I have occasionally blogged my reaction to previous years' Hugo shortlists. After all: it used to be the genre's blue riband award. Still, I think most folk would agree that it's been in quite serious credibility trouble for some years now. And now we have this year's shortlist, which rather puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer's stated reason for quitting writing his satirical songs: 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' Some of the fan categories are strong, and there are one or two worthwhile works dotted here and there; but taken as a whole, and noting especially its leap-up-and-grab-you-by-the-lapels elements (Robert Jordan? Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles? Vox Fucking Day?) it is the SF Award Shortlist equivalent of Kissinger's Nobel. It is self-satirising. It renders any subsequent comment by the likes of me superfluous.
Love the Tom Lehrer nod, and couldn't possibly agree with your points more.
ReplyDeleteOr as Douglas Adams said: "To summerize, people are a problem,"
ReplyDeleteWith vocal homophobes Larry Correia and Brandon Sanderson both nominated for Best Novel I'm quite disgusted the voting. What a shocking state for the Hugos to be in! I've always thought the SF/F community to be somewhat progressive. Clearly, I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteHuh? Brandon Sanderson has never made any homophobic comments.
Delete> Vox Fucking Day?
ReplyDeleteDid you think that Opera Vita Aeterna wasn't as good as the typical Hugo fare?
First of all.. since when is Larry Correia a homophobe? I didn't think anything scared him (cept maybe liberals)
ReplyDeleteSecondly, since when is Hugo voting based on the authors' political leanings instead of the writing?
Using your principle that there is such a thing as people with an unreasoning fear of gender-expression, I think the Hugo slate has heterophobes outnumbering the homophobes by a quite large margin. Either each exist, or neither.
ReplyDeleteFail Burton: well, there are a grievously large number of people who hate and fear hetero women. We call them 'misogynists'. Or were you trying to assert an absolute balance of prejudice? As if heterosexual love had been outawed for many centuries, heterosexuals imprisoned, executed, forced to live a lie and so on? But that would be a rather foolish thing to claim, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteNathan Barker: 'Secondly, since when is Hugo voting based on the authors' political leanings instead of the writing?' has the look of a rhetorical question; but it clearly has happened very often that people are voted onto the Hugo shortlist for reasons other than the quality of their writing. Vox Day is a terrible, terrible writer. Just for example.
Must admit to being surprised to see Vox Day on the shortlist when people have obviously ignored the film of Ender's Game because of Card's obnoxious views, and that is a much better SF film than anything that has made the list IMO.
ReplyDeleteIan Taylor
People didn't ignore Ender's Game because of Card being a lunatic (well some might have, but I doubt most cinemagoers even knew much about him), they mainly ignored it because it wasn't very good and came out at a time when films like Gravity were occupying most people's attention.
DeleteOddly enough, Day himself seems to agree that the nomination of his and Correia's work indicates that the Hugos do not pick out the best works, artistically speaking:
ReplyDeleteWin or lose the awards, Sad Puppies has served its purpose. The purpose of Sad Puppies, as Larry repeatedly explained, was three-fold. First, to test if the award process was fraudulent or not. To the credit of the LonCon people, we have learned it was not. Second, to prove that the awards are a mere popularity contest, contra the insistence of those who have repeatedly asserted they are evidence of literary quality and the intrinsic superiority of the nominated works. We have shown that it is. And third, to prove that the SF/F Right is more popular in the genre than the gatekeepers have insisted. We have demonstrated that to be the case. [My emphasis]
He also seems to believe, unlike some of his defenders, that the nomination is essentially about politics ("the SF/F Right is more popular in the genre than the gatekeepers have insisted").
The passage I quoted above is so weird that I'm honestly not sure whether I've just caught Day unintentionally seeming to imply that he thinks his work sucks, or whether he means what he says and actually thinks his work doesn't deserve the award.
That second point is seriously weird. Might it be a slightly warped anti-literature statement - as in, "we've proved that, if you encourage real people to vote (for a list of books), they vote for things they like goddammit (from that list), and the hell with your so-called literary quality"? Doesn't really make sense, but it makes a bit more sense than "who wants to write a good book if you can write a popular book?"
DeleteMy best guess is that his thinking goes like this:
Delete--If the Hugo nominations can be gamed by having some author get their fans to go and vote, then it can't reflect (at least not very well) any kind of real, enduring quality, because the Hugo nominations in any given year are simply accidental patterns created by which authors have or haven't mobilized their fanbases. (As far as I can tell, there is a lot of truth to this point)
--Because VD and Correia successfully gamed the Hugo nominations, they can be gamed, so (by the above point) they can't reflect real, enduring etc.
The problem with this is that it seems like any possible result of the experiment could have been spun in Day's favor. If Day's work hadn't gotten onto the shortlist (as, generally, it hasn't) this would have been evidence that the nominations don't reliably recognize quality (if you assume his work is good enough to be there, as he and his fans do). The fact that they now appear on the shortlist could, itself, be taken as evidence that the Hugos, imperfect as they may be, have just accurately recognized the quality of some particular thing called "Opera Vita Aeterna." (Many well-meaning defenders of Day have in fact taken this line!) So basically I think he's right that this is a good demonstration of the game-ability of the Hugo nominations, but based on what I've read in the past by him and people in his camp, I think he has a ready-made spin for any possible outcome. (If he hadn't demonstrated that the Hugos were gameable, that would have meant he was right about them not accurately reflecting literary quality, such as that of his own work. The point is "proven" by either outcome.)
The logic, I agree, is distinctly weird.
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