Hugo Award Changes
August 8th, 2008 by Editors
Today’s WSFS Business Meeting dealt with a range of motions concerning the Hugo Awards. The results of the deliberations were as follows:
Motions Passed on from Yokohama
Two Hugo-related motions received their first passage at Yokohama and were ratified today in Denver. The effects of these motions are as follows:
- Artists can now be eligible for both the Fan Artist and Professional Artist Hugos in the same year
- Worldcons are not obliged to report candidates that receive fewer than five nominations in any given category
Recognizing Peter Weston
Peter Weston’s contribution in standardizing the design of the Hugo rocket has been formally recognized in the WSFS Constitution alongside that of the original designers, Jack McKnight and Ben Jason.
Removal of Semiprozine Category
A proposal to remove the Semiprozine Hugo was passed and forwarded to Montreal for ratification. The old qualification criteria from semiprozine are now used to define what is not eligible to be a fanzine. (We’ll post the actual wording later when we get official electronic copy). The vote was 40-28, and the issue continues to be hotly debated.
Changes Regarding Electronic Publication
Various changes to the category definitions have been proposed to make it clear that the medium in which a work is published does not affect eligibility. So, for example, someone who edits an online magazine is eligible in Best Professional Editor. Mostly these changes were clarifications rather than substantive changes (for example, Strange Horizons has always picked up a bunch of nominations in the editor categories). However, Best Related Book has been changed to Best Related Work, and this does open up the possibility of nominations for web sites. Again these changes need to be ratified in Montreal before they take effect (although they passed overwhelmingly so ratification failure seems unlikely). And again we will publish the actual wording when we get electronic copy.
Best Graphic Story
The proposal to add a new category for graphic stories was passed and goes to Montreal for ratification. In addition Montreal has announced that it plans to use its power to add one additional Hugo category to trial Best Graphic Story next year. The proposal passed overwhelmingly today, but whether or not it gets ratified in Montreal may depend on the number of quality of nominees we get next year. The resolution also includes a sunset clause in that the 2012 Business Meeting may choose to remove the category with a single vote (not requiring ratification) in the category proves unpopular. (A similar sunset clause was used in the Best Professional Editor split).
If you have any questions about exactly how these changes will work, please post them in comments and we will attempt to clarify matters.
[...] No, we haven’t had the actual Hugo Awards yet , but SF Awards Watch reports on some changes to the award categories which were passed at the WSFS Business Meeting yesterday – notably, the proposal that the [...]
Do you know how it will work if a magazine which has previously met the criteria for being a semiprozine stops meeting them? Are they then eligible for Best Fanzine?
“The old qualification criteria from semiprozine are now used to define what is not eligible to be a fanzine.”
Um, this would appear to mean that there is now a whole class of publication which no longer qualifies for any award at all? Or am I misreading?
Liz: I would assume that they would become eligible for Best Fanzine if they no longer met the criteria that disqualified them from eligibility. This has always been the case before — a publication could have moved between categories as its circumstances changed — and there is nothing in the wording that suggests that a publication is permanently ineligible if it happens to be ineligible in a given year.
Chaz: You are right that works currently qualified as semiprozines would no longer qualify for any award at all. That’s not unusual. There are lots of other works that don’t qualify for an award. Professional magazines like Analog do not qualify for any Hugo Award.
The editors of semiprozines would be (and they already are) eligible for Best Editor, Short Form, as are the editors of professional magazines.
It may not be obvious to everyone, but not everything that exists necessarily is eligible for a Hugo Award.
Liz:
A specific point of contention was the act of declaring yourself as Semiprozine. It was unclear whether you could un-declare yourself in a later year. However, that clause does not appear in the new rules. You can declare yourself ineligible for Fanzine, but it is made clear that you can change your mind in later years.
Chaz:
What Kevin said, though in my report on the meeting in my blog I noted that the makers of the motion specifically argued that the class of magazines that was being denied a chance at a Hugo was not worthy of the honor.
“It may not be obvious to everyone, but not everything that exists necessarily is eligible for a Hugo Award.”
Hee. That’s very … succinct. Thanks.
Cheryl, in your response to Chaz above, am I reading it correctly, that those who put forward the motion to not have a semi prozine Hugo felt that Locus, Ansible and Interzone were not worthy of the honour of winning a Hugo.
I don’t want to misinterpret something, and obviously I wasn’t there, so I am reliant on what your reportage, but that seems a little harsh.
Like lots harsh on the part of the motion proposers.
Not sure what is being achieved.
