The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.
Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.
"I got a Hugo" is probably worth something in negotiations with traditional publishers; exactly which award is being stuffed is not mentioned. If you're up for, say, "Best Fan Writer" and are looking for a traditional publisher then it's starting to look attractive, if you can think of a clever way to cover the costs.
"Prove you voted for me and you get access to a big download of everything I made in the past decade, which would cost $300 to buy normally" comes to mind as a way to cover a chunk of that. Crowdfunding!
You’re right, it’s uneconomic to manipulate the vote this way. However, if recent history is anything to go by, the motivation here is political, not economic.
One would think so, but, having read all the fiction nominees this year, I can't think of any who would have an obvious political agenda to back them.
One possibility I could think of is a certain state trying to boost their up and coming Science Fiction industry, but even that seems a rather far fetched prospect.
> if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.
$22,000 is cheap in the world of literature award purchasing.
Authors will often hire services to buy their books by the thousands to get on to best seller lists. The cost can be on the order of $100,000.
I know one author who had purchased many boxes of his own book with the intention of getting them back into his publisher's system somehow and recouping some money. Apparently he didn't plan it out fully, because not only did the book not sell well but he was stuck with boxes and boxes of his own book. He couldn't even give them away after a while.
To offer a counter anecdote: for a while I enjoyed reading books from the list of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards[1] - and later from the list of winners for a single award (same, Hugo or Nebula).
https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ has some data for one year. "They do have an effect, but probably no more than a few thousand sales for most books, maybe over ten thousand for the luckiest, and then only in exceptional years."
I think Banks possibly just had the poor planning to die to early, there. Both due to the nationality thing (it has gotten a _bit_ less American-centric), and because it feels like his _style_ fits better with current winners than 90s winners (I was actually quite surprised to discover than Ancillary Justice was _not_ in some way a Culture homage).
Yeah, I've read a couple of more modern Hugo award winners and thought that they sucked. Maybe I just got unlucky, but it certainly didn't inspire confidence that I will enjoy reading the award recipients.
I think I've read a large proportion of recent Hugo winners, and they definitely tend to be better than average. The nominees are normally pretty good in general.
"Better than average" is a pretty low bar. I'd certainly hope that a winner of one of the more recognized SF awards would be somewhere on the upper end of the quality distribution whether or not it's a great indication for
The statement doesn't say it's the Best Novel. Maybe there's someone who would happily drop a ton of money to be a Hugo-award-winning Professional Artist?
Or maybe Paramount are desperate to beat Doctor Who in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form?
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) and this year's new Best Game or Interactive Work stand out to me as the categories most where the economics are weirdest. 22,000 pounds may be a rounding error to some film and game marketing budgets, they might not even need to do the math on how many extra sales they could get from the "Hugo Award Winning" sticker they can slap on the Blu-Rays or Steam tags.
- "Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial."
The FCC fake-comment fraud involved literally millions of real identities and real names [0]. It was caught for a different reason: many of the comments had identical text strings.
The corporations that funded this fraud got what they wanted (at that point in time, when the FCC sided with them in policy) and were not punished with even so much as a fine.
It's a very interesting example, to me: the telecom companies set up an arms-length arrangement with the criming entities, the "social media consultants", such that if the fraud were caught (and it was), the people who benefited from the crime, and intended for the crime to happen, could plausibly plead ignorance. US law apparently has no good solution to this type of "wink-and-nod" white-collar crime.
> Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected.
Not at all clear, actually. They wouldn't have been discovered by this exact heuristic, but that's not to say this was the most complex fraud the Hugo committee were capable of detecting.
> Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.
It is of course completely impossible that while one person was arranging fake votes using obviously fake names, they or someone else might have arranged fake votes using more realistically fake names.
Like, I agree that there's not a lot that the committee can do here, but the Hugo voting process in its current form does not warrant this level of confidence. We simply cannot be sure whether the people who "won" did so fairly or not.
