Cancel Culture and Worldview Division at WorldCon

It’s been a contentious few years for WorldCon and the Hugo Awards. First, there was a nasty squabble in 2018 about disrespect for the Hugo finalists in panel assignments, and SFWA president-elect Mary Robinette Kowal stepped forward to try to rework the panels to make everyone happy. Then in 2019 after the conference closed, there was a charge of racism about Jeanette Ng’s acceptance speech trashing John W. Campbell as a white man and a fascist.

This year’s WorldCon was managed by fans in New Zealand, but actually ended up being an online event because of issues with COVID-19. The same issue arose with the panels, although the squabble wasn’t quite so nasty. After a couple of repeats, it looks like this is an unsolvable problem with the current organization of the WorldCons. It seems to do with panel management trying to 1) assort all the applicants, 2) keep down any divisive conflicts and 3) produce interesting interactions. Apparently panel management tried hard to make sure all the finalists had a spot on a panel this year, but then everybody groused and complained about what panel they were placed on. The end result was a group hosting their own unauthorized discussions elsewhere and undermining the prestige and authority of the con.

Next, it’s clear there’s an ongoing, though subtle, battle between worldviews affecting the membership. Alert readers may have noted the win for Jeanette Ng’s 2019 (allegedly racist) Hugo acceptance speech in the Related Works category, contrasted with a win for (allegedly fascist) John W. Campbell for Best Editor in the Retro category. H.P. Lovecraft, commonly denounced as a racist, also scored a win in the Retros this year. Besides this, George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg, possibly offered prominent positions because of embarrassing snafus in past years, spent a lot of time talking about what a great man Campbell was during their allotted times. Then Martin mispronounced a lot of diverse names. Progressive fans grumbled that there was no excuse.

This split may be generational, of course, but it also reflects the dramatic political division going on right now in US society, where activists pushing radical change want to tear everything down, demonize the founding fathers and rewrite the historical narrative to match their own worldview. Campbell and Lovecraft are now torn down, so who are the new founders of SFF going to be? When we look at the politics of WorldCon, there is a serious skew in both the nominations and the wins–there’s some pretty clear discrimination going on there. So, will later WorldCon memberships look back on the current era as a Dark Age? Cancel the new founders?

Last, I’m wondering if the win for Lovecraft was to balance the fourth recent Hugo for Jemisin, Vox Day being unavailable this year. Whatever, I have to congratulate everyone on keeping the kerfuffle low key. There was a lot of eye-rolling, but at least there wasn’t a riot.

Are activists bullying editors and small publishers now?

For anyone who’s really tired of hearing about the RWA dealings, I promise this is the last blog about it. In the last post, I mentioned there are a number of issues that stand out in the recent controversy. I’ve discussed one, but here’s another.

There has been a movement on Twitter for some time now to bully writers based on allegations of racism. This happens especially in the Young Adult genre, an apparent attempt to make examples of vulnerable minority writers, in particular, to publicize issues of racism and cultural appropriation. One particularly egregious example includes Jenny Trout attacking black writer Fionna Man for a fantasy novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. More recent incidents include attacks on Laurie Forest for The Black Witch, a book that addresses racism; on Amélie Wen Zhao for Blood Heir, a book about an enslaved population, and on Kosoko Jackson, a gay black author for A Place for Wolves, about a gay black protagonist in the Kosovo war. However, the incidents that sparked the RWA meltdown are a little different; in this case, Courtney Milan and her Twitter army attacked two editors and a publisher.

