*Sigh* The Hugos, again
Apr. 3rd, 2013 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeIt's Hugo nomination season, and we have another crop of complaints about the nominees. Most notably, about the nomination of the same authors regularly, coupled with the complaint that the Hugos award popularity rather than quality.
Let's tackle the first complaint first. Yes, it is problematic that very weak works by popular authors get nominated (I'll let Captain Vorpatril's Alliance pass, for the moment, but the nomination of Diplomatic Immunity a few years ago was definitely offbeat. [ETA: I checked, and realize that DI was nominated for the Nebulas but not the Hugos. However, Cryoburn, which was almost as weak, was a Hugo nominee.] And as for Willis' Blackout/All Clear...). However, every cure I've seen is worse than the disease. There is a very real likelihood, given the power-law relation between authors in skill as well as popularity, that one would expect the very best authors, at the height of their powers, to produce their best works in a relatively tight cluster, and to produce excellent candidates several times within a short period. (Note, too, that in a weak year, even a medium book by a good author may be a comparative best of the year.) So just barring authors for several years after a win seems to be a poor way to go. After all, the Best Novel award (which is what most people complain about) is not for a body of work, and every novel theoretically has an equal right to be considered regardless of its author's past history.
(And, let's face it, any voting-based award is going to feature "campaigning": if not by authors, then by their readers. This isn't a nolo episcopari type of situation, and the payoffs can be significant in terms of exposure even to be nominated. My advice to anyone who is upset by the presence of campaigning for Hugo votes is to get over it.)
The real complaint would seem to be about quality, and I think it's worth saying that if the Worldcon members skew in reading habits anywhere near where I think they do, they are choosing, in part, based on quality as opposed to popularity. I'm betting that a lot of them read Weber, Flint, Carriger and other popular ("Bestselling") writers whose aim is to entertain their audience rather than to produce major works (and I think many of them would agree with that characterization). People nominate weaker works by Bujold, Willis, Miéville et al. because they thought that they were better works than the latest Safehold or Honor Harrington novel, even if they're happy to buy and read Weber. Which brings us to exposure.
There's a publishing industry problem with exposure. It hasn't been helped by the dominance of Amazon (see Tom Slee's discussion of the recommendation system), which tends to enhance the popularity effects, or promotional approaches which push already popular works at the expense of less popular but potentially equally good ones. Yesterday I was passing an Indigo store and noticed that Guy Kay's latest book (River of Stars), which has been out for two days, is already featured at a 30% discount. I don't begrudge this to Kay, who is a topnotch writer, but it's a good example of a focus on potential or actual bestsellers. (Kay has won the World Fantasy Award, BTW, and has been a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award, but has never been nominated for a Hugo: was The Lions of Al-Rassan really worse than Remake or Brightness Reef?) There's also a problem with the splitting up of SF into subgenres: even if a really great urban fantasy book came out, readers who scan shelves or even review sites might blip over it if their interest lies elsewhere and they've been put off by masses of mediocre urban fantasy. The John W. Campbell awards help here: I have to say that I haven't read anything by Zen Cho, Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Stina Leicht, or Chuck Wendig, but I will certainly look them up. (And speaking of which, I notice that Leicht and Lafferty are both urban fantasists and Cho writes (short) steampunk, which meshes with the subgenre issue.)
Defining "best" is a complex endeavour. Juried awards can have specific criteria to define "best", but given that many SF fans seem to react with strong allergies to the sorts of works that juried awards tend to select I doubt that any award voted on by a large number of readers will skew towards works which critics will tend to see as "best". The Hugos can't be fixed because they aren't broken -- their weaknesses are inherent in the very nature of the award: the very thing that gives them their heft (a broad fan base as the deciders) pretty well ensures a power-law distribution of authors, a tendency for approachable but "safe" books to edge out interesting but niche ones, and a criterion for inclusion which hovers somewhere between popularity and quality.
Let's tackle the first complaint first. Yes, it is problematic that very weak works by popular authors get nominated (I'll let Captain Vorpatril's Alliance pass, for the moment, but the nomination of Diplomatic Immunity a few years ago was definitely offbeat. [ETA: I checked, and realize that DI was nominated for the Nebulas but not the Hugos. However, Cryoburn, which was almost as weak, was a Hugo nominee.] And as for Willis' Blackout/All Clear...). However, every cure I've seen is worse than the disease. There is a very real likelihood, given the power-law relation between authors in skill as well as popularity, that one would expect the very best authors, at the height of their powers, to produce their best works in a relatively tight cluster, and to produce excellent candidates several times within a short period. (Note, too, that in a weak year, even a medium book by a good author may be a comparative best of the year.) So just barring authors for several years after a win seems to be a poor way to go. After all, the Best Novel award (which is what most people complain about) is not for a body of work, and every novel theoretically has an equal right to be considered regardless of its author's past history.
(And, let's face it, any voting-based award is going to feature "campaigning": if not by authors, then by their readers. This isn't a nolo episcopari type of situation, and the payoffs can be significant in terms of exposure even to be nominated. My advice to anyone who is upset by the presence of campaigning for Hugo votes is to get over it.)
The real complaint would seem to be about quality, and I think it's worth saying that if the Worldcon members skew in reading habits anywhere near where I think they do, they are choosing, in part, based on quality as opposed to popularity. I'm betting that a lot of them read Weber, Flint, Carriger and other popular ("Bestselling") writers whose aim is to entertain their audience rather than to produce major works (and I think many of them would agree with that characterization). People nominate weaker works by Bujold, Willis, Miéville et al. because they thought that they were better works than the latest Safehold or Honor Harrington novel, even if they're happy to buy and read Weber. Which brings us to exposure.
There's a publishing industry problem with exposure. It hasn't been helped by the dominance of Amazon (see Tom Slee's discussion of the recommendation system), which tends to enhance the popularity effects, or promotional approaches which push already popular works at the expense of less popular but potentially equally good ones. Yesterday I was passing an Indigo store and noticed that Guy Kay's latest book (River of Stars), which has been out for two days, is already featured at a 30% discount. I don't begrudge this to Kay, who is a topnotch writer, but it's a good example of a focus on potential or actual bestsellers. (Kay has won the World Fantasy Award, BTW, and has been a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award, but has never been nominated for a Hugo: was The Lions of Al-Rassan really worse than Remake or Brightness Reef?) There's also a problem with the splitting up of SF into subgenres: even if a really great urban fantasy book came out, readers who scan shelves or even review sites might blip over it if their interest lies elsewhere and they've been put off by masses of mediocre urban fantasy. The John W. Campbell awards help here: I have to say that I haven't read anything by Zen Cho, Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Stina Leicht, or Chuck Wendig, but I will certainly look them up. (And speaking of which, I notice that Leicht and Lafferty are both urban fantasists and Cho writes (short) steampunk, which meshes with the subgenre issue.)
Defining "best" is a complex endeavour. Juried awards can have specific criteria to define "best", but given that many SF fans seem to react with strong allergies to the sorts of works that juried awards tend to select I doubt that any award voted on by a large number of readers will skew towards works which critics will tend to see as "best". The Hugos can't be fixed because they aren't broken -- their weaknesses are inherent in the very nature of the award: the very thing that gives them their heft (a broad fan base as the deciders) pretty well ensures a power-law distribution of authors, a tendency for approachable but "safe" books to edge out interesting but niche ones, and a criterion for inclusion which hovers somewhere between popularity and quality.
