional representation.

Proportional representation means basically that if 60% of ballots are A-B-C-D-E and 40% of ballots are F-G-H-I-J that the 5 nominees are A-B-C-F-G. This is what I actually favor: minority representation is important no matter which "side" one might be on. It makes for an environment where if 600 people really dig literary spectrum stories, and 400 people really dig pulp adventure, that each can put forth some nominees, instead of the 600 always having their sway. (Or the 400 turning rabid and ramming a wedged slate down everyone else's throat.)

Further, by allowing 10 short fiction nominations, for example, we can avoid the problem of so many people (who like the same 20 stories) splitting their own voice and picking non-intersecting groups of 5 stories, only to be overwhelmed by a dedicated group that won't split its vote.

http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/proportional.html

At that link is a short article about the Condorcet "proportional representation" method, attached to the Cornell server which you can play around with, submitting sample ballot files, etc. (I encourage trying the 60% ABCDE and 40% FGHIJ ballot, because I think it's *awesome* that it comes up with ABCFG.)

Even without the (radical, I admit) step of expanding the nominations to 10 per category per voter, using proportional representation would also prevent a 'sweep' by a true minority bloc. I should note, though, that not expanding to 10 nominations per vote would not allow people to express their preference for more of the long tail of truly fantastic fiction that you and your fellow writers publish each year.

Sad little corrupt puppies

The true winner on this year's Hugo Award final ballot isn't the Sad Puppies campaign of Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen but Vox Day and his more extreme Rabid Puppies. As Mike Glyer demonstrates over on File 770, the Rabid Puppies slate actually placed more items on the ballot than the related Sad Puppies campaign slate. This indicates to me that Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) has more power and ability to get people to game the Hugo Award nomination process than either Larry or Brad.

Of course, Larry and Brad have gone to great lengths to distance their campaign from Vox Day's. No doubt this is because of VD's well-documented attacks on others, such as how he used SFWA's Twitter feed to link to comments he made calling N. K. Jemisin a “half-savage,” for which he was eventually expelled from the organization. When you state you want to make the genre inclusive for everyone, as Larry and Brad say, then Vox Day is a very inconvenient finger in everyone's eye.

No, Larry and Brad don't want to be associated with VD. But they also must not mind benefiting from his campaign. I say this because it's the only reason I can think of for why they're not calling Vox Day out for the obvious conflict of interest of his Rabid Puppies campaign turning out the block vote for both himself and his own publishing house.

As Charles Stross points out, a Finish publishing house founded last year by Vox Day landed a nine nominated works on the ballot because of the Rabid Puppies campaign. And this isn't taking into account the two nominations for long and short editor Vox Day also scored.

Larry and Brad made a big point about how their campaign aims to fight against a corrupted Hugo Award nominating process. That they want to return the power in the genre to those who are supposedly being overlooked.

So I ask: How is the Rabid Puppies campaign, which benefited the very person running it, not simply a continuation of the corruption Larry and Brad are supposedly fighting against? I'd also love to hear if Larry and Brad support Vox Day receiving dual Best Editor nominations, especially when VD was the one who urged people to vote for himself in those categories.

Am I the only one who is amused that the Puppy's big step in supposedly cleaning up the genre turns out to include cranking the dial on genre corruption to 11?

Yes, people do read the non-Puppy novels up for the Hugo and Nebula Awards

So the Hugo Awards final ballot has been released and it matched up pretty much as I predicted earlier this week. Essentially every fiction and editing category outside of Best Novel is all Sad Puppies all the time (or from the related Rabid Puppies campaign). In addition, three of the five finalists in the novel category are also from these slates.

I've already said plenty about this year's Hugos, including how the Puppies campaign is merely the dysfunctional US political system expanding its reach into the SF/F genre. There are many others commenting on the issue right now, so I won't rehash my earlier points.

But I do want to address a different issue raised by the Sad Puppies campaign, which is that they represent the "true" version of science fiction and fantasy fandom. In this view, few people read the works that have been nominated for the Hugo Awards in previous years and the Puppies campaign are merely nominating the stories actually read by genre fans.

