What I understand from Bob Altemeyer's work is that the point to being an authoritarian is actively not the outcome; it's the getting to enforce the norms. (The peer-reviewed version of "the cruelty is the point".) What's actually in the book getting the award is way secondary to getting to declare people unsuitable for consideration.
Once the system got hard to rig, the opportunity to be authoritarian with it went away.
"quality" gives me the squeems as applied to art; any quantifiable quality would have to be a statistical abstraction of a number of individual emotional responses, and to have any "it's the art, not the moment" confidence it needs lots of people over generational time. And certainly there aren't any large numbers in SF today, never mind the "the alleged best isn't a statistical universe"; there may have been when a book would sell tens of thousands of copies but as I understand it, what is today "best seller" territory used to be the trailing edge of the mid-list. There's just so much out there now, much of it excellent as craft.
My take on SF is that it's a creature of a particular set of insecurities (three phases of which so far; I think they're related but they're definitely distinct) and really isn't likely to produce any enduring art. This isn't required for it to be worth the effort; enjoying things is a sufficient reason. But that isn't widely held as a view of artistic activity.
And there is the thing about the current field that enough arbitrary obstacles aren't effective process but the folks who manage to clear all of them are going to be biased towards skill as well as luck. Differential obstacles eventually produce some strong counter-examples to the orthodoxy generating the obstacles.
no subject
Once the system got hard to rig, the opportunity to be authoritarian with it went away.
"quality" gives me the squeems as applied to art; any quantifiable quality would have to be a statistical abstraction of a number of individual emotional responses, and to have any "it's the art, not the moment" confidence it needs lots of people over generational time. And certainly there aren't any large numbers in SF today, never mind the "the alleged best isn't a statistical universe"; there may have been when a book would sell tens of thousands of copies but as I understand it, what is today "best seller" territory used to be the trailing edge of the mid-list. There's just so much out there now, much of it excellent as craft.
My take on SF is that it's a creature of a particular set of insecurities (three phases of which so far; I think they're related but they're definitely distinct) and really isn't likely to produce any enduring art. This isn't required for it to be worth the effort; enjoying things is a sufficient reason. But that isn't widely held as a view of artistic activity.
And there is the thing about the current field that enough arbitrary obstacles aren't effective process but the folks who manage to clear all of them are going to be biased towards skill as well as luck. Differential obstacles eventually produce some strong counter-examples to the orthodoxy generating the obstacles.