Hugo voting report

[calimac]

The Puppy affair roused my slumbering patriotism in science fiction enough to prompt me to buy a supporting membership in the current Worldcon, so that I could vote a straight anti-Puppy slate in the Hugos. Over the course of my recent vacation, I read most of the Hugo voting packet on my elderly Nook, though to keep my reactions fresh I have avoided reading reviews of the nominees.

Now that I'm about ready to cast my vote, however, I can let you see my reviews if you'd care to. Here, for the categories for which I feel I have something substantive to say about the nominees, are my voting choices. I'm of the "Nothing from the Puppy Slates goes above No Award" school of thought, but that doesn't mean I don't have differential opinions among them if I don't get my way, so I at least looked at their nominees.

Novel
1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The opening section, the part set in 1969, I thought one of the most gripping pieces of fiction I'd read recently, though until the end of it I was uncertain what was going to be science-fictional about it. After that it rapidly dropped off in interest, though I still think this is the most Hugo-worthy of the nominees in this category. I wish authors wouldn't put lists of characters at the front: the thought that you're going to have to know who all these people are is disheartening, though in the reading I had no trouble. Oh, and by the way: As someone who's named his cats after literary characters, I'd just like to point out that Wang Miao would be a perfect name for a male cat.
2. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I enjoyed this, though as the blurb says it's a novel of court intrigue. The sfnal and fantasy elements feel like window-dressing.
3. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie. Maybe it's because I didn't read its predecessor, but I found this impenetrable. After a few pages my eyes simply refused to take in any more.
4. No Award
5. The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson. Although I didn't get far into this, and my interest in the "folks roaming around on starships through already-existing universes that I don't know anything about" subgenre of SF is limited, this looks pretty well-written.
6. Skin Game by Jim Butcher. I actually read the entire 86-page excerpt that was included in the Hugo packet, but don't ask me to remember anything about it, or, indeed, to have understood the story at the time I was reading it.

Novella
1. No Award
2. "Flow" by Arlan Andrews. I recall this as being not bad, but on looking it over, I find my memory of it has been entirely overlain by Lou Antonelli's "On a Spiritual Plain."
3. "One Bright Star to Guide Them" by John C. Wright. If you're going to tell a story about characters remembering things the reader knows nothing about, you have to be a better writer than this. It would also help not to be so wordy.
4. "The Plural of Helen of Troy" by John C. Wright. This might have been a good story if it weren't so convoluted, talky, and all-around garrulous.
5. "Pale Realms of Shade" by John C. Wright. Sorry, stories that devolve into religious tracts don't do it for me. This is the sort of story that makes C.S. Lewis at his most didactic look good. (And Wright's "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus", the story removed from the Novelette category, was so bad in that way that it made this one look good.)
6. "Big Boys Don't Cry" by Tom Kratman. War war war war war. Of purely specialized interest to war buffs, and boring as hell to anybody else.

Novelette
1. "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. This is an exceedingly memorable story, I'll give it that, though it's pure whimsy, not even fantasy. (Why would a reversal of gravity - already an impossible notion - not work on air or water? Because everyone left would immediately suffocate, and there'd be no story.) The real problem is that this story is the perfect embodiment of what the Turkey City Lexicon calls "Squid on the mantelpiece." Heuvelt's narrator finds the upending of the world and the deaths of most of its populace to be a trivial concern next to the fact that his girlfriend had just left him. I can understand why he feels that way, but he can't expect me to agree with him. Worse, judging from the afterword included in the Hugo packet, the author intended this effect. Intending to write a story badly is no excuse for doing so. Nevertheless, it's memorable enough that, even in a non-Puppy year, I'd place it above No Award. Barely.
2. No Award
3. "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium" by Gray Rinehart. Let me get this straight: This is a story about a dying man who plots (sorry) to have himself buried so as to offend the aliens living on the same planet who find burial sacrilegious. Yep, it's as dumb as it sounds.
4. "The Journeyman: In the Stone House" by Michael F. Flynn. Characters who make sophisticated sarcastic jokes while talking like Tonto.
5. "The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale" by Rajnar Vajra. I gave up on this one three pages in when the narrator introduces an expository lump with the words, "Lecture time, quick I promise." Why am I not tempted to stick around long enough to learn if you'll keep that promise?
6. "Championship B'tok" by Edward M. Lerner. I gave up on this one three pages in when the author explains that, though this universe has AI of human-level intelligence, it doesn't have intelligent robots because that would be creepy.

