Awards

Well That Could Have Been Much Worse

~ Cheryl

As someone who is liable to be in immediate danger should a far right party ever achieve power in the UK (because a smart Fascist always targets the smallest and least popular minorities first, and my trans status is on many government files), I am always disturbed by a rise in the popularity of such parties. At the very best I would expect a UKIP government to rescind the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act, and require all trans people to return to living in their assigned gender at birth. However, bad as the past week has been for UK politics, I’m actually quite comforted at how much better it was than I had feared.

I’d like to start by looking at the South West region of the European elections. Frankly, I’d been expecting a UKIP landslide. There were good reasons for this. The region already had two UKIP MEPs — it is largely rural and country areas are generally less multi-cultural and more xenophobic than urban ones. Secondly the area has traditionally been a LibDem stronghold, and that party has been dead in the water ever since they opted to enter a coalition with the Tories. I expected mass defections from the LibDems to UKIP. Finally, the government’s handling of the severe flooding in Somerset over the winter proved conclusively that Westminster doesn’t give a monkey’s arse for what happens in this part of the country. Consequently I also expected Conservative voters to defect to UKIP in droves.

The eventual results were much better. UKIP’s share of the vote did increase, but at 10.23% it was one of the smallest rises in the country. The Tories and LibDems did indeed lose seats, but they went to Labour and the Greens, not to UKIP. What this suggests is that there is a limit to the level of anti-EU sentiment in the country, and that people with real political issues to face are less likely to cast a protest vote.

Protest vote? Yes, because despite all of the hand-wringing on social media I’m still fairly certain that many people who voted UKIP really don’t want to see them in power, and won’t vote for them in Parliamentary elections.

Some of the evidence for that comes from the local government elections that took place at the same time. Here’s some data from Cambridge.

https://twitter.com/Puffles2010/status/470814840496607232

So there at least voting for UKIP in a local election was less than 10% of what it was in the European election. That, I suspect, will carry across to elections for Westminster, unless the UK media somehow manages to make the next Parliamentary election all about withdrawal from Europe.

Another reason why UKIP’s success won’t be translated into Westminster is that the UK Parliamentary system is gerrymandered to within an inch of its life. More than half of the seats are so safe there seems to be no point in voting, and two thirds of MPs are elected on less than half of the popular vote in their constituency. UKIP would need a much bigger swing than they got in the European elections to make a significant dent in Westminster politics.

I’m not too worried about the European Parliament either. Most of the newly-elected far right MEPs are anti-EU and won’t be attending many debates. The parties, being xenophobic to a fault, find it very difficult to form alliances with similar groups in other countries. UKIP, on past record, will only actually turn up to vote on things that really matter to them (such as voting against LGBT rights, or voting against sensible environmental policies). I don’t think the far right will actually be able to take control of policy.

The media narrative of the right wing sweeping to power all over Europe needs a bit of examination too. Firstly it isn’t true.

https://twitter.com/luebue/status/470664294708019201

And secondly there’s the question of turnout. Here’s the UK

And here’s Europe:

I find it very interesting that three of the countries that voted most heavily for extreme right-wing parties are also countries that had large empires at the start of the 20th Century. I suspect there’s a lesson in that.

On the other hand, Denmark is terrifying. It had a comparatively large turnout, and yet voted strongly for extreme right parties despite not having had an empire for over 1000 years.

So what exactly is going on here? My reading of it is as follows. Firstly, the whole of Europe has been going through a period of economic depression and austerity politics. In such circumstances, people are going to be unhappy with the incumbent politicians. Secondly, in many European countries the media have been busily stoking up resentment against “foreigners”, which could mean immigrants, or could mean other parts of Europe that are portrayed as getting an unfair share of EU benefits. Where this has happened (and where people do not have a healthy suspicion of extreme right-wing parties having been governed by them in living memory), a far right protest vote has done well.

In other areas the protest vote has taken a different form. Scotland is fascinating.

https://twitter.com/BrigadoonGent/status/470809670886903808

What that shows us is that support for left wing parties is about the same as it is in the rest of the UK, but the anti-Westminster vote is split between UKIP and the SNP. If there is a perceived viable alternative to UKIP, people will vote for it.

Of course it is hard to provide a viable alternative if you don’t have media support, and the media won’t support any minor party that doesn’t present itself as highly controversial in some way. The most depressing thing about last week is that the news teams at the BBC will be congratulating themselves on a job well done because their all-UKIP-all-the-time media coverage generated even more outrage, and therefore more attention, than the Daily Malice.

The real problem, however, is a voting system that leaves people feeling disenfranchised and frustrated. The EU elections in the UK are supposedly run on a system of proportional representation, but it is a deeply flawed system that creates as many problems as it solves.

