As Hugo Outrage season has been replaced by Clarke Outrage season, I should be wrapping up what I say about this year’s nominees, but I did promise Sandra McDonald a full reply to a comment she left on one of my earlier posts. This is the meat of what she said:

Here’s my concern: in the year 2013, with perhaps more magazines and anthologies than ever before, with almost 700 ballots cast, the best the ballot can provide is 3 choices in the short fiction category. There are 10 movies or television shows to choose from, but only 3 short stories. 3 short stories, in a field rich with amazingly talented writers sharing a lot of great stories. 5 short fiction editors, but only 3 short stories. And woe to voters who took the time to vote with choices that didn’t make the 5% rule, because we’re only going to have 3, and 2 of them from the same (very excellent) magazine. That’s not what I call plentiful options expressing the wide diversity in short fiction today.

The first thing to note here is that 3 short stories is very much a matter of definition. Yes, the Hugos have two categories for dramatic presentations, but they have four for written fiction, three of which are for shorter lengths. The breakdown between Novella, Novelette and Short Story is by no means a given. The World Fantasy Awards, for example, have only two short fiction categories. Some awards only have one. Compare this, for example, to non-fiction, which is mostly what I write. There’s only one category for professional work, and it has to be shared between critical works, reference works, how-to books, art books, and thanks to a bizarre decision from last year that still rankles, music CDs.

Now as far as I’m concerned, categories rise and fall dependent on the level of support they get. The catch-all of Related Work exists because probably none of the things that go into it can sustain a category on its own. All three short fiction categories are well-supported, despite the diversity of nominations in Short Story. But equally when I see short fiction writers complaining that they are getting short shrift I find it difficult to feel very sympathetic.

Then there’s the voters. Some of them have had their nominations ignored. Well, yes, it happens. Most years most of my Novel nominations are ignored. I’ve not got time to do tallies, but I suspect that most years around half of the works I nominate don’t get on the ballot, possibly more. That’s the nature of the beast. Under normal circumstances only five works get on the ballot in each category. If you have a lot of potential candidates, then a lot of people’s nominations are going to get ignored.

Finally, what about diversity? We’d like to encourage that, wouldn’t we? And actually, that’s what the nominations stage is for. People elsewhere have been complaining that the Hugos are battle between competing voting blocks, but that’s exactly what the system is designed to produce. A consensus on a winner is only required in the final ballot (which uses a very different voting system). What is expected in the nominating stage is that a variety of different works will get on the ballot, each of which is a favorite of its own particular constituency. It doesn’t always work, but provided you have a range of different tastes voting then you should get a range of different types of work on the ballot.

The problem with Short Story is that the electorate’s taste is far too diverse. There’s not enough agreement on what the best stories of the year might be. It isn’t clear why that might be the case. Possibly it is because there are so many venues, but then there are hundreds of novels published each year and that doesn’t cause the same problem. Possibly it is because of the lack of review venues for short fiction (I know I found Rachel Swirsky’s recommendation posts invaluable). Possibly it is because most of the people who write short fiction are not such big stars as those who write novels, and don’t have huge fan followings. All sorts of explanations are possible.

I would certainly like to see five nominees in each category. But at the same time I don’t want to see 10 stories on the ballot because of a big tie for 5th place, and I don’t want the threshold for getting on the ballot to be so low that it is easy to buy your way on (which people have tried to do). So we need to craft a solution that will do more good than harm. I have some confidence in the minimum number of votes idea that I suggested, though I fear that many people will want it set very low. Some sort of action outside of WSFS, to help voters find the best stories, might also help, and may also prove quicker and easier to implement that the grinding wheels of WSFS democracy.

Hopefully, someone out there will have the time to do something.

As I mentioned over the weekend, I met these nice people from For Books Sake at the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival. They are keen to expand on their SF&F coverage, so I wrote them an article about the Hugos, extolling the fact that this year the ballot has been submerged in a terrifying flood of girl cooties. It did, after all, give me an opportunity to enthuse about Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, Aliette de Bodard, Kij Johnson and so on. And Clarkesworld, of course. Hopefully this will encourage some of For Books Sake‘s legion of readers to try some SF.

