Wis[s]e Words

The Hugo Awards: things I won’t consider (II): categories

Published on July 1, 20143 Comments

For Loncon3 there are sixteen Hugo Award categories, plus the not a Hugo John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, to vote in. That’s a lot to be knowledgeable about. They reflect the history of the award, as categories came and went:

Best Novel
Best Novella
Best Novelette
Best Short Story
Best Related Work
Best Graphic Story
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Best Editor – Short form
Best Editor – Long form
Best Professional Artist

Those are all what you might call the professional awards, the ones most like other literary awards. The first four are perhaps the core Hugos, though the distinction between novella and especially the novelette and short story is more of historic than actual importance and nobody outside fandom pays attention to anything but the novel award anyway. Best professional artist in one way or another has been around since the beginning as well; illustrations, especially cover paintings have of course always been important in science fiction.

Meanwhile the editor and dynamic presentation –basically anything that isn’t written science fiction– awards are split up the way they are because voters over time thought that e.g. writing a single episode of a tv series is slightly different from writing a movie and the same for editing short stories vs novels. Best graphic story is for comics.

The next category is sort of a transition category, where the smaller commercial magazines mix with the bigger fanzines, always a bit of a mess. Beyond that there are the fan awards, awarded for work inside of fandom. It’s always a bit of a surprise for newcomers to discover that yes, professional writers too can be eligible for these awards, as long as they are active in fandom in some way or another. That I think is the real charm of the Hugos: they’re for all of us, not just fans voting for their favourite “celebrities”.

Best Semiprozine
Best Fanzine
Best Fancast
Best Fan Writer
Best Fan Artist

In short, there’s a split in awards categories that deal in the business of science fiction and awards that deal in the business of science fiction fandom, but pros can be nominated and win in fan categories and vice versa. It’s one of those things that are utterly charming about sf fandom even if it made a lot more sense back in 1953 when every other fan was a pro writer and the rest were aspiring pro writers. There is still much less of a pro-fan distinction than there is in related fandoms like media sf or comics.

Now, if I’m completely honest, the only two Hugo categories I’m truly interested in are the Best Novel and the Best Fan Writer ones; these are the only ones I can form opinions about without the help of the Hugo Voter Package. But thanks to the voter package I can at least make a stab at rating the candidates for the other categories too. Which I’m going to do with the following exceptions: I won’t vote in either of the dramatic presentation categories, nor in the graphic story one, because I don’t believe the Hugo is suited for them. These are not where this fandom’s strengths and interests lie and they always default to already well known, well established works.

The two other categories I’m wavering about are the editorial categories. It’s not the awards themselves so much that are the problem, but rather my ability to judge them. Editing is a largely invisible art to me as a reader, not helped by the lack of editorial acknowledgement in most sf books. And since I don’t read sf magazines, where the role of the editor is much greater in shaping the magazine as a whole, it’s hard to judge those kind of editors too. Some editors have been thoughtful enough to include samples of the stories/books they’ve edited, but just because I like a story doesn’t mean the editing was any good, nor the other way around. Therefore I probably will take a look at these categories and decide later if to vote on them.

All other categories I will be voting on, which means a lot of reading and thanks again for the Hugo Voters Package for making this so easy. I think I’ll be blogging about the various awards throughout July and aim to have made my choices by August. For some that will be easy; for others, not so much.

The Hugo Awards: things I won’t consider (I)

Published on June 30, 2014Leave a comment

I’d been dithering about going to the Worldcon this year, even though it’s rare that it’s held inside Europe, partially because it’s been such a long time that I’ve been to a proper con and would I not feel uncomfortable going to the biggest of them all. However when Rose Fox turned out not to be able to go and offered their membership for sale I took the chance. So now I just need to book a hotel and a train journey and I’m there.

Oh, and I have slightly longer than a month to decide what to vote for in the Hugo Awards.

Here’s how I’m going to do this: I’m of course going to blog about it, so I’m laying down some ground rules. First, I’ll have to address the rightwing attempt to turn the Hugos into a propagandafest. That’s easily solved: everybody on this slate is disqualified and won’t appear on my ballot.

This includes:

Best Novel: Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia (Baen Books)
Best novella: The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells (Privateer Press)
Best novella: The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen (Analog, Jul-Aug 2013)
Best Novelette: The Exchange Officers by Brad Torgersen (Analog, Jan-Feb 2013)
Best Novelette: Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (The Last Witchking, Marcher Lord Hinterlands)
Best editor Long form: Toni Weisskopf
Best fanzine: Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond

All these won’t be taken into consideration, won’t be read, won’t appear on my ballot.

