I received the following query with regard to the 2024 Hugo Awards:

Can you clarify one point for me?

Under Best Fanzine, File 770 apparently got 14 nominations and was carried through the EPH procedure (until eliminated in Round 33). Yet Brother Glyer in 2018 withdrew himself and File 770 permanently from all future consideration.

If nominators fail to become aware of this, or choose to disregard it e.g. by way of making some kind of public statement, I do not see that the administrators are at fault.

But why was File 770 not excluded at once, with a suitable notice, as e.g. for System Collapse, under Best Novel?

I have replied:

You ask why we did not exclude the nominating votes for File 770 from the 2024 Hugo nomination vote tallies, bearing in mind Mike Glyer’s declared withdrawal back in 2018.

In my view, the duty of the Hugo Administrator is to ascertain the will of the voters, and then (and only then) to assess the conformity of voters’ choices with the rules.

For that reason, we do not check the eligibility of any nominee other than those that make it to the top six, or which replace any of the top six which are disqualified or withdrawn. Had File 770 qualified numerically for the ballot, we would then have contacted Mike Glyer, who would have then had the option to decline or not. In fact this is precisely what happened in 2019, when I was also Administrator.

It is not realistic or reasonable to expect Hugo Administrators to track every public statement of intent from potential finalists – there are an awful lot of them! Also, Mike Glyer would have been within his rights to change his mind and accept the nomination if File 770 had qualified; it is not the Hugo Administrator’s job to hold a nominee accountable for a statement that they made in 2018.

You also ask “Why was File 770 not excluded at once, with a suitable notice, as e.g. for System Collapse under Best Novel?”

I’m afraid you are under a misapprehension here. As noted above, File 770 was neither included nor excluded; we did not make a formal determination of its eligibility in 2024 at any stage. (Though our researchers gave us a strong indication that it would be eligible if it qualified for the ballot.)

As for System Collapse, Martha Wells had not made any prior public or private statement of her intention to decline the nomination. After we counted the nominating votes, we contacted Ms Wells with the news that two of her novels had qualified for the ballot. She replied declining the nomination for one of them and accepting for the other. System Collapse was not excluded “at once”, but only after the votes had been counted and the author consulted.

I hope that this clarifies the situation.

Here for reference are the statistics for Best Novel and Best Fanzine.