james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2008-04-16 10:42:00
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Are SF Awards an exercise in futility?
From a discussion between Konrad Gaertner and myself on rasfw:

James Nicoll wrote:

> William George Ferguson <wmgfr...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> >(James Nicoll) wrote:
> >>I am woefully underread in F&SF.

> >This is that new-fangled construction called 'irony', yes?

> No, every time an award like this is announced I see titles
> I not only have not read but haven't even heard of. This is one reason
> why I am hesitant to vote for such book related awards as I am eligible
> for,

By this logic, is *anyone* qualified to vote? James, you read SF as
your full time job; I don't think anyone here can claim to read more
novels per year than you do (though Rich Horton probably has a lock
on short fiction).

> because I know I am missing huge amounts of good stuff.

That's because there's too much stuff that some people think is good
to read it all.

Granted, rasfw is smaller than it was but if I'm the best read SF reader on rasfw and I know I've missing almost everything, what hope is there that the people who vote for awards are actually giving the awards to the most suitable works and not just the most suitable works of which they are aware?

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[info]sinboy
2008-04-16 02:57 pm UTC (link)
This is why the nomination and shortlisting process are important, IMO. If you make it easy to submit books, have a good intelligent process for shortlisting, have judges who know the genre and what is or isn't good writing, you'll probably get a good range of nominations.

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[info]jeffreyab
2008-04-16 02:58 pm UTC (link)
"the most suitable works of which they are aware"

I think this is the rule for any award. Robert J. Sawyer pointed out that this year's best novel Hugo nominess are all white males born in the sixties (I think) which to me is a function of them being nominated by the members of the worldcon whose average age in 2003 was around 48.

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[info]dsrtao
2008-04-16 05:01 pm UTC (link)
Not only that, but the results of most competitions are drawn solely from entrants who entered. I don't have a problem with that; the Hugos et al are a form of literary popularity contest, after all.

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[info]kevin_standlee
2008-04-16 06:45 pm UTC (link)
Well, nobody "enters" the Hugo Awards. It's not a competition to which you submit your work for consideration.

But you're right that the Hugos are something of a popularity contest. We've never said otherwise. They're awards given by the members of the World Science Fiction Society to the works that they liked the most. So naturally they're subjective based on the membership of WSFS (Worldcon) and their tastes.

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[info]sinboy
2008-04-16 02:58 pm UTC (link)
Also, getting works nominated can be something that publicists and authors work on. Sclazi regularly pinps his own works. I see nothing wrong with it. If you're well know as being well read, and important in genre reviews, publicists should be trying to get your attention.

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-04-16 03:01 pm UTC (link)
I regard awards whose winners are dominated by self-promoted books as valueless. All they tell me is which author is best at self-promotion, which isn't what I want to learn from a work winning an award.

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[info]sinboy
2008-04-16 03:05 pm UTC (link)
These days, a lot of new authors (IME) don't accept that a publicity department in a large publisher is always going to market the book for them enough to get a good return. Some awards are given large-list nominations based on submissions from publishers.

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[info]montoya
2008-04-16 03:48 pm UTC (link)
Also, who wants to spend all their time reading Rob Sawyer?

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[info]mjlayman
2008-04-17 02:13 am UTC (link)
I have to read Hominids for next month's bookgroup. Waaaaaaah

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[info]ninebelow
2008-04-16 03:07 pm UTC (link)
None. Whoever thought there was?

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[info]montoya
2008-04-16 03:34 pm UTC (link)
The hope, certainly, would be that people are getting their reading filtered down to the good books, so that they'll have read most of the award-likely stuff by the time voting comes around.

But realistically, I doubt it. I mean, even with how much less I read these days, I have to believe I'm still reasonably on the right side of the reading bell curve (I read 44 prose books and 72 graphic novels in 2007), and I routinely haven't heard of Hugo-nominated books, never mind read them.

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[info]kaffyr
2008-04-16 04:02 pm UTC (link)
As someone else has suggested, all awards are, almost by definition, awarded to the most suitable works of which (the voters) are aware. Awards are, I think, still valuable because the voters will still base at least part of their decision on what they see as the intrinsic value of the work, no matter how narrow the base from which they are drawing. Those writers who receive awards are being, one hopes, touted for their worth, and deserve the accolades. (Yes, I'm aware this is rather a rosy view of the whole awards paradigm, but I think it's better for my ulcers.)

And even when the field is narrow, even when readers haven't heard of the nominees, if they are like I was in my long ago youth, they will take the effort to read the nominees once theyhave heard of them. That alone makes awards worthwhile; after all, anything that prompts a reader to broaden his or her reading experience is a good thing.

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[info]sanity_cheque
2008-04-16 04:05 pm UTC (link)
I can read between 5 and 9 novels a month, but I don't feel like I'd be a good judge for any awards program. Mainly because I can't actually AFFORD to read that many new books a month. Publishers are pushing their price ranges outside of my discretionary fund limit more every year, and 2 of the 3 libraries near me suck (and the third is at a university that I don't have access to). God bless america...

In any case, people are going to vote for what they like. Out of a given sample of nominees, there may be 1 or 2 books that your average reader is even familiar with enough to make a judgment call on quality, and yes the publicity applied will be a big factor in which books a person has read.

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[info]martin_wisse
2008-04-16 04:14 pm UTC (link)
One reason I didn't vote in the Locus poll, though I could've. I feel more in tune with f&sf currently than I've done in a good many years, but I'm barely familiar with only a small part of it. There's just too much and even if you can assume 90 percent of it is crud, in a genre that sees some 1500 new books published each year, that's still 150 books to get through.

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-04-16 04:20 pm UTC (link)
150 books is a breeze but how do you know which 90% to discard?

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[info]montoya
2008-04-16 04:34 pm UTC (link)
Many of them have Baen logos, which is a start...

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-04-16 04:35 pm UTC (link)
If you toss Baen, you toss Bujold, just for starters.

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[info]montoya
2008-04-16 04:44 pm UTC (link)
Not in the last five years...

I think David Weber is the only currently Baen author I read and like, and he seems to be moving to Tor anyway.

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[info]martin_wisse
2008-04-17 10:17 am UTC (link)
For you maybe, but last year was the first time since 2001 I got above the hundred books mark and besides, I want to read more than just f&sf.

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[info]doc_lemming
2008-04-16 04:50 pm UTC (link)
Unfortunately, James, you have no say in the vast majority of what you read, so you might get to read crap or you might get to read gold; neither guarantees you are reading what the people are voting for (although your chances of being asked to read a book after it has won are probably higher).

The fact that you read as a job unfortunately has little or no bearing on whether you read the award winners (or even nominees) that year.

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[info]papersky
2008-04-16 05:10 pm UTC (link)
I think if you look at the Locus "awards of the year" page for any year, it ought to look like the best books of the year and an interesting pile of books. Mostly this works, if I look at any random year.

There are brilliant books that come out and get totally ignored. I recently read Molly Gloss's Dazzle of Day, a brilliantly written generation starship novel, which came out in 1997 when I was reading all of rasfw all the time and I don't recall ever hearing mentioned on the group, never mind nominated for awards.

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2008-04-16 05:49 pm UTC (link)
The two best examples of the worthlessness of the Hugo Awards: the crying within the community when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won Best Novel (particularly among Charles Brown at Locus, because J.K. Rowling apparently didn't kiss his ass beg his permission to accept the nomination, much less the award), and the equally impotent crying during the 1997 Hugo presentation, when four-fifths of the audience hung around to watch Joe Straczynski win his Hugo for Babylon 5 and then walked out. You have an award where the only criteria for voting is that the participant was willing to pay the usurious admission fee, usually because that Worldcon was within driving distance of the participant's home, and we have the nerve to look surprised that the only categories with more than a handful of votes are Best Novel and Best Dramatic Presentation?

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[info]kevin_standlee
2008-04-16 06:51 pm UTC (link)
By now I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of anyone reading this who doesn't know: You don't have to buy an attending membership ("the usurious admission fee") to nominate and vote on the Hugo Awards. I'm not saying that a supporting membership is cheap (currently about $50), but it's less expensive than an attending membership (around four times that).

