Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Significant Awards

I was traveling so I missed the discussion around this post at File 770 https://file770.com/announcing-the-westfahl-award-and-other-insignificant-science-fiction-awards/

Personally, I’m in favour of a multiplicity of awards in Science Fiction & Fantasy. Ignore the awards you don’t find interesting. It really is that simple. Having many kinds of awards is good for reasons I’ll outline below. The downside of there then being too many awards to pay attention to has no actual negative consequences because you ignore the ones that you’ve got no interest in.

The positive aspect of multiple awards I think are clear and are issues I’ve discussed before. No one award can sensibly address the range and depth of books/stories available in Science Fiction & Fantasy. Having multiple awards helps people discover notable interesting works. Every method for identifying the “best” work in a field has serious flaws and multiple systemic biases. Those flaws can be tweaked and biases reduced but any single award system will still retain some.

This is particularly relevant to the Hugo Awards because they are one of the few awards in any space that I can think of where there is semi-public participation in deciding the process for selecting the finalists and winners. The Hugo Awards don’t have a good solution for works not written in English. They don’t have a good solution for works who only find their audience in the years after they were published. They don’t have a good solution to the financial barriers to people voting. They don’t have a good solution to recognising works in sub-sub-genres. Hugo voters rarely, if ever, recognise manga or anime despite these being of major cultural significance worldwide in science fiction and fantasy…and so on. Some of these are tractable problems that people may come up with solutions for but others aren’t and more broadly the Hugo Awards are never going to truly going to provide some kind of definitive answer on what was the best science fiction of a given year. What they can do is give an interesting and useful answer to that question.

Having a multiplicity of awards which use a range of methodologies is the best way past these issues. Consider these parameters:

  • The number of stages in an award (typically either two or three e.g. finalist/winner or longlist/shortlist/winner)
  • The people who make the subjective choices and how those groups are defined: jury, administrators, voters.
  • The mechanics of the selection process (voting systems, jury deliberations, eligibility criteria)

Across the SF&F awards that I pay attention to (roughly in order Hugos, Nebulas, Dragon, IGNYTE, Clarke, Goodreads) there is a mix of juries and popular votes and differing degrees of power/intervention from administrators but it isn’t even close to a mix of the more credible methods.

One method I haven’t seen implimented is random sampling to create a long list. I don’t know how that might work really but done right it might end up with a very interesting way to create an award which has a final popular vote but which is more than just a popularity contest. I think it could be a very effective system for short fiction for example (define the qualifying magazines, create a giant list of all the stories they published, randomly pick 20, ask people to read and pick the best). I find that almost appealing enough to attempt it! Yet…you can see the obvious biases in it. Back in the early 2000’s when many women SF authors were getting very frustrated with the apparent gender bias in published science fiction, an award with the method I just described would still be as male dominated as real awards. A juried award might have the same bias or even have a worse bias but also, a juried award could intentionally address the bias. Awards that focus on particular groups or subgenres or even political criteria (e.g. the libertarian flavoured Prometheus awards) can cut through existing biases to elevate works that might otherwise go unnoticed.

OK, now I’ve completely distracted myself thinking about how to create a random-sampling system for a short fiction award and can’t think of a conclusion. I hate concluding paragraphs anyway. We need an award for best essay without a decent concluding paragraph.

camestrosfelapton

35 responses to “Significant Awards”

  1. I think a fair-ish system could be done with enough volunteers. Assign a few things at random for each volunteer to read, and let them nominate the good ones for the next round. In each round, more people read each nominee, maybe assigning them scores. And in the final round, every judge must read each nominee before voting.

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    • Could be like Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off. You get a bunch of different bloggers/reviewers involved who get a subset of the stories to review. That would increase the overall amount of short story reviews as well.

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      • I do not fully understand how that contest works, but it seems to manage winnowing down the massive quantity of self published books while each one does still get read by someone.

        Liked by 1 person

      • As a judge in the science fiction spinoff, it’s been such a slog of an experience. So much stuff and to be fair, the quality is much lower than say other juried awards might deal with. A few gems in here, although I have rather negative thoughts about half the final ballot :/

        So I’m not sure I’d count on such as a good thing to duplicate

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        • I can see how that could be an issue but it might be less of a problem with published short fiction. Firstly there would already have been one filter of quality (it was published by some place that had an editor) and secondly there would be much less to read.

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  2. Well we do have a multiplicity of SFFH awards. Almost any SFF convention of any decent size and years of establishment has an award, sometimes a set of awards, because they want to do that as part of their celebration. Plus then there are just a lot of awards from associations, groups of people usually promoting a love of SFFH. All of the awards are usually meant to be encouraging and get some attention for books. As that is a worthy goal, none of the awards are insignificant.

    I’m not able to load File 770 right now, for some reason. But anyone complaining about the existence of an award seems to me to be totally missing the point. Even the Dragons, hot mess that they still are, are useful and might one day even be fun.

