Why Should I Care About the British Fantasy Awards?
There has been a lot written in the last week about the British Fantasy Society’s British Fantasy Awards, which were handed out at Fantasycon 2011 in Brighton last weekend. In brief, this is the situation as I see it:-
The awards were administrated by David J Howe, chairman of the BFS. He’s taken over the administration of the awards earlier in the year, when the previous administrator resigned for personal reasons. David Howe’s girlfriend/partner/”live-in lover” is writer Sam Stone, and Howe is also co-publisher/co-owner at Telos Publishing. So, armed with that information, here’s a list of who the awards were presented to (with certain names highlighted to make the point here unavoidable):-
Best Novel (The August Derleth Fantasy Award) - Demon Dance, Sam Stone (The House of Murky Depths)
Best Novella - Humpty’s Bones, Simon Clark (Telos)
Best Short Story - “Fool’s Gold,” Sam Stone (The Bitten Word)
Best Collection - Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)
Best Anthology - Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, Johnny Mains, ed. (Noose & Gibbet)
Best Non-Fiction - Vincent Chong, Altered Visions: The Art of Vincent Chong (Telos)
Best Artist - Vincent Chong
Best Small Press - Telos Publishing; David J. Howe & Stephen James Walker
Best Magazine - Black Static
Best Graphic Novel - At the Mountains of Madness, I.N.J. Culbard (SelfMadeHero)
Karl Edward Wagner Special Award: Terry Pratchett
Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer: Robert Jackson Bennett, for Mr Shivers (Orbit)
So, so far so good. Of the ten awards that were voted on, Sam Stone won two - Best Novel and Best Short Story - and David Howe and Telos Publications were associated with three others - Best Novella, Best Small Press, and Best Non-Fiction - with that last one going to a book of art by Vincent Chong, who also won the Best Artist award. So, we could say that David Howe had some direct relationship with at least five of the awards. It really didn’t look good.
Before I get to why I’m interested in all of this, and what I think, I’d like to present one other set of facts. In the course of the week, the voting figures came out - or rather, some of the voting figures. The figures below are the total number of votes cast in each category - not the number of votes the winning entry got, but the total number of votes cast for that particular award:-
Best Novel - 116 Votes Cast
Best Novella - 102 Votes Cast
Best Short Story - 92 Votes Cast
Best Collection - 97 Votes Cast
Best Anthology - 111 Votes Cast
Best Non-Fiction - 90 Votes Cast
Best Artist - 108 Votes Cast
Best Small Press - 110 Votes Cast
Best Magazine/Periodical - 111 Votes Cast
Best Comic/Graphic Novel - 77 Votes Cast
Best Film - 114 Votes Cast
Best Television - 120 Votes Cast
The British Fantasy Awards use a ‘First Past the Post’ system so, with five eligible candidates in each award, all the winner needed to get was 20% of the vote plus one vote. For instance, for the best novel award, it is theoretically possible that the votes could have been 23 votes each for four of the books, and 24 votes for the winner, adding up to 116 votes altogether. This means, for instance, that in the section with the lowest number of votes cast, the one for Best Graphic Novel, the winner could have won with as little as 17 votes. Also, the shortlist was announced, as far as I can see, at the end of June 2011, with the voting ending a month later, at the end of July 2011. (If I’m wrong here, please feel free to correct me on it.) Although the voting was open to both members of the BFS and attendees at Fantasycon, anyone who joined the con after the end of July, including anyone who might have just signed up at the door last weekend, were not able to vote, whether they wanted to or not. There are also some stories going about that members of Fantasycon didn’t know they could vote, although these are countered by other stories saying that they were informed by email.
So, unsurprisingly, this has caused something of a furore. Stephen Jones, who apparently already has a reputation for shooting from the hip, wrote this blog post, called ‘Putting The "Con" Into FantasyCon,’ where he lays waste to all around him, saying, early on, ‘I guess the "fix" was in months ago before pointing the finger in all sorts of directions, even taking in people who had nothing to do with the awards in any way. This led to a substantial amount of posting by all sorts of people, the majority of which has been collected, and commented on, in Nicholas Whyte’s excellent post here, where he particularly tries to see how the awards reflect the wider world’s opinion of the works nominated, specifically in the Best Novel category. Amongst other things, Nicholas is a working diplomat and political commentator, so knows a bit about voting...
