The Hugo Awards Kerfuffle...

[Toby Frost]

That's not a red shirt - that's a red banner! He's a commie!

A few random thoughts:

I don't think the left is any more independently-minded than the right (someone once referred to a herd of independent minds - maybe it was Nick Cohen, but I'm not sure). The Requires Hate debacle is unusual in terms of scale, but demonstrates a familiar symptom. In the frantic rush to be on-side (usually the best way to prove your loyalty is to denounce someone less loyal) basic decency was forgotten and fairly normal people became idiots, because one nutcase either tricked them or gave them an excuse. Then many earnest tears were shed. It won't happen again, until the next time it happens.

On the counter side, I agree that the puppies are probably not a single bloc, politically speaking. They seem to range from exasperated semi-conservatives to truly crazy people. The view seems to be that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", as Larry Correia explicitly says. I think they should be less generous with their friendship.

David Selig makes a very good point. The puppy agenda (great title for a book by Robert Ludlum, by the way) would artificially freeze SFF, and not just in terms of the appearence or role of minorities or women. We would forever be stuck in the land of the Competent Man, forever saving the world and never actually improving it (which itself is a sort of political statement). Not only would SF become the lightweight robots-and-explosions stuff that many people who don't read it believe it to be, but it would become very dull. The trick, I suppose, is to support books that entertain and explore new territory.

 

[K. Riehl]

I remember a discussion that Lois Bujold had about the relative benefits of winning a Hugo. The first establishes your name and leads to about a 15-20% increase in sales for a period of a year or two. Subsequent wins have a lesser impact. "Hugo Winning Author" on the cover will get me to pick up the book and examine it more closely but it is no longer the decision maker that it used to be for me.
I stopped taking the Hugo's seriously when Harry Potter book number whatever won.

 

[Connavar]

I never took Hugo award seriously unless its the year its won by the greats of the genre historically. Bester won the first best novel,Heinlein,Vance etc

A big reason i never took the modern winner seriously is because to me an award is like Cannes festival award. A jury of creators decide what they think its the year best. Popular vote award is why i never took awards like Hugo seriously. I dont care what the fans popular vote says and what the clicks like SP decide is the writers to nominate. This current Hugo issue is too messy.

A SFF award is to me like Toby Frost says its recommendation of quality books and not books won by political reason, popular vote.

World Fantasy is the only book award i respect because the best, the most talented modern fantasy authors has won it at some point, better gender balance between the winners too.

 

[Anushka Mokosh]

Brian, if I messed up, move this wherever it belongs ahahaha

Anyway, Martin seems to want to rant about this and he plans to make a series of blog posts about it to speak his mind about it.

Here is the first one.

http://grrm.livejournal.com/417125.html

What do you guys think?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The whole idea of a "slate" of stories to vote for boggles my mind. Surely the whole idea of the awards is that each book and each story should be evaluated on its own individual merits? Not in relation to any group agenda, no matter what that agenda, no matter whether one agrees with that agenda in whole and in part. When you vote for a book, it should be because you think it's the best (or the best on the ballot), not because someone else says you should. To do anything else is to turn the voting into a farce. (Some will say that it was always a farce. In that case, this sort of thing only makes it more farcical.)

If any one of us thinks that there should be more books of a certain kind or written by a certain color or gender of author, then surely the way to go about that is to recommend those books to other readers as books to look for and to read. People will then either heed that advice and read the books or ignore that advice and not read the books -- or do one or the other in spite of that recommendation -- depending on whether or not they respect the person doing the recommending. Anyway, sales matter more than awards in terms of what is going to be published in the future. Apparently awards do help sales but there are other things that help more. And sales, more than anything, are what bring books to the attention of the readers who will then become voters, so it's really rather circular.

There is nothing dishonest about any of that. If the results sometimes frustrate us, then the only solution, I suppose, is to speak up for the books we ourselves admire**, recommend them, talk about them, make other people aware of them (and speak up with our wallets by actually buying them new).

But the moment anyone starts telling other people which books to vote for, no matter what their reasons, no matter what their agenda, I think something is very, very wrong. It's not like we're voting someone into office and will have to live with the way they govern us for the next several years. It's none of our business how other people vote. When voting for awards like the Hugo, we are supposed to be thinking about merit, and specifically about the nominees for one specific year. Once people start voting for a slate of books, they are allowing other people to do their thinking for them. Once people look years ahead or years back to decide who to vote for this year, something is wrong. It happens all the time, of course, and there is no way to stop it (I am not even certain that it would necessarily be a good thing if it never happened at all) but when people start encouraging it then something is not right.

