Anne McCaffrey won exactly one Hugo Award, and the three men who ran the 1968 Worldcon later disclosed that they helped decide how she won it. Bill Donaho, Alva Rogers and J. Ben Stark co-chaired Baycon in Oakland, counted the final ballots themselves, and closed the Best Novella race with a tie. Had social media existed that Labor Day weekend, Worldcon would have spent the week defending itself.
What the Count Showed
Baycon’s committee report gives the final Best Novella tally as 213 votes for Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and 213 for McCaffrey’s “Weyr Search.” Roger Zelazny’s “Damnation Alley” finished third with 133. The committee received 482 final ballots and counted them by hand under a preferential system, a job that took about six hours. The report adds that nobody but the three chairs ever saw those ballots.
Three Votes, Three Unused Ballots
Donaho explained the rest in File 770, issue 129. The race swung back and forth between McCaffrey and Farmer until the two finished three votes apart. He, Rogers and Stark had not voted. “So we decided to make it a tie.” Donaho said he thought McCaffrey was the one ahead, though he could not say for sure.
Three votes separated the two stories, and three chairs held unused ballots. The count came out 213 to 213.
If Donaho remembered correctly, McCaffrey would have won the only Hugo of her career outright, and the men running the contest turned it into a share. She was the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction, and the final result came from three chairs holding unused ballots.
McCaffrey Deserved More
McCaffrey deserved more than one Hugo, and Worldcon voters spent the next quarter century declining to give her another.
“Weyr Search” ran in Analog in October 1967. It followed Lessa, a young woman recruited to bond with a queen dragon, and it became the opening of Dragonflight, the book that launched the Pern series in 1968. The Hugo that fall was supposed to be the start of a run. McCaffrey went back to the ballot the next year with “Dragonrider,” the story that took the Nebula, and lost the Best Novella Hugo to Robert Silverberg’s “Nightwings.” A third novella nomination followed in 1970 for “Dramatic Mission.”
In 1972 Dragonquest, the Pern sequel, lost Best Novel to Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Farmer was the same writer she had shared a trophy with four years earlier. The White Dragon reached the 1979 ballot as one of the first science fiction books on the New York Times bestseller list, and voters passed again. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern in 1984 and All the Weyrs of Pern in 1992 got the same answer. The first woman to win a Hugo for fiction went zero for six over the next 23 years.
The Half a Hugo
The other famous piece of Hugo arithmetic belongs to Harlan Ellison.
At MidAmeriCon in Kansas City in 1976, A Boy and His Dog beat Dark Star, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Rollerball for Best Dramatic Presentation. Ellison had written the 1969 novella and started the screenplay before writer’s block stopped him. L.Q. Jones finished the script and directed. Dramatic Presentation Hugos go to the people who made the film, so the trophy went to Jones.
Ellison objected that the story was his. The committee had no spare rocket, only a spare base, and Ellison took the base. He called it his half Hugo, and in later years he counted himself an eight-and-a-half-time winner.
Eight years earlier, Baycon had handed Ellison a special committee award for Dangerous Visions. That anthology first printed Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage,” the story that tied McCaffrey.
Blocs Before the Puppies
Ballot pressure did not begin with blogs.
In 1983 a push to nominate L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth as a bloc missed the final ballot. Four years later a similar push put Hubbard’s Black Genesis on it, and voters ranked the book behind No Award. In 1989 the authors of The Guardsman, Todd Hamilton and P. J. Beese, withdrew from the final ballot after a fan bought numerous memberships under false names, all sent in on the same day, to get the story there.
None of those efforts filled a category. In 2015 the Puppies filled five.
The Puppies and the Count That Followed
Sad Puppies began in 2013, when Larry Correia asked readers to nominate his novel Monster Hunter Legion, which finished 17 nominations short of the ballot at 101. Correia and Brad Torgersen said the Hugos had drifted toward message fiction and away from the work readers bought, and Torgersen’s 2015 slate listed women and writers of color alongside the men. Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies slate came a day later, overlapped Torgersen’s, and told followers to nominate it as written. Together the two slates placed 51 of 60 and 58 of 67 recommendations on the final ballot, and five categories held nothing but their nominees. Voters answered by ranking No Award above every one of them, a response many writers had urged in advance, and gave it the win in all five, the first time No Award had taken a category since 1977. Connie Willis declined to present, at least six nominees withdrew, and the only slate work that won was the film Guardians of the Galaxy. In 2016 Kate Paulk replaced the Sad Puppies slate with a crowd-sourced recommendation list, while the Rabid Puppies slate again filled all five finalist slots in four categories.
