Hugo short fiction short shrift

[sandramcdonald]

Congratulations to the Hugo nominees, including editors Sheila Williams, John Joseph Adams, Neil Clarke and Jonathan Strahan!  I'm delighted to have worked with all of them and it's great to see their work get recognized

Comments

[j_cheney]

I, too, found it weird. From a statistics point of view, I understand the logic. More people voted on more different stories, making it harder to reach the 5%. But still, I think that rule isn't working the way it was intended if it only turns up 3 stories.

[sandramcdonald]

I'd love to see a plan moving forward to ensure that a full five stories get on the ballot. This might be the first odd year, but with an increasingly wide field, it probably won't be the last.

[sandramcdonald]

I think more people voting on different stories is a good thing. It shows diversity, wide reading, and independence. I hope to see that every year. But there should be a contingency plan and full 5 stories.

[anonymous]

This might be the result of people starting to figure out how few people really determined the Hugo ballot in the past. With a only few hundred votes cast it often seemed like writers with a strong following could be assured of at least landing a spot, particularly once you got out of the Best Novel category. With the recent interest in shifting the awards away from their traditional greying white male demographic though, it's become obvious the only way to do that is to vote your agenda. Depending on how you read the results, those voters either have or haven't quite coalesced into organized voting blocs which leaves the results a little skewed.

[sandramcdonald]

I'm all a fan for voting one's own agenda, not following a bloc. I would hope that the Hugo administrators can figure out how to handle that kind of shift in voting.

Someone on twitter pointed out that it only took 33 votes or so to get onto the ballot. So three entries got more than 33 votes, and the rest were scattered. But we don't know by how much. If the next most popular got 30 and 29, I think those person should be on the ballot and not have those votes tossed.

[secritcrush]

That is the rub, isn't it? It would be good if the rule had an exception of where if the remaining stories needed to fill out a slate of five got X% of the lowest qualifying story (where X was somewhere around 85-90) it would qualify even without meeting the 5% rule.

It will be interesting to see how many votes the fourth and fifth place finishers received.

[oneminutemonkey]

I agree with you on the short story rule. It's a tragic waste of an opportunity when the rules won't even allow the full slate of stories to make the ballot.
And honestly, I think there should be a rule that no one can be on the ballot more than once per category. No offense to Seanan McGuire, who is a wonderful person and an awesome writer, but it amazes and baffles me that, with only 5 slots available, the rules allow more than one nomination to go to any particular person. In the interests of fairness and writing diversity, mind you.

People are already pointing out how this year's slate of nominees is an odd change from the norm, and I think we may be seeing the start of a change in how things work. A slow years-long change, but I suspect we'll see some fallout if this keeps up.

[sandramcdonald]

I agree that I would rather see 20 different writers in 20 different slots than 15 in 20. I would like to think that if I were ever nominated twice in one category, I'd decline one to give someone else an opportunity.

We have many great writers in our field and I like that the Hugos bring attention to the them. More is better.