Well, that was - for good or ill - as thorough a refutation of the slate as could have been mounted.

Is there any news from the business meeting? I haven't had a chance to go looking yet.

The Hugo stuff will be voted on tomorrow. Last thing that has to happen.

From Soon Lee at File 770, the stats. (26 page PDF.) For those who are interested, Goblin Emperor was ahead through pass 4.

Meanwhile: Best Novelette won from at home in bed!

Best Novel awarded from a freakin' space station!!!.*

* Why, yes, I do think that's too cool for words. Why do you ask? =:-D

Pretty cool stuff! I turned out to be more invested in it than I'd thought I would be. So, hey, I guess I can thank the puppies for that, anyway.

I'll be moderating this thread closely (unsurprisingly).

Let me just say up front that I think this conversation can either be wonderful or a cesspit, and the basic choice we have is how much we let our anger at the past months set the tone of it. It's justified anger, I know, and of course we feel a triumph that the wreckers did not wreck, despite their best efforts. It will be part of the conversation here, and it totally should be.

But...what we do and say now is also part of a larger, wider conversation of fandom, a conversation that has already been full of a lot of people not even trying to reach for their best selves. I'd like to ask, if possible, for us not to join that part of it. Please write for the ages as well as for the moment. I know I can come across as kind of prissy about these matters; it's because I think there are the conversational equivalents of poison and I don't want my dear friends drinking that.

Also, more practically, let's skip the namecalling. However terribly amusing it can seem, it's not really very good discussion of anything.

Thanks, PJ. Going to amend the post with rankings.

What makes me happy is that I look at the list of winners, and in every case where I know enough to have an opinion, I think "That was worthy." Not that every one was my first pick, but every one makes sense as an expression of what this part of fandom loved this year. Nothing won because sufficient quantities of vandals thought it would be funny to brandish as a weapon; everything is there because the thing it was (or the person it was) pleased voters for its real qualities.

In an ideal world, one would be able to take that for granted. But since we can't, it's really good to take note of.

David Gerrold flirting with a Dalek... o.0

And blessings on whoever it was that thought to have Connie Willis immediately follow the In Memoriam. (That's always a difficult part of the evening, but this year's losses seemed especially hard, somehow.)

And SilverBob, with the class, and the grace.... (Though, like many of us, he's looking more like SnowyBob, anymore.)

Looking at the numbers, the categories that got no-awarded, there was no contest.

I heard that at least one Puppy stormed out of the ceremony when "No Award" was announced. Can anyone who was there confirm?

Steven Brust @5: It's pretty neat that there were record turnouts. I think that, more than anything else, shows that the Hugos do matter.

All things considered, it was a wonderful ceremony (I watched on Ustream), and a refutation of the notion that the Hugos have lost their meaning.

While I cheered on the winners, the statistics released have been sobering reading, and at times painful reading. The number of worthy creators & works denied a chance to be on the final ballot is (I think) part of the damage sustained this year.

My hope is that EPH passes at the Business meeting & we can relegate the damage caused by bloc-voting to the dustbin of history.

It looks like, in the absence of Puppy voting, the 5% rule would have kicked in again on the short story ballot, and we would've had only three nominees in that category again. The amendment to abolish the 5% rule passed at today's business meeting, and needs to be ratified at next year's meeting to take effect in 2017.

What a weird, cool ceremony. I've never watched the Hugos before, but I happened to be home, and awake, and curious.

Was this the first time a work in translation has won for best Novel? And Novelette? I got the idea from the speeches that something unique had happened, but I wasn't sure.

I'm also very happy about Ms. Marvel and Orphan Black, which I didn't think were likely to win. I see Sex Crimials and Saga getting more coverage in the mainstream press, and I see more fansquee about Dr. Who. But Orphan Black is probably the best TV sci-fi I've seen in years, and Ms. Marvel is just such a love letter to the idea of fandom, and the idea that everyone belongs there.

I'm actually crying, writing about those two series. I cried during Cixin Liu's speech, too. It was a good night for a series of good cries, for reasons both happy and sad.

Remember that amending the WSFS Constitution requires majority votes at the business meetings of two consecutive Worldcons. Even if E Pluribus Hugo passes at Sasquan, it has to pass again in Helsinki next year. That means the Puppies get to soil next year’s nominations, too.

Where were all the ballots? 11,000 people joined Sasquan - if not to vote, then why? I know it's why I joined.

I'll have more to say later. Right now TNH and I are at GRRM's Hugo Loser Party and all I have to say is, my, that is some tasty, tasty schadenfreude pie.

P J Evans @3: It looks to me like Three-Body was ahead from round 1 through the end. Is it possible you're accidentally looking at the race for second place?

I'm pretty sure that this is the first time even one translated work has won, let alone two. Heuvelt has been nominated before, but not won.

All puppy nominees finished behind No Award. When there were multiple puppy nominees and No Award, in every case No Award won in the first round. In Novella, for example, there were almost twice as many first place votes for No Award as for every puppy nominee put together.

This was a derisory result. The voters have said, "Up your hacienda, Teddy."

I'm very happy to have just come home from a friend's wedding to see that the Hugo results are what I believe to be the right answer. Works that deserved recognition got it, and works that didn't, didn't.

Now that the Hugo stats are out, I think I'll spend some time looking at the longlists and finding new things to read. Seems like the best way to move forward past this whole mess.

Avram #16:

Correction: it's next year at MidAmericon. Helsinki is 2017.

19
Yes, you're right. My bad. (The colored numbers...don't help.)

Looking at the numbers, I was very surprised at how much of a landslide Ms. Marvel won by. It thoroughly deserved it, but I thought Saga would be much closer behind it.

I'd guess, looking at the categories where No Award won, that there are maybe 200 'rabids' and maybe three or four hundred 'sads'. (Look at the lowest-ranked nominees. That's the core.)

Someone is sure to claim, tomorrow in the business meeting, that this is proof we don't need EPH. My answer would be that it's a demonstration of why EPH is needed: we shouldn't have to have a fan revolt every time someone decides to stuff the nominating boxes!

Well that was a delight. I've been at the Hugos once in the flesh - Melbourne - but I wasn't heavily invested in them that year. This year who won was a big deal, and I was glued to the screen.

- Tananarive Due and David Gerrold did a damned fine job of steering the evening towards being a celebration of SF, rather than the final round of a punchup that's been going on for months.

- Silverberg is classy. Seeing him provide some historical context, chant Hare Krishna, and then tell us that everything was going to be allright set my thoughts onto a healthy path. Talking to him was definitely the high point of my Melbourne worldcon.

- I'm not part of organised fandom in any way and have only been to a few cons, but I got a bit overwhelmed at one point, and really felt that these people were my tribe.

- I'm happy with everything that won and that didn't win. Not necessarily what I voted for, but good solid winners.

I'm surprised Rat Queens beat Sex Crims in the rankings, though I suppose I shouldn't be. I just happen to inhabit the parts of the internet where everyone is talking about Sex Crimimals all the time... including me. I had to eventually learn to stop recommending it to strangers at work-related parties.

P J Evans #24

I agree. Even though the Puppies' picks got repudiated, without EPH (or even just the 4 and 6 proposal), it of course remains possible that they could continue to capture entire categories — and Noah Ward's mantle has enough rockets on it. It would be rude to risk collapsing it under the weight of even more.

Speaking of rumors about the ceremony, as Sarah@11 was doing, I heard a secondhand rumor about Robert Silverberg leading the crowd in a Hare Krishna chant. (Ok, a bit of Google-searching makes that a firsthand rumor, but no details.) Can anyone elaborate on the context? Because that sounds quite funny indeed.

Also, what was the thing about the Best Novel award being awarded from a space station?

Actually ... if this was livestreamed, is there also a recording, or will there be?

28
They had the Best Novel winner's name read by very-long-distance video.

...but what were you reading, Abi?

Added Sad and Rabid nominations, gotta dash for a little while.

(I was reading Uprooted, by Naomi Novik. Excellent; worth staying up to finish.)

Brooks Moses @ 28 write:
> I heard a secondhand rumor about Robert Silverberg leading the crowd in a Hare Krishna chant. (Ok, a bit of Google-searching makes that a firsthand rumor, but no details.) Can anyone elaborate on the context?

Silverberg was talking about the '68 Berkley con and how the US was having a bad year, with riots here and there, and an unpopular war in Vietnam. He mentioned being able to smell tear gas from the convention when the wind was right. Talking about going out on the streets to be reassured by the chants of the passing Krishnas allowed him to segue into, yes... just what you heard.

> Because that sounds quite funny indeed.

Hearing him say "Everything is will be allright" was strangely reassuring.

Brooks Moses #28

The Hare Krishna bit I can vouch for. That happened before my network crapped out, so I got to watch every bit of it. He had a tambourine!

It was the punchline of a story about a Worldcon in Berkeley where there was (he said) tear gas a pot smoke in the halls, and a certain amount of tension within the SF community.

People who have attended more than a handful of Worldcons can probably describe the event better. I was not alive at the time...

Brooks Moses #28:

Given that previous years' ceremonies were made available for viewing, I expect that this year's ceremonies will be available at some point from the Ustream channel.

And yes, Robert Silverberg did lead the audience in a Hare Krishna chant. And it was a calming experience.

Schadenfreude pie? Say hello to Scalzi's recipe!

3
I was alive, but it was some years before I met organized fandom. (However, Wikipedia says Baycon in Berkeley in 1968, so the pot smoke and tear gas is maybe only slightly exaggerated.)

Everything Silverberg said about Baycon (the 1968 Worldcon) was indeed true. I was there (my first Worldcon, at age 15) and saw much of what he reports first hand. He was also Toastmaster at the Hugo banquet that year (yes, they had banquets in those days). And it's definitely the first time a translated novel won. And we have now doubled the number of time No Award has won the Hugo (five previously and five tonight).

It wasn't a total whitewash, but Guardians of the Galaxy was getting a lot of buzz without the Puppies. Though that maybe points to a weakness in Hollywood movies in general. And there were one or two other Puppy nominations that didn't deserve that status, although I doubt they would have won in an ordinary year.

I may start planning on attending Helsinki — my brother once attended an academic conference there — but Loncon was heavy going for me, and I would want my health to improve a lot. The timezone difference would make watching a Hugo livestream a lot easier.

Has anyone thought of livestreaming business meetings?

I was alive when Baycon happened, and even living in Berkeley. I might have attended the con were it not for being only four months old at the time.

The numbers are bad. Really, really bad.

A rough estimate from looking at the data:

Nomination: About 170 rabid puppies, about 180 sad puppies and some mild supporters, about 1,400 non-puppies. Puppies are 20% of nominators.

Voting: About 700 rabid puppies, 1,100 sad puppies and 4,000 non-puppies. Puppies are 30% of voters.

It's clear that both puppies and truefen rallied to the cause.

The 350-400 puppies were easily able to swamp most nomination categories except for best novel by huge margins. Ancillary Sword's 279 nominations would not have survived a slightly larger campaign.

This year, the 4,000 non-puppy to 1,800 puppy balance caused no awards to any puppies. A false victory, I fear. Because look at next year.

With a ratio of 4 non-puppies to 1 puppy, the slate was able to swamp non-slate voters, in many categories by margins of 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.

With normal nomination, puppies with 30% of nominators will easily dominate all categories. That presumes neither side out-recruits the other side significantly in adding new members, and old members continue to care. (For all Sasquan members, nominating is free, but adding new members costs money.)

The only ways to defeat that would be for the anti-puppies to make their own slates, or for the non-puppies to majorly increase their participation. To regain many categories you would want to take the puppies down to 10% or less of nominators -- that means getting 15,000 anti-puppy fans. Yikes.

I now deeply regret I did not wake up in time to propose write-in in this year's business meeting. It's special ability to affect the 2016 Hugos rather than waiting for 2017 would have been worth it.

I await analysis of how ePH performs with 30% slate. What if puppies can increase even further?

Because STV is robust against collusion, the final vote results won't be taken over -- for that you need to be almost half the voters. As long as truefen are half the voters, they can have the pyrrhic victory of handing out no award.

It sounds like the Puppies were about as thoroughly repudiated by the Hugo voters as anyone could wish for. Congratulations to the winners, commiserations to the losers, and thanks to the voters!

Also, I want to welcome everyone to Helsinki in 2017. Our Finnish SF fandom is fun and active, and Helsinki is a fine city. It will be a great Worldcon, I'm sure.

What if the puppies decide to mass-vote No Award next year, rather than try to vote for their slate choices? I've heard it threatened they might try that, to deny the icky SJWs their victory.

Could the Hugos' voting system withstand that kind of attack?

Wakboth #41 -- Repudiation in the final ballot was not much in doubt, because the Hugo voting system (unlike the nomination system) is largely impervious to slates. The only questions were whether candidates like Resnick (a well established non-puppy favourite) would fall -- he did, or Guardians of the Galaxy would be punished for being on the Puppy slate (it does not appear to have been.) We did learn that the non-puppy fans were quite strong. There were 282 first place votes for No Award on best novel, which is a big jump over the usual count, but not a really big one -- only a couple hundred fans seem to have been in the "Nullify all the awards" camp.

(Though it is worth noting that No Award got more first place votes than The Day The World Turned Upside Down -- I am not sure that has ever happened before. A fair number of fans did feel No Award was the right choice when there was only one non-puppy choice on the ballot, which is understandable. There were also 1,000 who ranked No Award first vs. Laura Mixon and a few other high performances for No Award vs. non-puppy candidates that do not appear to have been cast by puppy voters.)

Chris Meadows @42

Looking at the novelette category it seems unlikely they can manage that. The initial no award vote in that category seems to be close to the puppy ceiling in this year. Unless the puppies make up a majority of voters, in which case they could get their nominees to win anyway.

24: there are those who might say that fandom should always be in a spirit of revolt. In the words of not quite Oysterband:

Fall asleep with the Hugos on
Wake with an ache, that's another Worldcon
Consider how my vote was spent
And do I approve how the ballot went
I asked an old pro for advice
She told me once, then she told me twice:
"Your life is full of choices made at random!"
She smacked me hard across the head
Handed me a card which read:
"Work like you were living in the early days of a better fandom." (x2)

"Count those votes again!" I cried.
The counters said "It's cut and dried.
The Puppy slates all got ignored
And finished up below 'No Award.'
You gave them stick, you gave them hell,
And all the votes have gone really well.
They couldn't have gone better if we'd planned 'em!"
And where the filkers laughed and sang
Loud the call to action rang:
"Work like you were living in the early days of a better fandom." (x2)

"Take this lesson to your heart,"
She said, "and honour well our art.
If we would keep the Hugos free
The greatest threat is complacency.
We must frustrate their knavish tricks
And pass the rule of four and six,
Or else an easy victory we'll hand 'em.
Next year at MidAmericon
This great task we must carry on--
Work like you were living in the early days of a better fandom. (x2)
Living in the early days,
Living in the early days,
Living in the early days of a better fandom."

I do not think counter slates are a solution. Yes, a slate works to get opposing positions heard when one slate has already been created; this is the essence of party politics.
What a counter slate cannot do is restore a freeform system. Creating a list of Correct Works and telling people to nominate those (instead of whatever wild diversity they would have chosen themselves) means accepting the proposal to turn the Hugos into party politics.
Even if the winning party has politics you like, something is lost when that happens.

Brandon Kempner's analysis puts the total number of Rabid voters at a bit above 500 this year, all of whom have nominating privileges for next year..

So even in the best case scenario of E pluribus Hugo passing this year & getting ratified next year, we still have at least one more year of Puppy bloc-voting shenanigans messing up the nominations. After that, EPH should mitigate bloc-voting impact.

(Shorter me: it's not over yet.)

Brad from Sunnyvale: Though it is worth noting that No Award got more first place votes than The Day The World Turned Upside Down -- I am not sure that has ever happened before. A fair number of fans did feel No Award was the right choice when there was only one non-puppy choice on the ballot, which is understandable. There were also 1,000 who ranked No Award first vs. Laura Mixon and a few other high performances for No Award vs. non-puppy candidates that do not appear to have been cast by puppy voters.

Personally, I voted both of those below no award not because they had no non-puppy competition, but because I didn't feel either deserved a Hugo. OTOH, they were the only nominees I ranked at all in those two categories, precisely because they weren't on the slates.

Yes, Jennifer@48, I suspect there will be arguments that some of the winners who were the only non-puppy, particularly Day-the-World would have been unlikely to win had they not been the "only" choice on the ballot. The sad truth is a lot of the voting this year was for emotional or political reasons, and we can expect that to continue.

(And there seem to be many who voted works below no award, in spite of the attempt to educate about it, but it did not have a negative effect.)

Procedural question -- it seems you can amend the standing rules through a simple motion, which would allow a temporary amendment to allow new business to be entered after the deadline in the standing rules. So in theory an emergency amendment is possible even on Sunday.

Well, as someone who was only galvanized out of a fannish coma by this year's shenanigans, I will certainly be looking out for good stuff to nominate next year - and if there are enough people like me, the overall increase in broad-based individual nominations might, in itself, be enough to eliminate the effect of a highly organized, but very small, slate. The loud rumbling noise of fandom-in-general could drown out the yipping, as it were.

As for the results... a victory for common sense, on the whole. (Some things I voted for won. Others didn't. It's democracy in action, I'm fine with that.)

Some more detailed analysis, which is more optimistic than my first quick glance and gives a lower puppy number (around 1,000) but lower numbers as well for solid anti-puppy voters.

https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/2015-hugo-stats-initial-analysis/

brad@43,

No Award got more first place votes than The Day The World Turned Upside Down -- I am not sure that has ever happened before.

Last year, No Award got the most first preferences for Best Fancast, in the counts for wnner, second place, third place, fourth place, and fifth place, but was overtaken by other candidates each time.

Interestingly, even discounting No Award (since my actual preference would have been for there to be non-slate nominees in those categories), this year makes only the second time I can recall off the top of my head that one of my top-ranked choices won in a year where I voted. (Orphan Black and Among Others, if anyone's curious.)

I've come to the conclusion that my tastes just don't line up well with the Hugo voters' as a whole; IIRC I ranked Three-Body Problem under No Award, too, frex. But I do always find something I enjoy from the nominees that I wouldn't have read otherwise, which makes it worth participating anyway. And it's certainly worth preserving the integrity of the process, whether I personally like the results or not.

Congrats to the winners and to fandom.

This is the first year I've paid much attention to the Hugos as a process - due mostly to what I've read here, so thank you all for that. It's good to see the puppies fall, and hopefully none of this will pollute the process much in future years.

It was great to read the nominated books and get a look at things which I normally wouldn't have tried, even if I am still mystified by the appeal of some of them. Like Jennifer, I really didn't see the appeal of The Three-Body Problem, and ranked it below No Award personally.

It felt strange, not seeing the Awards all there on a display, after three years of a new tradition that was started in 2012 by Susan de Guardiola and yours truly.

I am tempted to conclude, from the way the number 160 keeps showing up in the votes for VD, that this represents the number of Rabid voters.

I thought that the ceremony had almost exactly the right amount of snark. It would have been wrong to play Cleopatra, and ignore the entire kerfuffle, but at the same time, descending into meanness and anger would have ruined the celebration. I laughed like a drain at the asterisks, and I very much appreciated Gerrold saying that cheers were appropriate but boos were not. Also, telling people to wait until all the nominees had been announced before cheering was a good thing to do, and by and large the audience complied.

The rumor I know (from VD, so not reliable) is that Toni Weiskopf left the auditorium at the asterisk jokes. Interesting, if true.

And when Silverbob said, "It's all going to be ok," i felt a huge weight lifted. It was weird, but it was real. Never thought I'd be grateful to the Hare Krishnas, but there you go. Life is long and ever strange.

Dear Fandom, I love you.

I think David Gerrold and the other speakers did an outstanding job of setting a positive tone. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who worked so hard on the Hugos and Sasquan.

The appropriate fannish antidote to a slate is not "more slates," it is "widespread reading list suggestions," each to contain either one or two entries or well over the number of possible nominees -- 8-10 is a good number, I think -- per category.

Make it easier for casual nominators to find a bunch of potentially-worthy stuff to read so they can make their own determinations, and more will nominate -- all the rest of the 11000 supporters this year are eligible next year as well.

Is there any place where people are listing their potential nominees?

Has anyone seen a puppy supporter saying that they need to find and write better sf?

Wesley Chu's tossing his hat in the ring for the GOP presidential nomination has me pondering the relationship between the Puppies' and Trump's campaign.

What I see from the puppies is that they are going to burn it down. They also are proud that they forced things off the ballet.

James May for example is saying: "SP kept about 30-35 man-hating anti-white racists or those dupes which support that con game off the ballot entirely. They’ll never get that year back. That in itself is a win.

...That has now been confirmed by Tobias Buckell at his blog. Tough break."

This has nothing to do with SFF and being "nice" to puppies in the glow of last night isn't going to help. I have used the term freeping. The term one poster at 770 used was "Denial of Service". That is what you are facing next year.

I hope those at the business meeting clearly understand that. It appears GRRM does not.

Ander Nyrond @45: Nicely done pastiche/parody. I'd give credit to the author of the song (in the spirit of the Hugos honoring the authors), which was Billy Bragg. And yes, I prefer the Oysters' version too.

Dave Bell @38: Livestreaming is expensive (getting that much bandwidth out of a convention center's wifi is a moneymaker for the convention center, and they won't give it away). And since the people who are not present can't vote, it's a less-important expense than some others. What Kevin and Lisa have done with making video available pretty much by the next day is (for most purposes) amazing and quite good enough.

61
There's a wikia for next year. I know it isn't the only place.

Every (actual) winner in the prose, dramatic, and graphic-novel categories is a work that I enjoyed and would recommend to others. This is what winning looks like.

As to the Puppies' response... they said up front that they would declare victory no matter the outcome was. They did. They were going to try this again next year no matter what the outcome was. They will.

Me, I will do some nominating next year.

I am grateful for the livestream, and for our community.

I am Hindu and I felt like the mocking repetition of a Hare Krishna chant was a slap in the face to me.

Sumana Harihareswara @67: It didn't seem mocking to me. Rather, it was aimed at bringing peace to a number of souls who needed it. YMMV, of course, but that's how I saw it on the stream.

Let me add another voice thanking the hosts and presenters for maintaining a celebratory, positive tone throughout the ceremony. They clearly worked hard at it, and hit the right notes.

One note on the In Memoriam scroll: it's always sad to see one's friends and acquaintances there. It would, however, be sadder NOT to see members of the community acknowledged. I'm glad the IM takes the wider road, rather than (as it could), aiming at a smaller, tighter-focused list of high-profile or Worldcon/Hugo-related names only.

Tom @64

There are other differences in the situation, but the BBC Parliament channel is, I think, a sufficient counter to the argument that people who can't vote at the meeting don't deserve live coverage.

As it happens, in the UK parliament there is often time to contact one's representative before the next stage in the procedure and argue for a particular vote, though we don't have time zone differences to contend with. This didn't depend on the immediacy of live coverage. In the compressed timescale of Worldcon business meetings the timing could be significant.

But I appreciate your point about the cost.

67
1968 was during the time when the Hare Krishnas were quite a common sight in places like Berkeley (where Worldcon was that year).

(I've seen people say about last night that they felt better after Silverbob did that.)

Thanks to everybody, everywhere, for the "yoooge" signal boost. I'm headed for the big time now. I won't forget the good times!

Now I just have to write a book or something.

#68 ::: Bruce Adelsohn

For what it's worth, I think it was an effort to bring in something that would have a calming effect (and it did have a mild calming effect for me) without setting off the anti-religion reflex a lot of fans have.

So it wasn't exactly mocking, but it also wasn't taking Hare Krishna seriously as something from an actual religion.

There's some snittering at white faces on the winners, so I guess that quotas are now 'good' and no longer 'bad.' Soon there won't be a stick of their underlying philosophical platform left.

I really enjoyed "One Bright Star to Guide Them". I can't speak to all of the categories, but I'm sorry to see people No Awarding worthy work just because of the author's politics or because it was nominated by the wrong fans.

74
'Wrong fans' isn't part of it. (Using that indicates canine affinities.)
'Not good enough' is - and the slated works were not good.

Congratulations to the so called trufans, you won a victory by burning the awards to the ground around you.

Here we go.

Sumana @67: I am sorry that you felt slapped. For me, with my extremely American context, I felt that Silverbob was pulling calm and unity and kindness out of conflict. The Hare Krishnas were, in their day, highly irritating to many people. Using the Hare Krishna chant to unite people seemed to be reaching towards several important things, including diversity, multiculturalism, and acknowledging the good and wonderful in even things which annoy us. I see the argument for it being cultural appropriation, but at some point, the interaction between my culture and the presence of the Hare Krishnas is about my culture, too, I think...I dunno. I'm getting confused, here. I will say that from where I sat, it did not look to me like Silverbob was mocking the Hare Krishnas in particular, nor Hinduism in general, but rather touching on the ways in which we interact with culture clashes and culture wars.

77
There have been several over at File 770.
My fog-file script has grown by several.

That was a much more thorough sweep than I expected. I voted along the lines that many of the major commentators (including John Scalzi) stated they were voting, which was doing my best to judge on merit. I add the caveat that anything from VD's press would have had to meet a very high bar indeed, but the caveat turned out to be unnecessary; in most cases there was no contest in quality, and I two-pages a depressing number of works.

I also voted thorough preferences below the No Award line in many categories, not out of a lack of understanding, but out of a desire to see "least worst" things win if necessary. From the numbers and the final rankings, it looks like a significant number of us voted along my lines and more or less agreed with my taste; Kary English in particular deserved top of the very limited heap.

I knew which way the wind was going when the first Editor No Award was announced, because there were actually some fine editors in there.

The larger set of members voting the clear bright line is, in my opinion, a huge Exhibit B for E Pluribus Hugo. It was a slate. An understandable slate, and I don't fault people for voting it as I partially voted it myself, but the situation drove people to extremely polarized choices. The puppies didn't win, but the Hugos didn't particularly win, either, they just did their best to weather the storm.

I hope the good editors get nominated again and get a real chance at winning.
I hope people look at the also-rans and more people discover Ursula Vernon's Jackalope Wives.
I hope to see some amazing and lengthy reading recommendation lists this year, which I can mine for nominations that I have personally enjoyed.
I hope the larger body of this year's puppies are disillusioned with the behavior of their leadership, or (even better) understand the principles behind the Hugo nomination process by next year's nominations, and that some of them also move to nominating things they have personally enjoyed.
I hope E Pluribus Hugo passes.

I hope a lot of things.

#75 ::: P J Evans

I think "Totaled" was at least decent, and "The Hot Equations" was better than that, though of rather specialist interest. I don't think it was a coincidence that they came in at the top of the lists under No Award, and Kloos' novel might well have done the same if he hadn't withdrawn it.

My impression of the puppy nominations is that they were semi-random, and there was some good work (not necessarily work which would have won) which would have done a good bit better if it weren't for the slates and fury at the slates.

I'm hoping for Hugo awards which aren't strongly affected by infighting among fans, but I don't have a feeling for how long it will take to get there, if it ever happens. It's certainly not going to happen next year.

#67 Sumana, thanks for speaking up. I wondered. I understood why he did it, but drawing on minority (in America) religious practices is consistently delicate territory and will almost inevitably hurt people.

I'm sorry you were hurt by it. Full stop.

Roger @74:
Welcome to Making Light.

I really enjoyed "One Bright Star to Guide Them". I can't speak to all of the categories, but I'm sorry to see people No Awarding worthy work just because of the author's politics or because it was nominated by the wrong fans.

It's always a pleasure to find a piece that speaks to one, isn't it? It's one of the reasons I've been so upset, from this side, by the repeated assertions that the works I've enjoyed and been transformed by have only been nominated out of some kind of political correctness.

In point of fact, I at least used No Award not because works were nominated by "the wrong fans", but because the use of slate-based nominations is kind of the Hugo equivalent of eating the forbidden fruit. Although the exploit has been well-known for some time, no one before now actually tried to use it. I, at least, am hoping that the failure of such behavior to lead to the awarding of rockets will cause people not to do it again.

It's a shame that a story that you liked didn't get an award. I feel much the same about Ursula Vernon's "Jackalope Wives", which was a wonderful and interesting piece that did not make it onto the ballot because of lockstep nominating.

wrongfanal @76:
Welcome, too.

Congratulations to the so called trufans, you won a victory by burning the awards to the ground around you.

I'm not convinced that the awards are burned to the ground. I think this year's results were a fair reflection of the damage done to them by slate-based nominations. I could, in turn, congratulate you back for breaking the nomination process, but I don't know that that gets us any further.

Were there any particular works that you liked on the final ballot? Which ones, and what about them spoke to you?

