lah@MIRO.BERKELEY.EDU (08/28/85)
From: lah@MIRO.BERKELEY.EDU (Commander RYN Leigh Ann Hussey) Actually, as I understand it, all you need to win the Nebula is enough friends in SFWA... For that matter, would Battlefield Earth even have come close to a Hugo without umpteen suddenly-fans from the ranks of the Scientologists paying for membership and voting for their favourite god? Leigh Ann Cynical
tom@utcsri.UUCP (Tom Nadas) (08/29/85)
Though I am a minor SF writer, I am an active member of SFWA and do nominate and vote for the nebulas. Nominations are handled in an unusual fashion. Every month or so Orson Scott Card issues a Nebula Awards Report which lists not only the titles of works that have been nominated but the names of those who actually sent in the nomination. There is no limit to the number of nominations a member can make, so it is true that many members (myself included) feel an obligation to nominate works by their friends. However, because SFWA is a arelatively small group (700 people), it's easy to look at the Awards Report and see which nominations are sincere and which are likely to be returned favours to friends. The final voting, of course, is done secretly. There's a second safety valve which helps preserve the integrety of the award: each year, the appointed Nebula Award Judges have the option of placing works on the final ballot that might somehow have missed being sufficiently nominated by the members. As far as I know, the judges have always used quality as the only criterion in selecting works to be added to the ballot. The Hugo is another matter. I interviewed Donald Kingsbury for Science Fiction Review a few years ago. (He teaches Math at McGill University in Montreal, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's got access to the net, too). He admitted to having toyed with the idea of buying enough Worldcon memberships to guarantee himself sufficient votes to win the Hugo. Of course, Don is a man of absolute honour and he did not try this, but as a math-type, he couldn't resist playing with the numbers. If a Hugo is worth, say $50 000 to an authors career and a hundred votes are enough to secure the award, and if you buy Worldcon memberships at the earliest supporting rate of $10, you can get a 50:1 return on your investment. Robert J. Sawyer posted through the good graces of Tom Nadas CSRI -- University of Toronto