The world moves very slowly, and then suddenly everything becomes very fast.
I am moving.
Not on the internet, in the off-line world.
The redhead and I had wanted to move, but we had a specific area and a specific type of place we wanted to move to, so we waited for something that fit those criteria to become available. We waited for a while.
Last week a condo that fit all of our criteria became available. We looked at it the Monday before last. We made an offer that night. We had a contract by the end of the next day.
And now we are going to move in less than three weeks. This means that over the next couple of weeks I will be doing a lot of planning, packing, and all of the other things one has to do to get ready to purchase property and move into it.
The corollary to this is that I will be spending less time than usual reading and writing. I'm hoping to be able to put up some posts over the next month, but I expect that I will be able to do less than even the modest amount that I've been producing in the last few months.
I don't know if this is a warning, an apology, and explanation, or some combination of all three, but basically I'm saying that for the next month my blog posts are likely to be minimal in number, probably limited in content, and possibly not on the schedule that I would like to keep.
Random Thoughts Home
Showing posts with label Random Thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Random Thoughts. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Random Thought - Unexpected Lives
The following is a mostly faithful recreation of the speech I gave at my parents' 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration on October 13th, 2018:
Fifty years ago, they were a small town boy from Indiana and a small town girl from Illinois.
I don't think they expected to be getting married at eighteen.
I don't think they expected to be parents at nineteen.
When they got married, I think they expected that my father would become a history professor and they would live in some sleepy college town where he would wear tweed jackets with patches on the elbows and smoked a pipe while grading papers. That plan didn't work out.
I don't think my mother expected that her studies would be disrupted the way they were. I can still remember being taken with her to classes at Parkland Community College as she tried to keep pursuing her education.
I don't think they expected to move to Washington D.C., packing their two children and everything they owned into an orange Datsun station wagon to move to the crappiest, roach-infested apartment in Arlington.
I don't think they ever expected to move overseas, or find themselves living in Africa.
I'm pretty certain they never expected to be changing the tire of a van as a pride of lions looked on.
I don't think they ever saw themselves stopping to help some members of the Chinese Peace Corps when their car had broken down, and because my father spoke no Chinese and the Peace Corps volunteers spoke no English, they communicated entirely in Swahili, which was their only common language.
I don't think my mother ever expected to be the Queen of Aerobics in Kinshasa.
I don't think they ever expected to send one of their children to a boarding school on a different continent from the one they were on.
I don't think they ever expected to be driving away while I stood on the steps of the school and waved.
But if they had not been willing to embrace the unexpected, if they had not been willing to accept what came they would have missed so much.
They would have missed seeing a cheetah in the wild.
They would have missed climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
They would have missed swimming in the Indian Ocean at Bahari Beach.
My mother would have missed going shopping with Jackie Hassan when Jackie forgot which stores her family owned.
They would have missed seeing castles on the Rhine.
They would have missed the tall ships festival in Amsterdam and eating ice cream in the cold, because ice cream is hard to come by in Africa and we wanted some despite the freezing temperatures.
They would have missed seeing David in Florence.
They would have missed going to the Acropolis. They also would have missed losing all my Lego on that same trip. I'm still a little bitter about that.
At every turn my parents embraced the unexpected. They took the curveballs life threw at them in stride. They didn't get the life they expected. In the end, the life they did get was so much better than that.
Random Thoughts Home
Fifty years ago, they were a small town boy from Indiana and a small town girl from Illinois.
I don't think they expected to be getting married at eighteen.
I don't think they expected to be parents at nineteen.
When they got married, I think they expected that my father would become a history professor and they would live in some sleepy college town where he would wear tweed jackets with patches on the elbows and smoked a pipe while grading papers. That plan didn't work out.
I don't think my mother expected that her studies would be disrupted the way they were. I can still remember being taken with her to classes at Parkland Community College as she tried to keep pursuing her education.
I don't think they expected to move to Washington D.C., packing their two children and everything they owned into an orange Datsun station wagon to move to the crappiest, roach-infested apartment in Arlington.
I don't think they ever expected to move overseas, or find themselves living in Africa.
I'm pretty certain they never expected to be changing the tire of a van as a pride of lions looked on.
I don't think they ever saw themselves stopping to help some members of the Chinese Peace Corps when their car had broken down, and because my father spoke no Chinese and the Peace Corps volunteers spoke no English, they communicated entirely in Swahili, which was their only common language.
I don't think my mother ever expected to be the Queen of Aerobics in Kinshasa.
I don't think they ever expected to send one of their children to a boarding school on a different continent from the one they were on.
I don't think they ever expected to be driving away while I stood on the steps of the school and waved.
But if they had not been willing to embrace the unexpected, if they had not been willing to accept what came they would have missed so much.
They would have missed seeing a cheetah in the wild.
They would have missed climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
They would have missed swimming in the Indian Ocean at Bahari Beach.
My mother would have missed going shopping with Jackie Hassan when Jackie forgot which stores her family owned.
They would have missed seeing castles on the Rhine.
They would have missed the tall ships festival in Amsterdam and eating ice cream in the cold, because ice cream is hard to come by in Africa and we wanted some despite the freezing temperatures.
They would have missed seeing David in Florence.
They would have missed going to the Acropolis. They also would have missed losing all my Lego on that same trip. I'm still a little bitter about that.
At every turn my parents embraced the unexpected. They took the curveballs life threw at them in stride. They didn't get the life they expected. In the end, the life they did get was so much better than that.
Random Thoughts Home
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Random Thought - The Misery of the Hustler, and the Joy of Being a Fan
Or, we live in two worlds, and trying to cross the streams is asking for nothing but trouble.
This post is inspired, in large part, by a well-justified Twitter rant Seanan McGuire went on about a month ago. The first tweet in the thread can be found here for anyone who wants to go read it in its entirety. The short version is that Seanan and a group of her professional colleagues were at San Diego Comic Con having a conversation in a public space and a random dude jumped in to try to pitch his own work and did so in a fairly sexist and tone deaf manner. The part of the rant I want to focus on is this one:
I even have my own story in this vein: A couple of years ago I was at Gen Con and ended up playing a game of Cards Against Humanity in the hall of the convention center with a large group that included the redhead, most of the members of Five Year Mission, their spouses, and a couple of other people. It was late in the evening - late enough that the halls of the Indianapolis Convention Center were mostly deserted. While we were playing, a random dude walked up to the group and proceeded to try to pitch us on the game he and his buddies were trying to Kickstart. First he proceeded to denigrate the game we were playing, and then he spent a half an hour droning on about how great the card game he and his friends were producing was despite the fact that we were pointedly ignoring him after about the first five minutes of his pitch.
The reason I want to focus on these stories is that this sort of behavior seems to be all too common, despite the fact that it is unlikely to ever work and will probably result in an exasperated pro and an unhappy fan. Now, I'm not going to tell anyone else how to be a fan, but going to a convention with the goal of cold pitching your brilliant idea (or manuscript, or screenplay, or whatever) to a random famous person you recognize at the event is simply a recipe for disappointment. In short, the people who do this, who go to a convention (or a writer's group, or a reading, or any number of other similar spaces) with the notion that they will "hustle" themselves into the publishing industry are probably not having as much fun as the people who just show up to be fans and are probably deluding themselves as to their likelihood of success to boot.
The root of the problem in all of the examples is treating what is intended to be a social interaction as a commercial one. I am reminded of Dan Ariely pointing out in his book Predictably Irrational that humans don't live in one society, we effectively live in two. One society is the commercial world, in which we engage in professional transactions with others, trading labor for money, and then money for goods and services. When you go to a supermarket and buy food, or hire a tow truck to come get your car when it breaks down, you're participating in the commercial world. You pay them, and you get stuff in return. But humans also live in a social world of family and friends, and you interact with them very differently. If your car was to break down, and you asked a friend to come and help you fix it, you wouldn't tell them afterward "hey, to thank you, here is $50 for your time". You wouldn't go to your mother-in-law's house and leave her a cash tip for making a particularly good dinner. You might offer to take your friend out to dinner, or send your mother-in-law a thank you note, but you wouldn't pay them with cash. And if you did try to pay them with cash, they would probably be at least confused, and probably offended1.
When someone shows up at a convention or a writer's group or some similar event with the intention of locating a conveniently placed famous person (or potential customer) and trying to pitch their idea to them, they are trying to cram a commercial exchange into what pretty much everyone else expects will be a social one. This is why this sort of behavior is so very off-putting, why this sort of approach almost never works, and why approaching such venues with the intention of simply engaging in a social exchange results in a much better experience for everyone. When I think of the many guys (and almost all of them seem to be guys) who do this, I am struck by how much frustration they are causing themselves. They are taking what should be an enjoyable experience - attending a convention and meeting the creative people who make so much of what they profess to enjoy - and transforming it into a series of disappointments. They miss out on the joy of being a fan, and in some cases, on the human experience of having pleasant and friendly social interactions with other people. Their mercenary intentions have eliminated their ability to see the dual world they live in, and left them with only the cold comfort of existing solely within the commercial world.
In the end, this post is about expressing just how freeing it is to simply be a fan. I don't have stories to pitch, or books to sell, or a brand to promote - I don't even have ads or any other monetizing mechanism on this blog2. There is simply something glorious about being able to go to a convention with no ulterior motive of any kind. To bring this back to the first example in the post, I have met Seanan McGuire: She signed a couple of books for me and we talked about some of her other books. I got to hear her recount her story about the guy with the lizard in his leg and her story about the boa constrictor (at least I think it was a boa constrictor) that bit her arm. I got to hear her exchange stories about frogs and reptiles with Ursula Vernon. I also ended up having lunch in a group that included Ursula Vernon. I could do all of this without trying to figure out how I was going to launch myself at either McGuire or Vernon in order to pitch a comic book script.
If you multiply that experience by a couple hundred, you can get a sense of how many experiences I have had as a result of simply being a fan with no further expectations. Over my years of attending conventions, I have made many friends who are authors, editors, and even publishers. I have wound up having lunches or dinners with them, playing board games with them, or just sitting in a hotel bar and having long conversations with them. Several of the people I have made friends with keep in touch so they can be apprised of the adventures of the littlest starship captain, a few have even sent her gifts. If I had attempted to go to conventions in order to hustle some business instead of cultivating these friendships, there is a tiny chance I might have been able to get a story or something published somewhere, but I would have missed out on so many truly enjoyable interactions as a result. Even if all that had resulted from my fannish attendance at things like conventions and book readings had been sitting in the audience and listening, then the result would have been more rewarding than selling a couple of stories.
Just being a fan is freeing. Just being a fan is fun. Just being a fan is rewarding. Just being a fan is joyous.
1 This sort of mixing of the social and commercial is problematic in the other direction as well. Think back to those times when a salesperson tried to behave like they were your friend in order to make a sale and how off-putting that felt. This is also why people tend to react negatively to friends trying to sell Amway or Primerica products to them - these kinds of businesses advise their members to treat their circle of family and friends as a market for the company's products, essentially advising people to use their social circle as a source of commercial contacts.
2 On occasion, someone gets mad about something I've written and loudly proclaims that I must have "just written it for the clicks", or they declare that I have just lost them as a reader, and my response is to suppress a laugh. I don't make any money off this blog, and I have no plans to change that. I don't really care how many clicks a post gets or how many readers I have. Anyone who wants to stalk away mad is welcome to and it won't bother me a bit.
