…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.