Question of the day

[james_davis_nicoll]

Do people who read for juried awards tend to become jaded and embittered with the state of the art for books covered by the award in question?

I mean, either the judges are going to have to work their way through a lot of material and most of it won't be award worthy (I feel like I need a disclaimer here that winning this or that award isn't the primary goal of most authors, although I'm sure that they don't mind winning) or the set of books covered by the award is so tiny that there's no real room for an exceptionally good example to occur.

Of course, with small sets you can get weird distributions, from "all of these should win the award" to "Let's just declare this catagory dead [1] and move on to Great Novels about 12-year-old boys from Woking who discover that their bicycle is in fact a shape-shifted unicorn."

1: Was it Andre Norton who wanted to create an award for best unpublished fantasy by a woman, on the idea that the Patriarchy [2] was suppressing a lot of good fantasy novels by women? I think it turned out that while that might be true, larger numbers of novels are being suppressed because they could suck the chrome off a bumper.

2: I'd rattle off a list of female editors at this point but I think that in fact despite male readers being a distinct and somewhat freakish minority in the world of books, most editors are still men.

That seems to imply that at some point, the male editors might stop being men. Hrm. What I mean is that a majority of the population of editors is male. I don't know if the male/female ratio is changing with time and if so, in which direction.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I seem to be collecting various productions of War of the Worlds as well. The Spielberg is quite useful as an example of how it isn't enough to come up with a new twist on an old idea. One also should sit back and ask oneself "Does this new twist make sense or is it in fact the dog's breakfast, seen in instant canine replay?" It also demonstrates that Spielberg should never, ever be allowed to work on stories that involve children.

So far I like Jeff Wayne'sWar of the Worlds best.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The LP, I mean. I have not seen the stage show and I don't know the status of the CGI movie.