Two Finalists Withdraw from 2015 Hugo Awards

The 2015 Hugo Award Administrators have announced that two of the finalists originally announced for the 2015 Hugo Awards have withdrawn their acceptances and will not appear on the final ballot for the 2015 Hugo Awards. We have updated the 2015 Finalist Shortlist accordingly.

In the Best Novel category, Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos was withdrawn by its author. It has been replaced by The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu).

In the Best Short category, “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet was withdrawn by its author. It has been replaced by “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond.

The Administrators also announced that in the Novelette category, the listing for “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt originally did not include the name of the translator, Lia Belt. That oversight has now been corrected. The announcement from the 2015 Worldcon further noted that this year appears to be the first time that multiple fiction finalists for the Hugo Award were originally written in languages other than English. Under World Science Fiction Society rules for the Hugo Award, a work originally published in a language other than English gets an additional year of eligibility if it is published in English in a later year.

This year is the first time in the history of the Hugo Awards that a finalist has withdrawn a work after announcement of the finalist shortlist. Nominees with sufficient nominating votes to make the shortlist have in the past declined nomination as Finalists; however, this has always happened before the shortlist was announced.

In the statement explaining the above changes, the Administrators announced that the ballot is now going to the printer and there will be no further revisions. The original finalist announcement stated that they expected to open the final ballot for voting by the members of the 2015 Worldcon “as soon as possible.” We will post an announcement on The Hugo Awards website when online voting opens.

Only supporting and attending members of Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, are eligible to vote on the final Hugo Award ballot. See the 2015 Worldcon Membership Registration Page for information about joining Sasquan. Membership is open to any person with an interest in SF and Fantasy literature.

A Hugo Voter Packet of nominated works will be released as soon as it is available with versions of the nominated works for members of the current Worldcon to review so that they can be better-informed voters. The availability of nominated works is dependent upon the generosity of the authors, artists, publishers, and rights holders, and no work is guaranteed to be in the Hugo Voter Packet. Only eligible voters (voting members of the 2015 Worldcon) will be given access to the Hugo Voter Packet.

The 2015 Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award winners will be announced Saturday, August 22, 2015, during the Hugo Awards Ceremony at the 2015 Worldcon.

Please direct questions about the administration of this year’s Hugo and Campbell Awards to the Sasquan Hugo Administration Subcommittee. TheHugoAwards.org does not actually manage the administration of each year’s Hugo Awards, and while we can answer general queries, definitive answers to specific questions about given year’s Awards can only come from that year’s Administrator.

33 thoughts on “Two Finalists Withdraw from 2015 Hugo Awards

  1. It’s good to see the process unhindered by politics, thanks to the work of people who slandered and harassed a pair of authors until they rejected the fans who supported them because those fans didn’t have the right politics.

    1. It’s almost like you just decided to make up your mind without actually reading what either author said while announcing their withdrawal, or something. Imagine that.

    2. That is a willfully ignorant statement given the very public, very clear explanations for the withdrawals from the authors themselves.

    3. I hope all of the people who bemoaned politics becoming part of the Hugos but then decided that anyone who was voted for by someone whose politics they disagreed with deserved to be bullied and slandered get hit by a bus.

  2. Sad to see some authors felt the need to withdraw, but TBP is a wonderful story, and it looks like Mr. Kloos is very happy with his replacement on the ballot. Kudos to him and TBP, both deserving of any praise that may come their way.

  3. I just want to appreciate the buzzword salad of the above comment.

    Here’s hoping that anyone considering putting forth a slate next year will realize that authors don’t want to be on slates.

  4. [Edited at author’s request to correct reference, per follow-up comment. – ed]

    I, personally, do not consider people “fans” who signed up for supporting memberships for the sole purpose of voting the way someone told them to about works they have not read, which appears to be the situation at hand here — an issue which is totally separate from *the political views* of the person who told them how to vote; clearly the gent nominated who withdrew is as concerned about the politics as the mechanics, but I don’t believe that’s necessary to be unhappy about this event.