First up today, if anyone has actually come here from Larry Nolen’s blog wondering what I have to say about a Hugo for Genre Poetry, all I can say is that McCalmont is wrong, as usual, (and check the date on Larry’s post).

Rather more seriously, I am continuing to see rumbling about the Short Story situation. I’d like everyone to bear three things in mind:

1. There is no secret conspiracy to defraud short story writers of the nominations that are their right.

2. There is nothing new in Short Story having a very broad pattern of nominations. This sort of thing has happened before.

3. It is not the job of the Hugo Administrators to fix the result of the ballot to give the results that other people might want, it is their job to follow the rules.

Here is a cautionary tale (now somewhat edited – see Kevin’s comment below for an explanation).

In 1994 we had exactly the same issue as we have this year – the 5% rule resulted in only three short stories being eligible for the ballot. The reason that we don’t see that in the historical record is that the Administrators did what some people are yelling to have done this year – they fixed the results to get nominees. It was all very legal, and I’ll explain how they did it, and what the consequences were, shortly.

First, however, I want you to note that this was 1994. Most people hadn’t even heard of the Internet. There were no online short fiction magazines. 13 of the 16 short fiction nominees came from the big three fiction magazines, and 2 from Ellen Datlow’s Omni. So if you want to spin a story about how what happened this year (and the 4 Short Story ballot of 2011) is all a result of online magazines, you have to explain how they managed to travel through time to 1994, or provide an alternative explanation for what happened then. Having watched the Hugos closely for almost 20 years, my view is that a broad range of nominees is inherent to the Short Story category, not something that has only just happened.

OK, so we are back in 1994 and we only have three short stories on our ballot. What can we do that is legal? Consider this:

3.2.9: The Worldcon Committee may relocate a story into a more appropriate category if it feels that it is necessary, provided that the length of the story is within the lesser of five thousand (5,000) words or twenty
percent (20%) of the new category limits.

Back in 1994 the 20% option didn’t exist, so the Hugo Administrators could re-allocate novelettes to Short Story if they were less than 12,500 words. As it happened, there were a couple of novelettes below that limit that would get 5% of the vote if they were in Short Story, and sufficient remaining novelettes for a full ballot in their category too. So the Hugo Administrators (David Bratman, Seth Goldberg, Peter Jarvis, Athena Jarvis and Kevin Standlee) decided to move the two short novelettes and make a full ballot.

You can see how I know about this. Kevin didn’t take that decision himself, but I can assure you that he’s been scarred for life by the experience. Fandom was furious. The professional writers were furious too. One of the moved novelettes won the category. I understand that Mike Resnick, who had an actual short story on the ballot, was hopping mad. (Mike, if you are reading his, feel free to explain how you saw it.)

That year the Business Meeting was packed. You couldn’t change the results, but the 1994 Hugo Admins were left in no doubt that fiddling with the ballot, even if it was completely within the rules, would not be tolerated. And that’s why, to this day, whoever is in charge simply enforces the rules. Activist Administration is simply not worth the risk.

So, as I said yesterday, if you want something done about the 5% rule (and I think that may be wise, because of the increasing number of voters, not because of any seismic shift in the nature of the field), then get the rules changed. Please don’t yell “shame” or “conspiracy”. All we can ask of the Administrators is that they implement the rules correctly.

It being Easter, news is a little slow around the blogosphere, so you may not have heard that the winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award was announced at Norwescon last night. A drum roll please for Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery (Tor). Naturally Tor.com does have the news up, along with a sample chapter. I’ve not read this book, but I have loved everything by Brian that I have read so I’m in no doubt that this is a very worthy winner.

The runner up was Lovestar by Icelandic writer, Andri Snær Magnason. Can we invite him to Finncon, please?

This year’s Hugo Nominees will be announced live at a number of conventions, including Eastercon, this coming Saturday. There’s a list of them available here, but if you are not able to be at one of those events then the place to hear the announcement, and talk about the lists, will be the Hugo Awards website. Kevin will be hosting live coverage. I’ll doubtless be dropping in too. We hope that we’ll see you there on Saturday.

The submissions list for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award was released today. There are lots of great books on it, and as always many interesting-sounding ones I’m not familiar with. However, I suspect that one of the things that will grab the attention of UK fans is the absence of Jeff Noon’s Channel Sk1n.

