Awards

BFS – Still Rumbling

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Quite a few people on Twitter today have pointed to this post by Nicholas Whyte which, amongst other things, uses reviews on GoodReads as a comparison to the Best Novel result. That’s a very good way to show how disputes like this must seem to outsiders. Other commenters have expressed surprise that the British Fantasy Awards tend to be dominated by horror fiction.

Of course things have been that way for a long time. The World Fantasy Awards have a strong leaning towards horror as well. The David Gemmell Awards were started in part because of a perceived lack of awards for epic fantasy.

You can get another view on this through the Karl Edward Wagner Special Award. The award rules say:

The Award may go to someone who has made an important contribution to the genre throughout his/her lifetime; or it may go to the organisers of a special event or publication that took place in the relevant year.

Steve Jones complains:

In recent years the BFS Committee has decided to also use it as a Life Achievement award

That certainly appears to be within the spirit of the rules to me, but Steve is upset that the award was used in this way. Apparently the FantasyCon committee and the BFS had a big dust-up over it.

It seems to me that very few living writers who are as deserving of a lifetime achievement award for fantasy as Sir Terry Pratchett, though I can think of some possibilities. Perhaps by “the genre” some people mean just “horror and dark fantasy”. But the point here is that this is an example of Dave Howe and his friends looking outside of the usual BFS group, and Steve Jones opposing that. Steve makes the same complaint about the award going to someone who didn’t attend the convention as he makes about the winners of the media awards.

So I think it is a mistake to this of this as a conflict between an in-group and someone with a wider view. I think it is actually a conflict between two rival factions within the BFS.

I suspect also that there are people who are horrified that the Hugos go to people like Paolo Bacigalupi, China Miéville and Connie Willis rather than to people who write Star Wars novels, because the latter sell much better. We need to be careful when we complain that award results don’t reflect popular tastes.

British Fantasy Awards Update

~ Cheryl ~ 23 Comments

This morning I was pointed to this post by David Howe on the BFS Forums. In it he confirms that he did indeed act as the administrator for the awards. However, the votes were automatically counted by software (which I guess explains the online-only ruling), and were independently checked by the BFS webmaster, Del Lakin-Smith. Neither Del nor his wife, Kim, was up for an award this year.

So as far as that is concerned there’s absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing, but a fairly clear error of judgement by Howe in accepting an award when he was the award administrator. I note from comments in my previous post that the British Science Fiction Association has a similar rule to the Hugos about award administrators not being eligible for the awards. Obviously there are issues with available volunteers, but it is a fairly simple rule that will make it much harder for Steve Jones and others to sling mud.

Howe also gives some voting figures. A total of 140 people cast ballots. The largest number of voters who participated in any category was 120, and the lowest 77. For comparison this year’s Hugos had 2,100 voters. The most popular category had 1813 ballots cast, and the least popular 814. Also, as I noted yesterday, the Hugos use a preferential ballot that makes it harder for a small, dedicated clique to dominate the voting, whereas the BFS does not. I understand the attraction of first-past-the-post voting, but hopefully you can see why a ballot with low participation numbers might choose a preferential system.

Finally, on the question of participation, I have now had two people say to me that, as members of FantasyCon but not members for the BFS, it was not at all clear that they were entitled to vote. This is potentially a rather more serious issue as the results of the ballot could have changed if more FantasyCon members had voted. I understand that the convention had around 500 members, and not all of the 140 who did vote were members (myself, for example).

It is not obvious who is responsible for this, and indeed responsibility may lie with many people. To start with I only have two bits of anecdata, and those people may have missed the messages they were getting, or they may have signed up too late to vote (I believe that votes are counted before the convention as with the Hugos — there is no voting at the convention as with the BSFA Awards). Also it isn’t clear how responsibility for contacting voters is shared between FantasyCon and the BFS committee. It would seem likely that FantasyCon should have contacted its members, and had something on the website about the awards, but it is possible that the arrangement was that they should share membership details with the BFS. I think the latter is less likely as it would probably be a breach of UK data protection laws, but I don’t want to point fingers without a proper understanding of who should have done what.

This all comes back to what I said yesterday about making it easy for people to vote. If you don’t want the results of your awards dominated by a small clique then you need more people voting, and the starting point for that has to be to make sure that everyone who is entitled to vote knows about the ballot and can participate easily.

Further Updates

I see from The Guardian that Sam Stone has returned her Best Novel award.

Also Damien Walter has called for a “unified spec-fic award”, allegedly becuase the BFS and BSFA Awards are, “dominated by amateur writers and publishers voting for their own work.”

Further update

We now have a comment on the previous post from someone who was a FantasyCon member, but not a BFS member, saying that he got an email from FantasyCon reminding him to vote. As I understand it, voting takes place in June and July. It is quite possible that some of the people who say they didn’t know they could vote joined the convention after that time.

Awards: Head – Desk – Repeat

~ Cheryl ~ 37 Comments

I wasn’t able to make it to FantasyCon this year, which is a bit of a shame as the weather was superb and the convention was in Brighton. All of the reaction I have seen on Twitter was very complimentary, until last night, when people started posting links to this. Oh dear, another awards train wreck.

Yes, that would be Steve Jones, a man of whom it could be said that he has opinions and is not afraid to voice them. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end — most notably Steve was one of the people least happy with the 2009 World Fantasy Convention. He has “previous” when it comes to slagging off convention committees and the like.