As an example, here are the issues that faced me in the ballot box. I had just one vote that I could cast, for one party (not a person, a party, though with minor parties you were voting for the person at the top of their candidate list as they were only going to get one seat at most). I had to make a choice between the Green candidate, who I hoped would do well; or the long-serving and popular LibDem candidate who might be the only chance of preventing a UKIP gain. I would have liked to vote for both of them, with a preference for the Green, but that wasn’t possible. (I would also have liked to vote for the Green candidate who was least anti-science, but again that wasn’t possible.)

Also there were four extreme right wing parties on the ballot paper, three of which were worse than UKIP. Two were basically racist thug parties, and the other’s publicity included an astonishing attack on what they claimed was the EU’s “aggressively expansionist” policies towards Russia (poor Mr. Putin is apparently only defending the natural borders of his state). Frankly my interests would be better served if we had no MEP for my region than if any of these four parties won. I would happily have taken Labour or Conservative in preference, and I desperately wanted to rank those four extreme right parties below “No Award”.

Unfortunately the voting system that we have only allows voters to express a single preference in favor of one party. It does not allow any expression of preference, nor does it allow any means to vote against specific candidates.

We are not going to get a better voting system in the UK Parliament. The recent referendum proved that. The two main parties don’t want it because it would threaten their dominance; and the media don’t want it because it threatens the simplistic Us v Them narratives that they love to spin.

Unusually, they have STV (a system very like the Hugo final ballot) for the European elections on Northern Ireland. That’s not because people over there are far more intelligent than the rest of the UK, though the media and party loyalists will continue to tell you that STV is too difficult for the average British voter to understand. It is because, in trying to bring peace to that troubled region, politicians in Westminster understood that they needed to provide a voting system that made as many people as possible feel that they had a say in the democratic process, and which allowed everyone to vote against militant extremists.

If people in the European Parliament are thinking seriously about how they can increase interest in, and participation in, European elections, they could do a lot worse than mandating STV for all elections. I’d be interested to see whether choice of voting systems correlates with turnout across Europe.

I like to think that if we had had STV for the whole of the UK, UKIP would have done a lot less well. They only got a little under 28% of the vote. If people who preferred other parties had been able to rank UKIP last, or below No Award, things could have been very different.

The ability to express a preference against a particular candidate is a very powerful thing in an electoral system. Many of you will soon have the opportunity to vote in a ballot that does allow such an option. Please remember that.

A Modest Proposal : Corrective Hugos

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

I wasn’t planning on saying anything about this year’s Hugo drama, but a conversation on Twitter on Thursday gave me an idea that I think will solve everyone’s problems. Kevin hasn’t had the chance to re-cast this into a proper constitutional amendment yet, but I think it should be self-explanatory.

It is noted that:

  1. In past years the WRONG people have often won Hugo Awards.
  2. Even more WRONG people have been nominated for Hugo Awards.
  3. That, despite repeated and vociferous demands from fandom, the Hugo Jury* has shamefully and persistently refused to rescind their decisions and correct these travesties of justice.

It is therefore resolved:

  1. To create a new category of Corrective Hugo Award
  2. Each year the nomination ballot shall include space for fans to nominate a year/category to be corrected, and a correct slate of nominations for that award
  3. The year/category featuring on the largest number of ballots shall be chosen for correction in that year
  4. Final nominees for the year/category to be corrected shall be decided in the usual way based on the ballots naming that year/category
  5. Categories for correction may be suggested for years in which they did not exist, or indeed have never existed, and nominees need not be eligible for that year/category, otherwise it would be NOT FAIR
  6. The chosen year/category shall go forward to the final ballot and be voted on as normal, including the option to vote for No Award
  7. If No Award wins the ballot, the results of that year/category will remain as per the historical record
  8. A win by No Award shall not preclude the year/category being submitted for correction in a later year. Corrections can and will continue to be made until the Hugo Jury gets the result right
  9. If someone other than the original winner of the year/category wins a Corrective Hugo then the original winner (the WRONG person) shall be required to return their Hugo trophy
  10. The return of the trophy must take place on a live webcast and shall be followed by the WRONG person being dropped from a Great Height into a vat of jello
  11. The WRONG person must also confess to being guilty of at least one of the following crimes against fandom (tick all that apply):
    1. Being a misogynist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, Christianist, monogamist and many other forms of -ist either forgotten or not yet invented bigot who shall be first up against the wall when the revolution comes
    2. Being a commie, pinko, liberal, tr*nny, f*ggot, Muslim feminist who will be enslaved, tortured, raped and shot when the Libertarian Utopia is established
    3. Being Not Part of Our Community
    4. Having too many fans
    5. Being someone that fandom has never heard of
    6. Being a Fake Fan or Fake Geek
    7. Preying on the sentimentality of fandom by dying or otherwise suffering misfortune
    8. Campaigning and ballot stuffing
    9. Being a member of the nefarious Hugo Jury that secretly fixes the results of the Hugos each year
    10. Actually reading books
    11. Liking sport
  12. The WRONG person shall agree to spend a month in Corrective Therapy in order to cure them of their WRONG ways
  13. The WRONG person may also be handed over to the appropriate authorities and charged with Witchcraft, Un-American Activities and Having Sex with a Teenage Pop Star

For the avoidance of doubt, and so as to not waste anyone’s time campaigning on the issue, the first Corrective Hugo shall be awarded for Best Fanzine in 2004.