As in the author bullying attacks, the Twitter activists picked an editor and a publisher they thought were vulnerable. Sue Grimshaw is a freelance editor and in 2019 was working at Jack’s House and at Glenfinnan Publishing as an acquisitions editor. Sharp-eyed activists on Twitter noted that Grimshaw had “liked” several tweets that expressed conservative views. Grimshaw had also worked as a book buyer for Borders when the company policy was to shelve African American romances separately, and some romance fans reported encounters at conferences where she seemed uncomfortable with questions about diversity. Based on this, Milan and other activists began to suspect that Grimshaw might hold conservative views. Although this was only a suspicion, they still went after Grimshaw as an anti-diversity editor. Jack’s House fired her based on the Twitter campaign, and the Twitter activists then put pressure on Suzan Tisdale at Glenfinnan to do the same. Tisdale refused, and Grimshaw’s co-editor Kathryn Davis also stepped up to defend her. Milan then went after Tisdale and Davis. The two of them approached the RWA separately with complaints, which management encouraged them to make official.

So, an important point that emerges from this is that Milan and her team of activists attempted to destroy an editor’s ability to find work in the profession based on a mere suspicion that she might hold conservative views. They moved from a few “likes” on Trump quotes to a campaign that labeled Grimshaw a racist gatekeeper who was reducing diversity. When Davis and Tisdale tried to defend her, they became racists, too, which damaged their reputations as an editor and publisher, respectively.

I may be wrong, but I’m thinking this attack on editors/publishers is a new direction for diversity activists. Of course, Vox Day attacked Irene Gallo and Tor after Gallo called him a neo-Nazi racist, sexist and homophobe on Twitter, but in that case, Gallo attacked him first. Making an example of an editor and publisher on suspicion, without any real evidence of anti-diversity, looks to me like something completely and dangerously different. And Milan was an official in management of the RWA at the time? It’s no wonder Tisdale filed a complaint. Grimshaw, apparently, did not. But she did delete her Twitter account.

So, what should we think about this? Should all small publishers and free-lance editors now be concerned that the Twitter activists might go after them? Should they all try to fatten up their reputations as diversity friendly? And what recourse might wronged editors/publishers have when they lose business over alleged transgressions? A civil suit? Should professional organizations get ahead of this with a fund to help with libel litigation?

And last, let’s hear it for Sue Grimshaw’s ghosting ability.

Wrap-up of the 2019 Dragon Reviews

The Dragon Awards are pretty much impossible to review before the vote because of the short time between the announcement of the finalists and the end of the voting period. However, I don’t want to neglect them in any way, so this year I’ve gone on to review the 2019 fiction winners. For a look at the whole list of finalists, see my blog on it here.

First, here are the winners again:
Best SF Novel: A Star-Wheeled Sky, Brad R. Torgersen (Baen)
Best Fantasy Novel: House of Assassins, Larry Correia (Baen)
Best Young Adult Novel: Bloodwitch, Susan Dennard (Tor Teen)
Best Military SFF Novel: Uncompromising Honor by David Weber (Baen)
Best Alternate History Novel: Black Chamber by S.M. Stirling (Ace)
Best Horror Novel: Little Darlings by Melanie Golding (Crooked Lane)

As usual in my analysis, here the diversity count of the finalists:
Best SF Novel: 2 women, 5 men, 2 LGBTQ, 2 Jewish (Note: James S.A. Corey is 2 men)
Best Fantasy Novel: 3 women, 3 men, 1 LGBTQ, 2 Jewish, 1 Hispanic
Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel: 4 women, 3 men, 1 Jewish
Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: 2 women, 6 men, 1 Hispanic
Best Alternate History Novel: 2 women, 4 men, 2 Jewish
Best Horror Novel: 2 women, 5 men, 1 Jewish.

Apologies if I missed anybody or mixed anybody up; it’s sometimes hard to tell about diversity from online biographies. There are other names in the list that look Jewish, for example, but I couldn’t confirm. The gender issue is complicated by the number of cowriters among the finalists, all men, as it turns out. Comparing on the numbers, the gender count works out to be 15/41 (37%) women and on the books 15/37 (41%). The minority count includes 3/41 (7%) LGBTQ, 8/41 (20%) Jewish and 2/41 (5%) Hispanic. I know there’s an argument about whether European Spanish/Portuguese should be considered Hispanic—this category in the US generally counts Latino writers, who are typically mixed race—but I’ve just noted the names here as Hispanic, as I’m not sure how they identify.

