Hugo voting: how, why, for what

by Doctor Science

This is a guide intended for fans from the transformative works/Tumblr ends of fandom who are voting for the Hugo Awards for the first time.

There are two basic principles for Hugo voting:

1. You do not have to vote in every category
2. When you *do* vote in a category, you have to at least look at all the legitimate nominees. You don't have to finish them, but you're honor-bound to at least try.

Choosing, by George Frederick Watts. A much better representation of the process than the usual Judgement of Paris, I feel. What "uncontrollable sneezing" is a metaphor for I leave up to you.

I'm cutting here to spare those of you who are uninterested.

This year, as you probably know, the Hugo nominations were overwhelming influenced by two related slates, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies. The Rabid Puppies, organized by Vox Day (and focusing on the small press he runs, Castalia House) were far more successful.

Many SFF fans, myself included, think that slates -- any slates, regardless of who puts them together -- undermine the Hugo nominations process, which relies on fans making a good faith effort to make up their own minds and do their own evaluations. In a later post, I'll get into how this happens and what is being done to close up the vulnerability the slates exploited, but for now I'll just say that a lot of people are planning to deploy No Award in many categories.

Here are the nominees on the full Hugo ballot. I've made three easy .txt files you may wish to use for your ballot, if you feel that slates make some nominations other than kosher.

1. Minus nominees associated with Castalia House
2. Minus nominees from the Rabid Puppies slate
3. Minus nominees from either slate

Some people are going a step further, and voting for No Award if there is only a single non-slate nominee in a given category, on the grounds that that's not really a competition any more. Many other people are using a mixed strategy, and ignoring the slate effect for the two Dramatic Presentation categories, because they are (to some extent) awarded outside the SFF community, to movies and TV shows for which fans are only a small factor.

Because ballots have to be completed by July 31, you may find yourself pressed for time. Pick the categories you are most comfortable with and vote in them -- you can vote as you go, you don't have to save all your voting for one fell swoop.

Here are some tips for voting in the different categories, if you've never done this before:

Story categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story

These are the heart of the Hugo Awards, so most people take voting for them pretty seriously. There are two basic ways of going about choosing what to vote for:

1. Order the nominees according to which one is "best", however you personally define that.
2. Only vote for stories that you consider "Hugo worthy", however you define *that*, and stick "No Award" after your last choice that is still Worthy.

I like the method used by Camestros Felapton, a Scandinavian fan who I've gotten to know at File770:

For several categories I have also mentioned a comparison work as part of my voting strategy. The named work was a non-nominated work (or works) used to judge the relative quality of works on a slate or non-slated works in a category dominated by slate nominees. The comparison work may not have been technically eligible and is not intended to be an example of what should have been nominated -- just an extra point of comparison unaffected by the influence of slates. Several were drawn from the comparable Nebula category for 2015. Works voted below ‘No Award' were not as competitive for my vote as the comparison work(s).

To get yourself "warmed up", I recommend reading Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon, which won the Nebula Award for Short Story. It's got a very transformative-works feel, and I suspect many of you will like it very much. Another good point for comparison is last year's Short Story Hugo winner, The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.

Best Related Work

Basically, this is for meta. Last year's winner was 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative by Kameron Hurley, which you may have already read -- it was widely linked on tumblr.

Best Graphic Story

This is where you guys really get to shine, because you already *know* this stuff. Go to it!

Note: the only Puppy nominee on the ballot isn't in the packet, you have to go to the Zombie Nation website.

Dramatic Presentation, Short and Long

Again, pretty much self-explanatory, and you guys are already well-equipped to judge. The nominated movies and TV episodes aren't in the packet, you have to track them down on your own.

Best Editors, Short and Long

These categories are *really difficult* to vote for if you're a newbie to the process -- i.e. I have no idea, myself. Skipping is no shame!

ETA: Jim Hines and George R.R. Martin have very useful posts about how they approach these categories.

Best Artist, Pro and Fan

These categories are confusing and IMHO outdated. The distinction between them isn't actually between pro and fan *artist*, but between professional and fannish *distribution*. "Pro" is for artists and works in for-profit magazines, book covers, and art books; "fan" is for zines, works shown at con art shows ... and online.