So to sum up my personal take on what readers and voters should do: Buy books of the sort you would like to see more of (whether it's style, subject matter, new perspectives brought in by more diversity, fair representation of old values that you think people are losing sight of ... whatever else makes a book one you want to read), and if they are books you find well-written, enjoyable, perceptive, or whatever else you value in the books you read, however you measure quality, then recommend that others buy and read them, too.

After that leave how other people choose to vote for awards alone.

____
**And here I mean in discussions about books in general, on blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. Not every reader gives a hoot about awards anyway, and they may be actively avoiding such discussions. If you wait until it's time to nominate books and you only discuss them in that context, you're speaking to only a very limited number of people.

 

[J-Sun]

I look forward to his posts. He did at least three things in that intro: pointed people directly to the sources of both sides, lamented the abuse both sides seem to revel in, and allowed that it might not be ordinary Hugo procedure but was in no way "illegal". Now, I suspect we'll disagree on What It All Means (though I'll allow that it could be as bad as I fear rather than as good as I hope) but - so far - it seems Martin is using reason, balance, and fair play to get across his disagreement with the SP faction and that's all deserving of respect.

I'm going to ask a mod if this should be merged into the current main thread on this topic. But it's quite possible this should remain separate, being of direct interest to Martin fans. If it stays separate, I'll link to it from that thread if no one else does. Thanks for posting it.

 

[Nerds_feather]

To continue the thread on what SP is "really about," I don't think it's an attempt to promote "white dudes" over others. (RP is another story--its architects have their own agenda.) But neither do I think it's just about "fun books vs. literary books" or "secret campaigns" or whatever other rhetorical frame its advocates have concocted. Rather, I'm pretty sure it's about values, and a sense that books with "traditional values" (i.e. the things that conservative Americans venerate) are being supplanted by books that challenge those values. Specifically, I'm talking about various combinations of:

• Gender relations where "men are men and women are women"
• Conflicts with a clear "good guys vs. bad guys" dynamic
  
• Futures that are distinctly "American" (the America in Space trope I bang on about)
• Heroes who are "rugged individualists" on the Western pioneer model
• Soldiers and wars that are unproblematically heroic

...and more along these lines.

I think people who are fans of this kind of thing sometimes feel threatened by the incursion of books that problematize, deconstruct or outright reject any or more of these, and this is not only what most recent Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel do, in fact, have in common, but it's what most major new trends in SF/F over the past 3 decades have in common. Gritty fantasy? Check. New Space Opera? Check! New Weird? Yup, that too. Neo-feminist SF? Uh-huh. Biopunk? You guessed it. Metahumor SF? Once again.

Of course a lot of Hugo nominees only do these things in superficial fashion. Ancillary Justice, for example, presents an ungendered culture, but reallly doesn't explore it to any meaningful degree. Redshirts problematizes the idea of heroic war on face, I guess, but at base it's an uncomplicated in-joke for fans of the original Star Trek series. These are entertainment-first books--and not even close to the literary SF/F Torgerson claims to be standing up against, but which consistently fails to garner nominations for Best Novel.

(I mean, seriously, Station Eleven is not only the best and most literary SF novel of the year (IMO), it's also the second best-selling SF book of the year, yet it's nowhere to be found among the Hugo--or Nebula--nominees. Neither is The Bone Clocks, The Peripheral or Memory of Water.)

But here's the thing--it doesn't matter if they are literary or not, page-turners or not, or even substantively progressive/liberal/left oriented: all that matters is whether they fail to meet the above criteria for the "correct" values, with extra bonus points if they invert or upend the above criteria. And, while a significant portion of the SP slate may not be white or male or conservative, the books and stories promoted do reflect the "traditional" values outlined above--straightforwardly and unproblematically. This is what SP is really about, an organized campaign against those who approach SF/F from the other moral direction.

...that, and "giving the 'SJW's' a blackeye" (despite, apparently, not understanding what the term actually refers to). Let's be honest here, and admit that this is a big part of the agenda. It's so transparently true, I have a hard time understanding how anyone can't see that.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Maybe forget the Hugos and see what all the Chronners didn't regret buying (sometimes lots of people buy something and it's rubbish, a sort of media hype / mass hysteria has gripped them. If 6 months later every charity shop has 10 copies it's maybe a BAD sign!)