Short Story
1. No Award
2. "On a Spiritual Plain" by Lou Antonelli. Another story about aliens trying to understand human funeral customs! Yet I actually liked this one. The ending was a particularly satisfying wrap-up. Yes, even Puppies can show good taste on occasion.
3. "Totaled" by Kary English. And another story about dead people! Having the dead person be the narrator made the story a little bloodless - you'd think she'd be more invested in the narrative - and the plot wasn't as clear, but it's not a terrible story. (English's Campbell nomination storypack consists of two stories about dead people and one about someone plotting to disappear: is she trying to tell us something?)
4. "A Single Samurai" by Steven Diamond. A story in which the narrator commits suicide at the end, taking the adversary with him/her, and in a Japanese setting? (More death!) Sorry, but it's been done already, and done a lot better than this, and it won a Hugo, which it deserved: this doesn't.
5. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" by John C. Wright. Ever read Lord Dunsany's "The Use of Man", which has a similar premise? I have. That one was simplistic enough, and I have no use for this one. And so garrulous it was hard to maintain the premise that it was animals speaking.
6. "Turncoat" by Steve Rzasa. War story. Obsessed with numbers.

Related Work
1. No Award
2. "The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF" by Ken Burnside. This would be interesting, if I were at all interested.
3. Letters from Gardner: A Writer's Odyssey by Lou Antonelli. If you thought The Early Asimov was self-indulgent, get a load of this. It starts off with the stories Antonelli wrote that were rejected - and you can see why, and if you can't, he'll tell you what's wrong with them - while the "letters from Gardner" that the title promises are mostly just encouraging notes scribbled in the margins of rejection slips. What's most disturbing is the exceedingly hard-boiled attitude towards life that Antonelli shows in his stories, such as the one whose setting is a nuclear bomb explosion in the U.S. but whose focus is on the protagonist keeping his car running. It reads like Antonelli wanted to write a story about the car and merely stuck in the nuclear devastation for motivating background. Nevertheless, this author is serious about developing his craft.
4. Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright. Wright's windiness as a writer made this essay collection difficult to read as a book; it was easier to tackle one essay at a time. Wright can actually be pretty insightful when he sticks to SF, especially on the theological side: he has some good strictures on the spiritual philosophy of Arthur C. Clarke, for instance. (But, considering how much he hated the second Hobbit movie and Philip Pullman's third Golden Compass book, why did he like their predecessors? He doesn't say.) However, especially towards the end of the book, his sweeping denunciations of What Feminists Think, What Modernists Think, What Progressives Think, are simply lunatic. They bear no discernible relationship to what any of those actual people actually think or behave, and not just because, pace Wright, none of these categories consist of identikit cadres. This is the true SFnal part of the book: it's from another planet.
5. "Why Science is Never Settled" by Tedd Roberts. There are far better articles out there explaining the scientific method than this one. I hope no anti-scientists come across this: they could use it maliciously to tear holes in any science-based viewpoints.
6. Wisdom from My Internet by Michael Z. Williamson. My ghod. This makes even Mallard Fillmore look like a model of wit and incisiveness. What made anybody, even the author, think that these witless and inane quips were worth collecting … it boggles the imagination.

Best Fan Writer
1. No Award
2. Laura J. Mixon. The only non-Puppy I'm putting below No Award. Look, I suppose Mixon performed a public service and all, but it's not an achievement I feel like celebrating, nor do I find there's anything about the quality of the writing as such that's award-worthy. Maybe not Mixon's fault, because she had a complex story to untangle, but it was a slog to get through.
3. Jeffro Johnson. If we were going to honor someone who writes about classic fantasy in an RPG context, we should have given a Hugo years ago to John D. Rateliff. Still, Johnson is a good writer, if somewhat condescending towards his topics, and though of crabby social views, he does not spend his time whining about SJWs, which sets him apart from the rest of this category.
4. Dave Freer. There's the shards of an interesting guy to talk with in here, but his mischaracterizations of the SJWs he repeatedly gratuitously brings up are dismaying, and worse is his appallingly clumsy attempt to prove bias in the Hugos by contrasting the results with mathematically random events. Totally inappropriate analogy.
5. Cedar Sanderson. I gave up on this person at the description of the fuss over the "shirtstorm" at the Rosetta comet-lander press event as "epic bullying."
6. Amanda S. Green. This person's mind is just filled with bile, and apparently nothing else. It's a very unpleasant place to visit, and I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with a lot of the Sad Puppies group; I've looked lately at Correia, who is not to my taste, and there are a few others I've read, of whom the only one I like is Flynn. But I think Flynn is a writer of considerable merit; In the Country of the Blind was a very sound first novel, and The Wreck of The River of Stars is a book that moves me after repeated readings. So I don't think there is a one-to-one relationship between being nominated as part of that slate and merit. (I originally wrote that there wasn't a correlation, but in fact I just asserted that there is a correlation! It's just not perfect. . . .)

