Hugo Voting on the Cheap

by Yonmei

This post was written by Cheryl Morgan as part of the ongoing series about men-only short lists at the Hugo Awards. It’s full of excellent positive ideas about how we can change the men-only lists – for this year and for always! – and I hope people will comment with other ideas about nominating more women for the Hugo Awards. (I’ll post a follow-up when the short-lists go public.)

If you want to argue about whether this is worth doing, or about the Joanna Russ Amendment from last year’s Worldcon, I suggest you do so on one of the other posts on this topic, rather than take up discussion space on this one.

Update: The deadline for Hugo nominations is Sunday 14th March 2010, 07:59 GMT.

Guest post by Cheryl Morgan

It is another year, and Hugo nominations are once again open. What’s the betting that come April when the nominee lists are announced most of the people listed will be men?

Yes, I thought so. And the only way that’s going to change is if more women get involved in the process. But it costs money to participate in the Hugo process, and that’s a definite barrier. One of the many ways in which women are disadvantaged is that they are poorly paid, even for the same work, so an economic barrier will act against us. Therefore it is important to know how to participate cheaply.

Let start with some good news. Firstly, you do not have to go to Australia. Worldcon might be in Melbourne this year, but you don’t need to fork out for an attending membership, plane fares and hotels in order to vote in the Hugos. A simple “Supporting Membership” will suffice, and that only costs $50 (and may be cheaper in other currencies, depending on current exchange rates). [£31 in UK]

But, if you had a membership in last year’s Worldcon in Montréal then you already have nominating rights for Melbourne. You don’t have to pay anything more to nominate this year.

In case you are confused by that, here’s a bit more detail.

• There are two stages to the Hugo voting process: nominating (to create the short lists) and the final ballot (to pick the winners);
• If you had a membership in the Montréal Worldcon you can nominate this year (but you can’t vote in the final ballot);
• If you don’t have a membership from Montréal you need to buy at least a Supporting Membership for Melbourne, by January 31st in order to nominate this year;
• If you miss than January 31st deadline you can still buy a Supporting Membership in time to vote in the final ballot (we don’t know the deadline for this yet);
• Regardless of when you buy it, that Supporting Membership will be good for nominating rights next year in Reno.

Yeah, it is still complicated, but the ability to buy a membership in time to vote in the final ballot, and then get nominating rights for the following year, is quite useful if you are short of money. Here’s why.

That $50 is still a substantial amount of money, but you should get something in return. For the past couple of years Worldcons have produced what they call a “Hugo Voter Packet”. That’s a collection of nominated material in ebook format. Last year it was solidly good value, including 6 whole novels and over 20 short stories, plus a bunch of other material. What’s more all of the material was DRM-free – you didn’t need fancy ebook reader to access it.

The problem with the Voter Packet is that you don’t know what will be in it until after the nominee lists are announced. You might not want the books in it (though if you are going to vote in the final ballot you ought to look at them), and not all publishers agree to participate. Last year, for example, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem was not in the packet. But remember that if you are a member of one year’s Worldcon then you have nominating rights for the next one. So if you are really concerned about the value of the Voter Packet, wait until the contents are announced, buy it if you like it, and then use those nominating rights the following year.

However, if you can nominate this year it would help a lot, because it is in the nominating stage that women lose out. Most male fans these days are not openly sexist. Faced with a list of nominees containing men and women, most of them will attempt to judge fairly. As a result, women who get onto the final ballot do much better (last year women won four of fifteen categories outright and featured in winning teams in three others, which is by no means half, but much better than their share of nominations might have suggested). The problem is that many men are still subconsciously sexist. If you ask a man to list his five favorite writers, the chances are he will list five men without even realizing what he has done. That’s a big reason why it is mostly men who get on the ballot, and why we need more women to nominate.

So if you are going to nominate, you need a Supporting Membership in Aussiecon 4, and you need to buy it by Jan. 31st (because the Australians need time to process your membership before the nominating deadline). You can buy that membership here.

So much for your Worldcon membership, but are there any hidden costs?

Well it depends, but if you are currently thinking “I can’t possibly afford all of those books” please stop now, because you may be guilty of another of the biggest reasons why women don’t get nominated – we are too modest.

I spend a lot of time encouraging people to vote in the Hugos, and one of the most common excuses I get (after the cost) are things along the lines of “I haven’t read everything” and “I’m not qualified to vote”. These almost always come from women. Most men don’t care. If a male fan wants to vote for his favorite writer then he probably will. He doesn’t agonize over whether he should have read 50 other books to check that his favorite author really is his favorite; he doesn’t ask himself whether he knows enough about writing science fiction to be able to judge what is the best; he just votes. We don’t. We disqualify ourselves. We need to stop doing that.

Besides, this whole “I haven’t read everything” argument is a nonsense. The Hugos are open to all work published in the year of eligibility, regardless of where it was published, or what language it was published in. The vast majority of the voters can’t even read more than half of the eligible work because they don’t understand Chinese, or Russian, or Urdu, or Japanese, or Spanish, or Arabic, or any of the other languages in which science fiction and fantasy literature is published. So reading “everything” is impossible. You just have to look at what you have read and seen, and judge whether you think any of it is good enough to be nominated.

Don’t worry if you don’t have views in every category either. If you haven’t read any novellas in the past year, leave that section blank. If you only saw three movies and they were all crap, leave that section blank. If your only purpose in voting is to nominate Tempest Bradford for Best Fan Writer because you think she’s awesome, that’s OK. Believe me, there have in the past been people whose ballots have contained only one nomination, for themselves.