Random Thoughts Home
This post is inspired, in large part, by a well-justified Twitter rant Seanan McGuire went on about a month ago. The first tweet in the thread can be found here for anyone who wants to go read it in its entirety. The short version is that Seanan and a group of her professional colleagues were at San Diego Comic Con having a conversation in a public space and a random dude jumped in to try to pitch his own work and did so in a fairly sexist and tone deaf manner. The part of the rant I want to focus on is this one:
Mr. Hustle promptly went into his pitch. And the reason I say that this was PUA techniques, and not a lack of social awareness, is that he knew it was a pitch. He called it a pitch, called it a hustle, said several times "this is why I came to con."Seanan's story kind of dovetails with another that I recently observed, this time from Hillary Monahan concerning someone who moved in her writer circles. The first tweet in that thread can be found here. The short version of this story is that an aspiring author spent their time networking to "move up" the ladder of writerly contacts, discarding "lower tier" authors when they had been able to move "up" to more successful authors and then began name-dropping in order to get published, apparently wildly exaggerating the extent of their relationship. The specific part of Hillary's thread to focus upon is this:
If knowing people is a boost, pissing people off with power and influence . . . does a lot more to your career than that boost.Once again, the focus is upon trying to cultivate relationships, not for the purpose of cultivating relationships, but for the sole, and seemingly exclusive, purpose of career advancement. The issue isn't forming a network of professional contacts, the issue is pretending that you are socializing with people for the purpose of cynically using them for career advancement.
If you want to befriend authors, you should.
If you want to scale us while you scramble up a ladder, fuck you.
I even have my own story in this vein: A couple of years ago I was at Gen Con and ended up playing a game of Cards Against Humanity in the hall of the convention center with a large group that included the redhead, most of the members of Five Year Mission, their spouses, and a couple of other people. It was late in the evening - late enough that the halls of the Indianapolis Convention Center were mostly deserted. While we were playing, a random dude walked up to the group and proceeded to try to pitch us on the game he and his buddies were trying to Kickstart. First he proceeded to denigrate the game we were playing, and then he spent a half an hour droning on about how great the card game he and his friends were producing was despite the fact that we were pointedly ignoring him after about the first five minutes of his pitch.
The reason I want to focus on these stories is that this sort of behavior seems to be all too common, despite the fact that it is unlikely to ever work and will probably result in an exasperated pro and an unhappy fan. Now, I'm not going to tell anyone else how to be a fan, but going to a convention with the goal of cold pitching your brilliant idea (or manuscript, or screenplay, or whatever) to a random famous person you recognize at the event is simply a recipe for disappointment. In short, the people who do this, who go to a convention (or a writer's group, or a reading, or any number of other similar spaces) with the notion that they will "hustle" themselves into the publishing industry are probably not having as much fun as the people who just show up to be fans and are probably deluding themselves as to their likelihood of success to boot.
The root of the problem in all of the examples is treating what is intended to be a social interaction as a commercial one. I am reminded of Dan Ariely pointing out in his book Predictably Irrational that humans don't live in one society, we effectively live in two. One society is the commercial world, in which we engage in professional transactions with others, trading labor for money, and then money for goods and services. When you go to a supermarket and buy food, or hire a tow truck to come get your car when it breaks down, you're participating in the commercial world. You pay them, and you get stuff in return. But humans also live in a social world of family and friends, and you interact with them very differently. If your car was to break down, and you asked a friend to come and help you fix it, you wouldn't tell them afterward "hey, to thank you, here is $50 for your time". You wouldn't go to your mother-in-law's house and leave her a cash tip for making a particularly good dinner. You might offer to take your friend out to dinner, or send your mother-in-law a thank you note, but you wouldn't pay them with cash. And if you did try to pay them with cash, they would probably be at least confused, and probably offended1.
When someone shows up at a convention or a writer's group or some similar event with the intention of locating a conveniently placed famous person (or potential customer) and trying to pitch their idea to them, they are trying to cram a commercial exchange into what pretty much everyone else expects will be a social one. This is why this sort of behavior is so very off-putting, why this sort of approach almost never works, and why approaching such venues with the intention of simply engaging in a social exchange results in a much better experience for everyone. When I think of the many guys (and almost all of them seem to be guys) who do this, I am struck by how much frustration they are causing themselves. They are taking what should be an enjoyable experience - attending a convention and meeting the creative people who make so much of what they profess to enjoy - and transforming it into a series of disappointments. They miss out on the joy of being a fan, and in some cases, on the human experience of having pleasant and friendly social interactions with other people. Their mercenary intentions have eliminated their ability to see the dual world they live in, and left them with only the cold comfort of existing solely within the commercial world.
In the end, this post is about expressing just how freeing it is to simply be a fan. I don't have stories to pitch, or books to sell, or a brand to promote - I don't even have ads or any other monetizing mechanism on this blog2. There is simply something glorious about being able to go to a convention with no ulterior motive of any kind. To bring this back to the first example in the post, I have met Seanan McGuire: She signed a couple of books for me and we talked about some of her other books. I got to hear her recount her story about the guy with the lizard in his leg and her story about the boa constrictor (at least I think it was a boa constrictor) that bit her arm. I got to hear her exchange stories about frogs and reptiles with Ursula Vernon. I also ended up having lunch in a group that included Ursula Vernon. I could do all of this without trying to figure out how I was going to launch myself at either McGuire or Vernon in order to pitch a comic book script.
If you multiply that experience by a couple hundred, you can get a sense of how many experiences I have had as a result of simply being a fan with no further expectations. Over my years of attending conventions, I have made many friends who are authors, editors, and even publishers. I have wound up having lunches or dinners with them, playing board games with them, or just sitting in a hotel bar and having long conversations with them. Several of the people I have made friends with keep in touch so they can be apprised of the adventures of the littlest starship captain, a few have even sent her gifts. If I had attempted to go to conventions in order to hustle some business instead of cultivating these friendships, there is a tiny chance I might have been able to get a story or something published somewhere, but I would have missed out on so many truly enjoyable interactions as a result. Even if all that had resulted from my fannish attendance at things like conventions and book readings had been sitting in the audience and listening, then the result would have been more rewarding than selling a couple of stories.
Just being a fan is freeing. Just being a fan is fun. Just being a fan is rewarding. Just being a fan is joyous.
1 This sort of mixing of the social and commercial is problematic in the other direction as well. Think back to those times when a salesperson tried to behave like they were your friend in order to make a sale and how off-putting that felt. This is also why people tend to react negatively to friends trying to sell Amway or Primerica products to them - these kinds of businesses advise their members to treat their circle of family and friends as a market for the company's products, essentially advising people to use their social circle as a source of commercial contacts.
Random Thoughts Home
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Random Thought - Five Things
There is a meme going around Twitter asking people "If you had to recommend 5 [of X things] to really get a feel for you and your tastes what 5 would you pick?" Rather than let my responses to these queries be lost to the winds of Twitter, I have compiled them here. I considered putting a little explanation as to why these particular entries are on each list, but I decided that this would be contrary to the spirit of the meme. Here are my responses:
Five Books:
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Grey King by Susan Cooper
The High King by Lloyd Alexander
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Five Movies:
Dragonslayer
Excalibur
Flash Gordon
Jason and the Argonauts
Krull
Five Television Shows:
Babylon 5
Farscape
Hill Street Blues
Parks & Rec
Star Trek: The Original Series
Five Role-Playing Games:
Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition
Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd or 3.5th edition
Generic Universal Role-Playing System
Hollow Earth Expedition
Mouse Guard
Five Tabletop Board Games:
Constantinopolis
Firefly
Lords of Waterdeep
Mice & Mystics
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Five Video Games:
Alpha Centauri (including Alien Crossfire)
Crusader: No Remorse (followed by Crusader: No Regret)
Master of Magic
The Summoning
Temple of Elemental Evil (the modded version put out by Circle of Eight)
Five Battles:
Battle of Arbela (331 B.C., also known as the Battle of Gaugamela)
Battle of Lepanto (1571)
Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.)
Battle of Missionary Ridge (1863, really the entire Chattanooga Campaign)
Battle of Poitiers (1356)
Note: These lists vary in small ways from my original Twitter responses. In those cases, I decided after reflection that a different response was better than my initial response.
Random Thoughts Home
Five Books:
The Grey King by Susan Cooper
The High King by Lloyd Alexander
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Five Movies:
Excalibur
Flash Gordon
Jason and the Argonauts
Krull
Five Television Shows:
Farscape
Hill Street Blues
Parks & Rec
Star Trek: The Original Series
Five Role-Playing Games:
Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd or 3.5th edition
Generic Universal Role-Playing System
Hollow Earth Expedition
Mouse Guard
Five Tabletop Board Games:
Firefly
Lords of Waterdeep
Mice & Mystics
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Five Video Games:
Crusader: No Remorse (followed by Crusader: No Regret)
Master of Magic
The Summoning
Temple of Elemental Evil (the modded version put out by Circle of Eight)
Five Battles:
Battle of Lepanto (1571)
Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.)
Battle of Missionary Ridge (1863, really the entire Chattanooga Campaign)
Battle of Poitiers (1356)
Note: These lists vary in small ways from my original Twitter responses. In those cases, I decided after reflection that a different response was better than my initial response.
Random Thoughts Home
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Random Thought - Farewell Le Guin
I have made no secret of my love for Le Guin's work - I don't really "rank" authors, but if I were to pick a favorite author, she would definitely be on the short list. Every piece of her writing that I have come across has been nothing short of brilliant. I've said before that being a science fiction fan means saying goodbye to your heroes on a regular basis. All of the losses hurt, but this one is going to hurt more and hurt longer.
I haven't reviewed much of Le Guin's fiction here - only two of her works of short fiction - mostly because I've never really felt bold enough to step up and evaluate her work that way. There are a handful of works that I have shied away from reviewing on that ground, but Le Guin is the only author whose entire body of work I have mostly left alone because of this. Sometimes I think this has been the wrong call. I love Le Guin's work, so maybe I should write about it to express that love. I don't know.
I do know that I'm going to be rereading some of her books in the near future, because that's all we have now.
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Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Random Thought - Four Dollars Worth of Books
I have written on this blog before about my love for library book sales, so it should come as no surprise that last Friday the redhead and I took a short trip to a nearby sale following up on an advertisement on the website Book Sale Finder. We knew we were going on a day when they were having a bag sale, so we brought a little cash and were prepared to spend an hour or two going through their selection and figuring out which books we already had and which ones we didn't (I have a tendency to buy books that I already own if I don't take a spreadsheet with me when I go book shopping). In my experience, one can expect to pay something on the order of five to ten dollars per bag of books, but when I walked up to the table the volunteers had set up, they were almost apologetic when they told me that they were charging one dollar per bag.
People sometimes ask me how one acquires a collection of thousands of books - the collection the redhead and I have amassed is just over eleven thousand books - and this sort of luck is a part of it. But it isn't really luck, because this sort of thing happens when one goes to book sales on a regular basis. Most of the time you show up, you buy reasonably cheap books, and you walk away having spent some reasonable amount of money for a reasonable number of books. Other times you get there and you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. I have had this happen before, when a library book sale had science fiction and fantasy paperbacks in flat fruit boxes and was selling them at a dollar a box. That time I bought everything they had and left with something like 1,200 books for around thirty-five dollars.
I wasn't quite so willing to buy out this library book sale's stock, and they didn't have that many books to begin with, but once I knew how little they cost, I became far less selective than I normally am. They had about seven flat fruit boxes of paperbacks and a smattering of hardcover. I ended up buying about half of their mass market paperbacks and a handful of their hardbacks and trade paperbacks. I am pretty certain that I unintentionally bought some duplicates of books I already have. I know that I bought duplicate copies of a few books I already owned, but in those cases the copy for sale was in better condition than the one I owned already. For example, I know I have a copy of John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline, but my copy is beat all the hell and the cover is close to falling off. So I got a new copy that is in good condition. Similarly, my copies of Dune Messiah and Heretics of Dune are both pretty mangled. I got new copies of those as well. I bought one book twice at the sale, but that's the risk one runs in these situations. In the end, I wound up coming away from the sale with one-hundred and sixty-six books for my four dollars.
I figure that even if half of the books are unintentional duplicates (which seems reasonably likely), I'll end up coming out ahead. After all, the cost per book was in the two and a half cent range, so even if half are books I don't need that will only push the total up to something like five cents a book, and that seems like a pretty good deal to me. The most important thing about most of these books isn't that they were inexpensive. No, a lot of them are books that I probably would have bypassed on most days. Instead, I have a pile of books that I can now read and maybe find new storytellers and new stories that I might have missed otherwise. Some of the books are by authors who are unfamiliar to me, but are good enough at their craft that they have apparently managed to have several of their books published. Other books are parts of one or another extended multi-author series that I have never read. Others are books by authors that I know well, but I haven't read that particular title of theirs. And so on. The real point here is that there is a lot of new material for me to read in these boxes, and I am quite looking forward to it.