Historically, the Fan Artist Hugo has tended toward a "usual suspects" list of candidates and winners (this is even more the case for Pro Artist. However, in 2013 and 2014 Fan Artist was won by people who had never been nominated before. In both these cases, the artist got into the ballot at the bottom of the list of nominees (because they weren't already known to the Hugo-voting community) -- but won the award itself by a landslide, because they're basically professional-level artists. These artists are coming into the Hugo pool via deviantart and tumblr, and it's starting to reconfigure the field.

Best Fancast

This is the audio award, and it's another one where you guys may be better than us olds, or me anyway, at evaluating (and nominating!) worthy candidates.

Best Semiprozine, Fanzine, Fan Writer

Don't worry about the distinction between Semiprozine and Fanzine, just pick what works for you. For the fan writers, you can use your favorite fannish meta writers as your basis of comparison.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Not a Hugo, but given out at the same time. There's a two-year window of elibility.

Comments

[tigtog]

I'm using the classic bookshop "buy or not buy" test to evaluate the nominees (already widely mentioned by others over the last few months).

If I'm keen to keep turning pages within 5 pages, then I'm pretty much sold on finishing* the book. If I'm bored or dreading what I'll find on page 6, I stop reading because life is too short. Any of the nominees that doesn't pass the bookshop test goes below No Award and I move on without regret.

Works that I read to the end and enjoy will not necessarily go above No Award on my ballot. For me a work will have to also truly engage the 'sensawunda' with cohesive worldbuilding, plus be either a technically excellent execution of their narrative or a distinctly innovative exploration of a what-if (ideally both) to be considered Hugo-worthy.

* A work that passes my bookshop test might still end up failing to hold my willing suspension of disbelief at some later point, and so I might stop reading at page 50 or page 350 or even page 550 if whatever the disruptor was is sufficiently problematic to me in any number of ways. Any such nominated work will also be placed below No Award on my ballot as non-Hugo-worthy.

[Doctor Science]

tigtog:

That's a pretty good test. Your also approach supports my theory that world-building is the core literary value for Hugo voters.

What rubric do you use for the Editor categories?

[tigtog]

If the works they edited (as included in the voter package or linked to otherwise for consideration) seem to be meeting or at least yearning/stretching well towards my Hugo-worthy criteria, then that's the sort of editor I want to see more of, so that's the sort of editor I would rank highly. I'm not sure what other rubric I really have at my disposal.

[Camestros Felapton]

'Scandanavia' would be a promotion of sorts :)
Currently Australasian but I've been other things.

I find the editor categories very difficult to vote for and in normal circumstances I probably wouldn't...

[Cat]

For me, anything on a slate is going below no award, because in my opinion slating is unfair.

Legitimate (i.e. non slate) nominations go below no award if I have to hold my nose to rank them. Legitimate sole nominations go below No Award if I don't honestly like them well enough to vote them #1.

If something was slated but I would have voted for it had it made the ballot honestly, I will rank it first below No Award.

To tell you the truth I've been kind of busy for the last month or so and I'm not sure how much reading time I have. I've read the legitimate fiction nominees, (and most of the slate ones also) but slogging through slate dreck in Best Related Works is not really high on my to-do list right now. So I may end up just leaving slate works off the ballot entirely in many categories. The Campbell only has one non-slate nominee if I remember correctly; I should try to read his stuff next. t I bounced off it last year, so I may vote No Award in that category also. We'll see.

[Bruce Baugh]

There are two available axes for evaluating editors.

#1. The author's published work recently under two or more different editors. Take John C. Wright. He continues to put out novels with Tor, where he's edited by David Hartwell, and several of those books have the look-inside option at Amazon. You can compare his work there to what he's put out with Castalia House, and a lot of it's in the Hugo voter's packet for this year.

The work Hartwell edited is consistently superior in every way: the wordiness reined in, the sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph flow better, random grammatical errors simply not present. Granting that it's always possible that Wright writes drastically differently and worse for Beale than he does for Hartwell, the much more likely conclusion is that Hartwell is a very fine editor and Beale is a very bad one.

