Odds and Sods (Editorial, NYRSF 321)

I’m happy to say that we’re basically back on schedule with this issue. Depending on how quickly Weightless Books can process our files, you might even see this in May. Now that we’re running quasi-smoothly on the issue production front, I can turn my attention back to some longer-standing matters. We ran into several font-related complications with our print-on-demand issues through Lulu that I hope are now resolved. Back in October of last year, we submitted a couple of issues to Draft2Digital for distribution through other booksellers such as iBooks and Barnes & Noble, but for various reasons they were rejected; we are going to get that straightened out as well.

As all times are, this is a time of transition for the magazine. The Pleasantville home of David Hartwell is up for sale as David relocates to Dragon Press’s luxurious Westport headquarters. For the first time since I joined the magazine, the monthly Work Weekend will be held somewhere other than the kitchen and living room of Stately Hartwell Manor, and I will miss them. We have whiled away many mostly happy hours there shivering or sweltering (as the seasons commanded) as we visited our editorial wisdom upon our contributors’ works. Now we will meet in Valentine’s Castle and its oh-so-welcome climate control.

Currently the garage at Hartwell Manor holds the bulk of our back issue inventory. Sales of the paper back issues have dropped off sharply over the last couple of years, to the point where we cannot justify the expense of a storage unit to hold them. As a result, we’re having a (figurative) fire sale: $1.50 for any individual issue, $1/each if you order more than 5, and $0.50 each for 100 or more. Grab bags of 20 issues are now $5 each—you can order up to 10 grab bags and be guaranteed all the issues will be unique. While supplies last! Email <[email protected]> for more info.

Finally, a bit more about the Hugos and the Puppy slates.

Bit 1: Brad Torgersen wrote a long reply to last month’s editorial, which you can find here: <bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/fisking-the-broken-narrative/>. He obviously didn’t find me particularly convincing.

Bit 2: Now that the Hugo Finalists packet has been distributed to voters, I want to explain how I intend to vote on this year’s short list. I am going to rank the various works I feel myself qualified to judge. Below them I will vote for No Award. I am omit from my ballot any work (or person) that was on either Puppy slate.

I believe this is the proper response not because the works/people on the Puppy slates are bad. For instance, DAW’s Sheila Gilbert is an excellent candidate for the Best Editor, Long Form award—she was nominated last year without being on the “Sad Puppies 2” nominating slate. However, the entire process of slate voting is corrupt, because a slate asks nominators to abandon their charge to nominate the works they found to be Best in their respective categories and instead follow the instructions given to them by a third party. Given this subversion of the process, I cannot in good conscience consider the slate candidates to be valid finalists; rewarding these finalists in any way, deserving as they might be, would simply be rewarding the entire corrupt process. To use a phrase from American jurisprudence, these nominees are fruit of a poisoned tree; to use a phrase from a classic cartoon, “And I say to hell with it.”

Others have taken other positions; George R. R. Martin argued <grrm.livejournal.com/424767.html> that it’s the responsibility of Hugo voters at this stage to take the finalist list as seriously as in any other year. Other writers (and it vexes me that I can’t find an example) have suggested that No Award–ing every category is the only fair vote because the slate voting affects the entire ballot, not just the slate nominees; non-Puppy works that reached the final ballot are facing far less “real” competition than they should. I cannot gainsay these other approaches, but my stance makes the most sense to me.

(Hugo final balloting is open until July 31, 2015; any attending or supporting member of Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, is eligible to vote. If this is something that interests you, find out more at <sasquan.org/>.)

Bit 3: The Making Light community has spent the last several weeks working on a proposal for an alternate nomination system that would be easy for nominators, easy to implement (with software or even with hand counting), and much less susceptible to slate voting and other forms of ballot-box stuffing. Details are here <nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016262.html>. The summary is that ballots go through multiple rounds of counting, eliminating the least popular nominees until a list of finalists is reached. Because slates will have a batch of candidates all weighted equally, they will be eliminated together and leave the nonslate nominees in the counting pool.

I support this revision and I encourage everyone who cares about this question to take a look. If you’re planning on attending Sasquan and support this initiative (or any other credible initiative), I encourage you to attend the WSFS Business Meeting to debate and vote upon the proposals.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors