Hugos: novellas

[liv]

I think maybe starting from the shortest categories and working upwards was a mistake, but anyway. Thoughts:

1. Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages: Wakulla springs
   
   I really liked this one, I think the way it follows several generations of a Florida family from the Jim Crow era to the present day is really cleverly done. The characterization is great, even though we only meet each person very briefly, and there's a real sense of poetry to it including what it does with Southern and African-American dialects. A lot of people complained that it's not really SF, but I took the fantastical elements quite literally, and in that context it seems very genre. Plus, it's Tarzan fanfic, and that alone makes it speculative IMO.
   
   
2. Catherynne M. Valente: Six-gun Snow White
   
   Does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It's a version of the Snow White story set in the Wild West. I have mixed feelings about Valente, both her fiction and her internet persona, but she has some obvious strengths, and this matches several of them. She's very good at writing slightly macabre yet magical stuff, and at very poetic language and imagery. I felt some of the stuff about parental abuse was a bit gratuitous in some ways, but it's a topic worth tackling seriously.
   
   I am really not at all sure about the way Valente handles Snow White's Native American heritage and some of the Native mythology she combines with the western fairy tale. The book felt slightly creepy in the same way that The ink readers of Doi Saket does, as if the culture portrayed is more a source of exoticism than a real culture that the reader should take seriously. But it also makes sense that if you're doing Americanized versions of European myths, you should acknowledge that not everybody in America is ethnically European.
   
   
3. Charles Stross: Equoid
   
   Yes, this novella is quite a bit on the silly side and sometimes the humour grated. But Stross has a good sense of voice and his parody of a cross between Lovecraft and Gibbons is well executed and manages to be an engaging story as well as just a stylistic exercise. I am not even slightly a fan of Lovecraft, and I kind of disliked Cold Comfort Farm, which of course was a parody in its own right. So I'm not the ideal audience for this but it's a good example of what it is and I am a bit back and forth about whether I vote for this ahead of the Valente.
   
   
4. No Award. Turns out that this another category with two Sad Puppy nominees and I can't be bothered.
   
   
5. Brad Torgerson: The chaplain's legacy
   I was so disappointed with Torgerson's novelette (which I read without knowing he was part of Correia's pointless gimick) that I decided I wasn't going to read his longer work. Voting this above the other one based on what friends have said about its good points.
   
   
6. Dan Wells: The butcher of Khardov
   If the best example of "Conservative" SF is a tabletop wargaming tie-in, which apparently is mostly a gore-fest, I have very little interest in expanding my horizons to read more stuff coming from that sort of political direction. But I doubt this is actually the best novella by a Conservative writer in 2014, Correia drummed up support for it purely to annoy people like me.

Comments

[ceb]

Wakulla Springs> it's also The Creature From The Black Lagoon fanfic.

[ursula]

I thought for Hugo voting you're supposed to leave anybody you like less than No Award off your ballot entirely?

[wychwood]

I found the Cold Comfort Farm references really distracting, actually - because he'd be in the middle of a really horrible death-and-suffering scene and suddenly there'd be something clearly designed by Stross to make a totes hilarious reference to the Starkadders, and it would throw me out of the narrative because suddenly I was thinking about the author instead of the genuinely quite scary story.

Having said that, I generally like his Laundry novels better than the rest of his writing - I think he usually balances the tone pretty well, and it's a fun mixture.

[forestofglory]

It is a form of Instant Runoff Voting. So if you rank everything even No Award in order of preference the system is well designed to capture your intent. The problems people have been talking about show up when a voter really likes some things on the ballot, really dislikes others, and feels meh about the rest. If you don't rank the middle things that can not represent your intent.

See: http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2014/05/15/14904.html

[redbird]

It depends: if there's only one thing you like less than no award, leave it off. if there are two or more and you dislike one of them more than the other, it makes sense to rank them, because No Award can be eliminated, just like the other ballot choices.

Suppose your ballot is

Wonderful Story
Good Story
No Award

and you leave off Kind of Okay Story, Bad Story, and Oh God It's Horrible.

If the first three rounds eliminate, in order, Good Story, No Award, and Wonderful Story, your ballot will now be ignored.

If you put Kind of Okay Story and Bad Story after No Award, in the fourth round your vote would go to Kind of Okay Story, giving it more chance of defeating Bad Story and Oh God It's Horrible.

On the other hand, if you would describe the choices as one wonderful, one good, and three equally boring but with nothing specifically wrong, you shouldn't list the three you don't like but have no preferences between.