#2. Multiple authors publish work with the same editor. Ideally they'd all have easily available work edited by others for the fullest comparison, but we can look at this stuff in isolation to see if there are consistent problems (or virtues!). Do the same kinds of bad grammar turn up in all the various authors? Are there verbal tics that get reused in the dialogue or exposition? Do stories excerpted from longer works provide necessary info to new readers, and do they have a completeness of their own?

Filling in the blanks here is left as an exercise to the reader. :)

But it seems like those are good ways to start assessing the impact of an editor.

[Dave W.]

How to Vote ABD (Anyone But Day) for the Hugo Editor Categories

Speaking as someone who is voting for the Hugos for the first time this year, I don't have a lot of basis to judge most of the candidates for the best editor Hugos, and in a normal year, I wouldn't vote in either of these categories. This, however, is not a normal year. The architect of the Rabid Puppies slate, Vox Day, has put his own name on the ballot in both editor categories. Given his success at appealing to #gamergaters to put his nomination slate forward, I must assume there will be a similar effort to bring people in to vote for him in the final election. Therefore, if I have an opinion about his candidacy, which I do, I believe it is important for me to vote in these categories.

The number of Castalia House entries in the Hugo packet this year have certainly given me a basis to form a judgement about Day as an editor. He presumably chose these stories as worthy of publication, performed (or failed to) detailed editing on the text, and further selected these stories as worthy of a Hugo nomination on his slate. All these are editorial functions on which I can judge him, above and beyond his sin against the Hugos themselves by exploiting a broken nomination system to exclude the rest of the electorate from many nomination categories.

I therefore judge Day/Beale as unworthy of an editing Hugo, and wish to express this judgement through my ballot by placing him below No Award. However, this leaves me with a small problem: as Kevin Standlee has noted (http://kevin-standlee.livejournal.com/1440530.html), once you rank No Award on your ballot, you no longer have a meaningful No Opinion option available by leaving other entries off your ballot. Any such entry left off is implicitly ranked below anything you do rank, including No Award. This would not be a problem if I was willing to automatically vote No Award against all slate nominees, but at least in the editor and dramatic presentation categories, I am not going to do that. (This in part reflects my judgement about how important the slate support was to these entries getting on the ballot.)

So instead, what I have done is to rank the remaining nominees in the two editor categories randomly above No Award, then No Award in fifth position, and finally Day in sixth. I did this with a few rolls of a single die - roll once until I got a number from 1-4, which became my first position, then assign the remaining nominees (1-2), (3-4), and (5-6) for a second die roll, which determined my second choice, and then the last two got (1-3) and (4-6) for the third-place die roll. This ensures that all permutations of the other four nominees are equally likely. If I get enough information about one or more of these nominees to form an informed judgement about them before the voting deadline, I may move them up or down from that initial random position. But if not, I am at least voting in a way that should minimize the effects of my ballot on the collective informed opinions of other voters, while still making sure that my vote counts against Day getting a rocket.

If there were, hypothetically, 99 other voters who shared my general opinion and voted the same way, we would average 25 first-place votes for each of the four non-Day nominees, with a standard deviation of 4.33. After two of these nominees were eliminated, we would have an average of 50 first-place votes for the remaining nominees, with a standard deviation of 5. That means, roughly, that 2/3rds of the time, we would contribute between 45 and 55 votes for each of the two finalists, while 95% of the time it would be between 40 and 60 votes (obviously the vote for each one would be the mirror-image of the other). While that means there would be a certain amount of randomness in the final vote, it could only make a difference in the outcome if the informed vote was very close between the remaining nominees. Meanwhile, our votes would count as 100 solid votes against Day winning, both head-to-head against the other candidates, and in the final "No Award" showdown, if it came to that.

While this randomness is somewhat undesirable, it's the best I can do without explicit coordination, which I am loath to propose. Accordingly, I offer this strategy for others who may be in a similar position and wish to vote against Day while still allowing more-informed voters to (mostly) determine the final result among the others.