Given than, I have to say that your decision not to vote for any of the Puppies slate, no matter what, is anecdotal evidence that Larry Correia was right about one of his original claims: It's a decision made on political grounds, out of factional loyalty, and not on grounds of literary merit, which as I understand it was one of Correia's main assertions about the Hugos. There's a point to the old saying about "not descending to their level." Voting on straight grounds of merit would probably not have resulted in your supporting a lot of the slate anyway, for that matter.

That said, it's to your credit that you read all that material, including writers you had no intention of voting for.

I read the Liu, which was one of this year's nominees for the Prometheus Award, and it was my second ranked choice, just above No Award. I have to agree it was a bit of a slog toward the end, though that may have been partly because its conventions were not those of American SF.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Absolutely there is no one-to-one relationship between slate designation and merit. Observe that I liked Lou Antonelli's nominated story, although most of the others I thought were really bad. So, yes, as I said at the top, I'm voting all Puppy nominees below No Award on principle.

But Larry Correia is still wrong. The principle is not one of "factional loyalty" or tribalism. Believe me, I have no personal fondness for many of the anti-Puppy leaders. It is - as the anti-Puppies have said repeatedly, and as the Puppies have persistently refused to grasp - a principle of opposing slate ballot-stuffing. Whatever the content of the slate.

And I read and ranked the Puppy nominees not out of nobility or a desire to be fair to Puppies, but because I understand how Hugo voting works. If I can't get my preferred nominees or No Award to win, and one Puppy or another will win regardless, there are some Puppy nominees that are less objectionable than other Puppy nominees.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

This year is not the first time that a dedicated group of slate voters have banded together to push a narrow, focused set of nominations in the Hugo Awards. However, most years it has not been more than one finalist. In nearly every case, the reaction of the electorate as a whole to finalists who they don't think legitimately belong on the short list has been to vote them below No Award. Remember, there's no step in the process that allows the electorate to say, "I think this candidate doesn't deserve to be on the final ballot;" you can only vote the candidate below No Award, for any number of reasons.

Anyone who says "It's not fair to vote a finalist below No Award because you don't think it should have been on the ballot at all" has no understanding of how the rules work or how they have been historically used by the member of WSFS.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Of course that's what No Award is for. We use it for that on the Prometheus Award, for example. But I wouldn't put a work below No Award because of my political opinion of the author or of the nominator; I'd do it because I had read the work and decided that, as a work, it substantially lacked merit, or didn't fit the definition of what the award was given for. It's not impossible that a really good work might be nominated by someone with political motives; saying that it should not win because of those motives is exactly the same category error as saying that it should win because of those motives. (Not having read any of the nominees, but going by the authors whose other works I've read, I would pick Michael Flynn as a likely example; his best writing has been very good.)

The complaint about political nominations seems to be that they do not result from the independent critical judgment of the people who are voting for a slate; and that's a problem. But if you vote based on your own independent critical judgment of a work, your vote is part of the solution to that problem; whereas if you vote based on political disapproval of the people who nominated a work, you're not exercising independent critical judgment, and if a whole lot of people choose to vote that way, the independent judgment is missing on both sides. At that point you've completed the politicization of the award that you're complaining about the Puppies starting. Correia allegedly started the whole thing because he believed that awards were being denied for political reasons (which, having struggled through part of one of his novels, I don't think is the case)—and he's succeeded in getting a lot of people to vote No Award for political reasons, that is, in getting them to give evidence that he's right.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You're still not grasping what I wrote earlier, that this manner of voting is not one of political opinion, but a morally principled objection to slate block-voting. The No Award vote is not because of my political opinion of the nominator, which would be an objection to the literary values the Puppies are trying to promote. I don't share those values, but that I'm willing to judge story by story, and if on some occasions we like the same stories, fine. That's been true for ages: stories get on the ballot that were nominated by people whose idea of SF and what it's for are very different from mine, and if I like the story also I vote for it, and if I think it's a bad story I don't, and consensus of individual voters acting independently wins the day.

