Some people are not pleased with the Hugo nominees

[james_davis_nicoll]

one example.

Comments

[mishalak]

Oh, a Heinlein fellator. Well his opinion is worth slightly less than a brass farthing. Heinlein was a perfectly fun writer but his prose was no more deathless than Lois McMaster Bujold's.

[murphys_lawyer]

Someone in the article's comments thread asks:

While I totally understand the desire to see new names and titles on the ballot, can I ask, have you read any of the Fanzines nominated?

To which he replies:

I don’t read them, Chris. And I’m totally willing to buy in to the fact that they’re GOOD. Legitimately GOOD. But, the fact the same ones are nominated EVERY year is a problem. For me. Please don’t read this as a criticism of YOU, but a criticism of the SYSTEM that produces these results.

So... while he's totally willing to buy in to the fact that they’re GOOD, he can't be arsed to check if they're BETTER than anything else and thus worthy of a nomination. Or not. By him.

Okay. Wow.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

The Hugo nominees aren't totally pleasing to everyone on earth? Shock! Gasp! I am overcome at this novelty.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

That's incoherent!

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

That's lucky! If it were coherent it would be a LA-SER!

--Dave, capable of emitting a beam of PURE ANTI-MATTERING

[sesmo.livejournal.com]

To summarize, a popular voting based award tends to result in popular authors with active audiences being the nominees and winning. I'm shocked.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

No, "An award voted on by people willing to pay money to participate in fandom reflects the views of a small contingent of people with narrow and predictable tastes." If it were simply a popularity contest, Robert Jordan and David Weber would have more awards than Bujold and Willis have nominations.

[avram]

I’m thinking someone who wants to complain about a lack of literary style should avoid writing things like “squarely in my sites” and “inferiority inferiority complexacle”.

[jwgh]

This was my first thought as well, but typos happen, and it's not like most blogs have an editor to catch that sort of thing.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

'Stop writing about the Hugos' he says, then writes a few hundred words about the Hugos.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

Meh. He's right about one thing: the Hugo awards are given way too much significance, considering what they are.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Yes, this. Also, since I noticed your secret identity via your comments on James' LJ I've been meaning to tell you how much I'm enjoying the Twenty Palaces books. I'm only sorry I didn't discover them until after the series folded, I guess I'm part of the problem.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

lets see, the Hugos are a fan based award, and then reflects which fans care enough to attend/support Worldcon, and vote. Duh.

and by the way, I have voted for the Hugos and I read about 400 books a year, most of them without pictures.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

I was scratching my head over just how tiny the intersection of the sets "pays good money to go to a Worldcon" and "reads fewer than 7 novels in a year" might be. Does seem implausible, doesn't it?

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

I think Bujold is better than Heinlein. (Also, Gangnam Style is awesome.)

I don't mind him being annoyed at the Hugos, but what gets me is that he calls for throwing out the entirety of the Hugo procedure 6 sentences before the end of the essay, describes what he wants out of the replacement procedure in one sentence ('This award should recognize all the various forms of contributions in all the ways the tired mechanisms of the Hugo fail to.') and doesn't suggest anything new or specific.

I think his essay needs more examples and specificity in general.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

As soon as I saw that Heinlein comparison, my alarms went off too.

I agree this is a weak year (McGuire and Scalzi will get Best Novel eventually, but not for those books; Bujold has been better; I shall not insult our host by mentioning whatshisname; haven't read the Ahmed) but, like, a get off my lawn rant? Really. Even though he's quoting Pogo by using "inferiority complexacle."

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Someone calls him out on it in the comments, too. Paraphrasing, "So, when can we expect your proposed changes at the Worldcon rules meeting?"

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

--rage-- "I can think of hundreds of books more worthy than this one!"

Really? Name a couple.

--crickets--

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Hell, I was surprised when Cryoburn and CVA got Hugo nods. Cryoburn was terrible, and CVA was, to be honest, fluff. Lovely fluff, but I'm never going to pretend that it's Mirror Dance.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

I really liked Cryoburn, especially after Diplomatic Immunity. It just wasn't really about Miles and sidelined Ekaterin again.

[mcwetboy.livejournal.com]

If he doesn't like the repeat nominations in the fanzine and fan writer categories, wouldn't he have just hated the period between 1984 and 2007 when the fan writer award was swapped between Mike Glyer and Dave Langford. Or when Michael Whelan won all the pro artist awards. Or when Gardner Dozois won all the pro editor awards. Or Locus and semiprozine. Some of this is not new.

[dsrtao]

"Seanan McGuire for all her talent is not the second coming of Ursula K. LeGuin."

Nor should she have to be.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

That was my thought too.

It's weird that he's comparing writers so different. Did he pick Le Guin because she's the only famous female author he can think of? Why not compare a famous male author who is more like McGuire? Otherwise it sounds as if he thinks Le Guin is the only female author who can win the Hugo.

Of course, I haven't looked at the awards lists for the past few decades, maybe she is. Wait, no, because I've seen in Bujold's author bio that Bujold has a number of them (which is one thing the Staffers' Book Review guy is complaining about).

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

Nice, I like how he complains how Doctor Who is over-represented compared to that dramatic masterpiece, The Walking Dead, the show where you need a tunneling electron microscope to even detect the presence of a plot.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Not on topic, but your userpic intrigues me. A temporarily comatose Cookie Monster narrowly avoids being buried alive? There's a story to be told there.

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

He is right about one thing, at least -- I cannot imagine how Larry Correia could imagine that he would be in line for a Hugo. His books are the small-arms equivalent of cotton candy.

I just wish that variants of this did not occur every year. The Hugos use the qualifier "best" because that's what the voters think of the works they're choosing. They think that they are the best novels (presumably). If they were voting on "most popular" they would have a different selection and nomination model based on estimated sales.

The complaint about the same names showing up tends to ignore the general power law behaviour of all sorts of things with popularity-based inputs. The same problem affects, e.g. the Amazon recommendation model. And it tends to reinforce the point that authors opposed to DRM keep making: that obscurity is a bigger enemy to an author than piracy. There may be some really good novels out there, but if not enough readers even hear about them, let alone read them, they won't be nominated. (The comment by Robert Jackson Bennett on that site is apropos here.)

And screening out authors based on recent nominations is pointless. If you block CVA because it's Bujold and weak (there hasn't been a strong Bujold since Paladin of Souls, which was (big surprise) the last one to win a Nebula or Hugo (well, it's possible that one of the Sharing Knife books could be considered strong if you enjoy romance tropes, but they aren't aimed to my taste or that of the general SF fandom demographic), what do you do if she produces a best work of her career as her next book? Exclude it too, even if everyone thinks its the best book of the year?

If the Hugos are "broken", it's because book distribution is increasingly broken; but that's another discussion.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Or maybe the distribution of readers is broken. I'd guess that up to mebbe '76 it was possible to have a good notion of what was published in sf that year. Since then, not so much.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't understand--"Hugo nominees are all written in a certain Hugo style that I can't describe but I know it when I see it"? What does that mean?

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

This. Specificity. It's hard to start a general movement against something you can't really describe. It's like 'beware the middle ten and a half days of March!'