So, why do I care about this? After all, I’m not a member of the BFS, nor a reader of fantasy. But I’m interested in things like the need for clarity, the ability of people to be able to stand over what they do, the power of words, and how the outside world see all of us genre enthusiasts, regardless of which genre.
First, though, a sad story from my childhood: My father has, for pretty much the entirely of my lifetime, worked either fulltime or freelance for RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcasting station. This meant that, even though there were often competitions in the RTÉ Guide or on the radio and telly I’d love to have entered, I knew I couldn’t, as there was always that clause about ‘employees and their families are not eligible to enter.’ I got used to seeing that line on competition forms, and understood from a very early age why it was there. If I won something, people would have said it was a fix, even though I knew it wouldn’t have been. If people could point the finger, there was a very good chance they would point the finger. (Another lesson I learnt early on - possibly even the same lesson in a different form - was also due to my father: Besides his career in broadcasting, he had earlier been a primary school teacher - in the school which I attended. Many of my fellow pupils thought this meant that the teachers were easy on me - in actual fact, the very opposite was true. I couldn’t win for losing. Again, if people see a connection, they almost automatically assume this means that connection is being used for the benefit of one person or another, regardless of whether there is any evidence of any kind to support it. Actually, usually because there is no evidence to support it. But that’s another day’s work...)
So, what I’m saying is, if you’re involved with running an award, you need there to be clear air between you and those awards. This is probably the fundamental problem with these awards: David Howe, the awards administrator, was also involved in one way or another with several of the awards. I want to say, hand on heart, that I do not think there was any malpractice of any kind with his administration of the awards. But, I think he was colossally stupid to think that it was OK for him to be nominated in the awards he was also administering. If people can point the finger, there is a very good chance they will point the finger, and that’s what happened here. And, in a lot of ways, I have very little sympathy for him. I think someone said that all he was guilty of was being naïve, but I think that that’s letting him off too lightly. How can he have imagined that the awards would not be commented on? Particularly in this Internet age, where these kinds of perceived miscarriages of justice are ruthlessly exposed? There is no doubt in my mind that he should have declared at least some of the Telos nominations as being withdrawn, and the same should really go for Sam Stone, whose case is possibly a bit more complex. I haven’t read her novel, or indeed any of the others nominated. However, I have read her winning short story, which you can read for yourself here. Some years back I was one of the early readers for the James White Awards, a short story competition, where we received the stories without any information about the authors, to start work towards the shortlist of five that would be given to the main judges to read. I have to say, and you may think this cruel of me, that if that story had come to me to be read, I would not have passed it further up the line. Perhaps it was the best short story published in the last year, but I’m hoping it wasn’t. What is much more likely is that it was simply the story that received the most votes in this competition, a very different thing to ‘Best,’ at times. With 92 votes cast in the entire category, this could have been won with as little as 20 votes. I don’t have some sort of personal vendetta against Sam Stone, although I think at this stage we are unlikely to be fated to be friends, and I have to say it is clear that she won her two awards fair and square, according to the rules of the competition. There has been some loose talk about her touting for votes, although absolutely no evidence to back this up, but even if it is the case, I can’t see any really grave sin in asking people to vote for you. After all, don’t politicians do it all the time? (OK, maybe not the greatest analogy...)
So, issues about the quality of her work completely aside, as that is an entirely different discussion, and one I’m definitely not qualified to comment on, I think the major problem here is how it all looks Again, and I want to state this very clearly, I honestly do not think that there was any wrongdoing of any kind going on in the Howe/Stone household, but I can certainly see how people could imagine there was. David Howe was in charging of checking the votes, which were accumulated on a Google spreadsheet, which actually counted the votes automatically. So, surely it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine Sam Stone sneaking a look at his computer, seeing how many votes she had, and putting the strong arm on some of her friends to get her those few votes she needed to come out on top. And this is why some people have to be excluded from being eligible: because, if they are, in circumstances like this, then there is no room for people to make suggestions or accusations. And that’s why I think David Howe was colossally stupid not to exclude himself and his partner from the awards: because this outcry, which surely anyone could see would ensue, would have been avoided.
And here’s another thing: Was there nobody else who voiced any concern? Did nobody on the BFS committee raise any concerns about their chairman and awards administrator being in this position? And if not, why not? Were the awards not under the general care of the BFS committee, or was one man in total control, with no input from anyone else? From Howe’s own account of how the awards were verified, he did show the results to at least one other person, but if that person sounded any note of warning, we are not told.
