Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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What’s Right and Wrong with the Hugo Awards
May 4th, 2011
The Hugo awards are based on fan voting for various science fiction and fantasy categories, such as best novel. Hugo winners have always been part of my ongoing reading list my entire life.
First of all, one of the things that’s right this year: my buddy Jay Lake is one of the hosts of the award ceremony in Reno. I was initially planning to go, then leaning against it, and now I’m considering it again. I would be tickled to death to see Jay hosting. He and I go back nearly 20 years to when neither of us were close to being published, and now things are different. So different.
I’ve been going to Worldcons (where the Hugos are awarded) off since 1988 and have done my share of voting. Never nominated myself, but a number of good friends have been. I have come to realize that I prefer a number of the nominees to the winners, and that sometimes the winners have winning personalities that help swing them some votes. But I don’t want to criticize that aspect. That’s fair and natural in any system with voting and the winners are still really good and deserving.
Let me make it clear how fundamentally important the Hugos have been to me. A bunch of us aspiring and semi-pro writers were talking in Austin back in the 1990s about our ultimate writing goals. One of them said that she’d like to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, even though she didn’t seem to ever write anything that would fit into that category, sticking usually to commercial genre fiction. Myself, I said I wanted to win a Hugo someday. I’d still like to, although balancing priorities had made pursuing that goal challenging.
No, my main complaint about the Hugos these days is that some of the categories are just stupid or confusing, and some that should exist don’t. Let me elaborate.
Best Related Work: Awarded to a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year. The type of works eligible include, but are not limited to, collections of art, works of literary criticism, books about the making of a film or TV series, biographies and so on, provided that they do not qualify for another category.
This is a catch all, and while I like the flexibility, it just seems like a mishmash.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): This Award can be given a dramatized production in any medium, including film, television, radio, live theater, computer games or music. The work must last 90 minutes or longer (excluding commercials).
I’m ok with the category, but would an 88 minute movie actually be shifted to the short form category? I’d hope not.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): This Award can be given a dramatized production in any medium, including film, television, radio, live theater, computer games or music. The work must be less than 90 minutes long (excluding commercials).
We should have TV episodes separate from actual shorts. “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” is up against Dr. Who episodes. Silly.
Best Editor (Long Form): This is the first of the person categories, so the Award is given for the work that person has done in the year of eligibility. To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length (i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the year of eligibility that are not anthologies or collections.
Best Editor (Short Form): To be eligible the person must have edited at least four anthologies, collections or magazine issues devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which must have been published in the year of eligibility.
I’d like there to be awards for editors, but I don’t think fan voted Hugos are the way to go. The long form is impossible to judge. Did the editors acquire the novels or were the books forced on them? Fans don’t get to see the books as submitted and the books as revised, so how can they judge?
For the short form, the authors decide where to send stories, and the editors do different sorts of editing. Again, the readers don’t have a clue about why a given story ended up somewhere, who rejected it first, or how an editor helped improve a story.
Best Professional Artist: Another person category, this time for artists and illustrators. The work on which the nominees are judged must class as “professional”.
This should be tossed out in favor of best genre artwork, likely book and magazine covers. There could be subcategories for color vs. black and white, for instance.
Best Semiprozine: This is the most complicated category because of the need to define semi-professional. A lot of science fiction and fantasy magazines are run on a semi-professional basis: that is they pay a little, but generally not enough to make a living for anyone. The object of this category is to separate such things from fanzines, which are generally loss-making hobbyist pursuits. To qualify a publication must not be professional and must meet at least two of the following criteria:
1. had an average press run of at least one thousand (1000) copies per issue;
2. paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication;
3. provided at least half the income of any one person;
4. had at least fifteen percent (15%) of its total space occupied by advertising;
5. announced itself to be a semiprozine.
Who wants to announce themselves to be “semi-pro”? Seems like something to do to announce you’re either overperforming amateurs or less than successful pros. I don’t like mixing fiction and non-fiction publications. Who can judge that? This category has often been the Locus award over the years. I like Locus and have been a subscriber off and on over the years, but I don’t think a Hugo should be for just doing a good job year in and year out, but for excelling in some specific way.
