Well it has been a surprisingly long day and also a very hot day in NSW. I've speculated before that there is, almost like clockwork, some weird fannish controversy in January and this year it is somehow last year's Hugo Awards. I'm hot and cross about how many people I like have been negatively affected by this and also morbidly obsessed with it.
So, weird Hugo stuff. Don't know the why of it and can't entirely see the what of it. Still, time to think about how the stable door can be shut better even as the Hugo 2023 horse gallops off into the distance.
I'm not going to think about big stuff but let us ask a hypothetical that doesn't necessarily apply to the Chengdu Worldcon. Imagine it is January of the year after a given set of Hugo Awards. Everybody was happy and got their respective rockets or made peace with not winning that year. Suddenly, it is revealed that actually the Hugo Awards the previous year were a complete stuff up! No ballots from people with an "i" in their name were counted or every work that had a robot in it accidentally had 20 votes deducted or instead of EPH being used to count the ballots a D&D 5th edition manual was used or people with Irish sounding names were deemed ineligible because of an old Florida statute. Everybody is very angry. The losers feel cheated, and the winners feel like frauds. What to do?
You can't really do a do-over. That's not fair to the winners and it might not be feasible and also who would do the do-over?
So what kind of remedies could be offered?
I don't know. However, if I focus just on the eligibility issue I think some changes could be made.
Worldcons typically have been keen to let voters decide eligibility issues where possible but each year there are issues that come up. I don't think it would be helpful for the Hugo admins to address eligibility publicly at nomination time. That would likely skew votes and lead to protracted arguments. However, finding out you were deemed "ineligible" only after the award ceremony (or worse, months later) is pretty bad.
If eligibility decisions were announced AFTER final voting but BEFORE the actual Worldcon then an aggrieved nominee would have some option of redress by bringing the issue to the Business Meeting. For works deemed incorrectly declared ineligible (after a vote) one remedy might be an extension of eligibility i.e. a second go the following year.
That might be a remedy for a specific work but it is less reasonable for an award to a person. A different and more radical remedy would be if a nominee deemed incorrectly declared ineligible was then automatically an additional seventh finalist the following year. I can see that working and most years wouldn't apply anyway.
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