* The Hugo Jury does not exist and never has existed. Nevertheless, so many people in fandom believe devoutly in its existence that, like Tinkerbell, it is actually real. Unfortunately, like certain other faith-based beings, the Hugo Jury is very bad at answering prayers. Consequently fans feel the need to resort to human sacrifice in order to ensure that their entreaties are heard.

Yesterday’s Awards News

~ Cheryl

While I was out and about yesterday a few pieces of awards news came in. Most importantly, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has won the PEN/Faulkner Award. This is huge for Karen and I’m absolutely delighted for her. My review of the book is here, and my interview with Karen is here.

In addition, DetCon 1 has released the finalists for their Young Readers Awards. Locus has the lists. I really must read Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince, which is picking up awards everywhere. And Paolo Bacigalupi’s Zombie Baseball Beatdown because, hey, baseball!

Ross, the Hugos and the Oscars

~ Cheryl ~ 50 Comments

I don’t pay a lot of attention to British TV and the celebrities that work on it. I’ve been out of the country a lot in past years. Much TV “light entertainment” is deeply transphobic so I prefer to avoid it. And I’m suspicious of anything the media says about celebrities on the grounds that most of it, good and bad, is probably manufactured in some way.

My knowledge of Jonathan Ross, therefore, is somewhat limited. But here are some things I do know.

He’s a lifelong comics fan who used to co-own a comic shop in London. He has written a science fiction comic. His wife, Jane Goldman, won a Hugo for the script of the film, Stardust, and he’s a bit jealous of that.

There’s controversy, of course. That’s pretty much par for the course for TV celebrities. He’s even been yelled at for telling transphobic jokes. But an interesting thing happened in that case. Hearing of the incident, Neil Gaiman had a word with Ross, who agreed to meet with Roz Kaveney and educate himself on trans issues. He ended up apologizing and doing an interview with META, a now-defunct trans magazine edited by Paris Lees.

In my view, that puts Ross well ahead of most high profile UK comedians (honorable exception for Eddie Izzard as always). It puts him ahead of Jared Leto. And it puts him ahead of most of the celebrity white feminists that I regularly see being praised in my tweet stream.

I should note also that I take a fairly relaxed view of who is an acceptable person to have around. The reason for that is that if I objected to everyone who had ever been transphobic I wouldn’t have many people left I could speak to. Besides, most people don’t give a fuck if trans people are offended. I have to survive in the world, and that means dealing with a lot of people I would rather not give the time of day to.

Case in point: everyone was expecting Leto to win the Oscar, so there was a lot of speculation amongst the trans community as to whether he would acknowledge the role that he played and the struggles of real life trans women. As it turned out, he very carefully avoided any mention of it. Apparently even uttering the word “transgender” was deemed too offensive for the Oscars audience. My tweet stream has been full of fury from other trans people. And yet his speech is being lauded, not just as the best of the night, but “beyond perfect”.

So to my mind Ross is a pretty good candidate for a Hugo ceremony host. He’s a genuine fan with a lot of respect for the awards. He’s also got a huge media profile and would have got us lots of press coverage. He has, on the one occasion I know of, engaged respectfully with a minority group that was upset with one of his shows. And hosting award ceremonies is something he has done professionally.

I understand that he had agreed to do the job without pay, which I think says a lot about how he felt about the Hugos.

However, one of the things about intersectionality is that you need to take note of what other people think. Just because you have no problem with someone, it doesn’t mean that everyone else does. You have to listen to what others say, and respect their points of view. So while I would have been happy with Ross as the host, I have to take into account that many other people object very strongly to him because of things he has said or done in the past.

The thing is that this is a conversation that should have been had within the Loncon 3 convention committee — initially in the Executive Committee, and if that proved highly contentious then perhaps with the wider staff group. This conversation should have taken place before the invitation was issued. (Kevin reminds me that for ConJosé we discussed Guests of Honor and Toastmaster amongst the entire bid committee and allowed members a veto on any suggestion.) If you are going to involve someone potentially controversial, you need to be sure that you have the support of the bulk of your team.

I’m not going to comment further on what went wrong in the committee because I have not been privy to any of the discussions, nor have I talked directly to any of those involved. However, I cannot understand how anyone involved thought that it was appropriate to resolve the issue via a flame war in social media.

As I said, I’m perfectly happy with the argument that Ross is an inappropriate person for the job if a large number of people would be uncomfortable with his presence. We don’t want nominees unwilling to attend the ceremony because they are afraid of what the host might say to them. But the conversation around Ross did not restrict itself to that issue. I’d like to address some of the other things that were said.