Best Fanzine: This is the other serial publication category. This Award is for anything that is neither professional nor semi-professional. The publication must also satisfy the rule of a minimum of 4 issues, at least one of which must have appeared in the year of eligibility.
Best Fan Writer: This is another person category. Note that it does not just apply to writing done in fanzines. Work published in semiprozines, and even on mailing lists, blogs, BBSs, and similar electronic fora, can be including when judging people for this Award. Only work in professional publications should not be considered.
Best Fan Artist: The final category is also for people. Again note that the work by which artists should be judged is not limited to material published in fanzines. Material for semiprozines or material on public displays (such as in convention art shows) is also eligible. Fan artists can have work published in professional publications as well. You should not consider it when judging this award, and also any artists who make the final ballot for Best Professional Artist may not also be on the final ballot for Best Fan Artist.
These are just weird and are a legacy of the fan origins of the Hugo awards, but they don’t make sense to me for the same reasons some of the above categories don’t work for me. They’re awards for people who may be doing both pro and “fan” work, and voters are supposed to separate the two. It’s not for any specific work, but for some impression of a body of work. Some of the same people appear on the nominee list for decades. I don’t like any awards for just being good in general. I think awards should be for specific work.
I’m not the first or last to make criticisms like this, I’m sure, but maybe if enough of these are leveled regularly enough some inertia for a change of direction will set in. I’m a fan of the Australian voting system for the awards, and the list of nominees almost always great reading even when I don’t agree with the ultimate winners.
But let me summarize how I’d change the Hugos, for starters:
The dramatic presentations should be separated into movies, TV episodes, and shorts.
Get rid of editor awards, perhaps adding them to the Nebula Awards which are voted on by professional writers who have a clue about who is good.
Get rid of artist awards in favor of best artwork (e.g. book covers).
Get rid of fan writer and fan artist awards in favor of awards for best genre-related article (e.g. in a fanzine, blog, where ever) and best genre-related comic (online, fanzine, wherever). I was the Missouri Amateur Chess Co-Champion in 1986, and I know exactly what that means and what it doesn’t. It’s not in the same class as being a professional champion, and it’s kind of embarrassing in my opinion.
Get rid of “semi-prozine” category and let there be just fiction and non-fiction categories, “pro” or not. I’d prefer specific issues of periodicals to compete rather than annual runs. It’s too easy for people who are casual readers to vote with as it is.
Add categories for best blog post (which can get 10-100 times as many reads as most of the pro magazines) or online commentary, best genre website (e.g. Tor.com, io9.com, etc.), best original anthology, best periodical in fiction and non-fiction, etc. So much in the community has moved online and that should be recognized without having to resort to catch-all categories or shoving it into best fan writer. Hell if I know what I write that qualifies as fan or pro at any given time.
How about best genre video game??? Writing in a video game, art in a video game. There’s some fine work being done there, and the fan base is MILLIONS, not hundreds.
The whole problem of Worldcon attendance being small, the Hugo voters being small in number (hundreds at most for most awards, sometimes dozens), etc., is another big problem. I don’t know how to get more people interested in reading science fiction again. Maybe the Hugos will just diminish and vanish in the future. Worldcon is small these days compared to Dragoncon and Comicon and a number of other cons. I don’t want that to have happened, but it did. The world has changed, and so has our ghetto, for better or worse.
I love the Hugo awards, but the system has problems. I won’t even mention some travesties in past voting (although I will save them for a future post). I’m too busy and probably don’t care passionately enough to get involved to fight for these, but I’ll give a shout out for some changes, because I do care enough to do that. Screw the Pulitzer, I still want a Hugo someday.
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So many things to comment on! Rather than put them into one post, I’m going to post a bunch of comments, each attempting to address a single point.