On the other hand, he’s also a very successful and hugely respected editor whose word carries a lot of weight. The fact that it is him casting aspersions on the results of the British Fantasy Awards means that a lot of people will take the issue very seriously. And, of course, it didn’t take me long on Twitter to find someone saying that the BFAs were just like the Hugos, then. *sigh* But given some of this goings on at the Business Meeting this year, who can blame people for thinking that?

Obviously I wasn’t at the award ceremony so I can’t offer much comment one way or the other on what actually went on. The BFS apparently has the whole thing up on YouTube, so if you are interested you can judge for yourselves.

What I can say is that Maura McHugh mentioned the poor quality of the sound while she was tweeting the results live. Also the MC, Sarah Pinborough, tweeted, “All I can say about those awards was it was the longest two hours of my life..shameful.” And if your main hired talent is upset at what went on then you have definitely got something wrong.

What interests me, however, is the process. I want people to have faith in awards, and clearly Steve doesn’t have much faith in what happened here. What could have been done better?

The BFAs are fan-voted awards. I can no longer find the award rules on the BFS site, but I believe that they are open to members of the BFS, and members of the current and previous FantasyCon. The total potential electorate is probably under 1,000, and I’d guess that the number of people actually voting is maybe 200, possibly a lot less. That compares to 2,100 people voting in this year’s Hugos.

Membership of the BFS currently costs £35, which is comparable to the $50 a supporting membership of Worldcon costs. You don’t get anything like the Voter Packet, but the BFS does publish various books that members get for free.

As you can see from the ballot form, the BFAs use first-past-the-post voting on the final ballot rather than the preferential balloting that the Hugos use. This means (as Kevin is fond of pointing out) that the winner in each category (assuming 5 nominees) could have had the support of only about 21% of the voters. People often complain that the system the Hugos uses means that a genuinely daring and different work will never win, because the system always favors works with mass appeal. This is true, but the system also makes it hard for any one special interest group to force a win against the will of the majority. The smaller the group of voters, the more likely it is that a small group of friends can come to dominate the results.

Of course you can reduce the likelihood of this by encouraging more people to participate and vote. Steve seems to think that the BFS didn’t do this very well. Personally I don’t have a huge problem with outlawing voting by paper mail. Of those 2,100 who voted in the Hugos, only 14 voted by paper mail. Possibly the BFS is different. Maybe voting electronically is something that only the “coastal elites” do. I suspect not. What I will say, however, is that catering for those 14 people was not a great deal of work for the Hugo Administrators, and their willingness to do that is good for the public image of the awards. Little differences like that can be important.

As to giving people time and notification, all I can say is that I managed to find out when I needed to vote. I recognize that I’m rather more connected to online buzz than many people.

Steve is unimpressed with the media awards (for film, TV and graphic novel) which he says, “were reintroduced in 2009 in a pathetic attempt to make the awards seem more ‘prestigious'”. I don’t know what was actually said when this decision was made, but as far as I’m concerned such categories are also there to make the awards seem more relevant to younger people, and the wider fan community. They are therefore a means of increasing participation. I appreciate that the winners probably won’t attend the award ceremony, but complaining about that sounds suspiciously like complaining that the winners are “not one of us”. If you want people to respect the award results it is important that they don’t always go to people who attend the convention.

I should note also that Ian Culbard’s graphic novel version of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is a very fine work that I voted for both in the BFAs and the Hugos. Its win was one of the highlights of the awards as far as I’m concerned.

The most telling part of Steve’s commentary is this:

Without any proof, I’m not accusing anybody of doing anything underhand. But there is certainly a strong case for the BFS Chairman to have removed himself from the entire process once it became apparent how many of his own titles and those of his partner were on the initial nomination list. This shows a serious lack of judgement by someone in such an important position.

I don’t know who was responsible for administering the awards, but if Dave Howe was involved that certainly doesn’t look good. With the Hugos there is a very firm rule that those responsible for administering the awards cannot be eligible for them. It is important that that should be true, and also important that the distinction be made clear because otherwise everyone involved with the convention falls under suspicion.

It is things like this that led me to resign from the Board of the Translation Awards. If I’m going to be busily searching out translated books and promoting them, someone is bound to get suspicious if works I like do well. Of course we have a separate jury, and the Board has no control over their deliberations, but I know what the Internet is like.

For fan-voted awards to be respected these days I think that they need the following:

  • The rules should be posted publicly on the organization’s website
  • It should be made easy for eligible people to vote
  • Those responsible for administering the awards should be clearly identified and ineligible to receive awards

Personally I’d also like to see numbers. People are always complaining about how few people vote in the Hugos, but I doubt that any set of national awards comes close unless voting is open to everyone. If you publish numbers, that puts pressure on to increase participation. It also helps the public know which awards are liable to be hijacked by a small clique.

It may well be that the BFS can clarify some of these issues, and I hope they do. If they can’t, or won’t, it will reflect badly, not only on them, but also on all other fan-voted awards.

For further details (and numbers) see my follow-up post here.

Green Carnation Prize Long List

~ Cheryl

The UK’s LGBT fiction prize, the Green Carnation, announced the 2011 long list today. I’m not familiar with any of the books, which probably means that none of them are SpecFic, and none of them are trans-related. But you never know. If I am wrong I’m sure that Simon or Gav will turn up here and correct me. In any case I’m delighted to see so many nominees from big name publishers.