Firstly, some people appeared to not want Ross involved because of the press coverage it would have given us. The idea seemed to be that we shouldn’t want the media to notice us because of the embarrassing things they might write about us. This, I think, is a fundamental error. You cannot hide from the media, especially these days when newspapers are happy to take “comment” pieces from anyone (because they don’t pay them). What’s more, I think that only by accepting that everything we do is going to be subject to constant media scrutiny can we learn to behave sensibly and not, for example, take things that Dave Truesdale says seriously. Whenever we get angry about something, we should always think, “How is the press going to spin this?”

Secondly a lot of people appeared to be saying that Ross was unsuitable as a Hugo ceremony host because he was not a proper fan, by which they meant that he had not attended conventions regularly down the years. The view was that only someone who had been a beloved member of the fannish community for some time should be given the honor of hosting the ceremony.

As someone who has been a regular target of accusations of being a “fake fan” and “not part of our community” in the past, I take this sort of thing seriously. It felt like I was back in 1997 again and being accused of “destroying fandom” though my evil habit of writing book reviews online.

I note that Loncon 3 is set to be the largest Worldcon in decades, perhaps the largest ever. There will be a lot of people for whom it will be their first ever convention. It worries me a lot to see the whole “not part of our community” thing raising its ugly head again. Science fiction is mainstream now. It does not belong to us anymore, and trying to pretend that it does will only make us look ridiculous.

I didn’t attend the last UK Worldcon in part because I expected I would get a very unpleasant reception from many of the attendees. I am not on the committee of this one because of the way I was treated while working on the last one. I have, however, been trying to help when I can behind the scenes, and I have been promoting the event. I am beginning to think that was a mistake, and that I should walk away from fandom and not look back. It is not like I don’t have other things to do with my life.

Got Nebulas

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The short lists for this year’s Nebula Awards have been announced. As usual there are way too many of my friends on the ballot. They can’t all win. Heck, four of the books on the Best Novel list were mentioned in my Hugo post, and I’m fascinated to see SFWA thinks that Hild is fantasy, despite Locus deciding it was not. That complicates things for me.

Anyway, the main reason that I am making this post is to give huge congratulations to Sylvia Spruck Wrigley who has made a major award ballot for the first time with her short story, “Alive, Alive Oh”, from Lightspeed. I know her because she is one of the friends of Colin Harvey who contributed to his memorial book, Colinthology. Colin would have been so proud of her, had he been around to see this. And parts of the story are set in South Wales too. It is like one of the BristolCon family is up for a Nebula. So although Rachel Swirsky and Sofia Samatar are on the ballot, I shall be cheering for Sylvia.

Aurealis Awards Finalists

~ Cheryl

Still on the subject of awards, Australia’s juried Aurealis Awards have announced their finalists (PDF). We have a lot of the books in the store.

Congratulations first to Fablecroft who have several books up for prizes:

The Jo Anderton book is particularly recommended as it is up for Best Collection and stories from it are up for several other awards.

Twelfth Planet Press doesn’t have quite as many finalists, but they do love you because they have made all three books available as a cut-price bundle. The books are:

Individually the books are priced at a total of £11.49, but you can get them all at £7.99. Kirstyn’s book was all over the Locus Recommended Reading List. Bargain, as they say.

Tiptree Results Announced

~ Cheryl

The winner and honor list for this year’s Tiptree Award have been announced. Details are on their website. It is great to see a book by an Australian writer, published by a UK small press, come out on top. Rupetta was a finalist for the Crawford as well. Definitely worth a look.

The Tiptree honor list is always full of good recommendations. I’m delighted to see Ancillary Justice on this list. The book has now won Best Debut in the Kitschies and an honor list placing in the Tiptree. I am waiting patiently to see if the various male reviewers who went on and on about what a badly written book it is might consider why they felt that way about it. (Not that it is perfect, by any means, but I found some of the reviews mind-boggling.)

Also on the list is Hild by Nicola Griffith which I love to pieces and will be getting a UK edition later in the year.

Eleanor Arnason’s Big Mama Stories is from Aqueduct Press and therefore available in the bookstore.

There’s lots more there that I want to read, but the final thing I want to mention is not readable, it is music. Here’s the Archandroid.

Even if it makes others uncomfortable
I will love who I am

Yeah, the booty don’t lie.

The DetCon1 YA Award

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As many of you will know, this year’s NASFiC1, DetCon1, will be presenting a popular-voted award for YA and Middle Grade science fiction & fantasy. The nomination stage is open to all — you just have to request a PIN from DetCon1 — and they want as many people involved as possible. The deadline for nominations is February 28th so you don’t have much time.

My friends at BASFA have been discussing possible candidates and have a list up here. That includes some suggestions from me. I’d like to add to that Emilie and the Hollow World by Martha Wells (Strange Chemistry) which I read last week and really enjoyed.