As far as I can tell, if there are five actual nominees, there's no point listing your fifth-choice nominee after no award and the four you like better.

[ursula]

It's a bit trickier than this because No Award will almost certainly be eliminated in an early round, and therefore votes for things below No Award could contribute to those things actually being ranked, assuming they weren't ranked below No Award often enough to trigger the special No Award part of the rules (which is not standard IRV).

[vatine]

There were elements of The chaplain's legacy that I liked. I think, mostly, the aliens. The version of Six-gun Snow White that I managed to get hold of was close-to-unreadable on my ereader, so (alas) I have not read it and therefore will not be voting for it.

I think I actually declined voting for The butcher of Khardov (and I think it's actually a computer game tie-in, not a tabletop tie-in, but I may be wrong).

[liv]

I confess I had never heard of The Creature from the Black Lagoon before I read the novella, so that reference went over my head.

[liv]

I understand that what you're "supposed" to do with items you really hate is somewhat contentious. I'm not much of a psephologist, and I am not passionately committed to making sure that the sad puppy slate is ranked as low as possible. So my plan is to rank everything fairly literally according to my preferences, and not get too much into the intricacies of this particular voting system.

[liv]

I found all the humour really distracting, whether it's making jokes about CCF or making jokes about English political bureaucracy and the "county" class. I am very unlikely to like any kind of mix of humour with horror, because yeah, it's too wrenching to be thinking about the scary and emotive context and suddenly stumble into a joke. I don't know if Equoid is better or worse for that sort of thing than the sub-genre as a whole.

[liv]

That's a shame about the file not working for Six-gun Snow White. I did find it a bit oddly formatted, but nothing that made it actually unreadable. I might give The chaplain's legacy a try, though I've left it a bit late to read novellas I'm starting out prejudiced against, so I'm mainly concentrating on the Campbell samples so I can vote in that category.

I may have garbled the story about The butcher of Khardov, and it's true that media tie-ins can be well-written. If it had got onto the slate because genuine fans nominated it, and if I hadn't heard that it was massively violent, I might well have overlooked its unpromising origins.

[jack]

Oh, thank you for that link, that's a really good explanation. I tried to write something similar, but it kept getting too annoyed.

[jack]

votes for things below No Award could contribute to those things actually being ranked,

What is it that people are worried about here? I thought forestofglory's post was right, and that, yes, your below-no-award votes could matter, but only in the case where the rest of the voters have already eliminated all the choices you wanted and no award, and it's come down to a choice between the books you hate the most, but you'd still rather the 4th best won, rather than the 5th best. Are there cases where listing all your preferences all the way down to the worst one produces an undesirable result? Or people don't want to be seen voting for "second worst book ever", even in preference to "worst book ever"?

[jack]

I'm not much of a psephologist I am not passionately committed to making sure that the sad puppy slate is ranked as low as possible

I'm a bit stressed by this :( I'm not sure if I should bring it up or not, because it obviously matters a lot MORE to you than it does to me, but I'm not sure if I should just shut up, or if I should try to figure out if I can talk about why I care about the problems with the advice people are giving without dwelling on how awful vox day is :(

It feels to me like, EVERYONE is saying "this is how to fill out your ballot so it has the effect you want" (even if they're wrong about how) and NO-ONE is saying "you're not technically supposed to do this, but pssst, if you do, it will have some clever effect".

And that seems to matter, not because I want something in last place to come EVEN MORE last but because firstly some of the incorrect advice people are reposting doesn't just mess with the bottom of your ballot, but leads to voting "book you hate" next after your favourite and all the "books you haven't read" below that.

And secondly, and more importantly, people are trying to explain "how to list your preferences from best to worst on an IRV ballot". And I thought that was fairly simple, but now it seems like people genuinely DON'T get it, and if so, that makes a big difference to real life politics -- I thought it wasn't that hard, but now does that mean we SHOULDN'T use IRV for national elections? Or that we can, but we need a lot more work in designing a ballot? Or is it ok with "None of the above", but people are confused by the other aspects of the hugo system like "no award test" which almost never come up?

So I kind of don't want to keep bringing it up, because ANY discussion seems to come across like endless voting system arcana with a side order of dwelling on horrible people :( But to me, it feels like "how to fill out an IRV ballot without making a few common mistakes" SHOULD be fairly normal and SHOULDN'T be a tremendously obscure nitpicky thing only interesting to voting-geeks and tactical voters.

