Randomness and the Hugos

[jsburbidge]

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.

Comments

[graydon]

I think it's fair to say that the Hugos are a beauty contest.

The "beauty" being judged is a notion of quality, "best", but it's a very squishy and amorphous and to go back to a dice analogy would involve dice where the participants can't agree on how to read them or what numbering system is involved.

So while I agree that there's no reasonable statistical inference -- things are emphatically clustered -- I'm not sure there's even an agreement on the standards of quality. The component that's "how did I feel when I read this?" isn't small, and it can't be abstracted very well.

Which is a long way to say I think the Puppies are plain old authoritarians, angry at not getting to force people to be normal.

[jsburbidge]

A beauty contest is a close parallel, if we substitute for "beauty" "fan-pleasingness".

I do think that the Hugos generally show a general convergence on implicit standards of quality: just not particularly good standards of quality; whence comes the long-standing objection that they reward no quality at all ("Have we lived and fought in vain?").

What I found somewhere between amusing and irritating was the commenters trying to apply statistical analysis to a non-random pool which is in any case too small. (I gather that psychologists speak of a Law of Small Numbers which is "people believe the Law of Large Numbers applies to small numbers.")

The Puppies, thankfully, seem to have subsided into the background, or the morass of American right wing culture, though I'm sure James was implicitly responding to complaints coming from that general direction.

The irony in that is that this year's winner is as clear an homage to their god RAH in technique and style as I've seen since Panshin.

[graydon]

What I understand from Bob Altemeyer's work is that the point to being an authoritarian is actively not the outcome; it's the getting to enforce the norms. (The peer-reviewed version of "the cruelty is the point".) What's actually in the book getting the award is way secondary to getting to declare people unsuitable for consideration.

Once the system got hard to rig, the opportunity to be authoritarian with it went away.

"quality" gives me the squeems as applied to art; any quantifiable quality would have to be a statistical abstraction of a number of individual emotional responses, and to have any "it's the art, not the moment" confidence it needs lots of people over generational time. And certainly there aren't any large numbers in SF today, never mind the "the alleged best isn't a statistical universe"; there may have been when a book would sell tens of thousands of copies but as I understand it, what is today "best seller" territory used to be the trailing edge of the mid-list. There's just so much out there now, much of it excellent as craft.

My take on SF is that it's a creature of a particular set of insecurities (three phases of which so far; I think they're related but they're definitely distinct) and really isn't likely to produce any enduring art. This isn't required for it to be worth the effort; enjoying things is a sufficient reason. But that isn't widely held as a view of artistic activity.

And there is the thing about the current field that enough arbitrary obstacles aren't effective process but the folks who manage to clear all of them are going to be biased towards skill as well as luck. Differential obstacles eventually produce some strong counter-examples to the orthodoxy generating the obstacles.

[jsburbidge]

The question of quality in art is a vexed one.

It's clear at both ends that there are meaningful judgements which derive from craft. At one end there is the lower level where poor writing makes for bad art. Sometimes works in this lower limbo survive, or are revived, for other reasons: my daughter is doing a short paper in Lady Mary Wroth as part of a Grade 12 class; there is a reasonable view that Wroth may be historically important in a way but that her poetry is technically bad. In general, though, these are the works of Pope's dunces and the Peri Bathous. At the other end there are writers like Virgil, Milton, Henry James, Shakespeare, Dante, and so forth.

In the middle, with adequate craft, it's much more of a blur. There are a lot of reviews of books on LibraryThing which amount to assigning one star because the reader was not interested in the type of book bring reviewed, and not in whether the book was well done of its type, and a pit of the Hugo filters probably come down to those sorts of judgements.

Traditionally, before English was taught as a discipline, there was a simple way of punting the question: wait a hundred years. If a work lasted it might not become part of the canon, but it would still be recognized. (The Anatomy of Melancholy has never been part of any canon.) One did not have to make judgements, but just recognized "the judgement of posterity".

The rise of English Departments and pressures to include things more recent than (then) the mid-Nineteenth-Century made this a burning issue for about fifty years: how to determine what works were "worthy" in the interim? The advent of critical theory and the new Historicism, which pushed English studies in the direction of history of ideas rather than aesthetics, has rather blunted the edge of that problem.

It's clear that lots of lasting art is not about feeling: neither The Rape of the Lock nor The Ambassadors is much about feeling, appealing to the intellect instead. So gut response based on feeling is sometimes, in the aggregate, a good metric for applying, and sometimes not.

Whether anything from SF (broadly defined) will endure probably depends on the random appearance of appropriately skilled and driven individuals: lasting authors and works are rare in any domain. Tolkien probably counts, and Cabell and Eddison are around the hundred-year mark, as is Wells. (Wells is in a similar category to Doyle: a founder effect contributes to keeping their works alive.) Pynchon is a reasonable candidate. Somebody could appear on the scene next year with a masterwork (and probably be denounced by some as being too literary).

[graydon]

I will argue that appeals to intellect are entirely appeals to feeling. It's a culturally distinguished feeling, it's a culturally valourized feeling, but it's a feeling.

I don't think Tolkien's going to make it; I don't think much will, just like we retain effectively no Middle English works. Even what we've got is too difficult to understand. If we make it through the time of angry weather I think the cultural change is going to make elegiac Edwardian world views specialist-only.

Not even slightly inclined to argue about the "denounced as too literary" part.

[jsburbidge]

Ah, yes. Not going to argue that one. There's a great gulf between "last like Virgil" and "last like Trollope" and nothing written since at least 1950 is beginning to be in the first category. And it will pretty well have to be in the first category to last through the upcoming stresses.

I was going to pick at Middle English as a choice - most of the works their contemporaries thought important have survived - but then I considered: I've read the prose Lancelot, I've read (parts of) the Confessio Amantis, I've read some of the Brut, and though we have lots of Middle English and Middle French (as opposed to our loss of Anglo-Saxon works) almost nothing from the period will ever really appeal to more than specialists - even the favourite bits of Chaucer are on the edge, and only in translation. (If I had to bet on any mediaeval secular literature continuing to have immediate impact it would be the best short poems by Villon. La Ballade des Pendus continues to have immediate impact.)

[graydon]

Yeah. We've got a fair bit but it's this mix of "people are people" and completely alien. The later romances are like that, too; "love stories are inherently about how they died" is a distinct take this cultural period hasn't got.