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Thursday, June 15, 2017
Random Thought - Justine: The Kind of Black Woman the Wonder Woman Movie Needed
Among people who have seen (and for many of us, loved) the movie Wonder Woman, one thing that is noticeable is the lack of black women in substantive roles. The movie is, of course, centered on a woman, and so it gets kudos for that, and there are two men of color with fairly notable (albeit problematic in their own way) roles, but with the exception of a handful of Amazons, women of color are notably absent from the movie.
Note: There will be spoilers. You've been warned.
I have heard two responses to this lack of representation for women of color in the movie:
The first response is that the black women who do appear in the movie are important people. They are Amazon teachers or warriors, and at least one is an Amazonian Senator. These are clearly people of note in their society, and so black women should feel well-represented by these nods. The problem is that while they are clearly important in their own society, they are minor players in the story being told. Pointing out that a character is an Amazonian Senator doesn't really mean much if the sum total of her presence in the story is a single line in a single scene. There is a difference between being important in the fictional world the story is set within, and being important in the story set in the fictional world. None of the black Amazons in Wonder Woman are particularly important to the story.
The second response is that the responder simply cannot imagine black women running around World War I era Europe. This, I think, is a sign of both a lack of imagination and a fair amount of historical illiteracy. There were people of color in Europe during World War I. In fact, there were a lot of them. To begin with, all of the combatant nations with colonial holdings drew upon the populace of those colonies to fill out the ranks of their armies. Hundreds of thousands of men from Africa and Asia fought and died on the battlefields of Western Europe. Not only that, a lot of black and Asian women also came to the war - as army nurses, Red Cross workers, and for a myriad of other reasons. There were also black women in Europe simply because that was where they lived. France, for example, was well entangled with places like Algeria, and there were a lot of people who had emigrated from there to France simply living in the country. On an interesting side note - getting the data on the demographic make-up of France is somewhat difficult due to an 1872 law that prohibits making a census that distinguishes between citizens based on race. That said, while we don't know its exact size, we do know that France had a population of African and Asian emigres in the World War I era, because we have records of their presence in the country.
The only reason that it is hard to imagine the presence of people of color in Europe during World War I is that history has obscured their presence, and has been aided in this task by media that has omitted them from books, films, television programs, and other artistic representations set in that era. They have essentially been erased from our cultural memory, and the act of saying "I can't imagine black women in World War I Europe" simply continues that erasure.
So, there were black women in Europe, and none of the black women who are actually in the movie are actually important to the story. The only question is how would one put a black female character into the movie in such a manner that she was a substantive character. This is just me throwing an idea against the wall and seeing how it might work, but I would insert such a character into the story just before the battle across No-Man's Land. In my opinion, one of the weaker elements of the story is the set up for Diana's charge into the German lines. Basically, the scene in the movie centers around a woman who is a refugee from a village across the battlefield huddled in a corner of a trench holding her baby. Diana talks to her, and she informs Diana that the Germans have seized her village, taken the villagers' possessions, and started using the remaining villagers as slave labor. Confronted with this, Trevor argues that Diana and their other companions need to stay the course and continue their mission, leaving the poor villagers to their fate. Diana rejects this and heads out to liberate the village.
This sequence is functional, but a little bit unsatisfying. Once the refugee village woman delivers her bit of exposition, she more or less vanishes from the narrative. After the fighting is over, there is a brief scene in which Diana, Trevor, Chief, Sameer, and Charlie bask in the glow of victory, have some beers, and dance (or rather, as Diana says, sway back and forth). The villagers never show up again, not even when the villainous Ludendorff fires poison gas into the village as a demonstration of the effectiveness of his new chemical concoction. The presence of villagers on the British side of the field also raises the question of how they got over there, and how long have the Germans occupied the village. As Trevor points out, the British regiment in that sector hadn't been able to make an inch of headway in a year, so the Germans had presumably occupied the village for that whole time. Further, how did the refugees cross No-Man's Land without getting killed? And so on.
Here's how I would reset this scene: Instead of a random French woman, Diana, Trevor, and the rest come across a Red Cross nurse arguing with the British regimental commander. Like many Red Cross workers during the war, this woman is black, as are the other Red Cross personnel with her. To give her a name, we can call her Justine. She and her fellow workers had been working in the village providing relief to the civilians and were recently expelled by the Germans, who sent them across No-Man's Land under a white flag. The Germans tried to hide it, but Justine learned that the Germans were carting away villagers at the order of General Ludendorff to work on some secret project. Justine is arguing that the lives of the villagers are important and that the British should attack, while the British commander is demurring. Instead of having Trevor give a status report on the British troops, the British commander can. For her part, Justine can make the moral argument for helping the innocent that spurs Diana to make her stand.
That's a minor change, but the real meat of Justine's role in the movie comes after the village of Veld is liberated. Justine and her fellow nurses begin to care for the wounded of both sides and try to help the villagers. When Diana tells Justine what she knows about Ludendorff's plans, Justine makes the decision to help her. Because Justine has been in the area for an extended period of time, she has local contacts, and can use them to find out where Ludendorff is (which would have the side effect of eliminating the cringe-worthy "smoke signals" scene with Chief). Justine can also use her network of friends to get Diana and Trevor into the castle for Ludendorff's gala (this time eliminating the cringe-worthy scene where Sameer grovels his way through a guard post), possibly sneaking Trevor and Diana in through the kitchens or some other service entrance. Justine through this segment plays an active role in helping the heroes get to the places they need to be, and then returns to Veld.
Of course, Justine returns to Veld just in time for Ludendorff to hit the village with some poison gas shells. She and her fellow nurses can then try to evacuate people, getting some to safety, but perhaps at the cost of their own lives. One of the weaknesses of the movie as presented is that when Ludendorff kills off the people of Veld, it doesn't have a whole lot of impact, mostly because the villagers were never fleshed out as characters. If Justine is killed, or even just severely wounded, this sequence would have had far more impact on the audience. Have Diana find Justine just on the brink of death, and have Justine tell her that helping others is worth facing injury or death. If Justine doesn't die in the poison gas attack, she could be worked into the rest of the plot with too much difficulty, perhaps putting her as a thematic counterpoint to Lady Poison in the final battle sequence where Diana has to choose between love or rage. The end result would be a character who played a significant role in the movie, and could be a full realized, well-developed person on-screen.
So that's one idea. I'm sure there are others, many of which would probably be better than mine. The point here is that working a substantive black female character into Wonder Woman would not have been all that difficult. All the film makers needed to do was to decide to do it.
Random Thoughts Home
Note: There will be spoilers. You've been warned.
I have heard two responses to this lack of representation for women of color in the movie:
The first response is that the black women who do appear in the movie are important people. They are Amazon teachers or warriors, and at least one is an Amazonian Senator. These are clearly people of note in their society, and so black women should feel well-represented by these nods. The problem is that while they are clearly important in their own society, they are minor players in the story being told. Pointing out that a character is an Amazonian Senator doesn't really mean much if the sum total of her presence in the story is a single line in a single scene. There is a difference between being important in the fictional world the story is set within, and being important in the story set in the fictional world. None of the black Amazons in Wonder Woman are particularly important to the story.
 |
| Red Cross Workers in World War I |
The only reason that it is hard to imagine the presence of people of color in Europe during World War I is that history has obscured their presence, and has been aided in this task by media that has omitted them from books, films, television programs, and other artistic representations set in that era. They have essentially been erased from our cultural memory, and the act of saying "I can't imagine black women in World War I Europe" simply continues that erasure.
So, there were black women in Europe, and none of the black women who are actually in the movie are actually important to the story. The only question is how would one put a black female character into the movie in such a manner that she was a substantive character. This is just me throwing an idea against the wall and seeing how it might work, but I would insert such a character into the story just before the battle across No-Man's Land. In my opinion, one of the weaker elements of the story is the set up for Diana's charge into the German lines. Basically, the scene in the movie centers around a woman who is a refugee from a village across the battlefield huddled in a corner of a trench holding her baby. Diana talks to her, and she informs Diana that the Germans have seized her village, taken the villagers' possessions, and started using the remaining villagers as slave labor. Confronted with this, Trevor argues that Diana and their other companions need to stay the course and continue their mission, leaving the poor villagers to their fate. Diana rejects this and heads out to liberate the village.
This sequence is functional, but a little bit unsatisfying. Once the refugee village woman delivers her bit of exposition, she more or less vanishes from the narrative. After the fighting is over, there is a brief scene in which Diana, Trevor, Chief, Sameer, and Charlie bask in the glow of victory, have some beers, and dance (or rather, as Diana says, sway back and forth). The villagers never show up again, not even when the villainous Ludendorff fires poison gas into the village as a demonstration of the effectiveness of his new chemical concoction. The presence of villagers on the British side of the field also raises the question of how they got over there, and how long have the Germans occupied the village. As Trevor points out, the British regiment in that sector hadn't been able to make an inch of headway in a year, so the Germans had presumably occupied the village for that whole time. Further, how did the refugees cross No-Man's Land without getting killed? And so on.
 |
| Red Cross Drivers in World War I |
That's a minor change, but the real meat of Justine's role in the movie comes after the village of Veld is liberated. Justine and her fellow nurses begin to care for the wounded of both sides and try to help the villagers. When Diana tells Justine what she knows about Ludendorff's plans, Justine makes the decision to help her. Because Justine has been in the area for an extended period of time, she has local contacts, and can use them to find out where Ludendorff is (which would have the side effect of eliminating the cringe-worthy "smoke signals" scene with Chief). Justine can also use her network of friends to get Diana and Trevor into the castle for Ludendorff's gala (this time eliminating the cringe-worthy scene where Sameer grovels his way through a guard post), possibly sneaking Trevor and Diana in through the kitchens or some other service entrance. Justine through this segment plays an active role in helping the heroes get to the places they need to be, and then returns to Veld.
Of course, Justine returns to Veld just in time for Ludendorff to hit the village with some poison gas shells. She and her fellow nurses can then try to evacuate people, getting some to safety, but perhaps at the cost of their own lives. One of the weaknesses of the movie as presented is that when Ludendorff kills off the people of Veld, it doesn't have a whole lot of impact, mostly because the villagers were never fleshed out as characters. If Justine is killed, or even just severely wounded, this sequence would have had far more impact on the audience. Have Diana find Justine just on the brink of death, and have Justine tell her that helping others is worth facing injury or death. If Justine doesn't die in the poison gas attack, she could be worked into the rest of the plot with too much difficulty, perhaps putting her as a thematic counterpoint to Lady Poison in the final battle sequence where Diana has to choose between love or rage. The end result would be a character who played a significant role in the movie, and could be a full realized, well-developed person on-screen.
So that's one idea. I'm sure there are others, many of which would probably be better than mine. The point here is that working a substantive black female character into Wonder Woman would not have been all that difficult. All the film makers needed to do was to decide to do it.
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Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Random Thought - Some Thoughts About Library Book Sales
I love library book sales1. I love the hunt - perusing the rows of books and separating the wheat from the chaff, and then coming across the unexpected find that you never knew you absolutely needed. There is something magical about standing among the piles of books, shoulder to shoulder with other bibliophiles,most of you searching for something none of you had any idea you were looking for. I love that I can usually get dozens of books for the price of one or two new hardbacks.
