Camestros Felapton

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Why I Trust the Hugo Awards

I needed to take a break from writing about the Hugo Awards after the time spent on the enormous mess of the 2023 Hugo Award statistics. I believe that the many fans who came together to pull apart what went wrong with the 2023 awards have shown definitively that the was a huge breach of trust and process last year. Many people who take an active interest in Worldcon and the Hugos are still debating what kinds of reforms are needed. Meanwhile, many people no longer trust the integrity of the awards.

I don’t know when the 2024 Hugo Award finalists will be announced but I assume it will be this month or early April. Ironically, I’d spent so much of my focus on the 2023 Awards that I barely had time to think about 2024 before nominations closed and it would have been better if I’d posted this before then. However, now is a second-best opportunity to say that I believe the preponderance of evidence points to the Hugo Awards being a process of singular integrity and transparency compared to other literary awards.

The flip side of the “Charting the Cliff” analysis is this. Every broad analysis that was done to identify the issues with 2023 was also done with the same data from 2017 onward. Every year where EPH was run was checked against issues such as the EPH ratios or rounding issues in the decimal fractions or power-law-like distributions. If an unusual feature appeared to exist in 2023, the same features were looked for in earlier years. Occasionally, some things could be found in earlier years. There were some odd rounding issues in 2020 for example…but only a few.

Does this by itself exonerate the Hugo Awards from all taint of potential maladministration during those years? No, I can’t numerically prove that a Hugo admin in previous years didn’t more subtly change some numbers. However, I think the document demonstrates that the complexity of messing with the Hugo ballots means that firstly tell-tale signs are likely to show in EPH but also, with additional data such as samples of actual ballots, the nomination figures are very checkable. In principle, a sufficiently unusual combination of choices that show up in the longlist can be verified at an individual ballot level. This is an amazing feature of EPH that I really hadn’t considered until early this year. You can’t work out from the data how somebody voted (ballot secrecy is ensured) but if you already know how a group of people voted you can somewhat validate that in the nomination stats.

That is an amazing level of transparency! Fannish resources such as File 770’s readers posting how they voted provide ways of verifying the nomination statistics in ways that would take some work but which anybody hoping to fake the stats would find very challenging to circumvent. True, there is no way of 100% reconstructing the figures without the raw data but that’s not necessary to provide a substantial check on the voting integrity and to provide a major disincentive to anybody trying to meddle with the figures. I remain surprised that Dave McCarty actually released those statistics given the degree to which they revealed the malpractice in 2023. It would have been a scandal if he had actually gone down the “dog ate my homework” route but it would have been a scandal of a smaller scale. Potentially it would have been a storm he could have weathered.

Even so, every award still requires a degree of trust in the personal integrity of the people running the award. With the 2024 Hugo Awards, I was so glad to see the steps taken by the Glasgow team to add additional transparency to the awards. In addition, Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte has an exemplary track record of going above and beyond in providing details and insights into the voting process whenever he has been involved.

Every award’s reputation rests on a degree of trust in indviduals acting in good faith. This is especially true of juried awards and to some degree we should apply the standard we apply to juried awards to awards based on popular or membership-based voting. Simply put, do works highlighted in longlists/short list/finalist pools reflect a notable subset of works? What biases are revealed in those choices (regardless of whether we think those biases arise from individuals within the awards, within the pool of voters or arise from external factors)? I put more trust in the IGNYTE awards than say The Dragon Awards or The Goodread Awards because the FIYAH team are clear about their aims have demonstrated their commitment to their own aims within science fiction and fantasy. I don’t know the exact details of how the jury pick the finalists each year but I can see what they come up with. It isn’t hard to assume good faith in the parts of the process I can’t see. I have substantial less faith in the Dragon Awards precisely because of the mismatch between how the awards present themselves as a mass-participation popular vote process but with obscure rules, lack of publicity around nominations and almost no data on actual numbers. The Goodreads Awards? Well, they present more transparency around numbers than the Dragon Awards but Amazon and Goodreads are inherently untrustworthy.

But I should consider some objections to my case.

Am I just saying all this as a Hugo insider defending the SMOFs? Well clearly I’ve invested a lot of my time since 2015 writing about the Hugo Awards and I’ve been a Hugo finalist twice. However, despite appearances I am not an insider. I have attended exactly ZERO Worldcons. The number of people active in Worldcon I have met in real life is also exactly zero (to my knowledge). My “real life” social circle is wholly independent of science fiction conventions and to some degree fandom in general. My connection with the Hugo Awards, Worldcon and fandom in general revolves around this blog, the social media accounts under the “Camestros Felapton” name and comments on relevant blogs or Discord groups etc. I’m invested in the Hugo Awards because I like them more than I like the Hugo Awards because I’m invested in them.

