Are SFF awards out of touch?

[Brian G Turner]

Whenever a big name organisation gives out awards for best fiction, there's always discussion on the rights and wrongs of such decisions.

Personally I've avoided such discussions - every award system is subject to its own rules and quirks. I accept that, and it has no bearing on my personal life, my book buying decisions, or what I read.

I've always presumed that there's nothing wrong with a little flag waving for the genre, wherever that leads.

But.

Having looked at the lists of award winning novels, I'm left scratching my head at what exactly any of these awards are trying to say or promote:

Hugo awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Nebula awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award_for_Best_Novel

World Fantasy awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award_for_Best_Novel

British Fantasy Awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth_Award

When I think on whom I would consider giants in the epic fantasy genre, I'm astonished to find nothing of them among the winners.

Of course, the winners are picked from the wider SFF genre. In which case, I would expect some astonishing books.

Instead, looking at the past couple of decades at least, I'm left stumped as to how most of these winners represent the best of science fiction and fantasy in any way.

Or am I just being narrow minded?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Some of my favourite writers and books are in there. (which might say more about my reading tastes.)

There's not a lot of epic represented - outside of Jordan/Branderson - to be fair. And there seems to be an imbalance to sf rather than fantasy compared to sales.

But there are big names in there - Bujold, Gaiman, Robinson, Scalzi, Mieville. Also, some of the books in there were, genuinely, original. Jo Walton's Among Others, for instance, was very original and fresh, but she is an emerging name, rather than established. Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane was truly fantastic.

I wonder, too, if there is a UK/US bent? Bujold is only known in genre circles in the UK, for instance, and hard to get in shops. Are there some of these authors better known to US readers?

 

[J-Sun]

Having looked at the lists of award winning novels, I'm left scratching my head at what exactly any of these awards are trying to say or promote:

Hugo awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Nebula awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award_for_Best_Novel

World Fantasy awards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award_for_Best_Novel

Well, the Hugos are supposed to promote the novel people who pay for Worldcon memberships like, the Nebulas are supposed to promote what the remaining block of people who've both sold 3+ stories to professional markets and have bothered to keep paying dues to the SFWA like, and I don't know what the WFA is really about but is presumably supposed to promote the favorite novel of some small self-selected body of folks like the others.

Instead, looking at the past couple of decades at least, I'm left stumped as to how most of these winners represent the best of science fiction and fantasy in any way.

Well, I'm not saying a word about the individual quality of particular books as the best in particular years (which they almost never are) and am only able to address the SF, so looking at the Hugo/Nebula lists, still, lists saying "Robinson, Bujold, Stephenson, Haldeman, Willis, Vinge, Sawyer, Scalzi, Bear, Butler, and Le Guin are either good or sell a lot of books" is not unreasonable. (I only particularly like Haldeman and Vinge and sometimes Butler and used to like Bear and Le Guin outside the timeframe under discussions but still...) There are a few "first novel bandwagons" and some "this one is overtly literary" and some "this meets the political agenda of the moment" and so on, but it still ends up being a list of mostly popular and esteemed names, at least. But, no, these are not cutting edge or unarguably great or necessarily eternal masterpieces or anything.

And there seems to be an imbalance to sf rather than fantasy compared to sales.

Aigh! Aigh! There's no imbalance at all considering the Hugos are in honor of Hugo Gernsback and are supposed to represent the World Science Fiction Convention and that the Nebulas came out of an organization founded by Damon Knight called (originally) the Science Fiction Writers of America. Now the group has added "Fantasy" in its name and half the awards of each go to fantasy works and no SF novels win World Fantasy Awards and they aren't suddenly called the World Fantasy and Science Fiction Awards. (Pet peeve, here. The Hugos should be all SF, the WFA should be all fantasy and the Nebulas should be all SF but, given the change in their remit, can reasonably be half and half.)

I wonder, too, if there is a UK/US bent? Bujold is only known in genre circles in the UK, for instance, and hard to get in shops. Are there some of these authors better known to US readers?

Likely - I'm no Willis fan but I find it astounding that any SFF fan might not have heard of her, yet it seems many (especially UK) people haven't. And Bujold is huge here. I suspect Scalzi, Haldeman, and Vinge and perhaps others are also bigger in the US than in the UK.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Thanks, J-Sun. Until I read this article, I'd thought the Hugo and Nebula were primarily sci fi, and then saw the fantasy and wondered was I daft.

And, no, I've never heard of Willis. Nor would I have come across Bujold but for here...

