{"id":12170,"date":"2013-04-03T11:18:30","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T19:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/?p=12170"},"modified":"2013-04-03T11:46:26","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T19:46:26","slug":"thoughts-on-the-2013-hugo-awards-all-and-sundry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/news\/thoughts-on-the-2013-hugo-awards-all-and-sundry\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on the 2013 Hugo Awards, All and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HugoOn the back of Justin Landon’s provocative thoughts<\/a> on the 2013 Hugo ballot, the past 48 hours has produced several thoughtful responses, some in favour, some against and some carving their own path to find answers to the Hugo ‘problem’ (if such even exists). My thoughts are here.<\/a> Here I’ve gathered together some of the responses complement and balance out Landon’s article and the resulting discussion (nearing a staggering 200 comments at the time of writing this).<\/p>\n

In particular, Vixyish and Lavie Tidhar both encouragingly suggest that we should not be focussing on the issues of blockvoting and ‘the old guard’ (as the SMOF crowd is sometimes affectionately called), but rather on the ethnic and gender diversity that is beginning to appear on the ballot of what has traditionally been a very staid and conservatively white\/male award. Lots of food for thought.<\/p>\n

So, onward.<\/p>\n

Vixyish<\/a>, Hugo your own way<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nI’m sorry if the stuff you like didn’t get nominated, but some of the stuff I like didn’t get nominated, either. You’re upset that the Hugo Awards are a popularity contest? So are all awards. So is pretty much anything that’s decided by a popular vote. That doesn’t make it a “broken system”. If we’re looking for some kind of objective absolute value of “best”, we’re going to need a declared, agreed-upon and publicly-posted scoring rubric (and how we’re going to get the entirety of SFF fandom to agree upon it is something I don’t want to contemplate, let alone how you’re going to ensure its reliability and validity), a jury of evaluators trained in that rubric, and some kind of financial support for the jurors, since they will be doing nothing all day every day but reading every single published work of sciene fiction and fantasy throughout the year and scoring each one according to that rubric. Ridiculous? Yep. So is complaining that not every work was represented. So is complaining that only the “popular” stuff ever gets nominated for any award.<\/p>\n

But seriously, I want to focus on just one aspect of this topic for a moment. Science Fiction has, for a very long time, been the genre of, by, and for men. Women and girls were (and still are) told it wasn’t for them, made fun of for liking it, or outright denied the right to participate. Tiptree (a female author) used a male pen name to get published, and female authors to this day get told that they should consider using male pen names to “appeal to a broader audience” (that’s a direct quote). And we still have the myth of the “fake geek girl” going around. Women wearing science fiction shirts or costumes or merchandise still regularly get asked by male fans whether they know enough to have the right to wear those things. <\/p>\n

Think about that for a minute. Today, not 50 years ago but right now, women science fiction fans actually get told that they don’t have the right to like what they like.<\/p>\n

And in that climate, we have a record number of female authors nominated for Hugo Awards, and the first female author to be the one to set an “x number of nominations” record. (i.e., previously all “first person to have x nominations in one ballot” records were set by men, and later had a woman match that number.)<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This is a fucking exciting year, and a fucking exciting time for SFF. Things are changing. I want them to change faster, but they are changing. And anyone who can look at all that and claim that it’s the same old thing over and over? I don’t even have the words for how divorced they are from reality.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lavie Tidhar<\/a>, Editorial: The Hugo Awards<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nI think a part of the sense of \u2013 disaffection \u2013 we get every year is the very real sense that science fiction [ETA: I’m using this as an umbrella term for speculative fiction, including fantasy] itself has profoundly changed over the decades. Some terribly ambitious novels had won the award since it began in 1953, a period during which science fiction was in a very real sense an avant garde literary movement. The first novel to win was Alfred Bester\u2019s The Demolished Man, and the 1960s saw such novels as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune and Lord of Light winning \u2013 surely some of the most remarkable and ambitious examples of American science fiction ever written.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

And the thing is this \u2013 this is perhaps the first year in the award\u2019s history (and the Campbell, a \u201cNot a Hugo\u201d award) where we see such a strong representation of international voices. I\u2019m not sure I can highlight this enough. Saladin Ahmed\u2018s Throne of the Crescent Moon, for instance, is the first novel by a Muslim writer ever to be nominated for a Hugo. The first by an Arab-American, for that matter. (And this is when being Muslim in SF is still cause for a lot of nasty sniping, to put it mildly). Ken Liu, a Chinese-American author doing amazing work, amongst others, in translating Chinese science fiction into English, is nominated for Best Short Story. Aliette de Bodard, a French author of Vietnamese ancestry, is nominated for both Best Novella and Best Short Story, while Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt is a surprise nominee with a translated story in the Best Novelette category.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The Hugos are<\/em> changing, I think. Or SF as a whole is changing. The surprise is not that popular American writers are nominated for a Hugo \u2013 but that diversity is increasingly represented on the ballots.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Jackson Bennett<\/a>, Some thoughts about awards<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nThe biggest award in SFF is, with little debate, the Hugo Awards, the nominations for which just got announced this past week. When I first got started being a writer, I knew very little about the Hugos, beyond that Ender\u2019s Game had won it (because it had a big shiny silver star saying so on the cover of the copy I stole from my brother \u2013 it also had one for the Nebula, another big award I knew very little about when I first started writing).<\/p>\n

The Hugo, like any award, has its own very distinct culture, and also like any award, every time the nominations come out, there\u2019s a flurry of discussion over what does it mean? As if the nominations are an alien language, and we are trying to figure out their message.<\/p>\n

However, I\u2019m not sure this is necessary, because there are only about three different kinds of industry awards, and each kind tends to articulate and message three very different things.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin<\/a>, \u2018Tis the Season: What Good are the Hugos?<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nThis year\u2019s paroxysms of disgruntlement, particularly the essays written by Justin Landon at Staffer\u2019s Book Review and Aidan Moher at A Dribble of Ink, make me wonder about a more fundamental, heretofore unstated question: what good are the Hugo Awards? What is their purpose? What role(s) do they serve?<\/p>\n

Every person who voices an opinion on the nominees, or the winners, or the awards process itself, has some presumptive answers to these questions. Are my answers the same as Justin\u2019s? Are his the same as Aidan\u2019s? Are ours the same as Kevin Standlee\u2019s? Are Kevin\u2019s the same as Hugo Voter X? Without exploring our unstated assumptions, it will be difficult to understand and contextualize either the complaints about the Hugo Awards, or the defenses of the same. Accusations of demagoguery and privilege are already flying in the comments to Justin\u2019s post, and I suspect they stem from a disconnect in a basic question: what purpose do the Hugo Awards serve?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ultimately, my hopes are that discussions like these, thoughtful and insistent on diversity, are important in driving forward change not only with the Hugo Awards, but with the SFF genre in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the back of Justin Landon’s provocative thoughts on the 2013 Hugo ballot, the past 48 hours has produced several thoughtful responses, some in favour, some against and some carving their own path to find answers to the Hugo ‘problem’ (if such even exists). My thoughts are here. Here I’ve gathered together some of the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[561,38,57,59],"class_list":["post-12170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-2013-hugo-awards","tag-fantasy","tag-hugo-awards","tag-science-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n