And here is a video that DetCon1 put together to promote the award.

A quick note on eligibility. In the video they say “novel length”, but the website says “book length”. I queried DetCon1 about this and they said the latter is correct. YA and Middle Grade “novels” often come in below the 40,000 word limit traditionally used by SF&F awards to denote novel length. So Cat Valente’s Six Gun Snow White is indeed eligible, as the BASFA list suggests, and consequently it will be on my ballot.

1. For those not up on convention acronyms, NASFiC is the North American Science Fiction Convention, an event that takes place only in years when Worldcon is taking place outside of North America. This year’s Worldcon is in London, and the NASFiC will be in Detroit.

Bookstore Software Updates

~ Cheryl

While I’m on the subject of the bookstore, I am in the process of making various improvements to the site.

All product entries should now have a list of category tags so that you can see at a glance what sort of content they have.

I have also started adding little badges to products that have won or been finalists for awards. I’ll need to go through the site and check everything we have to get those up, but here’s an example: On A Red Station Drifting by Aliette de Bodard. This should also serve as a reminder to awards that they really should have logos that can be easily downloaded from their websites.

Finally the Wizard’s Tower Twitter feed is now syndicated on the bookstore site, so you can see at a glance what new books have been added.

There will hopefully be more good news about software updates in a week or two.

Oh, and you’ll note that I am now using the word “finalist” rather than “nominee” for works that get on award shortlists. This is because I’m very much over seeing people describe themselves as a “Hugo nominee” because they got their mum to put their book on a nomination ballot.

On Fan Categories

~ Cheryl

Having listened to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast, I feel the need to point out that the fan categories in the Hugos are not, and never have been, defined by content. You do not have to write about fandom, or write in a “fannish” way (whatever that means). All that is required is that you do what you do out of the goodness of your heart, and for the good of the community (at least as you see it) rather than being paid to do it.

This does not mean that I am opposed to fans getting paid for their writing. Indeed, I think it is a very good thing. The main reason I am not still doing Salon Futura is because I could not generate enough income from it to pay the writers properly. But if you are getting paid then you should accept that you have to play with the big boys and girls in the professional categories. In practice, of course, most fans who get paid for some of their work also do a huge amount of unpaid work as well — it should not be necessary to cite their professional work in order to nominate them.

As I said the other week, the Hugo rules allow voters a great deal of leeway in areas where category definitions are unclear. However, they do not allow voters to comprehensively redefine categories. You cannot vote a novel into the Short Story category because it feels like a short story to you, or because you think dividing fiction categories by length is silly. If you do nominate paid work in the fan categories, you risk wasting your vote.

I should add that one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this because when I started out people tried to bar me from the fan categories on the grounds that my work was “not fannish”. You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 20th Century many people thought that book reviews were an inappropriate subject for fan writing. Defining categories on the basis of the type of content is a risky thing that opens the door to all sorts of discrimination. As I benefited from the categories not being defined by content back then, I do not want to see that rule changed now.

The Shout Out Awards, 2014

~ Cheryl

Last night I was in Bristol for the second annual Shout Out Awards ceremony, hosted by my good friends from Shout Out Radio. A full list of winners and runners up is available here.

The award for Best Trans Event went to Glitzy Girls. Huge congratulations to them. But in second place was the Trans Day of Remembrance Ceremony. I think that a memorial ceremony doing that well in a set of awards that are mainly for the LGBT night life scene in Bristol speaks volumes for how important human rights issues still are for trans people. Thanks are, of course, due to Bristol City Council for providing the venue for the event. Not many cities in the world do that. But mainly this award is a message of support from the people of Bristol to the people, almost all of the trans women of color, who live in fear of their lives simply because of who they are.

Congratulations are also due to Steffi Barnett who was runner up in the Best Community Radio Show category for her Handbags & High Heels show on Bradley Stoke Radio.

And finally, I was overjoyed to see Orange is the New Black come in as runner up in the Best TV Show category. Doctor Who won, of course, but it is great to see a show featuring a fine trans actress getting such recognition. Well done, Laverne Cox. I may have whooped a little loudly on air when that was announced.

Congratulations to all of the winners, of course, including my pals at Bristol Bisons, and to the lovely Daryn Carter.

Recommended Reading

~ Cheryl

The Locus Recommended Reading List was published over the weekend. As some of you will know, I am one of many people who have an input to this. I’m very pleased with how things went.

It has been an interesting year. I have read precisely two of the books on the Science Fiction list, though there are another seven I would like to read. I’ve done a bit better in Fantasy, but the fact that I have read five of the nine books on the Debuts list tells you a lot about the focus of my reading. The Collections list is frankly amazing, and almost all down to hard-working small presses.

