Do the Hugo Awards Need Fixing?
The Hugo Awards voters have spoken, and they don’t like puppies. On Saturday, fans at the World Science Fiction Convention gave “No Award” in several categories where the nominations were dominated by a voting bloc of disaffected white guys.
Said white-guy-canids are currently frothing at the mouth on social media, and good luck to them. I had some doubts beforehand about the process — in fact, I’ve been noodling away on blog posts about “how to fix the Hugo Awards” for a while — but the voting results proved the resiliency of the Hugos’ Australian ballot system.
Unlike the classic American ballot, Hugo votes are a series of preferences. Even if your favorite candidate fails to garner enough votes to win, your vote can still be counted for your second-favorite, third-favorite and so. There’s also a No Award choice, so you can support all the works you like and withhold support from anything you don’t like. If enough voters feel that nothing on the slate is worthy of an award, No Award wins.
On Saturday night, Hugo voters felt just that. No Award was the first choice of votes in all five of the canine-hounded award categories. In other categories, works that embraced diversity and fun surged to the top of the standings. In a genre that has its fair share of reactionary, this year’s awards were a hippy-dippy lovefest.
Hugo Awards Math
This was a resounding defeat for pale-skinned male American curs. The Hugo Awards committee always publishes the voting statistics afterwards, and the voting patterns are clear. There were a few hundred snarling nutbags in the electorate, and they were completely overwhelmed by the three thousand or so voters who are no crazier than the average science fiction fan.
The controversy pushed voting to an all-time high. There were nearly 6000 voters, 65% more than usual. This is notable mostly because it points out what a tiny niche Hugo voters really are, but it also seems clear that even if voting had stayed at normal levels, Readers for Old-timey White Racism (ROWR) would probably have gone down in flames.
If this year’s Hugo Awards proved anything, it’s that the puppy piddle brigade is just one of the many sects of science fiction fans existing in sometimes uneasy symbiosis. We can probably stop worrying about having to give a rocketship to anything more embarrassing than They’d Rather Be Right.
(Which, by the way, was all about fighting prejudice and the unwillingness to deal with diversity. In 1955. Go figure.)
The Road to the Hugo Awards
That said, what about the nominations process? This year’s shenanigans were a distraction for everyone who just wanted to enjoy some skiffy, so what can be done to keep the housebroken-challenged in check in 2016?
In terms of formal process, not much. It takes a few years to change the rules in the Hugo Awards process, which is a good thing. And the fact is that the nominations process is already pretty good. It may be susceptible to gaming, but it’s also simple to use — and that’s important when a process appeals to only a very few users.
Let’s go back to the statistics. Look at how few people actually nominate works for Hugo Awards. The ballots top out at 1827 nominations for Best Novel, which is half of a normal Hugo voting turnout. Puppy-loved short fiction and editor categories had a thousand or fewer ballots, which a small enough number that a few hundred droolers can distort the slate.
We now know that doughy, pasty white guys with a hard-on for hard-man science fiction make up a voting bloc of a few hundred. The best way to dilute that bloc back to its usual insignificance is to have a nomination turnout that more closely approximates the real diversity of fandom.
(Yes, even that furry over in the corner. *shudder*)
But It’s All About Me!
The problem is that a lot of those fans are gafiated, if they were ever active fans at all. Take me, because why not me? I used to vote in the Hugo Awards. I spent a couple of decades as a faithful subscriber to the magazines. But then I got older, had kids, and got busy (not necessarily in that order).
I don’t recognize most of the names that bounce around in short fiction these days. And let’s get real, I’m not going to go digging through magazines or anthologies looking for them. I don’t have time.
Dangle enough good fiction in front of me, though, and I might just bite. Make the evaluation process easier, and I could probably be talked into casting a ballot for the stories I like. Bring enough of me back into the process, and you dilute the screaming crazies back into irrelevance.
The audience is out there. We’re just asleep. It’s up to content publishers to wake us up.
I think it’s time for magazines, anthologies, and web publishers to get a lot more active in putting things up “for your consideration.” Pick your best stories, make any necessary deals with their authors, and put them out on social media when award season rolls around. Use any channel that gets you eyeballs, from free PDFs to the upcoming Apple News feed. Make sure everything you put out has a link to the Hugo Awards voting process.
Content publishers, it’s up to you to get my frazzled attention. Get me interested, get the stories in front of me, and you’ve got a good chance to get my vote. You’ve got an even better chance to get me to spread the stories I like. You may even get me as a customer.
It’s time to take short science fiction viral. Give it a try, content publishers — you have nothing to lose but your obscurity.