Does that make sense? I feel like I should care about this a lot less than I do, but I also feel like, even if I only have a small point to make, I should be able to make it *somehow* without tripping over the political aspects of the situation, but it seems I can't, and I don't know whether to keep talking in the hope I can figure it out, or just let well alone... *hugs*, sorry

[ursula]

The possible Very Bad Scenarios I'm coming up with first might or might not arise depending on how Hugo voting scores partially completed ballots, which is something I don't actually know.

Suppose the competitors are Kitten, Puppy, and Boring Story Nobody Read, and most people aren't explicitly ranking No Award. If at least 51% of the ballots say Kitten > Puppy > Boring Story, then Boring Story takes 3rd place. If at least 51% of the ballots say Kitten > Puppy and don't rank Boring Story, then Boring Story does not place.

Now, suppose you slog your way through Boring Story and discover there is an appalling scene of kitten abuse 500 pages in. You tell your friends their ballots should be Kitten > Puppy > No Award > Boring Story, but your campaign isn't very successful, and the final balloting is:

49%: Kitten > Puppy
49%: Kitten > Puppy > Boring Story
2%: Kitten > Puppy > No Award > Boring Story

If the vote-counting algorithm treats No Award like any other candidate, then No Award will be eliminated immediately, and Boring Story will take 3rd place. In that case, you would be kicking yourself for writing Boring Story on your ballot. If the vote-counting algorithm expands all of the Kitten > Puppy votes to Kitten > Puppy > No Award, then No Award takes third place handily, and only first and second place are given.

[ursula]

This assumes that you care about the distinction between "takes Nth place" and "does not receive an award", of course. If you only care about who takes first place, I think there are fewer plausible scenarios to be anxious about.

[vatine]

Oh, the story was at best "did not appeal to me", so I didn't (I think) rank it at all. Or if I did, I ranked it last of those I ranked.

I think Six-gun Snow White only came as a PDF and that really didn't survive conversion to epub very well (no, PDF on my e-reader is Not A Good Choice).

[jack]

Ah! Thank you for taking the time to explain.

I think the problem is, in IRV, the results are supposed rank ALL the entries, the best result is supposed to be "1st" and the worst result is supposed to be "6th", and there's not supposed to be a separate category for "unranked". Like, in a race of 20 people, 3rd can be described as a prize, but in a race of 6, 6th isn't really an "award", it just says "worst", whether that's "all the stories were great but the others were a bit better" or "this one was actively repugnant".

I'm not seen "no award" (or "re-open nominations") in IRV outside the hugo awards, although elections probably should have it by default (I don't know how it works in countries that do have some form of preference voting), so I'm not certain how it works, but I think if you have "no award", "below no award" is the closest equivalent to "not ranked".

(As it happens, I think that might make sense for hugo awards: "hugo nominated" is treated as a good thing in itself, if all (or some) of the nominees come below "no award", it sort of feels like they shouldn't be described the same way nominated stories people actually voted for. But I know some people very strenuously disagree.

Although that only makes sense if everyone hates it -- otherwise, as you point out, no-award will usually be eliminated first.)

[ursula]

I generally like the Laundry books-- Apocalypse Codex is my favorite, mostly because American megachurches creep me out-- but I was not a fan of the "teenage girls are scary" theme in "Equoid".

[ursula]

Thanks for pushing me to sort things through! I'm tempted now to do a literature dive and see what people have written about IRV and partial preference orders. Maybe I'll ping some political scientists . . .

[damerell]

Nope. Warmachine is a tabletop wargame which is essentially a clone of Warhammer 40,000 with a bit of steampunk, and about as highly original as that sounds. There's a spinoff videogame in development.

[jack]

Is there actually a problem adding "no preference between" to IRV? I assumed that, at worst, randomising the preference, or possibly counting a vote for A, B-or-C, D... as a half-vote for B or C once A was eliminated, or something like that, would express it, if people thought it was sufficiently important to have that option. Would there be drawbacks to that? A bigger hurdle seems like how to have a ballot it's easy to write that on...

[redbird]

For a real-life electoral example, look up the last Minneapolis mayoral election, which had 35 candidates and asked each voter to list their top three choices in order. (This among other things produced someone whose main plank was "count all ballots," meaning that he wanted people to be able to rank all the way down to their 35th choice.)

[ursula]

Well, textbook analyses of IRV assume that everyone ranks everything from first to last. But if you leave stuff off your ballot, that's effectively voting "no preference for last place". This clearly changes the incentives for strategic voting.

(Pretty much any much realistic voting system that outputs a ranked set of candidates will incentivize people to vote for something other than their true preference order under some circumstances. So the question is less whether people will vote strategically, and more why and when.)