I’m a bit disappointed that Adventure Rocketship didn’t get a mention. Jonathan Strahan did say on the latest Coode Street that he had lobbied to get Tim Maughan’s “Flight Path Estate” listed, but the competition is intense. Even the folks at Tor.com were a bit disappointed, so I can’t complain. There are plenty of Clarkesworld stories listed, but that is expected these days.

There are a number of books that are listed that I have in the bookstore. Here are some highlights.

Campbellian Anthology 2014

~ Cheryl

Campbellian Anthology 2014Well, here’s a bargain. What to sample the work of many of the candidates for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer? Well now you can. The 2014 Campbellian Anthology contains 860,000 words by 111 authors, and is absolutely free. Authors featured include Dan Kimmel, Helen Marshall, Tim Maughan, E.C. Myers, Ramez Naam, Sofia Samatar, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Bogi Takács and many, many others. It is an ebook, of course, but you couldn’t do something like this any other way. Full details and download links are available here.

Huge thanks to M. David Blake for doing the work to make this happen.

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

I am seeing an increasing number of people of late suggesting loopholes in the Hugo Award rules whereby things that you would not expect to be eligible in a category could be argued as being eligible. Typically this involves work that ought to belong in one of the more competitive categories being moved into one that is seen as a soft option. The most obvious examples are getting professional work nominated in the fan categories, and getting anything into Related Work.

Now obviously there are reasons why such things might be legitimate. It is OK for a professional writer or artist to do fan work as well. It is quite another to suggest nominated work that was clearly well paid as fan work. Equally Related Work is a catch-all category for work that can’t be nominated anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean that things that clearly do belong somewhere else should be moved to Related Work.

There are a number of reasons why this sort of thing is bad. Firstly, it discredits the awards, because it makes it look like the way to win is to exploit the rules, rather than produce good work. Of course there are people who think that discrediting the Hugos is a fine and upstanding moral cause, but thankfully they are more noise than anything else.

Reason two is that is can make problems with the rules harder to fix. If a category definition is unclear then it is normally sufficient to ask the Business Meeting to pass an amendment clarifying the situation. That will probably go through on the nod. It still takes two years, but it is uncontroversial. However, if someone has taken advantage of that lack of clarity and gotten nominated because of it, fixing the problem will be much harder. Everyone who is a fan or friend of the person who got nominated, and everyone who hopes to follow in their footsteps, will immediately yell UNFAIR! It will be seen that a possible route to nomination is being taken away. All fandom will be plunged into angry exchanges on social media.

Interestingly this is an example where Cheryl’s Second Law is not crazy enough. The Second Law states that something has to happen twice for something to become a sacred and holy tradition of fandom that must be defended. With the Hugos, nomination need only happen once to become sacred.

Finally, encouraging people to nominate works in line with a perceived loophole can cause people to waste nominations, and thereby cause works to miss getting on the final ballot. To understand why that is, you have to look at the rules for moving nominations between categories.

It is not the job of the Hugo Administrators to look for reasons to disqualify nominations. Normally they will bend over backwards to try to accommodate the voters’ wishes. That includes fixing obvious mistakes.

For example, suppose you mistakenly think that a work must be a novel because it was published as a book, not in a magazine, but it fact by length it is only a novelette. The Administrator will remove that work from your list of nominated novels. But, as you clearly liked the work, they will look to move the nomination to the correct category. However, there is a firm rule that you cannot nominate more than five works in any one category. If you had less than five works in Novelette, then the work you wrongly put in Novel can be moved. But if you have filled the Novelette ballot then the incorrect nomination is wasted.

This is why it can be very dangerous to try to exploit loopholes. To take another common example that I have seen touted for this year, it may seem from last year’s odd ruling about “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” that audiobooks are eligible in both fiction and dramatic presentation categories, but you have no guarantee that this year’s Administrator will follow that ruling. If you fill up your BDP: Short Form nominations with stories you have also nominated in fiction categories, and it is ruled that audiobooks can only be eligible in one category at a time, then you will have wasted five nominations.

In the later case, your nominations in one or other of the categories will still stand, and the works will not be disadvantaged. However, in the earlier example, losing your nomination because you thought a novelette was actually a novel, and you nominated five other novelettes, may be that one vote that makes the difference between the work getting on the ballot, and it not doing so.

So please, don’t risk wasting your nominations, and don’t risk harming the chances of works that you like, by trying to be clever.

Some Hugo Thoughts

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As I am way behind with everything, still, I don’t have anywhere near as many Hugo recommendations as I would like this year, but here are a few for you to think about. I’ll start at the bottom of the ballot.

I note that the Campbell Award list on Writertopia is not 100% accurate as the poor folks who run it get no help from Dell Magazines. I do know that Madeline Ashby is not eligible. My ballot will probably be: Gwenda Bond, Tim Maughan, Sofia Samatar, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Helen Marshall.