Serge @77:

Maybe. Let's be courteous to our new guests, though, unless it turns into a sewer or a trollfest.

#64 Tom, you're quite right, and I owe Mr Bragg an apology for inadequate research. Thank you for pointing it out, and I'm glad you like my filk.

Sumana @67

I'm sorry that chant hurt you. At the time I really liked it and it did make me feel better but I didn't think how it would feel to a sincere believer.

Is there something I can do to make you feel better?

I was quite tired by the beginning of the ceremony--three hours time difference, I can certainly see why Abi didn't stay up. I also am amazed at the stamina of PNH and TNH to go to the loser's party afterwards. I am not a night person.

I liked Silverbob reminding us that everything was going to be OK. I didn't think/know that it would be offensive to sing/chant the chant. I did think that Kumbaya would be appropriate since with all the smoke, it seems like a campout.

I liked the tribute to Jay Lake. He faced his illness with strength and grace.

Sarah @ 33: "People who have attended more than a handful of Worldcons can probably describe the event better. I was not alive at the time..."

I initially read this as referring to Silverberg's Hare Krishna chant, and thought "And you've recovered so quickly!"

People who attended the losers party, please dish! I'd really like to hear about that party, as it was supposed to be supportive to all concerned. I'd like to know how well that came through in practice.

I was deeply moved by the tribute to people who have died in the past year. Particularly in that I hadn't realized filkers were included (and at least one of those filkers would definitely have been sympathetic to the Puppies, so it seems to have been an impartial tribute.)

Having Connie Willis come up afterward was the perfect touch to get the ceremony back to lightness again.

And I thought I was going to bust a gut when that remark about a rabid marmot came up, though I later learned that the marmot is kind of a mascot of Spokane, so it wasn't a File 770 shout-out.

And I really loved Laura J. Mixon's speech.

I had no idea these ceremonies were so fun and touching; I had never seen one before watching the livestream this year. This makes me want to go to a WorldCon.

I am bemused by those who felt that result was a victory or success. Generally, the 4 professional fiction Hugos are considered the core of the Hugos by many. Last night, two of them were not even given out due to the attack on the system. The Novelette winner almost surely would not have been the winner in an ordinary year. The best novel Hugo seems to have survived, but the winner only made the ballot due to two Puppy nominees withdrawing.

Next year, it looks far worse in all categories. Puppies were 25 to 30% of the voters. Only extraordinary counter-effort would stop a bloc that large from entirely controlling the nominations, and this time they will check their year of publication and they will check that the authors nominated will accept a puppy nomination.

Next year, barring extreme efforts, there will be no Hugos.

Yeah, we sure showed 'em.

They're doing a serpentine vote on EPH.

186 in favor, 62 against!

According to my Twitter stream, EPH has passed, 186-62, by serpentine vote. It was amended to have a five-year sunset clause, which seems fair.

I'll be at the Business Meeting in Kansas City; hope to see people there. And many thanks to the people who have worked so hard on EPH.

Okay, step one to reduce the problem of slates has been taken. Whew.

abi, some of the arguments against it were, um, interesting.
The guy from this year's admins arguing about how much more work it will be, and that they won't be able to do a manual recount was - did he even show up at any of their meetings?
And Glenn Glazer arguing it wasn't a real algorithm. WTF?

Brad @40:

You shouldn't assume that everyone who voted for any work nominated by either group of Puppies shares their political goals. Most of those works were published by a major press, and were bought and presumably liked by a bunch of people; see Roger @74 above. Further, I suspect that a number of voters don't like the idea of using No Award as a statement, and so ranked everything.

Based on this year's winners, and the No Award categories, that says to me that the number of dedicated Puppy voters is a very small block indeed.

I would expect the Sad Puppies to fall apart after this, if they have not already done so. It's one thing to believe that you are campaigning for the True Fans who will rise up and support you given a chance; it's another thing entirely to find out that you are part of a disliked minority and even some of the authors you nominated don't like you. I really think that Torgensen is going to have a really hard time putting together any kind of a faction next year. This was a rout.

Teddy Beale's supporters will be unfazed, of course; they wanted to disrupt the Hugos, and they can claim partial victory. But Beale's faction was always a tiny minority; without Torgensen to give him the appearance of respectability, how many votes do you think Beale can really command?

E Pluribus Hugo passes to be considered for final ratification next year by wide margin, 186-62. Thought folks on here would want to know. Congrats to Kilo, Jamison, et al. Proud to have voted at first business meeting,

Excellent Abi! I'll be in Kansas City business meeting also where we can reaffirm this.

EPH just passed by more than 2/3. Will be ratified next year, and has a 5-year sunset clause from the date it actually goes into effect.

Fantastic work, Teresa & Co.!

Josh Berkus @96 - claims of partial victory from the Rabid camp remind me of nothing so much as Vichy Dupree fighting the Wolveroach in Cerebus the Aardvark: "I almost had 'im fer a minute there, Countess... he bruised his knuckles purty badly on one'a mah kidneys...."

The only victory, I suppose, is the negative and mean-spirited one of having denied some awards to the people who actually deserved them.... Whoever draws those Puppy logos, they really ought to show those dogs sitting in a manger for SP4.

A couple of points about Hugo nominations:

Back in the '50's, Joe Phan could have a reading habit that would put before his eyes, probably, over 95% of Hugo-worthy SF published in English in a year. He would receive a half-dozen or so magazines in the mail each month, depending on the vagaries of transatlantic shipping, visit the library or bookstore to get a novel every couple of weeks and a half-dozen original anthologies in a year, and feel equal to meeting Mr. Unamit Ahsredit. And in February he'd go thru the ToC's of last year's issues on their shelf, check his notes on library borrowings, and fill out his ballot in confidence.

But Old Joe's grandsons and granddaughters live in world with more distractions, less time, and more sources of quality SF (should I nominate this story from a New Zealand Ezine if I'm likely its only reader in North America ?)

More of us looked at the five blank spaces and said not "Here are the best I've read" but "Well, I could come up with five I've liked better than the rest, but are they five of the best there was last year" And, lacking confidence, put the ballot aside for further thought and retreived it a week after deadline...

Methinks that in December and January we shall see many blogs and websites and email lists with postings "Here are my opinions on the best of 2014", which will be discussed, disputed, annotated, and emendated. People will read unfamiliar stories, with ballots in hand, weighing message and plot, character and language. The 'slates' of the Social Justice Rogues and the Colicky Pit Bulls will be publicized and critiqued in advance.

And, it is to be hoped, the number of nominating ballots will be several times that of 2015.

Or maybe not. Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

abi @ 84... Deal!

Brad@91: "I am bemused by those who felt that result was a victory or success."

A success is when you achieve the best available outcome. After winning practically any battle, you can say "If only we hadn't been attacked at all!" Sure, that's a better hypothetical outcome. But you still won.

Yes, VD will try the same thing next year. I don't know how well it will work. We talk about "the Puppies" but they are not a clone army. Some will be discouraged; some will get bored. Some will refocus on supporting their favorite authors in non-Hugo-related ways.

The same is true of Hugo voters in general, of course, but our dander is up. I bet (as JAFD just said) that a *lot* of nominating ballots will turn up next year. I am going to send one. First time ever for me.

Josh@96 -- I hope you are right. My estimate of 1,800 puppies may overstate it, but they are not a small bloc. I think the low end estimate is 500 to 600 strong rabid puppies -- after all, 586 people put Vox Day as their first choice on their short form editor ballot, and a similar number of sad puppies on top of that -- ie. over 1,000.

That is a large bloc to keep together, so I hope you are right. And general fandom will become more allied against the slates after seeing last night's results, too. So my initial shock of total pessimism may be too strong, but it's still very bad. Certainly for 2016. If ePH is ratified, we'll need to do the math, but they may see that as a challenge rather than a deterrent. Even so, I think a bloc of 1,000 to 1,500 still gets as many as 3 of the nominees in many categories, and possibly 4 of them in some, like short story.

(The puppy nominators overwhelmed the 2nd place non-slate choices by margins of 3 to 1 in some categories, and there were only about 380 of them, and they were not that cohesive, and did not vote in all categories.)

The cohesion is an unanswered question. We have less info on how many puppy supporters just were thrilled at the chance to strike a blow for their values and candidates, and how many were dedicated to destruction of their opponents. Will they have less discipline or more? Since regular fans think discipline is entirely the wrong thing here, we won't counter with that.

ePH will help in 2017, but still several good works will be kicked off the ballot if the puppies continue, though there should be few to no No Award categories. In most elections, failures in the nomination system are fixed by using write-in as the catch-all, and I now have concluded it would have been the best choice for us, and still might need to be.

(I figured out last night how it still could have been added this year, at least technically, to save 2016, since you can move to amend the standing rules to allow new business past the deadline, and the chair can also accept, but it's not going to happen this morning!)

Sumana Harihareswara #67

I'm with you on this one -- that was unkind. I knew where he was going as soon as he took out that tambourine. (¬_¬)

#92-93: Since I wondered, from the Noreascon procedures, a "serpentine vote" means asking all on each side of the issue to stand, and count off to determine the vote counts. Apparently so named because they count back and forth along the rows.

Ooh! Boustrophedon!

Well, damn. I had visions of them rising and proceeding to one side or the other of the room, according to their voting preference, in a stately yet sinuous dance, possibly to the accompaniment of viols, tambors and fifes. Burning of costly incenses in jewelled thuribles to be optional, but strongly recommended.

(You have to admit it would make the voting more aesthetically pleasing.)

I heard elsewhere that 4/6 (barely) passed. Is that true? Did both proposals pass?

Chris Meadows @109, From what is posted on file770, both passed. I gather they'll work just fine together, however.

@JAFD: You make a great point. What the Skunk-at-the-Picnic people taught me this year is that I need to lower my standards. There were some Pup supporters who defended their actions by saying, "I did so read all the works on the slate, and I liked them!" And my instinctive reaction was, "But - that's not enough! Sure you liked those five in that category. But unless you've read at least, oh, fifteen works in that category, how do you know that those five are really the most deserving?"

Now I realize that the nomination stage should be for registering your legitimate enthusiasm for what you read, regardless of how widely. This year I would not have nominated "The Litany of Earth" because, surely, I needed to read 14 other novelettes to be qualified to nominate for that category. If I got a redo of this year, I'd nominate it because it blew my doors off, and that's enough. If it blew off the doors of enough other fans, it would hit the final five and everyone could decide whether they thought it worthy of an award. If not, not.

Next year, I'll nominate whatever I've read and loved (not liked). That may be one work in a category. It may be two, three or five. And The System, Man, will sort it all out if everyone does the same.

Brad from Sunnyvale @43:

...No Award got more first place votes than The Day The World Turned Upside Down...A fair number of fans did feel No Award was the right choice when there was only one non-puppy choice on the ballot, which is understandable.

Benjamin Wolfe @20: Now that the Hugo stats are out, I think I'll spend some time looking at the longlists and finding new things to read. Seems like the best way to move forward past this whole mess.

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but is/should there be there a place to consolidate recs for 2015 works elligible for nomination for next year?

I had gotten a supporting membership but the prospect of catching up on even the shortlist was overwhelming, so I bailed.

I might just be able to deal if I start now. (And my intuition is that the nomination phase is going to be especially important next year.)

Meanwhile, tangentially, I woke up this morning thinking I really really want to nominate Google Deep Dream for Best Artist. My only question: would it be fan or pro? (I'm leaning toward fan...?) Purely aside from it's innate coolness, I think it that, given that we had (I think) a recordly diverse field this year, and Best Novel was awarded from FREAKIN' SPACE*, how cool would it be to have a nominee next year that's an AI?

* Yes, I am totally over-squee about that.

Jacque, there are at least two websites with Hugo-eligible lists out there. If nobody posts the links before the next time I look, I'll try to hunt them up for you.

I think someone already linked to this, but it bears repeating:
Hugo Nominations Wiki.
There's also a Google Doc.

Everyone who is eligible should try to nominate something next year. It's gotten important.

I wasn't fond of the Hare Krishna chant either, even though I realize it was mocking the Hare Krishnas and not Hindus generally. But I have family who are Hindu and didn't like seeing sacred names used as a joke, without any apparent awareness that they were venerated by a living religion.

It would be like if Christianity were only known in this country by a small, funny evangelical cult. It still would hurt regular Christians if the name of Jesus was used as a joke.

My prediction for the rabid puppy slate next year:

VD goes full troll, and puts together a ridiculous slate that combines "conservative" fiction a la Wright, literally unreadable dreck read by 3 people including the author's mother (published by Castalia), and stories by "enemies" a la Scalzi without consent- that way he can declare victory at every step of the way no matter what happens without having to bother with actual "goals".

The Sad Puppies, I expect will coordinate with a slate that overlaps greatly, but replaces the nonsense fiction with carefully placed minorities- many of whom end up declining later. Sarah Hoyt has never struck me as someone who would take a calm, peacekeeping path when an angry, self-victimizing path exists.

Theophylact #107: Yup.

So, I glanced around the Sasquan site without finding the videos of the award ceremony. Anyone have links handy?

As far as next year's Hugos are concerned: my issue as a potential nominator is that I'm not a very good one due to my rather shallow reading in the field these days. I'm weak precisely where the puppies are strong: in the short fiction. They are strong there precisely because there are, I surmise, a lot of people like myself who aren't reading the short form stuff and therefore aren't up to making legitimate rankings.

The stats tell me that the nomination stage is still vulnerable. The novel cat doesn't show a big notch where puppies leave of, but the short fiction cats sure do. It's going to take a huge kick-up in the short fiction nominations to drown out another puppy slate, unless a few stories come along that everyone nominates.

You can add me to the list of people bothered by the Hare Krishna chant. It's not something I would have participated in had I been present, and, to me, it felt different from the multi-lingual greetings David and Tananarive opened the ceremony with. That felt welcoming. Silverberg's commentary did not. And had he chosen to use a Hebrew prayer, I would have been just as unhappy. It did not seem to be a moment of grace.

I'm unsure overall about the whole "blessing of the Hugos" thing. I really do not know that this is something that belongs in the ceremony, especially give the diversity of the community, which is made up of people of many faiths and also people who are atheists.

Overall, I thought some of the speeches--even Connie Willis's--went on too long. But the Dalek was funny and the space station stuff was _amazing_.

Looking at the breakout stats (and without a lot of time to delve into them in detail; was on my way to see Michael K. Frith and Kathryn Mullen talk about Fraggle Rock, and other stuff). It looks as if there were about 500 really dedicated puppies. There was *an* indicator in that of about 800, but it didn't seem to repeat: I have thoughts about that, but would need to take an hour or two to test the hypothesis against the available evidence

I say this because there were an anomalous number of "no award" votes categories the Puppies didn't have any candidates. I'd have to look at previous years; and ratios, to be certain. If it's true I find it painfully ironic.

It's not the best of news (those 5-800 dedicated followers of fashion), but it's not the worst.

We knew this wasn't going to go away; it's why so much thought and effort were put into the proposals we hashed out. With luck those will both pass into effect next year and the swamp the slate tactic will be almost impossible to pull off.

Next year will be interesting. The big question is how many of the people who took part this year can be kept active enough to participate next year. The one's who kicked in to the final vote this year get to nominate next year; without spending extra money.

That makes a slate easier for them to pull off (even assuming some fall-off from those who vote to those who nominate, getting a couple of hundred to lock-step next year is probably doable).

Which means I fear there will be one more round of this; even if a significant portion of those who voted in this year's ballot nominate next year.

I'd like to think there are enough good books to get enough nominees above the puppy slate numbers, but absent a non-puppy slate (which I think would require another asterisk) I fear it's not possible. There is too much in the way of good writing out there (which is why the system was gameable in the first place.

So yes, we had a success, maybe even a victory. I think the outcome of the dispute is pretty certain (i.e. slates will be crippled past 2016), but 2016 could be a repeat of this, with the more reactionary of the Canes depubes rallied to try and claim one actual, rather than phyrric, victory.

"Harry Warner,
Harry Warner,
Warner Warner,
Harry Harry…"

#119 ::: C. Wingate

If any consolation, you don't need to be widely read in a category to nominate, you just need to have something you're enthusiastic about.

Chris@109/Cassy@110: Correct, 4 and 6 passed by a vote of 86 to 82. It seemed less popular overall than EPH, probably lost a bunch of support when EPH passed, but picked up some support from *opponents* of EPH who now think having an alternative on the agenda boosts their chances of defeating EPH next year.

If EPH passes next year, 4 and 6 will not do much to battle slates, but it will increase the number of finalists, which I am (weakly) convinced is a good thing. 4 and 6 will almost certainly be considered after EPH, so in the event of an EPH win I'll move to change the numbers to 5 and 6, which our voting experts say will work better with EPH, and which is a small enough change to the amendment that it won't require an additional year of ratification. (6 and 6 would need to be ratified in Helsinki.)

Thanks for the responses.

Cat, you asked: "Is there something I can do to make you feel better?"

On Saturday, with family (some Hindu, some not), I went to see the new South Indian blockbuster film Baahubali: The Beginning. Early in the film, the protagonist gets frustrated that his mom is wearing herself out bringing holy water from a nearby river to ritually pour over a Shivalingam (rounded stone cylinder used for worshipping Shiva). So Baahubali physically picks up this enormous Shivalingam, which weighs like a ton, and carries it to the river, placing it under a waterfall. This is in one sense super sacrilegious -- he uses a makeshift crowbar to wrench the Shivalingam out of the ground, ignoring priests' and laity's gasps and protests -- but in another sense completely respectful of the gods and of the ritual framework. It's so badass that the movie poster depicts this scene, evidently without fear of offending Hindus.

There are a bunch of scifi/fantasy films out of India recently that engage with Hinduism. Eega literally uses reincarnation as a plot device. RangiTaranga has little Hindu-aware touches, like a guy covering up a pratfall by saying he meant to fall to the other guy's feet to ask for his blessing, and larger ones, like the specifically Hindu demon that seems to menace a protagonist. And that's just in the last three years from South India, not even Mumbai; Bollywood's been doing speculative fiction grounded in the Hindu tradition for decades.

Short fiction: Elizabeth Bear's "In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns" is pretty accessible to non-Hindus, as is "Archana and Chandni" by Iona Sharma. Check out these recommendations for South Asian speculative fiction -- many of these authors engage specifically with Hindu tradition and practice.

I'm glad that saying "Hare Krishna" in a room with our community helped some people feel better. It would make me feel better if more non-Hindu sf/f fans read or watched a bit of sf/f that takes Hinduism seriously, especially sf/f by Hindus. This doesn't mean everything in those works is reverent -- you saw how I described that Shivalingam scene in Baahubali. But, you know, they basically treat Hinduism and Hindus as something beyond set dressing and non-player characters.

I have read A Canticle for Leibowitz, and a ton of James Morrow, and The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss, and various Orson Scott Card, and The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and so much stuff about Arthuriana and golems and demons and fairies and Athena and you get the picture. I'm not asking you to meet me halfway. But read or watch one additional thing that you wouldn't have before I asked? That would be pretty neat.

Will the gnomes please release my comment, which had several links? I offer some freshly carbonated water.

Sumana Harihareswara @ 125 has been gnomed.

...and is among those hoping for a link to a ceremonies' video.

A Jewish prayer would've been better because 1) Silverberg is, as I understand, at least nominally part of that culture and 2) "We have a blessing for everything" is a fine old joke.

(when in doubt, shehecheyanu probably has you covered...)

This was my first Worldcon, after a 20 year absence from any organized fanish activity. It was my wife's first fanish exposure. We had a wonderful time; both our thanks to the welcoming community, and the the kind folks I met at the ML dinner.

As a governance nerd, I spent much too long in the business meetings - I've never before seen such a well-run "public" meeting. Well done! I had also never before seen a serpentine vote performed - I'm impressed at it's efficiency. I'm even more impressed that the WSFS hasn't gone the way of so many other organizations with hidden ballots. The open voting serves very well to reinforce that even when viewpoints diverge we are still a community that works together.

I'm so glad EPH passed, and I hope to see many of you again next year at MidAmeriCon II!

I have a question: I am told that if a category get a "No Award" in back-to-back years, that category goes away. Is this so?

If so, what are the chances that another "No Award" can be forced onto one of the five categories that received one this year?

~Gary

I don't know if it would help or hurt to understand that the Hare Krishnas weren't considered to be particularly Hindu at that time. I think they're much closer to standard Hindu practices now.(Most of them were, IIRC, European-ancestry Americans.)

@131 -- No the category doesn't go away.

Some Worldcons have a special one-time category in the Hugos, and that one DOES disappear after that Worldcon.

No Award has no magic powers to banish a category.

Gary Arbuthnot @131, I think you've been misinformed. I went to the Hugo Awards Wiki and found no such rule.

Should one go look over at Torgersen’s blog, you'll find that he is changing commenter’s words if he disagrees with them – and is admitting to doing so.

What a shockingly dishonorable (and juvenile!) thing to do; confirmation, if any were still needed at this point, that Torgersen lacks any sense of honor at all.

Wow. I find that I’m surprised that these guys can still shock me.

'As You Know' Bob @ #135:
Should one go look over at Torgersen’s blog, you'll find that he is changing commenter’s words if he disagrees with them – and is admitting to doing so.

Ethics aside, doesn't admitting to it kind of negate the effort of changing the words in the first place? I mean, "my enemies are so bad I've had to manufacture evidence to prove it" seems to have a lot of flaws as an argument.

Ah, good.

Sumana Harihareswara @ 125: Thank you for the reading list!

It has been such an emotional roller coaster this last day that I feel like....lord, I don't know. Drained and wistful and fuzzily grateful.

The sort of day where it's dangerous to listen to music with words because you'll wind up crying because you just identify with that one song SO MUCH (where said song could be virtually anything.)

Anyway. I feel more like part of fandom than I ever have, and that may fade as life knocks the edges off, but I am very fond of us, flawed people that we are.

Sumana Harihareswara @ 125:

I'll add my thanks as well for the many suggestions, so kind (and kindly phrased).

between4walls @ 116 But I have family who are Hindu and didn't like seeing sacred names used as a joke, without any apparent awareness that they were venerated by a living religion.

I wasn't there, but the Hare Krishna chant strikes me as one of those things which is "as sacred as you want it to be." On one hand, you can believe that it's some kind of joke, and of course it was a joke on some level. On the other hand, you can see it as a kind of ritual invocation which states that what was happening fifty years ago is happening today, that controversies continue, that difficult Worldcons continue, and the dance of Light and Darkness continues, overseen by ancient spiritual forces that are beyond our ken.

And Silverberg is both old enough and smart enough to understand that the whole thing works on both levels. Anyone who is offended by his use of the chant, or by the laughter, is missing something both important and powerful. I should also note that Zelazny's Lord of Light won the Hugo at Baycon in 1968, for portraying a universe where people from India are conquering an alien world.

(Pro Tip: It's worth checking out what else won a Hugo that year and contemplating the possible symbolisms of a callback to Baycon!)

[Two paragraphs commented out by moderator at poster's request.]

Sumana @ 125 :: Thanks for putting the effort into this list. I look forward to digging into it.

Alex @ 141 :: No. A world of no. This comment is the distillation of fans behaving badly when someone speaks up and says, "That hurt." If you're not living with your culture being a constant punchline, put down the holy putter and have some respect.

Alex R.: I have to admit, my first response to that is...not particularly cordial, and I'm not especially Hindu.

Protip: When someone tells you they're insulted, offended, or upset by something, the correct response is not to earnestly explain to them how no reasonable person could possibly be insulted, offended, or upset by that thing.

Sorry if the tone was off. I'm having a very bad week and nothing I've tried to say has worked very well.

If some kind moderator would remove the last two paragraphs of my previous comment, I'd be much obliged.

Alex R: And Silverberg is both old enough and smart enough to understand that the whole thing works on both levels. Anyone who is offended by his use of the chant, or by the laughter, is missing something both important and powerful.

Just no.

Setting aside any thoughts I might have on this, no. Imagine, if you will, that you said that about someone reciting the Kol Nidre, or the Misere Nobis. Would you tell someone who was of one of those religious affiliations that they didn't get it?

No. You don't get to tell someone that they aren't allowed to have reactions to the use/misuse of their religion/culture because you think it serves a greater good.

Alex R @141

"as holy as you want it to be"--if you're not a member of the faith in question, you really can't determine that.

people run around co-opting bits of other people's religions all the time, especially by saying things like, "this is secular now because so many people are doing it" or "I don't think it's religious and therefore I'm not doing anything wrong by wearing this item of clothing/piece of jewelry."

another example, for instance, is the wearing of the bindi mark or bindi jewelry. many white people think this is just a pretty decoration but that doesn't change the fact that it has religious significance and should not be worn by people who do not share the faith.

this attitude, which is usually expressed by members of a majority religion, doesn't make the acts less offensive to those whose religions are being co-opted...and often altered in the process.

Hm. I suspect I am still a bit raw from a lot of things in the past few weeks.

I should rather like to lighten the mood, but poetry seems to be escaping me. Perhaps I need to read some. Issa comes to mind (obSF, his name is Kobayashi Issa)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
     casually.

The crow
walks along there
as if it were tilling the field.

The snow melts
and floods the village
    with children

#125 ::: Sumana Harihareswara

Thank you for the reading list.

I think James Morrow is an ambiguous example for Christian influence in sf-- what I've read of his stuff is what I'd call rather heavy-handed satire of Christianity.

It's Christian influence in the sense that his readers are expected to understand what he's criticizing, but unless I missed something, it isn't pro-Christianity.

Could somebody recap/explain the asterisk thing to me? I somehow missed that reference, and didn't understand the bit at the ceremony.

(Also: ignore if this has been asked/answered; I'm behind on this thread.)

Sumana Harihareswara @125: Please add my voice to the chorus of thanks to the reading list. While I live in a largely Hindu neighborhood in NYC, what we do not have, AFAIK, is a good bookstore (and particularly not one that offers good secular fiction from South Asia). (I apologize if my earlier comment was in any way offensive; it was not meant to be, and I should have made it far clearer that what I was noting was my own perception rather than absolute truth.)

Nancy Lebovitz @72: Anti-religion, yes, and in too many cases, anti-Christian.

Zander Nyrond @45: Second, applause. Very nice indeed. But first, a bit of startlement because your opening line invoked Steve Goodman ("Vegematic") for me and I tried to fit the entire first verse into that tune.

#149: The asterisk: Imagine a sporting event which was compromised in some way. Like the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which were boycotted by the US and many other western nations. Or any Tour de France in which Lance Armstrong competed.

The winners of medals at these events might have asterisks, with footnotes explaining while the events occurred and people competed and won medals . . . there were circumstances that made the honors less than would be otherwise.

(That should have been: The records might show asterisks next to the winners of the medals...)

Stefan Jones @151-152: Or the most infamous sports-record asterisk of them all, assigned by Major League Baseball to Roger Maris' record of 61 home runs in a season, breaking the record previously held by Babe Ruth. The asterisk was justified by Maris doing it in a 162-game season, while Ruth did in 154, of course.

re 31: I saw Uprooted at the game store my son frequents and decided to get it today. It's looking good so far.

Morrow’s work is typically highly critical of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular, but it’s written in a Christian (or sometimes Jewish, or generally Abrahamic) context. The Continent of Lies (my favorite Morrow story) assumes the reader is familiar with the Garden of Eden story, and Only Begotten Daughter with the gospels.

Hey, did I ever mention how I found that Morrow was in the same train car as I was, coming back from the 2009 Montreal Worldcon? I asked him if the title of his then-latest novel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, had been inspired by the title of the first Harry Potter being being changed for US publication. It hadn’t.

File 770 is saying Wright as no longer being with Tor. Link to comment quoting Wright.

Just to ignore the puppy thing for a while, I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but I'm amazed Interstellar didn't do better: I thought it was the standout SF film of the last ten years, even better than Gravity.

Well, what do I know?

It seems to me that discussion of Wright’s latest blog post is likely to produce the sort of comments about Wright that Patrick wouldn’t want on his official blog. This is especially awkward since Patrick is away at Worldcon.

Yeah, any discussion about specific people might be better suited to 770 or elsewhere.

In happier news, I just realized that the vast majority of tumblr doesn't know how to nominate for the Hugos, or what is eligible. Next year when the season comes up, I am going to tell everybody how you vote for Hugos, and that episodes of Steven Universe and Gravity Falls will both be eligible.

The question is, what episodes of Steven Universe would I suggest? They're 11 minute episodes so it should probably be at least a two episode set, but I'm not sure whether it'd be better to do 48+49 or 49+50 of Season 1. Still... that section of the show is the best SF television I've seen in YEARS (well, other than orphan black), its fans are by and large hardcore SF&F nerds, it's got such cool worldbuilding... and until this year, I'd never even thought about nominating anything for the Hugos.