Should I like them though? Does not a long pattern of scandals over the past few years demonstrate that there is something profoundly broken about the Hugo Awards? No, I don’t think so. Firstly, there really have only been two scandals in recent years about the actually integrity of the award process itself. The first being the Sad/Rabid Puppy attacks on the award running roughly from 2014-2017 and organised by a group of voters engaged with the broader culture wars that have gripped the US in recent years. The second being the 2023 Hugo Awards and the malpractice and self-censorship done by the Hugo Award admins of the Chengdu Worldcon. The various other controversies have revolved around the awards have included issues on the treatment of finalists by the convention, the running of the award ceremony and the unethical sponsorship of a worldcon by Raytheon, a notoriously unethical arms manufacturer (unethical even by the low standards of “US arms manufacturers”).

Of the two voting scandals, I think I have demonstrated two things in my detailed writing about both. Firstly, for all of the trauma, anger and stress of the Puppy years, the Hugo Awards and Worldcon in general weathered that minor front in America’s culture wars far, far better than many other places. True, the Sad/Rabid Puppy debarkle was in many ways just a minor footnote in the political storms associated with the Alt-right and Trumpian politics but the Hugo Awards came out of that with better rules and a stronger community (but not one that magically had expunged all issues of bias and bigotry). Secondly, in the 2023 Chengdu/McCarty scandal, I think I’ve shown how even with the worstcase scenario of essentially a rogue Hugo Award committee, the voting process can be checked and that the community will take it into its own hands validating the results and showing when it has failed. The 2023 Hugo Awards are a scandal because people who love the awards demanded answers and told the world when those answers were lacking.

I don’t want to minimise the other scandals. I think there are still unanswered questions about the involvement of Raytheon in the DC Worldcon for example. However, they simply are not scandals about the actual Hugo Award process. I have no reason to doubt the results of the 2021 Hugo Awards based on the evidence that is publicly available. The existence of a shitty sponsor is not evidence of a failure of process. The anger around it (or the anger around the intermible 2020 award ceremony) is justified but that anger also arises because people care about the Hugo Awards and people care about the Hugo Awards for reasons beyond simple inertia or because some people like going to conventions.

The Hugo Awards are not a paragon of left-wing virtues. There are still inherent biases that arise out of community that tends to be older, whiter and more American than the much more diverse nature of global fans of science fiction and fantasy. However, it is a community that has repeatedly been willing to criticise itself and make good faith attempts to do better. I trust the Hugo Awards because I’ve seen when they have failed and how people have responded to that failure.

camestrosfelapton

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20 responses to “Why I Trust the Hugo Awards”

  1. Yeah, I agree.

    The Hugo Awards have been well respected for good reasons. It will take work to regain trust after what happened in 2023, but the initial signs are positive.

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    • Thanks, I meant to post this earlier but initially I hesitated because it felt like there could be even more bombshells and then time got away from me and Hugo nominations were already closed.

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  4. I believe that this year’s Hugos will be the most transparent and squeaky-clean Hugos of all.

    Dave really should have gone with “dog ate my homework”, though — it would have passed in a couple of weeks and not gone mainstream. More grumbling than righteous fury.

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    • Yup. I’d have been angry about it but after a certain point, it would just sound like being a conspiracy nut. The various kinds of sinophobia or fear of the CCP that surround the discussion of the con anyway would have made it difficult to demand more without sounding like I was supporting things I don’t agree with.

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    • Probably would not have looked good on him personally, but he would probably quitly have banned from administrating a Hugo ever again, but at last he would have been welcome at a Worldcon which I doubt he will be now anymore.

      On the other hand it would have made him look incompetent and some people do prefer to look evil than incompetent. Of course the whole affair made him look incompetent evil, so win?

      I also think that the Hugos this year should be fine. There is also no award that can substitute for the Hugos, the Nebula comes closest but misses the fanelement.

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  7. In news tangential to the Hugos: T Kingfisher is giving an author talk at Harry Hartog Penrith on the 10th of April! I didn’t make it to the store during the Christmas run up, but enough other SFFH enthusiasts must have done so to make her appearance a viable proposition. Yay!

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  8. More to the substance of Cam’s post:

    Thanks to the 2023 malfeasance and the response to it, the process whereby a work receives a Hugo award is now better known than ever. Can’t say that about other prestigious SFFH awards. As for Amazon and Goodreads, I do not wish to disparage the efforts of those who put their heart and soul into making them better places to be. But ultimately those venues are about corporate enrichment and not about reader-to-reader helpfulness. Cait Corrain’s attempt to carve herself a bigger slice is indicative.

    Crises with the Hugos are a moment for reflection on fanac in general, and the many factors that press on it: politics, money, pandemics, inequity. On one hand are those who say Worldcons and Hugos are a spent force, to be derided or ignored. On the other, those who say, “How dare you? Let’s see you step up and do the hard work that makes them possible.”