James
James:
No one said that Locus was not worthy of a Hugo. There was a comment that there were not enough semiprozines worthy of a Hugo to make the category viable, and a comment that 5th place finishers in the category were not even worth reading. I’m not sure that they really meant it, though it was clear that they didn’t much like small press fiction magazines and knew little about them. Basically they appeared to be floundering for something to say that wasn’t “we want to stop Locus winning.”
Best Graphic Story: Huzzah. I expect to see Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary fighting for the top spot next year.
Losing Best Semiprozine: A shame it had to happen right now; hearing about the upcoming changes to the SFWA Bulletin that would make Locus much less essential to professional writers, it seemed like that would have loosened its grip. Now we may never know…
If the issue was the LOCUS dynasty, all they had to do was tinker with the circulation figures in the rules to kick LOCUS out of the category (a category created to kick LOCUS out of the Fanzine category). Presumably, they thought of that, so I’m guessing that the decision had more to do with the general quagmire of what kind of publications deserve the support of Hugo voters. There were only 33 1st place votes for No Award in that category this year, so my impression that this is an issue for SMOFs more than an issue for voters.
I don’t feel that the field owes me personally more Hugo nominations. (I gather that I’m second only to Stan Schmidt for nominations without a win; I don’t actually know off the top of my head how many I have for NYRSF; and I wasn’t strongly enough motivated by the nomination to show up in Denver).
In discussions of whether to restore the category or what might replace it, it seems to me that awarding recognition for types of activities that the community wants to encourage and that can benefit from recognition ought to figure into the choices that are made.
I am certain that NYRSF benefitted from 20 years of nominations and I’m not sure that the magazine would have endured for two decades without them.
(Meanwhile, would you like to buy a complete set of back issues? All 240 are available!)
I urged the creation of a semi-prozine category in the 1970s, and then was dissatisfied with the criteria adopted, but no one was ever interested in changing them.
One of the changes I wanted was a top circulation figure of 2000 in a semiprozine. Everything over 2000 would be prozine (and in my view should be). NYRSF never exceeded 650 in its best year, and is about 550 now. I knew that for instance 2000 circulation used to define professional publication limits for SFWA, though probably it does not still, haven’t checked.
There are in my view a number of high quality zines, such as Electric Velocipede and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, that I think might well have appeared on Hugo ballots in the past, had the circulation limits been reduced. And might in the future should the new ruling not be ratified, or be modified.
The belief of the group that founded NYRSF was that we were a sercon fanzine, run entirely be volunteer labor, albeit one that wanted subscribers, and that paid a token amount for contributions. We were surprised, initially, to find ourselves in the semiprozine category, where we could never win, but always pleased to be nominated. We value our loyal readership.
I guess I have to get up to speed on the rules and attend next year’s business meeting.
And there’s also the interesting possibility that in another year F&SF will fall into the semiprozine category, at least as far as circulation below 10,000 is concerned. I don’t think we as a community want that to happen.
Kathryn and David:
Many thanks for your input. I suspect that this issue will be debated fairly thoroughly over the coming year. If that has no other result than to make more people aware of the various magazines that are eligible for the Semiprozine category then it will be a good thing.
David Hartwell said:
Actually, the 10,000-copy print-run rule no longer exists. It went away when we split the Editor category into Long and Short Form. WSFS no longer attempts to define what a “professional” magazine is directly; instead, it leaves it up to the judgment of the voters, who make the subjective decision “is this a professional publication.”
Should the pending amendment be ratified, there will not be any such thing as a semiprozine anymore in WSFS rules. The word only existed as a piece of WSFS jargon as it was. In a way, the fanzine-disqualification rules actually are setting a new boundary between “things that are fanzines” and “things that are not fanzines.”
Of course, the editors of what are currently called semiprozines will be eligible for the Best Editor Short Form category. One wonders if we’ll see Charles Brown appearing there should the proposed repeal be ratified in Montreal.
Kathryn Cramer said:
Possibly, but it was never raised in debate as a possibility. The entire debate focused on (a) eliminating the existing semiprozine category and (b) redefining fanzine in such a way as to make anything that currently qualifies as a semiprozine ineligible for fanzine — unless it’s one of the fanzines that only kicked up a weight class by the “declares itself a semiprozine” criterion.
One possibility that people who oppose eliminating the category entirely but favor redefining it to only eliminate Locus would be to advocate rejection of ratification, but to also introduce a new amendment that explicitly defines what a professional publication is. The biggest problem with including a declaration that “A professional publication is one which had an average press run of at least [insert figure here] copies per issue” (the old wording on Best Editor, since deleted) is that it doesn’t recognize electronic publications.
Furthermore, many professionally-published books have print runs of less than 10K books, don’t they? I was personally pleased that we abandoned trying to impose a technical definition of “professional” because it created its own problems.