If Otakon is anything to judge by, the show is incredibly popular... as popular (or more popular) than Adventure Time was during its heyday.

(Oh, and want to get more young people to go to Worldcon? Watch Steven Universe or Gravity Falls, nominate 'em if you like 'em wel enough, and get their creators/artists/writers to come.)

Really, everything else could go terribly, and if Steven Universe and Mad Max: Fury Road both ended up on the ballot, that'd be the strongest possible repudiation of the politics of regression. Ooh, and personally I'll probably nominate Ex Machina too, of course.

I'm still cooling down from the hype and excitement but seriously... I heartily recommend Steven Universe for your consideration next year. It starts out seeming like a fairly standard homage to magical girl shows, and slowly deepens into something much weirder and more science fictional... with hints of some of the most interesting non-human social worldbuilding I've seen in a while. Episodes are 11 minutes long, and it's a little bit of a slow burn as a result. though I'd say starting at the beginning and watching through episode 12 will give you a good idea of the direction things are going. That's 130 minutes, or like 3 episodes of a typical american-length drama. The explosion of plot developments known as the "Steven Bomb" doesn't start until around episode 40, I think, and it was at that point that I noticed an explosion of passion for the series from online fandoms.

The best bet for next year is to spread information to large, passionate fanbases who don't know how to nominate or vote yet.

Paul @130: Yes 1000%. Kevin Standlee and his team (I'd list their names but I can't remember all 5 off the top of my head)
did an *incredible* job of maneuvering the entire agenda, including two new, complex Constitutional amendments, at least one of which was controversial, through only 11 hours--3 to set schedules & debate time, and the other 8 for everything else. He made sure every side was heard (every voice would've been impossible), and kept the agenda firmly on the rails through at least two appeals of the Chair's ruling and multiple amendments.

Melissa @120: As an agnostic UU, I have no problem with the general concept of blessing the Hugos, and would not be bothered by either a non-denominational blessing or one that was in the speaker's religion.

Heh. I'd love to bless the Hugos in MY religion. Then JCW would have to pray he didn't win one (because it would be tainted with icky Wiccan cooties, not because I'd do anything nasty).

This year Lenore attended the Business Meeting, and requested CART so she could follow it. Many people besides her found it useful. Hardly anyone said "what? repeat that please," because it was right there on the screen.

I think that may have shortened the whole process substantially, when you add up all those tiny delays that didn't happen.

ETA: Showed this to Lenore prior to posting it; she said one of the regular attendees of WSFS business meetings actually told her that CART had shortened the meeting time.

I guess in prior meetings people had to repeat themselves until they were hoarse. Yes, they were hoarse before the CART.

Rachael Acks has linked to video of the business meeting along with her excellent liveblog (and dapper self) here: http://katsudon.net/?p=4365

Straight to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUE4UD_dOMY&list=PL0oLnkb-s4Yd_nZwV7lG_aItUV_5aP0aB

Leah Miller @160, yeah, I’ve been loving Steven Universe. I’ve had a partially-written post about it sitting on my hard drive for over a month, waiting for me to get coherent.

So there's video of the business meeting, but is there video of the ceremony? I missed it and would like to watch...

Shane at 163 I guess in prior meetings people had to repeat themselves until they were hoarse. Yes, they were hoarse before the CART.

During one D&D game a friend named his halfling Descarte. I set things up so he was in charge of leading the pony... *Runs away!*

It's not clear whether there will be a video of the Hugo ceremony available. The Sasquan Twitter account wasn't able to say one way or another.

They also snarked me when I tweeted about it. I haven't been enchanted by the Sasquan Twitter account for a while.

So can I ask a favor? Can we explain what happened for things like the asterisks, for those of us who didn't watch, and now don't look to be able to catch up on the fannish history we missed?

Yes, I am feeling disgruntled.

#49 Brad from Sunnyvale said:

(And there seem to be many who voted works below no award, in spite of the attempt to educate about it, but it did not have a negative effect.)
I don't understand a scenario in which filling in a complete preference list (i.e. including items below no award) can lead to a worse outcome for me and my preferences than one in which I do not so vote. I have read the rules (and lived in Australia). Please, educate me.

Expressing a preference between bad and worse can prevent worse. Not so doing is a win under what circumstances?

That… blog post… of Wright's probably calls for some sort of response from PNH, but I'll be damned if I can tell what sort. [shakes head in confusion]

I don't think it's Patrick's obligation to answer every unhinged rant that appears on the internet about him.

<snark>Assuming the post was about him. Between the spelling and the unwillingness to acknowledge that Patrick and Teresa use a combined surname, Wright did not once actually name Patrick Nielsen Hayden in the entire screed.</snark>

Devin #168 -- a truly complete preference list with items below No Award will not lead to a worse outcome. A large fraction of voters, however, do not read/evaluate all the works, and so they don't fill out a complete set, and as such they can cause a result other than what they intended (being counted as a vote to give a Hugo to a disliked work competing with an unranked work.)

Some people we see with votes transferred to other works from NA ranked all works, but it is a probable assumption that some did not, based on typical voting patterns.

It is a common misunderstanding that "Unranked" means "Below everything here," including No Award if it is ranked. People have an emotional feeling that "Below No Award" is more negative than "unranked" but that is a false feeling.

If nothing was unranked, you're cool.

Sumana Harihareswara: #125 Thanks for the recs!

Regarding the Baahubali scene: In the mythopoetic contexts I'm more familiar with, such a stunt would mark the doer as a mythic figure in themselves. Would that interpretation fit into the movie?

James@157 -- our tastes clearly differ, since I felt Gravity and Interstellar were super well made movies with absolutely ridiculous science in them -- and in the case of Interstellar a muddled ending.

It's funny, though. Guardians of the Galaxy also has ridiculous science in it, more fantasy than SF. But because it's a comedy it doesn't pretend to have otherwise. And we are strange that way -- we are more bothered by something that pretends or aspires to being good SF and blows it, than something which deliberately doesn't aspire to that and does well what it tried to do.

My own preference was probably Edge of Tomorrow -- which also has fantasy time travel aliens in it. Edge of Tomorrow stayed within the realm of decent time travel fiction, though, and once you are ready to accept time travel fiction, it did a good job of it. I like my DP winner to meet the test of "be decent SF if it were written."

Which reminds me of my disappointment that nowhere on the DP nominees list did we see the White Christmas special of Black Mirror. Did nobody see that? As far as I am concerned, that's a serious contender for the best episode of SF TV ever made in history, not just in 2014. Yet it seems to be unrecognized by fans, and oddly, its predecessor episodes (also super good) found no recognition even in an English worldcon. What's up with that?

Re: David@112, and "The Day the World Turned Upside Down".

I really disliked most of that story, not just in general (not to my taste) but also in execution (I did not consider it well done). I would not recommend it to people, so I won't rank it above "no award". However, I *did* rank it below.

Not a question of a "field of one" - I liked Mixon's and Dillon's work well enough to vote for it. Just my personal take on "not Hugo material".

Me #172: And reading the film synopsis: Oh yeah, that dude is totally a mythic figure.

abi @170: Well… Dignified Silence is certainly a response… and I don't think anybody could blame PNH for choosing that one.

Greg @161:

Most UU I know started as Christians, and therefore are still affiliated/aligned with the majority religion of the US. I suggest that people of a general Christian alignment are more comfortable with public blessings than people of a minority religion. Members of minority religions are rarely asked to be the ones to bless a convocation in the first place and in many places, when they do, there is backlash because they're "not our kind" and/or using unfamiliar blessings, sometimes in unfamiliar languages. There have been outcries in recent years about Muslim blessings at public events, for instance.

Members of minority religions may feel uncomfortable with public blessings conducted on behalf of the majority religion, depending on their experiences of persecution by the majority religion and/or their historical understandings of same. People conducting blessings may use that opportunity to present a slant or send a message (whether they are from the majority or minority faiths) which may be quite pointed rather than a general blessing--I'm thinking here of blessings where the speaker prays for the conversion of those present, sometimes in coded speech, sometimes more obviously, and of blessings that discuss "outsiders," some of which I have personally experienced. This can sometimes actually be even more uncomfortable if the person giving the blessing is unaware that members of minority religions are present.

If the blessing is given on behalf of the majority religion and involves any form of call-and-response or group recitation of a prayer, members of minority religions have sometimes awkward choices to make: play along? keep silent? Playing along may cause the person to compromise their own belief; staying silent may make the person stand out in the group, which is not always a good thing. It's not pleasant to have people staring at you or asking questions about why you chose not to participate, especially in the public sphere where you may not know all the people around you and may not have allies present. Of course, participating isn't always sufficient camouflage; one may not know the correct in-group way to perform.

I'm aware that this can happen in one's own faith as well; my former congregation adopted a new prayer book a few years ago and changed the melodies of some prayers and it was quite disconcerting for some older members, who had difficulty changing to the new tunes--especially if they only attended services a few times a year. it was also odd when one visited congregations that were not using the new melodies; there was--for me--a moment where I had to shift gears in order to sing the older tune. But it didn't make me feeling too conspicuous, as opposed to times when I've refused to take communion when literally everyone else present was doing so.

Sumana, 125: Thank you for the recs! I often find myself daunted by enormous traditions I know nothing about, and you've given me a reliable starting place.

Brad, 173: I've never even heard of Black Mirror. I don't have a TV, but usually I'm aware of the fannish squee about the latest shows. But for this? Nothing at all.

Inge, 174: I hated that story too. I can't remember if I ranked it or not, but if I did it was below No Award. Now that it's won, however...well, I'm a translator. Two winning translations in a year might bring me work, you know?

Melissa, 177: I agree completely. I'm a churchgoing Christian, and I find all public prayer in secular settings offensive. Because I grew up in Evangelical Fundieland, and I'm an Episcopalian, I'm very conscious of how it feels to be left out of the prayer--and I can't imagine how much worse it would be if I truly were outside of the dominant group. (If it's a non-Christian prayer given by someone who practices that religion, I'm less upset, but it's still one of my least favorite American habits.)

Glad my previous comment was helpful! Thanks should definitely go to Anil Menon and Vandana Singh for their Strange Horizons interview with Samit Basu, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Indrapramit Das, Payal Dhar, Swapna Kishore, Suchitra Mathur, Arvind Mishra, Shweta Narayan, and Manjula Padmanabhan (scroll down to Question Five for their several reading suggestions). This conversation has reminded me that I need to pick up Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana on my Kobo. And of course here I am following in the tradition of Deepa D. whose "I Didn't Dream of Dragons" essay is an indirect commentary on Elizabeth Bear's work.

I need to be careful: I am trying to not conflate "South Asian" with "engaging with Hinduism" in the works I mention! I wouldn't want anyone to think I am ignoring Usman Malik's "The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family" or other works that engage more specifically with Islam. And I need to also mention speculative fiction that engages deeply with Hinduism, like some of Shweta Narayan's poetry, or "Promise of the पुरवाई" by Dhobi ki Kutti, but is more challenging and less accessible to an audience that is not already familiar with Hinduism. (Question three in that Strange Horizons interview evokes some interesting thoughts on exoticism, setting, and assumptions about what the reader already knows.)

As Avram says -- Morrow assumes the reader knows enough about Judeo-Christianity to get his references. Super irreverent, but the specific religions he's being irreverent towards -- for the length of the entire book -- are Judaism and Christianity. For comparison: when I was a kid, I read a ton of Amar Chitra Katha comic books that covered South Asian legends, folklore, history, and myths. That's how I originally read the Mahabharata, for instance. The sadly shortlived webcomic "ACK!" parodies the Mahabharata and specifically those educational comic books.

David Harmon: There's a Baahubali in ancient myth (in fact I just reread the Amar Chitra Katha about him) who is not the character depicted in the film. But yeah this film is super myth-level. There is a super sexist bit about Baahubali harassing a woman warrior into falling in love with him and giving up her soldier career (if you find anything empowering in the story of Mulan then this is the opposite of that), but there's also an unearthly pretty bit where the ethereal image of a woman sings and coaxes Baahubali to climb an impossibly high waterfall, and I am at a loss for words to describe how gorgeous that scene is.

It would be interesting to see a movie like Baahubali or Eega on the Hugo ballot for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form someday!

I posted another comment that had many links; will you please release it? I have a snack of crackers and salsa to offer.

Melissa @177:

I wouldn't say that most formerly-Christian UUs I know are "affiliated with" or "aligned with" Christianity; most of the ones I know left Christianity because they were deeply hurt by it in one way or another, so while they may still have issues regarding viewing Christianity as the assumed default, they're not terribly likely to be sympathetic toward public Christian prayer. I do agree with your general assessment, just not with where you're placing UUs. YUUMV. (I've only been a member of two different UU congregations, in different cities, so my experience is limited.)

I would not be offended at someone praying according to their own religion (free exercise and all that) but appropriating someone else's is disrespectful.

Posting something here because I want to try and process it, and it’s Hugo-related: the only negative comment I’ve encountered on the recent Hugos that really bothered me came from someone I’ve recently friended in an online forum, who seems to be a decent, if sometimes impetuous person. Yesterday she posted "If you support Mixon, we're going to have problems. Consider unfriending,” and explained that she considers Mixon to have stalked RH/BS and exaggerated and provoked her behaviour.

I think my friend’s view of RH/BS is a severe case of “there but for the grace of God go I” —she has acknowledged that she was a jerk in some online forums in the past, although people who’ve known her longer than I have have countered that she never directed the same level of vitriol at anyone that RH did. Really, I think the issue is that as a transwoman, she’s reacting instinctively to a case of someone’s current identity being publicly linked to a past one, and not taking into account that it’s the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the identities, not their existence, that’s sparked anger.

At least one person has made gentle attempts to argue with her, and others have asked her to PM them, possibly to argue in a less-public way; and she’s softened to the point of agreeing that bad behaviour in meatspace may justifiably result in a blacklist, but that as far as online behaviour goes, even using a phrase like “the community remembers” is excessive punishment. So far I’ve said nothing to her either way, feeling like I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge to address the topic. She seems to have moved on to being mad at TERFs, in which I can heartily agree with her, so should I just let it go for now? I guess I worry that silence=hypocrisy, but then there's not wanting to add fuel to someone's fire.

Thank you, gnomes, for all the releasing of my link-laden posts!

Xopher @ #162 -- Yay CART! That's a great piece of news.

For those who don't know about Computer-Assisted Realtime Transcription, also referred to as "live captioning," it can really help conference participants for a variety of reasons. My friend Mirabai Knight discusses when it's a good idea to offer CART instead of or in addition to a sign language interpreter. CART for the awards ceremonies and for Guest of Honor speeches at sf/f conventions would be great; WisCon does this.

In response to TexAnne @ #178 and others, regarding translation: Do you have favorite translators (including yourself) whose translations of speculative fiction I should look out for, or sites/feeds I should watch so I can learn of recent translated works? I know about Read Paper Republic, which is not specific to sf/f, and about the the Society of Authors translator listing (which does not, for instance, include Ken Liu).

Lorax @181:

Reframing, in the hopes that my point is more clear:

Most UUs I know still celebrate Christmas and Easter. They understand Christian text and tradition in a way a non-Christian does not; they catch the allegories in C. S. Lewis and James Morrow in a way non-Christians do not.

This seems true to me regardless of their dissatisfaction with and dislike of elements of Christianity.

This is similar to the way my secular Jewish parents retained an affiliation/alignment with elements of Jewish practice and belief. We celebrated Passover and Chanukah every year; my dad could recite certain prayers from memory until the end of his life.

Does that help?

162
OWWW!
Yes, I'd be one of those appreciating CART.

169
Editorial remarks would seem to be best. ('I have a thesaurus and I want you to know it' is not a plan that should meet with favor.)
I had teachers who would have returned his papers with many, many markings in red pen.

BT's¹ post laying claim to increased participation as a Good Thing (which is sort of like Kaiser Bill laying claim to increased participation in European military service) inadvertently points out one persistent problem: the relatively small size of non-US Worldcons. Assuming the puppies manage to maintain a consistent presence and are willing to keep paying for supporting memberships, they may well have enough numbers in Helsinki to influence the final voting, if the rest of us get tired of having to police them.

¹It also pleases me to refer to him as the name of a disease which kills off caterpillars and grubs.

For anyone interested in reading the works that were pushed off the ballot this year, I've assembled a list, complete with links. (The majority of shorter works are available without cost.)

Sumana, 184: Alas, I am yet unpublished. But if I ever sell anything, I promise you won't be able to miss it.

"Nominate. No-mi-nate!"

Dalek fan of the Hugos about one way to help next year instead of waiting for the finals.

#184 ::: Sumana Harihareswara

That reminds me-- does anyone have sources to recommend about translating? I'm fascinated by theory of translation, and the choices translators make between plausible and/or difficult alternatives.

Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot has lots of interesting things to say about translation, and language in general.

Yesterday's game day was obviously a cross-community event and by way of keeping it cool, nothing substantive was said about the Hugos. The group is friendly and cohesive enough that it will stay together, but it doesn't need to have heated arguments.

It feels unusual to walk in multiple worlds with different behavior being the accepted thing in each. It's a part of life, but not that often for me.

#192 The late Robert Conquest wrote an interesting (and intermittently very funny) essay called "Done into English" that explores the horrifying ramifications of translating just two lines of Rimbaud. It's in his critical collection The Abomination of Moab (1979), and available through the Wiley Online Library if you have access (first-page teaser here).

Sumana Harihareswara @125: But read or watch one additional thing that you wouldn't have before I asked? That would be pretty neat.

I've added your movie recs to my To Be Watched folder, and likewise the short stories to To Be Read.*

Extra points for any of the above coming out in 2015, and therefore being 2016 Hugo elibible?

* I'm way behind in my non-English movie watching; I'm typically doing artwork when I have the TV on, which makes tracking subtitles hard.

Sumana 184: By all accounts*, Michael Kandel is, as the Polish word goes, kongenialny; in fact he may be the best-known Anglophone SF translator at all.
(* The little I've had time to sample was very witty but a bit too arbitrary for my taste in places.)

By the way, may I ask you what you thought of Ian McDonald's River of Gods et al.?

Nancy 192 (and whomever it might concern): I wholeheartedly recommend Jiří Levý's The Art of Translation, which – although half a century old – was groundbreaking and remains very influential throughout (Central) Europe; also, it is very accessible and concrete, with no vague academese that seems to permeate the modern Translation Studies field. Only, the recent English translation (there's a dry video introduction was by an commercial-academic press so it costs 95 EUR. But if you have access to a large enough library (including, um, the Library Genesis, nudge nudge wink wink), it's certainly worth the time.

#195 ::: David Langford

It looks like fun, but it costs $6 to rent the PDF, and over $60 to get the book. I'm trying Interlibrary Loan.

Gement, #82:

Thank you for saying what I wanted to, more clearly than I could do it.

Sumana, #67:

I, also, am very sorry.

Mouse or Rat, Umberto Eco's essay on translation, comes highly recommended.

The translations I do are mostly technical, but even those feature many different ways to skin a cat.

Cubist @169: That… blog post… of Wright's

Hey, I didn't realize that Patrick was Lord of Fandom. Hey Patrick, would you change the location of next year's Worldcon to Boulder, please? I want a shorter commute. Thanks!

::boggle::

Re translation, I enjoyed Is That A Fish in Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos. But I am otherwise ignorant of the area and so wouldn't necessarily recognize problems.

@ Sumana - My thanks as well for that list! I consume very few movies these days, but will try to track down some of the stories.

Sumana Harihareswara #184: I'm hard of hearing, but not a signer. CART would help me, while signing wouldn't. (I'm also hyperlexic, which just makes it "more so".) As an aside, solid expertise applied to the acoustics/sound system is also a good thing. I have to deal with echoey rooms or distorted pickup/amplification way too often.

lorax, #181, Melissa Singer #185: Way back in Cambridge, a UU pastor (term?) claimed that UU was a Christian denomination. I informed him about the two UU Wiccan circles within the local area.

David Harmon @204: Some UU people (and some UU congregations) are Christian. Some are not. Some congregations provide a congenial environment for explicitly atheist parishoners to attend services and seek fellowship and meaning; others insist on putting some concept of Deity at the center of the endeavor and making it explicitly about worship.

UUs vary a lot. Generally for categorization purposes they're considered a kind of mainline Protestant denomination, but that's as much cultural or historical as anything else.

#198 ::: Nancy Lebovitz to me

If you have difficulties, I'm sure I can dig out my copy (WHICH IS SOMEWHERE) and make a scan.

Abi @ 167: Can we explain what happened for things like the asterisks ...?

I watched the livestream.

David Gerrold made some non-biting generalizations about how this year's awards were controversial and said that they'd inspired the creation of official Hugos Asterisks for all of the nominees. The creator of them was brought out to speak as they were shown on the big screen. (Scott Edelman has shared a good photo of his.)

Gerrold continued by saying said they were in honor of this year being the ultimate "wild card."

An asterisk implies illegitimacy, the way Roger Maris' home run record in baseball has been listed with one by some fans because he did it in a longer season than Babe Ruth. So Gerrold was making an edgy joke there.

Nick Mamatas said on Twitter that Gerrold tested the joke to the nominees at the pre-party, so none of them were caught off guard.

Also worth mentioning, regarding the Hugo Asterisks: Smofbabe in a LiveJournal comment says this:

"... there were very serious attempts throughout, and up to the last minute, to convince them not to do this. However, the people who were behind the idea were somehow of the opinion that the asterisk was a perfectly innocent way to celebrate the record-breaking attendance and voting at the convention (which they also bizarrely insisted were a *positive* thing about the Worldcon rather than the result of the unfortunate Hugo situation). They refused to be deterred by the argument that the majority of people would interpret the asterisk in its more common use to indicate that a record is somehow tainted by circumstances."

TexAnne #178 -- Run, don't walk to your device now and watch Black Mirror, whose first 6 episodes are on Netflix. Episodes 2 through 5 are astounding, better than almost all SF TV out there. Episodes 1 and 6 are good but not as astounding, and Episode 1 is strange enough it's not your best introduction. You can watch in almost any order so put them in the middle.

The White Christmas special is 3 connected 20 minute vignettes. You can watch it online if in the UK or if you have a proxy. I think at least 2 of the vignettes would have a shot at a short fiction Hugo if they had been written stories --and that's not something I ever say about TV. I suspect that Booker borrowed some ideas from The Quantum Thief for this episode, but borrowed in a good way, in that he expands and goes beyond them.

I'm hyping it too much -- if you hype something a lot people enjoy it less -- but this should definitely be on your watch list.

TexAnne @178: A disclaimer is possibly necessary.

Black Mirror is in the vein of the old Twilight Zone or Outer Limits -- quite a few of the episodes (the general pattern is "postulate a thing and then show it in detail in a world almost like ours") are deeply disturbing, some verge on horrific, and almost none are kid-friendly.

Good, yes. But even the most innocuous is really creepy.

Some nominations for 2015...

NOVEL:

James SA Corey's space opera "Nemesis Games"
Victor Milan's "Dinosaur Lords"... Action! Women with their own agendas! Dinosaurs! What more do we need?
Mary Robinette Kowal's Austenesque fantasy "Of Noble Family"

DRAMATC PRESENTATION - LONG FORM:

Season Two of "Half and Catch Fire"
Definitely not "Fantastic Four"

Serge @ 211: Season Two of "Half and Catch Fire"

How would a drama about the Texas computer industry in the 1980s be considered SF?

The show I'd like to see on next year's ballot is Humans.

#206 ::: David Langford

Thanks very much, but let's give interlibrary loan a month or two.

I was about to ask where this "Black Mirror" of which I've never heard before could be found, but then Brad said it was on Netflix. Oh. Ok, I guess I'll never see it then.
Not everyone has Netflix.

I'd like to make a tentative offer, let me know if this seems like a reasonable thing to you-all.

I'm seriously thinking about going to MAC next year, and I'm fully engaged with the importance of nominating for the 2016 Hugos.

However, I just don't read all that much, and even the prospect of trying to study up for the noms is enough to give me the vapors.

I'm probably good making noms for both Dramatic Presentation categories, and I've got a couple of candidates for another two categories, but aside from that, I'm bone dry.

Would it be a reasonable thing to allow some not-Puppy to use my nomination slots that I won't be using?

Cally Soukup @214: Yes, Neflix has Black Mirror, but I think it's a BBC production, so it's not only Netflix, if that helps any.

rcade @ 212... How would a drama about the Texas computer industry in the 1980s be considered SF?

For the same reason that I nominated Season One of "Halt and Catch Fire", and for the same reason that people nominated "The Right Stuff". They are about the drive to create the Future. I know, I'm probably the only person who feels that way.

Jacque @215: It is explicitly not ok for anyone else to provide nominations under your name on your membership.

However, you don't have to read widely and deeply. If you have three, or four, or five entries in any category that blew your doors off and amazed you as works of fiction, nominate them. They are worthy. They don't have to be the Platonic-ideal BEST nominees for the year; they just have to be works that you think were wonderful fiction (or whatever, in the nonfiction categories).

I would note that fanfic authors are eligible in the Fan Writer category, as long as the works for which you are nominating them are (a) not professionally published and (b) strike you as suitably fannish or attached to fandom.

Anita Sarkeesian's YouTube works were nearly nominated this year, en masse, as a Related Work.

Elliott Mason @210, thank you very much for the disclaimer. I don't do "deeply disturbing" at all well, let along "horrific", so thank you; the glowing recommendations had me intrigued, but I think I'll probably pass.

#215 ::: Jacque

Letting someone else use your excess nom slots strikes me as tacky, though not extremely so. Some fraction of the curse would be taken off if it's someone who doesn't have their own membership.

I take nominations to be for works that you're very enthusiastic about, but those works don't have to represent deep knowledge of current sf. Partly because it's just the enthusiasm, and partly because there's just so much sf coming out that there's no way to know whether there might have been something else you'd have liked better.

I don't know if this is the wrong advice, but I think that if you post about what you're enthusiastic about, other people might have some ideas about more sf to nominate that you'd also be enthusiastic about.

Apparently Black Mirror via Netflix is only if you have streaming - not on discs.

I haz a sad. :-(

I'd like to do my part for next year's Hugos, but (unless something in my life changes dramatically) it seems I won't have a "part" to "do." Like I said, I don't read much these days. Reading the three non-Pup novel noms pretty much soaked up all my reading spoons for this last year. Oh, well. It is what it is.

Serge @ 217: They are about the drive to create the Future. I know, I'm probably the only person who feels that way.

That's an interesting way to get some works into the tent.

rcade @ 223... That's an interesting way to get some works into the tent

Interesting *and* valid too. It's all in its attitude.

#222 Jacque

If you can handle audio, I'd recommend looking for SF audiobooks and/or short fiction podcasts that explicitly feature works published this year. I don't have a huge amount of focused reading time these days either, but I did finish two audiobooks on a recent cross-country drive, and last year I listened to the first seven Master and Commander novels while I was doing housework and other stuff that doesn't engage my language centers.

Hmm. A list of eligible work available in audio format would be really useful, actually. Bah, if no one else does, maybe I'll make an attempt at it.

Abi @187, I am heartbroken. I had planned to wake up early to watch the awards but at it happened I never went to sleep and as soon as the ceremony started my "tv lulls you into sleep" mechanism kicked in and I drifted off. :-(

But I was sure it was going to be available later, after all, the announcement of the ballot was!

Jacque@222

Making any nominations in any of the categories is doing more of a part for the Hugos than the majority of the Worldcon members ever do. So just nominate in any of the categories that you feel comfortable nominating for. And there's nothing wrong with making only one or two nominations in a category if that's how many nominations you have.

(If it helps, the "Best Novel" category generally gets more participation than any of the other categories, anyway. So if you have limited time and energy and want to spend it on some of the other categories that would actually tend to balance things out a bit.)

@200 Nancy -- not just tacky, against the rules. Both ballots would be tossed. Say Alex lends Bob two slots.

I'm a magical all knowing/all seeing Hugo Admin. I look at Alex's ballot, and see that Bob has voted two nomination slots. This means that Bob has voted more than one Ballot. Therefore, I toss Bob and Alex's ballots, per Section 6.2, which states."In all matters arising under this Constitution, only natural persons may introduce business, nominate, or vote, except as specifically provided otherwise in this Constitution. No person may cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election."

Alex's ballot wasn't filled out by a natural person -- it was filled out by two natural people. Bob didn't submit a ballot, he submitted a ballot and a fraction of a ballot. Both thus are invalid.