Update: Nicola Griffith has very good things to say about the long list here.

Lambda Makes Progress

~ Cheryl

Last week I blogged about the new awards that Lambda Literary was taking on, and how the eligibility criteria were LG inclusive, but not really LGBT. The original wording was as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group).

That wording has now been revised as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards given annually during the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony (each to a male-identified and female-identified individual) marking stages of a writer’s career: the Debut Fiction Award (to one queer man and one queer woman), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group).

This is much more inclusive. Of course it is by no means perfect, as it sticks rigidly to the idea of the gender binary and thus excludes anyone who does not identify as male or female. There may also be some people who have issues with the word “queer”. But it is progress, and to be honest it is a lot more than I thought we would get. I suspect that we have Nicola Griffith to thank for applying pressure on the Lambda board, and possibly other supportive folks as well.

So, thank you Lambda for listening and acting. Now we need to have a conversation about this gender binary thing. Would you like to talk some more?

Bowing Out

~ Cheryl

When I saw the nominations lists for this year’s Hugos & Campbell I was fairly pleased. We had four women on the Best Novel list, we had an African American and a French Vietnamese in the fiction nominations. Nick Mamatas was nominated for editing a line of translated Japanese fiction. There were a South African and, I think, a Muslim American, on the Campbell list. We also had record levels of participation in both the nominating and final ballot stages. I wasn’t too impressed with some of the winners, but hey, that often happens. Overall I thought we were continuing to make progress.

The reaction to this year’s results, however, has been the worst I can remember. Depressingly much of this has come, not just from outraged fans, but also from professionals in the field. And some of those people, accidentally or otherwise, have said things that can be taken to imply they think the process is corrupt.

I don’t want to go into individual cases. Some people were probably just careless with words. Some appear to genuinely believe that the Hugos are a blight on the industry. And a few, I suspect, are trying to stir up controversy in the hope of getting more traffic to their blogs. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much why people say what they do, it is that fact that they say it that everyone else remembers. Fling enough mud, and it sticks.

Nothing I have seen has been directed at me, which is a big relief after the ridiculous nonsense last year. However, all winners are tarred with the same brush. The same people who voted for Connie Willis, or Girl Genius, or Chicks Dig Timelords, or whatever winner someone is particularly incensed about, also voted for Clarkesworld. If the process is suspect, then we must have benefited from it as well.

I guess this sort of thing is inevitable. The higher profile a set of awards, the more carping there will be. But I’m tired of having to worry about it. In particular I’m tired of worrying that projects I’m involved in, which I care deeply about, will suffer through their association with whatever mud-slinging is affecting me. And I have to face up to the fact that for a large segment of the community I will never be anything more than a fan who won fan Hugos in controversial circumstances.

So I am bowing out.

I’ll be retiring from Clarkesworld as soon as Neil can find a suitable replacement. So if you fancy editing non-fiction for one of the best magazines around, get in touch.

I’m also giving up SF Awards Watch. I still think it is a worthwhile project, but it needs someone else to take charge. Kevin and Petrea tell me that they are happy to stay on and help if someone wants to take it on, so again get in touch if you are interested.

I have resigned from the Board of Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Travel Fund. There’s a lot of money involved there and I don’t want there to be any controversy over my involvement in choosing next year’s beneficiary.

Finally, and most importantly, I have resigned from the Board of the SF&F Translations Awards. I’ll still be supporting these with my time and money, but I think it absolutely essential that any idea that these are in some way my awards be erased. We desperately need someone, preferably several someones, who can help promote the awards who is widely respected within the industry. I very much hope that we can get more help, because I think this is a hugely important initiative. I do not want to see it die because people associate it with someone who they think has won four more Hugos than she deserves.

I haven’t yet decided what to do with Wizard’s Tower. It is pretty obvious by now that nothing short of a lottery win is going to get me back to the US. However, if there are ways in which I can continue to help good writers sell good books then I want to continue doing that. Also I have obligations to people whose books I am already selling in some way or another.

I will, of course, continue to blog here occasionally, and I’ll continue working hard behind the scenes for various projects I believe in. I just won’t be lending my name to anything in future unless I’m sure I’m the only person who’ll be harmed by that.

Oh Lambda Literary, Clueless Again

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

The Lambda Literary Foundation has been having a bit of an issue with the eligibility criteria for the awards. A while back they decided they would limit eligibility to authors who self-identified as LGBT. This caused something of a ruckus (see here for some links), and they have now changed their minds again.

I should note here that this is not an easy issue. The UK’s Green Carnation Prize has a similar LGBT-only restriction on authors, and one of the consequences of that is that publishers are refusing to submit books because they don’t want their authors to be publicly identified as queer. See here for an example.

Having said that, what Lambda has done is rather bizarre. They now have a three-pronged policy.

1. All judges must be LGBT-identifed, which I think is fair enough.

2. The main awards are open to all authors, which I’m very pleased about.

3. They have some separate awards specifically for LGBT writers, or rather LG(bt) writers, as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group)

I’m sorry, what is going on here?

First of all, why is one award specifically restricted to “one gay man and one lesbian”, while others are for “male-identified and female-identified” people. At least the latter appears to include some bi people, which the former seems to exclude. As for trans people, apparently they are OK for the first award if they identify as gay or lesbian, but not otherwise, and they are OK for the other two awards is they are male-identified and female-identified, but not otherwise.

