As per my comment on the Octocon affair earlier today, things seem to be moving forward in Dublin and I recommend that we leave them to talk in peace. However, those of you who haven’t quite eaten all of your popcorn might like to pop over to the Not the Booker thread where Rana Dasgupta appears to be throwing a significant hissy fit despite having been declared the winner.

Various people have asked me exactly what I meant when I said I wanted the Fan Writer Hugo to go to someone else next year. Here is the official public statement.

You can’t win with this. If I were to compete again next year and win then people would complain that I was being greedy and dominating the category. If I retire people will complain that I am being arrogant in assuming I might win again. Of course the smart thing to do is to compete again and somehow ensure that I lose, but I don’t really want to do that, so I’m going to settle for being called arrogant instead. I have, after all, been called worse things.

Of far more concern to me is that I’ll be accused of devaluing the contest. Kate Heartfield made an impassioned plea about this a few days ago. In the case of something like Best Novel I think she has a point. Certainly when Neil Gaiman declined nomination for Anansi Boys, and when Terry Pratchett declined nomination for Going Postal, there were people around fandom who said this just proved how worthless the Hugos were, because some of the most successful writers in the genre were not interested in winning then. The fan Hugos, however, I think are different.

Inside the community we make a point of insisting that the fan Hugos are just as much Hugos as any other category. Winning one, and even being nominated, is a tremendous honor. I’m certainly absolutely delighted with the success I have had. Outside of the community, however, things are very different. If you look around reports of the Hugo results you will see that the fan categories (and semiprozine) are often left off the listings. And even within the community there is an awareness that some Hugos are worth more than others. Would I have won this year if John Scalzi had been on the ballot? Of course not. Would I have won against Jo Walton, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Jay Lake, Wil Wheaton or Elizabeth Bear, all of whom got significant numbers of nominations? I very much doubt it. All of those people are much more high profile than me, and better writers as well.

When talking about the fan/semipro/pro categories in the Hugos Kevin often uses the phrase “going up a weight category”. It is an analogy with boxing. If you win in a lower weight category you can choose to beef yourself up and compete against bigger fighters. By that analogy I’m about 3’6” tall and puny, and I don’t stand any chance of being able to duke it out with the Mike Tysons of our world, let alone the Ali-like elegance of Gaiman, in Best Novel. But I chose to take Emerald City into the semiprozine category and got nominated there. I feel that I have a reasonable chance of a share of a nomination in the same category next year with Clarkesworld (though I hope that Neil Clarke takes most of the glory because he deserves it). And maybe one day I’ll be good enough for a shot at Best Related Work, or even one of the Editor categories. I want to try my luck.

Also Scalzi and I are having a race to see who can be the first to win a Hugo in every category.

Then there is the whole difficulty with the “body of work” categories as well. No matter how much you tell people that they are supposed to be voting on who did the best fan writing in the past year, you can’t stop people voting for the person they believe to be the best fan writer of all time. I don’t see any way of changing that other than re-designing the categories or having people drop out.

I have one more reason as well. Over the past few years I have been doing a lot of work on promoting the Hugos and trying to get them, and Worldcon, more responsive to fandom as a whole (rather than simply be what the small number of people who frequent the SMOFs mailing list wants them to be). Kevin is doing a lot of the high profile work within WSFS, but he needs someone to help with the day-to-day work as well. It is hard enough for him as it is, without having people telling him that I should not be allowed to do the work as I’m a potential nominee. It is also hard for me to push the Hugos publicly when people are saying that I’m only doing it to try to win one myself. So I think it is time for me to take much more of a back seat and do the work rather than take the glory. Not having my name up as a nominee for Best Fan Writer will hopefully help with that.

So that plan is that next year I will decline nomination for Best Fan Writer. I am telling you now so that you don’t waste any of your nominations by listing me.

Next year, give that Hugo to someone else. Preferably give it to someone new. I know that Dave Langford is still the best fannish writer out there, but there are lots of other good people around too (here are some suggestions). Because few things devalue the award as much as making it seem like a foregone conclusion.

Over at File 770, Mike Glyer is wringing his hands in horror at a potential change to the eligibility rules for fanzines. Here is the text of the change in question:

3.3.12: Best Fanzine. Any generally available non-professional publication devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which does not qualify as a semiprozine.

The underlined section is the bit that is being added to the definition. The bit in italics was highlighted by me. You’ll see why in a minute.

Those of you who have been following the ongoing debate about the eligibility of electronic media in the Hugos will know that this is part of a much wider project to make it clear that paper publication is not a requirement of eligibility. That has, of course, been the case for some time, but some people still keep arguing that the term “issues” somehow implies paper publication and not, say, a podcast program, or a a periodic update of a web site. Hence the plan is to introduce language that will remove the validity of such claims.

Mike, however, thinks that this will results in major changes to the fanzines that appear on the ballot. He thinks it “a realistic possibility” that next year’s fanzine nominees will be: eFanzines, Locus Online, SF Site, SF Signal, Whatever. Furthermore he offers up as a possibility this list of nominees: io9, SyFy.com, SCI FI Wire, SF Universe, Tor.com.

Quelle horreur!

I find this a little odd. The first list is, I suppose, possible, but I suspect many people will argue that Locus Online and SF Site are semiprofessional, and that eFanzines.com, marvelous service though it is, is not actually a publication at all. As for the second list, you’ll note that all of the web sites listed are owned by commercial operations – in some cases huge multinationals. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, “non-professional”.

Mike has an answer for this. Apparently there is a danger that the great unwashed masses of fandom, slavish in their devotion to the latest fashionable trend, will vote for them anyway. And the Hugo Administrator (who next year will be Mr. Vincent Docherty) will be too scared to do anything about it.

Now, I am a cat of very little brain, and I sometimes have difficulty understanding fannish paranoia. And what I don’t understand here is this. If fandom is going to vote for the likes of i09 in Best Fanzine because electronic publications are explicitly eligible (as opposed to implicitly eligible as they were before), why haven’t they previously filled the ballot with the likes of paper magazines such as SFX, Sci-Fi Now, Sci-Fi Magazine or Starlog? Can someone please explain this to me?

Nor am I very impressed with Mike’s plea for “more concrete rules”. Haven’t we been through this enough already. WSFS spent years having committees look over the proposed Dramatic Presentation split, with the end result that no one could agree and we did it anyway. We’ve also spent years having committees look at electronic publication, and the only thing that came out of that was that we realized that a Best Web Site category would probably be a mistake. The truth is that no set of rules can perfectly capture every possible wrinkle, and the more detailed you make the rules the more likely it is that a) you will accidentally exclude someone, and b) that you’ll have to keep changing the rules year after year as new technologies emerge. When it comes to Hugo rule changes a plea for more discussion and more precise rules is almost always a delaying tactic to prevent the change being made.

Still, there is one thing I do commend Mike for – his determination to try to protect the rights of the little guy. His primary concern is that people who work hard to produce fanzines as a hobby will be elbowed aside from their rightful category by people who are doing the same thing as a job. Mike, I am sure, would never advocate removing a Hugo category and forcing hard-working amateur editors to compete against full-time professionals, would he now?

Andrew Wheeler has gazed into his tea leaves and predicted who will win this year’s Hugo Awards. Interestingly he has not read or seen most of the works on the ballot. He has based his predictions almost entirely on an assumption of the generally conservative and sentimental nature of the voters. Well it is a method that has worked very well in the past, I think.