Now, what I do depends not on my all seeing and all knowingness, but on how much of a jerk I am. It would be perfectly legitimate for me to do nothing and just count them as spoiled ballots. Or, I could do the fannish thing, since I probably can get contact info from Registration, to get in contact and say "Dudes. Busted. Try again, do it right, and no nomination sharing. No third chances." and let them fill out a proper nomination form. And, of course, as the Hugo Admin, I am the law. :-)

In general, if the rules violation comes from a mistake, the trend is to explain and let them try again, since the rule on multiply submitted ballots by one person is accept the last before deadline as conclusive. But in the case of hostile action, you drop without warning and don't bother to contact them, assuming they're just going to try again.

Speaking now as me, not as this Magical Hugo Admin: I doubt, if you took any care, you'd be caught. But if I caught you, I'd call it hostile and drop them, unless I actually knew you, in which case, expect a very disappointed phone call and having to redo your ballot.

But that's me. Your Hugo Admin May Vary.

"No. You don't get to tell someone that they aren't allowed to have reactions to the use/misuse of their religion/culture because you think it serves a greater good."

Right. Of course I may feel no particular obligation to modify my behavior based on their reactions. Their feelings are just one variable among many.

@211: Mary Robinette Kowal has stated she'll decline any nominations as part of the Sasquan memberships she sponsored this year.

Robert Z @ 230... So I later heard.

If it weren't so god-awful nasty, I'd give Rick and Morty a recommendation. Obviously written, and visually designed, by people steeped in SF tropes.

In last week's episode, the family is plagued by memory-altering parasitic beings. The creatures create happy memories of themselves in the minds of people around them to cloak their horrifying nature. They appear as everything from a beloved uncle to a dazzling array of imaginary friends. Eventually someone realizes the sure way for a human to identify a parasite: They only have good memories of them. So we see the lead characters dredging up horrific incidents about brothers, sisters, and mothers, and beloved childhood friends getting blown away.

Immensely creative, but not for everyone.

I'd rather people discover Steven Universe.

Anna @226 & Abi @167 -- all of the videos currently available on the UStream Hugo Awards channel were streamed live and then later moved into the replay windows now available. (For example, the Hugo ceremonies from 2012, 2013, and 2014 are all available for viewing, as is the 1939 Retro Hugos ceremony from last year.)

To the best of my knowledge and memory, this process has never been immediate. I'll be very surprised and disappointed if the video of this year's ceremony isn't available eventually. (For values of eventually guesstimated at "sometime within the coming week or month.")

I've just added my query to the Twitter conversation between Abi & Sasquan. Abi, you're right. If this year's video couldn't be archived for later replay, Sasquan would have been best off saying so up front.

Jacque @201: Hey, I didn't realize that Patrick was Lord of Fandom. Hey Patrick, would you change the location of next year's Worldcon to Boulder, please? I want a shorter commute. Thanks!

If it's during Freshman move-in week, the commute to Kansas City may well be shorter...

--

On the asterisk joke: I don't see any mention of it, and I'm not saying it makes it less edgy, but--Gerrold began by counting up "exclamation points" (most Hugo voters of all time! THAT's an exclamation point! and the sun finally came out despite all the smoke! That's ANOTHER exclamation point!) until there were six of them, at which point he pointed out that if you arrange six exclamation points together, you get an asterisk. Thus, commemorative asterisk!

I will admit to having chortled in the privacy of the space behind my laptop screen. It struck me at the time as a light-hearted, emphasis-shifting way of talking about the elephant in the room. The attack on the community needed to be acknowledged, but bitterness and vindictiveness needed to be avoided, and, hey, some positive things really did come out of the situation, so let's acknowledge that too.

They really did look like elegant souvenirs, from what I could see.

Melissa Singer @185, thank you for the clarifications; it sounds like we're a bit closer than I expected (since I do agree that former Christians, wherever they end up religiously, are more likely to at least be familiar with the trappings of Christianity than otherwise, and to fail to see some specifics of Christianity (such as, in the case of formerly-Christian UUs, a belief in no more than one god) as being less than universal.) I took "affiliated/aligned with" as a stronger statement than you appear to have intended it as. (I would object very strongly to being characterized as "affiliated with Christianity", and admit to "having some blind spots regarding Christianity as the unmarked default religion", so I was probably having my own buttons pushed there.)

Lester Bangs @229:

Of course I may feel no particular obligation to modify my behavior based on their reactions. Their feelings are just one variable among many.

Verily. And your willingness or otherwise to take other people's feelings into account and treat them seriously is one factor in how you will be perceived in the wider community. It may also affect what reaction you get when it's your ox that gets gored (it may not; some people are willing to extend empathy even to the unempathic).

Elliott, 210: Thank you. That dampens my enthusiasm.

Brad, 209: Genre matters. I'd have been very upset if I'd gone in expecting straight SF and gotten a liberal dollop of horror instead. It's like saying "please try my Coke" without mentioning the rum in it.

Geri @233:
Thanks for adding your voice. I confess that I've let my exasperation at the degree of attitude the Sasquan Twitter account dishes show; that may sway them to the negative.

Nicole @234:
So were some kind of asterisks handed out during the ceremony then? Pretend I haven't seen it and therefore don't have any idea...

abi: Roughly palm-sized wood disks with an asterisk laser-cut out of the middle and legends etched around the rim (because lasers!). See rcade's link @207.

Continuing on the asterisks thing:

rcade and Nicole have summarized things well, but I'll add for completeness that the asterisk presentation is reportedly the point where Toni Weisskopf walked out of the ceremony.

(editing for abi's latest post: Prior to the presentation of the Campbell and Hugos, the hosts presented laser-cut and -engraved wooden asterisks, a circle maybe five inches in diameter with the asterisk carved out as negative space, to each Hugo [and Campbell, too, I assume] nominee. They also had the designer of the asterisk at the podium to talk about the design and how it was made with computers and lasers and such, and Twitter comments about "that's how the Pac NW does formal" were in reference to said designer's fleece vest thingy. The hosts also talked about the various records for the con -- most members!, most voters!, most whatever!, and that all the exclamation points sort of overlaid into an asterisk, per Nicole's post.)

For which I can't blame her in the least. I'll admit that I had an ill-mannered chuckle at the asterisk thing while watching the livestream, but I'll also say that I recognized that impulse as ill-mannered. I can't fathom how a bunch of Americans could possibly come up with an asterisk as a souvenir in this circumstance without recognizing the implicit message of illegitimacy behind it.

Would a souvenir have been nice for the nominees, particularly given the nature of the awards? Yeah, probably (and I don't really even know that "given the nature of the awards" factors in to that). But this souvenir was not nice.

Thanks for the explanations about the asterisks.

Further on the asterisks: IIRC David Gerrold also said that (similar?) asterisks would be available to members purchase as souvenirs & the proceeds would go to supporting Orangutan conservation.

(It seemed to me that having DEATH & the Redshirts (one of whom was Tananarive Due) at the beginning was a nod to both Pterry & Leonard Nimoy)

Toni has clarified what happened (saw this on Fb, under her name): she did not walk out of the Hugo Ceremony. She never got that far.

The asterisks were distributed to the nominees at the pre-ceremony reception. This is where, David Gerrold says, he explained the joke he intended to make and said no one objected (I believe he did this and I believe he believes this).

Toni has not said that she said anything during the reception, but she has said that she felt the asterisks were not funny and that she was offended. At that point, she left the reception and went to hang out with friends, and never went to the actual awards ceremony.

So she did walk out, but not during the awards presentation.

My comment at the time (I tweeted this) was "And... trying to pre-empt the phrase '2015 Hugo Awards will come with an asterisk'?"

That is, I'd seen that comment come up in Hugo discussions already -- more than once -- phrased exactly that way. (Generally as the first move of a blame-game about whose fault it was.)

So I figured that Gerrold was acknowledging that and attempting to partially defuse the argument with a material pun.

It didn't seem ill-tempered. On the other hand the pun rated a mild eyeroll rather than a groan or cackle.

Connie Willis is right: MCing is hard.

Melissa @243:
Thanks for the clarification -- I thought it odd when I saw the "walked out" report afterward that I hadn't seen any sort of commotion in the front rows during the ceremony.

"has not said that she said anything during the reception, but..." strikes me as tangent to the discussions about the Sasquan committee getting Gerrold's input on the Antonelli thing. There's a significant power imbalance in the MC telling the guests "I'm about to do this thing [with what, an hour's notice?] that an unsympathetic crowd will recognize as a jab at many of you -- is that OK?"

I can see how someone nominated for the Hugos this year could be pretty unhappy with the whole asterisk plaque. I get the point of giving it, but making that point in inherently going to poke some people pretty hard, and not all of them deserve it.

I can particularly see how people in the editing categories could be unhappy, since, with the exception of VD, they were collateral damage in the affair.

Stephen @245:

I agree there seems to be a power imbalance there, even given Toni's position in the field. An hour before the Hugos is not the time to make a stink about something the convention's GoH is doing, especially if it's presented as a charitable fundraiser to honor a man so many people loved.

But equally, it's not the right time to spring something like that on the nominees.

The whole LA thing makes me uncomfortable. Again, a power imbalance: Gerrold is the GoH of the convention; the woman editor threatened by LA's supporters is not. It seems to me to be bad form to ask an abused person, "can your abuser come to the party?" especially if that's coupled with "this much more famous and important person says it's all right."

Just yesterday I found a poster explaining (?) the origin of asterisks in David Gerrold's 13th Aug Facebook post (image deeplink)

that an unsympathetic crowd will recognize as a jab at many of you

IMO - and I wasn't there, only watching the livestream - is that that may be reading into it something that most people weren't thinking. (I certainly wasn't thinking that.)

Hmm. While Black Mirror is indeed dark, I would not class it as horror, though I see what might inspire some to do that. Black Mirror's worlds are all somewhat dystopian and frightening, but nothing beyond what you would commonly find in similar written SF -- just more visceral for you because it is a drama. There's nothing graphic that I recall, and I do know that horror is not just disemboweling.

In some countries, you can play it directly on the Channel 4 Black Mirror page

What's great about the show is that when it shows you a darker world, you think, "this is really good extrapolation and worldbuilding." Well, except the pedal-powered society. My retcon (which may even be valid) is that this is just a lie the people are told to keep them happy, they aren't really powering their world that way any more than the people in the Matrix can be a battery for the AIs. It's never said that it's the truth, just that people believe it. I love everything else about that episode, though, even the other over-the-top parts.

If you could handle the Twilight Zone amped up a bit, you can handle this show.

Anybody can get Netflix free for a month on your computer, phone or tablet. In that free month, watch Black Mirror, Sherlock and a few other of the greats (Breaking Bad perhaps but that's hard in just a month) and you more than got your free trial's worth!

My favourite one is White Christmas (Series 3 episode 1) but S1:E2, S1:E3 and S2:E1 are all outstanding. S1:E1 is not as good and very odd. S2:E2 is probably the darkest and S2:E3 is good but not as great as the others.

abi @83:
You are gracious as usual. I've been here over a decade, since before Electrolite was folded in, but I wasn't about to admit that I enjoyed a Wright story under my own name.

I don't like seeing my friends squabble.

I wish Vox Day would go away and take his gas can with him.

I am wondering how Sense8 will fare at the Hugos.

It is . . . wrenching. Wonderful and wrenching. R rated, queer-friendly, visually stunning. It's kind of like what might happen if Sturgeon and Brunner lived into the Twenty Teens and didn't get stodgy and decided to collaborate on something.

I can't imagine binge-watching it. I generally need a week's break between episodes.

Stefan @253:
Sense8 is the most divisive show I've heard of in recent years. I loved it (despite some unevenness in writing and character development), and several of my friends loved it. Lots and lots of people haaaaaaated it, some because it was "boring" (?!) and some because they didn't feel it went far enough with its efforts at sexual and racial diversity (i.e. a show that tries in that regard, but falls short of being revolutionary, pisses them off more than a show that doesn't try). I dunno, it sure isn't perfect, but it did do things I've never seen on TV and it had a lot of heart.

a) The asterisk thing could have worked if everyone involved felt as if they were mutually part of the same community, sharing wry, sad jokes about the same thing. Clearly, this did not prove true.

b) As a UU who is also pagan, I have generally said the UU Church as a whole is descended from and of the heritage of Christianity, and some parts of it are still in conversation with Christianity, but the Church itself is no longer Christian.

Erik @228:

IANAL, etc., but based on the clause you quote it sounds as though it would be within the rules (though tacky and possibly not intended to be legit) for Jacque to give a nominating slot to someone who wasn't eligible to nominate on their own behalf, because that person would not thereby "cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election." Offering it to the Fluorosphere at large would clearly be a bad idea; asking advice of one or two friends who Jacque knows aren't members of any of the relevant worldcons is likely okay.

What's clearly okay is something like "Alice, Bob, you know what books I like, is there anything I really ought to read before the nominating deadline, and if so, can you lend me a copy?" A more personalized version of a recommendation list.

I did not feel that the asterisks were a part of the evening being about the nominees and honoring them. It was for the audience and particularly those that felt the Puppy slates were a problem.

On the other hand, I thought they were subtle enough, and not rubbing salt into the wound. And it's absolutely fine to disagree and leave or avoid the ceremony. That doesn't make DG evil for including the asterisks.

Nancy, 192: I've written once or twice about translation myself at my LiveJournal (here, for example). My freelance translating work is mainly medical documents these days, and I'm working towards specializing in commercial and financial translation, where the challenges are different from literary translation, but I do think about literary translation (and I've done a little of it, but nothing ready for public consumption yet!). Another LJ worth exploring is Mount Orégano - I think the author, Sue Burke, hangs around here once in a while.

I can second OtterB's recommendation of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, and I'll add Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters - she translated García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, and I disagree completely with her ideas on translating poetry (they're valid, I just differ with them) - and Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents - he translated García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I haven't read either the Conquest essay Dave Langford mentions at 195 or the Levy work Jan Vanek jr. mentions at 197, but now I want to.

@250: Given Jan's link at 249, with Gerrold leading off with "so many people have been saying 'this is the year of the asterisk'", I'm reasonably confident that I'm reading the intended meaning. Certainly those "so many people" weren't talking about overlaying a bunch of exclamation points into another typographical symbol.

That's not to say that I think it shouldn't have been done -- I understand at least some part of the impulse that drove it. But I think it's important to recognize that this, at least, is not a place where fandom holds a moral high ground.

Lady Kay @257: if the intent had been strictly for the audience and those who felt the Puppy slates were a problem, it would not have been necessary to publicly highlight that the Hugo nominees were all being presented with their Official Asterisks as part of the ceremony.

Brad from Sunnyvale, #104: My estimate of 1,800 puppies may overstate it, but they are not a small bloc. I think the low end estimate is 500 to 600 strong rabid puppies -- after all, 586 people put Vox Day as their first choice on their short form editor ballot, and a similar number of sad puppies on top of that -- ie. over 1,000.

I'm not sure where you're getting the 1,800 figure, but I think it's a massive overstatement. The statistically-minded people who've analyzed the results (and my own analysis agrees with theirs) is that in the nominations process there were around 170 Rabid Puppies and another 100 Sad Puppies (~270) or around 12.7% of nominators, and in the voting process there were around 550 Rabid Puppies and around 500 Sad Puppies (~1,050) -- i.e. around 17.6% of voters.

In most elections, failures in the nomination system are fixed by using write-in as the catch-all, and I now have concluded it would have been the best choice for us, and still might need to be. (I figured out last night how it still could have been added this year, at least technically, to save 2016, since you can move to amend the standing rules to allow new business past the deadline, and the chair can also accept, but it's not going to happen this morning!)

This is incorrect. Even if you had gotten added to the agenda a "write-in" option for final voting, AND it passed (and I won't go into all the reasons here why it most likely would never have passed being added to the agenda and would have almost certainly been killed before even entering debate), it would still have had to be ratified next year and could not have possibly "saved" 2016.

Something nobody's mentioned here yet, in re asterisks and rubbing salt in wounds, is that the designer and maker of the asterisks is Jim Wright. Stonekettle Station Jim Wright. Who has a history of making thoughtful, detailed, angry posts from the point of view of an ex-military man and the-right-kind-of-person-to-be-conservative who nonetheless has no patience for bigots and people out of touch with reality claiming to be 'conservatives'.

I don't know for sure if he's posted about the Puppy thing, but it wouldn't surprise me; he regularly posts detailed takedowns of Tea Party nonsense, Gamergate, etc.

He was not a neutral random designer (unlike, say, the guy who did the Hugo bases, who is a fairly well known filker's husband but otherwise not terribly embroiled in Fannish Politics).

Criticizing the asterisks seems a bit odd. First of all, the Hugos really were compromised this year (at least, by the standards of past years). Why pretend otherwise?

And as far as "offense" goes, the asterisks weren't aimed at the winners--no one is casting doubt on the legitimacy of the vote. Rather, the asterisks were for the losers, as a way of saying, "because the nominations were screwed up, the votes may not reflect the true value of your work." It's kind of a mea culpa.

Unless, of course, one's work was nominated solely because of the puppies. THEN the asterisk becomes a rather pointed critique. But why would Toni Weisskopf think that anyone would believe that her nomination was solely due to puppy support?

262
I'm thinking that Toni had a good idea what the results were going to be, and didn't want to be present for the formal repudiaton of the canines.

Chris Battey: I just got my ribbons, thanks! (Thinking about how I can adapt it for badge-less wearing tomorrow....)

Regarding putting your asterisk for the ceremony:

I'll bet most of us--witty crew that we so often are--have been in that position where there is some tension, some hurt, some conflict, and a clever line pops into our head to point to it and laugh at it.

When it works, it relieves the tension; when it doesn't, it leaves us looking like jerks. As Scalzi says, the failure condition of clever is asshole. That's why we so often--okay, sometimes--decide not to say the clever thing. And more often than not, that's a good decision.

Okay, but here's the thing: As the MC of an award ceremony that his been ripped by conflict to such a degree that this conflict is the foremost thing on pretty much everyone's mind, you do not have the option of not saying it. If you say nothing, it sits there like a black hole sucking all the energy out of the room; if you address it directly it puts a damper on the evening. You *have* to do the witty thing. That is exactly your job.

And however you address it, some people are going to get bent out of shape, some people's feelings are going to be hurt, and you're going to be accused of being an asshole, and that's just the deal.

Was the asterisk bit the best way of addressing it? Frankly, I can't think of a better one. Maybe someone else can; but then other people's feelings would be hurt.

Do I think those who were hurt or offended are "wrong" to feel that way? I do not; in their position I'd feel the same way. But just because someone's feelings are legitmately hurt, it does not follow that someone else did something wrong and ought to feel shame.

jj@260 -- I am of course fully aware of the Hugo ratification process. In another thread and posting you will see the hack that allows an amendment which modifies the final ballot tallying process to affect the next year's Hugos, while amendments which modify the nomination process can only affect the Hugo nominations in 2 years. I continue to believe that there is a reason why write-in is used all around the world (even on WSFS site selection) as the corrective force for issues with nomination systems, and we would have been wise to consider that.

Of course, it is indeed unlikely that the business meeting would have done it. I blame myself for not getting around to it after I decided I could not attend the convention. However, in spite of common assertions to the contrary, it is technically possible under the standing rules to introduce new business after the deadline with consent of the chair or a majority of members. To have had that happen, there would have needed to be more time to absorb just how bad it is for 2016. All moot now.

The 1,800 is an upper bound on puppies, and comes from the fact that that many people voted puppy choices as first on their ballot in Novella. Some of those are not die-hard puppies, obviously, but this was so well publicised that I would be surprised if 1,000 non-puppies put those candidates first (ahead of No Award.) This was a relative small worldcon (by attendance) with immense numbers of extra supporting voters who supported primarily to express a view (one way or the other) on the Hugos and the puppies.

Consider this: 5 years ago, at another small con, only 792 people voted on Novella at all. In spite of all the evil of the puppies they have certainly boosted attention for the Hugos.

There were 2411 1st place votes for Puppy chosen long-form editors, 2214 for puppy-chosen short stories, 1672 for puppy chosen novelettes, 1642 for puppy-chosen related works.

If there were only 900 dedicated puppies, then as many as 700 to 1400 people -- people who largely voted only because of the puppy controversy -- placed a puppy choice first on their ballot, above No Award. More people than even voted at all at Aussiecon.

I am not sure there are 1,800 puppies. But I am fairly confident there are well over 1,000. I don't know if these puppies will get bored and not nominate in 2016, or if the reverse will happen and more will be recruited.

I have no fear for the final ballot. 2015 demonstrates fans will not give a Hugo to a slate candidate (excepting Guardians of the Galaxy which most fans seem to have decided was not really a slate candidate.) What I fear is that in 2016, with no write-in, and no ePH, that all categories the puppies care to control will grant no award, and that is no victory for fandom.

There are ways out of it. They are controversial. Counter-slates most obviously. Alternate awards (meaningful because there were no Hugos.) I am formulating some possible methods.

I hope I am wrong. I hope there are fewer puppies, and that they get demoralized, and independent fans get more energized. But even with 1,000 puppies, they will control traditional nomination even in the face of 5,000 independently nominating fans, with perhaps 1 or 2 exceptions. With 1,800 puppies, there are not even any exceptions.

When they made the joke, at the awards, it seemed a decent nod to the problem.

The thing is, in any category the puppies sullied, there is going to be doubt; at least so long as living memory lasts.

So making a nod to to it seemed tolerable; but that was before I found out they made it a pointed commentary, not an observation about extant circumstance.

Jim Wright's Worldcon-related Facebook posts
(you may need to log in to Facebook to see these, but you shouldn't need to be on his Friends list to see them; if you've been blocked by him for being an asshole on his wall, you're S.O.L.)

If you read only one of these, it should be "My Hugo Asterisk Bit".

It's official: I will be attending WorldCon 2015

Sasquan First Day

Sasquan Day 2 highlights

Sasquan Day 3: I Still Hate My Shower

Sasquan Day 3 highlights

Sasquan word of advice

Sasquan Day 3

Sasquan Day 4: The Hugo Awards

WorldCon: The Day After

Worldcon: My Hugo Asterisk Bit, the short version and the long version

I consider David Gerrold a personal friend

Nepos @262 wrote: Criticizing the asterisks seems a bit odd. First of all, the Hugos really were compromised this year (at least, by the standards of past years). Why pretend otherwise?

I have no problem at all with the existence of the asterisk, the rationale behind it, the use of it as a fundraiser, etc -- heck, I'd like to have one! I just don't like it as part of the ceremony with a thin pretense of exclamation points pasted on.

Steven Brust @265: Was the asterisk bit the best way of addressing it? Frankly, I can't think of a better one.

Fair point. I can't think of a better way, either, and your point about "not being able to not say it" is also a good one. I mostly intended to get into this topic as a way of reminding people that hurt feelings from the asterisk, just as hurt feelings from the blessing, are real and reasonable responses. And as no one is disagreeing with that, I'll let go of this particular bone.

---

So, I'm reading Linesman by S.K. Dunstall, who appears to be a pen name for two people though I haven't dug into who precisely (the acknowledgements are written in the plural). On the whole, it's been a good debut novel, but I felt like it hit a natural endpoint for a "kicking off a series" book at about the 80% mark and I'm not quite sure what to do with the last 50 pages or so.

And the reason for mentioning those asterisks at the Hugo Awards Ceremony?

They were being sold afterwards at the Info Booth to raise money for Sir Terry Pratchett's favorite charity. Mr. Gerold was trying to stir up demand...
not bad feelings.*

*My feelings are summed up by the lyrics of a song in Chicago -- "They had it comin'..."

Stephen @268: " I mostly intended to get into this topic as a way of reminding people that hurt feelings from the asterisk, just as hurt feelings from the blessing, are real and reasonable responses."

Just want to quote that so I can point to it and nod enthusiastically.

For JJ @ 269

Brad from Sunnyvale:

Of course, it is indeed unlikely that the business meeting would have done it. I blame myself for not getting around to it after I decided I could not attend the convention. However, in spite of common assertions to the contrary, it is technically possible under the standing rules to introduce new business after the deadline with consent of the chair or a majority of members. To have had that happen, there would have needed to be more time to absorb just how bad it is for 2016. All moot now.

I think to get it approved for consideration (given the givens) it would have to so obviously be an almost perfect corrective as to have near unanimous support; given that what you propose is gaming the system to make an end run around the normal process of ratification/effect.

That (plainly) is not the case

Nepos: And as far as "offense" goes, the asterisks weren't aimed at the winners--no one is casting doubt on the legitimacy of the vote. Rather, the asterisks were for the losers, as a way of saying, "because the nominations were screwed up, the votes may not reflect the true value of your work." It's kind of a mea culpa.

Given the historical-social context of "The Asterisk" I disagree. As a social object it appeared when Roger Maris beat Babe Ruth's single season home-run record. The fans who adulated Ruth the level of demi-god weren't happy. As a result MLB said Maris record would be recorded differently (i.e. with an asterisk) to denote it as a lesser achievement; because he didn't have to work as hard.

Elliot beat me to the punch on the issue of Jim Wright making the asterisks. Like me he is a veteran (Navy, Master Chief, perhaps the most idiosnyncratic, outspoken; don't get in their way, rank of NCO in any service; in any country). Like me he uses that status to speak to issues seen as "conservative" with the status that comes of being a vet, and so stop-thrusting a major line of attack.

Myke Cole wrote an Open Letter to Torgersen; it was pretty harsh, esp. for an officer. If Jim had written it... well lets say that being chewed out by an NCO is painful, by a Senior NCO raw, by a Master Chief, it's like having them use Ascorbic Acid Crystals on a case of road-rash covering your entire back.

So that wasn't neutral. Having him come to explain it wasn't neutral. It was a (moderately subtle, a la General Pace calling Rumsfeld "sir" as he told him, on national television he was fractally wrong) dig at Torgersen, and Wright and Beale.

And collateral damage should have been taken into account.

Some admission of the elephant in the room needed to be made. This could have been it, but mistakes were made in execution.

But, as abi pointed out, they have been tone-deaf; from the beginning.

Steven Brust@265, Stephen Rochelle@268 -- Yes, exactly. It was there; it had to be mentioned; there was basically no way of doing it perfectly, though I think Mr. Gerrold and Ms. Due did the best they could; the emotions are valid.

Even if I think the Puppies' approach and logic is wrong, they still have an emotional stake in the issue. Nothing wrong with that. And I sympathise.

(Other things on the internets surrounding this subject, I have more of an issue with, but we're not talking about those here.)

Terry Karney@274, I agree it wasn't neutral--it was an entirely deserved slam on the puppies, who did, in fact, screw up the Hugos as part of their continuing, and abhorrent, efforts to dehumanize most of humanity.

Let's not forget what we are dealing with, here--these sick puppies are virulent racists and misogynists who make Stormfront look moderate (as far as I know, the neo-Nazis don't typically advocate revoking female suffrage.)

If someone felt targeted by this relatively civil jab--maybe they shouldn't stand so close to scumbags.

Terry #273 -- actually it only requires an ordinary motion (51%) not unanimity, but again, this is all pretty moot. To happen, people would have needed to be strongly afraid of an all-no-award 2016. The hack is a hack, but not a violation of the spirit of the rules. The rules require ratification from a 2nd worldcon so that one single worldcon can't go nuts and change things willy-nilly. Once an amendment is ratified by that method, and people agree it's the right thing, there is nothing I have seen that says more delay is needed, and the sooner it can come into play the better.

The thing that would bother people about the hack is it goes against tradition. The WSFS constitution do not require Hugo tallying or awarding to be done during the convention (or in fact say anything about when they are done, other than after nomination and balloting) but by tradition they are done before the gavel is banged to close the worlcon. However, I think if fans were faced with the choice of a likely "All No Award" hugos before the gavel and a real Hugos after the gavel, I don't think they would have a hard time deciding which they wanted.

If you wanted to accelerate that, while it might be slightly controversial, it would break no written rules for the Hugo administrators to mention that under the old rules, 10 No Awards would be given out, not naming the categories. Such a declaration would cement the decision because nobody wants that other than maybe Vox Day.

But I don't think people need that. And if I had not had a schedule conflict, I could probably have sold it pretty well. But that's the past. Right now my concern is how to have a better 2016 Hugos, and even a better 2017 Hugos, because if the puppies really are 25% of nominators, they will still corrupt the 2017 Hugos quite a lot, even if ePH is ratified.

277
The WSFS constitution do not require Hugo tallying or awarding to be done during the convention

In fact, the counting is done before the convention, for logistical reasons.

PJE@277 -- well of course, but my point was really that the WSFS constitution does not specify when the tallying and awarding are done, though it is implicit in the requirement that the final results be published within 90 days that they be done no more than 90 days after the convention.

The point is, the tallying and voting can be done after the convention, and thus after newly ratified rules have gone into effect, which is at the close of the convention they were ratified at. Thus, if you wish it, you can have changes to the tallying rules come into effect in the next year's hugos. The rules require nomination and sending out of ballots to precede the convention.