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      • I noticed the Le Guin award that announced its second set of finalists the other day uses an April-March window, so it’s a mistake (IMHO) people are still making. On the plus side, it’s a juried award, so there shouldn’t be any misunderstanding about what’s eligible, that you’d likely get with a public poll vote using the window.

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  3. It’s typical for fans to become embroiled in the technical problem of identifying the “best” works in a “fair” way. From the writers’ viewpoint, they don’t care about that. They want there to be as many awards as possible, thereby increasing the opportunity for works on their eligibility lists to be shortlisted or even win something so they can broadcast that on social media and lift their profiles above the insurmountable noise of others trying to sell books. The Helicon Award is absolutely as satisfactory as the Hugo Award for that purpose.

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  4. As a reader, what I want from awards is for them to call attention to books that I would like and that I haven’t otherwise seen or made time to read.

    Because I’m the sort of person who does this sort of thing, I have kept track of the winners (and in some cases the nominees) of a bunch of major SFF awards and my subsequent opinions about the book and generated statistics from them. In some cases, those aren’t that accurate since I haven’t read many winners, but in the case of a few of the awards (Hugo best novel, Nebula best novel, Locus best SF novel) I have read all or nearly all the winners just out of curiosity. (So I am someone who has read the infamous They’d Rather Be Right. Not only is it not the worst Hugo award winning novel, it’s not a very close contender for the worst Hugo winning novel. Although I do agree that it’s not a good book.)

    I therefore have a bunch of data that says, FOR ME, the Hugo award turns out to be mediocre at finding books that I would enjoy, doing slightly worse than I do on my own. The Nebula award does better. The best award for finding books that I personally would enjoy given the data I have? The Mythopoeic Award for best adult novel, which the author of this rather silly File 770 post would doubtless consider a minor award that should not exist.

    So, simply from a place of personal selfishness, I appreciate the diversity of awards so that I can locate awards that have a better track record of success for me than the Hugo award does. (Of course, the problem of how to locate such awards without reading the winners of every award, thus defeating the whole point, is, uh, tricky. I… haven’t figured out that bit yet.)

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  5. I saw the original post and read the comments with much enjoyment (much more a lurker on F770 these days), but I was on my phone (I’m trying to get work done on my computer so try to limit reading on my fan/fan sites to my phone where I’m not tempted to comment much because I hate trying to type on the phone keyboard). So I didn’t comment, but my response was pretty much yours, I’m in favor, I ignore ones not relevant to my interest, the more the merrier/better. I think I remember Westfahl from the science fiction fantasy academic conferences I attended in the 1990s and early 2000s — and sort of winced to see him out there shaking his cane and cursing kids today (but even back then, I seem to recall he was pretty much in the Old Guard who disapproved of the sort of scholarship I was doing, and would probably disapprove even more nowadays — luckily for me things change, even if in academia it’s pretty dang slow) .

    I just don’t think there’s any way to create some sort of ideal objective/fair award if by that you mean no systemic or structural biasses (*gestures at the whole world we live in*). I also have horrific memories of major fandom imbroglios in the Tolkien online fandom (which existed in different groups/communities on yahoo lists, blogs, archives, and in that new radical upstart, LiveJournal) when one of the fan groups who had, I think, pre-existed offline before the internet (and only reluctantly went online to try to “protect” Tolkien from that nasty Peter Jackson) thought it would be good to start an award for the best fanfiction in the fandom. It got very nasty, very fast, and no I’m not naming names of anything in public.

    I only started voting in the Hugos because the Puppy furor pissed me off.

    I think the Otherwise Award has the best process and I love it when the jurors publish their lists, comments, etc. for the world to read. But I also suspect it’s a whole lot of work that a lot of people would not want to do.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. By way of analogy, I give you: sport. At its most primal, people fighting mock battles with/without weapons. Teams of big boofy guys pummelling each other to move an inflated pig bladder from one end of a field to the other. Sleeker fellas & gals going, “That’s cool, but we’re seeing who can swim to the other side of the lake the fastest.” Others: “Carry on; we’ve challenged ourselves to climb to the top of that rock face without falling off & dying.”

    Before too long, there’s golf, motor racing, artistic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, archery, tenpin bowling, foosball & Nordic skiing. Not a damn one of them needs to apologize for its existence; the fact that people want to do them is enough.

    Okay, I draw the line at fox hunting.

    Westfahl’s contention seems to be, “Men fighting over a pig bladder is all there ever is, or should be! The rest of youse, kindly leave the stadium!”

    If someone has passion enough for an artform to give of their time & expertise to organize an award for it — I salute them. Because there *will* be accusations of unfairness. Noses *will* be put out of joint. Certain actors *will* be sufficiently pissed off to engage in sabotage. It takes fortitude to stand up to that.

    I could have said all this at File770, but instead I squandered my maiden post on a nitpick. 🙂

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  7. If you’re trying to award on quality , randomly selecting a Longlist would seem to fall foul of Sturgeon’s Law. Therefore I propose an award for luckiest SF/F novel of the year where the (very) long list is randomly pruned over multiple rounds.