Given how the names were generated, it seems the bad actor might actually want to be caught. Maybe it was trying to get the committee to disqualify a title. Since it doesn't make sense financially, as a sibling comments points out, so personal grudge might be the motivation. But I guess we'll never know.
That's an interesting theory. At least one of the nominees is known to be on hostile terms with a group with a past record of trying to interfere with the Hugos.
Hugo and Nebula awards drive my fun-reading list. It is sad to hear that even this quaint corner of the book world is no longer ignored by vote and review manipulators. Is nothing holy anymore!? man shakes a fist at the space-ship shaped cloud
They claimed there was bloc voting based on non-literary critera and responded by definitely bloc voting for non-literary criteria.
I've read ~half the winners from 1960-1980, and a slightly larger proportion from 2000-2020. I found the more recent novels had more interesting concepts and vastly improved writing. The quality overall has increased significantly. Pretty painful to try to read eg Asimov nowadays
I was at some of these worldcons at the time and where it may not have been bloc voting, it was definitely voting for people over stories. And I'm talking open discussion of voting for effect rather than story quality. Worldcon attendance around 2012 was heavily skewed older and I might say a hippy vibe.
Sad puppies at least was completely honest about it. I don't agree with what they did, but it's honest. Everyone's pretending like they're voting for things nobody has read because they read them and not because the author has been "blessed" as appropriate for accolades. Also, not saying it should be a strict popularity contest.
Also, 2000's looks pretty normal and it doesn't seem to kick off until 2010+.
I could be convinced, though. It's hard to pick out a book from the last 15 years which which will be on the read list 30 years from now. Except The Three Body Problem, which I loved and I think will last.
So, I'll check back on this in 30 years and see how it's aged.
It's funny, I found the three body problem to be challenging and unrewarding to read, which is similar to some of those old Hugo winners. Might have worked better as a novella than a 3 part series.
If I were asked to pick winners from the last 15 years that will still be recommended reads in 2050, I'd pick Ancillary Justice and The Fifth Season. From nominees not winners, perhaps Seveneves or Too Like The Lighting would qualify. The most recent book I can say will definitely be on the to-read list is 2000's winner, Vernor Vince's A Deepness In the Sky
> The quality overall has increased significantly. Pretty painful to try to read eg Asimov nowadays
I wouldn't go that far, Asimov is still awesome, with all the weaknesses that have always been in his works but with all the strengths, too.
That said, I agree that the SF/Fantasy scene has gotten some really amazing works lately. I don't agree with all the Hugo winners of the last few years, but that's because we have so much good competition lately :)
I kind of get the sentiment. If I go back to read Lovecraft or Verne, the technical aspect of their writing is poor by today's standards. Their stories are creative and original, though. There is a sameness to so many stories today.
Also that stuff last year in China. The key seems to be not to be the very most prominent award; Locus and BSFA and Nebula and so on seem to have a lot less strife.
The strife is more obvious with the Hugo than Locus/BSFA/Nebula because the Hugo has an intentionally open voting membership. Anyone with interest and the cost of a membership may vote. Voting blocs have to be public attempts to sway popular opinion. That very nature of it forces it to be public drama.
Some of the Chinese controversy about the Chengdu's WorldCon last year was as much about that natural sway in attending membership simply by being hosted in a controversial country like China no matter what else happened. It's called WorldCon for that reason and that sway in voting membership was always somewhat intentional to keep the Hugo Awards worldly and diverse. Some people were always going to have issues with a Chines WorldCon, even if they didn't also end up very publicly making mistakes.
Yeah, there were the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns, which led Worldcon to change the award rules.
Then in 2023 there was the self-censorship incident for the Chengdu Worldcon (and also some question about the ballot for selection of Chengdu in the first place, I believe).
Now this.
The Hugos are really having a lot of trouble recently.
