Locus Award Rumpus Breaks Out
July 8th, 2008 by Editors
The latest issue of Locus has apparently arrived with subscribers. We don’t have our copy. Cheryl is in the UK and Kevin is still driving home from Westercon. But other people have theirs, and have been busily reading about the award voting statistics. Neil Clark is not happy, and it is easy to see why. He quotes from Locus:
Results were tabulated using the system put together by webmaster Mark Kelly, with Locus staffers entering votes from mail-in ballots. Results were available almost as soon as the voting closed, much sooner than back in the days of hand-counting. Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much that, in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine readership, we decided to change the counting system, so now subscriber votes count double. (Non-subscribers still managed to out-vote subscribers in most cases where there was disagreement.)
So, it looks like Locus decided to change the rules of the awards after the votes had been cast, and while this might not have made a difference in most cases Clark reports that the change deprived Patrick Rothfuss of a win in Best First Novel, handing the prize to Joe Hill instead. Niall Harrison also has the issue, and notes that the change also allowed Connie Willis to beat Cory Doctorow to the Best Collection prize.
Clark continues:
Doing something like this makes it seem like they were unhappy with the results and put a fix in. Given their long-standing reputation, I’m sure that wasn’t their plan, but what were they thinking?
Oddly enough, “what were they thinking?” was a phrase that came to mind here too. The Locus Awards are, of course, the property of Locus magazine and they can do whatever they want with them. If they want to give more weight to the views of their subscribers, that’s their right. However, awards ought to be open and transparent, and something like this seriously damages the reputation of the Locus Awards and gives plenty of ammunition to people who would rather believe a conspiracy than that their favorite book didn’t win.
Parts of the blogosphere are already glowing incandescent. Here’s one example, whose author can’t resist putting the boot in to the Hugos and Nebulas as well:
The Nebulas have become little more than a popularity contest among writers with nominating rules that could confuse rocket scientists (but would probably make sense to the IRS). The Hugos have become a joke with such a small percentage of members of a club with membership fees actually voting that I have no idea who is deciding things. My feeling is that the results are heavily skewed by authors, editors, and over-weight, Baby Boomer trekkies that are most comfortable at home in a basement speaking Klingon.
OK, hands up every Hugo voter who speaks Klingon. This is all your fault, you know.
nuqjatlh?
(Which I am reliably informed means “Huh?” — see
http://www.kli.org/tlh/phrases.html)
Later I will go back and look up “What were they thinking” so we will both be able to say it in Klingon. When Locus opened (1) online voting to (2) nonsubscribers, anyone could have predicted who was going to have the biggest say in the outcome.
Except I forgot the correct answer must be — the Locus staff.
[...] I’m here, have some links to other Locus Awards [...]
pep ghop
(I think that’s “raise hand” in tlhIngan Hol)
>The Hugos have become a joke with such a small percentage of members of a club with membership fees actually voting that I have no idea who is deciding things. My feeling is that the results are heavily skewed by authors, editors, and over-weight, Baby Boomer trekkies that are most comfortable at home in a basement speaking Klingon.
Uh-oh.
Time to take an accounting of myself…
1. Author?
Let’s just say I’ll keep writing and see if anybody’s interested.
2. Editor?
I try to edit myself before I speak. Does that count against me?
3. Overweight?
5′11″ 185 lbs the last time I weighed myself
4. Baby Boomer?
I’ve never blown up a baby. … What?
5. Trekkie?
Probably not. Because while I’ve seen every Star Trek episode, I haven’t had the urge to watch them over and over again.
*ducks*
6. Lives “at home” in the basement?
I live in a basement apartment, but it’s 250 miles away from my mom’s house. You only get partial credit on that one.
7. Speaks Klingon?
Klingon? Isn’t that one of the imaginary languages J.R.R. Tolkien made up?
Oh, wait. Would I be considered too geeky for simply knowing that?
DAMN!
Hm. So I guess my Hugo vote is at least partially tainted.
– Chuck
OK, hands up every Hugo voter who speaks Klingon. This is all your fault, you know.
Ummm… that would be me, I think.
And, since I’m taking responsibility for it (the only honorable thing to do) can I also slip in a plug for the KLI’s newest book, a Klingon translation of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching? Seriously.
{{:-)
[...] time in the latest printed issue of Locus. Janice Gelb drew to my attention, and SF Awards Watch discussed at length Neil Clarke’s online report about the double weight given to Locus subscribers’ votes [...]
If Locus had announced the rules changes before this year’s voting started — I have no problem with that. If they announced the changes after this year’s awards were announced, saying, “These are the rules for the future” — again, no problem. Changing the rules in the middle of this year’s voting — it sounds to me as though Locus is cooking the books to get the results they want.
Speaking of changing the rules after the voting (or, in this case, after the first round of voting), what about the year the Hugos got so many nominations in one of the short fiction categories that the administrators split it into two (by length) on the final ballot?
That would have been 1968.
I can imagine that would have caused a lot of fuss at the time, David. The Hugos were younger and more innocent in those days. I don’t think that something like that would happen now.
At least you can say that splitting a category in 1968 to produce two Hugo winners deprived no one of an award they would have received had no change been made.
[...] has finally caught up with the Locus Awards affair. There’s a fairly large comment thread with a few rather depressing if predictable entries: [...]
I don’t believe the category split caused much fuss in 1968; it actually put the Hugo fiction categories in alignment with those of the Nebulas, which was generally considered a good idea.
My point was really more that the administrators back then had a freedom of action that would be impossible today, now that the categories and rules are firmly embedded in the WSFS Constitution.
[...] Well, two and a half months is a long time to go between posts, even for me. I finally got a copy of the last issue of Locus, and I was very pleased to discover that I came in second for the Locus Award. (The winner, Barry Malzberg’s Breakfast in the Ruins, was announced some time ago, but I didn’t see much point in posting that I lost until I found out by how much.) Malzberg pretty well creamed me, but I get some consolation from a comment in Locus that the online voters preferred BNW over Breakfast by a slight margin. Thank you, on-line voters, for your excellent taste! Those of you who have been following the brouhaha over this year’s Locus Awards should note that it’s highly unlikely that the rule change affected the outcome any — Malzberg won by 400 votes, which would be a very comfortable margin, even without the doubling of the subscribers’ votes. (For those of you who don’t obsessively follow the vagaries of SF awards, the Locus Award has historically been voted on by the readership of Locus magazine, although voting has been open to all on the Internet for close to a decade. This year, for whatever reason, the number of non-subscriber votes was much, much higher than subscriber votes, so the folks at Locus decided to double the value of subscriber votes. They decided to do this after the votes were cast, mind you, which naturally resulted in a brouhaha. More details can be found here and here.) [...]
Of course, what a great site and advisory posts, Can I add backlink – import your rss feed? Regards, Reader.