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    • The award for the luckiest SF novel ought be called “the Teela Brown award”

      For a properly complicated voting suggestion how about this:

      https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Doge

      “New regulations for the elections of the doge were introduced in 1268, and,
      with some modifications, these remained in force until the end of the
      republic. Their object was to minimize as far as possible the influence of
      the individual families, and this was effected by a very complex machinery.
      Thirty members of the great council, chosen by lot, were reduced, again by
      lot, to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to
      twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine
      and the nine elected forty-five. Then the forty-five were reduced by lot to
      eleven, and the eleven chose the forty-one, who actually elected the doge.

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  8. One of the things I like about File770 is that Mike announces the results of a lot of awards, and often gives a little bit of context for them.

    That’s how I discovered Louise Penny’s mystery novels, set in present-day Quebec. I read the book that won the award, then read the ones published before that, and once I’d caught up, the most recent books.

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  9. I’m fine with lots of awards, including obscure ones. I do sometimes have issues with awards that seem to primarily exist for the benefit of the awarder, rather than the awardees.

    You see a number of these in the vanity publishing industry for example. Many folks may recall getting advertisements or invitations to submit to poetry contests where it turns out that just everything entered, no matter how bad, gets a “semifinalist” award, or something more impressive-sounding, from the sponsor. (The goal, of course, is to get enough suckers to buy the vanity-press anthology in which their entry is printed, or to pay to attend a convention to accept their award.) A bit less rapacious, but still widely seen and ridiculed in the early days of the web, were the many sites that would offer awards, complete with graphical badges, to pretty much any website they could find. Their main purpose was to drive traffic via the badges to their own sites, where they could market things or get ad revenue.

    The line between awards like this and legitimate awards can sometimes be blurry. A number of SF fans, myself included, look askance at the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award, due to its use as a vehicle to burnish Hubbard’s reputation and indirectly promote the abusive cult he founded. On the other hand, as far as I know, the actual awardees they choose are talented early writers, who often appreciate the award money. And, while the Locus Award by its nature serves to promote subscriptions to Locus, both due to its name and the extra weighting it gives to subscribers’ votes, the prestige it’s acquired by its picks over time means that it ends up giving more glory to the winners than to itself, so most people (myself again included) generally regard it as legitimate.

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  10. I know you are talking about decent quality awards, but there are so many junk ones around now. The authors pay for them (& sometimes they genuinely believe its a quality award) & pay extra for certificates, stickers, etc. It is such a ripoff!

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    • Yes, that’s true. I covered some of these scam awards in the past and absolutely authors should beware of these predatory schemes. They don’t have much impact on readers though (which is part of the scam)

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  11. Over at ISFDB, someone has just requested we add “The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work”. I’d never heard of it, but it appears to be a judged award from a special interest org called the Media Ecology Association, with most of the other categories being for academic papers that have titles with long words I don’t understand like “intersubjective” and “hermeneutic”.

    https://media-ecology.org/Past-Awards

    (Their credibility is slightly dented by the fact that Ready Player One is a former winner, but perhaps this is more understandable if the award is less about being the “best”, and more for being representative of their particular set of concerns.)

    The interesting thing for me is that this award seems to use a rolling 5-year eligibility window – I haven’t had it confirmed, but there’s a call for 2024 nominations that says anything published since 2019 is eligible. I don’t know that any SFF awards have ever broken away from the 12-month window, which IMHO ends up privileging works that have had lots of hype and/or heavily frontloaded readership, typically from being by authors with a big following.

    I’ve seen comments that the Hugo Best Series has outperformed some people’s (possibly low) expectations, which might be an indicator that there’s a “market” for an award with a larger eligibility window? Obviously there are issues w.r.t. nominators understanding what is or isn’t eligible, stopping the same work coming back into the nomination list every year until it wins, etc.

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    • I think a long eligibility window makes sense with juried awards. I also think the word “hermeneutic” should be one that people who like stats should use more but I’m aware this is a minority opinion 🙂

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    • “I don’t know that any SFF awards have ever broken away from the 12-month window”

      There was a weird case in which the Campbell award for best novel in 1976 was given to a novel written in 1970 in spite of the 12-month window, with this comment:
      “*The committee felt that no truly outstanding original novel was published in 1975. 1st place, therefore, was a “special retrospective award” made to a truly outstanding original novel that was not adequately recognized in the year of its publication (1970).” This was particularly awkward for the two authors of finalists published in 1975, no doubt.

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  12. Back when I was reading and reviewing short SFF, I joked that we should just offer a Rocket Stack Rank award. (Or three–one for each category.) This would be very easy to compute (since it’d just be based on my reviews). Transparent too (ditto). And, to make sure anyone paid attention to it, we should throw in a $1000 prize. (But no trophy–that’d be work.)

    Seriously, why doesn’t anyone give a cash prize? Or is there one who does but I’m just not aware of it?

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