So, the ~40% gender count on female-written books isn’t bad, considering that the categories separate SF and fantasy and include a military SF category that you’d expect might skew the results. The LGBTQ count turns out very low compared to say, the Hugo Awards, but it’s actually sitting fairly close to the 4.5% self-identified US demographic. Like most of the awards this year, the count for Jewish writers is much higher than their US demographic of 2%. Other than this, the diversity count really sucks. I’ve had to really stretch for the Hispanic names, as Corriea and Cordova are both likely of European extraction, and there aren’t any apparent black, Arab, Asian, Native American, trans or non-binary writers in this list at all. It’s clear that white writers were strongly preferred by the voting population, leaning to men, especially in the winners (4/6 or 67%). This isn’t unexpected for a popular award; the Hugos, for example, also leaned heavily (75%) to white winners this year, only to women instead of men.

Because of the way the categories are set up, there’s more diversity in the subject matter and type of work in this award than some others, with science fiction getting equal standing against fantasy, and military SF, alternate history, young adult and horror each getting their own categories. There was more diversity in publishers in the Dragons than in some other awards I’ve looked at, too. Tor had the highest count of finalists 5/37 (14%), with Orbit and Baen coming in next, both at 3/37 (8%). Two of the finalists were self-published (5%). On the other hand, all three of the Baen publications came in as winners.

I notice there’s been discussion online about the “legitimacy” of the Dragon Awards, questions about how they are administered and suggestions they’re a vehicle for the Sad/Rabid Puppies faction of the SFF community. Although Vox Day and the Rabid Pups made a good showing in the first year (and actually brought greater diversity), at this point I don’t see any indication this group has any real control of the awards. The award administrators encourage campaigning and voting by avid fan groups, so organization by particular groups to try and vote their candidate in isn’t against the rules. The results strongly suggest a different audience is voting on this than the Hugos, Nebulas and World Fantasy Award, but given the nature of the convention and the categories of fiction, I think that’s pretty much to be expected. The Dragon Award does seem to be suffering from the widespread tendency of the awards voting populations to nominate the same names every year. James S.A. Corey, Chris Kennedy, Mark Wandrey, David Weber, Kacey Ezell and S.M. Stirling were also finalists in 2018. James S.A. Corey, Becky Chambers, Larry Corriea and Mark Wandrey were also finalists in 2017.

As far as literary quality of the work goes, my reviews noted the same kind of wide variation I’ve seen in other awards systems. These novels are popular favorites, fairly straightforward, and only Little Darlings has the kind of strong subtext that I’d consider “literary” writing, though Black Chamber might be satire. The repetition of names from year to year suggests the voting population tends to vote for their favorite author, and maybe not for the particular book that’s up for an award. The short time between announcement of the finalists and the final vote likely encourages this, as there’s not really enough time to read and evaluate all the candidates.

Wrap Up of the 2019 Hugo Reviews

I’ve already reviewed the remaining Hugo stories as part of the Nebula series, so I’ll move on to a discussion of what patterns emerge from looking at the finalists. As usual, I’m just looking at the four main fiction categories: short story, novelette, novella and novel. I’ve not read/seen most of the rest, at least not well enough to comment. These numbers are as best I can figure from online biographies.

First, the Hugo finalists feature “diversity” as the WorldCon members like to define it. That includes a huge slant to female and lesbian writers with only 2 cis men: Daryl Gregory and P. Djèlí Clark (who appears twice). Seventy-five percent of the finalists were female and nearly 38% of the finalists were LGBTQ, with the trans Yoon Ha Lee as the only male gay author and Brooke Bolander the single non-binary (appearing twice). Sex/gender breakdown of the finalists: 18 women (75%), 3 men (13%), 1 trans (4%), 2 non-binary (8%), 9 LGBTQ (37.5%).