This was tried back in the 1990s. Hardly anything was nominated. In fact, in one year, there were only three nominees that managed to get the minimum number of nominations to make the ballot. While this sounds good intellectually, in practice it just doesn’t work. After a few anemic years, the members of the Worldcon voted to scrap the category.
The 1996 Worldcon trialed such a category. So few nominations came in that they scrapped it before it got to a final ballot. It doesn’t matter how good the category looks on paper if the members don’t nominate anything.
As it stands now, it’s possible to nominate a video game in the Best Related Work category.
Basically, it doesn’t really matter if there are millions of people playing a game. Those people aren’t buying Worldcon memberships and they’re not voting.
The reason dramatic presentations are split the way they are is that they represent the split of a single DP category, and dramatic presentations include more than just movies and television shows. What about radio plays, stage productions, and similar. Don’t scoff: such things have been nominated in the original unified Best Dramatic Presentation category. Splitting it by movies/TV shows would mean that the sum of the two categories is less than the original category.
Based on nominating patterns, it seems doubtful whether there would be sufficient nominations for your proposed “shorts” category. Again, it doesn’t matter how intellectually perfect a category is if the members of Worldcon don’t nominate anything in it.
Actually, this year’s Hugo Awards set a new record for the number of nominating ballots cast, and I think that’s a significant achievement when you consider that the eligible electorate consists of the members of Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, Australia and the members of Renovation in Reno, Nevada, the smallest US city to ever host a Worldcon. So as a percentage of eligible voters, turnout is even more impressive than getting over 1000 nominations for the first time in the history of the Award.
There are potential changes in how Worldcon memberships are priced that may result in the cost to vote (currently about $50 minimum for a Worldcon supporting membership) to drop down to about the cost of a new hardcover book. That, I think, will also increase participation.
You haven’t been paying attention to recent history, then, have you? Clarkesworld won last year in Australia and Weird Tales won in 2009 in Montreal. The fact that Locus historically dominated this category actually did spawn a movement to drop the category, but the amount of interest in the many semi-pro works out there was sufficient as to inject new life and new competitiveness into it.
You’re not reading all of the rules. Just as written fiction works may be moved between categories if they fall into the gray zone around a category edge, dramatic presentations may be moved to the “other” category if they are within 20% of the category boundary. So an 88-minute feature film could be moved to Long Form (I’d do that if I were the Administrator, and I’ve administered the Hugos three times), while a two-part television episode running 97 minutes total could be moved to Short Form.
However, the 90-minute boundary is deliberate, along with the gray zone around it. There was a consensus among those (including me) involved in splitting the original Dramatic Presentation category that Size Matters: a television miniseries should compete with theatrical motion pictures, not individual episodes of a TV show.
And here’s practical politics in action: Splitting the DP category was a very difficult task politically. There is a strong minority that didn’t really like there being one DP category, let alone two. Splitting it into three (or more) categories was impossible. You have to have the votes to make changes. Otherwise, it’s a wasted effort.
In practice, the only alternative is to not allow the short works to be eligible at all. Business Meeting attendees are quite reluctant to add categories. There are a fair few who think there are too many categories right now and thing it was much better when there were only two or three categories.
Thanks for the well-informed comments, Kevin! I learned some things.
Although I’m getting more practical in my old age, I’m still an idealist. I bet the artwork could work a lot better with the aid of the internet, and I also think that the video game field has advanced tremendously since the mid 1990s and might be a much more viable award today than then.
Whoops! I said 1996 (for the trialed Best Video Game) when I meant 2006. So the last attempt to try out such a category was only five years ago. You can see the original announcement of the trial category and the nominee announcement including the “dropped due to lack of interest” statement on the 2006 Worldcon’s web site.
So it really hasn’t been that long since this was tried. Note that you, someone who is an advocate for the idea and follows the Hugo Awards off an on, didn’t even remember it happening, which suggests that it sailed right past year. And this was at one of the larger Worldcons, in Anaheim in 2006, not an out-of-USA site or a something like that, so the voter base was pretty large.
