Hugo Awards
I'm currently working my way through this year's Hugo nominees for best novel. Even though the awards are all said and done with, and I know the results, I'm still plugging dutifully through the latter half of the list. Why? I'm really not sure. I've done this every year since I started seriously reading SF, but yet I've been consistently dissatisfied.
Now I know that awards are, in effect, meaningless. They boil down to nothing more than popularity contests in the end. A perfect example of this occurred in 2003, where a bunch of rabid Canadian fans decided to throw taste out the window and elect Robert J. Sawyer's immensely inadequate Hominids as the best novel of the year. I mean, did any of these people even read The Scar, or any of the other novels for that matter? The fact is, these awards are managing to continuously misrepresent the genre as a whole.
Look at the award winning novels and stories from the early years. Someone with no knowledge of the genre would be well advised to start reading these to lay the foundations for their SFnal education. You could even progress up the timeline and get a nice sense of how our genre has evolved...up until the late 90's or so.
Look at the novels that have won Hugos since the turn of the century:
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
2002: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
2003: Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer
2004: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I see a pattern here. Rowling won the award because of the Potter-mania occurring at that time. Gaiman won in 2002 due to his extensive and extremely dedicated fan-base. Sawyer won the following year because he is a Canadian writer, and the convention was held in Canada. Bujold won this year because she has a mafia nearly as extensive as Gaiman's. (I'm thoroughly convinced that some day she's going to write a Star Trek slash-fiction story and win a major award for it.) People aren't voting for the best book here, they're voting for their favorite authors.
Why does this disturb me? Because the awards are no longer honoring quality - they're just a representation of who's the coolest author at the moment of the convention. I don't necessarily disagree with the results of the voting, in particular I was glad to see Gaiman win in 2002, although I would have been happier if Mieville had won. This isn't to say that the awards haven't been popularity contests in the past, for all I know they were. I sure wasn't around to attend them, being the spirited little whippersnapper that I am.
But in fifty years, people aren't going to realize this. Award winning novels get remembered, jotted down in lists. I'd just hate to think that all the deserving books of our time are going to be overlooked in favor of something...mediocre. I guess I'll just have to break my sentimental attachment to the idea of the awards and work harder on pushing the good stuff onto people. Will I continue to read the nominees every year? Probably. Who knows, maybe there's be a diamond in the rough. At the very least I'll have something new to complain about. And, on a more positive note, I have been relatively satisfied with the way things have turned out in the short fiction categories. (Although there appears to be some sort of conspiracy against Charlie Stross...)
Now I know that awards are, in effect, meaningless. They boil down to nothing more than popularity contests in the end. A perfect example of this occurred in 2003, where a bunch of rabid Canadian fans decided to throw taste out the window and elect Robert J. Sawyer's immensely inadequate Hominids as the best novel of the year. I mean, did any of these people even read The Scar, or any of the other novels for that matter? The fact is, these awards are managing to continuously misrepresent the genre as a whole.
Look at the award winning novels and stories from the early years. Someone with no knowledge of the genre would be well advised to start reading these to lay the foundations for their SFnal education. You could even progress up the timeline and get a nice sense of how our genre has evolved...up until the late 90's or so.
Look at the novels that have won Hugos since the turn of the century:
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
2002: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
2003: Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer
2004: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I see a pattern here. Rowling won the award because of the Potter-mania occurring at that time. Gaiman won in 2002 due to his extensive and extremely dedicated fan-base. Sawyer won the following year because he is a Canadian writer, and the convention was held in Canada. Bujold won this year because she has a mafia nearly as extensive as Gaiman's. (I'm thoroughly convinced that some day she's going to write a Star Trek slash-fiction story and win a major award for it.) People aren't voting for the best book here, they're voting for their favorite authors.
Why does this disturb me? Because the awards are no longer honoring quality - they're just a representation of who's the coolest author at the moment of the convention. I don't necessarily disagree with the results of the voting, in particular I was glad to see Gaiman win in 2002, although I would have been happier if Mieville had won. This isn't to say that the awards haven't been popularity contests in the past, for all I know they were. I sure wasn't around to attend them, being the spirited little whippersnapper that I am.
But in fifty years, people aren't going to realize this. Award winning novels get remembered, jotted down in lists. I'd just hate to think that all the deserving books of our time are going to be overlooked in favor of something...mediocre. I guess I'll just have to break my sentimental attachment to the idea of the awards and work harder on pushing the good stuff onto people. Will I continue to read the nominees every year? Probably. Who knows, maybe there's be a diamond in the rough. At the very least I'll have something new to complain about. And, on a more positive note, I have been relatively satisfied with the way things have turned out in the short fiction categories. (Although there appears to be some sort of conspiracy against Charlie Stross...)