 

[Zoe Mackay]

1) "Classics" are almost impossible to identify in an contemporaneous award. Only the passage of time does that, and even then the process is suspect and open to interpretation. Things now regarded as classics will be forgotten in the future, things currently regarded as... apocrypha will be held as classics. The canon constantly evolves and changes. Any award trying to locate them is committing folly.
2) I wouldn't expect to like every book that wins an award, and any award only reflects the people involved in selecting it. The Hugos, for example, are populist and selected by Worldcon attendees. My personal taste, as impeccable as it is, is not a sensible judge of what should win awards.
3) If you look past the winners, and at the shortlist nominees, you get a much better view of what was going on in the genre at a particular time. Whilst books get missed (and it's worth noting the flukes of calendar in what gets nominated - it's often the case that if you come out at the wrong time of year, or in the wrong country first, you might not get onto shortlists - this is what movie studios work very hard to manipulate around Oscars time).
4) Side-genres do badly. YA does badly. Niche does badly (of course, that's why it's niche).

In short: I don't think it's worth complaining about, even if sometimes it feels quixotic.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I wouldn't have thought epic fantasy a niche, though! Truly, I'm amazed to see no big epic fantasy author win anything. Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, David Gemmell, Joe Abercrombie - not a single best-selling epic fantasy author on any winning rolls.

 

[Null_Zone]

Whilst there are excellent writers being nominated, looking down the list the repetition of names seems rather telling. Almost as if an author comes out with an outstanding piece of work and for a while all that follows becomes the current definition of excellent genre writing to the seeming exclusion of others. Just like everything else there are genre authors that are percieved to be cutting edge based purely on past experiance whilst others fail to make the cool list.

 

[Nerds_feather]

Non-juried awards typically reward popularity among a given audience, rather than any objectivity-approaching standard of "best." Nebulas are more reliable than the Hugos, I think, because the voting public is made up of professionals. But I honestly find the juried awards, like the Clarke or Locus Awards, to be much more interesting and reliable.

As far as why there's so little epic fantasy, here are some thoughts:

• Epic fantasy is viewed by non-readers as low-brow. This may be changing after the success of A Song of Ice and Fire alerted many to the existence of complex and well-written epic fantasy, but these prejudices remain (and, of course, are in many cases justified).
  
• The fact that there are so few standalone novels in epic fantasy undoubtedly makes winning awards difficult.

 

[Zoe Mackay]

Non-juried awards typically reward popularity among a given audience, rather than any objectivity-approaching standard of "best."

I think that there is no such thing as objectively-assessed quality, beyond a certain level of competence, and it's the rock that so much conversation dashes itself against. I think quality exists only (a) in context and (b) in the assessment of the judges, with all the bias, prejudices, and preferences they have. There's nothing wrong with this at all! There is something wrong with pretending it doesn't, in my opinion.

• The fact that there are so few standalone novels in epic fantasy undoubtedly makes winning awards difficult.

This. In general, the first book doesn't get enough attention, the second is... eh, the middle of the series, and by the time we reached the end, most people have got bored of it. And there aren't... many... epic fantasy series that really do finish on a strong note. Some, but the slow fizzle is more common. Question: Can you write epic fantasy in only one book? Or is it not epic unless it is impossible to carry in one hand?

 

[Vince W]

The problem I have with the awards is how many people read enough of the nominees to make an actual informed decision one way or the other. As I stated in another thread I didn't read any of the nominees (okay, I had read most of one, but that involved a lot of previously read material) so I couldn't vote one way or the other.

Take the Hugos, how many people read all the nominees? 80%? 55%? And if they didn't read them all did Ancillary Justice win simply because more people read that one than any other? I'm not trying to take anything away from any of the nominees, but it does beg the question are the people voting informed enough to make a balanced choice? I'm not sure.

 

[Kylara]

Same thing happens in the "literary" awards for "normal" fiction. The books that win may not be very good, but they are literary and high brow - they are novels that know that you know that they know they are novels and are enjoying and playing with that fact. That makes a lot of them annoying to read, and often nothing much happens, but they are "literary" and quite complex from a writing point of view. There are the occassional very good books which win, but often I read them (people buy them for me as presents assuming I won't have them as they are often "new" books) and so far I find them bleh. I am still reading one I was given 3 years ago. I can appreciate the "skill" and "literaryness" but I do get annoyed at books where nothing happens. I like reading the shorts from the Nebulas as they tend to be fairly interesting but again there is the odd one which seems a little bleh. But then again I love reading PKDs shorts and think many of those are award worthy - but it obviously depends on what the award is for. If there was an award for nothing much happening then a lot of winning books would fulfill those criteria, if there was an award for middle book in a series that was incredibly hard to get through then I know of quite a few that would be vying for 1st place!