Looking at the racial/ethnic composition of the list, it leaned very heavily to white this year. Including Jewish writers, this contingent amounted to a whopping 71%, leaving only 29% of the list for other ethnic/racial groups. The voters made maximum use of the African American writers they did nominate, with P. Djèlí Clark appearing in the list twice and Rebecca Roanhorse representing both African and Native Americans (for this breakdown, I’ve listed her as Native America). As usual, Hispanics are very poorly represented at 0%, although I see Malka Older gets a nod in the Best Series nominations. This year’s total of 3 is a big drop in the number of Asians nominated, down from 8 last year (or 30%), but the African American and Native American groups remained flat. Racial/ethnic breakdown: 12 ordinary white (50%), 5 Jewish (21%), 3 Asian (12.5%), 3 African American (12.5%), 1 Native American (4%), 0 Hispanic.

One pattern that repeats from last year is the dominance of Tor as the favored publisher. Nine of the finalists were published by Tor (37.5%), Uncanny magazine showed up well with three finalists (12.5%), and Fireside with two (8%). The big-name print magazines were totally frozen out of the Hugo this year; Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF didn’t feature among the finalists at all. An interesting new addition to the field was Zen Cho’s story from the B&N website, apparently getting into the game against Tor.

Another interesting pattern is the repetitive nature of the authors nominated. Ten of these same finalists appeared on the list last year (42%); five of the same names (20%) appeared in 2017, and four of the same names (17%) appeared in 2016, even with heavy interference from Vox Day and the Rabid Pups in both these years. This suggests the WorldCon voters have a very limited reading list, leaning to publications from Tor and from a small group of mostly female authors that they nominate year after year.

This year the stories leaned to fantasy, with 13 of the finalists falling into that category (54%), leaving 11 that could be classified as some type of science fiction. At least 3 of the science fiction stories also included heavily fantastical elements, and only Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition could be classified as anything remotely like hard SF. Twelve of these stories (50%) were also Nebula finalists.

Last, these stories tended to feature political messages, including a 3rd wave feminist slant. Five of the finalists (21%) went so far as to include a troubling quality of misandry, featuring men in stupid and/or sexist character roles. There were a high number of lesbian couples in the finalists’ stories, too, but I thought the number of non-binary characters was down a little from last year. Male gay characters remained poorly represented, featuring in about 8% of the stories.

Patterns in the Nebula finalist list

I had mentioned in the comments section of my announcement of the Nebula finalists that I thought recent shifts in the makeup of the SFWA membership had led to changes in the ballot. To clarify, this is the sudden appearance of indie press military/hard SF on the finalists list when it had been recently trending (as in most awards) to primarily female and fantasy nominees. As it turns out, some other people noticed this pattern shift, too. In the last few days, there has been a huge and embarrassing battle raging on Twitter about a recommended reading list posted before the vote at 20booksto50K a self-publishing writers co-op. Although the post stated that this was NOT intended as a slate, it was still taken that way by some readers who claimed it had unfairly influenced the results.

Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos (apparently still suffering from PTSD acquired from their experience with the 2015 Hugos) challenged the list on Twitter and demanded that the finalists whose stories had appeared on it withdraw. Author of the post Jonathan Brazee immediately issued an apology and offered to withdraw his novella from consideration. Other nominees hunkered down in horror and kept their mouths shut, as did the SFWA Officers and Board of Directors. However, Sri Lankan writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, angered by racist accusations that he cheated because he couldn’t otherwise make it as a POC, stepped up to fight it out. Welcome to the SFF community Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. Bellet and Yudhanjaya eventually kissed and made up on Twitter, but not before fairly serious damage was done to both their reputations.

I’m sure no one knew who Yudhanjaya was before his name appeared on the Nebula finalist list. For folks still in the dark, he is an established novelist and a hybrid writer, with both traditional and self-published works. His novelette “Messenger” with R.R. Virdi appeared in the anthology The Expanding Universe 4, and scored 15 recommendations on the 2018 Nebula reading list, plenty of votes to get the nomination without any slate. So, this comes off like another case of bullying successful POC writers.

