james_nicoll

I don't think he qualifies for the same reason it turned out Lem didn't; he qualifies for full membership.

Priest's comment remind me much of Tom Disch's "Labor Day Group", another sf writer castigating standards in sf awards, and that was over 30 years ago:

It's no longer enough to speak of the walls of the ghetto: now there's a dome, and (on the evidence of most of these stories) communications with the outside have ceased. For a writer's organisation to give an award to such a story as "giANTS" is tantamount to erecting a sign at the airlock, saying "Science Fiction - abandon all taste - ye who enter here". Indeed, I've heard it argued that sf transcends, in its nature, the canons of mundane literary taste. How often, though, what seems like transcendence from one point of view looks like a lack of plumbing from another.
This is not to suggest that sf, in its institutional aspects, should be disbanded. Conventions are fun, and trophies decorate the den like nothing else. But for writers (or readers) to frame a standard of excellence based on purely intramural criteria, and to amke it their conscious goal to win an award, is to confuse literature with bowling.

Thomas Disch "The Labor Day Group" F&SF February 1981

- matthew davis

Can you jog my memory on "giANTS"?

Here, the whole document (PDF link). Or just a relevant excerpt:

Ed Bryant's (or bryANT's) "giANTS" (in the Dozois annual) is about giant ants, like in the movie Them, only different. There are these ants in South America, see, that are really scary and they're heading this way, and here's bryANT's twist --- we defeat the ant invasion by inducing immoderate growth, since beyond a certain size exoskeletons are dysfunctional. I remember encountering the same observation some years ago in a book of essays by Arthur Clarke, and I'm sure the idea wasn't original to him. Bryant dramatizes this common knowledge by having someone unaware of it informed of it, after much cajoling, by someone in the know --- generally, and in this case, a poor sort of drama, since by a simple shift of point of view the story is reduced to the bare notion one already knows. Inexplicably, “giANTS” won a Nebula. Congratulations.

Oh, that one.

For some reason, I never encountered that one. It sounds like something that would have worked fine as a 1950s short-short about as long as that paragraph.

Oh, and I didn't like Timescape one bit.