It really is OK too. The voting system is designed to cope with that sort of thing. In fact the more people who participate, the better the system copes with the partial knowledge of the voters. Popular vote awards rely on the wisdom of crowds, but a crowd can only be wise if it contains a large number of people with diverse views.

So, you are going to vote, but there is an economic cost, because books and magazines and movie tickets all cost money, right? Well yes they do, but you may still be able to vote in several categories without any additional expense.

If you are reading this then you must have a computer and a web browser. That means you can vote in the Best Professional Artist category, because all you need to do is check out their web sites and see what they have created recently. Indeed, I beg you to do so, because Professional Artist is one of the most male-dominated categories in the whole set of awards. It has only been won by a woman once, way back in 1971, and then it was Diane Dillon sharing the award with her husband, Leo. The last woman to be nominated was Rowena Morrill in 1986. And it isn’t like women can’t draw. What about Kinuko Craft? Julie Bell? Anne Sudworth? Melanie Delon? I’m sure you can think of others.

Do you have a TV? Then you have probably seen shows you could nominate in the Short Form dramatic presentation category. You may even have seen some of last year’s blockbuster movies.

Fanzines are mostly available online for free. Check out efanzines.com. Quite a few are edited or co-edited by women. You may also find some great women fan artists and writers. Check blogs too, as they are good sources of fan writing and art. You must know of a few women bloggers… (Not me though, I think I’ve won enough fan Hugos.) And here’s a hint: this year’s Worldcon is in Australia, and the Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine last year was won by AS if!, edited by Alisa Krasnostein.

You can also find a lot of great short fiction online for free. Web sites tend not to publish novellas and novelettes, but short stories by big names writers abound. Just check out some of the top-rated online fiction magazines such as Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld. Many of those magazines are also eligible in the Semiprozine category (including Clarkesworld, for which I happen to be the non-fiction editor). And if Locus wins again, the award goes to Lisa Groen Trombi.

Talking of magazines, the editor categories really ought to be dominated by women (and not just by Ellen Datlow, wonderful though she is). Here are some professional magazines that are edited by women:

* Asimov’s – Sheila Williams
* Weird Tales – Ann VanderMeer
* Realms of Fantasy – Shawna McCarthy
* Strange Horizons – Susan Marie Groppi
* Fantasy Magazine – Cat Rambo

The Editor (Short Form) category is also open to anthologists such as Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Delia Sherman, Kelly Link and Sharyn November.

As for Editor (Long Form), guys like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell and Lou Anders might get all of the attention, but the publishing industry is chock full of fine women book editors. Here are a few, together with their employers and people they edit.

* Beth Meacham (Tor: Ken Scholes)
* Ginjer Buchanan (Ace: Charlaine Harris, Charlie Stross)
* Jennifer Brehl (Eos/HarperCollins/Morrow: Robin Hobb, Sherri Tepper)
* Jo Fletcher (Gollancz: Mary Gentle, M. John Harrison)
* Betsy Mitchell (Del Rey: Naomi Novik)
* Teresa Nielsen Hayden (Tor: Robert Charles Wilson, Harry Turtledove)
* Paula Guran (Juno: specialist in urban fantasy and paranormal romance)
* Anne Groell (Bantam: Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, Kelley Armstrong)
* Susan Allison (Ace)
* Liz Gorinsky (Tor: Cherie Priest)
* Toni Weisskopf (Baen)
* Betsy Wollheim (DAW)
* Timmi Duchamp (Aqueduct)
* Deborah Layne (Wheatland)

I also want to make a special plea for Juliet Ulman. She was the editor for Catherynne Valente’s superb Palimpsest (and the Tiptree winning Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden), but was let go by Bantam in the big financial panic last year. Since then she has set up her own freelance editing company, Paper Tyger, and has worked on some really fine books for small presses such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (Night Shade) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife (Tachyon). That’s a heck of an achievement in difficult times. She deserves a nomination.

And now, finally, to books. Yes, they can be expensive. Also they are sometimes very good. If you are interested in feminism and science fiction then you really ought to be considering getting Farah Mendlesohn’s On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan) and Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal (Aqueduct), both of which are eligible for Best Related Work. (Apologies to Robin Reid, but there’s no way I’m paying $200 for her Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy).

With novels there’s often a feeling that new books are only available in hardcover and are really expensive. But guess what, it is normally the guys who get the hardcover treatment. Women writers tend to get relegated to the trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. Almost all of the urban fantasy and paranormal romance, for example, comes out in mass market paperback and is therefore a third of the price of a hardcover. A good bet might be Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, which has got a lot of attention in the blogosphere and will only cost you $8. Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree at both trade paperbacks, but are only $11 on Amazon and available for less second hand.

Oh, and some novels do get published free online. Cory Doctorow does it all the time. You may want to check out Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making.

If all else fails you can of course try your local library, or borrow books from friends, but there are many ways you can see work that is eligible for the Hugos for free. It is not all about expensive books.

For ideas as to what books to look for, and other things to nominate, check out the Feminist SF Wiki. You can also find recommended works (by people of all genders) on my Science Fiction Awards Watch web site. There’s more information about artists and editors at the SF Artists Wiki and SF Editors Wiki, both run by my friend Anne KG Murphy.

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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