Much mulling over the…

Much mulling over the Hugo Awards today. The stats are really interesting to think about. It's frustrating to see that there's still such a huge skew towards men -- if you go through and count women on the ballot, you get (or I get):

4 out of 21 (for fiction, assuming Shane is male)

12 out of 59 total (not counting the movies or the Campbell, counting a woman even if her co-editors are male)

Not great numbers. Roughly a fifth? We improve, but slowly.

In other interesting stats -- only 21 votes were required to get a short story on the ballot? 21! If I were a sf short fiction writer, I'd be wondering right now whether I had 20+ friends I could have talked into nominating me...

It also makes me think that if, oh, Jed and I, say, had conferred and picked out three favorites of short fiction and novellettes from last year, and then posted them as a "recommended" list or some such, whether we might have gotten a SH story onto the ballot. I mean -- we have 30+ staff, and hundreds of supportive contributors, before you even get to our thousands of readers. Surely at least 25 of them nominated for the Hugos. And the Hugo administrators told me that there were *lots* of nominations for SH stories in the various fiction categories -- just not enough consensus on which ones. So, y'know...we could've.

But I think it would have felt weird -- moving beyond generally letting people know that we were eligible to actively trying to manipulate the vote. I'm not sure, but I think so. It's still a little odd to realize how few votes it takes to get on the ballot.

Various and sundry tasks today -- I'd like to get a fair bit of packing done, in between reading Paradise Lost for class. So far, only the first book done; it's somewhat slow going.

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