Randomness and the Hugos

James Nicoll was having his usual fun stirring up reactions in his post on gender representation in Hugo fiction categories.

I found one thing in the responses of interest (i.e. "irritated me enough to respond to"): the idea that this was an appropriate field in which to apply the sorts of general probabilities applied in rolling dice.

This assumes two things, neither of which are true of the Hugos: first, that events are independent of each other (each roll of a die does not depend on the other rolls); secondly, that the selection process is by design supposed to be truly random.

Let's look at the first one. There is a strong logical relationship between the works nominated in any reasonably close bracket of years: this is for the simple reason that it is rare for good writers to produce one work significantly better than their other works: they tend to reach a plateau and stay there for years (occasionally decades). There are obvious exceptions - Dune springs to mind, and, for other reasons, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell - but in general, a good author has a run of good works and they tend to show up recurrently in the awards during that period. (Consider Willis and Bujold in the 1990s and early 2000s, or, more recently Leckie and Jemisin.)

The Hugos aim at selecting on quality - "best", not "most popular" - and they are awards given to works, not authors[1]. On that assumption, it's not only understandable but expected that authors who have hit their stride will be recurrent nominees, and that happens, right now, to apply to a swathe of non-cis-male authors: Kowal, Jemisin, Lee, Leckie, Anders, Valente, de Bodard, et al.

Secondly, it's notorious that the Hugo awards tend towards a specific kind of "best", which is why the usual response (pre-Puppies) was to decry the absence of challenging and complex works from the slate. Sure, magisterial works get recognized as well - JS&MN, A Deepness in the Sky, Cyteen - but it's probably fair to say that when there isn't something of that sort in a given year the recent Hugo virtues tend towards works written in "neutral" prose, with straightforward structures and protagonists with whom it is easy to identify. (These are characteristics of Willis, Bujold, Leckie, Heinlein (in his context), Scalzi, Walton, Chambers ...) Sensawunda doesn't hurt, either, but I think it bulked larger in the more distant past. So filtering tends towards some kinds of works, and, honestly, these days more of those kinds of works tend to be written by women contrasted, say, with works hinging on blowing things up or on hard science along Mission of Gravity lines where more of the authors tend to be male. (Not that there aren't good male writers of personality-driven SF, and impressive female writers of military space opera and diamond-hard SF.)

The question of who makes up the Hugo voting pool is also not random. Maybe at some time it reflected fandom as a whole except filtered by considerations of money (resources being required to attend Worldcon).[1] The puppy wars, however, tended to reduce the number of people who liked that particular form of action-driven writing (not all of them: there were certainly old-time fen who liked that general kind of reading but were even more strongly appalled by the violation of norms involved in the slates), and also recruited some readers with an interest in (for example) literature exploring issues of inequality and discrimination more thoroughly into Worldcon fandom.

Note that this doesn't mean fen who vote for books because they are by minorities or women: but it means more who are likely to seek out and read more works by minorities or women, and who like themes which (understandably) are more likely to show up in works by minorities or women. Certainly Jemisin's and Kowal's winning books address these kinds of themes.

Ultimately, the only reasonable objection to a list of Hugo nominees is to bring forward a substantial concrete argument involving works which were passed over. When I look at the extended nomination information, I can't see any works which are obviously head-and-shoulders better than the works which made the ballot; I might have adjusted some rankings to suit my personal taste, but nothing suggests obvious distortions of judgement.

(The only conventionally-published work which I thought should make the list did not even make the extended list and was only technically eligible (American date of publication in 2018, but British publication in 2017). And it was exactly the kind of book - complex structure, artistic prose, lots of moral grays - which tends not to make the Hugos: Harkaway's Gnomon. And given its general dissimilarity to the typical Hugo nominee profile, and its only technical eligibility, I can hardly take this as a scandal.)

[1] There have been pretty blatant cases of mediocre works by popular authors - The Gods Themselves and Foundation's Edge come to mind, as does Hominids for slightly different reasons. When one looks at nominees as well as winners, the list can be extended fairly heavily. But that's not the intention of the award.

[2]Not that fandom as a whole is a neutral judge of anything. However, for the purposes of the current argument it is taken as a base state.