As I’ve said before, one of the major problems of rules-crafting is what I call the “toothpaste tube problem” — the harder you squeeze it, the worse mess you make.
As a genre, the “Semiprozine” was an entity created to describe Locus. Nonetheless, it is also true that NYRSF and Locus are in what might be considered the same game so, other than jokingly, I’ve never objected to being in the same award category even though Locus had more than 10 times our subscription base.
Looking at the rules for defining semi-prozine, I think NYRSF only meets 2 of the 5 criteria and could drop into the fanzine category if we simply stopped paying $10 per review and $25 per essay and simply credited such sums toward subscriptions (which we already do for many of our contributors anyway). Needless to say, our writers do not write for NYRSF because of the big bucks.
The advertising base we initially tapped into is long dead. And besides, the concept of the semi-prozine dies with the category. So really all that we would have to do to drop into the fanzine category would be to publish an editorial declaring that once the Hugo category dies, we are no longer a semi-prozine. The concept exists solely as a Hugo category.
Locus is a for-profit magazine that supports multiple paid staff members, providing several people with their liveihoods plus substantial travel budgets, and has for a number of decades. What’s not professional about that? Mr. Brown’s toe ring, maybe?
(Pssst: NYRSF really always was a fanzine.)
Hmm. Consulting the Final Report, I see that unless we at NYRSF are benefitting from a substantial anti-Locus vote, if we’d been in the fanzine category we would have won the Fanzine Hugo on the first ballot. This is of course hypothetical, though over two decades, we have developed substantial Hugo voter support. Never enough to beat Locus, but sometimes enough to come in second.
It would be Interesting if NYRSF went into the fanzine category.
Thanks for that feedback Cheryl. I think it still seems harsh and am disappointed no one had the honesty to say that they felt that the category was not working due to Locus’ domination of the field.
Bet it would never happen with Fanwriter, no matter how many Dave won. Which shows an inconsistency.
I like the idea of a Pro magazine category, as I do think that a number of Magazines deserve better recognition, and sometimes just being nominated does that. I know editor is a tip of the hat to that category, but it’s not the same.
I think David that perhaps your suggestion would have worked and still could, as I agree there are a lot of interesting ‘zines’ out there which are not Pro’s for sure, yet great reads.
and it will all make for interesting debate and discussion in Montreal.
james
The editor thing is complex. On the one hand the Short Form category includes editors of anthologies and magazines, and I think that’s good as otherwise anthology editing might be left out (or we’d need another category that would be relatively weak). But on the other hand a magazine is often far more than just its editor.
I suspect that there will be a lot of discussion regarding who should be ineligible for Fanzine in the run-up to Montreal. I’m planning to write something once I get all of the material I gathered on the trip processed.
The last time I discussed this matter with Ben Yalow (which was, I think, 2001), his point was not that there were not five good nominees for Best Semiprozine, but that there weren’t *fifteen*. His logic was that for an award to be meaningful, there had to be enough reasonable nominees that just being nominated was itself really an honor. If there are only five or six or seven reasonable nominees, then being nominated means little more than “this work technically qualifies for this category”. Which is a standard I don’t necessarily agree with, but it also isn’t directly insulting, the way that “nominee #5 is crap” is.
Also, there are many years in which Best Dramatic Presentation (either form) doesn’t reach that standard–and I think Ben opposed the split on that grounds.
Kevin:
I think that Ben’s requirement, as you state it above, is a good one. But in many cases the insufficient nominees problem is not a result of the nominees not existing, but rather a result of the people who nominate knowing very little about the particular category, and the people who do know the category not participating in the process. It is very clear to me from talking to SMOFish types that most of them have no idea how many small press short fiction magazines are out there, and wouldn’t want to read them anyway.
[...] Changes in Store for the Hugo Awards [...]
Kathryn Cramer: So it wasn’t until they repealed the category that you read the old rules and noticed NYRSF only meets ONE of the criteria, paying for material?
Cheryl: I’m sure you’re right about the smoffish types not wanting to read the small press short fiction magazines. Yet here we are on the threshhold of getting a new Best Graphic Story. What a commentary.
Mike: Clearly WSFS went downhill when they started letting those Star Trek fans attend Worldcon.
Cheryl: On the contrary, it was a blessing from heaven! At least half the Star Trek fans were/are women. It’s the event that changed “fandom as we know it” from being 90% male to whatever the current ratio is.
I have tended to believe that the increase of women in fandom via Trek made fandom more appealing to women with lots of other sf/fantasy-related interests. Maybe it was, as last year’s pop term goes, the “tipping point.”