I don't think this is in any way a bug, by the way. That something ratified at a convention would affect that convention if it so wishes seems perfectly reasonable. But it is still a kludge. But the WSFS Hugo rules are not a suicide pact. It would be foolish to stick to tradition just to have the MC read a lot of "no award" decisions.

Brad from Sunnyvale:

actually it only requires an ordinary motion (51%) not unanimity,

I think you misunderstand the political aspect of putting a motion to the floor which could be seen to subvert normal (as opposed to, allowable under the rules*) procedure to accelerate a proposal to modify the vote; and to modify it in a way that futher engages in parliamentary gamesmanship to execute in an expedited manner.

That's why I said approving it for consideration demands (which is different from *requires*) near unanimous agreement on it's merits.

Apart from my other objections (on logistics) I don't think you understand the "visuals" of so dramatically changing how balloting is done. It looks as if the vote is being rigged. The vast opening of the field (since it seems being nominated actually means being on the ballot) means all sort of shennanigans can be implied, inferred, and accused.

Rushing the consideration, and implementation, pretty much guarantees an intractable accusation of conspiracy to keep "non-cabal" candidates out. Even if I thought it were workable (on all levels), I don't think it acceptable.

Nepos: I don't forget what we are dealing with. I was here when Beale made his (thankfully few) attempts to browbeat us, some dozen years ago.

I'd already encountered him elsewhere. I've spent a significant portion of the past six years engaging him, and his followers, in other fora.

I am well aware.

I am also aware that there are those whom he injured by his methods. He may not give a rat's ass for the harm that caused (in truth I think he wants them hurt; thinking it will bring them into his fold. Machiavelli he ain't, but that's not beyond him), but I do.

No matter how much contempt I have for the Beales, and Wrights of the world, no matter my angry disappontment at the Torgersens and Correias, and my disgusted disdain for those who; in the full knowledge of what has already been done choose to take up their banner for the future; I am not going to forsake my charity for those who were otherwise deserving, and have been abused for those who chose to co-opt them to their cause.

Yes, I might rather they chose the high-road, but you know what... I'm not in their shoes. I'm not looking at being of merit for the award, nominated to it; possessed of work in the year which isn't deserving of rejection out of hand, and trying to decide if I'll ever get another shot at it.

So no, I'm not going to say that what you think is a "civil jab" doesn't merit them feeling abused in public.

And I shall not abuse them for how they reacted.

Brad from Sunnyvale, #277: if I had not had a schedule conflict, I could probably have sold it pretty well.

I think you vastly underestimate the intelligence, the skepticism, and the caution of the WSFS Business Meeting attendees. I'm not being unkind, but your proposal would have been regarded as a last-second, ill-considered, half-assed attempt and I think it would most likely never have seen a second of debate time before it was dismissed.

The people who go to that meeting take their responsibilities to Worldcon very seriously, and "last-second, ill-considered, half-assed" is just never even on the table there (at least for more than a couple of seconds; there were a few of those things proposed this weekend, and if you blinked, you missed them).

Hell, "well-planned, highly-developed, thoroughly-tested" things usually take several years before they get passed. Adoption of EPH was by no means a certain thing this year -- and it took months and months of hard work, testing, documentation, and concise, persuasive arguments to get it done.

Melissa Singer@177: Fair points all, except that I am absolutely not a Christian. I was raised areligious by an atheist and agnostic. But I've been lucky in that I've never run into trouble for that.

As a point of context, the asterisk was also something that was introduced in David Gerrold's Guest of Honor speech on Friday afternoon, and given his specific emphasis on the exclamation points constructing it, read to me like an attempt to make a positive out of a negative, *particularly* given what we now know about people kept *off* the ballot.

This is second-hand, but comes from multiple sources who know Person X well: Person X, a person on the slates, really, really wanted off the Hugo ballot almost as soon as it was announced, and was a third person--like Juliette Wade, and others--who was apparently not consulted *at all* about being on it.

But was legitimately terrified of how they might be targeted, personally and professionally, by at least one of the Puppy Leaders if X requested removal, so has just been very, very quietly waiting for this to end.

I really wish I'd known this before the voting, but I've used up all my anger. Now I'm just sad.

I didn't applaud at the announcement of No Awards, but there are levels of damage here we don't even know about. I'm friends with a good friend of Alyssa Wong, who would've been a freaking Campbell nominee if not for the slates.

Which is why I really can't be bothered by the asterisk. My empathy on this particular issue is used up.

Brad from Sunnyvale:

The point is, the tallying and voting can be done after the convention, and thus after newly ratified rules have gone into effect, which is at the close of the convention they were ratified at. Thus, if you wish it, you can have changes to the tallying rules come into effect in the next year's hugos. The rules require nomination and sending out of ballots to precede the convention.

This is precisely what I meant. That, no matter how legal it might be, is going to be (legitimately, IMO) called changing the rules in mid-stream.

And the accusation that it was done to prevent some people from being awarded Hugos they otherwise would have, is going to be hard to refute.

That's without getting into the problem of how one decides to count ballots; since the rules in effect when they were cast, are not the rules in effect when counted.

Brad @277 wrote: Right now my concern is how to have... a better 2017 Hugos, because if the puppies really are 25% of nominators, they will still corrupt the 2017 Hugos quite a lot, even if ePH is ratified.

Ehh... I think a campaign built around "deny two nomination slots to the Great and Powerful Tor" will lose peripheral support pretty quickly. It's not near as catchy as "sweep the ballot", and that sort of branding matters if an agitator is going to keep a bunch of henchmen motivated year after year (particularly when those henchmen are fronting real money year after year).

(I elided your mention of 2016 because I agree that it's a concern -- though my principle concern there would be seeing that EPH has enough support in the business meeting to ensure ratification.)

As for your proposed end-around: you did see that 4/6 -- a comparatively conservative Puppy-responding adjustment -- just barely passed at 86/82, yes? That it picked up about 30% more opposition than EPH despite being far easier to explain (and lost over 50% of the support as people left the meeting satisfied that enough had been done)? That people just wanted the meeting to hurry up and end? There is absolutely zero chance that your let's-just-twist-everything-to-the-textual-limit idea (and let's leave off "within the spirit") would have had any traction at all, personal charisma or no.

Brad, the Hugos belong, literally, to WSFS, and thus are legitimately part of Worldcon. It's the high point for a lot of attendees - if you were watching the livestream, you saw how full the hall was!

What you're proposing would effectively kill the Hugos as part of Worldcon, and do serious damage to the convention itself.
And for what? To make the awards more valuable?
No, to have write-ins on the final ballots. Which no one else seems to think is desirable, or they'd have been available years ago. (And which all the admins would argue against, because it's their workload you're wanting to fuck with.)

I've had a couple of interesting discussions about puppyhood and Hugos with some people at Sasquan. Based on that, I have a nagging feeling that I am essentially a moderate in this fracas.

Let me try to clarify: Last year's and this year's slates were appalling (that specifically is the slates and not a comment on the works that were on the slates, some of which I had read and enjoyed, some of whch I have read and really did not like). I wish they'd never happened and the loophole opened up had never been found and exploited.

I don't consider the heavy presence of Noah Ward in the end results as a victory. I consider it as a loss, but a loss that is survivable as something that sends a strong signal that slates are not acceptable. It is a loss for "us", it is a loss for "them". It is, in short, a loss for all of us.

One of the things that came up in conversation is that what may be needed is a bunch of "I read these, you may enjoy them". Ideally, these lists should be a very small fraction of the number of nomination slots (is a list of 1 item a list? the programmer in me says "yes", but...) or at least N times the size (intuitively, 3 feels like a good lower bound on N, so "15, for now", but I could possibly see 2 as an absolute lower bound (so "10, for now")).

To facilitate that, I handed out the URL to my "book meme" project (not underwritten by anyone but me), wherein I write a short thing about every published work that I read (the very first, back in 200x was the manual for a Stanley angle tool thing that I picked up, on the basis that starting a new year with a resolution and breaking it on January 1st is a bad idea). Things that are unpublished do not get counted (because those things are seldom in their final stage of polish and are frequently read with an explicit or implicit NDA).

If people think this might be a handy thing, I am happy to provide the URL to the tagged posts, to some sort of collection keeper, on the promise that the curated collection is scrupulously neutral to the politics and whats-have-you of the collected links. However, marking the link collection(s) may be an advisable thing.

Now, can we just get our wider community to start healing, in the hope of a better year, before EPH comes in force and makes healing moot?

Sumana @ 125

Thank you for the links. Yes, I will read some of those things and see if I can find the movies to watch them.

(coming back later) My word! "Archana and Chandni" is delightful! Thank you for linking it. It's late enough that I'm going to have to finish Elizabeth Bear's story tomorrow. But I appreciate the link to that also.

James Harvey #157

I avoided Interstellar because it looked like it was going to be as depressing as all get out. Guardians of the Galaxy, on the other hand, was fun. It made me laugh. I enjoyed it.

Why people pay $20 to watch people suffer for three hours is beyond me...

Melissa Singer #177

Yes, exactly. When I've heard UU deliver "non-denominational" prayer it has been "in Jesus's name amen." When people say "non-denominational" I hear "inclusive of all sects of Christianity." Country and western, as it were.

Regarding the asterisks:
Something about the presenters' accents ... I kept thinking of the other other other meaning of an asterisk, that being the 1* ... pronounced "one ass to risk", a favored slogan among mil-spec-ops-force types (or as they would say, "operating operators who operate operationally")

I see that according to Breidbart:

"The social justice warrior onslaught was co-ordinated on the blog of Tor books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his wife Teresa. Patrick and Teresa are, if you like, the Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine of this space opera."

Welcome to the Death Star, I guess.

#253: My wife and I have the opposite reaction to Sense8. Once we started watching we couldn't stop except when we had to sleep. We had the same reaction the second time through, which was just this last weekend.

I have some issues with the overarching plot but the character interactions are incredibly powerful. I haven't loved any TV this much since Buffy.

Certain members of the Sad Puppies faction made it VERY clear at the business meeting that they absolutely should not be conflated with the Rabid Puppies. I'm not talking about just saying it, like the detestable BT; I'm talking about getting up and speaking in favor of EPH (in the process saying "I'm a Sad Puppy, not a Rabid one"), and voting for it.

So there are some members of that faction who aren't forever-and-always evil, unlike the Rabid ones. They can (sometimes) be worth talking to.

Steven 265: I agree. And if it was anything from stinging to burning for the Puppy nominees...well, as Theseus said to Procrustes...

Rob 290: Being denounced in Breidbart is probably uncomfortable and may cause trouble for the person denounced...but GODS what an honor!

Ingvar 287: I don't consider the heavy presence of Noah Ward in the end results as a victory. I consider it as a loss, but a loss that is survivable as something that sends a strong signal that slates are not acceptable. It is a loss for "us", it is a loss for "them". It is, in short, a loss for all of us.

It is a loss, yes. Just as having the left side of my tongue removed was a loss.

I'll leave the parallel as an exercise for the reader.

myself @ #287:

Hey, me of about an hour ago (I think...), when you said "makes healing moot", you meant "makes healing no longer affect the Hugos, because EPH is just that awesome". What you said sounds like PEH is a bad thing. You should totally have done better.

Ooooh thank you for all the pointers to translators and translations!

The conversation here made me take another look at the Mary Poppins fic I mentioned earlier, "Promise of the पुरवाई" by Dhobi ki Kutti, which the author wrote a few years ago for the Racebending Revenge Challenge run by the Dark Agenda community. About one word in every sentence is in Hindi. I don't know Hindi, so I'd only understood the English layer before. Today I took an hour to read the story with my mom and grok the story's allusions, wordplay, and many-dimensioned subversiveness. I learned how much I already knew, e.g., "Guru-dakshina". And I learned new things. Did you know that, in Hindi, "kal" is a word for "one day away from today" and thus works both as "yesterday" and "tomorrow"? It all works out fine, evidently, because tenses.

This is probably the first fanfic I've ever shown my mom, so we all learned something today!

Jacque @ #196: "Archana and Chandni" is a 2015 publication. Am I right in inferring that you might like to see additional recs for textual Hinduism-related speculative fiction published in 2015?

Bruce Adelsohn @ #150: I today bought a few Amar Chitra Katha comics, which you might be able to find in a local South Asian grocery store near the DVDs (that's where I found mine; I don't think I've ever seen them stocked in a US comic book store). I feel an urge to recommend secular books at you even though they are not speculative fiction! Government Brahmana by Aravind Malagatti is a memoir of growing up Dalit in Karnataka, the Indian province my family comes from (thus, my Brahmin ancestors probably oppressed his lower-caste ancestors). Lavanya Sankaran's The Hope Factory: if you're looking for an English-language novel set in modern-day Bangalore, spanning rich and poor, family and business and politics, check this out. And here is Jo Walton's recommendation of Vikram Seth's epic novel A Suitable Boy. There have been bad days in my life where one of the prospects that sustains me is that sometime next year the sequel, A Suitable Girl, is going to be available for me to read. And there's fic for it on Archive Of Our Own, in case that's a selling point.

Jan Vaněk jr. @ #197: I haven't read any of his work yet, sorry. (And by the way, per an earlier comment, nor have I yet read any Zelazny, Lord of Light included.)

Cat @ #288: Oh I am so happy that you enjoyed "Archana and Chandni"! Please join me in loving Iona Sharma's other short stories, all available to read online without cost.

Oh, I'm not suggesting not to have the Hugos at the Worldcon! That would be terrible. The plan (as I said, detailed elsewhere) is to have them at that event of course, but after the gavel bangs to close the official Worldcon.

But it's not changing the rules in mid stream. As I said -- but perhaps you disagree -- I think the system is designed so that it takes two conventions both agreeing to bring about a change. I don't think that's the same as saying the change should be delayed even if we think it's important. It is a hack, but some hacks are good, and the core spirit of dual approval is a good one, and is preserved. However, it is not something I would talk about doing in other than extraordinary times. None of us can be certain, but I think there is a lot we should and would be willing to do, including non-traditional hacks of the rules, if faced with having all-no-award.

Brad: If the gavel bangs, and the rules in play before the con convened aren't the same rules by which the ballots are counted... how is that *not* changing the rules mid-stream?

Moreover, when there are motions in play, which don't require such shenannigans, why do it?

Does having to deal with one more year of a system easily gamed being attacked by people willing to game it suck?

Yes.

Does the idea of playing fast and loose with fairness, of gaming the system to "beat" them; when the means to defeat them fairly exist (and have already been effective?) bother me?

Yep.

Is it possible for Beale, et. al, to shit in the punch again? Yes. Can we stop them a second time?

I think so. I esp. think so if EPH and 4/6 are likely to pass, because it's just one more time.

I really don't like the idea of letting ends justify means.

As they say, "Hard cases make bad law". We have a "good law" in play. They also say, "the perfect is the enemy of the good. Putting aside that I don't think your proposal is good, it sure as hell ain't perfect and what we have under consideration is good enough (it may even be; for what we want; preventing a slate from running the table)coming closer to perfect than anything else will.

Brad @277:
if the puppies really are 25% of nominators, they will still corrupt the 2017 Hugos quite a lot, even if ePH is ratified.

If the puppies are 25% of the nominators, they should get about 25% of the slots on the ballot. EPH (note capitalization) would give them that.

That's not corruption; that's democracy.

More generally: if the way you've approached conversations about your proposal on Making Light are an example of how you would sell it at the Business Meeting, I don't see that you would have succeeded at Sasquan. You've certainly not persuaded even a single person here to support either the proposal or your ideas about how to get it in quickly.

Even leaving aside my opinions of write-in (and the dreadful idea of the committee, which you have thankfully abandoned) I am really appalled by the way you wanted to sneak it into effect for the 2016 Hugos on a technicality. You are completely blind to the ways that would deepen the rifts that we would so desperately like to heal. It's clear that you don't regard even the Sad Puppy followers as legitimate fans and real members of our wider community, because you're totally willing to give them a slap in the face that will last for decades.

Do you think these people are going to go away, and do so quietly and happily, if you so conspicuously cut them out? And do you think that that would be a good thing if they did, when they're fellow fans, readers and buyers of our genre?

For someone whose selling point is that he has a human solution, you haven't played the human factor at all well here. Just a thought to counter the "ah, had I only been at Sasquan, all could have been saved."

Brad @277

I'm gonna hafta go with abi here: while I am virulently opposed to the very concept of slates, literally any solution we could offer (even the one we should absolutely never pursue, which is competing full slates) would look better, feel better, and BE better for everyone involved - us, the puppies, and curious outsiders.

Yesterday, a friend was suggesting 'dueling full slates, but only for one year' and I told him that was the worst possible solution. I'll have to apologize to him tonight... it's now only the second worst possible solution I've heard, though yours does require a time machine.

Sorry, I'm not usually that glib... but it's late, and I'm a bit stressed. Still, consider this: the community has been aware of the potential slate exploit for YEARS (at least since 87, with growing awareness in the last decade), and have similarly been aware it would take two years to fix if it became a problem. Sure, a lot of people probably thought "Hey, even the Scientologists didn't have the guts to do it, what are the chances we'd get a group more aggro than that?" but most people were well aware of the possibility.

None of the news this year comes out of nowhere. Like, half the SMOFs I know are just shrugging their shoulders and saying "Well, we finally found somebody to out-crazy Hubbard's bunch. I guess I owe Frank that sawbuck after all."

#107 & #108: Haven't grepped all postings ever, but I'd guess that this is the first time both "boustrophedon" and "thurible" have been contained in the same Making Light thread. Adjacent postings, at that!

Brad: I'm gonna talk about why you are getting the sort of push back you are.

You've been tone deaf on this from the start (and I saw that you've been suggesting this for a little while now; if I read the dates correctly, in time to have put it on the agenda): and no one been saying, "Oh, that might work, let's game it out and polish it up".

No one.

That's a clue.

Maybe this is the perfect technical solution. But this isn't a technical problem. It's (as you admit) a human one. And you are ignoring the human element. What's baffling is it's the same element which is the root cause of all this.

Everyone (of good faith) involved in this is upset about fairness.

The puppy supporters think the game has been rigged against the puppies.

We think slating the ballot wasn't fair.

They think No Awarding the slate wasn't fair*

We can fix it. But the fix has to be, like Caesar's wife, beyond any possible appearance of unfairness.

So I apologise. I shouldn't have so stressed the logistical problem. That was me being stupid. At it's core I didn't like it because of the unfairness of the 2016 solution you were proposing; but I discarded that as a persuasive tool because it was irrelevant, since it couldn't be implemented.

I missed that a big part of what you saw as a feature was the very kernel of treating the puppy supporters without either fairness, or charity.

This, is not yet, a civil war in fandom (though that is, I think, Beale's desired end-state). The only way it can become one is if we, as the party with the whip hand, don't treat the people who misunderstand what is happening; the people who feel hard done by, without consideration.

We need to be compassionate. We need to be fair. We need to be aboveboard. We need to avoid cheap tricks and disenfranchising devices. We need to remember that conventions don't sell tickets, the fans buy memberships.

We are all in this together, Neofans, casual fans, "trufans" fanzine fans, filk fans, lit-fans, media fans, costumer fans, smofs, etc.

This, as abi says, tells those who disagree with our position to piss up a rope.

I, for one, won't stand for it. If you put it to the agenda for MidAmeriCon, I will go to Kansas; even if it means I miss Helsinki.

Because I will not shaft other fans, for a "Victory" which sows dissension.

*and for several reasons the argument that the works suggested were crap doesn't fly

Ingvar@287 -- I'm always interested in people's reactions to things they have read, and am always interested in more Lists Of Things That Came Out This Year.

So sure.

Abi @ 298 You are completely blind to the ways that would deepen the rifts that we would so desperately like to heal.

This is why I was talking in the previous thread about trying to find a way to translate the Puppies' ideas into some format which can be discussed sanely. We should be open to the idea that "box checking" can damage a story, or that graduates from a college writing program might deal differently with stories and science-fiction than those from a technical background and be willing to talk about it.

We don't have to forgive the Vox Days of this world, or engage politely with people named Brad, Larry, Lou, John or Sarah, but as far as I'm concerned, everyone else is probably worth talking to.

Stephen Rochelle @ 269: I've been recommending Linesman a lot in the past couple of weeks. I liked it so much that I reread it almost immediately, which is rare for me. The authors are Sherylyn and Karen Dunstall (they're sisters).

The other book I've been recommending around this year is Forgotten Suns, by Judith Tarr. (That's the other book I immediately reread this year. Normally I wait at least a month before rereading something.)

I seem to be on a space opera kick this year, I don't know why.

AlexR @303

I agree with much of what you say here, though it also illustrates why these conversations are going to be challengin.

Your line about "box-checking" is something I hear all the time, and it is often at worst a dogwhistle and at best a sign of unmarked cognitive biases.

The idea that straight white male represents unchecked boxes and anything else represents checked boxes is a bad piece of brain furniture that totally fucks up your mental Feng Shui.

I don't even necessarily think that's what you meant or had in mind when you used that phrase, but man oh man I have literally never heard "box-checking" maligned by anyone who did not have a strong picture in their head of what an "unchecked box" looks like. This is not malicious, it is something almost everyone does subconsciously. One of the best articles I've ever read about it was by one of the creators of Bojack Horseman, on how he realized he'd internalized male as the comedy default. And while I know plenty of people who will respond with the same "Oh, I get it now!" as that guy did, there are many, many more who will not. It's really hard to start that conversation over and over.

At the same time, Laura J. Mixon's piece and resulting win should be seen as a stark and important commentary on the real potential problems of certain habits of what I will admit I commonly consider "our side." RH was very scary, crossing them was dangerous, and they exploited the politics and language of the left to cause great harm.

I don't know, this doesn't really flow, but hopefully it's at least coherent. I'm on a plane waiting to take off, so it's airplane mode for me for the next few hours.

Regarding the issue of "box checking" Foz Meadows had what I thought was a very good explanation of why people who consider a writer's or protagonists gender or minority status are not ignoring quality the way the Puppies seem to fear.

I will link it here: Peeling The Onion

Sarah @289:

In both of my UU churches, I have never heard anyone pray in Jesus' name, not even the self-identified Christian minister. He's been mentioned as one figure among many, but never invoked in that particular manner. Was this in a non-UU setting? I'd be quite upset if I heard that in church, and would have a conversation with the minister about it. (And I have in fact called out the aforementioned Christian UU minister, when she expressed confusion about why atheists would go to church, for being unwelcoming and ill-informed. She apologized and has been better about that since.) UU is variable from congregation to congregation, and person to person within congregations even more so than most faiths, so generalizing is very fraught. I will say I've had atheist ministers and vaguely theist ministers and some whose status I frankly don't know.

As for "non-denominational", I have never understood it to be even intended to be anything other than "non-specific Christianity"; "interfaith" is what I see when the intent is to be more inclusive than that.

I'll give Rick and Morty a recommendation! I've been watching it ever since Steve Stiles sat me down and showed me a sample. Not only is it up to the windows in SF tropes, but the inter-family relationships have taken on some remarkable resonances as a result of various, eh, adventures. Personalities are caustic, and damn near toxic in some cases.

I thought the show was heartless at first (hilariously so), but it turns out that the heart is there. It just takes some hard knocks, and gives a few. It's personality-driven: these things happen to these people because they're the way they are.

At first, they didn't give a lot of attention to Morty's sister, Summer, but that has been remedied. Maybe they can make Jerry less of an idiot some day (he has stepped up to the plate a couple of times and shown some ability in a pinch).

There's a fair amount of grossness in it, which will seriously dampen the enjoyment of a subset of possible viewers, so I mention it now. They say "shit" from time to time, and it's not always metaphoric.

There's a strangely extemporaneous feel to some of the gags, as if some of the recording sessions are improvised. I've chosen to find this amusing, so far. The character designs remind me a little of Kim Deitch's comics. It was pointed out that Rick and Morty resemble Doc Brown and Marty. Huh. Morty. Marty. Huh. Anyway, it's pretty much a surface resemblance. Doc Brown is far more moral than Rick, and strictly Earth-based. Rick is rude, careless, alcoholic (and familiar with drugs we don't get on this planet), and conversant with many seasons worth of alien cultures and technologies.

(on previewing) I'll just stop here.

Abi@298:

If the puppies are 25% of the nominators, they should get about 25% of the slots on the ballot. EPH (note capitalization) would give them that.

That's not corruption; that's democracy.

I find this idea disturbing. Slates are inherently corrupting, because they do not represent people's actual preferences. The Hugo ballot ought to consist of works that a lot of people have actually judged to be good. That way voters can make an informed choice, with a good chance of picking out the best, or something likely to be widely recognised as such. If a large chunk of the ballot consists of works that three people have chosen, and urged other people to vote for in order to achieve an external purpose, the process is corrupted.

EPH addresses one source of corruption, the disproportion between votes and outcome. It does not address the other source, the disproportion between actual preferences and votes. I don't know, at the moment, of anything that would address that. I don't think Brad's proposal would work, for various reasons. But I think it's reasonable to keep looking for ways of improving things.

I suspect that the only long term solution is to get slates to go away; persuade the more reasonable Puppy sympathisers to change their tactics (because there are perfectly legitimate ways of getting stuff they like on the ballot), and keep No Awarding the others until they stop. I guess they will. If they don't, and Vox Day still controls a spot on the ballot twenty years from now, the value of the Hugos is at the very least seriously impaired.

Alex R @303:

We should be open to the idea that "box checking" can damage a story

Well, possibly, except I've never yet seen "box checking" so it's a hard hypothetical to test. What I have seen are stories with diverse casts of characters get derided as "box checking", when they have characters who differ from what the speaker perceives as the default (straight white men) who don't have a Good Reason to be so; there was a lengthy and rather acrimonious thread here on ML a couple years ago where someone representing this attitude explained he didn't mind gay characters, as long as their being gay was relevant to the plot, but regarded a random character happening to be gay as clearly the result of political correctness. Often people who dislike box checking will feel that one token minority character is acceptable, but more than one? Box-checking.

So, if you've seen box checking damage stories, can you name some titles? It's easier to discuss specifics than hypotheticals.

Brad--I've only been to two business meetings, but I'll echo the comments above in that the business meeting is very cautious and the post gavel approach would almost certainly not have a chance of passing.
We'll deal with 2016 as it comes. If it means that everything is No Award, that is unfortunate, but is really the only option at this point unless there is either a remarkable show of self restraint from the SP/RP groups or there are way more nominations than the usual numbers would lead us to expect.
Getting everyone who voted for the Hugo's this year to nominate next year and then some would be a very useful thing but the multiplication factor for slates make the numbers very difficult to achieve.

Kip@308, Rick could also be compared with the Doctor (and has been, by the show's creators) -- except in a universe that tends strongly towards the horrible and psychologically damaging instead of wondrous. In this comparison, I guess Morty and Summer both get to be Susan.

Leah Miller @ 305 said: "The idea that straight white male represents unchecked boxes and anything else represents checked boxes is a bad piece of brain furniture that totally fucks up your mental Feng Shui."

I just want to take that sentence, buff it up, and admire it.

Well said.

Andrew @309 wrote: If they don't [stop slating], and Vox Day still controls a spot on the ballot twenty years from now, the value of the Hugos is at the very least seriously impaired.

I can't help but think that this is unreasonably projecting this year's slating (and the long-term damage it could do if continued) onto post-EPH slating.

Supposing someone aggressively runs a slate for 20 years (and that they persuade enough people to keep paying money to make that slate work), what's the net effect? The Hugos are de facto reduced to 4 finalist slots. That's disappointing, sure, but I don't see where "seriously impaired" falls out of that. And if 4/6 also ratifies, the net effect will be that the Hugos are reduced to 5 finalist slots -- just like they have been all along.

I'm comfortable filing away a long-term hate campaign to lock down one slot in the "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" category.

Leah, I also love the "mental feng shui" phrasing.

It's something writers and readers need to internalize: every character has a sex and a gender, an ethnicity, an appearance, and so on. As their creator, you may or may not have any idea about these features as you go along. But you make decisions besides relying on the whims of inspiration, whether to fill in details for the reader, what you know but wish to allude to or outright conceal (I have John Scalzi and Emma Bull right here to talk about that last choice), and so on. But not making an effort to think about some features for some characters is a choice, and so is leaving them out of some characters' descriptions and not others.

In this regard, I recommend to Puppies-leaning readers James S.A. Corey's Expanse series: it's an exciting tale of clashing human cultures, epic disaster, war and near-war, and long-distance alien encounter, a kind of story that's been a welcome part of the sf tradition since the beginning. But the guys who collaborate as Corey show how some more modern features coexist well with the tradition, and one part of that is character description. They assume you'd like to know what people look like, and they describe their people in ways that don't presume that everyone's white, or male, or whatever, unless otherwise marked - the white people are described as straightforwardly as everyone else, and the men as straightforwardly as the woman.

