the Puppy-free ballot

The Hugo statistics are up as a PDF and linked to from here, and with comparison from the Puppy slates which are linked to from here, it's possible to extrapolate what the Puppy-free ballot would have been.

I'm not sure if anyone else has already done it, but I'm awake and at home and don't have parties to attend, so here are hypotheticals for the four fiction categories and Related Work, all of which were particularly disfigured by puppydom and for which I can be fairly confident that none of the Puppy candidates would have made the ballot without the slates' help. (A judgment that cannot be made for the Best Editor categories, let alone the Best Dramatic Presentation ones.)

Key. A = made the real ballot anyway despite the Puppies' help. B = made the ballot due to the ineligibility or withdrawal of Puppies. Note: There are typos and errors on the statistics (e.g. "Katherine Anderson" for Addison), and I may not have caught others.

BEST NOVEL
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (A)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (B)
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu (B)
Lock In, John Scalzi
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett

BEST NOVELLA
"The Slow Regard of Silent Things", Patrick Rothfuss
"The Regular", Ken Liu
"Yesterday's Kin", Nancy Kress
"Grand Jete (The Great Leap)", Rachel Swirsky
"The Mothers of Voorhisville", Mary Rickert

BEST NOVELETTE
"The Day the World Turned Upside Down", Thomas Olde Heuvelt (B)
"Each to Each", Seanan McGuire
"The Devil in America", Kai Ashante Wilson
"The Litany of Earth", Ruthanna Emrys
"The Magician and Laplace's Demon", Tom Crosshill

BEST SHORT STORY
"Jackalope Wives", Ursula Vernon
"The Breath of War", Aliette de Bodard
"The Truth About Owls", Amal El-Mohtar
"When It Ends, He Catches Her", Eugie Foster
"A Kiss With Teeth", Max Gladstone

BEST RELATED WORK
What Makes This Book So Great, Jo Walton
Chicks Dig Gaming, Jennifer Brozek et al
Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology, Brandon Sanderson et al
Invisible: Personal Essays on Representation in SF, Jim C. Hines
Tropes vs. Women: Women as Background Decoration, Anita Sarkeesian

One thing to note is that vol. 2 of Bill Patterson's Heinlein biography still wouldn't have made the ballot; it's 6th place on the Puppy-free list.

Another and most important thing to note is what this does to the male-female ratio of authors in the fiction categories, a topic of which I've written before. The actual ballot had 17 stories by men and 3 by women (15% women). The Puppy slates, taken as an aggregate, had 20 stories by men and 3 by women (13% women). The Puppy-free ballot above has 9 stories by men and 11 by women (55% women), which is in keeping with the post-Racefail numbers of recent years' Hugo nominees, and puts the lie to the Puppies' claim that they're increasing diversity, at least on this axis.

still at home

So what we needed a list of ten favorite novels that we had in paperback for was to make reduced-size color photocopies of their covers (color photocopying is really good these days: expensive, but good) for the party-game portion of a very small gathering of a very few close friends - all that B. wanted: she doesn't do large parties - to celebrate her milestone birthday. The game was Pin the Book on the Librarian: for books we used the 3-inch photocopies, for pins post-it notes taped to the back, and for a librarian, the ALA poster of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Several of the attendees needed the goal explained. "The tall guy with the vest and tie, he's the librarian. The rest are students, except for the one on the left: he's the vampire." For blindfolds we used eyes closed on the honor system. A copy of Gaudy Night won the prize.

For the rest, there was a plethora of cake and ice cream, and much talk, a little of it on the Hugos, though that's off the radar of most of the attendees. C. wanted to know what happened in 1977, since that was the last time No Award won a Hugo. I grabbed the old Howard DeVore book listing Hugo nominees. "It's because SF in the movies back then just wasn't what it is today. Imagine you're facing this list of nominated movies: Carrie, Futureworld, Logan's Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Now imagine that Star Wars has just been released - it came out in May - but it's not eligible until next year. In the meantime, which one of those four should win the Hugo? The answer, not too surprisingly, turned out to be none of the above."

It was while rummaging through the bookcase that it occurred to me that I should have titled my previous post, the one on the Puppy-free ballot, "What if?: stories that should have won the Hugo", in honor of Dick Lupoff's anthologies.