I’ve added the novel nominations for the Lambda Awards’ LGBT sf/fantas/horror category to the 2014 noticable SFF novels:
This is rather rich coming from the man who wanted to destroy the Hugos:
It should go without saying, but apparently I need to plainly state the blatantly obvious, everyone should read the nominations and vote honestly.
First you shit the bed, then you scold everybody else for wanting to clean the sheets. That seems to be the Puppy talking point du jour. Case in point, this douche:
Voting “No Award” over a work that one thinks has been “nominated inappropriately” is really a vote against the process of nomination, and should take place in a different venue, at the WorldCon business meetings where the Hugo rules can be discussed for possible change.
No.
That’s not how it works. That’s reinventing Hugo history and rules to suit your own cheating. This is another tactic straight from the Republicans’ Culture Wars playbook, an attempt to bind your opponents actions with rules and expectations you yourself aren’t bound with and which in any case you’re making up yourself. This working the refs has had far more success than it should’ve in American politics largely because of the braindead political media swallowing it hook, line and sinker. Not so much in fandom though. Nobody with any familiarity of Worlcon fandom’s history and culture believes that it’s dishonest to vote No Award over any nomination that got there through blatant slate voting, or that fans have a duty to be “fair” to nominations which stole their place on the ballot. That didn’t work when the scientologists did it, nor will it fly when it’s a bunch of whiny crybabies running cover for a racist asshole wanting to promote his vanity press.
This year, more then ever, the Hugo Voting Packet resembles the curate’s egg: parts of it are good, other parts not so much:
The packet contains the full text of three Hugo-nominated novels, The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, and The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, plus excerpts of Skin Game by Jim Butcher and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie.
That gets you two of last year’s best novels and nobody will force you to read the Kevin J. Anderson. Many of the other categories are of course soiled with Puppy droppings you don’t want even if free, but there are some gems among the dross. Especially so in the Best Graphic Story category, with no Puppy nominee included and complete PDFs of Sex Criminals Vol. 1, Saga Vol. 3, Ms Marvel Vol. 1 and Rat Queens Vol. 1.
Though the Hugo Voting Packet should be seen as a bonus, rather than an inalienable part of buying a supporting membership for Worldcon, for plenty of people this of course has been the main benefit of membership, after getting to vote for the Hugos and all that. For those people this year’s packet is far from a bargain, despite the presence of the books listed above. Another reason to smack down the Puppies..
So now we’ve had three years of increased Puppy manipulation of the Hugos, culminating in this year’s disaster in which a clique of rightwing whingers functioned as cover for a fascist bellend to get his vanity publishing project on the ballot. Cue much justified outrage, but what are we going to do about it so next year won’t be a repeat? For this year we all should vote no award over all Puppy entries, but how to make sure next year we don’t have to do it again?
To be honest, Worldcon fandom has been caught with its pants down by the Puppies, too slow to react to the first two attempts to game the Hugos. We all thought, and I was no exception, that after the Puppy nominees were trashed in the actual voting last year, the spoiled brats behind it would get the hint and fuck off. Instead they doubled down. And because of the deliberately slow ways in which Worldcon rules can be adapted, any change now will take two years to come into effect. Though I’m not sure any rule change will eliminate the Puppy threat, there are a couple of interesting proposals, the most complicated one at Making Light. But again, even if that one passed, it would still need confirmation at next year’s Worldcon and only come into effect in 2017.
The other method of preventing slate voting has been social control: until the Puppies, few people have tried it because it’s Just Not Done. Only outsiders, like the Scientologists, attempted it and those were punished quickly. With the Puppies though, that isn’t working anymore, or at least not to the extent it used to. They’re caught up in their rightwing culture war victim complex and hence insensitive to these kind of appeals. It’s still worth keeping that pressure up though, so nobody approached for participation in a Puppy slate has ignorance as an excuse. Meaning only those fully invested in the Puppy narrative will be onboard and fewer “innocents” are hurt.
But what we really need to realise is that the Puppies are just a symptom of the problems the Hugos have. An exceptionally annoying symptom, but a symptom nonetheless. The real problem is, and has been for years, is the number of people voting and especially nominating. Less than 1900 people voted for the Best Novel Hugo, the category with the most votes; 2122 ballots in total were sent in. That’s not much for a potential voting audience spanning last year’s, this year’s and next year’s Worldcon membership. This is where we need to improve and this is something that can be improved almost immediately.
LonCon3 had over 10,000 members: get all those to nominate and slate buying becomes slightly more expensive. But how do you get them to vote? Once LonCon3 was over, it was up to Sasquan to rally voters, but that only started in January, or four months later, far too late for those not into core Worldcon fandom to remember to nominate. What’s needed therefore is for the nomination process to open earlier, something which the WSFS rules don’t say anything about, so which can be done without needing that lengthy rule changing process. And while it is easier for a Worldcon to only start considering nominations in January, I think this is important enough to justify that added difficulty.
What I would like to see is having electronic nomination ballots open as soon as possible, either in January of the eligible year (e.g. January 2015 for 2016 nominations) or, if that’s too confusing, too much of a hassle, perhaps after the previous Worldcon has finished (September 1 for the most part). That way it also becomes easier for those already involved to keep a running tally for the year. It would also need not just opening the nominations, but promoting the nomination process as well. Get the members of the previous Worldcon involved, get them enthusiastic about nominating. It’s something next year’s Worldcon, MidAmeriConII, could start up already.
So let’s see if they’re up for it.
UPDATES:
13 July: The Prometheus winner has been announced
08 July: World Fantasy Awards shortlist
27 June: The Locus Awards winners are out
14 June: Claire North wins the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
07 June: Jeff VanderMeer wins the Nebula Award for best novel
02 June: the Lambda Award winners have been announced. Because the winning book isn’t a novel, it doesn’t change anything in the rankings.
01 June: added the Gemmel Awards short list.
22 May: Added the Lambda LGBT sf/fantasy/horror nominees minus the two short story collections to the list of nominations.
What with most of the major SFF awards having announced their nominees, or even winners, save for the Gemmel Award for Best Fantasy and the World Fantasy Award, it’s possible to make a list of the most critically acclaimed novels published last year. The Puppy candidates for the Best Novel Hugo have of course been omitted, as they cheated to get on the list. I’ll update it once more nominations and winners are known.
Looking at the list and the large number of singular nominations, there’s a huge spread in what the various awards think is noticable science fiction and fantasy, with not much overlap between the UK and US based awards. Genderwise there are thirty men nominated and twentyfour women, with the latter so far having the upperhand six to one in actual wins. What’s interesting if slightly disappointing is that Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatsmen, one of the best novels I read last year, hasn’t been nominated anywhere. At least Corinne Duyvis’ Otherbound got a honourable mention at the Tiptrees.
Award Winners (with nominations and which award won in parentheses):
Multiple Award nominees – in order of number:
Singulars:
Below is the list of awards I’ve taken into consideration. I’ll add the results for the WFA and Gemmel once they come out. Only finalists or winners have been looked at. Because some awards have multiple novel categories (e.g. the Kitschies have two: one for best novel, one for best first novel) the number of winners will be greater than the number of awards.