My first impression is that this is really sloppy writing. My second impression is that, despite the claim of widespread consultation, Lambda didn’t talk to a single bi or trans person when formulating this policy — or if they did they ignored any objections.

Is it really so hard for someone at Lambda to engage their brain before putting their fingers to the keyboard? Or do they just not care if they offend bi and trans people?

Translation Awards News

~ Cheryl

OK, most people should be home from Worldcon now, so it is time to repeat something I mentioned last week.

Over at the SF&F Translation Awards we are appealing for help. Basically, I can’t do it all by myself. Kevin’s also tied up with his own problems, and the rest of the Board of Directors all have full time jobs. We need more people, otherwise things just won’t get done.

There are three jobs we have advertised: one to help the jury, one to do fundraising, and one to help provide web site content. Hopefully they will all be interesting, and none of them individually is a huge time sink. More detailed job descriptions are available at the Awards’ website.

If you think you can help with any of those things, or you’d like to help but don’t have the skills for those particular jobs, please get in touch. And if you can’t help, please consider passing on the message, because I’m sure my blog only reaches a fraction of the people who could be interested.

Also I’m pleased to note that an interview I did with Val Grimm about the awards has now gone live at The Portal.

Further Hugo Thoughts

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

I’ve had a little time for things to percolate through the brain now, and also my shoulder is getting more used to typing, so here goes with a bit of Hugo analysis.

I should start by congratulating all of the winners. I may not have voted for you all, but you won and that’s what matters. I am not going to complain that this is somehow unfair. I will, however, also congratulate all of the nominees as well, because it really is an honour to be nominated.

The first thing of note in the stats is that out of 2100 people who participated in the final ballot, only 14 did so by regular mail. I’m pleased that we keep the mail option, but really the number of people who use it is very small.

In the Campbell I was cheering for Lauren as she’s a friend, and I’m really impressed with both Moxyland and Zoo City. With my PR hat on, however, Lev’s win is a very good thing because he’s so well known. I note also that despite all of the “not a Hugo” jokes that people make, the message still doesn’t get through. Step forward, the New York Observer, which proudly proclaims: “Lev Grossman Wins a Hugo Award”.

Fan Artist continues to be a fairly static category, but I was pleased to see Mo Starkey get a mention. Poor Spring Schoenhuth missed the ballot by just one nomination. The final result was as tight as it can be, with Brad Foster beating Randall Munroe by just one vote. I gather there is some story that fandom had it in for Munroe because he’s not “one of us”. I don’t know where that came from. As far as I was aware, the issue with Munroe was that he was being recognized for XKCD which people believed to be a business, not fannish activity.

I am delighted that Claire Brialey has finally won Fan Writer. Hopefully Steve Silver, James Nichol and James Bacon will get their turns too, and they have all done great work. I’m not sure that Worldcon can handle another Garcia win, though Chris’s triumph in Fanzine was undeniably one of the highlights of Hugo history (and the video has apparently gone viral so I don’t need to point you at it). Yay! Go BASFA! And well done James Bacon for staying calm through it all.

Semiprozine. We won. Thank you all, again. 🙂

I was pleased to see that Salon Futura got 42 nominations, placing 7th. It is actually eligible next year, though I doubt that anyone will remember unless I can afford to get a few more issues out between now and next March.

Artist. John Picacio has to win soon, people. Possibly next year when a whole lot of GRRM fans will be voting for the Game of Thrones TV series and John will have his work on the GoT calendar in the voter pack. Kinuko Craft was 6th in the nomination lists, but well short of making the ballot.

The mystery of all of the nominees in Editor: Long Form has been solved. Lots of people are still nominating David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden even though they have withdrawn from competition. Consequently we had to go down to 6th and 7th places, and there was a 3-way tie for 7th. It might be good if Chicago posted a list of people who were withdrawing for next year, and regular nominees who are ineligible (Juliet tells me she has only edited 2 genre books this year, so she’s not in the running).

Editor: Short Form is the place to recognize Clarkesworld next year with the magazine having withdrawn. This year Neil Clarke placed 7th, only 9 nominations short of the ballot. We can do this, people.

I am delighted for both Lou and Sheila. They are excellent editors and thoroughly deserving of the recognition. Poor old Stan Schmidt is still a bridesmaid. That’s what happens when a small, dedicated group love what you do but everyone else is unconvinced.

I don’t have much to say about the Dramatic Presentation categories, save to note that the voting pattern in Short Form is a classic example of why having multiple nominees on the ballot does not “split the vote”. The three Doctor Who nominees supported each other very well.

There’s nothing that can be said about Graphic Story. I know that Phil and Kaja have ruled themselves out of the running for next year, but the sunset clause vote is due up at the WSFS Business Meeting in Chicago and I can’t see more than a handful of people wanting to persevere with the category.

Related Work was a real mixed bag this year. I guess the huge popularity of Doctor Who won out.

Short Story and Novelette were disaster zones for me this year. Clearly my taste does not match that of the voters. The mystery of the missing 5th place nominee is now solved. Hannu Rajaniemi missed getting on the ballot by just one vote. Take note, please, Finland. We almost got there. If only a few more of the 48 people who nominated The Quantum Thief had voted for the short story as well. Anyway, the eligibility extension has been passed again, so The Quantum Thief will be eligible again next year thanks to its Tor publication.