 

[Nerds_feather]

David Selig makes a very good point. The puppy agenda (great title for a book by Robert Ludlum, by the way) would artificially freeze SFF, and not just in terms of the appearence or role of minorities or women. We would forever be stuck in the land of the Competent Man, forever saving the world and never actually improving it (which itself is a sort of political statement). Not only would SF become the lightweight robots-and-explosions stuff that many people who don't read it believe it to be, but it would become very dull. The trick, I suppose, is to support books that entertain and explore new territory.

Really well put.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I stopped taking the Hugo's seriously when Harry Potter book number whatever won.

It did??
I enjoyed the HP on a sort of re-reading Enid Blyton level. But really, other than for sales volume the series deserves no recognition at all.

 

[MWagner]

But the moment anyone starts telling other people which books to vote for, no matter what their reasons, no matter what their agenda, I think something is very, very wrong. It's not like we're voting someone into office and will have to live with the way they govern us for the next several years. It's none of our business how other people vote.

One of the problems is that voting is done by fans, and the ringleaders of fandom today tend to be well-known authors. So someone who is a huge fan of Joe Scalzi is going to ask Joe Scalzi to recommend what books she should read. And Joe Scalzi (I'm just using him as an example of an influential author) might well recommend his favourites of the year. And since he is both a reader, and a professional who has peers and friends who are also authors, he might recommend his friends. And who knows, maybe his friends will recommend him too.

And setting aside the Hugos for the moment, this kind of thing happens all the time. I've been following the blogs of several established SFF authors over the last year or so, mainly to pick up tips on writing and publishing. And without fail, they all give enthusiastic recommendations of the works of all their peers in the same niche -the people who sit beside them on panels, and who have a similar fanbase. I don't know if the circle of fan-sharing is a deliberate effort to promote their own work or not, but something about it makes me uneasy. The triple role of authors today as niche celebrities, social media alphas, and working professionals presents some ethical problems, in my opinion.

 

[Nerds_feather]

One of the problems is that voting is done by fans, and the ringleaders of fandom today tend to be well-known authors. So someone who is a huge fan of Joe Scalzi is going to ask Joe Scalzi to recommend what books she should read. And Joe Scalzi (I'm just using him as an example of an influential author) might well recommend his favourites of the year. And since he is both a reader, and a professional who has peers and friends who are also authors, he might recommend his friends. And who knows, maybe his friends will recommend him too.

And setting aside the Hugos for the moment, this kind of thing happens all the time. I've been following the blogs of several established SFF authors over the last year or so, mainly to pick up tips on writing and publishing. And without fail, they all give enthusiastic recommendations of the works of all their peers in the same niche -the people who sit beside them on panels, and who have a similar fanbase. I don't know if the circle of fan-sharing is a deliberate effort to promote their own work or not, but something about it makes me uneasy. The triple role of authors today as niche celebrities, social media alphas, and working professionals presents some ethical problems, in my opinion.

Some people have publicly spoken out against any sort of awards-related promotion by authors (for example, Adam Roberts) prior to this whole thing happening. I don't happen to agree with that position--I think it's fine, and quite different from organizing a bloc of voters to vote down the line on a list created to make a political point and "get" your perceived enemies. But just so you know, you are not alone. This is a very contentious debate right now among authors.

 

[chopper]

hmm. there's a difference between John Scalzi saying "my novel is eligible for award nominations, folks, what else would you like to see nominated?" and Vox Dull saying "here's a slate - vote for it".

"ringleaders of fandom" tend to be (though not exclusively - see Book Smugglers, nerdsfeather, Geek Syndicate, Bookworm Blues, etc etc) well-known authors because - well, because well-known authors tend to be ringleaders of fandom too

as far as "fan-sharing" goes - yes, i've been to conventions and met authors, and those i've really liked, i wouldn't have any problem nominating them for awards or voting for them once they have those nominations. no prizes for being a tool, after all. i don't think it's deliberate in the way you suggest; at the same time, there's so many people who *won't* engage with the community (communities) at large and then get miffed when folks don't beat a path to their door...

more positively, the Clarke Award shortlist looks rather good, yes?