The Sad Puppies were a response to the sorry state of Hugo voting, not the start of it. The Hugo process was designed (and to use that word at all is overstating things) for a world where there were enough independent SF magazines to both avoid groupthink and hopefully cover most of what was worth reading between them.
Hah. The WorldCon was designed to travel between cities and between continents to increase diversity of opinion. It doesn't need independent SF magazines to avoid "groupthink", it already has a world of diversity and the natural forcing function of the primary voters being attending members and attending members encouraging local memberships in addition to travellers.
That was as much a part of the controversy of the Chengdu WorldCon as any of the mistakes they made. The WorldCon was built to welcome that sort of diversity of opinion from an entirely under-represented part of the world in voting to that point. Even if the Chengdu WorldCon hadn't made silly mistakes it still would have angered a lot of people by how much it proved the Hugos actually aren't about "groupthink" and try to get a diversity of opinions.
Might be worth dropping some coin on getting the SFWA Lawyers to contract an outside data analysis group to verify these findings after the absolute fustercluck that was the Hugos 2023. I think this statement is made in good faith, and I believe they believe they are correct in their analysis but the shadow of the 2023 Hugos is long and dark. There will be questions regardless of how many good faith statements the committee makes. I don't envy them having to deal with this.
Wow. There are probably so many things that we enjoy in this life that are managed by people volunteering and soldiering on in positions like this. I will make it a point to be more appreciative in the future
Keep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names.
The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.
Isn't that the wrong baseline? I'm pretty sure the proportion of, IDK, disc golfers who win more than $100 in prize money is tiny, but that doesn't mean that a disc golfing tournament offering $100 needs to institute a massive anti-fraud crackdown.
I would guess that to SF and Fantasy fans "Hugo Award winner" does serve as some indication of merit, beyond what is really entailed (some number of hard core SF/ fantasy fans liked at least one of their works).
Outside, for example buying for a friend or colleague, I imagine it sounds like a generic literary award and they'd expect it was judged excellent by some number of experts, as with say a Booker.
It's also a nice ego boost of course. If you like that kind of thing anyway. If you're Greg Egan or something it's probably dreadful.
The problem is that "literary" awards, e.g. Nebulas in SF, probably tend to award more of a critic's sensibility than a fan's. But I'm not sure that Hugos are worth a whole lot at this point even as a fan's take.
Awards up until that Tor-adjacent blogger network started setting the agenda (intentionally or otherwise), i.e. pre-"Racefail", tend to be pretty good. After that (i.e. post-2009) the Hugos become very unreliable.
I don't think any of Blackout/All Clear, Ancillary Justice, Three-Body Problem, A Memory Called Empire or A Desolation Called Peace live up to Hugo standards (and I didn't read The Calculating Stars because I didn't think The Lady Astronaut of Mars did either). Looking at the post-2009 shortlists I think at least Anathem, Ninefox Gambit (and, frankly, both its sequels), The Goblin Emperor and Too Like the Lightning (even if the series ended poorly) were Hugo-winner-quality and The Dervish House was borderline (I appreciate that that that's two for 2015).
I was personally not a fan of the Three Body Problem (apart from the vivid flashback to the Cultural Revolution) because of the language (not clear whether it suffered in translation or whether it was the writing style of the original), and because the physics of it seemed ludicrous to me. But it's one of those "grand idea" series that to me would clearly qualify as winner tier, and it had many fans from across the political spectrum and quite a bit of commercial success.
Blackout/All Clear has been criticized for being rather loose with historical and cultural details, and for splitting up what might have fit into a single novel into two books, but I thought it was an excellent book otherwise.
I thought both the Ancillary Justice trilogy and the A Memory Called Empire trilogy were amazing works. I disagreed with the hectoring pro-Human Spaceflight messaging of The Calculating Stars, but as a book, I again thought it was good.
I was a fan of Anathem, Ninefox Gambit, and The Goblin Emperor (which was my preference to win that year) as well; could not get into Too Like the Lightning at all (but had no doubt that it belonged).