In the end, Sam Stone has handed back her Best Novel award - but not her Best Short Story award - and, after an explanation from David Howe about how the votes were counted, but not why he thought it was OK for him to be at both ends of the award process, I read that he has now handed in his resignation as chairman of the BFS. Personally, I think if he had come out with his hands up, said, ‘That really was an enormous error of judgement on my part, and I’m very sorry to all the people involved,’ and led a discussion on how to make sure something like that never happened again, it would have gone a long way Contrition, after all, is something people like to see. But, instead, we see his girlfriend handing back an award that she won fairly, although under unfortunate circumstances.
My last point is this: words have meaning, and words have power. If you call yourself the British something-or-another, if you’re going to represent yourself as having some sort of national standing, then this should have some sort of meaning, some sort of weight. And, it has to be said, if you’re giving awards for Fantasy, then there should be something in there that is actually fantasy, rather than a number of different shades of horror. I’m aware that the British Fantasy Society used to be the British Weird Fantasy Society, and perhaps a name more like that, like for instance the Weird Fantasy Awards, would better reflect what these awards are for. And removing the name British from the title would remove some of the gravitas that they certainly appear not to have lived up to this year. I’ve been concerned about the same sort of thing here in Ireland, where Octocon, from it’s very first con, called itself The National Irish SF Convention, thereby putting an onus on coming committees that they might not necessarily have wished to carry. In naming P-CON as ‘An Irish Literary Convention,’ I deliberately wanted to avoid the definite article, despite people trying to invoke it on my behalf. If you have a name, then you need to live up to that name, if you wish to be taken seriously. If you find it’s too heavy for you to carry, then consider changing either the way you’re carrying it, or the name itself.
I spent over twenty years working in bookshops, trying to interest people in coming to Science Fiction Conventions. Mostly people said things like, ‘Will I have to wear a Star Trek uniform?’ There are some very entrenched opinions out there, you know. I really care about my own end of things, and I’d really like the rest of the world to be able to see what I love in a positive light. I think we all would. Handing them free ammunition like this is not doing any of us any favours. To the big bad world, we’re all tarred with the same brush, and what happens at the BFS affects us all, eventually.
And that’s why I care about what happened at the British Fantasy Awards.
The awards were administrated by David J Howe, chairman of the BFS. He’s taken over the administration of the awards earlier in the year, when the previous administrator resigned for personal reasons. David Howe’s girlfriend/partner/”live-in lover” is writer Sam Stone, and Howe is also co-publisher/co-owner at Telos Publishing. So, armed with that information, here’s a list of who the awards were presented to (with certain names highlighted to make the point here unavoidable):-
Best Novel (The August Derleth Fantasy Award) - Demon Dance, Sam Stone (The House of Murky Depths)
Best Novella - Humpty’s Bones, Simon Clark (Telos)
Best Short Story - “Fool’s Gold,” Sam Stone (The Bitten Word)
Best Collection - Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)
Best Anthology - Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, Johnny Mains, ed. (Noose & Gibbet)
Best Non-Fiction - Vincent Chong, Altered Visions: The Art of Vincent Chong (Telos)
Best Artist - Vincent Chong
Best Small Press - Telos Publishing; David J. Howe & Stephen James Walker
Best Magazine - Black Static
Best Graphic Novel - At the Mountains of Madness, I.N.J. Culbard (SelfMadeHero)
Karl Edward Wagner Special Award: Terry Pratchett
Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer: Robert Jackson Bennett, for Mr Shivers (Orbit)
So, so far so good. Of the ten awards that were voted on, Sam Stone won two - Best Novel and Best Short Story - and David Howe and Telos Publications were associated with three others - Best Novella, Best Small Press, and Best Non-Fiction - with that last one going to a book of art by Vincent Chong, who also won the Best Artist award. So, we could say that David Howe had some direct relationship with at least five of the awards. It really didn’t look good.