In short, you’d be hard-pressed to convince another Worldcon to try this after only five years. The current opinion is that not enough Worldcon members are heavy-duty gamers to justify the category. Sure, millions of copies of games are sold, but in order to make a viable category, you also have to have the people who like the works also be Worldcon members who care to cast their nominating ballots.
Best Original Artwork might work, but I fear you’d end up with a variation of what happened with Best Short Story this year: too diffuse. In general, you have to get at least 5% of the nominations cast in a given category to make the ballot. If you get hundreds of pieces of artwork with only a handful of nominations each, nothing will have sufficient support and the category will be dropped. A voting distribution of 15,8,4,3,3,3,3,2,2,2,2,2,1,1,1,1,1,….. will result in even an existing category being dropped for that year. It was this sort of overly-flat distribution that resulted in only four nominees in Best Short Story this year.
Kevin, you argue cogently and with real data…but my sense of idealism isn’t satisfied! 😉
I try to stay out of gaming because I’ll spend too much time on it, but I’ve been really impressed with things like Half-Life, Bioshock, Portal, Mass Effect, etc., that have strong story and art and are genre.
For the artwork, I’d love to see a webpage (similar to the one maintained for the Campbell) that highlights eligible works. Ideally artists would propose just a few pieces each year as contenders and would-be Hugo voters could go check them all out with just a few clicks.
Again, I know I’m being idealistic. There’s always room for improvement.
Anyway, Kevin, thanks so much for supplying great information and perspective.
Amen. But.
The Hugos drag a long legacy along with them and effecting meaningful change has to take that into account. The system takes a minimum of two (three?) years to introduce and ratify a new or changed award category. That’s good in terms of insuring that drastic mistakes don’t become cast in concrete, but totally at odds with the pace of change in today’s society.
I’ve long advocated opening up the voting to non-WSFS members (you become a member in the World Science Fiction Society by purchasing a membership [attending or supporting] in the current year’s Worldcon convention; membership confers the right to nominate and vote on the Hugo awards) through some kind of relatively low-cost ‘Hugo Awards Voter Only’ membership; I’ve even suggested that a portion of the fee (5 bucks, 10 bucks, a dollar?) go towards a monetary component of the awards – or into Fan Funds like TAFF or some such.
It’s been argued that doing something like that would allow people to stack votes, but I believe that if they are opened up sufficiently, the total number of voters would overwhelm any such attempts.
And I don’t necessarily agree that the awards should be changed in the manners that you mentioned: my druthers would be to see a return to a stricter interpretation by only allowing works that are clearly science fiction to be nominated, and to further restrict them to what can arguably be termed literature: the World Fantasy Convention does a fine job rewarding fantasy works, same for horror, same for games (though I can see art and writing for games being allowed). Let’s prune those works that are self-identified as something other than SF; let’s prune those authors & artists who publicly deny their involvement with SF as well.
On the “fan” and “semi-pro” awards – I think you’re falling into the same misconception as others have by equating them with an “amateur” concept. They aren’t amateur so much as they are “non-commercial”.
What I also think we need are more awards for academics and reviewing/critiquing. And perhaps a “best use of real science” and/or “solidest scientific extrapolation” awards. Or maybe a “catchall” here where we acknowledge a work of fiction that has contributed directly to the advancement of science/engineering.
You have some valid points, but it seems you have several misconceptions about how the Hugos are run. I suggest before trying to change the rules, you familiarize yourself with them and the history of the Hugos a little more.
Some examples:
Re: Dramatic presentation long form: “I’m ok with the category, but would an 88 minute movie actually be shifted to the short form category? I’d hope not.”
There is actually some flexibility in the rules that would allow an 88-minute movie to be shifted over to the long-form category.
“Get rid of artist awards in favor of best artwork (e.g. book covers).”
The award used to be for Best Original Art Work (from 1990 to 1995, if my memory serves) and it was decided to change it to Best Artist.
Additionally, nominators are asked to provide examples of artwork done in the previous year by each artist they nominate. For example, I might nominate Vincent Van Gogh and mention his “Starry Nights” as an example of artwork.