In some Hugo Award categories, such as with short fiction, its impossible to test this theory. While there are some general numbers on magazine circulations and anthology sales — the main place short fiction is published — these numbers don't tell how many people read an individual story in a magazine or anthology. So you can't draw any definite conclusions on readership patterns from the short fiction categories. 

But there is one category where we do have solid readership numbers — Best Novel. And thanks to Nielsen BookScan, a book industry sales-tracking data system, it's not hard to compare the sales numbers of the different Hugo Award finalists and see how they stack up with readers.

Important Note: These are only sales tracked by BookScan, which does not report e-book sales or some print copy sales or how many books are checked out of libraries. (Update: Per the comment from Colleen Lindsay below, Bookscan represents about 60% of actual physical book sales.) But that said, this does allow for general comparisons of how many people are reading specific novels.

Here are this year's Hugo Award Best Novel finalists and how their BookScan reported sales compare as of earlier this week:

• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor), 1,800 copies.
• The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson (Tor), 1,900 copies.
• Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc), 94,000 copies.
• Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos (Amazon's 47North imprint), 2,360 copies.
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie,  (Orbit US; Orbit UK), 8,000 copies.

As you can see, the sales of the two non-Puppy novels (The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie) are either in line with the other novels picked by the Sad Puppies or extremely ahead of them, in the case of Ann's novel. In fact, Ann's novel is second in sales behind only Skin Game by Jim Butcher, which sold 94,000 copies in hardcover and is the 15th novel in a very popular series.

It's worth noting that Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia (Baen) evidently made the final ballot but Larry declined the nomination. So to be fair we should note that his novel has sold 6,100 copies. This is the fifth book in Larry's bestselling Monster Hunter Incorporated series. According to BookScan, the first book in his series has sold 54,000 paperback copies since being released by Baen in 2009.

If you wish, you can compare this with Ann Leckie's first novel, which is the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Ancillary Justice. Ann's novel on this year's final ballot is the sequel to Ancillary Justice, which according to BookScan has sold 26,000 copies in trade paperback since it was released. Of course, a direct comparison between these novels is a little tricky because Larry's novels are released in a paperback edition, while Ann's are higher-priced trade paperbacks and Jim Butcher is originally published in the most expensive format of all, hardcover. 

But this comparison still shows all of these top authors are reaching plenty of readers. If these sales represent what genre fans are supposedly reading, then there is no way to say that genre fans are not reading books like those by Ann Leckie.

Again, these are only BookScan numbers and don't include some print sales and all e-book sales. I keep inserting this disclaimer because I don't want any anyone to think I'm under-reporting any author's sales.

Of course, only two non-Puppy novels are on the Hugo final ballot this year, which limits the comparisons we can make. But how about if we also bring in this year's Nebula Award final ballot. After all, the same complaints the Puppies made about the previous Hugo Awards not representing what fans truly read have also been made against the Nebulas.

Here's are the BookScan sales figures for this year's Nebula finalists:

• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (FS&G), 33,836 copies. (Note: I want to remind everyone yet again that BookScan doesn't report all sales, and doesn't include any reports on ebook sales. As proof of this, note that Jeff's Southern Reach series has sold more than 150,000 copies to date. That's significantly more than BookScan is reporting.)
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor), 1,800 copies.
• Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon (Baen), 1,373 copies.
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie,  (Orbit US; Orbit UK), 8,000 copies.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor), 7,669 copies.
• Coming Home by Jack McDevitt (Ace), 3,311.

The BookScan numbers for the novels on the Nebula final ballot actually exceed the sales on the Hugo ballot with the exception of the novel by Jim Butcher. And both Butcher and Jeff VanderMeer blew everyone else on both ballots out of the water. The Three-Body Problem also had excellent sales, especially when you consider the book was (like Butcher's novel) released as an expensive hardcover edition.

The take-away: All of these numbers indicate that people are reading the novels on the Sad Puppies slate AND the novels their campaign implies no one reads. In fact, if you take VanderMeer's novel into consideration, then far more people read the first novel in his Southern Reach series than all the other Hugo and Nebula shortlisted novels combined with the exception of Skin Game by Jim Butcher.