Fancast — In addition to Small Blue Planet you should all be listening to The Writer and the Critic, and to SF Crossing the Gulf. The Coode Street Podcast and Galactic Suburbia will also be on my ballot.

Fan Writer is hard these days because you never know who is getting paid for what. I rather suspect that Foz Meadows does not get paid for the posts that she writes for Huffington Post. She’s done some good stuff on her own blog too, so I’m nominating her anyway. In contrast I believe that doing io9 is a full time job for Charlie Jane Anders, so much as I love her she’ll not be on my ballot unless I hear otherwise. I’d be interested to know whether Liz Bourke gets paid for her Sleeps With Monsters column at Tor.com, and if she doesn’t then next year I’ll probably be encouraging you all to nominate Alex Dally MacFarlane for her new Post-Binary Gender column.

Clarkesworld is not eligible for Semiprozine these days because Neil is (just) earning enough money from it to make it professional. However, he is still eligible individually for Editor: Short Form, as is Sean Wallace.

In Editor: Long Form I’d like to see both Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris make the ballot because what Angry Robot has achieved in a very short time is quite miraculous. I’ve also seen some suggestions that Tim Holman has toiled in obscurity for far too long, which is entirely true.

I’m totally out of touch with art, so I shall be checking the various recommendation sites around. I note that Larry Rostant, whom I have nominated in the past, is a Guest of Honor at FantasyCon this year which is long overdue. I will again be nominating Julie Dillon for being fabulous, and J.H. Williams III for his work on Batwoman. Joey Hi-Fi will also be on my ballot.

Dramatic Presentation: Long Form has to go to Iron Man 3. That isn’t up for debate. I don’t think I have seen any other 2013 movies, though I may get around to Pacific Rim in time to vote for it. I suspect there isn’t much else movie-wise I’d deem Hugo-worthy, much as I love admiring Thor & Loki. However, I am going to nominate An Adventure in Space and Time in this category as it is just long enough.

Dramatic Presentation: Short Form will be full of Moffat things. I shall wait for the final ballot and vote for No Award.

Graphic Novel will probably go to Saga again, though I’d prefer to see it go to J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman as a thank you for their work on Batwoman and a small protest against their being forced off the book by intrusive management. I’ll also be voting for the season finale of Young Avengers, a two part story called “Resolution”, because I’m sappy like that. There will probably be some Gail Simone in there too; I’m just not sure what.

Related Work is really hard this year because there is so much good stuff. Afrofutrism by Ytasha Womack is a wonderful book. I also really liked The Riddles of the Hobbit by Adam Roberts. Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook is indeed a wonder. I’m going to nominate Adventure Rocketship #1 because of the great music essays. There’s also Jonathan Clements’ fine Anime: A History, parts of which are based on articles he wrote for Salon Futura. That’s five already, and I have a nagging feeling that I am forgetting something.

I am way behind on short fiction. The only things I know I am voting for are “Zero Hours” by Tim Maughan (Short Story) and “The Lady Astronaut From Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Novelette). I know that some people have been talking about nominating audio fiction in multiple categories because last year’s daft ruling seemed to suggest that was OK, but this year’s Administrators are different people and may not follow that rule. You only get five nominations in each category. My advice would be not to waste them by nominating the same work in more than one category, just in case. In the meantime I’ll be going back through Mothership, We See A Different Frontier and the 2013 issues of Clarkesworld looking for good stuff.

As for Novel, top of my list is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, closely followed by River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. I loved Ocean At The End of the Lane too, but nominating Neil seems a bit pointless given that several billion other people will be doing it. I’d also love to nominate Hild by Nicola Griffith, but the fantastic content is very small indeed. So I will probably end up with The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord, A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar, and Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox. There are works that I would love to read before I nominate, most obviously Lavie Tidhar’s Violent Century. The short list for the Kitschies Red Tentacle is also very interesting. But the chances are I won’t have time, so I’ll just vote for things I have read, which is what you should all be doing. No one has to have “read everything” in order to take part, because reading everything is impossible.

Updates:

Liz Batty noted via Twitter that Young Avengers “Resolution” includes 2014 work, so is not eligible. She suggests nominating this collected volume from the series instead, which I shall do.

Also via Twitter, Foz Meadows confirms that Huffington Post does not pay.

And in comments below Justin Landon suggests that most Tor.com columns are paid.

That Eligibility Stuff

~ Cheryl

After having said that people ought to put up awards eligibility posts, I guess I should do one of my own. These days I feel way too guilty about this because I have plenty of Hugos already. I certainly don’t expect to win any more. But here are a few reasons you might consider nominating things I have done.