Rather, it's a moral objection to the technique by which they promote their values, slate block voting. Unprecedented in Hugos history, it uses a loophole in the rules to effectively change those rules. It introduces a force more powerful than that of individual voters acting independently, thus forcing those who don't share its political values to play by the same changed rules to have a fair chance of winning, and that's why it's morally objectionable.

Procedures are under way to close the loophole in the rules and eliminate the power of slate block voting, but they will not take effect before next year. Now that the Puppies have shown their voting power in the nominations, if they nominate slates again next year, the only way to prevent them from running away with the nominations again will be to organize counter-slates. We hate slates! But we'll have to have them anyway. This, not political objections to their tastes in SF, is the fuel for our anger at the Puppies.

This moral problem comes up all the time in politics and the same solution is adopted, which is why you shouldn't be surprised at this reluctance to self-abnegate. Liberals object to unlimited corporate donations in politics, but since we can't get the rules changed to eliminate them, in order not to be handicapped we have to seek them too, even though we know it corrupts us as well as the Republicans. Conservatives object to being outvoted by more left-wing poor people in greater numbers, so unless they can get the voting eligibility rules changed - and they're working on that - they have to engage in their own get-out-the-vote efforts. Libertarians have their own objections to government regulations, but until they can get them changed they have to abide by them.

All of this relates to the rules for Hugo nominations, not to the rules for Hugo final voting. But in the meantime, we have a Puppy-tainted final ballot before us, and the only way to register our disapproval of the way the ballot was assembled is to vote against (i.e. to put below No Award) anything on their slates. Doing otherwise would be to accept that they were right to employ block voting.

Once again, Larry Correia is wrong. His claim was that the awards were already being voted politically. You agree with me in believing that this claim is not correct. But on the basis of that claim, he and his allies went ahead and organized slates, thus committing openly the sin that they were objecting to when they thought it was being done sub rosa. Now the non-Puppies, against our desires, to secure our fair chance must do the same thing, equally openly Since the Puppies started this (though they claim they didn't), they muddied the waters from which we now all must drink.

So Larry is wrong because we're only voting in slate terms in response to his allies' slates. And it's still not political! Because I'm voting against slate nominees regardless of whether I have any political objections to the individual nominees or not. If I objected to slates but allowed myself to vote for slate nominees that I liked, that would be a political objection to the others. Only if I had no objection to slates would a vote on pure merit be non-political.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I have read the Addison and the Butcher novels. If I recall correctly, the Butcher is a Harry Dresden novel and it's part of a long series. It would be hard to just jump in with no knowledge of the others. They're okay reads (I may have listened to it on CD in the car) but they don't melt my velveeta.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Ancillary Sword definitely requires that you have read Ancillary Justice. Sword starts just days (?) after the conclusion of Justice -- enough time to pack the spaceship for the drive to the next space station. All of the details of Radch society, and the two-timeline stories of Justice and the thousand-year-earlier backstory, are presumed to be understood as Sword begins.

I'm not going to hold that lack of stand-aloneness against it, as I really love the story Ann Leckie is writing. Goshwow etc. It frustrates and confuses me that hatred for the Leckie books is one of the driving forces for the Puppies.

Somebody somewhere compared Three Body Problem to vintage Isaac Asimov -- Big Ideas, but mostly flat characters.

whswhs - the problem with the slating is that it breaks the "wisdom of the crowds" usefulness of the Hugos. In most categories we don't have choices selected independently from a survey of several hundred people -- we have a shortlist selected by the views of two slate leaders and a couple of pals, at most.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Liu's characters may indeed by flat, but I found them distinguishable and interesting (even with my lack of familiarity with Chinese names) - and I'd say the same for Asimov's.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the useful AND succinct summaries of everything that you read! I may read many of these writings someday. (I may not agree with your opinions, but I do appreciate them.)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Hey, our ballots are practically the same, although I didn't read the Puppies nominees and thus didn't rank them after No Award. I think I liked both Three-Body Problem and Ancillary Sword better than you did, but I still ranked the novels in the same order you did because I feel Ancillary Sword is simply a continuation of a novel that has already won the Hugo. (I read Ancillary Justice in preparation for reading Ancillary Sword.) I liked all three non-Puppies novels well enough.

I did vote in the other two fan categories as well, but may be you did too and just had nothing to say about them.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I did. The categories I discussed were the ones about which I felt I had something substantive to say about the nominees. I'll say more on my voting after we have results to compare it to.