See File 770 for a roundup of posts on the issue here and here. See Yudhanjaya’s blog here about this enlightening experience with the Nebulas so far.

Moving on to some other observations, once you get to looking for patterns in the Nebula finalist list, then there are at least a couple more that show up. I had meant to discuss this after the reviews, but since it’s been pointed out on other venues, this seems to be a better time. The dominance of certain traditional publishers on the list is troubling, for example, Tor. In the categories where Tor publishes (novelette, novella, novel) about half of the finalists this year were released by Tor. I’ve discussed this issue in the past, and the most likely explanation is the system of promotion, which includes give-aways, recommended reading lists, and reviews and recommendations in elite publications. I really almost think I could predict the finalists from a review of these promotions, and the same choices tend to appear in the Hugo Awards. The promotions determine what books everyone has read, so they become the award-winners, too.

The last pattern that shows up in the Nebulas is the inclusion of SFWA insiders on the list. This year, four members of SFWA Board of Directors out of five appear on the list of finalists, including: Sarah Pinsker, Andy Duncan, Lawrence Schoen and Kelly Robson. According to the rules, officers are ineligible for Nebula nominations because of their administrative access, but board members remain eligible. Mary Robinette Kowal, in line for president next year, is also a finalist. When asked about this on the SFWA forum, board members brushed it off as inconsequential.

There are also some patterns in the themes and styles this year, but I’ll get to that in my wrap up after the reviews.

Castalia House out at Amazon

Well, whoever was behind this missed a few audio books, but yeah, I checked and Castalia House was pretty much absent at Amazon for most of today. Looking at Castalia House’s website, it appears they politely inquired and found data on their account was completely wiped by someone at Amazon with access. Apparently the stated reason for removal was a question of rights ownership related to the Castalia-published book The Corroding Empire, a subject they thought was already settled when the book was published. If the missing data includes info on royalties due the writers, this could expose Amazon to some pretty serious repercussions. What is someone decided to wipe all the Tor books, for example? Or Baen? Oops.

Castalia’s books were back up by evening, except for The Corroding Empire, so it must have been a fairly easy fix. I don’t know that I could call this kind of action bullying, as Vox Day generally gives as good as he gets. I’m assuming it might be corporate wars? A drunken escapade on the part of some Amazon employee? A personal effort at censorship? Or maybe part of the marketing campaign for John Scalzi’s newly released installment in the Collapsing Empire series? Hm. There are all kinds of possibilities.

Anyhow, Castalia’s response has been to promote The Corroding Empire, still for sale at their Castalia Direct bookstore. Maybe I should put it on my list for review.

Are Hugo finalists suffering from affirmative action?

Now that it looks like the cat is out of the bag on how WorldCon members feel about the Hugo finalists, maybe we can analyze what went on with the programming. For anyone who missed it, WorldCon staff sent out the following about finalists who weren’t included on the program: “There’s a generation of new Hugo finalists who are exciting to the nominators but completely unfamiliar to attendees.” Then I had a conversation with a WorldCon member who admitted she didn’t really read anything, but actually nominated and voted based on the authors’ minority status.

Because of the volume of material out there, I suspect this is a standard practice for WorldCon voters. You feel obligated, so you look through the lists of recommended works, check the biographies and pick out the writers who advertise the most minority status. This discharges your responsibility as a progressive, and then you can spend your time at the con enjoying activities and authors you really like. (In this case, that looked to be panels full of white men.)

The problem is, this leads to a reality gap. It means that various authors are being promoted by a literary award system based on who they are rather than the quality of their work. It also means that quality now means pretty much zilch in the award. Certainly as a faithful reviewer of Hugo finalists, I’ve noticed wide variance in the quality of works nominated (both by Puppies and “organic” WorldCon voters). So, do members ever get around to reading these books at all? Will they get bored and impatient if they have to listen to too much from those darn finalists? After all, they got voted in, right? What else do they want?