The business meeting at Sasquan passed E Pluribus Hugo in 2015 and the 2016 meeting ratified it, so it took effect for the 2017 ballot. Before then the five most-nominated works made the shortlist. Under EPH, works are eliminated one at a time and each nominator’s vote spreads across the survivors. The shortlist grew to six, and no author can hold more than two finalists in a category. Chicon 8 re-ratified the system in 2022. Every Hugo shortlist since 2017 comes from a counting method that did not exist before the Puppies, and that leaves an asterisk on all of them.
Slates announced themselves in public, and voters answered in public. The 1968 tie was decided by the people holding the count. Worldcon had no rule against slates in 2015, and Rabid Puppies supporters argue the slate used the system as written until the rules were rewritten around it. EPH’s defenders say the new method stopped a bloc from filling whole categories: the 2017 Rabid Puppies list, backed by an estimated 80 to 90 voters, put 11 works on shortlists, and none won.
Chengdu
The Hugo ceremony at the Chengdu Worldcon took place on October 21, 2023. Final-ballot numbers normally appear within days. These arrived on December 3, 46 days later. Nomination statistics came on January 20, 2024, 91 days after the ceremony and a day past the 90-day limit in the WSFS constitution.
The numbers showed R.F. Kuang’s Babel, third in Best Novel nominations, ruled not eligible with no explanation. Xiran Jay Zhao for the Astounding Award, Paul Weimer for Best Fan Writer, an episode of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Hai Ya’s short story “Pagoda of Fogong Temple” met the same fate.
On February 14, 2024, Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford published a report built on emails leaked by Hugo administrator Diane Lacey. Administrators from the United States and Canada had researched the political histories of eligible authors and discussed pulling them from the ballot for political reasons. Ballots from Chinese voters had been tossed because an administrator judged them similar to a recommendations list from the magazine Science Fiction World, which made them a slate in the administrator’s eyes, though Worldcon had no rule against slates. The sponsors of a later resolution counted no fewer than 1,834 voided nominations.
Worldcon Intellectual Property censured Dave McCarty, Chen Shi and Ben Yalow on January 30. McCarty resigned, and Kevin Standlee, reprimanded for public comments, stepped down as board chair. Glasgow 2024’s chair apologized without reservation on February 15. Adrian Tchaikovsky, who won Best Series, said he could not consider himself a Hugo winner and would not cite the 2023 result. That August the Glasgow business meeting passed an apology to the nominators, voters, finalists and winners. This summer the LAcon V business meeting censured and banned McCarty, Yao Chi, Shi Chen and Yalow for varying lengths of time.
The Rest of the Ledger
Glasgow produced a cheating case too. In July 2024 the Hugo administrators disqualified 377 of 3,813 final-ballot votes, nearly 10 percent, after finding fake names and memberships bought in bulk, then refunded by a sponsor once the buyer voted as asked. The memberships would have cost at least £16,965, about $22,000. One finalist drew most of those votes, was not disqualified because nothing showed awareness, and did not win once the votes came out.
At Dublin 2019, Campbell Award winner Jeannette Ng called John W. Campbell a fascist in her acceptance speech. Nine days later the sponsor renamed the prize the Astounding Award, and the speech won Best Related Work in 2020. In 2022 the Chicon 8 business meeting passed a resolution condemning Sergey Lukianenko, the announced guest of honor for Chengdu, over statements supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He did not attend. In 2025 the Seattle Worldcon admitted using ChatGPT to vet more than 1,300 program applicants. Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte, deputy Hugo administrator Esther MacCallum-Stewart and WSFS division head Cassidy resigned, Yoon Ha Lee refused Lodestar finalist status, and the committee said no AI touched the Hugo process.
Baycon’s chairs and Chengdu’s administrators both ran counts that only a handful of people saw, and a proposal for an independent audit of Hugo votes had not become a rule when Glasgow caught the 2024 fraud. If EPH answers a slate that announced itself in public, which rule answers a count that only three people ever saw?
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