Novella was a lot better. I know hard core Chiang fans don’t like this year’s story, but I’m happy with it as a winner. I’m also very pleased to see Al Reynolds doing so well.

There was never much doubt about the Novel category. Everyone expected Connie to win and she did. I’m delighted for Seanan/Mira, who did very well indeed, and also delighted to see Nora on the ballot. I’m sure you all know that I think The Dervish House was head and shoulders above everything else on the ballot.

There has, of course, been the expected outcry about the result. Personally I though that Kirsten and Mondy on The Writer & The Critic had the most sensible approach. There are things that Connie does incredibly well, and if the woefully shoddy history doesn’t bother you the books are a fun read. There’s just not a lot of substance there.

What does bemuse me is the fact that some people have been complaining that allowing the two books to be voted on as one was somehow unfair, and by implication that “they” (the infamous “Hugo committee”, no doubt) had rigged the contest in Connie’s favour. Look folks, Blackout/All Clear is clearly a single narrative, with about the same number of pages as A Dance with Dragons. Length should be no indicator of quality. Indeed, the fact that the publishers split it in two so they could charge more for it, and only put the first half in the voter packet, should have counted against it. Besides, think what would have happened if people had been forced to vote on the two books separately. Both would have got on the ballot, Connie would still have won, and one fewer author (actually Lois Bujold) would have got a nomination.

It is worth noting that none of the categories produced an outright winner this year. I’m very pleased with that. There were also seven categories in which the candidate with the most first place votes did not win.

The final thing that occurs to me about this year’s results is that for years people have been complaining that the Hugo results are bad because the awards are voted on by a small, unrepresentative group of fans. This year we have had more people than ever participate in the process, and guess what? Yes, the results are more populist. What did you expect?

Moving On Up

~ Cheryl

Neil Clarke has announced (via Twitter) that he is withdrawing Clarkesworld from consideration in the Hugos next year so that other semiprozines can get a look-in. I’m very happy with this.

I should note, however, that this doesn’t mean that you can’t show your appreciation for Neil and all that he does. This year he got 56 nominations in Editor: Short Form, which placed him 7th, above such luminaries as Ann VanderMeer and Gardner Dozois. What this says is that people are starting to think of Clarkesworld as a professional-quality magazine alongside the likes of Asimov’s and F&SF. If that’s where people think we belong, then I’m very happy for us to be judged in that company.

Of course if you do think we are that good, we’d also be very grateful if you could subscribe, or just give us money, because then we could afford to buy more stories.

Slightly Muted Celebrations

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So, it appears I now have four Hugos. That’s pretty amazing. If I seem to be somewhat less enthusiastic this time, it’s not because winning is getting old, it is because we were not supposed to win this one.

I am, of course, very pleased that Neil and Sean got an opportunity to go on stage, having not been able to make it to Melbourne last year. I’m absolutely delighted that Kate has got a rocket, as I think her readings are one of the main reasons why Clarkesworld is so popular.

On the other hand, I really wasn’t expecting us to win this. All of the pundits beforehand were predicting that Locus would win, because Charles Brown was a Guest Ghost of Honor at the convention. Everyone was expecting Liza to go up there and make a very emotional speech about how much we miss him. Maybe she’s relieved that she didn’t have to do it, but the audience wasn’t. During the commentary Mur commented on how muted reaction was to our win. The perception seemed to be that we had rained on Charles’s party.

Looking at the stats, Locus had a clear lead all the way through until the final round of voting when Lightspeed‘s votes were redistributed, so this was a classic case of a very popular nominee failing because a majority did not want it to win, and were prepared to accept any other winner. I guess that’s what’s happens when you have won as many Hugos as Locus has.

For my part, I knew Charles fairly well and was proud to call him a friend. I had been the recipient of his generosity on many occasions. Like Gary and Jonathan, I miss chatting to him about books. All I can say is that I hope, wherever he is now, that he’s getting plenty of good meals, and is still getting all of the good new novels before anyone else. If that’s the case I suspect he won’t mind too much about losing this one.

Hugo Rule Wrangling

~ Cheryl

There was load more action at the WSFS Business Meeting yesterday. First the easy bits.

The annual motion extending eligibility to works on their first publication in English in the USA went through on the nod.

The Constitutional Amendment extending the right to participate in the nominations stage to members of the current Worldcon passed on a show of hands. Assuming that the (unopposed) San Antonio bid is selected, its members will be able to nominate next year.

And now the complicated bits.

A Constitutional Amendment to separate Best Fanzine into words and audio/video has received first passage. If this is ratified in Chicago then there will be two separate categories: one for things like Challenger, Banana Wings and The Drink Tank; and the other for things like Star Ship Sofa, Galactic Suburbia and Coode Street.

What happens if a fanzine has both print and podcast elements? Well, I guess it is eligible in both categories. Doubtless there will be a furore if that happens.

There’s a sunset clause, so the change will need to be re-ratified in 2016 to be continued past then.

In addition, after much wrangling, the main report of the semiprozine committee was passed. The primary effect of this is to remove from the category any magazine owned and operated by a company with full time staff. This affects the likes of Locus, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, but not Clarkesworld, Helix and Electric Velocipede. Editors of the magazines that have been removed can, of course, be nominated for Editor: Short Form.