 

[Brian G Turner]

I added a link to the British Fantasy Awards (BFA) to the original post. It does seem to be more for horror writers, though. And they've certainly had their share of controversy:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/oct/06/british-fantasy-award-winner-returns-prize

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I wouldn't have thought epic fantasy a niche, though! Truly, I'm amazed to see no big epic fantasy author win anything. Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, David Gemmell, Joe Abercrombie - not a single best-selling epic fantasy author on any winning rolls.

Well, Sanderson and Jordan were combined winners, and GRRM. Plus, as mentioned by J-Sun earlier, the Hugo and Nebula are more focused on sf...?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Ah, yes, Jordan and Sanderson won a joint Hugo this year. Apologies, didn't see that. Even still, that's awfully late recognition.

GRRM was nominated a few times for a Hugo and Nebula, but I don't see him winning anything?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But the addition of fantasy is, I think, relatively recent. Does fantasy as a genre need a higher profile award, I wonder...

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The World Fantasy Award is pretty high profile. However, although I haven't been paying attention lately, at least a few years ago it seemed to be slanted toward horror.

What it comes down to is what the people who care enough to vote happen to like, and that's never all the people who could vote for any particular award. Not everyone in SFWA votes for the Nebula, not everyone with a WorldCon membership votes for the Hugo.

 

[Nerds_feather]

I think that there is no such thing as objectively-assessed quality, beyond a certain level of competence, and it's the rock that so much conversation dashes itself against. I think quality exists only (a) in context and (b) in the assessment of the judges, with all the bias, prejudices, and preferences they have. There's nothing wrong with this at all! There is something wrong with pretending it doesn't, in my opinion.

I don't believe in pure objectivity, but I do believe in relative objectivity. Or, put another way, serious attempts to approach questions in as objective (and critical) a manner as possible. I used the term "objectivity-approaching" because I think you can get relatively closer to objectivity, even if you can never quite make it all the way.

This. In general, the first book doesn't get enough attention, the second is... eh, the middle of the series, and by the time we reached the end, most people have got bored of it. And there aren't... many... epic fantasy series that really do finish on a strong note. Some, but the slow fizzle is more common. Question: Can you write epic fantasy in only one book? Or is it not epic unless it is impossible to carry in one hand?

I think so; but there's more money and interest in series.

 

[J-Sun]

1) "Classics" are almost impossible to identify in an contemporaneous award. Only the passage of time does that, and even then the process is suspect and open to interpretation. Things now regarded as classics will be forgotten in the future, things currently regarded as... apocrypha will be held as classics. The canon constantly evolves and changes. Any award trying to locate them is committing folly.

I don't dispute the gist of your post in general but look at the Hugos from their start up to the start of the Nebulas - The Demolished Man, Double Star, The Big Time, A Case of Conscience, Starship Troopers, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, Way Station, The Wanderer, and Dune with only a whiff on They'd Rather Be Right (which was noted as a weird choice at the time, I think). Otherwise, all these books are still esteemed and most are still read and discussed and considered not just good books, but great. Bester, Heinlein, Leiber, Dick, Herbert, all still huge and Blish and Miller still right behind, even with Miller's small body of work (and Blish's not-huge). Simak may be fading but is now frequently mentioned as someone who should be mentioned more frequently. And compare this to a Scalzi fanstroking joke, a Willis mess, a couple of first novels, four fantasies or so, an arguably lesser Vinge, a somewhat mainstream lit book, etc. for the last ten. Not a whole lot of these are discussed even now, compared to the discussion about books from a half century or more ago.

Non-juried awards typically reward popularity among a given audience, rather than any objectivity-approaching standard of "best." Nebulas are more reliable than the Hugos, I think, because the voting public is made up of professionals. But I honestly find the juried awards, like the Clarke or Locus Awards, to be much more interesting and reliable.

I'll go back to Robert's post on the subjectivity of things here. More reliable for you, which is great and I don't mean a thing against it. But I find the Nebulas and juried awards to be more insular and cliched (they are often SFF ("literary SF") in the same way that "literary fiction" is actually a genre). (And the Nebulas are not given out by professionals, as such, but by a certain kind of professional - many professionals have quit the organization - some loudly.) The only thing worse than letting a bunch of fans determine what's good is letting a handful of critics. That said, there are some, sometimes paradoxical, gems in the little lists.

GRRM was nominated a few times for a Hugo and Nebula, but I don't see him winning anything?