Cool stuff.

lorax #307

I was there; I know what I heard.

Brad, I'd just like to point out one thing. Your suggested procedure for getting the rule change into effect quickly is technically within the rules, but against all custom and precedent.

"Technically within the rules, but against all custom and precedent" is exactly what the Puppies did this year to get themselves so thoroughly No Awarded.

Attempting to knock loose an Internal Server Error.

Stephen Rochelle: Well, I wouldn't rule out his getting two slots. As I understand it EPH isn't strictly proportional; a slate can still do better than its mere numbers suggest if the opposition to it is very divided.

But in any case, I think that even with one slot, the value of the Hugos is impaired, because 'Hugo nominee' is no longer a sign of quality. (Or at least of widely perceived quality.)

Last year the Puppies did not get more than two slots in any category. The value of the awards was still impaired.

I'd have thought so too, a year ago. But now I've come to understand that something like 15% of the Hugo voters have got a taste for right-wing message fiction. That's not my taste, but it's theirs and it's valid, and there are enough such people that their taste ought to be represented with the occasional nomination.

Sarah @316, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to question your experience. I'm just saying that mine differs.

Related to the box-checking, there's a subtle thing in Anansi Boys which I confess I only noticed on the second reread. In a lot of fiction, the narrative voice will casually mention characters' race in their introduction if and only if they are not white. ("Joe is a black man, about fifty-five, and he's wearing a custom-tailored suit and sunglasses.") In Anansi Boys, the narrative voice instead does this when characters are not black.

In principle, changing the default this way and not making a fuss about it seems like a clever authorial move, but there is a downside, viz. it's possible to not notice and thus go through the entire book without realizing that most of the characters are black. Sort of the same thing where Johnny Rico isn't obviously Filipino and I have encountered people who insist that he's white.

Roger @ 252... I apologize for what I said and for misinterpreting your original comment.

But, Laertes, nobody's saying otherwise, surely? The problem is with them gaming the system to get more nominations than they actually deserve - which would be a problem whoever was doing it.

That's what I get for not specifying what I'm replying to.

"I'd have thought so too" was a response to Andrew M's "Last year the Puppies did not get more than two slots in any category. The value of the awards was still impaired."

I thought so at the time. Now I think that the Hugos aren't diminished by the occasional right-wing message-fic nominee. There's a lot of people who like that stuff.

Just a note on the number of Sad / Rabid Puppies from one half of the "4 and 6" team:

Some of us read (at least the first part of) everything and voted accordingly. So, in my case, I voted for "Big Boys Don't Cry," "Totaled" and 3 or 4 deep in both Editor categories. Those votes inflate Puppy power.

Well, for one thing, do 15% have a taste for right-wing message fiction? It looks like some of them voted that way in order to cause annoyance rather than because they actually liked the stuff.

But even if they do, the slate is still giving them an unfair advantage. Suppose 15% of voters have a taste for alternate history. That won't get them a regular spot on the ballot, unless they can agree which work of alternate history to vote for - which they won't be able to do unless they have a slate. (Normally; sometimes an outstanding work will turn up.) If lovers of right wing message fiction continue to run a slate, and other people don't, the situation is still unfair.

A reporter asked me, from Sasquan, whether this discussion is going to be good for science fiction and the Hugos. I replied "Ask me in 10 years. We won't know until then." I stand by that statement: we've had a big event, and we don't know how it's going to shake out.

Leah Miller @305, Cat @306, et alia in regards to Default Humanity and noticing it: There's a really good
walkthrough of a guy noticing and realizing here.

loran @307, in re UU variability: Not only are there explicitly Jesus-filled congregations, there is a large subset of American UUs that are bigoted against queer folks. A friend of mine was shocked, upon moving to a new town, to go into her nearest UU congregation for services and end up feeling slapped in the face by all the content of the service. That's when she learned that you have to look carefully for the rainbow decal on the sign to make sure you're going to get an "open and affirming" congregation. Ever since, I've been looking, and she's right, there's way more bigoted UU groups than I would have thought even slightly plausible.

In my experience, a bit over half the congregations I've had reason to interact with have been explicitly heavily theistic (saying "God" every third sentence at least, shading towards the Christian end of things at the other end of the spectrum), and at least a quarter very obviously being "ecumenical" by including ALL kinds of Christian, not by actually embracing the full spectrum of human religious belief when it comes to creators and fundamental deity.

Sarah @289 & #316

I have never heard of any UU ending anything with "In Jesus' name' except satirically.

This includes visits to 5 UU churches.

However, I am sure it happens, just at a lower frequency than homages to Mohammed, Buddha, Hindu Gods, Zarathustra, Moses, Gaia, Mother Earth, The Great Spirit, honored ancestors, spirits of the north south east and west, Darwin, humanity, and science.

Re: translation, Ken Liu gave an excellent presentation on the subject at ReaderCon, drawing on both scholarship and personal experience, that I very much hope he will publish in some form.

Re: ethnicity of characters, I have been thinking for some time of a post made several years ago by Mary Anne Mohanranj (apologies if I have misspelled her name) on John Scalzi's blog. She recommended strongly that writers identify the ethnicity of their characters. In general I agree, but I think there may also be exceptions, especially in SF.

I'm thinking of reading Asimov's far-future books for the first time, many decades ago, and noticing that because of the completely made-up names and, frankly, fairly shallow characterizations, we usually have no idea what ethnic group the characters are. Therefore, they can be anything the reader wants them to be! I see this as a feature, not a bug, and I think it may have been deliberate on the part of the author. I'm guessing that people who read the books in translation probably imagine the characters as members of their own group, whatever that may be.

Cat @ 90: Of course filkers are included. All fen who've passed shou;d be. I doesn't (and shouldn't) matter what their sympathies are.

Estee @331: I would find the idea of extrapolating diversity into Asimov more convincing if his unmarked characters ever acted in any way as if they weren't mainstream middle-class-or-better white Americans. They don't ever even appear to have subcultural distinctions among themselves, for the most part, especially in his short works and juveniles. Everyone has one single culture and it's this one.

On the other hand, go back and read some of Judy Blume's iconic middle-school novels -- many of the background characters in those books (especially the ones set in New York public schools, etc) were nonwhite, but her publisher explicitly told her the book couldn't be published if they were mentioned as such. Any girl who's described as "dark" with "very curly hair" is Ms. Blume doing her best to get an explicitly black character into the book. Etc. Luckily, modern illustrators are now allowed to put the always-intended-to-be-there diversity into the internal illustrations, and in some of the 'updated' editions she has gone back and made her intentions plainer.

@Laertes

I am far less confident on the 15% figure then you are. We do not know how many people voted just to 'kick the SJWs' and without any great affection for the listed works. We do not know how many people voted who knew little of the puppy slates, or who judged the final ballot on merit and found some works worthy enough to place above No Award.

I would be happier saying that there is a minority who prefer conservative SF but to my mind that is quite a bit wider than what the puppies want to serve up.

@333:

"I would find the idea of extrapolating diversity into Asimov more convincing if his unmarked characters ever acted in any way as if they weren't mainstream middle-class-or-better white Americans. They don't ever even appear to have subcultural distinctions among themselves, for the most part, especially in his short works and juveniles. Everyone has one single culture and it's this one."

In Asimov's later books, he seemed to be making an effort to improve with that issue - in "Forward the Foundation" (I think it's that one) he explicitly talks about different cultures in different areas of Trantor. Parts of the plot are driven by the fact that a character who is from a poorly-regarded culture is passing as a member of more favored culture, and other characters from a culture that is characterized on Trantor as ill-educated and unsophisticated have become academics (as part of Seldon's group).

Sumana @ 125

Thank you so much for these links.

I suspect that Asimov was thinking that in the far future, races will have disappeared, as it is prejudice that prevents them completely mingling now, and this will in time be overcome. (I think that's an oversimplification of reality, but I'm guessing it's what he thought.) In his later books he recognises different ethnicities existing in the future, but they are newly developed ethnicities, not continuations of present ones.

Alex R: I, for one, am not going to be discussing the Eric Raymond thesis anytime soon, not least because I don't have the sense you are using it in good faith; since you have said you aren't ready to engage with it critically yourself; while you seemed to be perfectly willing to explain why those who were engaging with it were wrong.

Given that, I am less than completely sanguine about your use of "box-checking" which, as a term, has a lot of baggage, and some ugly implications. By it's very nature that term puts the argument into defending an author's choices, rather than one of, "is it a good story."

The Problem with the "box checking" narrative is that it assumes, by default, that there is a "normal" and any deviation is either needed for plot, or purely there as a political statement.

The issue isn't, so far as I can tell, one of "is this good for the story", but one of "what the fuck are you doing implying that it's not all about white men." It's the reactionaries asserting a political narrative of "White Dudes Are Evil", when it's really a narrative of, "the world is full of all sorts of people.

I wish I could find the article I was recently reading about a disabled playwright. He has disabled people in his plays, but the plays aren't "about" disability. His life isn't about being in a wheelchair. His life is about making supper, and getting the kids to school and watching TV, and reading books, and writing plays.

He does all those things (and more besides) in his wheelchair; and the wheelchair affects his life (e.g. how the furniture is laid out)

In that same way having a person who isn't socially dominant (since white men aren't a majority of the population) doesn't make the story about being Guatamalan or a woman, or a lesbian. Yeah, the story is about a person who happens to be those things, but who thinks Indiana Jones is about being a white male?

It's about a person who does stuff. The white man aspect of it isn't relevant. Same for most of the accusations of "box checking" I say most because there are stories about what it means to be black, gay, in the army, etc. In those stories the sex/age/ability/color/nationality/class of the character may be a central feature. But in those stories, it's not hidden.

Andrew M: re proportions on the ballot. I find this idea disturbing. Slates are inherently corrupting, because they do not represent people's actual preferences. The Hugo ballot ought to consist of works that a lot of people have actually judged to be good.

That's nnot what abi said. She said that in a direct democracy (which is what the Hugos are) one should expect to see any sizable block represented; and to some degree in proportion to their portion of the population.

I'm also not happy with the implication that, as time goes on, the people voting for conservative/space opera, etc. aren't voting for works they have read, and deemed to be good. We aren't advising people to look for "good" books. In fact we have long said one of the problems with the nominations is people figuring, "Oh, I don't know enough to pick the "good" books, so I'll just refrain".

If someone likes a book, they get to nominate it. Absent an obvious slate I don't care. The point of EPH isn't to keep "puppy" book/authors off the ballot. It's to keep small groups from being able to hijack the system.

But in any case, I think that even with one slot, the value of the Hugos is impaired, because 'Hugo nominee' is no longer a sign of quality. (Or at least of widely perceived quality.)

If so we might as well just concede defeat, and admit that Teddy Beale beat all of SF fandom.

Because it seems your interpretation of what needs to be done is either scrap the Hugos, or create an out caste which is deemed incapable of being eligible. The first case is what Beale wants, the second is what the puppies said already exists.

To elaborate (the oh no second kicked in).

There have been years when I thought some of the nominees were utter dreck Stuff I wouldn't have even tried to finish were it not on the ballot(e.g. Gravity).

They didn't diminish the value of the award (any more than Gigi winning best picture damaged the Oscars for me).

If some fiction the folks who supported the puppies gets on the ballot, that's fine. It's the way they prevented any other work from being considered I want to prevent.

Zack: One of the really interesting things BioWare did in Dragon Age Origins was to not voice the POV character. I didn't notice this until playing a module from an NPC party member POV.

Suddenly I understood why so many "gamerdudes" were upset. All the choices that get made, the tolerance which is, or isn't, engaged in is done in the head of the player. It's internal to the self.

It's a really powerful narrative tool, but it has secondary effects.

Re small groups of voters, slates, and representation:

On a practical basis, I cannot be the keeper of anyone's conscience but my own. And in the long term, I don't want to have to care whether there's some tiresome cabal of twerps who are trying to use the Hugos as a club against other fans. What I want to do is read a bunch of good books, then nominate and vote on the Hugos.

What that means on a practical level is that I do not want to care why any particular person nominated the works they nominated. If they qualify to cast a nominating ballot, they can cast it any way they like, for any reason they like: color of cover, the author's name rhymes with "orange", that's where the thrown dart landed. If enough people's darts land on the same work, then fine. Put it on the final ballot.

Not because I want people to do this; I'd like people to nominate works that (to use Lydy's phrasing) knock their socks into orbit. But the cost of figuring out why people have nominated any given thing and excluding the reasons I don't like is intrusive and excessive. It builds no bridges and brings no joy.

And the thing is, if I don't have to care what the nut wing of fandom is doing, because there are nominated works I can vote for with good conscience, then it will be less and less rewarding for said nut wing to slate. Because slating is boring: pay the money and don't even read the books; the only thrill is tribalism and sticking it to the Other Folks. I'm prepared to care a lot less than I did last year if we have to sacrifice a nomination slot to bore the Culture Warriors (though I still resent them behaving like middle-schoolers, with the namecalling and the weird-ass conspiracy theories).

Excluding slates completely isn't even making the best the enemy of the good, because I believe that everyone's votes should count, even if they're voting for reasons I don't like. And it prevents us from ever reaching common ground, when the mind-blowing conservative work of fiction gets written, published, and knocks even my socks into orbit.

It's just not a good idea.

Elliott Mason@333

How interesting about Judy Blume; I didn't know that. And I must admit to not having read any of her work, although of course her name is familiar.

I have heard rumors that similar things once happened in the romance field,with books that were actually written by and for African-Americans, but in code such as you describe so that white readers would buy them too. I can't cite any examples, though, so I don't know for sure.

What abi said.

As far as voting No Award - I've done that with more than one Big Name, when I felt that the nomination was more because of the Name than the quality of the nominated work.

PJ: Me too. As I said elseweb, the large number of No Award on best fan writer category shows that fandom isn't in "lockstep". There is still a lot of controversy about both the subject, and the writing (as well as the various ongoing issues attendent).

I did find something (sadly) amusing in relation to JCW's recounting of the Hugos:

I point you to [said commentary]. I haven’t seen a better write-up of SJW scummery or a more rational, logical discussion of why this year’s Hugo awards were an embarrassment and a black mark on science fiction writ large.

I am sad to say said person spent time in the USMC.

abi @ 342... What I want to do is read a bunch of good books, then nominate and vote on the Hugos

Yes.

abi @ 342... What I want to do is read a bunch of good books, then nominate and vote on the Hugos

Yes.

Curses. Duped again!

I am sad to say said person spent time in the USMC.

Certainly none of the ones I've met have been like that.

Andrew M. @ 327 wrote

But even if they do, the slate is still giving them an unfair advantage. Suppose 15% of voters have a taste for alternate history. That won't get them a regular spot on the ballot, unless they can agree which work of alternate history to vote for - which they won't be able to do unless they have a slate. (Normally; sometimes an outstanding work will turn up.) If lovers of right wing message fiction continue to run a slate, and other people don't, the situation is still unfair.

Yes this. Any other 15% nominates fairly, and something they love gets on the ballot provided a respectable number of fans outside their group love it too. I have heard it expressed that Hugo nominees tend to have crossover appeal; I suspect this is one reason why, and it makes the final reading more fun for all of us.

Slating is still cheating--but maybe after EPH is in play only getting one thing on the ballot will be less attractive and they'll give up and leave.

In light of Terry Karney's words @ 339 I'll just add that I don't mind people picking their honest favorites even when that is right-wing-message-fiction. I mind slating because it is unfair to all the other works including the other right-wing-message-fiction.

I agree that it's too hard to find a way to dump all slate votes--can you imagine the headache of trying to administer something like that fairly with the rabids dancing around you trying to produce edge cases to put you in the wrong and beat you with? (shudder) I'd rather swim with piranhas. But I don't like slating and I don't think it's fair, and if I know a nominee is the result of a slate it will have to really impress me to get my vote.

David Weingart @ 332

I just wasn't expecting it; that's all--I expected the Hugos' In Memoriam to tilt mostly toward writers and so on. It was a pleasant surprise. The filker names did make me tear up, when I saw them, but that happens at this kind of thing.

Terry@339:

Because it seems your interpretation of what needs to be done is either scrap the Hugos, or create an out caste which is deemed incapable of being eligible.

I have said what I think needs to be done: persuade reasonable Puppy sympathisers to adopt different tactics, and go on No Awarding the others until they stop. I'm confident this will work. I don't think Brad's scenario is likely to come to pass: continued non-success will make it harder for Beale to attract supporters.

But if by some weird turn of events it did come to pass, I think that would be a damaging situation. If he never gets more than one spot (which is the most likely outcome), not a fatally damaging situation; but still damaging, because it would reduce the value of a Hugo nomination (for anyone).

I should probably explain my perspective on this; it is that of someone who has for a long time been an outsider. I value the Hugos as a a source of information; they point me to what the most significant things in SF are at any time. Not infallibly, of course - everyone will know some decisions of the Hugo voters which they find incomprehensible - but to a large extent. I've seen lots of people during the current debate saying they find the Hugos helpful in this way. But this depends on the voters being a group of people who are worth listening to (which they are) and using their judgement (which they do). If they started making decisions in other ways, by throwing darts or whatever, the Hugo process, with a reformed voting system, would be completely fair, but it wouldn't be useful.

In fact this isn't going to happen on such a scale; the process won't be completely taken over by people who aren't exercising judgement. But even having a bit of it taken over can reduce the amount of good stuff which the Hugo process makes available to people. (It is possible for the lowest nominee to go on and win. The last example I can find is Best Fan Writer in 2013. If there had been a more active Puppy campaign that year, Tansy Rayner Roberts might not have got her award - even under EPH.)

In all this I'm not sure I'm actually disagreeing with anything you said; I certainly don't want to exclude conservative works - I said there were legitimate ways for Puppy supporters to get their stuff on the ballot - and you don't seem to like explicit slates. I do disagree, I think, with one thing:

We aren't advising people to look for "good" books. In fact we have long said one of the problems with the nominations is people figuring, "Oh, I don't know enough to pick the "good" books, so I'll just refrain".

Surely the problem is people saying 'I don't know enough to pick the best books'. We want people to pick books that they see as good; it's just they don't need to make wide comparisons to see if they are good enough. And if enough people see a book as good, that's evidence of its quality.

Abi, I am far from blind on those points. You do have to remember my background, my intense and very long proven dedication to keeping the rules and fairness. You may be forgetting those things if you're reading it into what I say, and of course this often happens in online discussion where the person isn't in front of you.

We are disagreeing over whether it is a worse thing to find a way -- within the rules -- to solve some of these problems, or to allow the puppies to almost completely destroy the 2016 awards and change long term the later awards. I find this ironic. I am usually on the other side from people who quote the line that the (USA) constitution is not a suicide pact. It takes quite a lot for me to say it in the other direction, trust me. But in the end, yes, I would rather see efforts which stay within the rules, and even within most of the spirit of the rules, but partly outside the spirit in that they are not what was intended in order to undo the destructive efforts of those who are willing to go entirely outside the spirit of the rules, and beyond that, to the point that people will amend the rules to stop them.

I believe some key elements of the spirit of the rules are:

a) The Hugos are intended to measure the independent opinion of Worldcon members on what the best works of the year are.
b) To avoid rash changes, changing those rules requires the attending members of two different worldcons to approve of it.

Write-in isn't cheating -- in fact, in the world it is the most common method used to deal with problems in a nomination system.

Is cleverly counting the ballots after ratification cheating? I view it as a hack that gets fans what they intend, and brings more power in a democratic way to fans, faster and without bias. Perhaps nobody else here feels that way, in which case this is not the place to discuss it.

More in a second message about a different matter with EPH.

354
There seems to be nothing in your proposal that would prevent a slating group from doing the same thing with the write-ins.

Write-ins aren't a solution: they're another problem, and one that is as gameable as the nominations.

Andrew M: There were reasons I put "good" in quotation marks.

One lots of people have the idea a ripping good yarn, easy to read and hard to put down, doesn't equal the sort of thing which should be nominated for a Hugo.

They don't think it's "good" enough.

The people who think their is a Cabal behind the Hugos think we don't want to see books which aren't "pushing an agenda", e.g. aren't "good" books.

What I want is people to nominate things they like, in the field, even the edge cases (I'm still not sure Lucifer's Hammer is SF, even if it has rocket ships).

So in that we are in agreement. But we can't stop slates from happening. Prior to now it's not been an actual issue, merely a theoretical one.

But why I am so heated about not wanting to even seem to be considering a way to try and "ban slates" is the discussion going on right now in the actual discussion on the Hugo Website about how the Hugo Committee should have just tossed out the "ballot stuffers".

At first I thought the person meant the No Award votes, but no, they meant the votes that weren't for no award; or maybe even the nominations.

That sort of discussion is one I really don't want to see take root.

Steve @ 324
Gamed the system. Interesting phrase. You mean people came into this awards system for the best Science Fiction and Fantasy with legitimate votes for what they felt was the best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and it was gaming the system? Or are you referring to the fact that some people talked about what they liked, and suggested people should vote for what they liked as well? I would say that ANYONE involved in the Hugos in the last few years should be jumping for joy at the amount of people who are interested in the Hugos again. Let’s look at the numbers. 2013 had 1848 valid ballots. Less than 2000 people decided the BEST SFF for the year. 2014 had 3587 valid ballots. That is a nice little bump in interest for SFF. Hooray! 2015 had 5950 valid ballots! Over FOUR THOUSAND more people are involved in deciding what is the best SFF for this last year! If the purpose of SFF is inclusiveness and progress, then the Sad Puppies campaign has done wonders for this community. Without breaking any rules, just getting people interested in the Hugos again. And if you look at that and say, “Well, those are the wrong kind of people to vote,” then maybe you need to do some soul-searching and admit that you don’t really want diversity. There are many definitions of diversity. I like this one: policy of encouraging tolerance for people of different backgrounds. Do you want to be a part of a policy that encourages tolerance, or do you want to continue to complain about all of these unwanted people voting for your award?

Terry, 346: On the first pass, No Award got half the votes that Mixon did, and the same amount as all 4 Puppy candidates combined. (Give or take. I don't have the PDF open in front of me.) Maybe not lockstep, but a convincing statement nonetheless.

Brad, my disagreement with your proposal is not personal. My views on it are not about you as a person, your history, or your beliefs.

I'm agnostic on write-in ballots, but I see some obstacles to the proposal from other quarters. I suspect that the Hugo administrators may see them as a ton of extra work, though you're comfortable with the normalizing effort. I don't know what electioneering geeks will say, but I'm sure I'll hear about it if you pursue this.

But every time you say "hack", every time you start talking about whether the constitution is a "suicide pact", every time you describe a process that's technically legal but clearly (to me) not intended to be possible, my hackles rise. It's true that I'm a process wonk (ex-auditor, recovering software test manager) and you're doing the equivalent of persistent boundary violations. And it's true that I've had a bellyfull of legal-but-not-intended behavior this year.

But it's more than that.

Cheekily bending the rules to deal with the Puppies is a politically terrible idea. It's more damaging than another year of slates and No Awards, because it's a perpetual offense. If it's only arguably legal, then it's arguably cheating, and once it's enshrined in constitution and custom, it's a suppurating wound.

And the fact that you didn't see this, didn't anticipate and plan for the idea that not everyone (or rather, no one here on Making Light) would be swept up in your enthusiasm, didn't have better outreach ready, tells me this is not going to fly in the wider community.

You can take it elsewhere and see if you can get a better reaction. But at some point, you're going to have to listen to this feedback and address it, because if this comes to the Business Meeting in Kansas City, well, a lot of people from here are going to be there, voting.

But not voting about you, because it's not about you. Voting on whatever you propose. I hope, if you do decide to take this forward, that it's better thought out and more wisely presented than it is right now.

Sumana Harihareswara @295: "Archana and Chandni" is a 2015 publication. Am I right in inferring that you might like to see additional recs for textual Hinduism-related speculative fiction published in 2015?

I've concluded I'm not going to manage Worldcon/Hugo participation for the 2016 Hugos (massive spoon/$$ deficiency), so you can take the query above as accurate, absent the "published in 2015" stipulation.

357
James, you seem to have the idea that 'all fans' are supposed to be Hugo voters. It's a pool limited to members of Worldcon. That limit is part of the prestige: people who care enough about the works to put their mouths where their money is.

TexAnne: The first pass was about 1,100 No Awards.

The non-puppy categories (as opposed to mixed) saw No Award in the 450-500 range.

Could it be that what the Sad/Bad Pupae did was a subtle plan to rejuvenate interest in the Hugo Awards, and in our field? If so, is there a turnip involved?

Here are the details of the final results, provided by Kevin Standlee:
http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/

Leah Miller @305: a bad piece of brain furniture that totally fucks up your mental Feng Shui.

Pardon me. I just want to admire that some more.

Please keep the name-calling dial firmly superglued at zero. "Puppies" is a self-chosen term; let's stick with it.

(Christ)

James @ 357

And if you look at that and say, “Well, those are the wrong kind of people to vote,”

And who and where said that? What some of us had been saying is that we are against the fact that a small minority can take the whole category by simply nominating in lockstep - it has nothing to do with who those people were, which works they selected (as bad as they were) or anything along this lines - it is because that tactics albeit being perfectly allowed under the current written rules made sure that the great majority of people did not have any participation in that nomination process - even after sending their ballots in - and were locked out of it. This is the problem - anyone that is part of the Worldcon is welcome to vote and if more people register, more power to everyone. So let's not turn the words around.

Everyone that cares enough to join is welcome and encouraged to nominate.

James @357:
2015 had 5950 valid ballots! Over FOUR THOUSAND more people are involved in deciding what is the best SFF for this last year! If the purpose of SFF is inclusiveness and progress, then the Sad Puppies campaign has done wonders for this community.

Alas that they didn't have a worthwhile ballot to vote on. Whose doing is that?

Wonders for the community indeed.

Stephen Brust #265:

Yep. There are times when something you want to say is going to hurt some people. That doesn't mean you're wrong to say it, but it does mean you should weigh the value of saying what you want to say against the hurt you're going to inflict.

It may be that the whole Hare Krishna thing was so worthwhile on other grounds that it's okay that it felt like a slap in the face to some people in the audience, and it may be that the whole asterisk thing was so worthwhile on other grounds that it's okay that it felt like a slap in the face to some people in the audience. But it's important to at least recognize that slap.

I think it's very easy to try to evade the issue by denying that anyone should be hurt by whatever you're wanting to say, or denying that their hurt counts. (Pretty much every use of the word "butthurt" on the web is a flag that someone's doing this.)

I don't think there's a universal rule that clarifies whether the hurt is worthwhile or not; it's a balance each speaker has to choose for himself, recognizing both his own effect on the world, and the likely response by the people who are affected. People hurt by your words can and often will respond with words of their own, or actions like walking out of a public venue.

Terry, 362: I remembered 1000, with 2000 for Mixon and 1000 for all 4 Puppies (hence my "give or take.") 2:1:1 doesn't seem like fandom is very divided. I may not understand the point you're making, though.

Albatross 370: "It may be that the whole Hare Krishna thing was so worthwhile on other grounds that it's okay that it felt like a slap in the face to some people in the audience, and it may be that the whole asterisk thing was so worthwhile on other grounds that it's okay that it felt like a slap in the face to some people in the audience. But it's important to at least recognize that slap."

I very much agree with this.

Is there available some software to run E Pluribus Hugo on a set of sample ballots? I have some concerns about the claim that if there are 25% puppies, they get 25% of slots (which would mean mostly 1 and sometimes two.

My own models suggest that based on past nomination patterns, a 25% bloc can pretty much guarantee 3, and sometimes 4 of the 5 slots in the widely distributed categories (like short story especially, but also the other short fiction) and even a very reliable 2 slots in best Novel (and other narrowly distributed categories.)

A 30% slate can assure 3 of the 5 nominees in all fiction categories and a few others under EPH, sometimes 4. Fortunately 5 is very difficult.

Worse, it is possible they can do even better, this is just my first round of white-hat test, but I want to confirm it against the software, and of course ideally the anonymized results when they come out.

As to the issue of the precedent set by hacking the rules in response to their hack -- oh trust me, I see it, I know exactly what you're talking about. That's why I called it a hack -- to be explicit about what it would mean. In most of my worlds, hack is a mostly good and sometimes bad word. The issue of hacking back is often and deeply discussed, generally disavowed when it breaks the rules, debated hotly when it only bends them.

I do think it's a bad precedent. I am worried about the risk of how it might continue. In my world we are constantly fighting against people who declare emergencies to alter the rules and never alter them back -- I would dare venture I have more experience with that than the vast majority here.

