The finalists for the 2015 Locus Awards, selected by an open ballot across the entire internet, have just been made public. And, as some commentators have not hesitated to remark, there’s not a single Sad (or Rabid) Puppy among them.
For anyone who wants more details on the Locus Awards themselves, their structure and voting procedure are here. Unlike the Hugo Awards, these are open to voting by any reader of Locus Magazine. First presented in 1971, the awards are given in the categories: Novel (usually split into SF, fantasy/horror, and first novel), short fiction, anthology, collection, nonfiction book, art book, publisher, magazine, and artist. As the details explain, the Locus Awards grew out of a list “established in the early ’70s specifically to provide recommendations and suggestions to Hugo Awards voters. Over the decades the Locus Awards have often drawn more voters than the Hugos and Nebulas combined.” The winners “will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 26-28, 2015.”
The actual list for this year’s Locus Awards includes many well-known names, and stories and titles that you’d expect to see on any reasonably well-informed science fiction and fantasy slate of 2014 publications. There’s Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance, which seems to be gaining iconic status in the modern literature of the New Weird. There’s The Peripheral, from that left-of-field nobody William Gibson. There’s Daryl Gregory’s very wonderful, and Nebula-nominated, We Are All Completely Fine. There’s Elizabeth Bear’s Steles of the Sky and Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire. There’s anthology titles from … well, obvious no-name SJW stooges like George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. What you will not find is one single title or author from the Sad Puppies list for the 2014 Hugos.
You’re either forced to assume that the liberal-left-loony conspiracy beloved of the Sad Puppies ringleaders extends across the entire internet – or that the SP promoters are just a bunch of histrionic opportunists who hijacked the voting process of a particular set of awards in the name of a particular ideological agenda. Which also makes you wonder what future history will make of the 2014 Sad Puppies Hugo list, if not a single one of them has made the cut in a more open ballot. Apologies to any fine writers besmirched by that comment, but in the circumstances, it’s understandable. And apologies too to the Locus Awards for casting their fantastic slate of contenders in the shade of the Hugos/Sad Puppies fiasco. All the same, people, compare and contrast.
Yes, quite openly stated that Locus subscribers have twice the voting power (now, their award, their rules, the only uncool thing is that they changed this after the voting was done a few years ago since they didn’t like the results, so decided to change them that way- I bet if VD and his legions will turn to the Locus award, Locus will give their subscribers enough voting power to get their own way)
Also, it is work to fill in your own titles, rather than use the pre-filled “recommended” titles – let’s call it the extended Locus slate – the reason I stopped voting a few years ago was exactly that I got tired of filling in titles
So your title should be – Locus has shown how to do slate voting, win and get the approval of your friends…
It actually shows the power of directed voting (and not just because they change the value of each kind of vote when they do not like the results).
When you vote you get a ballot like this one:
http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2013/PollAndSurvey.html
You’ll notice that there are a number of titles written in the ballot for you to select. You are also allowed to write in your own candidates, but obviously the effect of this ballot will be to concentrate votes on the candidates already in the ballot and disperse any write-in vote. The result is that it’s almost impossible for any work not already in the ballot to get nominated for the award.
The 2015 ballot is no longer available, but since they use the Locus recommended list as basis, I have just checked all the categories in the Locus recommended list to see whether there are any nominees not present in that list. After checking all the fiction categories (novels and short fiction), and also anthologies, collections, non fiction and art books, the result is that there is not a single nominee that was not in the recommended list.
You can see for yourselves. Even the order the nominees are listed is exactly the same order they appear in the recommended list.
Locus finalists:
http://www.locusmag.com/News/2015/05/2015-locus-awards-finalists/
Locus recommended list:
http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2015/02/2014-locus-recommended-reading-list/
So, yes, there’s voting, but de facto the nominees are limited to the works listed in the recommended list. Since it is well-known that the recommended list is not exactly full of Baen works (or any puppy-recommended work), the fact that it’s the same for the nominees does not add any new information.