> A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace are two of the best SF books I've read in the last 10 years. I loved them.
I found them fun and engaging (I wouldn't have read the second one otherwise) but ultimately not outstanding.
> Three-Body problem is one of the greatest SF books of all time, IMO.
This is an opinion I am constantly baffled with. I found it awful, simply devoid of redeeming features; no interesting plot, no interesting technical ideas, no interesting characters, no interesting writing. (The worldbuilding could've perhaps been interesting if it hadn't been so thin.)
I can see why people don't like Three Body Problem, though I personally do. Ancillary Justice is probably my favourite sci-fi since Banks died (unless you count The Fifth Season, but it can't decide whether it's sci-fi or fantasy).
I've only read Three Body Problem and Ancillary Justice. I think those are Hugo worthy novels, although I have problems to various degrees with the later novels in both cases.
That's quite a long time ago before there was so much politicization. I do think there's still value but probably also increasing reasons for skepticism.
My theory is that this is the first year that the AIs have tried to stuff the ballot for their favourite author, they're just not very good at it yet (and that Finalist A is likely Martha Wells)
This messy situation demands a lot of trust of the organisers—trust they do not have, after they corruptly tampered with the 2023 votes and tried to cover that up.
Incorrect, there has historically been a "Permanent Floating WorldCon Committee" [1] that has provided a lot of continuity. Sometime they have fill higher ranking slots when the locals don't have enough experience.
While the organisers have changed, up until this year the same person has written the un-audited software and run the voting process previously - which was how he was able to discard huge numbers of votes covertly last year, for example.
> which was how he was able to discard huge numbers of votes covertly last year
I don't think it was very covert–the conference organizers are required to release their data, which they did, and the voting issues were immediately apparent.
Coming on the heels of the 2023 Hugo Awards disaster (certain authors excluded for fear of offending China, see https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...) it's hard to believe the supposed post-Chengdu reforms didn't take into account loopholes like this.
It’s a fan voted prize, and you get a vote for being a member, and you can become a member with a fee.
If some person, people, or organisations attempted to masquerade as multiple non “natural” persons they seem to have been found out, which I would not call a “loophole”.
By the way, as a member it seems you get a copy of all the books and stories, which makes the fee pretty decent.
> If some person, people, or organisations attempted to masquerade as multiple non “natural” persons they seem to have been found out, which I would not call a “loophole”.
Some entity or entities doing this in a very dumb way has been found out. Why should that give us any confidence that no other entities did this in more sophisticated ways?
I don't know anything about the matter, but the Wikipedia page [1] says:
> several authors being declared ineligible without explanation [...] Leaked emails revealed that the authors were excluded due to self-censorship by the Hugo Award administrators in order to appease the Chinese government
The entries supposedly eliminated at the behest of the Chinese government are in many cases published in China, and there's never been any evidence that they were eliminated by anyone other than a secret committee comprising the guy who writes the closed-source voting software, which he refuses to let anyone audit. Moreover, there is clear evidence of anomalies and outright vote manipulation (with some winners having more votes allocated than were cast). Much of the vote manipulation appears to have been in order to override popular votes from Chinese fans.
The "oh it's just the evil Chinese government" appears to be as much a deflection to allow one or a few people to rewrite the votes to a slate of winners who they prefer, as anything else.
"There are a couple of other landmines in the report, namely that several Chinese language works were apparently removed for alleged slating before they even made the longlist. Note that Dave McCarty was also the Hugo administrator in 2016, i.e. one of the Puppy years, where slating very definitely took place, and yet found himself unable to remove any of the slate finalists from the ballot. And while I have no idea what We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu and the other Chinese novels which appear on the eligibility spreadsheet but not on the ballot, are about, they can’t possibly be worse than such literary gems as “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris or “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness, both of which Dave McCarty allowed to make the ballot in 2016."
> We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation.
The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.
Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.
[1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/, WSFS Membership.