Also, while I don't have a lot of data to work from, the total number of nomination and final ballots per year suggests to me that actually there's a core of Usual Suspects who vote every year, and that the location of the specific Worldcon has less influence on the results than you might assume. I think it probably affects the final results more than the nominating ballot. That is, the less than 500 nominating ballots (out of perhaps 7000 eligible voters) seem to come mostly from "we always vote" people, but the final ballot has more people voting who see the nominations and say, "I've heard of that" and voted for it. Nominating is harder work than voting on the final ballot.

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[info]daev
2008-04-16 07:29 pm UTC (link)
I was going to ask you about that. It's true that you read a lot of SF for your reviewing job, but you've also made it clear that Your Shadowy Masters seem to know you and your tastes pretty well -- or at least They believe so. That suggests there are plenty of books which you are never sent, because Andrew Wheeler (and his successors) think, rightly or wrongly, that they're not your sort of thing. Since the RASFW thread is discussing the winners of the Tiptree Awards, do you think that's what's happening here?

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-04-16 07:37 pm UTC (link)
I haven't asked if this policy survived the Unpleasantness but back when Andrew was picking my books, I know for a fact that he'd sometimes pick ones that would enrage me so that he could read the reports that resulted.

I read a lot of books for SFBC and "we need a report on this, fast" is more important than "James would like this". What I provide is a consistant POV and the ability to provide a 24 hour or less turn around on books. I assume but have not asked that when I get something of a sort of book that I hate, they know how to apply a correction to my reviews to get what the average reader would think. Heck, even I know how to apply one and I am embedded in my own opinions.

It may be or it may not be that the books that tend to get nominated for the Tiptree are not books that get submitted to the SFBC for consideration.

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[info]andrewwheeler
2008-04-17 02:49 pm UTC (link)
I can't speak to the Current Regime, either, but what James says above was essentially true in my day. (Imprimis, that I'd occasionally send him books because I really wanted to read his report on them -- not always because I thought he'd hate them -- and, secundus, he was my fastest and most reliable reader, so he got most of the we're-going-to-buy-this-anyway-but-we-need-a-report-by-Tuesday books.)

And there was also an element of "dibs" -- certain readers had claimed certain writers or series, and, even absent that, readers would tell me "I really want to read that new Tor book by J. Random Author" and I'd do my best to make sure they did.

Dunno what goes on now, though.

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[info]andrewwheeler
2008-04-17 05:53 pm UTC (link)
There's also the point that most awards in the SFF field are for something very specific -- libertoonian fiction, feminist dystopias, mainstream British novels with a tiny bit of science in them -- and those things are quite often not what most SFF readers are choosing to spend their money and time on when given the choice.

Since your reading in the field is largely dictated by a commercial enterprise, I suspect you read mostly commercial books, not the ones that are likely to win most of those awards. (I'd expect you to be most familiar with Hugo nominees, then Nebulas, and maybe World Fantasy after that.)

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[info]anders_m
2008-04-19 04:12 am UTC (link)
Dismissing award because they supposedly feature "libertoonian fiction, feminist dystopias, mainstream British novels with a tiny bit of science in them" is a cheap shot, but if SFF readers don't care to read recent books by Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross, or Vernor Vinge and Donald Kingsbury, that's their loss. For no doubt Wheeler is referring to the Prometheus Award in his first example, an award that has been around since 1979. Just as you don't need to be a gay/lesbian to write books nominated for gay/lesbian sf awards, being a libertarian is not a requirement to win the Prometheus Award. Most awards of any genre aren't about the 'best' novel or movie, as the Hugo Awards every year seem to demonstrate (when is the last time Iain Banks won a Hugo?). But it's not fair to denigrate the people behind any award, as no doubt they care passionately about fiction. I can't say I choose books based on whether or not they have won awards. If you only want to read New York Times best-selling books, or Hugo Award winning novels, that's your choice. But it's a pretty narrow choice. But judge a books by its merits, not whether or not any group has found that it speaks to them on certain levels and thus award-worthy.

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