Scalzi is being wrong on the internet

In which I overanalyse some throwaway remarks made by John Scalzi on his blog:

There’s always post-Hugo kvetching, for the same reason there’s pre-Hugo kvetching, which is, people like to kvetch, and/or they have a hard time internalizing that their own tastes are not in fact an objective standard of quality. I do think there’s a core of commenters whose problem internalizing that other people have other tastes is overlaid with a more-than-mild contempt for fandom, i.e., “Oh, fandom. You’ve shown again why you can’t be trusted to pick awards, you smelly, chunky people of common tastes, you.” Fandom does what fandom does with folks like that: it ignores them, which I think is generally the correct response to such wholly unwarranted condescension.

Apart from the slight defensiveness, which Damien Walter also noted, the mistake made here is to believe the Hugo Award voters equalise fandom. Once upon a time this was true, but that time is at least four decades ago. Even within print sf, there no longer is fandom, there are fandoms. The Hugo Awards and the Worldcon are the legacy of the arguably oldest still existing strand of fandom, but cannot be said to represent fandom as a whole. Hence the criticism aimed at the Hugos in general and this years abysmal winner(s) in particular is not that of outsiders condemning fandom, but an argument within fandom itself.

And the real problem with the Hugos is not that the voters have inferior tastes, or even so much that they keep rewarding the wrong books or people, but that they’re still seen as representative for the tastes of the whole of fandom, rather than a smallish subset of fandom. You could see that very well with this year’s Hugos, where the tastes of “online fandom” (or a sizeable subset of it anyway) differed so much from what the Hugo voters in the end awarded. Not just with the Best Novel Hugo, but also with the Best Fan award — which would’ve probably gone to James Nicoll if online fandom had had its say.

But no other subset of fandom has such a prestige outside of fandom as the Hugo voters do, as the Hugo Award is one of the two science fiction/fantasy awards well know to sf&f readers and other “civilians”. If the general taste of the Hugo voters is mediocre it reflects on science fiction and fantasy fandom as a whole, in a way e.g. the Clarke Awards do not. And since it’s only a small and distinct group of people voting on the Hugos, chances are they’ll get it wrong…