Annie Y @ 368: Here's a strong argument that the opposition to the Puppies' slates is grounded in rejection of the strategy rather than of the work: Everyone opposed to the Puppies agrees that one effective way to block the Puppies next year would be a counter-slate. This idea has been met with (near-total) revulsion.

Slates are anathema.

My problem with the Krishna chant is that, at heart, it was a good idea. The story as a whole worked well in the theatrical production that was the ceremony.

However, nobody involved in the writing process even had an INKLING that there might be a problem, because they were themselves so undiverse that they had, effectively, one point of view. If they'd realized there might be an ooginess, they could have changed JUST the chant (leaving the rest of the anecdote identical), and invented one with a mantra of Golden Age authors (including women, queers, and nonwhite creators) instead of the Holy Names.

Those are our Holy Names, are they not? And I think that the idea of chanting holy names to calm oneself is itself abstract enough as to not be disrespectful and tokenizing of a real-world oppressed culture.

Yes, he'd have to write it down and memorize it. But so what? Minimal work.

If he'd even thought of it.

But he didn't.

Because he's so blinded by his own particular viewpoint that it didn't occur to him to run it past anyone with any, y'know, interfaith expertise. He could have used something from HIS OWN culture and amended/parodied/used straight a Jewish blessing, and he knows enough about that culture to make a joke that's not an insult.

But he didn't even know enough to know that he didn't know enough to make a joke about Hare Krishnas without slapping people in the face.

And, similarly, I doubt anyone involved in the writing bothered to get anyone even slightly sympathetic with the Puppy end of the pool to look over their script or their items, or to ask one of the nominated-but-probably-won't-win longform editor folks at least a couple weeks ahead of time what they thought about it.

TexAnne: The puppies aver they lost because fandom is lockstepping to the tune of the SJW.

Looking at the other ballots it seems the Puppies were about 500 strong (hard to say precisely without a whole more knowledge/means to crunch the data than I have).

It happens Laura's subject matter was (and still is) a controversial subject. If "we" were all lockstepping to the known agenda of the SJW Creed, then she would either have been a landslide (with the Puppy Blocks agaisnt the total), or she, like them, would have been excluded.

That she wasn't means "we" as a group, weren't mindlessly voting a slate.

I'm sorry if it wasn't/isn't clear.

Brad @373:

For EPH code, Google will get you Kilo Watts' contact details. He's offered to send it out many times.

In my world we are constantly fighting against people who declare emergencies to alter the rules and never alter them back -- I would dare venture I have more experience with that than the vast majority here.

I'm at a loss for words about how arrogant and obnoxious that comment sounds. You have no basis for this statement; you don't have any idea what experience most of the people here have, and you haven't established your bona fides in this area to anyone's satisfaction.

Do you need to step away from the thread for a bit? You're coming across as kind of a jerk. It's not helping anything.

Brad @373:

During Sasquan, I received a copy of Kilo's code as well as permission to post it to Github: https://github.com/gmcharlt/EPluribusHugo. I also wrote an independent Perl implementation from scratch.

#306: Cat: That's a really great writeup; I'll be sharing that link.

I read Linesman recently, and really enjoyed it. (I think a Big Idea post put me on to the book.) I'm really interested to see where the ideas go in later books.

I finally picked up Three Body Problem, since it did win the Hugo and I've had several friends recommend it in the past. I'm thoroughly on the hook, and wriggling... =]

It's probably too late - or the wrong moment, given the way the conversation is developing - to say this with the force I intended it to have, but although I was pleased - and I'm sure there was more than a little unpleasant schadenfreude mixed in with the pleasure - with the results of the Hugo votes, the thing that really rejoiced my heart was the news that EPH had passed at the business meeting.

That's not really because I think it will prevent slates from being effective (though I think it will.) I found the process of it's formulation and presentation one of the most wonderful things I've seen in the Internet, and I'm proud to be associated (albeit rather less actively than I have been at some points in the past) with a community that was able to enable and support its formulation (and I'm grateful to those who stimulated and moderated the discussion as much as those who contributed content.)

One of the things that I liked about EPH as a proposal is that it's a measure which does, to some extent, what Alex R is urging - namely provides some kind of response tothe possibility that some of the Puppy concerns are legitimate, and does so without inflicting collateral damage on other participants in the conversation. It's as effective against secret cabals - if there are any, which for the record, I'm convinced there aren't - as openly mongered slates. (And it sounds, from what I've heard about the Business Meeting that it gained at least some support from the Puppy contingent on that basis.)

But what I loved about it passing, was not that it was an elegant fix to a technical, problem - but that it was an elegant fix arrived at on the basis of a sustained conversation between a large group of people, carried on In ways that wouldn't have been possible without a particular form of technology which we haven't always had.

P J Evans @ 361:

357 James, you seem to have the idea that 'all fans' are supposed to be Hugo voters. It's a pool limited to members of Worldcon. That limit is part of the prestige: people who care enough about the works to put their mouths where their money is.

P J Evans, am I understanding you right? You believe that only "prestigious" people have the right to vote, and the rest of the population should sit back and let the right people make this decision for them?

If that is what you're stating, I'm appalled at that opinion.

I do firmly believe that everyone who reads and enjoys Science Fiction and Fantasy literature, has the money to join Worldcon, and has the desire to vote for the most prestigious award in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature SHOULD be able to do so.

Do you not agree with that statement, and if you do not, please explain why you wish to be so against inclusion and diversity?

sez abi @377:

For EPH code, Google will get you Kilo Watts' contact details. He's offered to send it out many times.

Terry, 376: OK, we have different ideas of what a landslide looks like. I think that "twice the votes of the second-place finisher" is a landslide, and I'm quite pleased that half of the Hugo voters agreed that ten years of abuse and hypocrisy is enough.

This was my first year voting. I did not rank anything on either slate, including titles which I would have ranked first if they had not been on a slate (hello, Guardians of the Galaxy). Next year if there's a counterslate I will not rank anything on it either.

Slates are a terrible idea. Full stop. The politics behind them are irrelevant. The Hugos are meant to represent what Worldcon members in general are passionate about, and slating breaks that. Sometimes slating doesn't even successfully represent what the slaters are passionate about; in this year the slaters failed to nominate both Three Body Problem and the biography of Heinlein, and Three Body Problem only made it onto the ballot because Marko Kloos withdrew his nomination. I'm curious if the biography would have made it onto the ballot if the Puppies hadn't run a slate.

Next year I intend to nominate anything eligible which I've read/watched/listened to and am passionate about. It's quite possible this won't include the best things released during that time period, and I'm increasingly okay with that. I think that if I and any three of us on the site were to read the last twenty years' worth of Hugo winners and rank them, we'd have four different rankings.

About Brad's proposed hack: Brad, when I think about this I feel a bit of the anxiety I feel when watching one of those "newly released con tries to go straight" movies when his pre-prison friends show up with a hot tip on a job. I'd just like to join the chorus of people saying "I think this is a bad idea." I think a lot of social norms are sensible and exist for a good reason, and while the proposed hack might not break the rules (just as the Puppies didn't), that seems like a rather low bar to clear. The idea of it just strikes me as dishonorable.

Galen Charlton@378:Thanks for posting those.

What format would the Hugo administrators like the code to be in for their greatest ease of use? Since ease seems to be one of the objections raised.

If someone could contact them, this seems like an area where their lives could be made easier.

James, 381: I think you have entirely misunderstood what PJ is saying.

James @ 381: "P J Evans, am I understanding you right? You believe that only "prestigious" people have the right to vote, and the rest of the population should sit back and let the right people make this decision for them?"

It seems pretty clear that he means just the reverse: not that only the prestigious get to vote, but that those who vote, by the act of voting, gain prestige.

James @381:

P J Evans, am I understanding you right? You believe that only "prestigious" people have the right to vote, and the rest of the population should sit back and let the right people make this decision for them?

Gracious. You might want to reread PJ Evans' statement, because you are well astray of the plain meaning.

It's a pool limited to members of Worldcon. That limit is part of the prestige: people who care enough about the works to put their mouths where their money is.

In other words, the award is prestigious because it is voted on by people who care enough about the works to pay for Worldcon membership.

Which neatly matches your everyone who reads and enjoys Science Fiction and Fantasy literature, has the money to join Worldcon, and has the desire to vote for the most prestigious award in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature.

On the UU subthread -- Just as a demonstration of the explicit lack of universality in UU theology/covenants, of the Boston churches I've been to most often, the Dedham one I grew up with is sort of vaguely theistic, in a not-very-Christian kind of way; Jamaica Plain is explicitly Christian, though they try and be welcoming about it; West Roxbury is more specifically theistic but not Christian; King's Chapel has UU governance and is Anglican in liturgy; and Arlington Street is vaguely theistic and explicitly as welcoming as possible to all comers. Dedham (when I knew it best) was vaguely racist and homophobic in that 'well, we're Good, Well Meaning Liberals' sort of way, but they've done some intentional and hard work to become an official Welcoming Congregation (ie, queer friendly).

There's also (in non-Boston news) a Universalist Church in West Hartford, which hews more to the old-line Universalism. That was a hoot. I love 'em, though I wouldn't want to be part of their church.

So my point here is that I have heard quite a number of "In Jesus's name, Amen" statements, because the UU church is nothing if not politely but intractably stubborn about the individuality of its individual congregations. (But I haven't heard any of them at Arlington Street.)

Heh. And Steve Brust and I disagree on the meaning of the passage.

But neither reading involves some "prestigious" cadre of people who are set apart from the rest of fandom for any other reason, or by any other means, than the simple purchase of a Worldcon membership.

Thanks for the code. I did see one analysis at http://patrickmay.tumblr.com/post/126023308724/e-pluribus-hugo-vs-slates which I hope was not used in consideration of EPH. It contains some mathematical errors, and a very simple slate-counter strategy (debating if I should detail it here, but it's really simple and I suspect they would think of it) in this analysis gives a 25% slate 3 of the Novel nominees and 4 of the short story nominees.

By stroke of good luck 4/6 fixes that, in that the 25% slate gets 3 of 6 Novel nominees and 4 of 6 short story nominees. Though I can't model that exactly since 4/6 reduces grouping among non-bloc nominators.

A 20% slate does worse, only 2 Novels but still 4 short stories (though more certainly 3) in this 1984 example.

That presumes the slate doesn't think of something cleverer than it took me 5 minutes to think up in the intervening time.

Abi@390: On re-reading, I think you're right and I'm wrong.

In my world we are constantly fighting against people who declare emergencies to alter the rules and never alter them back -- I would dare venture I have more experience with that than the vast majority here.

Setting aside the insulting subtext...

I don't know what to say. No, that's not true, there are a lot of things I can say; but not all of them move the conversation well.

From what I have seen (here, and at your blog entry on the subject), the level of listening you've been doing is minimal.

You have ignored those who addressed the logistical problems of the proposal (which is, in short, if it gets ten nominations, it's on the ballot).

You have ignored those who addressed the social issues.

You have ignored those who pointed out the longer term repercussions.

You have denied that what you are proposing would change the rules between nomination, and voting; with the cheat of pretending that closing the convention somehow makes that all right.*

You've not explained how the newly created long-list can be voted on after the closing of the con, but before the 90 day window of required announcement, much less how it can be done on-site after closing ceremonies (which you have averred is your preferred "workaround".

You have, in short, shown no practical expertise on dealing with human beings in complex systems.

I do have to say that your zealous defense of a theoretical problem (because, barring EPH and 4/6 both failing, the issue is immaterial before your plan, even if the fast and loose with the letter of the law you think can be ruled [a la Bush v Gore, non-precedential] could take effect) is persuasive.

But persuasive against the proposal you are making.

Is there a problem? Yes. Might it cause another Hugo season of angst and heated words? Yes.

Will it have the same outcome as this year? I don't know. I do know that on July 30, as they were slapping themselves on the back for lockstepping Beale's ballots (all the while tacitly admitting that all they were doing was parroting the party line) the RPs were dead certain of victory. They planned to salt their meat with SJW tears.

And maybe next year they will. I'm willing to let that happen rather than pull a fast to to cheat them out of having their votes counted.

If those who don't like slates can't either find enough people to vote (from the 11,000 eligible voters this time around), or to say, "that's a slate" and defeat it, then they deserve to win.

As to the odds of another slate. I suspect any nominees who aren't actively in their camp, will refuse to be nominated; because they will expect the same results as this year.

Because I've spent at least two careers where watching how people game systems was either a large part of, or THE primary job description. I've got a decent track record of figuring that shit out.

Between the correctives in play, to which the Puppies hadn't really paid attention, neither No Award*, nor a change to the WSFS constitution.

What he/they did was a gambit. Gambits are interesting. When they work, you crush the opposition. When they don't, you usually find yourself in an exposed position, scrambling to recover stability. On Defense.

That's where they are now. On Defense. They spent money, and told themselves they were fighting the good fight, and thence to VICTORY!.

But some of them saw that the fight wasn't right. That the larger body of fandom was upset about the breach of fairness.

Not breaching that sense of fairness, that's what I want to see. It's why I'll take the risk of another slate.

And, for all the fancy language about it being a hack, or social engineering, or exploiting the rules... it's still not playing fair.

The Puppies did that. It got them drubbed. Some of them have been scorned. Some have been (to the discredit of our side) abused when they didn't deserve it.

I'm not going to support doing that to them. We should not do to others what we condemn when done to ourselves. Even if I thought it were practical, I don't think it's moral.

*I do think Beale expected some No Award, almost certainly for those categories he was in: but I think he expected the SP slate to manage a win.

praisegod barebones #380:

Hear! Hear!

James @357 - since you've addressed me, it seems only reasonable to reply.

"Gaming the system" is the politest phrase I can come up with for what happened. Since you seem to object to it, I'm perfectly happy to call it "cheating" instead. And if you choose to point out - oh, wait, you do point it out - that the slate runners technically broke no rules, I will just say what I've said several times before: any time you find yourself saying "but what I did was technically legal", you know damn well you shouldn't have done it. Technically, it wasn't cheating; morally, it was.

As you so helpfully point out, one outcome of the Puppies' underhand tactics was that a huge number of people turned out to vote. (Including me. I have no prestige worth speaking of, but I did happen to have thirty quid spare, and what do you know? turns out that's all I needed.) As abi, perhaps more helpfully, points out, another outcome was that we had very little worthwhile to vote on.

Diversity? Your bugbear, not mine, my friend - I want to read good stories, and maybe see good shows and read interesting essays and other related works. The Puppies' tactics denied me that. Diversity, mind, is generally a good thing - because a wider range of voices being heard, means a better chance of finding voice worth hearing. Yes, I'm in favour of diversity, as a means to that end (and, also, out of simple fairness). Certainly, I'm keener on diversity than the small shabby clique of literary snobs who recommended a slate of their own buddies, regardless of quality. Yes, I called the Puppies a clique of literary snobs, because that's what I think they are. They're a bunch of people who think their taste in SF is better than anyone else's; what is that, if it's not snobbery?

As for searching my soul, I believe its contents are quite adequately indexed. But thank you for your concern.

Kevin J. Maroney @ 374

Yes. It was never against who ran the slates or why. I would have reacted the same way if abi (sorry abi, just making a point:) ). So would have most of the people.

Though I’ve been a fan, reader, and writer for decades, this was my first year voting for the Hugos and attending Worldcon. My experience was amazing and positive. I’m planning to vote and attend in 2016, as well.

Now that I’m coming down off my post-con high, I have a concern. This time, our GOTV was more effective than their GOTV, but I’ve already seen VD vow to sabotage the 2016 awards. If our voting numbers drop due to waning interest, or VD is able to use Bre1tbart’s megaphone to round up GGers, MRAs, NRAs, and other fearful and angry people who feel their “rightful” spot in society is being encroached upon, he may focus his bloc on one work per category, instead of a slate.

I am not a voting expert, but I’m on the lookout for their improvements to this year’s SP/RP strategy. If their numbers rise, would they strive to get one nominee on the ballot for each category, and then vote only for that single work to sweep all category wins in 2016? In effect, the opposite of Brad from Sunnyvale’s “no award” strategy. (Presuming that we abhor slates and will all vote our taste preferences, thus dividing our vote.)

What I’m asking is, how do we plan for this with non-slate strategies? Should we be talking about GOTV efforts for next year? I’ve seen the wikia list of eligible works, which is a fantastic start. What would keep current voters interested and engaged, plus bring more voters in?

Making Light is one of the most smart and thoughtful spots to have a discussion about this*. Thanks for helping me understand these complex issues.

*The kaffeklastch with Theresa and Patrick was like a live version of Making Light in which a good 30% of their references went right over my head and they finished each other’s sentences in a way that made me smile.

James: P J Evans, am I understanding you right? You believe that only "prestigious" people have the right to vote, and the rest of the population should sit back and let the right people make this decision for them?

You are not, and I suspect you are intentionally not, understanding it.

The People's Choice Awards have less prestige than the Oscars. Why? Because the voting body is seen as being less expert.

The Hugos don't require expertise, they require the passion required to pony up the money for a supporting membership. Anyone can vote. Anyone who does vote counts the same as any other.

I cast my first Hugo ballot when I was 15.

As to your challenge: Do you not agree with that statement, and if you do not, please explain why you wish to be so against inclusion and diversity?

It's bullshit. You misread the pretty plain language of P J Evans comment, and then manufactured a specious claim that they are against inclusion and diversity.

Classic FUD. More Classic, "let's you and him fight" as everyone else is supposed to attack the strawman you've built.

(why yes, I do think you are here in bad faith James)

Steve Wright @395: Identifying the puppies as literary snobs is something that hadn't occurred to me, but I think the term is apt for the reason you give. That's really mean. Proud to know you.

TexAnne: I think we are speaking of related things.

Do I think Laura won, hands down? Yes. Would I describe that as a landslide? Yes.

And I would call that vote a landslide no matter what the nominees were, nor the category.

But the number of non-puppy no-awards was a lot higher than the background radiation. So it was a landslide, and there is disagreement (of a substantial, and perhaps even substantive, nature) about it.

Its hard to explain well, in part because the puppy setting makes things a lot messier. I'm glad it won. I'm more glad it was nominated.

I'm curious how I would have voted with a different set of nominees. I think I'd still have voted for it first, but I'm not sure.

And that's a lot more complicated, and touches on all the other issues in that mess.

Sorry you feel that way, Terry @ 393. This is often a consequence of online discussion where nuance and humanity are reduced. If you want to chat on phone/skype/hangout be happy to do that and I think it would go vastly better -- otherwise, we don't seem to be being productive. I know you think I've ignored those things, and you no longer want to give me the benefit of the doubt that perhaps my experience suggest it is unlikely I would have ignored them.

Can't say I like the word cheat, though. Write-in is the opposite of a cheat. Write in says, "If the nomination process failed us, then give the power to fix that to the community." It's about as fair and democratic an answer as there can be, and it's not a cheat to look for a way to make things more fair and democratic as fast as the rules allow.

I do hope the puppies are demoralized as you predict, and decohere. They were not fully coherent this year, but I don't know which direction they will move. If they stick together, they will continue to majorly corrupt the awards, far more than I would wish to tolerate.

I don't doubt your experience. Don't doubt mine. We all want, I hope, the same thing -- to deal fairly, to preserve both the rule of law and the spirit of the awards and the system. To have an award that truly reflects the independent views of the convention members. To have an award that is robust against those who would collude to corrupt it.

Don't forget that's what we all want, and interpret my words -- if we keep talking -- in that light.

On the whole "recognizing the hurt" or potential for hurt, I refer you to the recent controversy over the Nazi concentration camp commandant romance published by Bethany House and nominated for RWA's RITA Award as Best Inspirational Romance.

This book was apparently written and published in a complete vacuum where no one even imagined that a Jewish person might be bothered by its contents. It received a rave review in Library Journal and in RT Book Reviews--in both cases, by reviewers who were part of the inspirational community. And, truth be told, the book flew under the radar for a year, until it popped up on the RITA ballot.

At which point a significant number of Jewish writers, readers, reviewers, and publishing people all went WTF???

The author and publisher _had no idea_, they say, that there was any potential for hurt. The author and publisher _had no idea_, they say, that anyone might take anything in the book the wrong way.

You know what? I believe them. Because I believe they don't know anyone who is Jewish, or anyone who is the child or grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Because they live and work in an echo chamber.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I think Elliott's right @375 about Silverberg and whoever else looked at the speech.

#361 ::: P J Evans

" It's a pool limited to members of Worldcon. That limit is part of the prestige: people who care enough about the works to put their mouths where their money is."

This is mistaken. One of the peripheral things we've learned is that the majority of sf fans-- including those who go to conventions-- had no idea that the Hugos were voted on by members of worldcon rather than being a juried award.

I also have an impression that Hugos give glory to the worldcon (I've talked with people who think a worldcon wouldn't be a worldcon without the Hugos ceremony) much more than the association with the worldcon improves the Hugos' reputation.

TexAnne: And I see, with all else going on, that I was unclear in my first clarification to you.

When I said lansdlide I meant practical unanimity.

And I see I've misspelled Teresa's name above. I apologize and would edit if I could.

Tom Whitmore #328: A reporter asked me, from Sasquan, whether this discussion is going to be good for science fiction and the Hugos. I replied "Ask me in 10 years. We won't know until then." I stand by that statement: we've had a big event, and we don't know how it's going to shake out.

Actually, what we've already seen is pretty damn encouraging:

When the puppies attacked, the fannish scene was "feeling a bit poorly", stinging from various recent controversies¹, and with a lot of energy draining out into the mainstream. The response to the attack woke up a lot of people and pulled them back into their fannish identities.

It also prompted quite a number of essays and discussions... many of these would have been individually luminary in any year, and collectively they'll be guiding fandom for decades.

And then too, the Puppies highlighted a bug in our nomination algorithm, in such a way as to motivate the talent and spark the political will to thoroughly fix it. OK, the Puppies poop on the awards for a couple of years... out of 73. We'll get past it. Heck, maybe we'll even see some redemptions over the next year.

And the voting results make it quite obvious that the puppies aren't the "hidden majority" they claim to be, or even close. They rallied their troops for a full-on attack, and discovered that their five-headed monster was a giant's foot.

albatross #370: Yep. There are times when something you want to say is going to hurt some people. That doesn't mean you're wrong to say it, but it does mean you should weigh the value of saying what you want to say against the hurt you're going to inflict. ... I don't think there's a universal rule that clarifies whether the hurt is worthwhile or not; it's a balance each speaker has to choose for himself, recognizing both his own effect on the world, and the likely response by the people who are affected.

Yes, this.

¹ Which I'd characterize more as "growing pains", as the fannish community started standing up to some "inappropriate uncles" in the family. Necessary progress, but it still hurts.

Brad: Can't say I like the word cheat, though. Write-in is the opposite of a cheat.

This is where you are missing the point. I'm not saying what you are calling write-in* is cheating. I'm saying that pulling a fast one to implement in it one calendar year, while calling it two Worldcon Years is cheating.

I don't doubt your experience. Don't doubt mine.

I didn't. What I said is that from what you have done here, in explaining and defending your proposal, I have no faith in it. There is a difference. I only addressed it because you used yours as an appeal to authority; in a way which doubted ours.

Which you have done, not merely in that comment to which abi and I responded, but also to those who have described their experience in WSFS business meetings, and administering the Hugos.

Furthermore, as you brought up nuance, this isn't a question of nuance. It's questions of logistics, of practicality, of legality. It's a topic where the act of writing ought to increase the clarity, because one has the time (and at least one preview screen) to contemplate one's choice of words, what they mean, and how they will be taken.

I do, however agree, that we are likely to see any meeting of minds from further discussion.

*which isn't what you are actually proposing. Voters may also write in their personal choice of candidate, so long as said candidate is eligible for nomination in that category and was published on a list of all nominees published by the convention, and so long as the total number of ranked candidates or written-in choices in that category does not exceed the number its official candidates on the final ballot, with “no award” not considered part of either count.

Write-ins can only fix a certain kind of mistake. There has to be someone/thing for them to focus on or their very openendedness will dissipate their potential power--exactly as the slate was able to dominate the nominations.

As someone who doesn't really fit into fandom but is yet a reader, I felt that the no award barrage had to happen, but yet it had its ugly fallout in the editor categories. Suppose most of the slated folks had withdrawn in time for the thing to be refilled: would people still have "no awarded" the category? My guess is, probably not. And here's the other thing for me: the Hare Krishna chant and the asterisks exemplify a certain kind of fannish insularity, exactly as Elliot points out above.

And here, trying to find where BT did actually say that the SJWs did in the slate (which I haven't been able to find), I come across Damien Walter at The Guardian. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's not at all surprising there's enmity between him and BT. Walter has a politicized view of Where The Genre Should Be Going that someone like the puppies is going to object to, a sort of manifest destiny of diversity. I disagree with BT's vision of where the field is, and indeed one of the reasons I lost interest for a while was because I am not one for reading space opera/politics that much, and it seemed like that was dominating things for some time (my impression only, of course, and not a claim that this was so). The SF I read Back In The Day had its measure of diversity, more than fits his picture of the time. But I see that the emphasis on diverse voices, where that diversity is measured along political-demographic lines, is didactic, or at least has a didactic cast. The didactic tends to rub people the wrong way, for better or worse.

James, you talk about "diversity," but what is the diversity in hundreds of people all agreeing to nominate and vote for the same things?

@407 -- the reason for that language was to avoid being distracted by the question of how hard it is to do. If write-in is limited to the published longlist, it's much easier to see that it's not hard to make it easy to enter, canonicalize and count the ballots. However, the pure write in, as I wrote pre-modification, allows the fans to write in whatever they want, even something that got no nominations at all.

I apologize if anything I wrote came out as appeal to authority. I hate appeal to authority. The intention of what I wrote is not to say, "I'm right because of my background" but rather, "my background should make you give me the benefit of the doubt that I am not ignorant or ignoring things"

When somebody with a degree in math says, "your math is incorrect" it does not mean it is assuredly incorrect. It means you should give full consideration to the reasoning and benefit of the doubt on things which were not yet fully explained.

Fans are of many, many stripes on this and other issues. (Indeed, isn't that a message at the core of the puppy debate?) I've been to business meetings. I know how much they revel in procedure as entertainment as well as process sometimes, and the love for the system and the rules and I know how what the puppies did can make that even stronger. But the feeling is not as universal as one might conclude from that.

Leah Miller @ 305 Your line about "box-checking" is something I hear all the time, and it is often at worst a dogwhistle and at best a sign of unmarked cognitive biases.

The idea that straight white male represents unchecked boxes and anything else represents checked boxes is a bad piece of brain furniture that totally fucks up your mental Feng Shui.

I suspect I'm using the phrase a bit differently than the Puppies. When I use the phrase "box checking," I don't merely mean the inclusion of a POC or Queer person in the story. I mean the clumsy inclusion of POC or Queer folk (or whatever the clumsy inclusion might encompass) for nothing more than making a political point, and I can point to both left and right-wing examples of the "box checking" practice.

When I complain about "box checking" it means "your clumsy attempt push your political agenda came out of nowhere and pushed me out of enjoying your story and into critiquing your story." This is opposed by "You did a magnificent job of working your political/social concerns into the story, building them intelligently into your plot, characterization and world-building, such that in reading your story I lived the issue you are concerned with and was enlightened thereby."

My suspicion is that some of the people coming out of academic environments have been... overtrained to always deal with the social and political issues even at the expense of story.

If you've read Eric Flint's 1632 Gretchen's character arc is an excellent example of the right way to handle the social issues in a way which contributes to (rather than detracts from) the story. Flint talks about patriarchy and gender and two different societies' ideals about sex in a really entertaining and intelligent way while giving us a character who's really fun to read about.

Is Gretchen's story "perfectly" feministic? Probably not. Does it engage the issues - absolutely. Does it fit the themes and plot of the book without dragging me out of the narrative? Yes! In fact, that's the part of the book I was most engaged with. Flint being a Baen author, I suspect that many Puppies have enjoyed that book. (Heh heh!)

lorax @ 310 So, if you've seen box checking damage stories, can you name some titles? It's easier to discuss specifics than hypotheticals.

The first one that comes to mind, oddly enough, is a conservative author. If you've read David Weber's Honor Among Enemies you've probably noticed the one Gay character (in the entire series if I recall correctly) is a minor villain, and she is introduced in the context of being a minor villain. I bounced right out of the book right then and said, "Oh shit, he went there."

Another example, again from the Right, was Tom Kratman's Tuloriad. It looked really interesting (it's the only Kratman book I've read) and the whole "Aliens get saved" thing was so clumsily handled... box checking at it's worst.

From the left, there was a paragraph in "If You Were A Dinosaur My Love" that knocked me right out of the story, but that's probably a post in itself...