Meanwhile on the other side of the story, a group of authors thinks they’ve been recognized because people appreciate their work. They’re excited to go to the con and interact with their fans, and instead, they’re being brushed off into back rooms by the programming committee. This is disrespectful considering their status as finalists for a prestigious award—and they feel like their careers will suffer as a result.

So, are these finalists actually being harmed? Affirmative action has been around long enough for people to judge the results, and a few research studies have investigated both the short and long term affects. The conclusion is that affirmative action policies do generally work in increasing diversity within a population, but not always how you’d expect. For example, the most noticeable result is that affirmative action tends to strongly benefit white women. Meanwhile, minorities who are targeted by the worst discrimination, like black and Hispanic men, may actually lose ground.

Currently there’s some soul searching going on because of an Asian class-action suit against Harvard University alleging discrimination in admissions. This has brought up the topic of “mismatch,” a theory that suggests some minorities might actually be harmed by promotion into an environment where they don’t really have the skills to compete. This would be beginning authors, for example, who are nominated before they’ve really gotten control of their skills as a writer. This means people might lose respect for them, stop reading their work, etc. So, is this happening to minorities who win the Hugo?

So far, it doesn’t look that way, complaints from this year’s finalists notwithstanding. They still get the name recognition, and appealing winners have gone on to become poster children, nominated again and attractive for film and TV deals. For example, see recent winners Nnedi Okorafor, Nora Jemisin and Victor LaValle. There’s also at least a small bump in readership.

Maybe it’s a question of whether the ideas actually stand up?

Wrap up of the 2018 Ideation Ratings

In his 2016 article for the Daily Beast, professor, writer and literary critic Tom Leclair says he thinks literary awards should be for works that are “the most ambitious and important nominee—a major work, wide-ranging in subject, ingenious in form, and profound in its treatment of…history.”

As a political battle has developed over the SFF awards in recent years, somehow this approach to the nominations seems to have gotten lost for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Some of the recent finalists and/or winners have been called out as political propaganda, having little or no substance beyond emotional appeal, poorly written, etc. Things have settled down a little this year, as the traditionalist have made their point and pretty much left liberals in control of these two awards. The finalists for the Nebulas, given by industry professionals, seems to have been a serious striving for diversity of genre as well as author in the nomination process–an effort to be fair. Still, the list of winners ends up with crowd appeal, but not much to contribute to the “literature of ideas.” Totaling up the scores, I’ve given the winners an average Ideation score of 2.05. The Nebula finalists included Autonomous, “a major work, wide-ranging in subject, ingenious in form, and profound in its treatment of…history,” but it didn’t win.

The differences between the Nebula and the Hugo finalist list mostly subtracted ideas and quality works rather than adding to them. I suppose this is something we can expect, as the Hugo finalists are elected by a close group of WorldCon members and their tastes are, for this reason, very limited. However, they did come up with the five star idea man, Kim Stanley Robinson. I may revisit this when the list of winners is available. Robinson won the Nebula the last time he put out a novel, but he didn’t even appear in the list of finalists this time. We’ll see how much the climate has changed since 2013.

I’m thinking Robinson may not win for the same reason Newitz didn’t win—his book is hard to read. It’s long, it’s got small print, and it’s full of economics. Nobody wants to deal with that anymore. I’m expecting WorldCon members are going to go for Scalzi or Jemisin instead.

Wrap up of the 2018 Hugo Reviews

Now that I’ve reviewed all the works, it’s time to take a look at the Hugo finalists, and how they fell out this year. Most notable is the absence of Vox Day’s Rabid Puppy inputs, which in the past couple or three award cycles has provided the male diversity. That means ordinary cis men were totally shut out of three of the four Hugo fiction categories for 2018, with Best Short Story, Best Novelette and Best Novella featuring only women, trans and non-binary authors. The Best Novel category also featured two finalists who are possibly political appointees meant as a slap-in-the-face to Vox Day, these being his nemeses N.K. Jemisin and John Scalzi. That leaves the white-male-masterful-crusader Kim Stanley Robinson as the really big wild card in the whole thing.