There’s one other borderline entry on the Hugo ballots,The Wheel of Time series, which is slightly dodgy for two reasons. One, it’s a complete series put on the novel ballot under the idea that it’s one single book split up in parts and two, people campaigned for it in honour of Robert Jordan. The latter I have no problems with, as the people who nominated it did it out of a genuine appreciation of Jordan and his work. Remains the question, is it a single book?

Not to me. I find this stretches the definition of single book too far and hence won’t be putting it on my ballot. To be fair, even if had put it on the ballot I’ve read enough of the series to know it would’ve finished dead last. I like Jordan and will always appreciate The Wheel of Time for getting me through some dark times, but it’s not good enough for a Hugo Award.

So those are the works that drop off immediately for me. In the next post: which categories to exclude. I have opinions.

(Updated for pronoun errors.)

Hipster racism

Published on June 29, 2014Leave a comment

Ironic racism, Lester Bangs nailed more than three decades ago:

Another reason for getting rid of all those little verbal barbs is that no matter how you intend them, you can’t say them without risking misinterpretation by some other bigoted asshole; your irony just might be his cup of hate. Things like the Creem articles and partydown exhibitionism represented a reaction against the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussyfooting around questions of racial and sexual identity, questions we were quite prepared to drive over with bulldozers. We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecar they Coked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mindlessness which seemed to represent, as Mark Jacobson pointed out in his Voice piece on Legs McNeil, a new kind of cool. “I don’t discriminate,” I used to laugh, “I’m prejudiced against everybody!”

‘E that were tense

Published on June 29, 2014Leave a comment

So the first half was shaky enough already and then the Mexicans scored and so up until the 88th minute I thought “this is it, we’re going home. And then Sneijder scored a wonder goal to keep us in, Robben did his usual dancing around the box, tripped over a defender’s leg and got a fortunate penalty, roughly like this:

And of course it was Klaas Jan Huntelaar, left on the sidelines until now, who took the penalty and scored. Watching the buildup was as nerve wrecking as anything I’d ever seen in football, so tense I had to call my mum, who was also watching. And then of course it was buttock clenching time until the end whistle went.

But we did it.

Your Happening World (June 27th)

Published on June 27, 2014Leave a comment

The Transformers and the Middle Ages – Having been a boy of a certain age in the 1980s, I was one of the many, many fans of the cartoon show The Transformers (confession – I still watch the show on occasion, and have a collection of the toys in a box in my basement). Now, as the fourth live-action Transformers film hits the screens, I want to take you back to when the Autobots and Decepticons went medieval!
Sibilant Fricative: Ian Watson, Mana (Lucky’s Harvest, 1993; The Fallen Moon, 1994) – I’ve been holding back writing about Watson’s two Mana books, for reasons to do with that mode of debilitation called ‘but where to start?’ Given my peculiar academic background, and the topic of my PhD, excuse me if I open with a completely left field comparison to Robert Browning. A critic once described Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello as like ‘three dragons, guarding the entrance to the gold of Browning’s mid-career poetry’. You see what he means: however much you enjoy ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, you know that you can’t get a proper sense of Browning’s work without tackling the three brontosaur-sized texts with which he commenced his career.
Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City – The Daily Beast – As the world held its breath during the Cold War, England built a top-secret underground city to save its government in case of nuclear attack. For half a century, "Burlington" lay ready.
Is Ann Leckie the Next Big Thing in Science Fiction? | Riverfront Times – The Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo awards are the Triple Crown of science-fiction writing. If Ancillary Justice claims the Hugo, it will become the first novel to win all three. After years toiling in obscurity, Leckie's given up trying to wrap her mind around how quickly she and her gun-slinging, galaxy-traversing heroine, Breq, have climbed to critical and popular adoration.
Trinity: The Black Fantasy. – But who could blame Harmony? What black woman wouldn’t envy Storm? Storm had no need of relaxers or sunny Saturdays spent beneath the searing metal of her grandmother’s pressing comb. She never sat patiently while a beautician sewed blonde ringlets to her head to hide her tightly woven brown cornrows from view. Her hair was naturally straight. Her hair was naturally light. She was born conforming to the majority of our society’s beauty norms. She was born not looking like all the other little black girls. And because of that, she was lauded as beautiful. Because of how not black she appeared to be.