Not for novel, but he won a Hugo for best novella for a piece set in the same world as his fantasy novels. Ironic that one of the few wins for your major bestselling heroic fantasy epic guys is for short fiction. Especially when that form is even less popular with most fantasy folks than with SF folks.

But the addition of fantasy is, I think, relatively recent. Does fantasy as a genre need a higher profile award, I wonder...

I should be clear that it's a recent official, standard addition but, before there was a WFA (and after there was a brief, not-well-remembered IFA), the Hugos did go to at least a couple of fantasy pieces - a Davidson and a Leiber. But when there are major fantasy awards, they didn't tend to and I'm speaking of principles and tradition - there's nothing in the Worldcon bylaws that make it illegal or anything. But, yeah, the SF(F)WA officially changed around '96 or so - mid 90s anyway, and the prevalence of fantasies in the Hugos (maybe beginning with the staggering Harry Potter win, which Rowling let the Worldcon know she could not have cared less about) is also fairly recent.

I agree with Teresa that the WFA is pretty big but, considering it's THE fantasy award, it really doesn't seem to have or have ever had the importance and interest that the Hugos and Nebulas used to and is arguably less well known and discussed than they are even now. Bruce Sterling, around '83 or '84 or so, described SF as lying "in a reptilian torpor" and went on to describe fantasy as "its small, squishy cousin...creep[ing] gecko-like across the bookstands" but it's certainly not a small cousin anymore and it does seem like it ought to have a major award that people actually pay attention to.

 

[Nerds_feather]

I'll go back to Robert's post on the subjectivity of things here. More reliable for you, which is great and I don't mean a thing against it. But I find the Nebulas and juried awards to be more insular and cliched (they are often SFF ("literary SF") in the same way that "literary fiction" is actually a genre). (And the Nebulas are not given out by professionals, as such, but by a certain kind of professional - many professionals have quit the organization - some loudly.) The only thing worse than letting a bunch of fans determine what's good is letting a handful of critics. That said, there are some, sometimes paradoxical, gems in the little lists.

"Objectivity" is a red herring, as I didn't say that, but rather "objectivity-approaching." And I've now also stated that I don't believe such a thing as true objectivity exists. I do, however, think trying to be objective and critical puts you in a whole different universe from not trying or, as often appears to the case with some voting-based awards, being unable to try. Put another way, one type of person tries not to let his/her preference for the Xbox platform over the Sony PlayStation platform influence his/her assessment of The Last of Us (a PS3 exclusive); the other type of person writes angry letters accusing gaming magazines that positively reviewed The Last of Us of entering into conspiracies against saintly Microsoft. An extreme example, but you see my point? No one is objective, but some can be more objective than others. And with WorldCon, where you have to pay to vote, who is going to do that?

As for the SFWA, I don't buy into your take on the current situation. It's a professional association of, well, professional writers. Most who pay dues don't care one way or another for the political angles, but rather are members for networking opportunities and to take advantage of services--for example, prior to the enactment of the ACA, the SFWA (along with similar associations) represented one of the only ways full-time writers could get health insurance. (It still gets health insurance for its members at a considerable discount over market price, I hear.) Most who fall out of membership, by contrast, do because they simply stop paying dues A smaller number are actively involved in the political side of things, and an even smaller number quit because of it. I know this on authority of an ex-executive of SFWA, who I've spoken to about it, and who I have every reason to trust. Insofar as the Nebulas are concerned, I find their choices consistently higher quality than the Hugos, which tend to reward a certain kind of writer and often not even their best work. (That "kind" of writer shifts over time: at one point it was libertarianish "hard" SF writers; now it's liberalish "soft" SF writers.)

IMO the Locus, Clarke and now Kitschie awards all do a far better job picking out books marked by (yes) literary qualities, i.e. the mark of writing that has lasting artistic value

 

[tinkerdan]

I can't say that I know many of the winners in the last ten years, but that goes a lot into saying that my reading is not swayed by award winners.

Still I am of the impression that there is a lot of impact expected from the awards; enough that wherever possible a publisher would try to leverage their books into the nominations. A win seems to encourage more sales and the longer they can sustain momentum from that the better is for them and the author.

I might have been influence from as long ago as 50 years by some awards and up to around 20 years ago because I seem to be aware of most of the winners as I gaze through the lists. More recent I am hard pressed to find one or two names I can honestly say I am familiar with and even those I have only read a meager selection from and in all cases-from what I can tell-I've not read the award winning stuff.

Now whether that means I should because it might be better than what I have read of their work; I don't know.

I am not compelled to find out.