What these numbers tell me is there's no reason to say that the Sad Puppies campaign represents the true genre fandom any more than people should say the novels which made the Nebula Awards are the true fandom. People in the science fiction and fantasy genre are reading all of these works.

So the next time someone tells you their view of SF/F represents the genre's true fans, don't believe them. Because the numbers say otherwise.

Author James Blish complains about pirated fiction — back in 1951

The digital age has spawned an ongoing literary argument between authors who fear their works are too easily being pirated and authors like Cory Doctorow who believe current copyright laws are failing to serve artists (along with a million different views on the issue.) While I personally align more with Doctorow's position, I totally understand the concern of authors who fear that the free distribution of their creative works will undercut how they earn their living.

But with that said, it's silly to be believe this is in any way a new issue for authors. For example, in the 19th century pirating was a major problem, with American publishers being notorious for the practice. This is seen easily with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was not only the best-selling novel of the 19th century but likely also the most pirated one.

In the 20th century more rigidly enforced and standarized copyright laws helped make pirated works more rare, but it still happened. As proof of this, witness this letter from SF author James Blish to William L. Hamling, editor of Imagination: Stories of Science Fiction. The letter was published in the September 1951 edition of the magazine and is part of my continuing effort to scan and highlight forgotten correspondence of interest to genre history.

The letter is transcribed below. Readers can also download the letter as a PDF.

And I'm curious about this well-known fan who assisted with this pirating. Wonder if anyone knows who this was?

AN AUTHOR PROTESTS

Dear Bill :

While reading the June issue of IMAGINATION I ran across the reference to Spanish-language fantasy magazines in FANDORA'S BOX. To quote: "Even if you never see these magazines and never want to, its interesting to know that your favorite authors and stories are being enjoyed by fans who can't read English.”

To which, I'm afraid, it's necessary to add: For which privilege none of the authors represented are receiving one red cent. Evidently Miss Wolf is not aware of the fact that some of these Spanish magazines print by out and out piracy. The stories which go into them are selected, it seems, by an American, an extremely well known fan who apparently is proud of his participation in this kind of literary thievery.

There seems to be little that the pirated authors can do about this condition at the moment; however, you, as editor of an American science fiction magazine which will probably be pirated by Los Cuentos Fantasticos sooner or later should at least refrain from printing what amounts to tacit approval of the practice.

Incidentally, none of my own stories have ever proven popular enough to our friends South-of-the-border to be pirated in this fashion, so I have no personal axe to grind.

James Blish
171 Pelton Ave.
Staten Island 10, N. Y.

The literary piracy practices of the Мехісат таgazine you тепtion are no secret to your editor, Jim. While I edited FANTASTIC ADVENTURES at Ziff-Davis we found that not only were some of owr stories stolen by this questionable Mexican outfit, but they also used our covers, blocking out the logo. The matter was taken up with the attorneys of AS & FA, but it seemed as if there was no legal hold we could get on this magazine. As to our personal feelings on the mαtter you can imagine how angry we were—and are that a cheap fly-by-night Mexican firm would do such a dastardly thing under some technicality of a copyright being invalid insofar as they're cоncerned. And we'll go on record right now and say that in all likelihood we won't be able to stop them from pirating stories, illustrations and covers from IMAGINATION if they choose to do so, but if we ever meet anybody cоnnected with the project well have a few choice things to say.

As to the mention in FANDORA'S BOX, we don't censor fan news. We try and be as fair as possible even to a nauseating magazine like the one mentioned. Anything in science fiction is fan news and the fans have the right to know and express their views in any manner in the proper departments of this book. And along these lines wed like to mention one other thing. Mari Wolf's husband is Rog Phillips. And I believe Rog has had some of his work pirated by this same publication you mention. Which shows that Mari is reporting the news fairly, even though she may have an axe to grind personally.

As to an American having a hand in this literary piracy, we dont know anything about that … wlh

On the Hugo Awards and dysfunctional politics

I've received a number of messages and comments since my post about the pending sweep of the Hugo Awards final ballot by the Sad Puppies campaign. Many of these messages say that I simply want my political side to dominate the award, and that conservatives had to band together to save the science fiction and fantasy genre and/or destroy their opponents.

