Hugo Award Finalists Released
Jul. 7th, 2023 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThe 2023 Hugo Award finalists were released on July 6. I learned of this about the same time that everyone else did, when announcements starting posting. I had no advance information about this. Unfortunately, it showed up in my mailbox when I did not have time to format and post the information to the Hugo Awards website. Fortunately, Cheryl Morgan did have the time and was able to get the information posted, both the updated 2023 Hugo Awards page with the detailed finalist information and the post on the front page announcing the release and pointing people to the 2023 page.
As is usual about this time of the year, I've also been answering questions from people who don't understand that TheHugoAwards.org does not run the Hugo Awards. We just report the results and act as the long-term information archive. While each Worldcon runs their own Hugo Awards independently of all others, individual Worldcons are ephemeral. Their web sites usually vanish after their conventions are over, sometimes frighteningly quickly. Worldcons have been known to delete their YouTube channels, taking away recordings of their Hugo Award ceremonies. (Ever since that first happened, I have downloaded videos of Hugo Award ceremonies to my personal machine whenever they post, so that if necessary and permitted, we can post them to the Worldcon Events YouTube channel, which is operated by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, not any individual Worldcon.) As usual, when we explain how the system works to people who may have heard of the Awards but not looked closely at how they work, folks are mystified that there is not a Central Authority that runs everything.
Almost nobody would ever have deliberately set up the World Science Fiction Convention or the Hugo Awards the way they are organized. Except to people who have grown up within the system, how we do things tends to look insane. Even "insiders" like publishers and authors, including past Hugo Award finalists and winners, are surprised every year at how chaotic and counter-intuitive WSFS works. Any sane system, they assume, would have a Board of Directors and a single entity that ran everything. Recreating the entire system every year makes no sense to them. But Worldcon wasn't created in its current form all at once. It was created a little bit at a time, and the people who take the most interest in its rules are highly dubious of central authorities.
The good part about the current system is that it's so decentralized that there is no single point of failure that would bring down the entire system. Nobody can "take over" the Hugo Awards. The bad part is that you can take down any individual year's Awards. Somehow, we've managed to hold things together year by year, but only by some at times heroic efforts by individuals who care deeply about the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards. It's not a large group of people, either.
There was a significant glitch a few days ago when a list of Hugo Award finalists was published and then relatively quickly un-published as inaccurate; according to what I read (I have no inside information about it), this was due to technical mistakes during testing. I am sympathetic to this. Many years ago, when LiveJournal was a hotbed of fannish activity, those of us running the Hugo Awards website had an account there. There was a cross-posting add-in to WordPress (which runs the Hugo Awards site) that would post news items from the website to LJ. One particular year, we had the embargoed finalist data. (Because each year's administrators are different, they have different attitudes toward embargoed news.) We set up the post for the finalists to be published at the time when the embargo was to lift. What we did not know was that there was a bug in the WP-to-LJ add-in that cross-posted the finalist entry immediately instead of waiting until the make-public time happened. We did not notice this because of other things we were doing until people started screaming at us and "calling shenanigans." That year's administrator was furious, and showed how fannish they were by immediately assuming malice and a desire to "scoop" the actual Worldcon. They wouldn't listen and as far as I can tell never believed that this was a technical issue of which we were unaware until it bit us. Personally, I'm just glad that it wasn't the final results!
Because of what happened to us back then, we're leery of doing things that might accidentally break embargoes. Hugo Administrators do talk to each other, and it was some years before anyone was willing to trust us again. I'm very nervous about setting up finalist/winner information on the website in advance, lest I accidentally hit publish instead of preview. Consequently, it's not uncommon for many other sites to have the information online long before the "official" Hugo Awards website does. I suspect people are puzzled when Locus or File 770 or Whatever or Tor or anyone else has the information up before the Hugo Awards site does, but that's the reason. We would rather be safe and and as accurate as possible rather than be fast.
As is usual about this time of the year, I've also been answering questions from people who don't understand that TheHugoAwards.org does not run the Hugo Awards. We just report the results and act as the long-term information archive. While each Worldcon runs their own Hugo Awards independently of all others, individual Worldcons are ephemeral. Their web sites usually vanish after their conventions are over, sometimes frighteningly quickly. Worldcons have been known to delete their YouTube channels, taking away recordings of their Hugo Award ceremonies. (Ever since that first happened, I have downloaded videos of Hugo Award ceremonies to my personal machine whenever they post, so that if necessary and permitted, we can post them to the Worldcon Events YouTube channel, which is operated by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, not any individual Worldcon.) As usual, when we explain how the system works to people who may have heard of the Awards but not looked closely at how they work, folks are mystified that there is not a Central Authority that runs everything.
Almost nobody would ever have deliberately set up the World Science Fiction Convention or the Hugo Awards the way they are organized. Except to people who have grown up within the system, how we do things tends to look insane. Even "insiders" like publishers and authors, including past Hugo Award finalists and winners, are surprised every year at how chaotic and counter-intuitive WSFS works. Any sane system, they assume, would have a Board of Directors and a single entity that ran everything. Recreating the entire system every year makes no sense to them. But Worldcon wasn't created in its current form all at once. It was created a little bit at a time, and the people who take the most interest in its rules are highly dubious of central authorities.
The good part about the current system is that it's so decentralized that there is no single point of failure that would bring down the entire system. Nobody can "take over" the Hugo Awards. The bad part is that you can take down any individual year's Awards. Somehow, we've managed to hold things together year by year, but only by some at times heroic efforts by individuals who care deeply about the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards. It's not a large group of people, either.
There was a significant glitch a few days ago when a list of Hugo Award finalists was published and then relatively quickly un-published as inaccurate; according to what I read (I have no inside information about it), this was due to technical mistakes during testing. I am sympathetic to this. Many years ago, when LiveJournal was a hotbed of fannish activity, those of us running the Hugo Awards website had an account there. There was a cross-posting add-in to WordPress (which runs the Hugo Awards site) that would post news items from the website to LJ. One particular year, we had the embargoed finalist data. (Because each year's administrators are different, they have different attitudes toward embargoed news.) We set up the post for the finalists to be published at the time when the embargo was to lift. What we did not know was that there was a bug in the WP-to-LJ add-in that cross-posted the finalist entry immediately instead of waiting until the make-public time happened. We did not notice this because of other things we were doing until people started screaming at us and "calling shenanigans." That year's administrator was furious, and showed how fannish they were by immediately assuming malice and a desire to "scoop" the actual Worldcon. They wouldn't listen and as far as I can tell never believed that this was a technical issue of which we were unaware until it bit us. Personally, I'm just glad that it wasn't the final results!
Because of what happened to us back then, we're leery of doing things that might accidentally break embargoes. Hugo Administrators do talk to each other, and it was some years before anyone was willing to trust us again. I'm very nervous about setting up finalist/winner information on the website in advance, lest I accidentally hit publish instead of preview. Consequently, it's not uncommon for many other sites to have the information online long before the "official" Hugo Awards website does. I suspect people are puzzled when Locus or File 770 or Whatever or Tor or anyone else has the information up before the Hugo Awards site does, but that's the reason. We would rather be safe and and as accurate as possible rather than be fast.