This past weekend, the redhead and I went to three different library book sales - one in Reston, one in Annandale, and one in Arlington - and added a few books to our collection. Here is the bounty that resulted from our efforts:
Okay, it was more than a few books, which is pretty much what happens every time I go to a library book sale. Going to a library book sale requires a kind of chaotic mind-set. The sales are not like book stores, where you can walk in hoping to buy a specific book and have a reasonable expectation that you will be able to do so. Since the stock being sold at a library book sale is what had been donated to the cause, what one will find is almost completely random. One has to walk into the sale much like one walks into a used book store, willing to hunt through stacks of books looking for the handful of diamonds in the rough, and willing to more or less take whatever one finds. Usually, the selection is heavy on "classics" of the science fiction and fantasy genres. It isn't too difficult to find a copy of Ringworld by Larry Niven or The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, or any number of books by Isaac Asimov at a library book sale, but if you are looking for a particular book by Murray Leinster or James White, you're going to have to look a little harder. That said, there are some patterns that I have noticed over the years.
1. The closer a library is to an urban center, the better the selection of fantasy and science fiction it will have. One might even expand that to an assertion that the closer a library is to an urban center the better overall selection of books it will have, but there do seem to be certain categories of books that are more commonly found in rural areas - mostly books that one might find in a Christian book store. I live outside of the District of Columbia, and I find that the closer I get to the city itself, the more expansive and more interesting the science fiction section of a library book sale becomes.
2. The closer a library is to an urban center, the better the selection of DVDs and Bluerays is as well. I primarily go to library book sales for books, but I always check the DVD sales as well, and usually end up picking up at least a couple. I might not be willing to pay full price for a DVD of Minority Report or Elizabeth, but at two dollars each, they are worth getting. Even better, one can sometimes find stuff that you never would have thought of getting, but once you see it, you realize that you must have it. For example, at one of the sales this past weekend, I found volume two of the Superfriends, which immediately went into my shopping bag.
3. Though the specifics of a library books sale's stock are somewhat random, there are some types of books that crop up on something of a schedule. The stock of a library book sale is more or less a snap shot of what was really popular a year or two ago. Every book sale I went to this past weekend had piles of books by Veronica Roth and Rick Riordan. If I didn't already have them, I could have easily assembled the entire Percy Jackson series. A few years ago, the shelves were overflowing with copies of Harry Potter and Twilight novels. You can still find those, but they don't show up in the same numbers as they used to. On a more adult side, one can find piles of books by authors like Laurell K. Hamilton and Kelley Armstrong, along with a handful of books by authors like Jim Butcher.
4. On a fairly regular basis, one will find an intriguing puzzle in the books. It is relatively apparent that most books are donated by people who are cleaning out their homes and getting rid of the books that their kids read a few years ago, but have now lost interest in, or books that they got to read at the beach or on an airplane ride or something similar. But sometimes it is clear that the books were part of a collection put together by someone who really loved a particular author. When I find such troves, I always wonder what the story is behind their donation. Perhaps these books get donated when someone dies and their relatives clean their house out, or when they move from their home into a retirement community or some similar situation. For obvious reasons one will never almost certainly never know the story. At one of the three library book sales I found a pile of books by E.C. Tubb, an author that I had only a passing familiarity with. Last Friday, I owned no books by E.C. Tubb. Now I have sixteen.
5. The selection of graphic novels is always terrible. Over the years, I have only been able to find a handful of graphic novels that were worth getting, and some of those were ones I got because they were quirky - this past weekend I found a volume titled Library Mascot Cage Match, about which I know nothing about and picked up entirely due to the weirdness of the title. I also found a copy of The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which was a rare find for a library book sale. Manga, on the other hand, is amazingly easy to find at library book sales. I could, if I was interested, come away from most library book sales with dozens of manga books.
6. It is fairly rare to find recent books. Most of the time the selection consists of books that are at least a few years out of date, and in some cases, many years out of date. Even so, sometimes one gets lucky: One of the books I found last weekend was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, which is currently on the list of finalists for the Hugo Award.
None of these observations are grounded in anything other than my personal experience of going to library book sales for several years. I suppose that at some point it is inevitable that I will run across a library book sale that confounds all of these impressions, but thus far, they all seem to hold true.
As a final note, I recommend Book Sale Finder as a way to locate library book sales near you.
1 Technically, most "library book sales" (at least in the area I live in) aren't actually run by the library itself, but rather by a quasi-affiliated "friends of the library" organization, but that is not a distinction that really makes much of a difference.
Random Thoughts Home
This past weekend, the redhead and I went to three different library book sales - one in Reston, one in Annandale, and one in Arlington - and added a few books to our collection. Here is the bounty that resulted from our efforts:
Okay, it was more than a few books, which is pretty much what happens every time I go to a library book sale. Going to a library book sale requires a kind of chaotic mind-set. The sales are not like book stores, where you can walk in hoping to buy a specific book and have a reasonable expectation that you will be able to do so. Since the stock being sold at a library book sale is what had been donated to the cause, what one will find is almost completely random. One has to walk into the sale much like one walks into a used book store, willing to hunt through stacks of books looking for the handful of diamonds in the rough, and willing to more or less take whatever one finds. Usually, the selection is heavy on "classics" of the science fiction and fantasy genres. It isn't too difficult to find a copy of Ringworld by Larry Niven or The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, or any number of books by Isaac Asimov at a library book sale, but if you are looking for a particular book by Murray Leinster or James White, you're going to have to look a little harder. That said, there are some patterns that I have noticed over the years.
1. The closer a library is to an urban center, the better the selection of fantasy and science fiction it will have. One might even expand that to an assertion that the closer a library is to an urban center the better overall selection of books it will have, but there do seem to be certain categories of books that are more commonly found in rural areas - mostly books that one might find in a Christian book store. I live outside of the District of Columbia, and I find that the closer I get to the city itself, the more expansive and more interesting the science fiction section of a library book sale becomes.
3. Though the specifics of a library books sale's stock are somewhat random, there are some types of books that crop up on something of a schedule. The stock of a library book sale is more or less a snap shot of what was really popular a year or two ago. Every book sale I went to this past weekend had piles of books by Veronica Roth and Rick Riordan. If I didn't already have them, I could have easily assembled the entire Percy Jackson series. A few years ago, the shelves were overflowing with copies of Harry Potter and Twilight novels. You can still find those, but they don't show up in the same numbers as they used to. On a more adult side, one can find piles of books by authors like Laurell K. Hamilton and Kelley Armstrong, along with a handful of books by authors like Jim Butcher.
4. On a fairly regular basis, one will find an intriguing puzzle in the books. It is relatively apparent that most books are donated by people who are cleaning out their homes and getting rid of the books that their kids read a few years ago, but have now lost interest in, or books that they got to read at the beach or on an airplane ride or something similar. But sometimes it is clear that the books were part of a collection put together by someone who really loved a particular author. When I find such troves, I always wonder what the story is behind their donation. Perhaps these books get donated when someone dies and their relatives clean their house out, or when they move from their home into a retirement community or some similar situation. For obvious reasons one will never almost certainly never know the story. At one of the three library book sales I found a pile of books by E.C. Tubb, an author that I had only a passing familiarity with. Last Friday, I owned no books by E.C. Tubb. Now I have sixteen.
5. The selection of graphic novels is always terrible. Over the years, I have only been able to find a handful of graphic novels that were worth getting, and some of those were ones I got because they were quirky - this past weekend I found a volume titled Library Mascot Cage Match, about which I know nothing about and picked up entirely due to the weirdness of the title. I also found a copy of The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which was a rare find for a library book sale. Manga, on the other hand, is amazingly easy to find at library book sales. I could, if I was interested, come away from most library book sales with dozens of manga books.
6. It is fairly rare to find recent books. Most of the time the selection consists of books that are at least a few years out of date, and in some cases, many years out of date. Even so, sometimes one gets lucky: One of the books I found last weekend was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, which is currently on the list of finalists for the Hugo Award.
None of these observations are grounded in anything other than my personal experience of going to library book sales for several years. I suppose that at some point it is inevitable that I will run across a library book sale that confounds all of these impressions, but thus far, they all seem to hold true.
As a final note, I recommend Book Sale Finder as a way to locate library book sales near you.
1 Technically, most "library book sales" (at least in the area I live in) aren't actually run by the library itself, but rather by a quasi-affiliated "friends of the library" organization, but that is not a distinction that really makes much of a difference.
Random Thoughts Home
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Random Thought - High School, Expectations, and Literature
This post is inspired by the Book Blogger Hop question I answered on December 31, 2016. The question made me contemplate the classic works of literature I had read, and I realized that I read a large proportion of those when I was a student. Specifically, when I was in high school, the curriculum I read a lot of classic novels and other works of prose and poetry. From my memory, the list is something like this:
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
L'Etranger by Albert Camus
Les Jeux Sent Faits by Jean-Paul Sartre
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Rhinoceros by Eugéne Ionesco
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
I also read a number of plays by Shakespeare (to the best of my recollection I read Hamlet, Henry IV, Part I, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night) as well as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I also read substantial portions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Milton's Paradise Lost. I also recall an entire trimester devoted to studying poetry.
The point here is not to brag, after all pretty much every classmate of mine read a list of works either identical to or substantially similar to this. The point is rather to reflect upon the fact that I walked away from my high school graduation pretty well read in prominent works of literature. This wasn't really my doing - it was simply part of the school's curriculum, and that is the salient issue here. I'm not endorsing this particular list as being universal - looking at it, I think that there should definitely be more works by women in the selection, and it would have been nice if the list included at least some works by non-white authors. I didn't love all the books on the list - I'm not a fan of Austen, and a really loathed Salinger's work - but I'm still glad that I read them. Fundamentally, for whatever flaws it has, this is a list that provided me with a good grounding in literature.
I attended a private high school named Woodberry Forest School for the last three years of my secondary education, and this list is basically what I read during my sojourn there. I was able to attend this school basically due to a collection of circumstances that had almost nothing to do with me. My family is not wealthy, certainly not wealthy enough to afford to send a teen-ager off to one of the more highly ranked boarding schools in the United States.
This reading list didn't strike me as being out of the ordinary when I was a student. After all, it was the only high school curriculum that I had directly experienced at that time. That sort of classwork was, to me, normal. I have no idea what other high schools were teaching at the time. At the time, I was not exposed to the expectations of public high schools for comparison. More recently, however, my children have attended a public high school, and from what I can tell, the reading requirements were nowhere near as rigorous. Their school isn't a bad high school - it is in fact part of a fairly well-regarded school system, and is itself seen as being a pretty good school. Even so, based upon my observation of my son's high school career, I'm pretty certain that he didn't read even a quarter as much literature as I did in mine.
I think this lowered expectation does a great disservice to students. Fundamentally, one of the goals of reading literature in school is to give the student critical thinking skills: The ability to read a text closely, the ability to evaluate and understand a work, and so on. But that is not the only reason we read literature. Great literature informs us of the culture that we are inheriting, and passes on a reflection of the author's mind. Reading Huckleberry Finn tells the reader a story that reflects what Mark Twain thought about American culture, while reading Faulkner's Light in August tells a very different story about American culture. Students should read literature not just for the mechanical exercise of assimilating and analyzing the work, but also to be exposed to their own cultural heritage. I suspect that my son and daughter have been comparatively shortchanged in this regard.
Some people see this sort of difference and wonder why one should send their children to public schools. They seek to place their children in private schools like the one I attended, or to bring their children home and educate them themselves. Some even try to take funding away from public schools and direct that money towards "school choice". I am of the opinion that this is antithetical to the fabric of the nation in which we live. Fundamentally, it is the right of every child to have the sort of education that I was lucky enough to receive. We should not be dumbing down the public school curriculum and ceding the role of asking only those students fortunate enough to be educated elsewhere to students to stretch their intellectual muscles to a comparative handful of private institutions. We should be working to raise up our public schools and pushing students to read more widely than we do now. Great literature is a source of knowledge, culture, and joy, and we should be making sure that we give a full measure it to every student.
Random Thoughts Home
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
L'Etranger by Albert Camus
Les Jeux Sent Faits by Jean-Paul Sartre
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Rhinoceros by Eugéne Ionesco
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
I also read a number of plays by Shakespeare (to the best of my recollection I read Hamlet, Henry IV, Part I, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night) as well as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I also read substantial portions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Milton's Paradise Lost. I also recall an entire trimester devoted to studying poetry.