What's funny about this — aside from anyone assuming to know my political views or even where I stand on different issues — is it means some people now view the Hugo Awards through the prism of the United States' dysfunctional political system. For those outside the USA, this basically means that there are people who want to split our genre into two parties which continually attack each other and want nothing more than to destroy the other. Compromise and understanding and communication and simple human decency are out because the other side is so evil they must be wiped from the genre.

This is disturbing on many levels. First, it's a extremely wrong approach to life. Second, I don't want our genre to be split like this. Third, it assumes that all authors and fans are motivated primarily by politics, which is totally asinine. For example, Lois McMaster Bujold, who won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Novel, freely admits "her writing is not political or ideological." I'd say many if not most SF/F authors and fans fall into this category.

In addition, such an "us or them" approach to issues in our genre assumes that even those authors and fans who are politically motivated can be aligned on a simplistic USA-centric political model. There's a reason the World Science Fiction Convention is called Worldcon — one can find SF/F authors and fans around the globe and in every culture and country. Because of this, a large number of authors and fans can't be placed within the spectrum of our dysfunctional political system.

To understand what I'm getting at here, I'd dare anyone to place Scottish author Charles Stross, who has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel seven times over the last decade, on a simplistic USA-based left-right/liberal-conservative divide. For a glimpse at Stross' complicated political views, check out his statement about last year's Scottish independence vote.

All that said, there have long been strong political viewpoints in the American SF/F genre and it would be silly to ignore this. As Stross once said, "The history of American SF is of a genre that was profoundly infused by political ideology." Very true. The SF/F field in the United States has always been made up of people from across the political spectrum — libertarians, communists, radical right, radical left, socialists, Republicans, Democrats and every political viewpoint you can imagine. Since genre fans are rather outspoken, arguments and disagreements have flowed through our genre since its formation.

However, to my knowledge no side every talked about totally destroying the other, or risked splitting the genre and possibly inflicting permanent harm on either Worldcon or the Hugos. Instead, different sides debated and argued using the written word. For example, when Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960, many people were outraged about the novel's politics and view of war. But these people didn't try to game the Hugo nominating process to keep Heinlein off the ballot or place their own novels there.

Instead, these authors and fans responded to Starship Troopers with their own fiction and critiques. Harry Harrison wrote his famous 1965 satirical novel Bill, the Galactic Hero in direct response to Heinlein. Joe Haldeman also disagreed with the view of war in Starship Troopers and was influenced by both Heinlein's novel and Haldeman's own experiences in Vietnam to write The Forever War, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Instead of Heinlein being angry about Haldeman's novel and starting a campaign to force the genre to see things his way, the famously libertarian author approached Haldeman after the Nebula Award ceremony and said The Forever War "may be the best future war story I've ever read!"

I've disagreed with many people in the genre over the years. For example, I've critiqued several statements that Mike Resnick has made. But that doesn't mean I don't like him or can't enjoy his stories. And if he writes a great new story, I'll vote for it. The fact that he's received an amazing 36 Hugo Award nominations, and won five of those Hugos, means I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

I bring up Resnick because he recently said something very interesting about the Sad Puppies campaign. In response to supporters of the campaign saying on Facebook that recent Hugo Award winners had made the awards worthless and "defaced the legacy of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke," Resnick said the following:

"I have voted against at least as many Hugo winners as for them. I have thought better books and stories lost. But I have never felt that the fact that I didn't like a book that some editor paid money for and a majority of my peers voted for made it a bad book or story, just one that didn't appeal to me personally. I understand why you want a certain author or publisher to win; I do not understand why you, and so many like you, feel the awards of the past quarter century are worthless."

I'm in total agreement with Resnick on this.

In addition, Resnick later added in the Facebook thread that "A lot of prior Hugo winners were not liberals. I'm one of them ... When someone says, as so many have said here on Facebook, that they can't stand the award winners, that translates as their being unable to stand Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and Niven, all multiple Hugo winners."

Well said, Mike Resnick. Well said indeed.

The Hugo Awards belong to all of us. And that should never change.