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1: Was it Andre Norton who wanted to create an award for best unpublished fantasy by a woman, on the idea that the Patriarchy [2] was suppressing a lot of good fantasy novels by women?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]

Original is one of the things that I find interesting but it isn't the only thing.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

So what are these other things? (though perhaps I should qualify that I find things enjoyable that are not original, but I don't know that I find any interesting.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Style, although I'm pretty much style-deaf.

The skill with which they re-use the familiar material.

Not making stupid fucking mistakes or copying other people's SFM. Helix's 1 = 2 would be an example of a SFM and so would The Jovian's idea of sticking a giant straw into Jupiter so that Jupiter's internal pressure can drive H2 into orbit.

World-building, particularly consistency and detail. Also logic and reason: if the setting has powerful AI and automation and crewpower is pricy, I don't want to see crew/cargo mass ratios that seem to be based on the ratios used on dumb ships a century ago.

I'd also like my science fiction to engage the real world as opposed to being a mass of third artist material. I don't mean 1970s style "relevance": I'll leave that to the Mundane guys. I mean keeping track of current scientific developments, using them in their fiction where applicable and avoiding the use of outdated models.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

Not making stupid mistakes elevates something to interesting? I afraid we're on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to making something interesting.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

When stupid mistakes are the default, avoiding them does become interesting. Worldbuilding is hard. Someone might have an original idea and screw up the execution; somebody re-working it so that it works and makes more sense can be interesting.

As for Shakespeare, wasn't he "re-working" old plots and plays himself?

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

When stupid mistakes are the default, avoiding them does become interesting.

I just don't agree - I don't think people deserve awards for simply failing to be stupid.

As for Shakespeare, wasn't he "re-working" old plots and plays himself?

Every time someone brings up Shakespeare in a discussion like this, I wonder if they aren't really on my side if the example they want to offer is from four hundred years ago.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

You were the one who'd brought him up, as an example of originality vs. derivative.

Closer to home, _Psychohistorical Crisis_ was the Foundation universe with the names changed, but really really good. There's a Dr. Who novel which some say is the Culture done with more plausible detail, though I haven't read it. _Astro City_ is a re-make of standard superhero concepts. "That's Superman. That's Wonder Woman. That's the Fantastic Four. That's... Batman?" But it's awesome.

I don't know, "original" seems a fuzzy benchmark, anyway. There's originality in all of the above. OTOH, Xanth was original, too, and anyone can put together a sentence which has never been uttered before. Maybe even unpredictable. Conversely, de novo originality is pretty rare, compared to variations on a theme.

You talked about plot predictability. But if you read Jane Austen, you can be pretty sure X and Y will get married, the question is how. You watch Buffy, you're pretty sure she'll kill the vampire, and it's not even about how, but about the quality of the dialogue and the acting. You could say the dialogue's original. And I thought worldbuilding was an odd place for James to make a stand; surely making new worlds is quite original? But given that, the plot doesn't have to be that original; maybe the originality is getting shifted to different places. And for hard ScF, not making any mistakes isn't that common -- maybe because it's hard to do right.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

You were the one who'd brought him up, as an example of originality vs. derivative.

No, I didn't. James mentioned his plays as a starting place that productions work off of and I said "then the question becomes how much added value is there really when you rework Shakespeare or Stoker or Grimm or anything else."

I don't know, "original" seems a fuzzy benchmark, anyway.

You're right, it is - but then again it is the biggest thing that has struck me about reading for an award - how much published fiction is barely distinguishable from other published fiction. I feel like I read the same books over and over.

But if you read Jane Austen, you can be pretty sure X and Y will get married, the question is how.

I'd suggest that science fiction is generally a plot-driven form of fiction where Austen isn't.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Alan Moore's output in the mid-1980s, which was remarkably like he read Superfolks and thought "I wonder what this would be like if it didn't suck?"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Some are built into subgenres and preserved by habit and ignorance. It makes no sense, for example, to get hydrogen from Jupiter given all the icy worlds and energetically speaking it's easier to get 3He from the Sun than Lunar regolith but once something gets added to the standard kit of SF, it is hard to get it out.

Heck, I still lasers being used in SF as heat radiators from time to time.