Terry Karney @ 338 The Problem with the "box checking" narrative is that it assumes, by default, that there is a "normal" and any deviation is either needed for plot, or purely there as a political statement.

For me "Box Checking" points at poorly executed message fiction, regardless of who generates it. It's not really an issue of politics so much as one of technique. Looking at my own examples of "box checking" I suspect that each side (right v. left) is better at noticing the other side's clumsiness, in which case we really need the dialogue.

loran @ #310: Often people who dislike box checking will feel that one token minority character is acceptable, but more than one? Box-checking.

Or a character who is a minority in more than one way. I’ve come to realize that one of the reasons that “black, lesbian and disabled” canard bugs me is because it’s a reverse straw woman — lots of people really do fit all those categories but those who would like to ignore all three treat the combination as an outlandish PC mashup could never happen in real life. But none of those traits cancel the others out, because each is on a different axis — there’s no spectrum with “Black” at one end and “Lesbian” at the other, anymore than there’s a CatholicMilitary Vet spectrum or an AsianDisabled spectrum.

Anyway, /slightly OT rant.

Brad from S at # 266: If there were only 900 dedicated puppies, then as many as 700 to 1400 people -- people who largely voted only because of the puppy controversy -- placed a puppy choice first on their ballot, above No Award. More people than even voted at all at Aussiecon.

I voted for the Hugo Awards this year for the first time in decades because of the controversy. I read almost everything (did a lot of skimming in the novellas) and ranked them as I thought they deserved on merit. I voted for these slate nominees ahead of no award: Arlan Adams's Flow for novella, Kary English's Totaled for short story, Jennifer Brozek for editor short form, Sheila Gilbert followed by Tony Weisskopf for editor long form, and Kary English again for best new writer.

There's nothing that says Brad T can't have tastes similar to mine when he ran out of cronies and looked for deserving nominees to fill out a category.

I hope you wouldn't count me as one of your 1800 puppies.

Jane Berry @397 wrote: Now that I’m coming down off my post-con high, I have a concern. This time, our GOTV was more effective than their GOTV, but I’ve already seen VD vow to sabotage the 2016 awards.

It depends on what "GOTV" you're referencing. Beale can probably round up enough nominators to get a similar result on the ballot; that's the known exploit of slating. Even if the fandom participation grows dramatically, he needs far fewer raw numbers to counter that.

However, the voting is technically resistant to rigging, and fandom has just resolutely demonstrated that it is philosophically resistant to rigging. The nature of the transferrable vote ballot means that it's not enough to have more than any other work (a plurality); you must have a majority -- and if you've got a majority, it doesn't matter if you spread out the initial vote or not.

At this point, I'm linking to the official 2015 stats for reference; I recommend grabbing a copy to follow along so that I'm not typing out all of the details.

Page 1, the Best Novel Hugo, is reasonably typical despite the two slate nominees -- fandom is split roughly 30/30/30 on TBP, TGE, and AS in the first pass, but TBP's 1700 votes are nowhere near 50%+1 of the 5600 votes total in the category. So, the last ranked option (here, DBtS) gets eliminated, its votes are redistributed, and we check again for 50%+1. It still doesn't happen, and it repeats -- and the voting takes the maximum number of passes (5, or n-1 where n is the number of finalists including No Award, representing that all but the winner are individually eliminated) before the winner emerges. That's a tight race.

Now, suppose that Beale stacked the vote with 4000 first-place votes for Unimaginably Insulting Dreck, but that no one else is going to vote for UID (we'll swap it for DBtS, since that's the first finalist eliminated). UID will now lead after Pass 1, 4000 to 1700 to 1500 (and so forth), but 4000 is not 50%+1 of the now-9000 votes cast, so we continue the process. Visualize this by sticking UID in a row above TBP for most of this process. When it's down to 3, the score is UID 4000, TBP 2600, and TGE 2400 -- Dreck still leads from all those bullet-voted first-place ballots, but it isn't making up ground. And when everyone else's votes transfer from TGE to TBP, the final score is TBP 5000 to UID 4000.

Now the non-technical version of that: Sasquan had 11k members and 5.5k votes in Best Novel. If Beale really wants to take a Hugo, he's got to come up with something on the order of 5000 votes, vs the ~250 nominators and ~750 votes he had this year. I don't think he's got an eight-fold increase in voting participation in him.

And with "technically resistant" out of the way, I'll point to "philosophically resistant". See page 2 of the same PDF, Best Novella. No Award wins outright with 65% of the vote, no extra pass necessary. That is a smackdown of Balrog-like proportions, and it carries across most of the other slate-dominated categories (Related Work, 66%; Short Story, 58%; Novelette, 66% if you lump NA with the one non-slate finalist).

Beale will be up to no good, nominations may suffer, and fans should be wary of business meeting shenanigans. But I think the rockets themselves are safe.

Stephen Rochelle @ 414

If Beale really wants to take a Hugo, he's got to come up with something on the order of 5000 votes, vs the ~250 nominators and ~750 votes he had this year.

And if he (or someone else) comes up with 5000 votes then he legitimately has half the votes of the convention and should go home with the Hugo. It is all down to the numbers - it does not matter if someone likes it or not, if someone has half the votes, they have the award :)

A group of people simply nominating and voting for what they love doesn't really have a GOTV effort. That's something you do in a contested election, which is pretty much the endpoint of everyone needing to be on a big slate to get nominated or elected.

387. 388
Thank you both. I got run over by a nap.

David Harmon @406 -- I'm a bit more cautiously optimistic than you. I've seen a lot of things that looked as if they were making things better go seriously wrong in the second year. Remember the rule-of-thumb for biological success isn't the number of children that you leave, but the number of grandchildren. The first-generation effects are not always the long-term ones.

Where does "Beale has 750 votes" come from? He only has 750 votes if you don't count the rabid puppies as with him.

I think the rabid puppies are a little different from the sad, and they are more determined to do what it takes to get their slate on the ballot, including joining with the sad puppies even if the sad puppies disown them.

They are not one group. Hardcore puppies is probably 1,000. Good news -- "only" 1,125 put a puppy choice first on their novel ballot, but 2600 voters put a puppy best novel choice on their ballot ahead of No Award. Over 1,800 voters put a puppy choice FIRST on their ballot for Novella. Almost 1,700 put a puppy choice FIRST on their ballot in Novelette, even with a non-puppy choice present.

2,214 put a puppy short story first on their ballot.

Put these numbers in context -- 5 years ago, fewer than 1,000 people voted at all in these categories (smaller worldcon) but even the bigger worldcons before the puppies did not do much more.

900 people ranked Vox Day on their editor-short ballots! Only 342 of those are possibly ones where he was below No Award. You think many who were not a puppy thought Vox Day was a Hugo calibre short fiction editor?

The puppies were not cohesive, so I can't predict if they scatter or regroup, but if you think there were only 750, I fear that's a serous underestimate. (If you meant to say Beale has 750 while Day has 500, then I am more in agreement.)

Brad, 419: Beale is Day.

albatross @416 A group of people simply nominating and voting for what they love doesn't really have a GOTV effort.

I disagree. GOTV doesn't have to mean "Get out and vote the party line." It can mean "Let your voice be heard; it's as valid as anyone else's." I've been reading sff for close to 50 years and been aware of the Hugos for most of that time. I was vaguely aware of the nominating/voting process but would not have considered myself well-read enough to participate, so didn't seek out the details. I am one of many who voted for the first time this year and will make a point of nominating and voting next year. The desire to blunt the effect of the slates was a GOTV call to me.

My bad, I knew that but for some reason my brain fritzed and thought I was taking about Torg/Cor, because we almost never call him Beale. The numbers I wrote remain the same. My estimate was actually slightly lower for Beale-Day, and my estimate of Sads is higher.

There are a disturbing number of people who voted for puppy works beyond their core supporters. Some of them are "eager to vote" fans who took the (incorrect) Scalzi approach of "Read them and judge them on the merits" and then didn't have the heart to say they are unworthy of an award even if on the ballot.

Now I do feel there are a lot of fans of that stripe. Every year, many people vote for stuff that while "good" is not anywhere near the level of "excellent" that I feel should be what is needed to appear on a person's final ballot. Many, many people.

But at the same time, the vast influx of new voters this year (and to a lesser extent last year) is mega-huge. Of the 5,900 voters, only around 3,000 -- perhaps fewer -- were in the "no puppies, no how" camp. that means 2,900 were willing to support a puppy choice. That's odd because the big influx of people came because of the controversy. People were buying supporting memberships in droves in response to the puppy effort. Yet we see this large number supporting puppy choices which dwarfs the number of people who cared enough to vote at all just a few years ago.

To have there be fewer than 1,000 fairly solid puppies -- which some have asserted -- you need to explain thousands of fans coming to the rescue of the Hugos by buying supporting memberships -- and then using them to vote puppy. Some of them, sure. But a thousand?

Oh yeah, forgot to add why I called John's strange unity with the puppies on the "read them and judge them on their merits" argument incorrect. I suspect that John just didn't want to battle further, which I certainly appreciate, but in my mind saying, "read them and judge them" is like the government of Beijing saying to the members of Occupy Central in Hong Kong, "Look, Beijing is going to send you a list of named candidates. You should judge them on their merits and vote for the one you like best."

I liked The Triple Sun better than The World Turned Upside Down, so sue me.

I am against slates, so I did not have a slate listing in front of me as I read. I tried to evaluate each work without recalling who nominated it. (This was impossible in the case of John C. Wright, but I like to think that even if I were sympathetic with the slate-makers, I would have seen how Wright prioritizes Message over Story.)

johnofjack @384:
I'm curious if the [Heinlein] biography would have made it onto the ballot if the Puppies hadn't run a slate.

No, it wouldn't. If all the Puppy nominees are removed, it's #6 among what remains.

"This was my first year voting. I did not rank anything on either slate, including titles which I would have ranked first if they had not been on a slate (hello, Guardians of the Galaxy). Next year if there's a counterslate I will not rank anything on it either."

That's cool. I wouldn't expect Fans to vote lockstep necessarily. But there are a lot more Fans than puppies. So if a fraction do support a counter slate, that should open it up for the rest of Fandom.

And some Fans will vote if the pick is such that it obviously deserves to be there. Again - hello "Gardians of the Galaxy".

There is only 1 more year of Shenanigans. And then slates won't matter and people want to vote for them, fine. Till then and for the last time, - I am good with a counter slate.

Hey - we can make it right now. Pick an award that occurs prior and make that the counter slate. Pick several and average them and make that the counterslate.

I just had a thought.
Maybe James sees the problem as being that only 50% (roughly) of the members of Worldcon voted, and he thought it should require closer to 100%.
In which case, James, the usual participation level is something loser to 25 to 30%, so this year was a huge success.

@426:

Oh Hell No.

A slate is bad for everyone, even the slatemakers; a slate plus a counterslate is doubly bad.

SJW75126@426: Among the things I'm confident about with regard to Hugos for 2106, the doom of any counter-slate is right up there. The vast majority of us, I'm pretty sure, are disgusted both by the lousy quality of what the Puppies pushed and, independently, by their slate tactic. Even really good work on a slate is going to meet the same response. It's important to a lot of us not to adopt illegitimate tactics.

Brad @419 wrote: Where does "Beale has 750 votes" come from?

Initial voting for Best Novel and guesswork. My read of all the discussion prior to the awards is that a significant portion of fandom is extremely reluctant to vote No Award, much as a significant portion of fandom was reluctant to amend the nominations process despite agreeing that this year's slates were a problem. Thus, my guesswork is that numbers deep in the Novel ballot (your referenced 2700 NA vs 2600 SG + DBtS votes) or numbers from Slate-or-Nothing categories have slate votes substantially inflated by that portion of fandom that really, really wanted to avoid voting No Award.

But the first round of Best Novel, where there are three non-slate picks all with substantial acclaim in the run-up, and two slate picks most frequently described as "decent filler" and "Eight Deadly Words", I think serves as a good litmus test because it doesn't have the same propensity for "avoid No Award" signal distortion. And there we find about 1100 votes for the slated works; I think that's a good top-end estimate of Beale's actual strength.

Some of that, though, are people who just liked SG or DBtS better than the others. Some of that will be from the Sad Pups who recognized that Beale took them for a ride and won't support him again. And so I think 750 to 800 is a decent estimate.

Bruce said: "Among the things I'm confident about with regard to Hugos for 2106, the doom of any counter-slate is right up there. The vast majority of us, I'm pretty sure, are disgusted both by the lousy quality of what the Puppies pushed and, independently, by their slate tactic. Even really good work on a slate is going to meet the same response. It's important to a lot of us not to adopt illegitimate tactics."

And that's fine. Look puppies are 20% of the total. If 15% of the fans voted for a counter slate all it would do is make any slating difficult to succeed.

Fans are diverse. That's why slating works for the puppies. Next year it's going to be worse.

After that, I don't care if the puppies slate or don't slate. That's the whole point of EPH and 4/6.

Stephen Rochelle @430: That probably underestimates Day's support, because he himself had declared first-vote support for The Three-Body Problem and some reasonable number of his minions presumably followed him.

My own guess is 750 to 800 of both Sad and Rabid Puppies.

Further regarding the UU subthread: You know the old adage "if you've seen one [FITB], you've seen them all"?

I'm a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation. There's a fairly common joke in UU circles that "if you've seen one UU congregation ... you've seen one UU congregation" - and for some of those congregations, "if you've seen one of our services ... you've seen one of our services."

So, while I personally haven't been to a UU service where the minister prayed in Jesus' name, I'm not terribly surprised that others have had different experiences.

Among the things I'm confident about with regard to Hugos for 2106,

You're really getting ahead of the crowd!

James @432:

For what it's worth, I don't believe he voted that way, and I don't think I buy that that revised recommendation came out quickly enough to affect many votes from his supporters. That (along with "I didn't get around to reading TBP in time to slate it") is just tossing around as many competing storylines as possible so that he can claim one of them came true.

If Beale had the pull to actually swing the final vote, he'd have already done it (and in fact would have done it last year when the numbers were favorable; that's basic Watchmen-caliber Evil Overlording, it is).

PJ: Hush. You disgrace the dignity of these proceedings.

:)

I'm with Bruce, the odds of a counter-slate having traction is slim, because people (at least the ones I saw) weren't talking so much about, "we need to keep those terrible people from winning".

Nope, it was, "read them all and vote your conscience. If you can't see fit to vote for anyone on a slate, we understand. If you think The Parliament Of Beasts and Birds is best, we understand that too."

What I saw (in my circle of friends and close acquaintance) was reading the works, with the expectation that the slating raised the bar for excellence. That none of what was written rose to the level of mediocre, well that was insult on top of injury.

@437

You had to read crap and then that crap kept good stuff off the ballet.

Let's say we started a counter slate with the Nebula award winners - as a start. You would have had...

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)

Let's say 3 of those made it. Which one would you not want to read?

BTW - I am just thinking out loud here. I realize we are only talking about a 1 year problem.

@437

You had to read crap and then that crap kept good stuff off the ballet.

Let's say we started a counter slate with the Nebula award winners - as a start. You would have had...

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)

Let's say 3 of those made it. Which one would you not want to read?

BTW - I am just thinking out loud here. I realize we are only talking about a 1 year problem.

Let me just add in my example above. This year I would have liked to have seen "Lock In" make the list. It would have except for the puppies slate. So no - my example doesn't necessarily cure all slating ills. In my example, Lock In is still Locked out.

Thank you, everybody who complimented my turn of phrase. It popped into my head and I thought "welp, I may be about to get on a plane but if I don't write this down and put it out there I'm doing something wrong."

Right now I'm in a hotel lobby waiting for my phone to recharge so I can have some fun with Seattle's bus system.

And yet, I feel the need to respond to AlexR's response #411, and talk a little bit more about stories and boxes and such.

I appreciate the examples of right-wing authors doing it poorly, but that's... kind of the point? Today's audience is diverse. They want to see characters who realistically reflect the kind of demographic breakdowns they're used to seeing in actual human society. Writing diverse characters is a skill that some right-leaning authors lack, so they argue that demand for diverse characters can be harmful or unfair.

It's sort of like this: imagine an author who can write great science, but who is utterly terrible at dialogue. They'd still appeal to readers who don't care about dialogue, but it's not like a trend for preferring good dialogue is hurting science fiction. It might make that one guy slightly less successful than he'd be in a different era, but it isn't the focus on dialogue or the focus on diversity that are dangerous. It's simply the same as it ever was: different authors have different skillsets, and the most popular authors will be those who have a varied set of skills that match up with the kind of things readers like.

Right now, the ability to write different kinds of characters without them seeming shoehorned in or disruptive is a highly-valued skill. Wanting all stories to have diverse characters is like wanting all stories to have witty dialogue - they won't all succeed, but pointing out which ones succeed and which ones fail isn't a problem. It's just ordinary criticism.

Complaints about check-box-ism seem to be saying "I lack this specific skill. People used to not care whether or not writers possessed this skill. The fact that they now value this skill is A PROBLEM."

SJW75126,

And how this slate will be any different from the one that the Puppies are putting together? Quality? Taste is subjective and people like different things - which is why we have nominations.

It's a slate - no matter who does it and with what works - it still is against the unwritten rules and the spirit of the nominations. If we have to read crap for one more year until the rules can be changed - so be it. I had read all the books I wanted to read, nominated or not anyway. But I for one will not even entertain the idea of participating in a slate - that's not a solution; that's a "they did it first" knee jerk reaction. And I am not a teen anymore to actually be ok with having those.

Annie said:

"And how this slate will be any different from the one that the Puppies are putting together? Quality? Taste is subjective and people like different things - which is why we have nominations."

Your point is obviously well taken. But to answer your question it will be different because:

1. It doesn't require a lot of adherence to be successful. If 15% of fans supported the slate mostly, it would offset the puppy slate and what the other 85% did would still be fine. On the other hand, if only 15% of the puppies votes for their slate we wouldn't even care.

2. It wouldn't be pushing a point of view if it was selected on an objective basis. WHich ones in my example would you not vote for out of principle?

3. It is a one shot. Your voting rules guarantee a poor result next year.

Consider it a vaccination then. You are taking a bit of the ill to protect the body.

Still - while I am trying to convince you I am not myself convinced. But its nagging at me.

Sumana Harihareswara@67: that got to me too. My sympathies.

Cat@90: "I had no idea these ceremonies were so fun and touching" This was special. David Gerrold outdid himself on the script. I think everyone outdid themselves at Sasquan, in many ways. The masquerade was, I think, extraordinary. Tom Smith was the half-time entertainment. He got to play to his largest house and did a great job of keeping people there through the judging, which is always slow. I hope it gets him a ton of sales—he deserves it.

C Wingate @ 188: one persistent problem: the relatively small size of non-US Worldcons. That's a bit worse than a simplification. The long list of Worldcons says that Loncon had substantially more members than any previous Worldcon and is #2 on the all-time attendance list. It looks like older European Worldcons after ~1970 (when overall attendance exploded) average a bit smaller than North American ones, but the variation in both is so large I expect you'd get p>>.01 for that hypothesis.

C. Wingate @ 247: Weisskopf is not collateral damage; judging by the few postings I had the stomach to read, she's a pourer of gasoline on fires. Sheila Gilbert might be collateral damage; I've slightly known her for some time and don't know why she was slated.

James @ 357: a few hundred people nominated and several hundred voted for a slate devised by a small number of people. Do you really believe that so many people were somehow unanimous rather than just followers? I'm reminded of TNH's remark (offline) that the most implausible thing about the "explanation" for 1989 was that a couple of dozen fans could have been in absolutely agreement on \anything/. And if that doesn't convince you, consider Beale's boasting of his "minions", or Jeffrey@409's compact version of the above.
      Your comment about "the wrong people voting" is past a red herring.

Terry Karney @437: "I'm with Bruce, the odds of a counter-slate having traction is slim, because people (at least the ones I saw) weren't talking so much about, "we need to keep those terrible people from winning"."

A counter-slate is the only way to ensure there are works worth ranking above No Award on the ballot next year. It's not about stopping terrible people from winning, it's about having the opportunity to recognise good works. There's a good chance of the Puppies sweeping the nominations in all categories in 2016, if a significant fraction of their hundreds of extra voters stick around to nominate according to the next slate. (Extra non-puppy nominators don't help that much, because their nominations will be spread out over hundreds of different works).

The best possible counter-slate would be for the Hugo admins to tally the nominations early (say a week before nominations close) and announce what the finalists would have been if all works listed on any slate were eliminated. As well as providing a list of the works that would have been finalists in the absence of slates - as unobjectionable as a counter-slate could possibly be - this would be a strong disincentive to unofficial counter-slates. But while there isn't actually anything in the constitution forbidding such a thing, I doubt the admins would be keen on taking such a step.

A variant would be to release the top ten in each category, without eliminating slate works; that would be somewhat less vulnerable to accusations of bias. And the results could be released for both the current system and EPH tallying, which would be very interesting information to have before the ratification vote.

In the absence of cooperation from the Hugo admins, producing a democratic counter-slate is a lot more problematic. For a start, who's eligible to contribute? There's no reliable way to restrict it to WorldCon members, so what's to stop it being swamped by puppies and puppy sock-puppets even more than the actual nominations? And even if the puppies left it alone, it wouldn't represent the same pool of nominators as the actual Hugos. But if participation could be restricted to confirmed real people, and a sufficiently large pool of honest voters contributed, possibly some kind of tournament-style system would give a reasonable outcome? Pair up the works in each category randomly, and let voters choose a winner from each pair; repeat until five are left. Perhaps let voters tick all the nominated works they're familiar with beforehand, so they're not asked to compare works they aren't able to judge. Puppies wouldn't find it so easy to dominate such a system, since most of the pairings wouldn't feature any puppy nominees, and their votes wouldn't be any more concentrated than everyone else's.

While I do understand the opposition to fighting slates with slates -- this sort of debate happens in many spheres -- I wonder if the opposition is as universal to a counter slate that you could be 99% sure, for the purposes of this discussion, was exactly the final ballot that would have occurred without bloc voting. Don't dwell on whether this is possible or not for now. Certainly the "what should have been the ballot" examples we've seen this week may have their flaws.

But what if you did know what the real set of nominees would be from independent voters through some magic trick -- would you then vote that as your nomination ballot if you knew a lot of other fans were going to do the same, thus creating a slate that does indeed turn that into the final ballot?

Or would you vote your independent choices, knowing it was likely the final ballot would be mostly or all puppy choices?

ie. the classic question of ends and means. There is no one right answer.

After having made a bit of an idiot of myself for asking the No-Award question earlier, I managed to find the constitution of the WSFS.

I suspect that Beale isn't gunning for votes next year. I'm worried that he's going to spend the next year talking GamerGate and 4chan types into buying attending memberships.

If I read the rules right, anyone with an attending membership is allowed to participate in the WSFS Business Meeting held after the convention.

How many planted attending members would it take to cause mischief in the Business Meeting, and how much actual damage would they be able to create?

I apologize if those are stupid questions.

NO SLATES.
That means no counter-slates, also.

What part of this is so hard to understand?

@448

I don't think VD has enough powder. It's one thing to get someone to fork over $40. It's another to get them to spend $100 and travel. Some will but not many and you didn't see many.

Although you did see one. Thomas Monaghan is posting at Larry Correias site that 70 additional people showed up on Sunday that had not shown up before to vote for EPH but concedes it didn't matter.

Thomas was the guy that made the motion to adjourn and prior to the vote to kill EPH if I recall correctly.

That's cool PJ. You wouldn't be one of the counter slate voters.

The Business Meeting is held during the convention, Gary Arbuthnot @448. Any attending member is allowed to vote in it. And our members are quite able of causing mischief by themselves. That's part of why we have a Sergeant at Arms, and a Parliamentarian, and a Timekeeper -- and use Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised. The whole formality of the Business Meeting makes it difficult to cause serious disruption; managing Parliamentary Procedure is very much a learned skill, and the Puppies would be going up against people who have done it for 50 years or so. I'm not the most experienced person with that, and I've got 50 years of getting familiar with it.

The formal system has lots of safeguards. It would be possible for them to vote in various things if they get enough people there -- but that's true of any group. It was true this year with EPH, for example: but the creators of that were well organized, respectful, and willing to stay the course past several procedural attempts to keep them from getting a vote on the matter (like the attempt to adjourn sine die at the end of Saturday's meeting). Managing to get around Parliamentary Procedure is possible, but it takes a serious majority to do many things.

And the guys at the head table, IME, are really good at making sure that people understand the implications of what anyone is trying to do.

Terry K @ 437: There were many voices calling for "don't vote for a Puppy, regardless of quality". (I was one of them.) The fact that Toni Weisskopf and Sheila Gilbert, who have both been nominated without Puppy assistance and would be perfectly credible winners, both finished behind No Award indicates that a pretty sizable number of people voted that way.

These results were a repudiation of slating, irrespective of content.

felice @ 446,

So you are saying that having a slate is ok as long as it contains works that are worthy (according to who?) and/or that you like?

Uhm, no, it is not. Doing something not-good as an answer to another not-good thing does not make it any less not-good. If a counter slate is introduced to fight the slate, we will really loose the spirit of these awards next year.

Is there an estimate of when the 2016 Hugo nomination data will be run through EPH. I would really like to see that.

sez CHip @445: "Your comment about 'the wrong people voting' is past a red herring."
Hm. "past a red herring". Would that be an infrared herring?

Brad from Sunnyvale -- Please give it a rest. The community hashed this out months ago, and you're not going to find support for bending the rules here.

I don't give a damn what the puppies choose to do next year. We'll deal with it when it happens.

Gary Arbuthnot, you're being an idiot again. There is no "after Worldcon Business Meeting." They can ONLY be held during the actual Worldcon. And if many of the Puppies were reluctant to pony up $40 for an attending membership, they sure as Hell won't be willing to pay $200 at the door...

Infrared Herrings is the name of my Techno Chanty band.

To everyone who thinks a counter-slate is a good idea:
I'd no-award everyone on it, too.

It isn't who puts it together, or what the intentions might be: NO SLATES.

Kevin #453 -- Actually, while those choices were sometimes a repudiation of slating, I would say some motivations were more nuanced. (There were even some, and I have some sympathy for them, who advocated No Award in everything except possibly fan artist, because the awards that went to solo non-puppies are tainted for not having proper competition.)

However, I do not think the opposition, for many, was specifically to slating. Rather slating was an example of attempting to violate the spirit and meaning of the process. Most agreed that slating was "technically" (a frequent word) within the rules, which means that they felt it nonetheless stepped outside an unwritten vision of the rules.

This was as it was for me. I don't care how they did it. What I cared about was that they changed the nomination from a survey of the independent opinion of the fans who care into a political-party bloc vote where they were the only bloc. They colluded together to make the process not what it was normally expected to be.

And so, for me, what matters most is how you might return it to be what the vast majority of con members intended it to be. This may be at the root of the distaste TK has for some of my proposals. Because, after all, do I really know what most fans want it to be? That's why we have rules, to create a process so it isn't one person's vision. That is one of the stresses we feel.

The response (particularly here) was "They used slates to corrupt the nomination -- let's make the nomination process more robust against slates, because it is slates that are the evil."

As you know, that's always not sat particularly well with me. Slates are wrong, but they are the symptom, not the cause, and we have treated the symptom. And not particularly well.

SJW75126 @ 451:

I won't be one of the counter slate voters, either.

If I haven't read something, or if I did and I just didn't like it that much, then why would I nominate it or vote for it?

My conscience is my own. I'm not going to lie just to thwart liars.

OH NO SECOND: Pony up $40 for a SUPPORTING membership...sigh

Brad from Sunnyvale, I'm beginning to think you're Brian Z at File 770's cousin.

Social engineering will not work -- the objects of those efforts have to want to change -- and I have seen no evidence that the Puppies meet that requirement.

So, we change what WE can change -- the nomination system. That is all we can do, and MORALLY it is ALL we should do.

Robert @ 461,

I suspect there will be lots of Fans with that POV. Again though - a counter slate doesn't need a lot of adherence. Just a bit.

Besides - you might like it. An objective standard would hopefully select things people like. Why would they want to put things on the ballet that people didn't like?

In my example above, who would you not like? I can understand if you just had not read the work.

NO SLATES

Ballot ballot ballot - apologies for the spelling. I plead Mad Cow.

sez Steven Brust @458: "Infrared Herrings is the name of my Techno Chanty band."
Cool! I could see that… and I'm also a pretty damn good baritone vocalist, plus I'm okay on keyboards. If you happen to think this might be something worth putting effort into, I can be reached at [ my nym @aol.com ] for further exploration of the idea.

SJW75126:

Get thee behind me, Satan!