“Who wants to announce themselves to be “semi-pro”? ”
Historically, plenty of people have done so. You may want to ask them why they wanted to declare themselves semi-pro.
“How about best genre video game??? Writing in a video game, art in a video game. There’s some fine work being done there, and the fan base is MILLIONS, not hundreds.”
By that line of reasoning, why not have a vote for best soccer match? I understand there’s apparently billions of fans of that sport out there. On a more serious note, it was tried one year (in 2006) and the category was abandoned due to insufficient nominations. It might be worth trying it again — I don’t know.
I also notice that several of your suggestions concern themselves with the container rather than the content (Best Blog, Best TV Show, etc…) traditionally the Hugos focus on the content and don’t really look at how and where this content was presented. A short story is a short story whether or not in appeared in a book, a magazine, engraved in stone or online. This is why for example we have the Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form category and not Best Feature Film. Plays, audio recordings and more are also eligible.
Le me retiterate: you make some interesting points, and some of your suggestions could be looked at seriously by the WSFS Business Meeting. This is where all decisions regarding the WSFS constitution (the document setting out the Hugo rules) are discussed and voted on. Any attending member of the Worldcon can be present, talk and vote at the Business Meeting. Those who want to effect a change to the WSFS Constitution do so. I hope to see you there if you attend Renovation — you can then find out how you can change the rules.
It seems my tongue in cheek tags got removed in my previous post — any way of getting them back in?
Thanks!
Spoken like someone who doesn’t actually know how the system works.
The Hugos are given by the World Science Fiction Convention, which includes the Worldcon Business Meeting, where changes to the World Science Fiction Society’s Constitution, which governs Worldcon and the Hugos*, are discussed and enacted.
“All” you have to do is convince a majority of the people who deal with all this year in and year out to make the changes you want.
* According to the constitution, the only twp things a Worldcon is absolutely required to do is have a business meeting and give Hugos.
Neil, when it comes to the Hugos, at this point in my life I have the energy to bitch about what I don’t like, but not enough to change it. So I’m like everyone else who talks about most stuff. If I have the extra energy, it’s going into another novel, another marathon, my personal relationships, my career (especially grant money for my students), or my educational outreach. A blog entry is what I have the time and energy for in this case, I admit.
Rene, hmmm…don’t know where the tags went. Sorry. I could guess, but might change the meaning!
If soccer involved spacesuits and jet packs, I would be into it! Since isn’t, no Hugo. Getting a video game like Bioshock labeled “Hugo Award Winner” would help Worldcon a lot more than the other way around.
I doubt if anyone thinks the Hugos (or any awards) are perfect as is.
Why?
Agreed, but change for change’s sake isn’t good either. Just tossing random numbers around and hoping for a good result isn’t going to improve things.
I know this is something that sounds good, but how do you propose to make the members of Worldcon care about something they’ve fairly recently said they don’t care about?
“Why getting a video game like Bioshock labeled “Hugo Award Winner” would help Worldcon a lot more than the other way around?”
Because the Hugos and Worldcon aren’t well known among younger science fiction fans who find their love for the genre through video games, tv, and movies. I think more fans connecting is a good thing, and an opportunity for those of us who love written science fiction to turn on video game players to it. Eric Nylund’s Halo books have sold really well and he’s gotten thousands of fan letters from kids who rarely read before. They’re an opportunity.
I think you’re assuming that Worldcon members don’t care, Kevin, when it’s also possibly a case of inertia, lack of knowledge, and general lack of time/energy. Not voting isn’t necessarily a vote against something.
You’re right to ask how to make people care about change, however. Probably someone passionate about a change needs to spearhead a campaign and put real time and energy into it. Money, too, likely. And then it still might not work since your assumption might be perfectly correct and Worldcon members aren’t interested. So many attendees don’t even vote for the Hugos or attend the ceremony, however. Maybe changes to the awards would change that. A lot of research and work, sure, and something that’s about #39 on my priority list.
