Hugo statistics

[calimac]

Anybody run statistics on the 2016 Hugo nominees yet?

If my hasty count is accurate, 38 Sad Puppy candidates made it on to the final ballot, including 13 of the 20 finalists in the fiction categories. But in many categories they had more than a slate's worth.

The Rabid Puppies did run a slate, although they denied calling that, and 62 of their 81 candidates made it on to the final ballot. A few were obvious loss leaders, but others were straight from the loony bin. As a person who attempted making nominations myself, but had few concrete suggestions as to what to vote for, I can confirm that a slate is still a powerful tool.

What about gender function in the fiction categories? Leaving aside the half-slot for "S. Harris" whom I know nothing about, 7 out of 20 were by women, 35%. That's not as high as in recent pre-Puppy years, but it's solid historically and much better than last year. Only 2 of 20, 10%, on the Rabid Puppy slate were by women.

Only 5 of 20 fiction nominees were not Rabid Puppies, and those 5 are all by women: Leckie, Jemisin, Novik, Okorafor, Bolander. Time to pull out No Award in Short Story again, I suspect.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

So you're counting Stephenson, Bujold, King, and Hao as Rabid Puppies? I'm not sure what your criteria are.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My criterion is that they're on the Rabid Puppies slate. What other criterion is there?

Please note that I did say that "a few [candidates] were obvious loss leaders," i.e. that, just to play mind games, Beale included some genuinely good candidates on his slate.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I've thought about it, and on one hand that's the obvious right answer, but on the other hand it's the right answer to a very specific question, which is not necessarily the most useful question to ask.

Are you looking for a completely objective rule to use to classify a nominee as a Rabid Puppies nominee, one that has no element of "judgment call" to it? Then yes, "Was this work listed on Beale's proposed slate of nominees?" is that question.

But there seems to be a moral difference between works that became finalists because, and only because, Beale listed them, and works that could have become finalists in an alternate world where Beale had no influence at all on the Hugo Awards. Indeed you yourself make that distinction, when you say that "Beale included some genuinely good candidates on his slate." Those are not "Rabid Puppies nominees" in the same sense as the non-loss-leader nominees.

And making this distinction might be important. After all, the function of identifying the Rabid Puppies nominees is presumably to prevent them from winning, by ranking them lower than No Award when you vote. It doesn't seem desirable to prevent an obviously good candidate from winning.

In fact, it might be suggested that by applying that simple "tainted origin" rule, you're providing Beale with a simple device for denying the Hugo to actually deserving authors: He has only to include some actually deserving story on his list as a loss leader, and the author is promptly marked as a Rabid Puppies author and downvoted by people who oppose Beale. Or, as I understand happened last year, feels compelled to withdraw their work from nomination to avoid being so categorized.

Back when I was training other copy editors, I regularly worked with people who wanted really simple rules that always applied. Unfortunately English doesn't work that way; its grammatical rules are largely contextual and can only be applied by thinking about what the sentence is actually saying, which is a judgment call that a copy editor needs to learn to make, if they are going to produce actually clear writing that says what the author meant.

I think making the judgment call that certain nominees are genuinely good, and therefore do not count as Rabid Puppies nominees, because they could very well have become finalists without being on Beale's slate, is something that really needs to be done to accomplish what I think you are trying to accomplish; and moreover, it's a call you are already prepared to make, even if it's more challenging than just scanning Beale's list.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Before asking the second question, which requires some subtlety of thought and which, in any case, we have several months to consider how best to respond to, we need to ask the first question, which is capable of a simple straightforward factual answer, and which, moreover and even more importantly, serves as a basis of information on which we rely when considering the second question.

I wrote this post some two hours after the nominees were released, and only because nobody else I'd seen had gotten around to posting that calculation yet. I just intended to deal with that question for now.

It's particularly irksome to be lectured on the moral distinction between good and bad Puppy nominees, because I made specific mention of that distinction in my post, even though that wasn't the question I was addressing, and then cited that mention in the comment to which you wrote your long response.

Furthermore, the second question isn't whether the stories by Stephenson, Bujold, King, and Hao were Rabid Puppy nominees. Of course they were. (The stories, not the authors. The way you wrote your first comment, it was about the authors.) The question is whether to vote for them anyway. Even last year, its status as a Rabid Puppy nominee didn't prevent anyone from voting for Guardians of the Galaxy, and the same will apply this year, once we've sorted through the nominee list and determined which is which.

Possibly my line "Time to pull out No Award in Short Story again" confused you, but please note that none of Stephenson, Bujold, King, or Hao, the ones you named, were in that category, which appears to be rancid straight through. And please note also that I added "I suspect," because I am willing to be corrected on that point.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Okay, I see the point you're making. Apologies for the misparsing, and for the time you spent in clearing it up.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I think it worth noting that Marc Aramini's book on Gene Wolfe, despite coming from Castalia and thus being backed by the Pups, is a worthy and indeed intimidating work of scholarship.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

So I've read elsewhere as well.