Hugos and publishing patterns

For all those disliking the Redshirts Hugo win: have you really looked at the competition?  Although there have been nominations for both of its predecessors, Blackout represents a subgenre which only some fans read at all; Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is a weak representative of stronger predecessors; the Robinson seems to be deeply polarizing -- people either love it or loathe it -- and Throne of the Crescent Moon, while promising, has an episodic structure that started to bog down about halfway through (also, being fantasy already gives it a bit of a handicap[1]).  It's a weak year, but consider that the nomination runner-up was Monster Hunter Legion. (The novels which people were suggesting earlier on, when nominations came out, as competition were rather further down the nominations list, now that we can see it: The Killing Moon was #7, Glamor in Glass #10, The Drowning Girl #11, The Hydrogen Sonata #12, and Railsea #13.)

[1]The Hugos are perceived to have a mild bias against fantasy (translation: there are lots of fantasies which earn the Hugo, but they frequently lose to somewhat less impressive "pure SF" (not necessarily hard, but untouched by any grey area fantasy cooties) in a run-off).  Significant or very well-regarded fantasy works which have lost to SF novels include: Throne of the Crescent Moon, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Palimpsest, and City on Fire. (Perdido Street Station also lost, but to a fantasy novel.)  However, 7 of the 15 winners since 2000 were fantasy novels, so the bias is not extreme.

Redshirts' main "problem" is that it's light.  Like everything else by Scalzi, it's competently done, accurately aimed at its market (and thus popular), and clever.  But it's light.

However, that raises an interesting observation about expectations and the current incentives which affect the structure and quality of many current genre novels.

It's accepted knowledge that the long, frequently rambling structure of the mid-Victorian novel is in part due to the incentives that serialization presented.  If you were a professional novelist (Dickens, Thackeray, Collins) or semi-professional (Trollope, who was a part-time author until partway through his career) it made the most financial sense to have an episodic, fairly straightforward structure and a relatively wordy style.  And sure enough, many novels from the period are serial, wordy novels.

Modern genre writing has a different set of incentives.  There are a few prominent writers who treat writing as a side activity, but many genre writers are full-time authors who depend on a system of advances in a publishing cycle where keeping your name in front of the public, and receiving regular income from advances, requires a book a year or so. (Authors who hit full-scale best-sellerdom are less tied to this, because the scale of their earnings allows them to take longer between books.) There are exceptions: Vernor Vinge, for example, retired as an academic only in 2000 to focus on writing, after A Deepness in the Sky (published seven years after its predecessor) was published; Adam Roberts is a full-time academic as well as an SF novelist. However, it's more typical to write full-time among the dominant author set: Seanan McGuire, John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Lois McMaster Bujold, George R.R. Martin (who is now successful enough to be able to take his time), Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson (also in the successful enough to modify the incentives category), Steven Erikson, Catherynne M. Valente, Peter Watts. (So-called "literary" authors have a different set of incentives, since more of their income is likely to come from a combination of grants and academic or semi-academic positions.)

In addition, the SF genre audience (at least) is relatively averse to "literary" characteristics: although some readers like the density of Pynchon or Stephenson, many don't, and the majority of the market for the bulk of SF/Fantasy have tastes such that putting in effort to push quality from "good enough" up to "excellent" is unlikely to increase sales significantly.

The incentive for most authors is thus to produce one or two works a year which are workmanlike but not "artistic".  Length will be limited, unless the work can be converted into a series (in which case an extended story arc becomes a little like a 19th-century serialization in larger chunks).

There are some obvious exceptions to this.  First novels will typically be the product of several years' work; novels by authors with either independent means or day jobs may take longer to come out and be more heavily reworked/rewritten than novels by professional authors. Thus Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell took ten years to write, for example.

If we look back at the 20th century, though, and think of the books which stand out as high points... well, at one extreme, The Lord of the Rings took about 20 years between being begun and being published, with multiple rewritings along the way. Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow also took years to write; A Dance To The Music Of Time took over 20 years to write, with 2-3 years between individual volumes. On the other hand, Brideshead Revisited took only months to write. Cherryh wrote Cyteen after becoming a full-time author and as part of an ongoing regular flow of novels,and LeGuin's major works were published within a relatively tight timeframe, which overlapped with the years when she was bringing up a family, and she has referred to the time as two people (herself and her husband) doing three full-time jobs.  By the time Doomsday Book was published, Connie Willis had been a full-time writer for some years and it was produced as part of a regular publication schedule.

So this doesn't mean that we're doomed to a flow of substandard novels -- not at all.  First, the vast majority of novels written and published under the current system are good: well-crafted, well-plotted, enjoyable, frequently clever. Secondly, authors do have a secondary incentive to try to break into the top rank if they can, and one way to do so is to write more ambitious works. (The other obvious way being to be very good at meeting the demands of a large market segment.)  Thirdly, there's little evidence that the structure provides disincentives for the Tolkiens of the world: what it does do is enable good authors to produce more merely good works than they would have been able to in the past. Finally, the record indicates that there are plenty of lasting, important, really well-written works which have been written and published within a relatively short timeframe.

However, it also means that on average, the best works of a normal year will tend to fall into that professional-author-at-a-good-enough-level category.  And Redshirts is a good example of that category, just as 2312, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, and Blackout are. (Ahmed's book is that other exception, the first novel, and he falls into the more "literary" category of the quasi-academic author as his other work.)