Rocket Stack Rank™ (RSR) aims to help casual SF fans find and discuss great original short fiction. It reviews science fiction and fantasy short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and publishes articles of interest to fans.
We'll be at WorldCon75 in Helsinki from Wednesday, August 9 through Sunday, August 13, and we hope to meet some of our faithful readers and pass out RSR ribbons.
We plan to attend the morning "Stroll with the Stars" every day that one is offered. (Friday, 9:00 AM; Saturday 9:00 AM; Sunday 9:00 AM)
Beyond that, Greg will be on the following four panels. We'd be delighted for you to attend and then come up to chat right after.
Artificial Intelligence in Real Life and SF (Friday, 10:00 AM)
Short Fiction (Friday, 1:00 PM)
The State of Machine Translation (Saturday, 6:00PM)
The Power of the Reviewer: Promoting and Hiding Diverse Voices (Sunday, 4:00 PM)
Annotations include time estimates, links to the story on the author’s website (if available), author links with Campbell Award-eligibility marked (superscript for year 1 or 2), blurbs for RSR-reviewed stories, links to reviews, and links to digital back issues (of print magazines) at eBookstores and library websites.
In a May 7, 2017 blog post about the Hugo Award finalists for Best Novella, anthologist Rich Horton noted that "the print magazines were completely shut out of the Hugos this year" and wondered why that was the case even for novellas. Unlike in the novelette and short-story categories, it's not a case of free online stories competing with stories in magazines that you have to pay for. Nearly all the serious novellas published in 2016 had to be paid for.
I argued that it's because the print magazines have a lower cutoff for novella length, and that awards tend to go to longer stories--at least for short fiction.
But is that really true, and is it true in all three short-fiction categories?
Novellas
Let's look at the 2016 data for novellas (click charts to enlarge them):
This year's Business Meeting has an opportunity to fix the "slating problem" forever by adopting Three-Stage Voting (3SV) and either retaining E Pluribus Hugo (EPH) or adopting E Pluribus Hugo Plus (EPH+).
We did extensive analysis of nominating data from 2014 to 2017 to help fans planning to attend the Business Meeting at WorldCon75 answer the following questions:
Should we endorse continued use of EPH?
Should we ratify EPH Plus?
Should we ratify 3SV?
Is any of this really going to fix the slating problem in the long term?
For each year, we estimated how much impact different sized slates would have had under six different combinations of voting systems, assuming optimal strategies by the slate organizers. We found that EPH+ and 3SV are individually too weak to fully protect the Hugo Awards from future slating campaigns, but in combination they're unbeatable.
As a nominee for Best Fanzine in the 2017 Best Fanzine Hugo Award, we were invited to supply a copy of our work for the Hugo packet. Since Rocket Stack Rank published about 900 different articles last year (every review is its own article), that didn't seem very practical, so the award organizers suggested we create an article (this post) to direct people to highlights from 2016. The official packet will include a suggestion that people who want to evaluate Rocket Stack Rank come to this page to get an idea of what we're all about.
(SF) The theme of this anthology is stories about entities with godlike powers, similar to characters in some of the Marvel comics. (101,950 words; Time: 5h:39m)
Now that the 2017 Hugo Awards Finalists lists have come out, we can estimate how many slate voters there were. By our calculations, there were between 88 and 118 of them. This is just slightly higher than Mike Glyer's estimate of "80 to 90". When the detailed statistics are available in August, we'll make a more precise estimate, using the methods we used in our article Slate Voting Analysis Using EPH Data: 2014-2016.
The chart shows our best estimates for the number of voters from the two different "puppy" slates over the past four years. Note that these are people who voted in the nomination phase, not people who participated in the final vote. Contrast that to the total ballots:
Thank you for nominating Rocket Stack Rank for Best Fanzine in the 2017 Hugo Awards! We've learned a lot in our 1.5 years of operation, and aim to continue to improve our site to help casual SF/F fans find and discuss great original short fiction.
Annotations include time estimates, links to the story on the author's website (if available), author links with Campbell Award-eligibility marked (superscript for year 1 or 2), blurbs for RSR-reviewed stories, links to reviews, and links to digital back issues (of print magazines) at eBookstores and library websites.
While we’re waiting for the Hugo administrators to produce the list of finalists, some fifty "Filers" (commenters from File770) shared their nominations, and we’ve used that to create a top-15 list for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story. In a couple of weeks, we can see how well they predicted the actual finalists.
In the lists below, "count" is the number of Filers who nominated that work. A quick glance shows that these stories, for the most part, have been heavily recommended by reviewers, reader's polls, and anthologists. (Click on the links to see their reviews.)
Of the 55 stories below, RSR recommended 30 (average would be 10), recommended against 6 (average would be 17), and never read 5, so this is an exceptionally strong selection of stories by our measure and by any measure.
It has been eighteen months since we explored the Health of Hard Science Fiction in 2015 (Short Fiction), so we're overdue to take a look at 2016. This report divides into three sections:
