The Five-Percent Solution

[kevin_standlee]

As by now most of you who read this probably know, there were only three qualifying nominees for the Best Short Story Hugo Award this year due to the "5% Rule," that requires that the nominees beyond third place poll at least five percent of the number of ballots cast in each category. This is the second year in three in which Best Short Story ran afoul of this, as there were only four nominees in 2011.

Cheryl Morgan has written about the solution the Hugo Administrators in 1994 (including me) took when faced with a similar 5% drop — we relocated two shorter Novelettes into Short Story, "filling out" the category. We caught hell for it. David Bratman, who was the public face of Hugo Administration that year, has filled in more of the details. I apologize for the places where I got the year wrong on that story. David, Seth Goldberg, and I were Hugo Administrators in both 1993 and 1994, and when re-telling the story of the relocated works, I flopped the years.

One of the reactions to our decision in 1994 was that a huge number of people, presumably prompted by Mike Resnick's fury at the decision, poured into the WSFS Business Meeting in Winnipeg to pass a constitutional amendment that reduced the "gray zone" between categories from a flat 5000 words to 20% of the category boundary size, which probably was a good idea anyway.

One thing I remember as part of the head table staff that year was that we had a room that would ordinarily been considered too large for the Business Meeting. (This is a function of what size rooms the Winnipeg Convention Centre had; given the choice between too small and too large, I always take too large.) By sheer coincidence, we ended up with the right sized room after all. The turnout for that and one other hot-button issue of the day with a completely different constituency was, relatively speaking, vast. Considering that there were only about 3,500 bodies on site at ConAdian, I would not be surprised to find that the Business Meeting attendance measured as a percentage of attending members was larger than any time since the 1960s or even earlier. It wasn't quite as large (in percentage terms) as the Westercon 64 Business Meeting, but it was still impressive.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I see that there's a new comment on Cheryl's blog that claims that it should have been mathematically impossible for the 5% to have applied in 1994. But the commenter has misread Cheryl's descriptions. The universe of 16 stories she described is the total number of finalists in all three short fiction categories taken together, not, as the commenter understood it to mean, the total number of stories nominated by anybody in the Short Story category.

In fact, the total number of stories nominated, including those that didn't make the ballot at all, was very large, as it is today. So I hope somebody will correct this commenter's error.

The commenter is right about one thing, though, which is that many, maybe even most, nominators don't fill in all the blanks. I wish that fact could be widely spread; it might encourage more people to nominate if they knew it was not just legal, but perfectly OK, to leave some or even most of the ballot blank. When I was a neo I felt I was letting the side down whenever I left a blank in my Hugo nomination ballot. But that was silly. One of the years I counted, I remember noting that there were only four ballots in the entire set that filled in all the blanks in every category. And, if I recall correctly, they were all by people from a certain club extremely active in promulgating Hugo recommendations.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I've always been happy to leave categories blank where I either don't have an opinion or don't really care. You don't have to love everything.

The problem with the modern world is that there's a LOT of stuff out there and a lot of ways people come across stuff. Back in the day when every British fan would read Interzone, you'd come to nominations time having all read the same block of short stories there and in a few other places. I'll be honest, these days the only short fiction I'm getting to is in the Hugo packet. Which is a bit crap of me, but I read exactly Zero SF novels last year too.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

I'm at a conference just now. I am the Program Chair of one of it's associated workshops (it happend on Monday and went well). Running the program for a refereed conference/workshop has an interesting parallel to the Hugos, though many many differences.
I had 16 papers submitted. Of those, six had clear "accept" reviews from all their reviewers. five had clear "reject" reviews from their reviewers. The other five all had mostly positive reviews but their aggregate scores were lukewarm as were the reviews. There was very little to choose from in the numeric scores from the system so I was left with the choice of 6 or 11 accepted papers. Anything else would have been unfair and arbitrary.
Why is this relevant to the Hugo nominations? Well, looking at some of the numbers people have put forward recently, it seems to me that the differences in many years between getting on the final ballot and not getting on the final ballot is just one nomination and those cut out due to the 5% rule are sometimes similarly close.
There's been discussions of whether we need a larger set of nominees than 5, though that dilutes the "it's an honour simply to be nominated" aspect.
These aspects of an award such as the Hugo are very tough, and there's more light than heat in many of the discussions, but these discussions need to be had.