Before I get to why I’m interested in all of this, and what I think, I’d like to present one other set of facts. In the course of the week, the voting figures came out - or rather, some of the voting figures. The figures below are the total number of votes cast in each category - not the number of votes the winning entry got, but the total number of votes cast for that particular award:-
Best Novel - 116 Votes Cast
Best Novella - 102 Votes Cast
Best Short Story - 92 Votes Cast
Best Collection - 97 Votes Cast
Best Anthology - 111 Votes Cast
Best Non-Fiction - 90 Votes Cast
Best Artist - 108 Votes Cast
Best Small Press - 110 Votes Cast
Best Magazine/Periodical - 111 Votes Cast
Best Comic/Graphic Novel - 77 Votes Cast
Best Film - 114 Votes Cast
Best Television - 120 Votes Cast
The British Fantasy Awards use a ‘First Past the Post’ system so, with five eligible candidates in each award, all the winner needed to get was 20% of the vote plus one vote. For instance, for the best novel award, it is theoretically possible that the votes could have been 23 votes each for four of the books, and 24 votes for the winner, adding up to 116 votes altogether. This means, for instance, that in the section with the lowest number of votes cast, the one for Best Graphic Novel, the winner could have won with as little as 17 votes. Also, the shortlist was announced, as far as I can see, at the end of June 2011, with the voting ending a month later, at the end of July 2011. (If I’m wrong here, please feel free to correct me on it.) Although the voting was open to both members of the BFS and attendees at Fantasycon, anyone who joined the con after the end of July, including anyone who might have just signed up at the door last weekend, were not able to vote, whether they wanted to or not. There are also some stories going about that members of Fantasycon didn’t know they could vote, although these are countered by other stories saying that they were informed by email.
So, unsurprisingly, this has caused something of a furore. Stephen Jones, who apparently already has a reputation for shooting from the hip, wrote this blog post, called ‘Putting The "Con" Into FantasyCon,’ where he lays waste to all around him, saying, early on, ‘I guess the "fix" was in months ago before pointing the finger in all sorts of directions, even taking in people who had nothing to do with the awards in any way. This led to a substantial amount of posting by all sorts of people, the majority of which has been collected, and commented on, in Nicholas Whyte’s excellent post here, where he particularly tries to see how the awards reflect the wider world’s opinion of the works nominated, specifically in the Best Novel category. Amongst other things, Nicholas is a working diplomat and political commentator, so knows a bit about voting...
So, why do I care about this? After all, I’m not a member of the BFS, nor a reader of fantasy. But I’m interested in things like the need for clarity, the ability of people to be able to stand over what they do, the power of words, and how the outside world see all of us genre enthusiasts, regardless of which genre.
First, though, a sad story from my childhood: My father has, for pretty much the entirely of my lifetime, worked either fulltime or freelance for RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcasting station. This meant that, even though there were often competitions in the RTÉ Guide or on the radio and telly I’d love to have entered, I knew I couldn’t, as there was always that clause about ‘employees and their families are not eligible to enter.’ I got used to seeing that line on competition forms, and understood from a very early age why it was there. If I won something, people would have said it was a fix, even though I knew it wouldn’t have been. If people could point the finger, there was a very good chance they would point the finger. (Another lesson I learnt early on - possibly even the same lesson in a different form - was also due to my father: Besides his career in broadcasting, he had earlier been a primary school teacher - in the school which I attended. Many of my fellow pupils thought this meant that the teachers were easy on me - in actual fact, the very opposite was true. I couldn’t win for losing. Again, if people see a connection, they almost automatically assume this means that connection is being used for the benefit of one person or another, regardless of whether there is any evidence of any kind to support it. Actually, usually because there is no evidence to support it. But that’s another day’s work...)
So, what I’m saying is, if you’re involved with running an award, you need there to be clear air between you and those awards. This is probably the fundamental problem with these awards: David Howe, the awards administrator, was also involved in one way or another with several of the awards. I want to say, hand on heart, that I do not think there was any malpractice of any kind with his administration of the awards. But, I think he was colossally stupid to think that it was OK for him to be nominated in the awards he was also administering. If people can point the finger, there is a very good chance they will point the finger, and that’s what happened here. And, in a lot of ways, I have very little sympathy for him. I think someone said that all he was guilty of was being naïve, but I think that that’s letting him off too lightly. How can he have imagined that the awards would not be commented on? Particularly in this Internet age, where these kinds of perceived miscarriages of justice are ruthlessly exposed? There is no doubt in my mind that he should have declared at least some of the Telos nominations as being withdrawn, and the same should really go for Sam Stone, whose case is possibly a bit more complex. I haven’t read her novel, or indeed any of the others nominated. However, I have read her winning short story, which you can read for yourself here. Some years back I was one of the early readers for the James White Awards, a short story competition, where we received the stories without any information about the authors, to start work towards the shortlist of five that would be given to the main judges to read. I have to say, and you may think this cruel of me, that if that story had come to me to be read, I would not have passed it further up the line. Perhaps it was the best short story published in the last year, but I’m hoping it wasn’t. What is much more likely is that it was simply the story that received the most votes in this competition, a very different thing to ‘Best,’ at times. With 92 votes cast in the entire category, this could have been won with as little as 20 votes. I don’t have some sort of personal vendetta against Sam Stone, although I think at this stage we are unlikely to be fated to be friends, and I have to say it is clear that she won her two awards fair and square, according to the rules of the competition. There has been some loose talk about her touting for votes, although absolutely no evidence to back this up, but even if it is the case, I can’t see any really grave sin in asking people to vote for you. After all, don’t politicians do it all the time? (OK, maybe not the greatest analogy...)