The point here is not to brag, after all pretty much every classmate of mine read a list of works either identical to or substantially similar to this. The point is rather to reflect upon the fact that I walked away from my high school graduation pretty well read in prominent works of literature. This wasn't really my doing - it was simply part of the school's curriculum, and that is the salient issue here. I'm not endorsing this particular list as being universal - looking at it, I think that there should definitely be more works by women in the selection, and it would have been nice if the list included at least some works by non-white authors. I didn't love all the books on the list - I'm not a fan of Austen, and a really loathed Salinger's work - but I'm still glad that I read them. Fundamentally, for whatever flaws it has, this is a list that provided me with a good grounding in literature.
I attended a private high school named Woodberry Forest School for the last three years of my secondary education, and this list is basically what I read during my sojourn there. I was able to attend this school basically due to a collection of circumstances that had almost nothing to do with me. My family is not wealthy, certainly not wealthy enough to afford to send a teen-ager off to one of the more highly ranked boarding schools in the United States.
This reading list didn't strike me as being out of the ordinary when I was a student. After all, it was the only high school curriculum that I had directly experienced at that time. That sort of classwork was, to me, normal. I have no idea what other high schools were teaching at the time. At the time, I was not exposed to the expectations of public high schools for comparison. More recently, however, my children have attended a public high school, and from what I can tell, the reading requirements were nowhere near as rigorous. Their school isn't a bad high school - it is in fact part of a fairly well-regarded school system, and is itself seen as being a pretty good school. Even so, based upon my observation of my son's high school career, I'm pretty certain that he didn't read even a quarter as much literature as I did in mine.
I think this lowered expectation does a great disservice to students. Fundamentally, one of the goals of reading literature in school is to give the student critical thinking skills: The ability to read a text closely, the ability to evaluate and understand a work, and so on. But that is not the only reason we read literature. Great literature informs us of the culture that we are inheriting, and passes on a reflection of the author's mind. Reading Huckleberry Finn tells the reader a story that reflects what Mark Twain thought about American culture, while reading Faulkner's Light in August tells a very different story about American culture. Students should read literature not just for the mechanical exercise of assimilating and analyzing the work, but also to be exposed to their own cultural heritage. I suspect that my son and daughter have been comparatively shortchanged in this regard.
Some people see this sort of difference and wonder why one should send their children to public schools. They seek to place their children in private schools like the one I attended, or to bring their children home and educate them themselves. Some even try to take funding away from public schools and direct that money towards "school choice". I am of the opinion that this is antithetical to the fabric of the nation in which we live. Fundamentally, it is the right of every child to have the sort of education that I was lucky enough to receive. We should not be dumbing down the public school curriculum and ceding the role of asking only those students fortunate enough to be educated elsewhere to students to stretch their intellectual muscles to a comparative handful of private institutions. We should be working to raise up our public schools and pushing students to read more widely than we do now. Great literature is a source of knowledge, culture, and joy, and we should be making sure that we give a full measure it to every student.
Random Thoughts Home
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Random Thought - Third Party Candidates and American Elections
One thing this election conclusively settled is that a third party is never going to be viable in the United States.
If one were to tailor make an election perfectly crafted to buoy the prospects of alternative parties, the 2016 election would be pretty close to that model. Both of the major parties ran candidates that were unpopular among large portions of the electorate. There was allegedly a vast "anti-establishment" sentiment among voters.1 The Libertarian Party had two prominent former state governors heading up their ticket. The Green Party got a lot of press as a result of some rather ill-founded speculation about whether Senator Bernie Sanders would jump to their ticket after losing the Democratic Party nomination to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The only thing that would have made this election riper for a third party surge would have been if the economy was in a recession, and despite the constant bleating from the right that the economy was somehow in sad shape, it was actually doing pretty well in 2016.
When the time came to vote, the Libertarian Party ticket garnered just over 3% of the popular vote, and the Green Party ticket had about 1% of the popular vote. This is better than they performed in 2012 when the Libertarians got about 1% of the vote and the Greens got about a third of a percent, but this isn't anywhere close to being a factor in the election.2 Neither of these campaigns managed to get to the magical 5% total that would have resulted in matching federal funds for the 2020 election.3 One also has to consider that these results were generated under almost ideal conditions for third party success. This is realistically the best that third party candidates can hope to do in a U.S. election. This is, in a figurative but very real sense, the ceiling for third parties in our current system.
The reason third parties won't work in the U.S. is due to the structure of U.S. elections. The U.S. uses what is called a "first past the post" system for most elections.4 This means that to gain any representation in an election, you need to obtain more of the votes cast than anyone else. Because members of the House of Representatives and Senators are elected from specific regions (Congressional Districts for Congressmen, and States for Senators), you have a collection of small elections, each of which must be won by garnering more of the the vote in those regions. U.S. Presidential elections are actually a series of mini-elections conducted in each State, and one must win more of the vote than any other candidate in each one to win them. You technically don't need to win a majority of the votes to win such elections, but you probably need to get close. This reality pushes political parties to try to muster a coalition that can aspire to encompass at least fifty percent of the total vote.
There are other voting methods used in other countries: Some places use ranked choice voting, where voters can list a number of candidates in their order of preference and then those choices are worked through as lower vote generating candidates are eliminated from contention. Under this system, for example, someone who favored the Green Party candidate could vote for them first, but rank, for example, the Democratic Party candidate second, so if the Green candidate didn't get sufficient votes to win, their vote would work to prevent a Republican victory. This would mean that people wouldn't be concerned with "throwing their vote away" and could vote for third parties as their first preference. This doesn't eliminate the fact that one would need to garner the most votes in order to win and election, but it does mean that third parties might be able to gain more support than they do now, as people might feel freer to support them knowing that their second preference would serve as a backup.
Another voting method is proportional representation, which can be used as a means of selecting a legislature. A modified version of this system is used in Germany (the German system is actually far more complex than that, but to detail it fully would take a lot of time). In this method, the voter selects a party, not a candidate, and when the votes are tallied, the available seats are distributed to the parties in proportion to their share of the vote. So if the Democrats got 45% of the vote, and the Republicans got 45% of the vote, they would each get 45% of the available seats. If the Libertarians got 5% of the vote, they would get 5% of the seats, and so on. This would mean that the small number of people who were interested in a third party would have representation in the legislature. It would be a small number of legislators, but they would likely be important in deciding who had the majority. This system wouldn't really work for electing a President, and wouldn't make sense for the Senate as it is currently constituted, but it could make third parties viable in the House of Representatives - although we would have to completely redefine exactly who Representatives actually represent. One might also note that even in such systems, the result is generally two-coalitions at odds with one another, with minor shifting between them in the middle.
Even though alternative voting systems are possible, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will continue to use first past the post voting to decide its elections. This system almost inevitably drives the politics into a two-faction system. To have a chance at winning elections, you have to be able to reliably obtain 50% of the vote. Any party that does not will find itself forced to either expand its ranks to include sufficient voters to have a reasonable shot at getting to that mark, or they will wither away to fringe status in short order. This is exactly what has happened the handful of times that U.S. politics has seen third party candidates show signs of life.
The Election of 1860
Many third party proponents like to point to the election of 1860, sometimes accompanying this with the claim that "Lincoln was a third party candidate". This kind of claim is pretty much at odds with the actual history of the 1860 election.
In the early 1850s, the Whig Party, which had been the primary opposition party to the Democratic Party, collapsed. Presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore were Whigs, as was John Tyler, although Tyler was expelled from the party over political disagreements during his presidency. The last Whig presidential canddiate was Winfield Scott, who ran in 1852.
In 1856, the Republican Party was already established, formed out of a sizable chunk of the former Whig Party with the addition of former members of the Free Soil Party and a collection of anti-slavery activists. The party chose John C. Frémont as its nominee, and despite receiving fewer than 1,200 popular votes in the entire Sourth, he managed to come in second with 114 electoral votes. After the elections, the Republicans held fifteen Senate seats and 90 seats in the House of Representatives. In the 1858 elections, the Republicans increased their numbers in the Senate to 25, and their seats in the House to 116 and took control of the House at the head of a coalition made up of Republicans and Southern opposition members.
By the time the 1860 election rolled around the Republican Party was well-established, and can't really be considered a "third party" in any meaningful sense. The Republican Party held a plurality of seats in the House of Representatives, and held the second-most seats in the Senate. The party also held thirteen of the thirty-one Governorships in the country. It was at this point that the party nominated Abraham Lincoln to run as its candidate for President.
The 1860 election was fairly unusual in that four reasonably serious candidates ran for President. As noted above, Lincoln ran on the Republican ticket. The Democratic Party had traditionally been the major party in American politics - the Whig Party had originally formed in opposition to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson's era - but internal divisions over the issue of slavery effectively split the party into a northern wing and a southern wing in this election. The northern wing nominated Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas to run for President, and the southern wing nominated Vice-President John Breckinridge from Kentucky.
The fourth candidate was John Bell, who was nominated by the Constitution-Union Party, an organization formed out of the shreds of the Whig Party that had not migrated to the Republican Party, and held as its guiding principle "The Union as it is, and the Constitution as it is". The party tried to simply ignore the slavery issue and instead focused on anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant policies. As the oldest candidate in the field, Bell wasn't really interested in campaigning much, and seems to have been hoping for no one to receive enough electoral votes to claim a majority and have the election go to a vote in the House of Representatives, where he thought his propects as a "compromise candidate" would make voting for him an attractive option.
The election itself wasn't so much one election, as it was three regional elections. This is one of the reasons why the 1860 election is a terrible example to point to concerning the viability of a third party. Leaving aside the fact that the Republican Party cannot be called a "third party" with a straight face, the issue of slavery had riven the nation into very distinct regional entities. I am not sure that there will ever been an issue as divisive as slavery was in antebellum politics, and I certainly don't see one on hand today, or in the foreseeable future. The only southern state where Lincoln was even on the ballot was Virginia, and he only got 1% of the vote there. Bell and Breckinridge were effectively not on the ballot in several northern states, and where they were, they generally garnered between 1% and 5% of the popular vote. The only candidate to run a truly national campaign was Stephen Douglas, with the result being that there were really three regional contests: Lincoln v.s Douglas for the northern states, Bell vs. Douglas for the border states, and Breckinridge vs. Douglas for the southern states.
Lincoln won outright, with 180 electoral votes, although he only had 39.8% of the popular vote. Breckinridge came in second, with 72 electoral votes, while Bell came in third with 39 electoral votes. Douglas brought up the rear with 12 electoral votes, carrying only the state of Missouri and getting some of New Jersey's votes. One thing to note is that despite his low electoral vote total, Douglas had the second most popular votes as a result of running a national campaign when the other candidates did not. In fact, at 29.5% Douglas gained almost as much of the popular vote as the 30.7% combined total for Breckinrige and Bell. Lincoln won every state that stayed in the Union during the Civil War except Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland, which also happened to be the handful of states that remained in the Union in which slavery was legal. Breckinridge won every state that formed the Confederacy except Tennessee and Virginia. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia.
The key issue here is that there were very few places where there was a real three-way contest, and those were mostly either smaller states like California, or border states like Missouri and Kentucky. In most states, two of the candidates were completely non-competitive, and the race was really between the remaining two. This wasn't a four candidate horse race, it was three two candidate contests. I suppose a third party could try to follow this model, but it would have to focus on an issue that was of intense interest to a particular region of the country. The reason the Republicans dominated the northern states, and the southern Democrats dominated the southern states was that the country was riven by the issue of slavery, with the border states stuck literally in the middle.
On a further note, by the time elections were held again with a reconstituted Union in 1868, the Democratic Party was a single unit again, and the Constitution-Union Party had vanished, its members having been mostly absorbed into the Republican Party. As I said before, multi-party situations in the U.S. political system are essentially inherently unstable, and will generally quickly collapse back to two parties in relatively short order.
