The ill-fated women in the Hugos amendment (I’m not going to call it the “Joanna Russ Amendment” until I know that Joanna has sanctioned this – she is still alive and may not agree with the motion) is continuing to attract discussion around the blogosphere. Mostly this is good. I seconded the motion precisely to generate discussion, and I want discussion because I’m tired of the regular rants about how the Hugos are evil and sexist that happen every time the nominee lists come out. If something is wrong, we should discuss how we might fix it, and if nothing is wrong we should stop complaining.

However, some of the posts I have seen have been quite critical of Yonmei for being an extremist, which I think is somewhat unfair because her initial proposal (a year in which no men would be allowed on the ballot) was way more radical. She allowed herself to be talked down to a more reasonable position, whereas some other people were much less willing to talk. Also some of these posts seem to be rather missing the point, because they don’t understand the Hugo process very well.

One post that dismisses the motion as a bad thing is this one by Adrienne Martini on the Locus blog. It was a little surprising to me because if I’m not mistaken this is the Adrienne Martini who, back in 2007, roundly attacked the male dominance of that year’s Hugo nominee lists. She attributed this to sexism on behalf of the Yokohama Worldcon committee and demanded that something be done.

Martini’s post is headlined, “No one wants a pity Hugo”, which shows that she still doesn’t understand how the awards work very well. Nothing in Yonmei’s amendment would have automatically given women writers a Hugo. It would have given some a nomination, but in such cases the women would have had to battle it out in the final ballot against five male writers. Indeed, other people who have attacked Yonmei’s motion have suggested that it would have meant fewer women winners, because if people saw a woman on the ballot they would automatically assume she was there because of the special rule, not by right, and vote her down accordingly.

All of this misunderstands how nominations work. In the final ballot the nominees fight it out on a more-or-less equal footing. The voters generally make an effort to consider them all. But nominating is very different. It is quite impossible for anyone with nominating rights to consider all of the possibilities. (There probably isn’t anyone who reads enough languages to do so.) So the five nominees are by no means necessarily the five best candidates ranked in order. If they were there would be no need for a final ballot — we’d just pick the top-ranked nominee as happens in the Locus Awards.

The Hugo nominee process is an exercise in using the wisdom of crowds. The theory is that with a big enough number of nominators the works that get the most nominations will be those that are the best-liked. The process has acknowledged flaws, because some books don’t get noticed in time for people to nominate them. That’s why we have eligibility extensions. There is an inherent bias against books published late in the year that people may not have time to read, and possibly against books published very early in the year that people may have forgotten. We don’t do anything about this because the system of rolling eligibility that the Nebulas tried was so unpopular.

There are other issues too that people might think about looking at. Sometimes you get ties, so 6 or 7 nominees are listed. But sometimes you get a situation where 6 candidates are well ahead of the pack but the 6th-placed candidate doesn’t quite have enough votes to make a tie and so has to miss out. The cut-off point doesn’t have to be 5. There are other ways the nominee list could be worked out. I’ve seen plenty of situations where I have looked at the final nominations numbers are wished that the 6th-placed candidate had been on the ballot.

And remember, the work or person that gets the most nominating ballots is by no means certain of victory. There are plenty of occasions when that person does not win. I think it has happened to me in the past.

So this idea that the five nominees are fine and worthy, whereas any work that does not feature in that top five is not even fit to shine the nominees boots, is nonsense. We know that the nominations process is flawed. We have some patches already in place. We might consider others. The final text of Yonmei’s motion was an idea that I came up with in 10 minutes in the shower on the Thursday morning of Worldcon to head off an idea that was genuinely outrageous. With plenty of time to reflect and discuss, I am sure we can come up with something better. (Although of course if that idea doesn’t require us to change the mechanics of the process at all, so much the better.)

Every so often when people are discussing problems with the Hugos someone asks why Administrators are not given more power, or don’t exercise the powers that they have. Surely, people argue, if there are problems with categories, all that has to happen is that the Administrator should make the correct decisions and all will be well. Sadly this is probably the worst thing that we could do.

One of the problems is that the Hugo Administrator changes each year. While some people have had repeat stints, many only do the job once. Opportunities for learning from your mistakes and retaining institutional knowledge are poor, especially because each individual Worldcon inevitably has some people on staff who are determined to re-invent every wheel in con-running to prove that they know better than everyone who has gone before.

The real problem, however, is that people don’t agree about what the “right” decision should be. This ought to be obvious. The chances of a Hugo Administrator agreeing precisely with you on all decisions is very small, and even if she does that just means that she doesn’t agree with the person next to you, because he almost certainly has different views to you.

This year’s Hugo Administrator was by no means the sort of activist that people have been calling for. He didn’t disqualify anyone, or move nominations between categories, in order to meet anyone’s fixed ideas of just how the Hugos should work. But he did adopt policies, and some of those policies appear to have been somewhat harsh. I don’t want to finger Jeff Orth in particular here. It was his first time in the job, and I think he was rather badly advised. Mostly he did a very good job. Mostly.

The main source of complaint with this year’s Hugos was to do with how nominations are counted. Inevitably some people are quite imprecise in how they make nominations. Some Administrators can be more forgiving than others.