    In short: I believe that “fans” is too inclusive a term to use to describe the minions who voted the way Beale told them they should, and I believe using that term overinclusively *is purposeful conflation*, attempting to cloak those bloc voters in what should be a positive appellation which they don’t appear to deserve, as I’ve been able to apprehend the situation.

    Now I will descend into politics and personalities: given what I’ve been able to apprehend of Mr Beale, including from the Mike Brown *interview* published yesterday or the day before, I don’t approve of his views, stances, or politics, and because of them, I’m not suprised he would advocate gaming the voting as he appears to have done.

    But I wouldn’t care what his reasons are; gaming the voting system is bad, no matter who does it or why.

    (Edited to correct my mistaken unpacking of the pseudonym Vox Day to the wrong author.)

    1. [ Edit: Correction: I inaccurately expanded Vox Day to point to Larry Correia in that comment; he’s involved, but Vox Day is actually his partner in ‘crime’, Theodore Beale ]

  5. I’m happy that Three-Body Problem made it onto the final list.

    But also disturbed.

    I respect the decisions of Mr. Kloos and Mrs. Bellet. I don’t blame them for making the choice they made. I liked their work (which I’ve only read in the past week) and felt they deserved to be on the final ballot.

    This all feels like bullying to me. Maybe the nominees felt bullied/harassed to withdraw or maybe it was bullying/harassment that got them on the final ballot to begin with. It doesn’t really matter.

    This shows that if you don’t like the final ballot, you might be able to bully or harass the nominees into withdrawing so that something you like better might get on the ballot. Just say things like, “it was only because you were on a slate that you got the nomination,” or “it’s only because you have the correct politics/gender/ethnic background that you got nominated,” or “so-and-so liked your work, I didn’t know you were a ….ist.” It’s harassment no matter how I look at it (making people fear for why or how they got nominated) and it makes me very sad to participate in this years Hugos.

    I feel that the Hugo administration should seriously consider forgoing the awards ceremony. Simply throw a party, hand out a list of the winners, and mail off the trophies. (Okay, use the trophies as table decorations at the tables where the winners are sitting for each category.) WorldCon this year should be all about building good will and not about competition.

    1. I don’t see the point of handing out Hugo awards this year *at all* anymore. No one who wins can be said to have earned it because the circumstances of their nomination will have been irrevocably tainted. I’m frankly surprised that not *all* the authors have withdrawn their works from nomination. Who would want an award they may have only received because they fit the politics of a group that was gaming the tragically flawed nomination system?

    2. Moral awareness is not a bully. The nominees who’ve withdrawn didn’t do it because somebody forced them to, they did it because they each recognized that through no fault of their own, their potential award had been tainted, and they didn’t want a tainted award.

      There’s still a couple of otherwise-well-respected slate authors who have not pulled out, and that’s their choice. The choice may leave them less well-respected, whether or not they get a rocket, but when you choose your actions, you choose the consequences. And even so, it’s not like they’ll be shunned or persecuted, it’s just that people will remember.

  6. Contests get gamed all the time–candidates who get put on ballots with names similar to the opponents of the people who put up the similarly-named candidate to confuse voters, entering candidates to split a group of voters up enough for someone who wouldn’t have had a plurality without the vote splitting to win, etc.

    Dirty tricks aren’t always banned endeavors.

    What Beale, Correia, and Torgesen did is statistically referred to as inserting “pink noise” into a system–putting in a systematic bias in the system, where a distribution without the bias would have a very different profile and not the sharp “spurious peaks” which most of the Finalist positions of Puppy slates candidates represent.

    The Hugos have traditions of the Worldcon community having a very strong distaste for organized bloc voting.

  7. I don’t know why anyone would want to withdraw a story. It is supposed to be about the stories.

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