The Election of 1892
From 1864 through 1888, U.S. elections were essentially two-party contests between the Democrats and Republicans, with some minor parties garnering a few percentage points of the popular vote every cycle. In 1892, the Grange, the Farmers Alliance, and the Knights of Labor formed the Populist Party, and ran James Weaver as their candidate for President. Fueled by anti-banker and anti-railroad sentiment, Weaver's campaign wound up with 22 electoral votes, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a third party candidate, but he did so as a result of the quirky demographics of the country at the time. Weaver carried Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, and North Dakota. Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate for President, and eventual victor, didn't even bother to run in four of those states. Outside of these western states, the Populist Party did quite poorly, usually running a very distant third.
By 1896, the Populist Party had effectively merged with the Democratic Party, as William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate nominated by both parties. Bryan's campaign featured the famous "Cross of Gold" speech, but despite his eloquence, he lost to McKinley. Although the Populist Party was technically still an independent entity in 1900, they once again joined with the Democrats to nominate Bryan for President. By 1904, the Populist Party had been fully absorbed into the Democratic Party, and Bryan ran for the presidency a third time, but this time as just the Democratic Party's nominee. This is, in general, one of the almost inevitable fates of a third party in the U.S. political system. They can either grow big enough to supplant an existing party and become one of the two parties, whither away to irrelevance, or get coopted and absorbed by one of the existing two major parties. The Populist Party was absorbed by the Democrats, which transformed the Democrats into a party oriented towards farmers and factory workers.
The Election of 1912
Although the election of 1912 technically featured a third party candidate, the "third party" was really the creation of, and vehicle for that candidate. In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt declined to run for the Presidency due to promises he had made in the 1904 election. Instead, he annointed William Howard Taft as his successor, and stepped aside. Taft won the Presidency, but his actions in office outraged Roosevelt, who decided to run for the Republican nomination in 1912. When Taft secured the Republicn nomination anyway, Roosevelt formed his own party and dubbed it the Progressive Party, although it was quickly nicknamed the "Bull Moose" party.
On the Democratic side, a contentious and deeply divided convention required forty-one ballots to select Woodrow Wilson as their nominee, but they didn't fracture into competing factions like the Republicans had. This proved to be a smart move, as the general election turned into a landslide victory for Wilson in which he garnered 435 electoral votes, while Roosevelt mustered only 96, and Taft won a mere 8.
The election of 1912 is an almost textbook example of why third parties don't succeed in the United States. At first glance, Wilson's victory seems overwhelming, but when one looks deeper into the numbers, one discovers that it was far less convincing than it seems. In fact, one can make the case that Wilson only won because his opponents split the vote. Had the Republicans not divided and run two competing candidates, and instead united behind one banner, the results would likely have been very different. If one combines the votes that went to Taft with the votes that went to Roosevelt, one finds that twenty-five of the states that Wilson won would have been won by a unified Republican candidate instead5. Those twenty-five states accounted for 260 of the electoral votes that Wilson won. Switching those votes to a unified Republican candidate and adding the electoral votes Taft and Roosevelt won yields a Republican total of 356 electoral votes to Wilson's new total of 175. Instead of a landslide Democratic victory, the election would have resulted in a landslide Republican victory.
An almost inevitable result of a meaningful third party candidacy is that their candidacy will cause the candidate with the most ideologically incompatible policy positions to win the election. Looking at the arguments that led to the internecine war between the Roosevelt faction of the Republican Party and the Taft faction of the Republican Party, it is clear that they were much closer to one another on policy than they were to the Democrats, but by splitting into two factions, they not only ensured a Democratic victory, they ensured an emphatic and overwhelming Democratic victory. One could argue that Roosevelt made a moral point by running against Taft in the general election, but that ignores the fact that elections are about deciding who gets to set the agenda and enforce their vision of the future. By taking this stance, Roosevelt created a situation in which Democratic priorities, not Republican ones, would take precedence over the next eight years. A third party almost has to collapse into one of the two major parties, much like the Populist Party of the 1890s did, or else it all but ensures that its political antithesis will control the levers of power.
As a final point, one might note that by the 1916 election, the Progressive Party had shrunk to irrelevance, with most of its members, including Roosevelt, being absorbed back into the Republican Party. In 1924, a revived Progressive Party that incorporated some of the Socialist Party that had been limping along in obscurity nominated Robert La Follette for the Presidency, and he secured 16.6% of the popular vote, but only managed to carry one state: Wisconsin. Calvin Coolidge, running on the ticket of a Republican Party that had evolved from the trust-busting days of Roosevelt into a much more pro-business organization, won a landslide victory. By 1928, the Progressive Party was gone.
There wasn't another serious third party candidate until 1968. Even the much ballyhooed run by Strom Thurmond as a Dixiecrat in 1948 only resulted in the candidate winning 2.5% of the popular vote.
The Election of 1968
In 1968, the Democratic Party was in disarray. Lyndon Johnson had declined to seek another term. Bobby Kennedy was leading the race for the nomination until he was assassinated on June 6, a mere six weeks before the Democratic National Convention. The convention itself was the site of violent confrontations between anti-war demonstrators and police as the party split into factions at war with one another. The convention finally settled on Hubert Humphrey as the party nominee.
The Republicans, on the other hand, held a straightforward convention and nominated Richard Nixon, who ran on a "law and order" platform. This was a stark contrast to the chaos of the Democratic convention, and the choice to make the "law and order" policy intended to comfort the heartland into the flagship of the campaign was not an accident. This was the election in which Nixon first employed the "Southern strategy" of appealing to Southern voters upset over the passage of civil rights legislation in the previous few years, although the strategy didn't pay off very well, with the segregationist George Wallace winning most of the Southern states.
The American Independent Party was founded in 1967, essentially to promote and protect the policy of segregation that was the law of the land throughout much of the South, and which was under attack as a result of the passage of the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Governor George Wallace of Alabama ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing in large part due to his promotion of segregation. The American Independence Party seized the opportunity to pick Wallace as their flag-bearer, and handed him their nomination for the highest office in the land. On a side note, Wallace selected former Air Force General Curtis LeMay as his running mate, which proved troublesome for the candidate later when LeMay suggested using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
The election resulted in a convincing win for Nixon in the electoral college, although the popular vote was a nail-biter, with only a 0.7% difference between Nixon and Humphrey. Wallace came in a distant third in the popular vote, with 13.5% of the total compared to 42.7% for Humphrey and 43.4% for Nixon. Like most third party candidates who have had any success, Wallace was an intensely regional candidate. Although he was on the ballot in all fifty states, he only had meaningful support in the pro-segregation states from the former Confederacy, winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This seems to be one of the ways that a third party candidate can make inroads - if there is an issue that is of paramount concern in a particular region, they can win votes by running on that one issue. This more or less worked for the southern Democrats and the Constitutional-Unionists in 1860, and the Populists in 1892, and now Wallace in 1968. This doesn't seem to be a winning strategy though, and all of the parties that have adopted this strategy have either withered away or been coopted by one of the two major parties in relatively short order. The American Independent Party, for example, collapsed into irrelevance by the 1972 election where it gained 1.4% of the popular vote. It has never recovered.
The Elections of 1992 and 1996
After 1968, there wasn't a serious third party candidate until 1992. John Anderson ran an independent campaign as a moderate alternative to Ronald Reagan in 1980, but only managed to claim 6.6% of the popular vote. In 1992, for reasons mostly relating to the North American Free Trade Agreement, a large proportion of the electorate became infatuated with Texas businessman H. Ross Perot. It is important to note that Perot wasn't really a "third party" candidate, as he didn't have a party backing his run for the Presidency (although a party was organized in six states in order to allow him to be placed on the ballot). Perot self-funded much of his campaign, and bought air time on the networks to pitch his candidacy in what amounted to political infomercials.
Perot's campaign alternated between moments of brilliance, and an almost benign incompetence. In the debates with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Perot did quite well. Many states require a candidate for President to name a Vice-Presidential choice to get on the ballot, and Perot chose his friend Admiral James Stockdale as an interim choice. Unfortunately, Perot never revisited that decision, and Stockdale did quite poorly when he appeared for a Vice-Presidential debate, at one point absent-mindedly turning off his hearing aid. Perot abruptly pulled out of the race in July, and then just as abruptly returned at the beginning of October. When he tried to explain why he mysteriously withdrew, Perot related a story about how "Republican operatives" were planning on disrupting his daughter's wedding. When combined with revelations about his fear that the Black Panther Party was going to assassinate him, Perot began to be seen as a somewhat unbalanced conspiracy theorist.
When the final results of the election rolled around, Perot gained 18.9% of the popular vote, but his support was thinly spread enough that he won no electoral votes. Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush with 43% of the popular vote, which translated to a convincing 370 vote to 168 vote electoral college victory. One interesting footnote here is that despite winning more than 5% of the popular vote, since he wasn't running as the representative of a party, his success didn't make any new group eligible for matching federal funds in the subsequent election.
Perot ran again in 1996, and this time he had organized an actual political party named the Reform Party. Although Perot had little difficulty obtaining the Reform Party nomination, there was some controversy associated with it as supporters of former Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado accused Perot of rigging the selection in his favor and walked out of the convention to form their own party named the American Reform Party. This is one of the perennial problems with creating a stable third party: It seems that people who are willing to split from the major parties over relatively minor differences tend to also be willing to split from embryonic third parties over relatively minor differences. Perot did less well in 1996 than he had in 1992, winning only 8.4% of the vote.
That 8.4% number is important, because it means that the Reform Party met the 5% threshold to qualify for matching federal funds in the 2000 election. Pat Buchanan ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, and unfortunately for third party proponents, finished with 0.4% of the popular vote, behind even Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's total of 2.7%. By the 2004 election, the Reform Party was effectively defunct. The important point here is that getting access to federal matching funds is not the panacea that third party advocates seem to think it is. Getting matching federal funds will not alter the realities of U.S. elections and allow a third party to avoid the effectively inevitable fates that third parties face: They are either coopted by existing parties, or they whither to irrelevance. There has not been a meaningful third party candidate since the 1996 election, and there is no real prospect that there will be one in the near future.
Some third party advocates may take heart from this recounting of the effect of third parties on U.S. elections over the last one hundred and fifty years. They should not. From 1860 to now, there have been 40 presidential elections. Out of those forty, a third party candidate has had a meaningful impact in at most seven of those elections, and the number is only that high if you count campaigns like those of H. Ross Perot in 1996 and James Weaver in 1892 as being meaningful. Until U.S. elections are fundamentally changed, no third party will be able to establish itself for any substantial length of time, or have more than a moderately fleeting effect on elections.
1 This has been widely reported. To be fair, I seriously question how much actual "anti-establishment" sentiment there actually was. Yes, Trump won the presidential election, but those same voters kept the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and Senate, voting to retain the overwhelming majority of legislators. The elections seems to me to have been not so much an "anti-establishment" election as it was a "conservative backlash" election.
2 There were other "third party" candidates in both the 2012 and 2016 elections, but they were even less of a factor than the Libertarian and Green party candidates. In 2012, all other third party candidates garnered about a fifth of a percent of the popular vote, while in 2016, they obtained about half a percent of the popular vote.
3 Allow me to point out the humorous irony of the "Libertarian" candidate touting the possibility of receiving a federal subsidy in the future as a reason to vote for him.
4 In 2016, Maine passed ranked choice voting for state elections, although federal elections will still be conducted under the "first past the post" system.
5 Specifically, the hypothetical Republican unity candidate would have likely won Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Random Thoughts Home
If one were to tailor make an election perfectly crafted to buoy the prospects of alternative parties, the 2016 election would be pretty close to that model. Both of the major parties ran candidates that were unpopular among large portions of the electorate. There was allegedly a vast "anti-establishment" sentiment among voters.1 The Libertarian Party had two prominent former state governors heading up their ticket. The Green Party got a lot of press as a result of some rather ill-founded speculation about whether Senator Bernie Sanders would jump to their ticket after losing the Democratic Party nomination to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The only thing that would have made this election riper for a third party surge would have been if the economy was in a recession, and despite the constant bleating from the right that the economy was somehow in sad shape, it was actually doing pretty well in 2016.