Neil Clarke has more details on the changes here. Again this needs to be ratified in Chicago.

There’s more information available from Kevin and Mike Glyer.

Translation Awards: Help Wanted

~ Cheryl

This is probably a daft thing to post when so many of the Usual Suspects are busy in Reno, so I’ll post it again next week, but the SF&F Translation Awards are looking for some volunteers to help us with our work. Details of the positions are available here.

Thoughts on Categories

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I’ve just been having an interesting conversation with Mur Lafferty on Twitter about the fanzine category proposals. This all boils down to how you believe that Hugo categories should be organized. Here are some thoughts.

I’m firmly against any category distinction that is based purely on the means of delivery. We fought off the nonsense about having to have separate categories for fiction depending on whether it was online or on paper. I don’t see any reason for creating categories depending on whether words are spoken or written down.

We also, in places, distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. However, that does not happen with semiprozines and fanzines, probably because there are not enough candidates to make it worthwhile.

We also distinguish between novels and movies. We do that, not because one is on paper and one is on film, but because creating a movie requires a whole lot more than just a script. There’s acting, there’s camera work, costumes and special effects.

The contention of people wanting a fancast category is that making a fannish podcast or video requires a whole bunch of extra skills, just like making a movie does. I’m not convinced by that. I don’t think, for example, that the podcasts and videos I did for Salon Futura would lose much if they were transcribed to text. On the other hand, something like Star Wreck is clearly another prospect entirely.

If I were in Reno, I would be going to today’s BM with an open mind, interested to see what people had to say. As it is, I shall have to wait for the video.

WSFS Democracy in Action

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

Yesterday saw the first session of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. One of the issues due to be raised was the decision by the Mark Protection Committee (MPC) to ban me from serving on it, or any of its subcommittees, unless I agreed to decline any Hugo nominations I might receive. Allegedly being on those committees gave me an unfair advantage in the awards, with the implication that my wins in 2009 and 2010 had been unfairly obtained.

Well, a number of WSFS regulars were concerned that the MPC was over-reaching its remit here. They argued that the MPC had no right to decide who was eligible for a Hugo and who was not. Johnny Carruthers and Chris Barkley brought a resolution to yesterday’s meeting ordering the MPC to rescind the policy. This was the first step towards clearing my name.

Somewhat to our surprise, Johnny and Chris faced a new hurdle before they could bring their resolution to the floor. The chair of the meeting, Don Eastlake, ruled it unconstitutional.

To understand that you have to get to the real issue that was being debated here. In order to justify kicking me off the committee, the MPC had to attest that it did indeed have the right to set policy regarding Hugo eligibility. (And indeed if it had that right, I should not be on the committee.) Eastlake’s argument was that not only did the MPC have the right to decide who was eligible for Hugos, but that the Business Meeting had no right to overturn their decisions. He was, in effect, arguing that the MPC was an elected Board of Directors for WSFS that could adopt whatever policies it liked. The only way to change those policies would be to elect different people to the MPC and hope they adopted different policies.

I have no idea why Don took this line. Possibly he wanted to make the enormity of the power grab that the MPC members were making very clear to the meeting. Had his ruling been sustained, he would have fundamentally changed the nature of WSFS democracy. Maybe he wanted that decision on record. But equally by ruling that way he ensured that Johnny and Chris’s motion needed not just an ordinary majority, but a 2/3 super-majority in order to progress, that being the requirement for sustaining a challenge to the chair. It is hard not to see his action as yet another piece of parliamentary trickery intended to stifle debate on a contentious issue.

Update: Kevin has been in touch to tell me that my memory of debate rules is fault, and only an ordinary majority is required to overturn a chair’s ruling. So apologies to Don on that one, and I really do not know why he took that position.

Fortunately we had Kevin on our side. He was able to bring forward numerous examples of past occasions when the MPC had taken direction from the Business Meeting, thereby establishing precedent for the MPC being subservient to the BM. Also the regular BM attendees are an independent-minded lot. The thought of having their authority taken away from them was more than sufficient to rouse them to action. The chair’s ruling was rejected, and Johnny & Chris’s motion went on to pass.

That wasn’t necessarily the end of it. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it is perfectly consistent to believe that the MPC had no right to adopt such a policy, but still believe that the policy was a good one and should be imposed by the BM. A Constitutional Amendment to that effect had been proposed, and was due to be debated today. However, Chris raised an Objection to Consideration motion against it and the BM, having decided that they had discussed the issue quite enough already, backed him.

So the good news is that I’m in the clear. Any insinuations of improper conduct on my part have been disposed of. Where we go from here is not clear. I need to talk to Kevin about it, and it will depend to a certain extent on who gets elected to the MPC today. There are 8 people vying for 4 places. I note that Mark Olson and Stephen Boucher were among the people who took action against me in Australia, and Kate Kligman was one of the backers of the motion to write that action into the WSFS Constitution this year. So if I were in Reno I know who I would not be voting for.

That was by no means all of the business that got done yesterday. The meeting also had to cope with some complex drafting issues arising from multiple motions on similar topics. The first set of motions were all about removing podcasts and video from the Fanzine category of the Hugos. To some extent this is a bit like the people who claimed that Emerald City was not a proper fanzine because it was published electronically rather than on paper. There is, however, a crucial difference, in that these motions do not seek to ban productions such as Star Ship Sofa from the Hugos. Instead they argue that the skills necessary to produce a podcast or video are fundamentally different to those required to produce written words, and that a separate category is required. Many fan awards around the world already make this distinction. The people behind the various motions have apparently come to an agreement on a common approach. I’ll be interested to see how this goes today.