The next notable feature was the high rate of correspondence between the finalists for the Hugo and the Nebula Award. For the Best Short Story category the only difference was that two men nominated for the Nebula were replaced by women or trans writers. In the Best Novelette category, the same thing happened, but one additional woman was nominated. The most significant difference was in the Best Novel category, where only two of the finalists were the same. This strongly suggests how the same limited system produces both sets of nominees.

Next, the Hugo Awards drew from the same restricted number of publishers as the Nebula. In the novel category, this included: 4 from Orbit, 1 from Tor and 1 from Solaris. In the novella category: 5 from Tor.com and 1 from Uncanny. The novelette and short story categories showed slightly more diversity, drawing from Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex. Looking at these results, it’s clear why Rocket Stack Rank only reviews particular magazines. This is pretty much the list of shorter-than-novel publishers with inputs into the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Print magazines are doing so poorly, RSR can probably leave Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF off pretty soon without missing anything important.

Looking at what’s normally counted for diversity, the Hugo has done reasonably well. Best Novel includes 3 women, 2 men, 1 trans, 1 Asian and 1 African American writer. Best Novella includes 5 women, 0 men, 1 non-binary, 1 Asian and 1 African American writer. Best Novelette category includes 4 women, 0 men, 2 trans and 3 Asian writers. Best Short Story includes 6 women, 0 men, 3 Asian and 1 Native American writer. Those who recall my comments from last year will know I’m glad to see a Native American writer appear in the finalists, but we’re still short of Hispanics. These figures work out to be 75% women, 12.5% trans, 8% men and 4% non-binary. Looking at the counted racial categories, it works out to be 55% whites, 33% Asian, 8% African American and 4% Native American. Clearly the preferred finalists are young white and Asian women, while men, African Americans and Hispanics are all hugely underrepresented based on their population demographics. The one finalist works out okay for Native Americans, who are about 2% of the US population.

A couple of things stood out in the themes. First, the list included several repeat appearances from previous years, and also followed the Nebula tendency to nominate the same author in multiple categories. These included Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Sarah Pinsker and Yoon Ha Lee. The list of Hugo finalists avoided the tendency the Nebula finalists showed for editors, publishers and other industry insiders, but included at least a couple of short works written by popular novelists within the universe of their novels. I took this as unduly promotional. Like the Nebulas, there seemed to be a strong preference for stories with non-binary or trans characters.

This list leans heavily to fantasy and soft science fiction, with a serious lack of ideas and/or hard science fiction. I don’t think Nagata’s work qualifies, regardless that it’s set on Mars. The real stand-out, different work here, again, was Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which actually attempted to deal with hard science, real politics and real threats to humanity’s future. This is the kind of important work I’d prefer to see appear on the awards ballots.

Congrats to the Nebula winners!

Best Novel: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Best Novella: All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
Best Novelette: “A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson (Tor.com 1/4/17)
Best Short Story: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex 8/17)

That means I’ll be moving on to reviewing the Hugo finalists in the fiction categories. As in recent years, I’m expecting that the Hugo choices are more politically charged.

As usual, I don’t have a whole lot left to review. In the short story category, 4 out of 6 are the same for the two lists of award finalists; in the novelette category, 3 of 6 are the same and in the novella category, 4 of 6 are the same. I’ve got the most work to do in the novel category, where only 2 of the 6 are repeats. There is also a similarity in the names from previous years, with recent winners N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Seanan McGuire, Ursula Vernon and Nnedi Okorafor putting in repeat appearances.

For anyone interested in how many fiction works have won both the Nebula and Hugo Award, I see there’s a list at Wikipedia.