jack

“That Game We Played During the War”, by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, March 2016)

Chess, two countries slowly developing a peace after a long war, two people from opposite sides tentatively renewing a friendship formed during the war, and one side is entirely telepaths. Generally pretty interesting. More thoughts below.

“A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”, by Alyssa Wong (Tor.com, March 2016)

Two sisters with magical abilities over the weather and alternate histories.

“Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)

Two fairytale protagonists rebel against their allotted labours and help each other escape.

“The City Born Great”, by N. K. Jemisin (Tor.com, September 2016)

A struggle to allow, or prevent, New York to become a living city. Really evocative, but I found it hard to get into.

“Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”, by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine, November 2016)

Likewise, doing something good but I find it hard to describe.

The john c wright one

In general, I'll vote any spam entries no award and not feel obliged to read them, but I checked some reviews. It talks about things I genuinely find interesting, like the relationships between asimovian robots and theology. But in rather horrible ways.

( Some spoilers )

Background

I thought I wrote this last year, but I can't find it now. The Hugo Awards are decided by Instant Runoff Voting between all the nominees and the "no award" option to not let anyone win that year at all.

They have an extra step at the end, the "No Award Test", which says that in addition to the normal instant runoff vote, at the end, after the eliminations, if the final winner is one of the nominees (not no award), then all the original ballots are compared, are there more ballots which voted for the winner at all (ie listed them on the ballot, and listed "no award" lower or not at all) than ballots which voted for "no award" higher than the winner.

There is a detailed description at: http://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system

Although I found I needed to look up the WSFS constitution and an example (pdf) of the hugo results step by step from last year to make sure.

Exmaination

However, I got to wondering, when does this extra step make a difference. If ever?

First note that, despite the controversies about nomination this year, even if people vote "no award" above many or all nominees in many categories, I think "no award" will just win the vote in the usual way, this post examining the extra "no award test" will be completely irrelevant. So I'm just interested out of principle if it ever WOULD be used.

My impression is, it would make a difference if the vote is quite polarised (ie. different people voting the same book at the top and bottom of the ballot), and with people voting "no award" more than half way up their ballot. Both of which seem quite unusual.

My favourite example is to recall the Drazi from Babylon 5. Suppose the candidates for Dictator For the Year are Chief Green Drazi, Head Purple Drazi, and Susan Ivanova who is likely to smash the faction urns and do away with the faction system for all time. "No Award" means not declaring a dictator this year and waiting for next year. No-one wants the opposite-faction leader in charge. Traditionally all Drazi voted for their own faciton leader, but now nearly half don't want EITHER faction leader in charge.

40% of the Drazi are sick of the fighting and prefer the human to anything else. Ivanova, then no award, then the two colours.
30% vote along faction lines and are randomly chosen as Green supporters, voting Green, then "no award", then the interloper human, then the hated purple faction.
30% vote exactly the same but are randomly chosen as Purple, so vote Purple, then "no award", then Ivanova, then Green.

What are the results under IRV? What result SHOULD an election system give that voting? When the preferences are a bit circular is a time election systems often find it hard to give meaningful results, as often no result is really what the electorate wants.

According to IRV, "No Award" is eliminated immediately as nobody actually wanted that more than anything else. Then one of the two faction leaders is eliminated, and because all their faction supporters voted Ivanova over the other faction leader, Inanova wins. Which is good, but isn't really what the electorate wanted, as 60% of them voted that no dictator at all was better than her.

What the no award test says is that in this case, Ivanova won the run-off, but because she's behind "No Award" on the original ballots, there's no dictator this year.

Conclusions

So, is that useful? It makes "No Award" slightly more likely to win. I think in something like the Hugo Awards, where it's fairly plausible to not award one one year, it works. It makes "no award" slightly more likely to win. And it ensures that if the electorate hates a candidate, they can't somehow slip through a split vote and win.

So I think it's a mild positive which is unlikely to come up, but will probably do the something worthwhile if it does. And probably isn't worth the extra complication of it existing, but isn't worth trying to remove. I hear it may be a watered down version of an earlier proposal that would have given no award more teeth?

I'm not sure if it should be used in other contexts such as national political elections. I would like to see more "none of the above" votes, since many people's preference DOES seem to be "I hate all of them". But there's usually protest parties you can (and should) vote for in that circumstance. The "no award test" would only make a difference if "none of the above" didn't win but everyone voted for it highly. And I'm not sure if that's ever likely to happen, or if it did, if re-running the election is likely to help...

Asides on No Award in general

I admit, when I went to worldcon, it didn't really occur to me to vote any of the generally enjoyable novels below "No Award", I just voted for the nominees in the order I liked them.

But now I think, I'd vote for books that I think actively deserve a hugo, but when there are books that are perfectly enjoyable, but don't really feel stand-out to me, I WOULD put them below no award. (With the exception that if I feel the author deserves a hugo in that category but didn't get one yet, I would vote for a less-outstanding sequel they wrote as long as I enjoyed it.)

ETA: I found someone posted a similar explanation last year: http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2014/08/15/14938.html

Every sort of award has biases. With an award like the hugos, if you accept it as a popular award, the question seems to be, where is the right balance between favouring books which some people like a lot, and favouring books which everyone likes a little?

I don't know about the politics, but the current balance seems about right. It doesn't always produce the right answer, but it's not usually obviously wrong. The thing people fear is people signing up (especially with a supporting membership) in order to vote for a particular book. I agree this is a risk, and if it happens it has a tendency to destroy the system (because we already have a way of measuring "which book has the most fans" and that's how many people buy it, and that's not what the hugos are supposed to be about).

However, it seems this mostly doesn't happen yet, so if not we should probably go on with the status quo until it definitely becomes a problem.

So, what's the right amount of self-promotion without running into this sort of problem? I think authors announcing which of their books are eligible is clearly a good thing: if I'm eligible to nominate, I won't nominate a book just because the author says so, but if I liked it but didn't remember it might be eligible, I can do so. I think some people are unfairly criticised for this.

I felt Brandon Sanderson was a little too close to the wire in pointing out WOT was eligible, but at the same time reminding people they could buy a supporting membership in order to nominate. That seemed to come a little too close to suggesting that people should get a membership if they wouldn't have otherwise. However, he also wrote a blog post, exhorting people *not* to sign up specifically to vote for WoT, which is a good thing.

Some people have proposed a slate of recommended votes in each category, and urged people to buy a membership. With something of a suggestion you might just enter those votes without really having read any of the other entries. That seems harmful to the process: in small doses it does no harm, but if it becomes common it skews the award to "who can get the most people to sign up", which destroys either the usefulness of the award, or forces worldcon to stop allowing supporting memberships. That's bad for everyone, so no-one should do it.