Fantastika – Page 70 – Wis[s]e Words

Somebody pulled the drama tag…

Published on September 2, 20111 Comment

Cheryl Morgan has a rather strange response to the criticism of this year’s Hugo Awards winners

The reaction to this year’s results, however, has been the worst I can remember. Depressingly much of this has come, not just from outraged fans, but also from professionals in the field. And some of those people, accidentally or otherwise, have said things that can be taken to imply they think the process is corrupt.

[…]

I guess this sort of thing is inevitable. The higher profile a set of awards, the more carping there will be. But I’m tired of having to worry about it. In particular I’m tired of worrying that projects I’m involved in, which I care deeply about, will suffer through their association with whatever mud-slinging is affecting me. And I have to face up to the fact that for a large segment of the community I will never be anything more than a fan who won fan Hugos in controversial circumstances.

So I am bowing out.

Honestly, this all seems a bit over the top, especially the idea that the bogstandard complaints of the Hugos being a popularity contest has anything to do with Cheryl Morgan herself; that’s rating yourself far too highly. In fact, the first time I’ve heard Cheryl Morgan mentioned in the context of Hugo controversies is erm, here. It is of course Cheryl’s right to get away from fandom, but to blame unnamed Hugo bashing critics for her own decision is absurd.

Being less than truthful about what those supposed critics said is not helping either. There’s enough drama in fandom without making more up.

Scalzi is being wrong on the internet

Published on August 31, 20112 Comments

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…

A Civil Campaign – Lois Mc Master Bujold

Published on August 28, 2011

Cover of A Civil Campaign

A Civil Campaign
Lois McMaster Bujold
534 pages
published in 1999

A Civil Campaign should have been the last novel in the Vorkosigan series. Starting with Brothers in Arms and continuing through Mirror Dance, Memory and Komarr Lois McMaster Bujold had constantly upped the ante for Miles, not just by giving him bigger challenges to overcome, but by forcing him to grow up and become mature, putting him in situations where his character strengths are useless or even counterproductive. A Civil Campaign is the culmination of that process, as Miles crashes hard against the realisation that his usual crisis management tactics are not suitable for trying to win the hand of the woman he fell in love with the first time he saw her. At the same time Bujold also ties up all the loose ends from the earlier novels, providing a proper ending for the series. It’s not a book for people new to the series.

In the previous book, Komarr, Miles had met Ekaterin, a duty bound Vor woman trapped in a loveless marriage, and fallen hard for her from the first moment. With Ekaterin now a widow, Miles sets out to court her, but with the best of intentions decides to do so without her knowning or telling her that this is what he’s doing. Surely the same tactics of deception that worked so well in his career as a galactic man of mystery will be good enough to win him a wife? Of course there’s also the small matter of the imperial wedding to prepare for, the return of his clone brother Mark with his Escobarian business partner and their somewhat too biological startup they’ve set up in Vorkosigan House, the blossoming relationship of Mark with Kareen, the daughter of one of Miles’ father’s — count Vorkosigan — oldest friends and various other minor complications and side issues Miless will have to deal with, but how hard can it all be?

Trading in Danger — Elizabeth Moon

Published on August 27, 2011

cover of Trading in Danger

Trading in Danger
Elizabeth Moon
506 pages
published in 2003

Reading Sheepfarmer’s Daughter gave me a taste for more Elizabeth Moon. Trading in Danger, the first book in the Vatta’s War series was what the local library had available. It’s science fiction rather than fantasy, but it’ll do. It’s still the same sort of adventure story even if the genre has changed. The other thing they have in common is familiarity, both are coming of age stories with few surprises, but sometimes familiarity is just what you want in a story.

Ky Vatta is a cadet at the naval Academy, an unusual career choice for a child of one of the great trading families. She’s an examplary cadet, but this doesn’t save her when an impulse to help a fellow cadet lands her in the shit. Expelled from the academy, she now has to face her family. Worse, because it’s a highly politicised mess she found herself in, she also has to leave Slotter Key, her home planet. Worst of all, the reputation she has in her family as a sucker for anybody with a sob story is once again confirmed, in the worst possible way. The solution to all her problems lies in an old Vatta family tradition, that sends any child wanting to join the family trade on a shakedown cruise first. She will captain the Glennys Jones, an old trading ship on its last voyage which will be sold as salvage at the end of it, as it’s too expensive to bring up to modern standards. This trading trip will take a couple of months and at the end of it Ky will be able to come home, having proven herself as a captain. As importantly, it will also get her away from her own humiliation.

The one thing more predictable than dreadful Hugo Award winners…

Published on August 23, 2011

…is the griping afterwards. Yes, I know, I know, I do it too. Nothing more fun for an old fashioned science fiction fan than having an old fashioned grumble, especially if you’re a British fan and can cast aspersions at the abysmal taste of the yanks. It doesn’t solve anything of course, but it gets rid of some frustration.

In defence of the Hugos is the idea that, if you want to change them, you can, if you’re prepared to pay to play. To vote for the Hugos you need to be at least a supporting member of this year’s Worldcon, which is a fifty dollar or so outlay, a small price to pay for people so upset by the bland mediocrity of the main Hugo awards, isn’t it?

A bit unfair perhaps and I’m not found of the idea that you can’t criticise anything if you’re not prepared to help make things better — else I would’ve been obligated to help make the War on Iraq better too. But I can’t help but think that some of the complaints are more sour grapes than constructive criticism.

What we need to keep in mind and I’ll keep repeating until everybody is sick of it, is that the sort of fans who do faithfully vote for the Hugos are a distinct subset of fandom, less likely to be involved online, more interested in old skool fanac like conventions and zines than blogging or twittering. They have their own standards and tastes and they don’t necessarily overlap with the tastes of bloggers. Had that been the case, Connie Willis would not have won the Best Novel Hugo again and James Nicoll had won the best fan writer award.

The tragedy of the Hugos is that once upon a time the type of fandom that it represents was all of fandom, therefore the kind of people voting for the Hugos was the same as the kind of people who read science fiction, their tastes fairly well representative of fandom as a whole. But fandom got bigger while the Hugos stagnated, which in my opinion started to happen from the mid-eighties. The end result three decades later is an award that still got its prestige, but lost its relevance.

Don’t worry too much about it therefore, unless you like to restore it to its former glory. In which case buy that membership and start campaigning.