Well, At Least They Got the Dramatic Presenation Awards Right

Locus Online has the Hugo results, and the short fiction category winners are nothing short of dispiriting. OK, so I called Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts" winning the novelette category (and anyway there was no other story on the shortlist that desperately deserved to win), and I can hardly say that I'm surprised that Connie Willis' "Inside Job" triumphed over stronger, more interesting, and better written work by Kelly Link and Ian McDonald, because that pretty much sums up her entire award-winning history (I'm still baffled by Doomsday Book's double whammy). But how is it possible that Margo Lanagan, with one of the strongest short stories I've read in ages, lost out on both the Nebula and Hugo?

Oh well, I suppose I should just be grateful that it wasn't Mike Resnick or Michael A. Burstein that took the trophy.

UPDATE: The vote breakdowns are now available online. Here's a helpful primer on what all those numbers mean.

Comments

Molly Moloney said…
I share your underwhelment with the Beagle and Willis wins for these particular works (though I'm certainly much more of a fan of Willis than you)-- but I was absolutely thrilled to see the (heretofore, at least) underrated/underappreciated Wilson win for Spin.
August 29, 2006 3:47 AM
Anonymous said…
how is it possible that Margo Lanagan, with one of the strongest short stories I've read in ages, lost out on the Hugo?

It seems to me that she lost because of the preferential ballot system, which is designed to deliver a winner who is acceptable to the majority of the voters rather than a winner who is the first choice of a plurality of the voters.

If you look at the vote breakdowns for Dramatic Presentation (Short) and for Short Story you'll see a similar voting pattern. In each case there is one representative of a certain popular group ("Singing My Sister Down" representing more "literary" SF and "Pegasus" representing Battlestar Galactica) and several representatives of another popular group (four more "traditional" SF stories, three episodes of Dr. Who). In each case the singleton got the most first-place votes, but wound up losing to one of the works in the other popular group, because the voters who preferred that group (who hadn't all chosen the same work in the group first) tended to rank stories in the group higher than the singleton.

In effect, the Dr. Who voters didn't all get behind any one episode of the three on offer, but there were more Dr. Who voters than Galactica voters, and as episodes were eliminated during the ballot counting the Dr. Who voters converged on a single episode and put it over the top. A similar phenomenon put one of the more "traditional" stories ahead of the more "literary" Lanagan story. (I'm not trying to make a value judgement here, just analyzing the voters' preferences between two fairly distinct writing styles.)

Different voting systems produce different results. In a system in which each voter got only one choice, "Singing My Sister Down" and "Pegasus" would probably have won (I say "probably" because people might have voted differently if they'd known the votes would be counted differently).

Honestly, I expected to lose to "Singing My Sister Down" (the critical favorite) or Mike Resnick (a consistent popular favorite). I'm pleased and honored to have won, and I'm sorry that other good works had to be passed over to make it happen.
September 18, 2006 2:13 AM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk

It's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public . There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days before releasing the voting and nominating stats, most Hugo teams have them ready to go within minutes of the ceremony's conclusion. Chengdu, in contrast, waited the full allotted period, and even went a little bit over (the voting stats were released separately in December). Once the stats were released, it quickly became clear why the Chengdu Hugo team were hesitant to make them public. There are any number of irregularities and questionable choices in this document that suggest everything from erratic voter behavior, to incompetent collation and calculation of the nomination rank...
Read more

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more