E Pluribus Hugo, and other proposals (long post)

[nwhyte]

One of the reactions to this year's Hugo crisis has been the proposal of a tweak to the system for selecting Hugo Award finalists, with the goal of preventing slates from dominating as they did this year - as if you needed reminding, around 15% of voters got a clean sweep of the ballot in half a dozen categories, and would have done better if some

Comments

[strange_complex]

I'm not a Hugo voter or Worldcon attendee, but have followed this saga with interest anyway, partly because many of my friends are, and partly for the psephological angle. So thanks for the clear explanation of the proposed new system, its strengths and weaknesses, and their relationship to the actual purpose of the Hugos.

This sentence made me smile, though:

In previous years, one of the values of the Hugo process for me was that I was able to take recommendations from people better-read than me

I find it hard to imagine such people!

[nwhyte]

You're very kind (as ever)!

But the fact is that I don't read a lot of short fiction, or graphic novels, and for the former in particular I very much depend (or depended) on the Hugo nominations to keep abreast of the field. I'd like to be able to do that again, though of course there is also an onus on me as responsible voter to read around a bit more and contribute my own views at nomination time.

[minnesattva]

I had the same thought! :)

But of course, there's always someone better at/more of anything I suppose.

[drplokta]

Small correction. It's WSFS, not WSFA -- it's a Society, not an Association. WSFA is the Washington Science Fiction Association.

[nwhyte]

Cheers.

[livejournal]

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[nwhyte]

This is rather sad.

[davidgoldfarb]

I think it should be noted that EPH is completely orthogonal to both the 5% rule (which it does not remove, of itself) and "4 and 6". In my opinion, EPH makes "4 and 6" unnecessary, but in principle there's no reason why we couldn't have both.

Then again, under EPH there is really no reason why we need a limit on the number of nominees per person per category anyway. If someone wants to nominate 20 different things, let them.

E Pluribus Hugo

[anonymous]

So...an author who nominates his own work and nothing else has five times the point value of a dedicated reader who nominates five novels?
Yeah, that sounds fair.
The Hugo have officially become Animal Farm.