Have the Hugos become *too* diverse?

[james_davis_nicoll]

What of the poor oppressed white male SF authors?

Comments

[eagle]

Isn't it fascinating how, when the ballot is entirely white men, those just happen to randomly be the best works of fiction written that year, but when the ballot doesn't contain any white men, we should expect the racial and gender makeup of the ballot to exactly match the SF-reading population as a whole?

It's almost like the nature of statistics magically changes based on whether or not it justifies giving awards to white guys.

...in the world according to the sad rabids

[jessie_c]

More to the point, when the ballot doesn't contain any white men* it's all the result of a leftist plot to hand those underserving feminists and those not-white men awards they'd otherwise never earn because of not being proper manly white manly men who win manly awards on their own manly merits.




*where "any" in this case closely approximates any quantity of white men totalling less than 100% of the ballot.

[mme_hardy]

Who is Lela Buis?

[davidgoldfarb]

A person who pops up from time to time on File 770 as a Puppy fellow traveller -- not a part of the main groups per se, but definitely coming from their point of view.

[leecetheartist]

I wanted to gently point out that the Hugo is an international award, and should reflect the nominees of the world, not just the US, but I'm not sure I should.

[viktor_haag]

Hey, let's not get crazy, now.

[conuly]

here are no white men there. This outcome is considered progressive, but somehow I suspect there are some very popular white male writers out there.

Oh, is it supposed to be a popularity contest? I thought it was supposed to be about quality.

[dsrtao]

Hugos are a proxy for a popular judgment on quality, confounded by all the other factors.

If it were pure popularity, than you could just award each works award based on sales quantity.

If it were pure quality, the voters would have to be qualified in some way other than by their willingness to pay a fee.

After years of angsting about it, I have determined that to me, Hugo awards are not as useful as the nominations, which are crowdsourced recommendation lists. It's nice when a book I especially liked or an author I particularly admire wins, but the value is in finding good new things to read.

That is why the puppies piss me off so much: they decided that their opinions were worth destroying everyone else's.

[dewline]

In answer to the question as phrased in your subject header: no.

[heron61]

Ah, puppy nonsense at it's finest... It did contain two surprising (at least to me) bits:

Note that the two white men who appear on the ballot as a whole are due to Vox Day’s activism.

The RPs voted for China Miéville? That's exceptionally odd, and if true, I'm rather surprised he didn't withdraw his name.

Also and two disabled authors

I had no idea any of those 6 were disabled.

[yhlee]

I don't know which authors she was thinking about...I also don't know if bipolar disorder/mental illness counts as a disability, but I have bipolar I bad enough that I've been hospitalized for it 2.5 times.--Yoon Ha Lee

[davidgoldfarb]

Yes, "This Census-Taker" was on the Rabid Puppy slate. Who knows why? It's certainly something that might have made the list under its own steam.

[seawasp]

I love the split-personality of the entire campaign. Simultaneously the Hugos were a relic of the past with no relevance, and the most important award in the field, a mark of excellence and a mere popularity contest, etc.

Now the Hugos, which many of the Puppies have been saying were "made irrelevant" by the Dragon Awards, are suddenly not irrelevant because... they're not doing whatever the Puppies thought they should. Because the Cabal. Or something.

I wonder if the Puppy brigade ever realized how disjointed their position was.

[graydon]

It's coherent; it's the position of white supremacy, "we're so inherently good that we should get what we want by any means".

They're unwilling to state it directly because (absent material power to compel on their part) stating it directly gets them laughed at, and they're not much able to stand being laughed at.

[mindstalk]

Mimetic prophylactic?

[beable]

A tag for warning us that the link we are about to follow is probably awful.

[17catherines]

Mimetic prophylactic: It mimics the function of a prophylactic, but is not actually a prophylactic...

[bunsen_h]

with equal participation I’d expect the SFF readership demographics should roughly match the ballot for a popular award

[*sigh*] Even if one were to assume that people nominate based on "is this author in the same combined-demograhic set as me" rather than what they have enjoyed reading, that conclusion would not be valid in a first-through-n^th-past-the-post voting system.

[dragoness_e]

Funny thing, when I pick up a book, it's because either (a) I liked the author's other books, (b) people I know to have similar tastes and a similar low tolerance for badly-written fiction, like my daughter, recommend a book, (c) one of Scalzi's "Big Idea" pieces makes it sound really, really interesting, or (d) it was cheap at the fund-raising used book sale and in a genre I read.

Not one of those reasons include 'I looked at the back cover photo/looked up the author in the internet to check that their ethnicity and gender matched mine/were diverse'. Until someone else mentions it, I read their blog/meet them at a con, or I am curious enough about an author's background to look them up online (e.g., 'They write like they're personally familiar with City N, I wonder if they are from there?'), I generally don't know much more about an author than is revealed by their name. What's important to me is "Do they tell a good story?"

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

Per Buis's numbers, white males are 31% of the population, so random sampling five nominees should give us a no-WM ballot about 15% of the time.

The other numbers are approximately:

1/5 WM : 35%
2/5 WM: 31%
3/5 WM: 14%
4/5 WM: 3%
5/5 WM: 0.3%

[jsburbidge]

And, of course, from a statistical point of view 5^H6 is firmly in the small numbers category. Expecting any kind of proportionality to show except on the basis of many, many tries lumped together shows a lack of basic statistical sense.

[nelc]

How does that match up with historical observation? (He asked, lazily.)

[rosefox]

Extreeeeeeeeme diversity!

[elf]

That's hilarious. She's firmly implied that at least one slot on the Hugo novel ballot is reserved for a white male author. That man's identity would, presumably, be established by the voters, who would be required to investigate the books they liked and adjust their claimed preferences to make sure that someone of the correct race and gender got on the ballot.

Except, oh wait. That's exactly what the puppies are claiming other people were doing, and that it was evil.

(Funny; apparently all those gamergaters didn't renew their memberships and vote again. It's almost like they had no actual interest in science fiction or Worldcon or the Hugo awards.)

[eub]

Well, nowadays they have more important things to do, like getting their memes retweeted by the President.

[filkerdave]

The only unreadably bad story among the fiction was the JCW.

Even the dinosaur sex story was better-written.