When the time came to vote, the Libertarian Party ticket garnered just over 3% of the popular vote, and the Green Party ticket had about 1% of the popular vote. This is better than they performed in 2012 when the Libertarians got about 1% of the vote and the Greens got about a third of a percent, but this isn't anywhere close to being a factor in the election.2 Neither of these campaigns managed to get to the magical 5% total that would have resulted in matching federal funds for the 2020 election.3 One also has to consider that these results were generated under almost ideal conditions for third party success. This is realistically the best that third party candidates can hope to do in a U.S. election. This is, in a figurative but very real sense, the ceiling for third parties in our current system.
The reason third parties won't work in the U.S. is due to the structure of U.S. elections. The U.S. uses what is called a "first past the post" system for most elections.4 This means that to gain any representation in an election, you need to obtain more of the votes cast than anyone else. Because members of the House of Representatives and Senators are elected from specific regions (Congressional Districts for Congressmen, and States for Senators), you have a collection of small elections, each of which must be won by garnering more of the the vote in those regions. U.S. Presidential elections are actually a series of mini-elections conducted in each State, and one must win more of the vote than any other candidate in each one to win them. You technically don't need to win a majority of the votes to win such elections, but you probably need to get close. This reality pushes political parties to try to muster a coalition that can aspire to encompass at least fifty percent of the total vote.
There are other voting methods used in other countries: Some places use ranked choice voting, where voters can list a number of candidates in their order of preference and then those choices are worked through as lower vote generating candidates are eliminated from contention. Under this system, for example, someone who favored the Green Party candidate could vote for them first, but rank, for example, the Democratic Party candidate second, so if the Green candidate didn't get sufficient votes to win, their vote would work to prevent a Republican victory. This would mean that people wouldn't be concerned with "throwing their vote away" and could vote for third parties as their first preference. This doesn't eliminate the fact that one would need to garner the most votes in order to win and election, but it does mean that third parties might be able to gain more support than they do now, as people might feel freer to support them knowing that their second preference would serve as a backup.
Another voting method is proportional representation, which can be used as a means of selecting a legislature. A modified version of this system is used in Germany (the German system is actually far more complex than that, but to detail it fully would take a lot of time). In this method, the voter selects a party, not a candidate, and when the votes are tallied, the available seats are distributed to the parties in proportion to their share of the vote. So if the Democrats got 45% of the vote, and the Republicans got 45% of the vote, they would each get 45% of the available seats. If the Libertarians got 5% of the vote, they would get 5% of the seats, and so on. This would mean that the small number of people who were interested in a third party would have representation in the legislature. It would be a small number of legislators, but they would likely be important in deciding who had the majority. This system wouldn't really work for electing a President, and wouldn't make sense for the Senate as it is currently constituted, but it could make third parties viable in the House of Representatives - although we would have to completely redefine exactly who Representatives actually represent. One might also note that even in such systems, the result is generally two-coalitions at odds with one another, with minor shifting between them in the middle.
Even though alternative voting systems are possible, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will continue to use first past the post voting to decide its elections. This system almost inevitably drives the politics into a two-faction system. To have a chance at winning elections, you have to be able to reliably obtain 50% of the vote. Any party that does not will find itself forced to either expand its ranks to include sufficient voters to have a reasonable shot at getting to that mark, or they will wither away to fringe status in short order. This is exactly what has happened the handful of times that U.S. politics has seen third party candidates show signs of life.
The Election of 1860
In the early 1850s, the Whig Party, which had been the primary opposition party to the Democratic Party, collapsed. Presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore were Whigs, as was John Tyler, although Tyler was expelled from the party over political disagreements during his presidency. The last Whig presidential canddiate was Winfield Scott, who ran in 1852.
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| Abraham Lincoln |
By the time the 1860 election rolled around the Republican Party was well-established, and can't really be considered a "third party" in any meaningful sense. The Republican Party held a plurality of seats in the House of Representatives, and held the second-most seats in the Senate. The party also held thirteen of the thirty-one Governorships in the country. It was at this point that the party nominated Abraham Lincoln to run as its candidate for President.
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| John Breckinridge |
The fourth candidate was John Bell, who was nominated by the Constitution-Union Party, an organization formed out of the shreds of the Whig Party that had not migrated to the Republican Party, and held as its guiding principle "The Union as it is, and the Constitution as it is". The party tried to simply ignore the slavery issue and instead focused on anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant policies. As the oldest candidate in the field, Bell wasn't really interested in campaigning much, and seems to have been hoping for no one to receive enough electoral votes to claim a majority and have the election go to a vote in the House of Representatives, where he thought his propects as a "compromise candidate" would make voting for him an attractive option.
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| Stephen Douglas |
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| John Bell |
The key issue here is that there were very few places where there was a real three-way contest, and those were mostly either smaller states like California, or border states like Missouri and Kentucky. In most states, two of the candidates were completely non-competitive, and the race was really between the remaining two. This wasn't a four candidate horse race, it was three two candidate contests. I suppose a third party could try to follow this model, but it would have to focus on an issue that was of intense interest to a particular region of the country. The reason the Republicans dominated the northern states, and the southern Democrats dominated the southern states was that the country was riven by the issue of slavery, with the border states stuck literally in the middle.
On a further note, by the time elections were held again with a reconstituted Union in 1868, the Democratic Party was a single unit again, and the Constitution-Union Party had vanished, its members having been mostly absorbed into the Republican Party. As I said before, multi-party situations in the U.S. political system are essentially inherently unstable, and will generally quickly collapse back to two parties in relatively short order.
The Election of 1892
 |
| James Weaver |
By 1896, the Populist Party had effectively merged with the Democratic Party, as William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate nominated by both parties. Bryan's campaign featured the famous "Cross of Gold" speech, but despite his eloquence, he lost to McKinley. Although the Populist Party was technically still an independent entity in 1900, they once again joined with the Democrats to nominate Bryan for President. By 1904, the Populist Party had been fully absorbed into the Democratic Party, and Bryan ran for the presidency a third time, but this time as just the Democratic Party's nominee. This is, in general, one of the almost inevitable fates of a third party in the U.S. political system. They can either grow big enough to supplant an existing party and become one of the two parties, whither away to irrelevance, or get coopted and absorbed by one of the existing two major parties. The Populist Party was absorbed by the Democrats, which transformed the Democrats into a party oriented towards farmers and factory workers.
The Election of 1912
 |
| Teddy Roosevelt |
On the Democratic side, a contentious and deeply divided convention required forty-one ballots to select Woodrow Wilson as their nominee, but they didn't fracture into competing factions like the Republicans had. This proved to be a smart move, as the general election turned into a landslide victory for Wilson in which he garnered 435 electoral votes, while Roosevelt mustered only 96, and Taft won a mere 8.
The election of 1912 is an almost textbook example of why third parties don't succeed in the United States. At first glance, Wilson's victory seems overwhelming, but when one looks deeper into the numbers, one discovers that it was far less convincing than it seems. In fact, one can make the case that Wilson only won because his opponents split the vote. Had the Republicans not divided and run two competing candidates, and instead united behind one banner, the results would likely have been very different. If one combines the votes that went to Taft with the votes that went to Roosevelt, one finds that twenty-five of the states that Wilson won would have been won by a unified Republican candidate instead5. Those twenty-five states accounted for 260 of the electoral votes that Wilson won. Switching those votes to a unified Republican candidate and adding the electoral votes Taft and Roosevelt won yields a Republican total of 356 electoral votes to Wilson's new total of 175. Instead of a landslide Democratic victory, the election would have resulted in a landslide Republican victory.
 |
| Robert La Follette |
As a final point, one might note that by the 1916 election, the Progressive Party had shrunk to irrelevance, with most of its members, including Roosevelt, being absorbed back into the Republican Party. In 1924, a revived Progressive Party that incorporated some of the Socialist Party that had been limping along in obscurity nominated Robert La Follette for the Presidency, and he secured 16.6% of the popular vote, but only managed to carry one state: Wisconsin. Calvin Coolidge, running on the ticket of a Republican Party that had evolved from the trust-busting days of Roosevelt into a much more pro-business organization, won a landslide victory. By 1928, the Progressive Party was gone.
There wasn't another serious third party candidate until 1968. Even the much ballyhooed run by Strom Thurmond as a Dixiecrat in 1948 only resulted in the candidate winning 2.5% of the popular vote.
The Election of 1968
The Republicans, on the other hand, held a straightforward convention and nominated Richard Nixon, who ran on a "law and order" platform. This was a stark contrast to the chaos of the Democratic convention, and the choice to make the "law and order" policy intended to comfort the heartland into the flagship of the campaign was not an accident. This was the election in which Nixon first employed the "Southern strategy" of appealing to Southern voters upset over the passage of civil rights legislation in the previous few years, although the strategy didn't pay off very well, with the segregationist George Wallace winning most of the Southern states.
 |
| George Wallace |
The election resulted in a convincing win for Nixon in the electoral college, although the popular vote was a nail-biter, with only a 0.7% difference between Nixon and Humphrey. Wallace came in a distant third in the popular vote, with 13.5% of the total compared to 42.7% for Humphrey and 43.4% for Nixon. Like most third party candidates who have had any success, Wallace was an intensely regional candidate. Although he was on the ballot in all fifty states, he only had meaningful support in the pro-segregation states from the former Confederacy, winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This seems to be one of the ways that a third party candidate can make inroads - if there is an issue that is of paramount concern in a particular region, they can win votes by running on that one issue. This more or less worked for the southern Democrats and the Constitutional-Unionists in 1860, and the Populists in 1892, and now Wallace in 1968. This doesn't seem to be a winning strategy though, and all of the parties that have adopted this strategy have either withered away or been coopted by one of the two major parties in relatively short order. The American Independent Party, for example, collapsed into irrelevance by the 1972 election where it gained 1.4% of the popular vote. It has never recovered.
The Elections of 1992 and 1996
 |
| H. Ross Perot |
Perot's campaign alternated between moments of brilliance, and an almost benign incompetence. In the debates with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Perot did quite well. Many states require a candidate for President to name a Vice-Presidential choice to get on the ballot, and Perot chose his friend Admiral James Stockdale as an interim choice. Unfortunately, Perot never revisited that decision, and Stockdale did quite poorly when he appeared for a Vice-Presidential debate, at one point absent-mindedly turning off his hearing aid. Perot abruptly pulled out of the race in July, and then just as abruptly returned at the beginning of October. When he tried to explain why he mysteriously withdrew, Perot related a story about how "Republican operatives" were planning on disrupting his daughter's wedding. When combined with revelations about his fear that the Black Panther Party was going to assassinate him, Perot began to be seen as a somewhat unbalanced conspiracy theorist.
When the final results of the election rolled around, Perot gained 18.9% of the popular vote, but his support was thinly spread enough that he won no electoral votes. Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush with 43% of the popular vote, which translated to a convincing 370 vote to 168 vote electoral college victory. One interesting footnote here is that despite winning more than 5% of the popular vote, since he wasn't running as the representative of a party, his success didn't make any new group eligible for matching federal funds in the subsequent election.
Perot ran again in 1996, and this time he had organized an actual political party named the Reform Party. Although Perot had little difficulty obtaining the Reform Party nomination, there was some controversy associated with it as supporters of former Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado accused Perot of rigging the selection in his favor and walked out of the convention to form their own party named the American Reform Party. This is one of the perennial problems with creating a stable third party: It seems that people who are willing to split from the major parties over relatively minor differences tend to also be willing to split from embryonic third parties over relatively minor differences. Perot did less well in 1996 than he had in 1992, winning only 8.4% of the vote.
That 8.4% number is important, because it means that the Reform Party met the 5% threshold to qualify for matching federal funds in the 2000 election. Pat Buchanan ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, and unfortunately for third party proponents, finished with 0.4% of the popular vote, behind even Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's total of 2.7%. By the 2004 election, the Reform Party was effectively defunct. The important point here is that getting access to federal matching funds is not the panacea that third party advocates seem to think it is. Getting matching federal funds will not alter the realities of U.S. elections and allow a third party to avoid the effectively inevitable fates that third parties face: They are either coopted by existing parties, or they whither to irrelevance. There has not been a meaningful third party candidate since the 1996 election, and there is no real prospect that there will be one in the near future.