So, issues about the quality of her work completely aside, as that is an entirely different discussion, and one I’m definitely not qualified to comment on, I think the major problem here is how it all looks Again, and I want to state this very clearly, I honestly do not think that there was any wrongdoing of any kind going on in the Howe/Stone household, but I can certainly see how people could imagine there was. David Howe was in charging of checking the votes, which were accumulated on a Google spreadsheet, which actually counted the votes automatically. So, surely it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine Sam Stone sneaking a look at his computer, seeing how many votes she had, and putting the strong arm on some of her friends to get her those few votes she needed to come out on top. And this is why some people have to be excluded from being eligible: because, if they are, in circumstances like this, then there is no room for people to make suggestions or accusations. And that’s why I think David Howe was colossally stupid not to exclude himself and his partner from the awards: because this outcry, which surely anyone could see would ensue, would have been avoided.
And here’s another thing: Was there nobody else who voiced any concern? Did nobody on the BFS committee raise any concerns about their chairman and awards administrator being in this position? And if not, why not? Were the awards not under the general care of the BFS committee, or was one man in total control, with no input from anyone else? From Howe’s own account of how the awards were verified, he did show the results to at least one other person, but if that person sounded any note of warning, we are not told.
In the end, Sam Stone has handed back her Best Novel award - but not her Best Short Story award - and, after an explanation from David Howe about how the votes were counted, but not why he thought it was OK for him to be at both ends of the award process, I read that he has now handed in his resignation as chairman of the BFS. Personally, I think if he had come out with his hands up, said, ‘That really was an enormous error of judgement on my part, and I’m very sorry to all the people involved,’ and led a discussion on how to make sure something like that never happened again, it would have gone a long way Contrition, after all, is something people like to see. But, instead, we see his girlfriend handing back an award that she won fairly, although under unfortunate circumstances.
My last point is this: words have meaning, and words have power. If you call yourself the British something-or-another, if you’re going to represent yourself as having some sort of national standing, then this should have some sort of meaning, some sort of weight. And, it has to be said, if you’re giving awards for Fantasy, then there should be something in there that is actually fantasy, rather than a number of different shades of horror. I’m aware that the British Fantasy Society used to be the British Weird Fantasy Society, and perhaps a name more like that, like for instance the Weird Fantasy Awards, would better reflect what these awards are for. And removing the name British from the title would remove some of the gravitas that they certainly appear not to have lived up to this year. I’ve been concerned about the same sort of thing here in Ireland, where Octocon, from it’s very first con, called itself The National Irish SF Convention, thereby putting an onus on coming committees that they might not necessarily have wished to carry. In naming P-CON as ‘An Irish Literary Convention,’ I deliberately wanted to avoid the definite article, despite people trying to invoke it on my behalf. If you have a name, then you need to live up to that name, if you wish to be taken seriously. If you find it’s too heavy for you to carry, then consider changing either the way you’re carrying it, or the name itself.
I spent over twenty years working in bookshops, trying to interest people in coming to Science Fiction Conventions. Mostly people said things like, ‘Will I have to wear a Star Trek uniform?’ There are some very entrenched opinions out there, you know. I really care about my own end of things, and I’d really like the rest of the world to be able to see what I love in a positive light. I think we all would. Handing them free ammunition like this is not doing any of us any favours. To the big bad world, we’re all tarred with the same brush, and what happens at the BFS affects us all, eventually.
And that’s why I care about what happened at the British Fantasy Awards.