A Comment I Made at Brad T's Place

I said this to somebody at Brad T's Blog and I want to save it because I think it sums my thoughts up well.

Plus it illustrates a big issue at hand.  The Nominations ARE NOT THE VOTE.

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“So your argument is”

No.

” “I couldn’t be bothered to vote, but now I’m all butthurt because somebody else did, and they voted for stuff that I didn’t like.””

Couple of things. Nominating and Voting are two different things – we are agreed there? I’m ‘butthurt’ that the nominating process has been stuffed up which means that the things I get to vote for are stuffed up. To whit: Book 2 of a trilogy, a Fantasy, a MilSF novel that Amazon tells me is like something I didn’t like, Book 1 in a new series following on from another series, and Book 15 in an ongoing series I stopped reading around Book 2 or 3. Obviously what we think is a good set of nominees differs there.

In years where I hadn’t read enough to nominate, you know real life does get in the way even of reading some years, the items on the ballot always, generally met my personal criteria as set out above i.e. Original Stuff not a series etc… in fact, in the last decade, I have had something like a 50% ‘success’ rate in seeing things I nominate or liked going on the ballot.

However, in the vote… that’s a different thing entirely. Looking at 7 years I’ve voted over the last decade I have voted for exactly 1 winner.

Until now, that’s hasn’t actually bothered me, much. Apparently other people get very ‘butthurt’ about not getting their way in the nominations and the vote. A few years ago it was the Book Bloggers wanting diversity and literary merit in the Hugos and now its the Puppies wanting something else.

Hoist on my own petard...

I was asked to explain the criteria by which I vote for Hugo Novels - it is this.  I vote for original works that are typically SF - I'm not a fan of Fantasy (on the whole), Urban Fantasy, Series or multibook stuff i.e. Book X of Y.

I do vary from time to time and will read work outside of those.

A commenter said 'so you discount 90% of the works out of the gate?' - actually, no, no I don't.  In a typical year it would discount 2/5's of the works....

2005 – 5/5 – and I’m still ‘butthurt’ about that result
2006 – 4/5
2007 – 3/5 but I did read all 5 and I just realized I’m wrong, I’ve had 2 winners… Rainbows End
2008 – 5/5
2009 – 3/5
2010 – 5/6
2011 – 3/5 – NB: I did break my rules because I voted for and ranked the Zombie book because I found I liked it… I have discounted all the subsequent ones….
2012 – 3/5
2013 – 3/5 – did read the Fantasy, as I probably will do this year, didn’t like, actually didn’t like any of them
2014 – 2/5

It has been pointed out to me that for 2014 I actually broke those rules as you can argue the Leckie and Stross are 'series' novels - although given that in my defense I didn't know that about Ancilliary Justice at the time and given that while the Stross was in a universe he had used before, it was a stand alone novel with none of the same characters nor setting.  But still, yes, actually by my personal rules 2014 should have been a 0/5 year.  The first ever until now.

As I just said to the Puppies.  I wonder what changed.