Steve, I like some of your suggestions and could get behind them.
Maybe I have misconceptions about what “semi-pro” and “fan” mean in the context of the Hugos. I grew up with non-commercial meaning amateur, and issues of not allowing pros into the Olympics. Movies like “Semi-Pro” certainly give people the impression that the term means not as good as pro.
Personally I find the distinction not important. I paid pro rates and put together the anthology Diamonds in the Sky funded by the National Science Foundation. Definitely non-commercial. I don’t think any of the stories in it should be considered semi-pro or fan stories. And when I give talks or write stories or articles…some are paid and some are gratis, but I don’t change the quality level or expect to be treated differently. I guess also the term “fanfic” gives me pause for the fan category distinctions, since that has connotations that go beyond commercial/not commercial.
Well, I’ve shown my ignorance here in certain areas, and my biases, for better or worse. Thanks for the education and discussion.
Quite right. The attempt to drop Semiprozine was initially seen as a slam-dunk due to the torpid nature of the voters in that category; however, the Save Semiprozine campaign that it ignited ended up injecting new life into the category so that it can no longer be blithely dismissed as the “Best Locus” category.
To make this work, a very active, very ambitious organizer would have to show up and (a) volunteer to work on a Worldcon committee; (b) overcome severe skepticism from a committee that will point to the 2006 experiment as recent evidence of failure; (c) convince that committee to trial the category again; and (d) energize the nominating electorate into returning a reasonable slate of candidates; while (e) not being perceived as trying to promote any particular potential nominee. That’s a really tall order!
Actually, I’ll dispute that. Voter turnout for the Hugos as a percentage of the members has been increasing of late after a significant decline in the 1980s and 90s. While not up over 50% the way it may have been when Worldcons had fewer than 1000 members, it’s still improving. Interest has been increasing. And the Hugo Awards Ceremony has lately surpassed the Worldcon Masquerade as the best-attended event at the Worldcon. Our rule of thumb has been that we need to be able to seat at least 50% of the members, and we’d prefer a larger percentage because we don’t want to turn people away. This has led to Worldcon organizers usually getting rooms that are slightly or sometimes significantly too large.
(Also, event space comes in fixed sizes, which affects things In 2005, we had the Clyde Auditorium, which would have seated 100% of the attendees; consequently, the event Stewards closed off the third level entirely.)
Anyway, I think interest has been improving and we just need to keep up the marketing and not get complacent. Discussions like we’re having here and even controversies have the benefit of showing that people are interested!
Oh
I must have missed the part where you said you were just blowing smoke.
But every Worldcon you have joined sent you a copy of the WSFS Constitution. If you had never noticed that you keep receiving copies of the rules you say you don’t know (“Maybe I have misconceptions about what “semi-pro” and “fan” mean in the context of the Hugos.”), there’s not much more to say.
Now Neil, be fair: the terms “semi-prozine” and “fan” can certainly be considered, within the context of WSFS, to be “terms of art.” Their meaning as those of us who have been in the trenches for a long time and also know the historical context isn’t necessarily going to be the same as to the casual reader or even occasional Worldcon attendee. Such people can’t be too badly criticized for assuming that “fan” and “pro” are mutually-exclusive states of being, since their common definitions outside of the fandom that you (and I) know, where the two things are not radio buttons, but check boxes.
It’s really hard to encode the implicit meaning of “fan” and “professional” into our rules. I’m convinced that it’s what I call a “toothpaste-tube” problem, in that the harder you squeeze it, the messier it gets.
Oh
Neil, you sound like Steve Jobs in the new South Park episode HUMAN CENTiPAD! I guess you read in detail everything everyone sends to you? And if you do, you drop your whatever you bring to that reading? I doubt it.
The words “fan” and “semi-pro” have meanings to me (and others) outside the realm of the Hugos and telling people to ignore them isn’t the easiest thing to do. I, personally, even after this bit of education, would like to see them changed no matter how clearly it’s laid out in the rules, ok? The rules could say that the Asshole award is meant to smell of strawberries, but I would still be uncomfortable with the name.