    It takes great courage to step up and do the hard work. My (virtual) hat is off to the people of goodwill who do.

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  9. The incredible usefulness of EPH throughout this entire process is wildly underrated, and I hope it’s remembered if we ever have to relitigate EPH.

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  10. It doesn’t really matter if we trust the Hugos or not. They exist, they are a set of awards voted on and given out by the WorldCon of each year from attendees and associate voters. (The same can be said for the Dragons, a different type of award that exists, connected to a convention.) If WorldCon exists, then the Hugos can exist if WorldCon conventions/members want to give them out for its conventions. And WorldCon’s existence is not in any way dependent on the Hugos; most of the attendees don’t vote on the Hugos or go to the convention for those awards in any given year. WorldCon’s existence is doing just fine, decentralized and wildly uneven experience that it is. Despite many pronouncements, WorldCon, just like science fiction, printed books and written fiction in general, has not died.

    But the Hugos are a special award for their transparency of data and the tenacity of Hugo voters & fans of the Hugos themselves. The folks who vote on the Hugos are, most of the time, a dedicated lot who believe in giving as much of the short ballot a read as much as they can before deciding a vote, rather than just voting for what they want, know and nominated. They even do it, in smaller numbers, for more obscure things like Best Fan Writer, etc. It’s the only lit award I know where there is a massive amount of interest from general fandom in specific voting data.

    All of this is what made the Puppies’ claims in the years they campaigned about rigging the vote, etc., ludicrous. Even before EPH, the voting data showed exactly how the Puppies themselves were trying to rig the vote with their slate and Gamergater ringers and how they were thwarted by concerned fans showing up to vote — most of them after they actually read the Puppies’ nominees’ works, not just to confront the Puppies. The Hugos weathered the Puppies’ attack because there was no actual organized, unchanging group of scheming authors, publishers and fan voters to WorldCon. They faced a varied set of Hugo voters each year they tried things, dependent partly on where the convention was held that year and the year before. They went after an amorphous jello mold and pretended it was a fortress.

    It was the same situation for Chengdu in 2023, but there were two differences that created the problem: 1) the WorldCon was being held in China for the first time. No one in the decentralized world of WSFS with its often changing roster of volunteer convention runners knew how to prepare for that and the convention itself did not know how to throw a WorldCon and Hugos and had to learn on the fly (which it apparently did pretty well with on the convention part). And 2) Dave offered to be in charge of the Hugos and had his own ideas of what the Chinese government wanted, what the Hugo voters wanted and what voting slates looked like. He abused his position and it’s even worse that it wasn’t intentionally malicious, like the Puppies. He thought in his entitled savior brain that he was doing the right thing. And then quickly realized he was in quicksand due to the dedicated interest in Hugo data and kept trying to struggle out of it.

    The others on the Hugo committee, because of those two factors and their own racism, went along with what Dave said because they thought Chengdu had demanded it. Nobody checked enough or followed through with their initial mild objections or took responsibility to confront Dave about not following procedures. It revealed that wonderful as WorldCon’s decentralization is, when it comes to the Hugo, they’re going to have to look at more oversight and better procedures in the next half decade of WSFS business meetings. Which is what has happened for this year’s WorldCon. They kicked out the person who had been involved with the 2023 Hugo and they’ve been even more transparent about the process, knowing all eyes are on them. They are not some guy who took the job nobody wanted with the first Chinese convention and decided to just do whatever he felt was best. They aren’t going to repeat what Dave did because they are not Dave. Dave is not WorldCon and WorldCon is most decidely in no shape or form going forward Dave. They will have to prep and figure out how not to have anymore Daves in future, but that doesn’t mean the Hugos are a mess till they work that out.

    But that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to trust the 2024 Hugos, the Hugos in future or WorldCon. They may not go to WorldCon, or vote for the Hugos or pay any attention to the Hugos. And that is their right. But it’s not a desperate crisis that is going to collapse WorldCon or banish the Hugo Awards. It totally sucks for all the authors involved in any form in the Hugos 2023, that it happened and that it can’t be fixed. (But I have found their solidarity in the time of trouble inspiring.) And it totally sucks for everybody who ran Chengdu with such hopes or attended and all the fans who voted, etc. It’s a nasty mess. I hope that Chinese fandom still keeps reaching out and that this isn’t blamed on them, because that’s just not accurate or fair.

    But each year’s WorldCon is different. That’s its charm and sometimes it causes problems. And those problems seldom repeat when they come up. I’m sure the next WorldCon will rally. If I could make it, I’d go, as Scotland is one of my favorite places. SFFH awards celebrate and remind everyone about the fiction before they do anything else (yes, even the Dragon Awards chosen by the award administrator.) The Hugo will continue to do that for its fan voters, I think.

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