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1: Was it Andre Norton who wanted to create an award for best unpublished fantasy by a woman, on the idea that the Patriarchy [2] was suppressing a lot of good fantasy novels by women?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

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

So what would be an unoriginal book that you think is award caliber, if I might ask?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's comics but The New Frontier reuses well-established characters to good effect, I thought.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And I greatly enjoyed how Paul McAuley used stock props and sets in his Four Hundred Billion Stars setting. FTL, psi-powers, a UN whose influence spans the stars [1], humans slowly discovering that they weren't the focus of reality had all been done before (In fact, the FHBS universe looks a lot like a moody British version of Known Space).


1: Even a UN that had risen from the ashes had been used before, in Still Forms on Foxfield.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Funny, I always described Stephen Baxter's Xeelee universe as "Larry Niven if he were British and depressed". I guess there are shades of difference between "moody" and "populated by humans inexorably bent on insensate self-destruction".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

McAuley's characters are generally reasonably bright. Baxter's can't be trusted with a bowl of Jell-O.