Of course it is possible that Jeff decided not to submit it. You do have to pay to get onto the Clarke long list. But I tried to submit Archangel Protocol and was told that ebook-only editions were not eligible. I’m guessing that Jeff’s book was ruled out for the same reason. I should note that I had a very friendly discussion about this with Tom Hunter, and he did say that he’ll be looking at possibly changing that rule for future years. I hope he does.

Other awards do somewhat better. We are happy to receive digital-only books at the SF&F Translation Awards. Indeed, as we have such an international jury, we prefer submissions to be electronic. I did most of my Crawford reading digitally, and knowing the rest of the advisory group I can’t see any of them objecting to digital-only. We did, of course, have a long, hard fight to get the WSFS Business meeting to specifically include digital books in the Hugos, though there was never any wording that unequivocally excluded them, no matter how hard some people tried to advance strange interpretations of the word “published”. I did put Channel Sk1n forward for consideration on the Locus Recommended Reading List, but as far as I’m aware it failed to make the list because too few people supported my suggestion, not because it was a digital-only publication.

Back with the Clarke, I have no idea what will win. M. John Harrison’s Empty Space is probably the best written book on the list, but there’s no guarantee the jury will go for that. I’m expecting to see some outsiders on the short list, as usually happens. Maybe Ken Macleod’s Intrusion, or Juli Zeh’s The Method.

As is traditional, the Bay Area Science Fiction Association has put together lists of recommendations for the various Hugo Award categories, and for the Campbell. I am amongst the members who have contributed. Yesterday Kevin posted them to the Hugo Recommend LiveJournal. Because that’s a community blog, Kevin’s postings will slowly get buried by new postings (and I’m very pleased to see how many there are). The Best Novel list is here, and the others are all below that in the post stream.

Please note that these are recommendations, not how people have actually voted. In at least one case I know I have listed more than 5 works.

It is that time of year when people do Hugo recommendation podcasts in which they say things along the lines of, “I haven’t got a clue what the rules actually are, but if I say anything wrong I’m sure that Kevin Standlee and Cheryl Morgan will correct me”. In order to head some of this off at the pass, here are a few useful links.

Firstly it is not true that no one knows what magazines are eligible for Semiprozine any more. Nor is it the case that there are only a handful of semiprozines that are still eligible. You can find a list of eligible works here.

Also it is not true that no one knows who is eligible for the Campbell. As always, Writertopia maintains a list.

In both of these cases, if you think you should be on the list and are not, contact the people who run those websites, not me.

There is a real problem with Editor: Long Form, as most publishing houses still don’t credit editors. The SF Editor Wiki was intended to combat this, but in addition to the spam issues it simply wasn’t getting updated, which is why I was happy to let it die. I’ll try to do some research on who edited popular novels from 2012.

And finally, Kevin has done a post on the thorny question of what “professional” means in a Hugo context.

You are, of course, welcome to still cast the Summon Cheryl spell in cases of need, but hopefully the above will mean that Kevin and I are less busy this year.

It is Hugo nominating season again, and people are starting to think about letting WSFS members know what eligible work they have done. Some of you might be thinking of updating your entries in the Editor and Artist wikis that Anne Gray and I created. You will find that they have disappeared.

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly it is now common practice for people to trumpet their lists of eligible work loudly on their blogs and beg for votes from loyal fans. Whether you approve of that or not, it happens, and the people who do it do not see any value in also posting to another site. People were simply not updating the wikis, and that made them far less useful.

In addition I had lost faith in Mediawiki as a piece of software. While WordPress has become more and more useable, Mediawiki seemed mired in the old “if you are not a trained Unix sysadmin you should not be using this software” paradigm. I simply didn’t have the time to wade through all of the problems it caused.

I do have backups of the databases, and Anne may do something with them if she has the time (though she does also have Rosie to look after these days). My apologies to the few of you that this inconveniences, but there’s a limit to the amount of volunteer work I can do.

GalleyCat, a leading news blog for the publishing industry, runs a series of “literary mix tapes”, mostly featuring samples from work up for literary prizes. In 2012 they covered, amongst others, the LA Times Book Prize, the Orwell Prize, the FT‘s Best Business Books of the Year, and of course the Booker. But their most popular post in this category for 2012 was… *fanfare* …the Hugo Awards.

Go team!