First up is something I won’t get any credit for: Adventure Rocketship #1. All I did with this is love it so much that I asked if I could publish an ebook edition. It is a strange beast because it contains both fiction and non-fiction. There’s also confusion as to whether it is a magazine or a book. Well, as far as I’m concerned, anything that only comes out once a year is a book. Locus is treating it as an anthology, and it does contain several very good stories, but it contains as much non-fiction. And that non-fiction is by people such as Jon Courtenay-Grimwood, N.K. Jemisin and Minister Faust. I have no idea what the Administrators will make of fit, and I don’t envy Dave McCarty having to sort it out, but I’m going to nominate it in Related Work and see what happens. You should credit Jonathan Wright as editor, and Tangent Books / Wizards Tower Press as the publishers.

Some of the individual stories might also strike your fancy, though if you are going to nominate a Tim Maughan story (and I think you should) I think that “Zero Hours” has a better chance.

Secondly we have Small Blue Planet. That would be a nomination for Karen Burnham and myself in Fancast. The reason I want to get this nominated is that it would encourage more people to listen to the podcasts, as a result of which they would find out about all of the great non-Anglo writers and translators we spoke to.

By the way, if you are wondering what has happened to the podcast, Karen and I do want to make more, but we are both stupidly busy right now and we just don’t have the time.

Finally people keep nominating me for Best Fanwriter, which is very kind of y’all. Since 2009 I have been intending to decline if nominated, because I’ve been doing perfectly OK without this. However, this year’s Worldcon is in London, and is probably the only one for at least a decade that members of my family are likely to attend. So if I do get on the ballot this time I am going to accept. I will be back to declining again next year, promise.

A separate post about all of the other people I’d like you to nominate will come soon.

Brief Awards Catch-Up

~ Cheryl

Yeah, I know, no bloggage for a couple of days. We are a week and a half into the new year and already I can see myself starting to get backed up on projects. I need to focus. Here are a couple of things I would have spent more time on, if I had the time.

The nominees for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award have been announced. I have only read one of them — Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which I loved. Some of the others look very interesting. I’m particularly pleased to see Haikasoru getting another book on the list. I’m hearing lots of good things about The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, and congratulations to Solaris for getting two books on the list.

Also there has been (another) a big fuss about pimpage posts. I really wanted to write something lengthy about this, but thankfully Amal El-Mohtar has said most of what I wanted to say. Banning pimpage posts doesn’t make it harder for writers with big fan followings to win awards, it makes it easier, because they are the ones most people have heard of. Also the big mouths will pimp themselves anyway, it is the nice people who will be shamed into saying nothing. I do understand where British writers are coming from. We are trained from birth to be self-effacing and find it very hard to put ourselves forward. However, when you start telling people that they shouldn’t say something, you always need to be aware who you are silencing.

Of course having pimpage isn’t perfect either. There is no such thing as a perfect awards system. And while most people will simply list what works they have in contention, and the best will promotes lots of other works as well, there will always be someone scheduling “vote for me” tweets to appear every hour between now and the close of nominations. On the other hand, that does allow you to see who is an arse and who isn’t, and that too can be valuable information.

Doctor in the Hugos

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

There was quite a bit of excited chatter online over the weekend about the various Doctor Who specials. Most of them are clearly Dramatic Presentations, but I noticed some confusion over An Adventure in Space and Time. It is very obviously a drama, but it isn’t actually science fiction (well, unless you count the brief appearance of … Spoilers! … sorry), it is just about science fiction.

So where does it belong? Well, there is precedent. In 1996 Apollo 13 received a nomination in BDP. That is also a dramatization of real events, and those real events an actual space mission, not a TV program about a time traveler. My view is that An Adventure in Space and Time can quite happily follow that example.

Of course in 1996 there was only one BDP category. We have an additional question to answer: which length? I’ve seen An Adventure in Space and Time advertised as 90 minutes, which is right on the borderline. When I recorded it, it came out as 88 minutes. Technically that would put it into Short Form, but it is well within the wiggle room allowed for a work to be nominated in either category. The Hugo Administrators will presumably move it into whichever category proves more popular with the voters.

2014 Campbellian Anthology

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

For those of you eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer next year, there’s a service that may help to get your work more attention. There is a tradition started up of publishing an anthology of eligible work, and the 2014 call for submissions can be found here. Note that this is a non-paid reprint anthology, but if Hugo voters are getting it to check out eligible writers than it may well be worth your while.

For everyone else, I’ll let you know when the book is available.

Goodreads Choice Awards

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

When this year’s Goodreads Choice awards were first announced I was disappointed to see that the only book by a woman on the science fiction ballot was MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood. While it might have been amusing to see Atwood win an award for writing SF, I was pretty sure that there were better books out there. People on Twitter were talking about write-in candidates, but I didn’t think much of their chances. I’m delighted to say that I was wrong.

The semi-final around of voting is now open, and the SF list has expanded to include two very fine books: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord, and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I was so pleased that I went and voted. If you have a Goodreads account, you can vote too, here.

By the way, can I just say that I think it is very silly running a Best of the Year poll before the year has ended. The best historical novel of 2013 hasn’t yet been published, though it is out tomorrow in the USA. Look out for it.