Next year's Hugos: What I'm going to do

[nwhyte]

Mike Glyer over at File 770 has a tremendous assembly of reaction to the Hugo Awards, including some truly epic whining from the Sad Puppies (and my own post from Sunday morning). The votes were clearly cast against the slates on principle (apart from BDP) rather than on the quality of the work - there is no other way to read the figures. I'm sure

Comments

[mcbadger]

I agree entirely with your last two paragraphs in particular. I read some terrible writing this year in order to cast some properly informed votes. I am rather looking forward to reading some good writing to make informed nominations next year.

[danieldwilliam]

How do the additional nominations help dillute the (Puppies') slate's ability to get their stuff on the ballot?

[nwhyte]

The more nominations are made, the more diluted the contribution to the nominations from any one faction.

[danieldwilliam]

Thanks - and see also my reply to newandrewhickey.

Obliged.

[newandrewhickey]

There are something like 15000 people with the ability to nominate (plus whoever signs up for next year). There are only 500 Puppies. The Puppies got their choices onto the ballot because there were only a couple of thousand people nominating last time, and the Puppies did so in lockstep.
Given that there are only a relatively small number of SFF books released in a year, one can assume that the most popular of those (say the third volume in Leckie's Ancillary series when it comes out, Stross' most recent Laundry book, the sequel to Three Body Problem, Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, the new Pratchett if it's any good, a few others) will get more than 500 nominations if 15000 people nominate, even with no coordination.
There'll be less consensus about the short fiction nominations, but I can imagine that enough people will vote for any popular authors like Scalzi or Kowal who publish short fiction on the bigger sites, like tor.com, that there'll be a few things that beat the Puppies there, too.

[sashajwolf]

I have started keeping a list of things I have encountered so far this year that seem Hugo-worthy (and -eligible) to me. I will probably share it early in the New Year. I don't know that I will necessarily nominate in the categories I don't normally consume, but I will certainly consider doing so and will probably use other people's rec lists to help point me in the right direction in those cases, so that I don't have to spend too much time wading through the dross in unfamiliar territory.

[matgb]

I will probably share it early in the New Year

Please do, Jennie'll be able to nominate for the first time next year and I'm hoping to be able to, but it's unlikely we'll both see enough stuff to nominate a full slate, but if others recommend stuff to read then there's a better chance, etc.

[newandrewhickey]

One useful way of finding eligible short (under 1500 words) stories is signing up to http://dailysciencefiction.com/ 's mailing list -- they email you a new short story every day, and while not all of them are good (they're even publishing one by me, soon, so they must set the bar low), I'd be surprised if you couldn't at least find a handful of good ones with little effort. Certainly the best of the "real nominees" this year -- When It Ends, He Catches Her, by Eugie Foster -- came from there.

[seawasp]

I really am annoyed by the Puppies. To a great extent because I think their entire campaign is wrongheaded in so many ways, but also because as an SF/F author their actions are ALREADY directly impacting me negatively

[daveon]

I, too, was annoyed by the Heuvelt win because I just didn't think it was that good a story.

While a lot of people were saying we must read more and nominate, something I was guilty of not doing either, I still think the flaw in the process is such that if Beale motivates the 550 or so obvious Rabids who are eligible to vote he will have almost no problem stuffing several of the categories under the current rules.

We'll see.

That said, I suspect we will be more relaxed next year - we know how big the Beale problem is, and we now know that when push come to shove the people who give a damn about the Hugos will win every time. As we'll have the nomination process fixed to everybody's satisfaction by 2017 (even RequiresHoyt is behind it) we can get back to the books.