Justin Landon of Staffer’s Book Review appears to be about as impressed with the Hugo Awards as I am with the SFWA’s Nebula Awards:
The Hugos are utter twaddle.
Although the Hugos present the image of something more cosmopolitan
or representative than the standard convention award, it’s becoming
increasingly apparent every year that, despite being the most
recognizable award in science fiction and fantasy cultural awareness,
the Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like minded WorldCon
members, or agendized voting blocs, bent on vociferous back patting. I
apply that statement broadly, although it is most obviously associated
with the down ballot. Before I get too far into that rabbit
hole, let me first place ‘best novel’ squarely in my sites where the
only explanation is that the average Hugo voter reads somewhere been
four and six novels a year.Often when critics rail against the Hugo’s best novel category it’s
to attack lack of sophistication. The Clarke Award, British Science
Fiction Award, the Kitschies, Tiptree Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and
others spend some time examining science fiction and fantasy literature
through a critical lens. Anyone expecting that from the Hugo Award isn’t
just off the mark, they might as well be trying to stick ‘it’ in the
sarlacc.No, the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its
fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the
distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and
Connie Willis on a podium holding a. . . rocket ship. I admit
Gangnam-style doesn’t have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words,
Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because
they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Miéville,
Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active
members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a
certain motif that’s difficult to pin down. I’ll fall back on the old
pornography argument, ‘I know it when I see it.”
I have to admit, I don’t pay any more attention to the Hugo Awards than I do the the Dove Awards, the Christie Awards, the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, or the Tony Awards. The only reason I care about the Nebula Awards is because I am a Lifetime member of the organization that gives them out and I find it embarrassing that the SFWA so often honors mediocre novels at the expense of much more worthy ones.
The only award I’ve truly cared about in the last few years was Adrian Peterson’s MVP award for his heroic performance this past season; yes, it’s a quarterbacks’ league now but if the NFL MVP is only going to go to quarterbacks, then simply rename it the MVQ and be done with it.
And when I say I don’t care about awards, I mean it quite literally. I didn’t even know that Summa Elvetica had been nominated for an award until I saw it on Wikipedia a few years later, and when Marcher Lord was warned that A Throne of Bones would not be eligible for a certain award if I did not edit some of its more offensive bits, I cheerfully told them to go ahead and disqualify it. I’m with Raymond Feist on this, who knows perfectly well that he’ll never win an award until he is declared an SFWA Grandmaster, probably after he is safely dead. He is, quite simply, too successful to merit them.
Everyone has different goals. Rabbits need the group affirmation that these sorts of political awards offer them. Not-rabbits don’t. Psykosonik once beat out Prince for Best Dance Record at the Minnesota Music Awards for a song I wrote; I didn’t know we’d won until months later because not only did I not bother going, my bandmates who did didn’t even see fit to mention it because they knew I didn’t care. I didn’t even know I had been a three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist for about 16 years until I looked it up a few months ago when I was pointing out the dirty laundry of the “New York Times bestselling” authors.
When you are fortunate enough to experience success, you learn to value certain aspects of it and to disvalue others. My objective is to write a great epic fantasy series that is capable of creating the same feeling in its readers as Dune once created in me. That’s why I simply laugh when people claim I’m jealous of McRapey, or I’m imitating George Martin, or my feelings are wounded that A Throne of Bones wasn’t nominated for any awards. Because in the game I’m playing, those things don’t even enter into it. They’re not relevant to my metric for success.
Perhaps I’ll succeed. Perhaps I’ll fail. Most people would probably, and quite reasonably, bet on the latter. But regardless, talking about how people are performing in the shotput or the pole vault and who is winning those events means absolutely nothing to me over here in the blocks with Frank Herbert, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Richard Adams, and Neal Stephenson.