I’m no Hugos lawyer, just a fan trying to be constructively critical of the awards.
I feel like my face is covered in toothpaste. Smells like strawberries, I say. 😉
I reckon you may have been surprised at the fact that so much thought has been given to these subjects in the past. You’ve not actually raised much that hasn’t been debated (nearly endlessly) for as long as I can remember. (I’ve been at every Worldcon since 1989, plus 1984.) From my reading of fan history, the arguments keep going back before then, too. The details change but the substance doesn’t.
But for an explanation of why some people seem a little prickly about these things, imagine someone saying, “How hard can it be to be a writer? Just sit down, bang on the keyboard, and cash your check!” The indignation you might feel about such a fatuous statement is analogous to what long-time participants in the WSFS political wars feel when oversimplifications are applied to what’s taken years and years to hash out.
WSFS rules are a compromise. They can’t be anything but one, since they’re put together by more than one person. And WSFS is a chaotic mess of a government. If you know your US history, think of the US as it was governed prior to the adoption of the current US constitution of 1787 and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to try and accomplish anything.
As you say, it’s not a particularly high priority for you, and that’s perfectly understandable. But until someone with a desire to make the rules conform to their standards and an ability to make a fractious group of people who have been arguing these subjects for generations do what they say comes along, it’s likely that things will stay about the way they are now. WSFS doesn’t have a Ghod-Emperor; it has a bunch of people who act much like how the New York legislature was described in the musical 1776:
Heck, you can’t even get them to agree on what “published,” actually means. I rules from the Chair of the Business Meeting that is should be interpreted as it is under copyright law, since that’s reasonably well understood and doesn’t require re-inventing the wheel. But there are some pretty influential people who dismiss that on the surfaces because it’s “not intuitive.”
(I think that in their hearts, they only believe something is “published” if it appears on pieces of paper with ink impressions on it; that is, “published” and “printed” are absolutely the same thing and have no other possible meanings.)
Kevin, your perspective is insightful and appreciated.
Probably the only “Hugo” I’ve had a chance at was the Campbell for best new writer (NOT a HUGO as they say, although it is awarded at the Hugos) when my first novel came out. My inquiries about the rules for that award got some rules changed, and lost me a year of eligibility in effect. I’m just not a rules guy, even though I know they’re needed in a lot of cases. I think like a scientist, not a lawyer. I want to live in a perfect world, not a practical world.
Technology really is changing the world fast, whether for idealists or pragmatists, and things will change or fall by the wayside. I’d like to see the Hugos become more prominent in the future. Hope they can and will.
Incidentally, the reason the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer has such odd-sounding treatment is that it was grandfathered-in when WSFS passed rules prohibiting the inclusion of awards other than the Hugo on the Hugo Award ballot. There had been a sort of “awards creep” in the 1970s, I think, as additional non-Hugo Awards were being tossed in with the actual Hugos, and this got enough WSFS members annoyed that they put a stop to it, but didn’t want to banish the JWC. So we continue to have a Hugo-like category that is voted like a Hugo but whose winners don’t get shiny chrome rockets and whose eligibility rules are subtly different than the actual Hugo Awards, as you so deftly pointed out when the award’s sponsor was pressed into clarifying intent.
Mike,
My “tongue in cheek tags” where around my statement about soccer.
You, like many people (including me!) want to see some changes in the WSFS constitution. The problem is not every one wants to see the same changes take place.
Only those who put energy into effecting changes can see it happen. Also those changes take some time to happen: it helps to get support for your proposal ahead of time, you then submit a motion to the Business Meeting and if the motion passes, it has to be ratified the following year and only then will it take effect, so it essentially takes at least two years for a change to be seen.
The other way to get changes happening without attending the business meeting is to nominate. If enough people nominate video games in the Best Other Work category for several years in a row, then maybe the need for a new category would be felt and hopefully someone (else) would do something about it at the business meeting. This would take less of your energy but would of course take longer.