Entry tags:
dead dogs
I missed the Hugo announcements because I spent all day floating around in ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lindentreeisle's mom's swimming pool, which was definitely a better life choice, let's face it.
I'm still catching up on liveblogs and stuff, but looking at the numbers that were released, something occurs to me: the puppies may not have been 100% wrong. Because if you look at the nominations numbers, it really does look like a small group of people (~70-100) are all nominating from the exact same relatively small group of works, all of which share the trait that they are very thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, imperialism. Whereas when you looked at the other (non-puppy) works nominated, there are a lot more of them, but fewer of them hit that nominations threshhold, because the votes are spread among more works, so they are each less likely to get a nomination.
And the taste of that small group of people, while it isn't entirely different from the tastes of the wider fandom, isn't exactly convergent, either. Just look at some of the stuff that did get wins this year. And the effect is that it almost looks like slate nominations.
I mean, obviously it *isn't* : what it is, is that if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn worldbuilding, then you still have a WHOLE LOT FEWER stories to pick from. And so there's a lot less less spread in the noms.
And obviously the answer isn't to have a competing slate, because that's a solution to a different problem. The answer is for the Puppies and their friends to make sure there are SO MANY books published every year for the diversity-aware bloc to pick from that their nominations are as spread out as the straight-white-men's nominations.
Get on that, Puppies. Please.
(That might actually happen anyway, if all the people who bought first-time votes this year nominate next year, and nominate a lot of less-printsff-mainstream stuff. We'll see.)
lindentreeisle's mom's swimming pool, which was definitely a better life choice, let's face it.I'm still catching up on liveblogs and stuff, but looking at the numbers that were released, something occurs to me: the puppies may not have been 100% wrong. Because if you look at the nominations numbers, it really does look like a small group of people (~70-100) are all nominating from the exact same relatively small group of works, all of which share the trait that they are very thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, imperialism. Whereas when you looked at the other (non-puppy) works nominated, there are a lot more of them, but fewer of them hit that nominations threshhold, because the votes are spread among more works, so they are each less likely to get a nomination.
And the taste of that small group of people, while it isn't entirely different from the tastes of the wider fandom, isn't exactly convergent, either. Just look at some of the stuff that did get wins this year. And the effect is that it almost looks like slate nominations.
I mean, obviously it *isn't* : what it is, is that if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn worldbuilding, then you still have a WHOLE LOT FEWER stories to pick from. And so there's a lot less less spread in the noms.
And obviously the answer isn't to have a competing slate, because that's a solution to a different problem. The answer is for the Puppies and their friends to make sure there are SO MANY books published every year for the diversity-aware bloc to pick from that their nominations are as spread out as the straight-white-men's nominations.
Get on that, Puppies. Please.
(That might actually happen anyway, if all the people who bought first-time votes this year nominate next year, and nominate a lot of less-printsff-mainstream stuff. We'll see.)
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but to this casual observer, it did seem striking that a lot of the authors I associate with the corners of sf that I see overlapping on my circles were in very similar spots in the nominations listings, over and over again, even with things that didn't get a huge amount of buzz.
so it may not be true at all, but I definitely see how it could look true without doing the math. and we should implement my suggested fix either way. :p
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Heh, yep. :P
But I suspect this probably is the parable of drawing a bullseye around the bullet holes in the wall at play. There are other authors you might associate with the same social-justicey people that don't cluster around that 70-100 nomination point, but you found a pattern because you were looking for one.
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It'll be very interesting to see what comes out of the anonymized noms, anyway!
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i.e. my hypothesis would be that the nominating ballots that contained The Dark Between the Stars would have less other Best Novel nominees than the ballots containing The Three Body Problem, since TDBTS was part of a slate and 3BP was not.
This would also let us look at your hypothesis that the ballots containing Unlocked would look more like the ballots containing The Dark Between the Stars than the ballots containing The Three body Problem.
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I hope we get some good stats out of this! Because stats + SFF fandom can only lead to good things.
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