 

[Nerds_feather]

Btw, George R. R. Martin has weighed in:

A group of writers and fans, many of them of a conservative political and/or literary bent, felt that they were not being adequately represented in the Hugo Awards, and put together their own slate of stories and writers they wanted on the ballot. They blogged, they organized, they got out their voters, and they were wildly successful... to the extent that this year's Hugo ballot is dominated by their choices.

Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterizations.

You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules.

But many things can be legal, and still bad... and this is one of those, from where I sit.

I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo Awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired.

I will expand on that, and explain why, in the posts that follow.

 

[Nerds_feather]

hmm. there's a difference between John Scalzi saying "my novel is eligible for award nominations, folks, what else would you like to see nominated?" and Vox Dull saying "here's a slate - vote for it".

"Here's a list of stuff I like" vs. mobilizing voters to vote lockstep on a slate in order to prove a political point. Those seem pretty different to me, like the difference between saying "I want stricter gun control" on facebook and running a voter registration drive for the Democratic Party (or local, non-US equivalent) in your local town.

"ringleaders of fandom" tend to be (though not exclusively - see Book Smugglers, nerdsfeather, Geek Syndicate, Bookworm Blues, etc etc) well-known authors because - well, because well-known authors tend to be ringleaders of fandom too

I'm flattered that you think so, but none of my recommended novels made the shortlist (and only one did last year...and the really, really obvious one at that), so I imagine my blog's influence is actually quite limited

 

[chopper]

see, i mention people i've heard of

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It's sort of interesting that people are using Social Justice in a pejorative way, even if (as I realize they are) they're being sarcastic. Is it possible that anyone is actually against Social Justice? Surely the question of what different people regard as a just society is what this is all about, and who does and who doesn't think that SFF books and SFF awards have any role in promoting their own particular version.

I think it would be more productive -- not here, because I think the subject would be too inflammatory -- to discuss what a just society would be like.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

And since he is both a reader, and a professional who has peers and friends who are also authors, he might recommend his friends. And who knows, maybe his friends will recommend him too.

But sometimes these friendships begin because certain authors enjoy and/or respect each other's writing. Or, sometimes because these friendships are long-standing, these authors have influenced each other's writing, so that what each produces more and more resembles what the other (or others) perceive as quality writing. So such recommendations are often a good guide to what their fans might enjoy. It's not invariably true, of course, because what the writer likes in the work of their friend might not be something the reader likes at all, but it may be true more often than not.

Besides, people will also buy books on the recommendations of a random stranger met on a forum, even before they get a good sense of what that stranger likes. Ultimately, it's all about who speaks up, how vehemently or persuasively, and in what venue.

 

[Connavar]

But sometimes these friendships begin because certain authors enjoy and/or respect each other's writing. Or, sometimes because these friendships are long-standing, these authors have influenced each other's writing, so that what each produces more and more resembles what the other (or others) perceive as quality writing. So such recommendations are often a good guide to what their fans might enjoy. It's not invariably true, of course, because what the writer likes in the work of their friend might not be something the reader likes at all, but it may be true more often than not.

Besides, people will also buy books on the recommendations of a random stranger met on a forum, even before they get a good sense of what that stranger likes. Ultimately, it's all about who speaks up, how vehemently or persuasively, and in what venue.

That is very true in my experience and understandable. I have read,heard of many writers who became friends with other writers because they admired their work. Its easy to understand that you have something in common, something you like about the other person if he/she is writing what you as the other writer think is quality writing. Literary history has shown that through the ages up to today.

As a fan, reader personally i see no better recommendation than what a writer i trust to be quality writer says about another writer. Its all about trust if you cant trust the taste, knowledge of writing by an writer you admire than you cant trust anyone's recommendation. I have found alltime fav writers because their famous writer friend who i admired beforehand wrote,mentioned how good their writing to him/her.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Read GRRM's blog post. To my mind, the way to go is to declare the award null and void and devalue it.* Once no one pays attention to it then it becomes a nil event which, frankly, might be what it deserves by keeping voting a. So insular (you have to be a member to vote which is a little elitist and pricey enough) and b. So open to something like this (which is linked to pt a.)

really, until the ordinary reader and fan is engaged and able to vote, how can I ever view it as the voice of sff?

* yes, yes I know how naive that it. Let's call it a change in culture and erode it bit by bit...