The other major drafting issue surrounded the semiprozine committee’s report. I talked more about this here. There were, as of yesterday morning, two proposals that actively conflict with the committee’s recommendations. One of the fanzine motions contained wording that, I think inadvertently, would make all professional magazines — such as Asimov’s and F&SF — eligible for semiprozine. If this was a mistake, hopefully it has been corrected.

Still extant, however, is Ben Yalow’s attempt to wreck the semiprozine committee proposal by defining any paying market as professional, thereby ensuring that almost no magazines will be eligible as semiprozines, and allowing Ben to then argue that the category is not needed. That one will certainly come to the floor of the BM today. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Neil Clarke in attempting to deal with it.

There was one other decision that the BM took yesterday that I’d like to talk about. There was a Constitutional Amendment pending proposing the creation of a Hugo Award category for YA books. This too got the Objection to Consideration treatment, and therefore will not be discussed today. I have my reservations about the proposal, but it is one with a lot of support in the community and I think it was wrong for the BM not to allow the issues to be openly debated.

Anyway, my deepest thanks to Johnny, Chris and Kevin for their efforts on my behalf, and also to everyone who supported them with speeches and votes. Kevin has the video of the meeting available here if you want to see what went on.

Translated Work Nominations Needed

~ Cheryl

Over at the Translation Awards website we have started to ask for suggestions of eligible works from 2011. Obviously the year is by no means over yet, but we want to get a jury in place and reading fairly soon. If you know of any translated SF&F works that we should be considering, please comment over there. They can be from any language, but must be newly translated into English in 2011.

WSFS Business II: The HAMC

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Another issue that will come up for debate at this year’s WSFS Business Meeting was last year’s decision by the Mark Protection Committee (MPC) to bar me from working for the Hugo Award Marketing Committee (HAMC). The excuse given for this is that by working for the committee I was at an unfair advantage in the Hugo Awards (and by implication the Hugos won by myself, in 2009, and Clarkesworld, in 2010, had been won unfairly). However, this excuse is such a transparent fabrication that I am in no doubt that it was aimed squarely at getting rid of me, and casting doubt on my Hugo wins. Let’s take a closer look at what is involved.

First of all, what is this work that I was doing that gave me this unfair advantage? Well, I built and maintained the official Hugo Award website. That was largely an administrative job. I made a point of not signing posts with my own name so that I would not be seen as representing the Hugos. I also helped behind the scenes with running the logo contest, but again I made a point of letting Kevin be the front man whenever possible. The only major official public action I took while on the HAMC was hosting the live coverage from Melbourne. This is something I had done for several years via SF Awards Watch. And when I finally got asked to do it officially on the Hugo website, rather than on my own, suddenly this became “cheating”, despite the fact that I didn’t to it until after the votes for 2009 and 2010 had been cast.

I note that I have never served on a Hugo Administration committee, or been involved in putting together the Voter Packet.

Now obviously there is a conflict of interest of some sort. But conflicts of interest abound in the SF&F community. I’d have to give up reviewing if I restricted myself to only reviewing books by people I didn’t know. And other people on the HAMC have an interest in the results of the awards too. Rene Walling, the current chair of the HAMC, runs a small press. Should a work that he published be up for a Hugo, that would be perfectly OK under the HAMC ruling, because he would not be the author. Rene is also on the staff of a very fine fanzine, The Portal, but any nomination would be in the name of the editor, Val Grimm, so Rene would still be clear to serve on the HAMC. It seems, therefore, that a conflict of interest is only a conflict of interest if it involves you personally winning a Hugo, not if it involves your business or your colleagues winning one. It is a distinction, but it is a pretty shaky one, and one designed specifically to only exclude me.

There are other very specific and personal issues involved here. I have tried hard to not become one of those people who wins too many Hugos. When I finally beat Dave Langford to Best Fan Writer one of the first things I did was rule myself out of competition for the following year. And I have kept doing that. I would only have put my hat back into the ring if Dave had started winning again. I now have a Best Semiprozine Hugo. Had it been up to me, I would be perfectly happy to only win one with Clarkesworld. But I can’t withdraw the magazine, only Neil can do that. And besides, I really want to see Kate get a Hugo, so I’m happy the magazine is still in the running. What I would have liked, would be to get a nomination with Salon Futura. That would have helped my fledgling business quite a lot. It could have been key to helping me get back to the US.

So in order to continue serving on the HAMC I would have had to resign from Clarkesworld, and I would have had to give up any possibility of getting a nomination for Salon Futura, which at the time had only published one issue. I submit to you that the people who chose to bar me from the HAMC knew that they were putting me in an impossible position, and that my hopes of getting back to the US were in part dependent on my continuing to be eligible for Hugos. This was a very, very personal action.

There are, of course, other Hugo winners involved in promoting the Hugos. The Hugo Voter Packet was created by John Scalzi, and we should all be very grateful to him for that. The jury for the logo contest included Neil Gaiman, who has lots of Hugos, and Geri Sullivan, who won one in 2007 for the fanzine, Science Fiction Five-Yearly. Do you think anyone would object to these people helping out the HAMC again? Of course not. The argument would doubtless be made that they were not actually members of the HAMC, they were external consultants. But if Kevin had suggested that I be recruited as an external consultant to help maintain the website, or to host the live coverage, do you think that would be allowed? No, of course not.

In practice, of course, this shouldn’t matter very much. Despite the fact that Kevin and I have been able to do very little for the HAMC this year, we have record turnouts in both the nomination and final ballot stages of the Hugos. The logo is getting used. It could be better, but other people could be recruited to do the jobs that I was doing. I’m perfectly happy to have less volunteer work to do. That’s not what this is all about.

What I am mainly concerned about here is that people have been using small, barely quorate WSFS committees to prosecute a fannish feud, and to go against the wishes of the Business Meeting by trying to prevent the HAMC from getting any work done. It is dirty politics.

People keep asking me why WSFS is not a proper organization with a board of directors: people in charge who can take decisions. Well, the main reason is that if we did it would quickly get mired down in exactly this sort of nonsense. People would be forever pulling back-door tricks of this sort in search of “power”, no matter how illusory and ineffectual that power might be. Unfortunately, even with small, simple committees like the HAMC, people can’t resist the temptation.

The other thing that concerns me is that this is a deliberate attempt to alter the Hugo record. History says that I won a Hugo myself in 2009, and won one with Clarkesworld in 2010. The decision of the MPC meeting in Melbourne clearly implies that those wins were unfairly obtained, because if I wasn’t operating at an unfair advantage it would not have been necessary to bar me from serving on the HAMC. The effect of this is, as they say in sporting halls of fame, to “put an asterisk against my name” in the record. It is absolutely outrageous that a group of 5 people on barely quorate and little-known committee should be able to alter the official record in this way. If they are allowed to get away with in it my case, what it to stop them from doing it to other people as well?

Kevin has more to say about the issue here, in particular he has all the practical details of what is likely to happen at the Business Meeting.

WSFS Business I: Semiprozines

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

It looks like the WSFS committee investigating the fanzine/semiprozine split is going to report at the Business Meeting at this year’s Worldcon. Neil Clarke has a report here explaining what they have decided. The actual report and and some minority reports from dissenting members of the committee, is available here.

The objective of most of the people involved has been to try to find a clearer definition of what constitutes a semiprozine, because the existing definition was deemed too confusing and ineffectual. The point of semiprozines, at least as I see it, is that they are run as commercial concerns — in that they pay their contributors, may have advertising and so on — but they are run by people who all have other jobs, and those people often take no pay for their work on the magazines.

This has caused some confusion in the past because many people who are in the SF&F community have a variety of jobs. So, for example, Jonathan Strahan edits reviews for Locus, edits anthologies for other people, and has a day job. David Hartwell edits NYRSF, but also has a full time job with Tor. So focusing on the editors made it hard to see who was professional and who wasn’t.

What the committee appears to have done is shift the emphasis onto the ownership of the magazine. So if the magazine is owned by a company that employs staff, then it is a professional magazine, but if it run entirely by people working for it in their spare time, then it is a semiprozine. The actual rules are a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the substantive change.

Under this rule, magazines like Locus, Weird Tales and Lightspeed, which are all owned by proper companies, are professional. Magazines such as NYRSF, Clarkesworld, and of course Strange Horizons, though as far as I know they continue to ask not to be considered, are semiprozines.

The new rules are still fairly opaque, in that your average voter is not going to be easily able to tell which magazines are eligible are which are not. But that’s because there is no simple and easy rule that can be written. If you want to have a semiprozine category, you will have to have complex rules. Given that, this is probably the best we are going to get. It is certainly a new idea, and I wasn’t sure that the committee would be able to come up with one.

It is worth looking briefly at the various minority reports. I see Stu Segal’s point, in that we have had new winners in the past two years, so things do seem to be getting better. However, I am fairly certain that Locus will win again this year, and the “stop Locus” people would be very unhappy if the committee reported back that Locus had indeed been stopped, and then it went and won again.

Saul Jaffe is right when he says that the rules are still too complex, but it will be very easy for various websites such as the Hugo Recommend LiveJournal, or the SF Editors wiki, and indeed semiprozine.org, to list eligible magazines. Saul’s problem appears to be that he’s still hung up on the issue of “campaigning”, and he’s opposed to anyone even mentioning that they are eligible. I think we have moved well beyond that.

As for Ben Yalow’s proposal, it cuts against the whole philosophy of semiprozines. The reason that I and many other people work on them for nothing is that by doing so we are able to provide struggling writers with additional income. If you stop semiprozines paying their contributors then they become indistinguishable from fanzines. And, as Neil points out, Ben’s proposal will gut the semiprozine category. There will be so few eligible magazines that there will be no point in having the category. Given that Ben is one of the people who wanted to do away with the category in the first place, it is easy to see why his proposal is crafted the way it is.

Record Hugo Voter Turnout

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

The fine work that Renovation is doing to promote involvement in the Hugo Awards is continuing to bear fruit. You may remember that they set a record of 1006 valid nominating ballots. Now they have set a record for participation in the final ballot. A total of 2100 valid ballots were received, which amounted to a massive 46.1% turnout. The voters came from 33 different countries. Further information is available on the official Hugo Award website.

I’d love to know how many of those voters are supporting members. And 33 different countries, eh? That does make me happy.