Some third party advocates may take heart from this recounting of the effect of third parties on U.S. elections over the last one hundred and fifty years. They should not. From 1860 to now, there have been 40 presidential elections. Out of those forty, a third party candidate has had a meaningful impact in at most seven of those elections, and the number is only that high if you count campaigns like those of H. Ross Perot in 1996 and James Weaver in 1892 as being meaningful. Until U.S. elections are fundamentally changed, no third party will be able to establish itself for any substantial length of time, or have more than a moderately fleeting effect on elections.
1 This has been widely reported. To be fair, I seriously question how much actual "anti-establishment" sentiment there actually was. Yes, Trump won the presidential election, but those same voters kept the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and Senate, voting to retain the overwhelming majority of legislators. The elections seems to me to have been not so much an "anti-establishment" election as it was a "conservative backlash" election.
Random Thoughts Home
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Random Thought - The 2014 "E Pluribus Hugo" Revised Hugo Finalists
E Pluribus Hugo was passed largely in response to the results of the 2015 Hugo nomination process. I outlined the background leading up to this in my previous post about the 2016 E Pluribus Hugo Revised Hugo Finalists, and I'm not going to repeat myself here. Anyone who wants a summary of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns, the responses from non-Puppy Hugo voters, and an outline of the mechanics of E Pluribus Hugo can go read about that there.
The E Pluribus Hugo system had several goals. One goal was to dampen the influence of bloc voting. A second goal was to create a system that presented a nominating voter with a means of voting that was substantially similar to the one that voter had under the old system. The third was to create a system that would return results that were as close as possible to those that the old system did in a year in which there was no bloc voting. To test this third goal, the system was used on the 2014 Hugo ballots, which was a year in which there was a Sad Puppy campaign, but no slate in any meaningful sense, and therefore no real bloc voting.
An ideal result would be that using E Pluribus Hugo would result in no changes to the final ballot. Applying the new voting system to the 2014 nominations doesn't yield an ideal result, although they are close. Three categories see their finalists change under the new system, with one finalist changing in one, and two changing in two others - although the changes in the latter two categories are mostly the result of the new system's antipathy towards tie results. Out of seventy-six finalists on the 2014 Hugo ballot, seventy-one are unchanged under the E Pluribus Hugo system, meaning that ninety-three percent of the results are the same under both systems. Given that the perfect is often the enemy of the good, this seems to me like an acceptable volume of change.
Best Novel
Unchanged Finalists:
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman [nomination declined]
Parasite by Mira Grant
Warbound by Larry Correia
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Novella
Unchanged Finalists:
The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells
The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad R. Torgersen
Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Novelette
Unchanged Finalists:
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Short Story
Unchanged Finalists:
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Nonfiction, Related, or Reference Work
Unchanged Finalists:
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Graphic Story
Unchanged Finalists:
Schlock Mercenary: Broken Wind by Howard Tayler [ineligible]
Time by Randall Munroe
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Professional Editor: Short Form
Unchanged Finalists:
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jonathan Strahan
Removed Finalists:
Sheila Williams
Added Finalists:
Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Notes: Applying E Pluribus Hugo to this category results in one change, removing Sheila Williams from the list of finalists and replacing her with Bryan Thomas Schmidt. This seems to me like a relatively minor alteration, and one that can be reasonably accepted as a side effect of changing the voting system.
Best Professional Editor: Long Form
Unchanged Finalists:
Ginjer Buchanan
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Lee Harris
Toni Weisskopf
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Professional Artist
Unchanged Finalists:
Julie Dillon
Daniel Dos Santos
John Harris
John Picacio
Removed Finalists:
Galen Dara
Fiona Staples
Added Finalists:
Joey Hi-Fi
Notes: In the Best Professional Artist category, the application of E Pluribus Hugo results in two finalists dropping from the ballot and being replaced with one. In reality, this is only one change - Fiona Staples is pushed off of the list of finalists because E Pluribus Hugo makes ties much rarer, and as a result, there will be fewer ties for fifth place necessitating an expansion of the finalists in a category to accommodate those tied finalists.
The other change engendered by E Pluribus Hugo moves Galen Dara off of the final ballot, and replaces her with Joey Hi-Fi. In the original voting, Dara had 50 nominations, while Joey Hi-Fi had 48. This kind of switch is likely to happen every now and then under E Pluribus Hugo, especially when the difference between the number of nominators is as close as these two were. I will note at this point that we won't know what the vote "would" have been under the old system after the new one is implemented, so we won't know what the vote "should" have been. We will just have the list of finalists as voted upon by the eligible voters.
Best Semi-Prozine
Unchanged Finalists:
Interzone edited by Andy Cox
Lightspeed John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fanzine
Unchanged Finalists:
The Book Smugglers edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fan Writer
Unchanged Finalists:
Liz Bourke
Foz Meadows
Abigail Nussbaum
Mark Oshiro
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fan Artist
Unchanged Finalists:
Brad W. Foster
Mandie Manzano
Spring Schoenhuth
Steve Stiles
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fancast
Unchanged Finalists:
Removed Finalists:
SF Signal Podcast by Patrick Hester
The Writer and the Critic by Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: The changes wrought by E Pluribus Hugo in the Best Fancast category aren't really changes due to moving some nominees up to the list of finalists and removing others, but are rather the result of the fact that ties are exceedingly rare under the new system. SF Signal Podcast, The Writer and the Critic, and Tea and Jeopardy all tied for fifth place under the old nominating system, and as a result, the category had seven finalists in 2014. Under the new system, there is no tie and both SF Signal Podcast and The Writer and the Critic fall below the cut off, and the category has only five finalists.
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Unchanged Finalists:
Wesley Chu
Max Gladstone
Ramez Naam
Sofia Samatar
Benjanun Sriduangaew
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
What Are the Hugo Awards?
Go to the 2014 list of Hugo finalists: 2014
Random Thoughts Book Award Reviews Home
The E Pluribus Hugo system had several goals. One goal was to dampen the influence of bloc voting. A second goal was to create a system that presented a nominating voter with a means of voting that was substantially similar to the one that voter had under the old system. The third was to create a system that would return results that were as close as possible to those that the old system did in a year in which there was no bloc voting. To test this third goal, the system was used on the 2014 Hugo ballots, which was a year in which there was a Sad Puppy campaign, but no slate in any meaningful sense, and therefore no real bloc voting.
An ideal result would be that using E Pluribus Hugo would result in no changes to the final ballot. Applying the new voting system to the 2014 nominations doesn't yield an ideal result, although they are close. Three categories see their finalists change under the new system, with one finalist changing in one, and two changing in two others - although the changes in the latter two categories are mostly the result of the new system's antipathy towards tie results. Out of seventy-six finalists on the 2014 Hugo ballot, seventy-one are unchanged under the E Pluribus Hugo system, meaning that ninety-three percent of the results are the same under both systems. Given that the perfect is often the enemy of the good, this seems to me like an acceptable volume of change.
Best Novel
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
Parasite by Mira Grant
Warbound by Larry Correia
The Wheel of Time (The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight, Knife of Dreams, The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Novella
The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells
The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad R. Torgersen
Equoid by Charles Stross
Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. ValenteWakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Novelette
The Exchange Officers by Brad R. Torgersen (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)
The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)
Opera Vita Aeterna by Theodore Beale (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)
The Waiting Stars by Aliette de Bodard (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Novelette)
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Short Story
If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)
The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)
Selkie Stories Are for Losers by Sofia Samatar (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)
The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Nonfiction, Related, or Reference Work
Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas
Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin
We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative by Kameron Hurley
Writing Excuses, Season 8 by Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer with Jeremy Zerfoss
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Graphic Story
Girl Genius, Volume 13: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio
The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who by Paul Cornell, art by Jimmy Broxton
The Meathouse Man adapted and illustrated by Raya Golden from the story by George R.R. Martin
Saga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona StaplesTime by Randall Munroe
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Professional Editor: Short Form
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jonathan Strahan
Removed Finalists:
Sheila Williams
Added Finalists:
Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Notes: Applying E Pluribus Hugo to this category results in one change, removing Sheila Williams from the list of finalists and replacing her with Bryan Thomas Schmidt. This seems to me like a relatively minor alteration, and one that can be reasonably accepted as a side effect of changing the voting system.
Best Professional Editor: Long Form
Ginjer Buchanan
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Lee Harris
Toni Weisskopf
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Professional Artist
Julie Dillon
Daniel Dos Santos
John Harris
John Picacio
Removed Finalists:
Galen Dara
Fiona Staples
Added Finalists:
Joey Hi-Fi
Notes: In the Best Professional Artist category, the application of E Pluribus Hugo results in two finalists dropping from the ballot and being replaced with one. In reality, this is only one change - Fiona Staples is pushed off of the list of finalists because E Pluribus Hugo makes ties much rarer, and as a result, there will be fewer ties for fifth place necessitating an expansion of the finalists in a category to accommodate those tied finalists.
The other change engendered by E Pluribus Hugo moves Galen Dara off of the final ballot, and replaces her with Joey Hi-Fi. In the original voting, Dara had 50 nominations, while Joey Hi-Fi had 48. This kind of switch is likely to happen every now and then under E Pluribus Hugo, especially when the difference between the number of nominators is as close as these two were. I will note at this point that we won't know what the vote "would" have been under the old system after the new one is implemented, so we won't know what the vote "should" have been. We will just have the list of finalists as voted upon by the eligible voters.
Best Semi-Prozine
Apex Magazine edited by Jason Sizemore, Lynne M. Thomas, and Michael Damian Thomas
Beneath Ceaseless Skies edited by Scott H. AndrewsInterzone edited by Andy Cox
Lightspeed John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki
Strange Horizons edited by Rebecca Cross, Shane Gavin, Niall Harrison, Anaea Lay, Brit Mandelo, Abigail Nussbaum, An Owomoyela, Julia Rios, and Sonya Taaffe
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fanzine
The Book Smugglers edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher
Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond
Journey Planet edited by James Bacon, Christopher J. Garcia, Colin Harris, Helen J. Montgomery, Lynda E. Rucker, and Pete Young
Pornokitsch edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared ShurinRemoved Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fan Writer
Liz Bourke
Foz Meadows
Abigail Nussbaum
Mark Oshiro
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fan Artist
Brad W. Foster
Mandie Manzano
Spring Schoenhuth
Steve Stiles
Sarah Webb
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
Best Fancast
The Coode Street Podcast by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Doctor Who: Verity! by Erika Ensign, Katrina Griffiths, L.M. Myles, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Deborah Stanish, and Lynne M. Thomas
Galactic Suburbia Podcast by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, and Tansy Rayner Roberts; produced by Andrew Finch
The Skiffy and Fanty Show by David Annadale, Shaun Duke, Stina Leicht, Julia Rios, Mike Underwood, Paul Weimer, and Jen Zink
Tea and Jeopardy by Emma Newman and Peter NewmanRemoved Finalists:
SF Signal Podcast by Patrick Hester
The Writer and the Critic by Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: The changes wrought by E Pluribus Hugo in the Best Fancast category aren't really changes due to moving some nominees up to the list of finalists and removing others, but are rather the result of the fact that ties are exceedingly rare under the new system. SF Signal Podcast, The Writer and the Critic, and Tea and Jeopardy all tied for fifth place under the old nominating system, and as a result, the category had seven finalists in 2014. Under the new system, there is no tie and both SF Signal Podcast and The Writer and the Critic fall below the cut off, and the category has only five finalists.
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Wesley Chu
Max Gladstone
Ramez Naam
Sofia Samatar
Benjanun Sriduangaew
Removed Finalists:
None
Added Finalists:
None
Notes: E Pluribus Hugo results in no changes to this category.
What Are the Hugo Awards?
Go to the 2014 list of Hugo finalists: 2014
Random Thoughts Book Award Reviews Home
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