I have to say that you folks don’t always make the Administrator’s life easy. Take the Editor: Short Form nominations, for example. Ann VanderMeer got 32 votes. Jeff VanderMeer got 19 votes. But 10 people voted for “Ann & Jeff VanderMeer”. What was the Administrator to do with those joint votes? Are they full votes each for Ann and Jeff; a half vote each for Ann and Jeff; or full votes for someone who is neither Ann nor Jeff individually, but only has existence as a partnership? As it turned out, it made no difference to the final ballot, but 10 extra votes could have lifted Ann from 8th to 6th in the nominees list.

That question is also more complex than it looks, because some of the people who voted “Ann & Jeff” might not have used all five nominee slots. In that case the Administrator might have taken a decision to split them; but if all five slots had been used that decision would be harder.

The big controversy this year, however, came in Graphic Story, and it was big precisely because it affected the final ballot. One group of people nominated Paul Cornell’s Captain Britain & MI13: Secret Invasion. Other people nominated just “Captain Britain & MI13”. Combing the two groups would have put Paul on the final ballot. Had a mistake been made? It certainly looked like it.

The explanation that came from Anticipation was basically all about the precision of people’s nominations. Secret Invasion was a specific story arc of the Captain Britain series. Other people had nominated individual issues of the comic, and even material from the comic that was ineligible. Jeff and his colleagues had ruled that a nomination for “Captain Britain & MI13” was too generic. It could have meant the Secret Invasion story; it could have meant in individual issue; and the nominator might even have been thinking of something that was ineligible. There was no way to tell, so the generic nominations could not be allocated to any specific legal nomination.

Jeff is perfectly within his rights here. There is nothing technically wrong with what he has done. However he has, perhaps prompted by his advisory team, taken a fairly strict view of what to do in this situation. Another Administrator might easily have taken the view that Secret Invasion is the story from Captain Britain that most people were supporting, and that a generic “Captain Britain & MI13” nomination should therefore apply to that story.

Thankfully Paul has been very understanding about the whole affair, however, until we got a full explanation from Jeff quite a few people were very annoyed (example). Neil Gaiman, who was Anticipation’s headline Guest of Honor, said on his Twitter feed that a mistake had been made. And as someone who had nominated the story I was pretty annoyed too (though I would have been sad to see Fables pushed off the ballot, which would have happened if Paul had been on it). Had Paul chosen to make an issue of this, which a less understanding person might well have done, it could have been very ugly.

Fortunately this particular matter is now closed, save for making sure that next year people are aware of the need to make sure that they are clear and precise in their nominations, and don’t nominate anything ineligible. But here’s the point I want you to think about. The decision that Jeff and his colleagues made was fairly minor, and absolutely within the rules. There’s probably even precedent for it. Imagine how much worse it could be if we had an activist Administrator who was trying to make policy (and maybe even change the Hugo Award rules) by ruling people ineligible or something equally drastic.

The fewer decisions Administrators have to make, the better it will be for us all.

Yesterday The Guardian‘s Book Blog published the final short list for their Not the Booker Prize contest. There was, I regret to say, not a single work of speculative fiction on it. China Miéville’s The City and The City missed the cut by 4 votes. The other spec fic titles were nowhere.

But here’s what interests me about the whole thing. Voting was entirely free, and the contest encompassed the whole of fiction, not just our little corner thereof. And yet only 794 people nominated (as compared to 639 who nominated in Best Novel for this year’s Hugos) and discussion of the voting is rife with allegations of ballot stuffing.

That tells me two things. Firstly free voting alone won’t get you a lot of participation: people have to care about the award in question first. And secondly, if you do have free voting, you had better make sure you do get a lot of participation, because people will try to stuff the ballot. A fee, even a quite small one, would have deterred most of that, I suspect.

I keep an eye on reactions to the Hugo Awards because the same sort of nonsense crops up year after year. For example, on James Bloomer’s Big Dumb Object blog, James complains, “I thought the Hugo awards were for Science Fiction?”. He goes on to roll out the tiresome old theme of:

… originally the Hugos were called the Annual Science Fiction Achievement Award. So they were clearly aimed at Science Fiction and not Fantasy.

So I posted a comment quoting from the WSFS Constitution, where we find:

3.2.1: Unless otherwise specified, Hugo Awards are given for work in the field of science fiction or fantasy appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year.

(My emphasis)

Really, you can’t get much clearer than that. That is, after all, the governing document by which the Hugo awards are run. And Bloomer’s response to this? After several days he has yet to approve my comment.

Because, you know, actual facts have nothing to do with debate, right?

While we were still reeling from Worldcon San Jordison announced the long list for his Not the Booker award at The Guardian. 46 books are on the long list, are we have to vote to whittle them down to 6. We have one vote each. SpecFic books on the list include The City and the City (China Miéville), Spirit (Gwyneth Jones), The Quiet War (Paul McAuley) and Best Served Cold (Joe Abercrombie). I can also recommend John the Revelator (Peter Murphy).

On the basis of what has come in so far it looks like China will make the short list, but Gwyneth, Paul and Joe need your support. Go ye forth and vote.