‘Tis the Season: What Good are the Hugos?
Saturday’s announcement of the 2013 Hugo Award nominees has done what it always does: On the one hand, nominees and their friends were (justifiably) pleased, happy, and excited to be so honored. On the other hand, certain corners of the community were dejected, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the nominated works individually and the system which nominated them collectively. This is a cycle that we repeat every year and for just about every major award the field confers. It is not a debate limited to the Hugo Awards, nor to the Nebulas, nor to the BSFAs, nor to the Clarke Award. It is part of a perpetual cycle of community introspection and cultural validation.
On the Award Season Cycle
As I wrote last year, the disagreements produced by such awards are healthy for the field and for the community. Though the discussions seem repetitive, by constantly worrying at the bias demonstrated in nominees, by re-examining the processes through which works get nominated, and by criticizing the factions and reasoning for/against a particular title, we are all inching our community forward (or at least two steps forward and one step back).
One can wonder, for example, whether the increased frequency of female nominees on the Hugo slate is a result of previous year’s complaints, or whether it is merely a reflection of changing values/mores amongst Hugo voters. It’s a Zen koan-like question, and one which I think is ultimately unanswerable. Whatever the “truth”, I will cheer the Hugos’ increased inclusiveness regardless, while simultaneously lamenting that that they are not yet inclusive enough. I am confident that in time we will see still more diverse lineups, and maybe even (gasp) nominees who don’t come from a Judeo-Christian/English-oriented background. Every chance I get, I will wish for that and I will speak out for that. But I recognize that such change will take both time, and an exploration of how the Hugo procedures either inhibit or promote such inclusiveness.
The Unanswered Questions in this Year’s Discussion
This year’s paroxysms of disgruntlement, particularly the essays written by Justin Landon at Staffer’s Book Review and Aidan Moher at A Dribble of Ink, make me wonder about a more fundamental, heretofore unstated question: what good are the Hugo Awards? What is their purpose? What role(s) do they serve?
Every person who voices an opinion on the nominees, or the winners, or the awards process itself, has some presumptive answers to these questions. Are my answers the same as Justin’s? Are his the same as Aidan’s? Are ours the same as Kevin Standlee’s? Are Kevin’s the same as Hugo Voter X? Without exploring our unstated assumptions, it will be difficult to understand and contextualize either the complaints about the Hugo Awards, or the defenses of the same. Accusations of demagoguery and privilege are already flying in the comments to Justin’s post, and I suspect they stem from a disconnect in a basic question: what purpose do the Hugo Awards serve?
It is possible for each of us to answer this discussion differently, and yet to find common ground when discussing the Awards. Different individual values underlie any democratic system. Ask two people to prioritize the functions of government. You’ll get widely divergent lists, even among those who profess the same political beliefs. Yet by making those priorities and those values explicit, we can gain a better understanding of the real source of dissatisfaction. And it is that kind of understanding which I think is necessary if the Hugo Awards are ever to improve in any way.
Here are the unstated questions that I think deserve an exploration:
- What is the purpose of the Hugo Awards?
- Who is the primary audience for the Hugo Awards?
- Who are the Hugo Awards valuable to, and why?
Having asked these questions, I’ll take a stab at answering them, too. These are my own answers, and odds are they differ from those of many people. I’d love to hear what you think, though: it’ll help us find common ground on how to improve the Hugos.
What is the purpose of the Hugo Awards?
I believe that the purpose of the Hugo Awards is to celebrate “worthy” works in the field of science fiction and fantasy. The process by which the Hugo Awards get selected is a system designed to assess a given title’s relative “worth” within the field. What constitutes that worth is idiosyncratic and highly subjective.
For example, I might nominate the works which I consider to be the most challenging, the most forward-looking, the most interesting in any given year. That’s because in my personal system of judging “worth,” those are criteria which rank high. Whether I enjoyed a given work or not may be of secondary concern (for example, I consider Lavie Tidhar’s 2011 Osama
As a result, the Hugo Awards are there to offer us a snapshot as to the creative/aesthetic values of fandom at a particular moment in time. The voting system is meant to take disparate and divergent priorities, and to aggregate a selection of the “worthy” titles. Some years (historically, rather often), the result may be backward-facing, reactionary, and nostalgic. Other years (even more often, I think), the result may be comfortable, safe, and conservative (culturally – not necessarily politically). And still in other years, the result may be innovative, challenging, and refreshing.
What is more, this process will vary across categories of work. While – for example – the Best Novel category may be deemed “safe” one year, another category (Fan Writer, say) may push the envelope in interesting ways. It is a messy, unstable process – like all democracies.
Yet in each case, the underlying purpose of the Hugo Awards remains the same: to select a “worthy” set of titles. I use that word advisedly, and you’ll note that I don’t say select the “best” works in the field. I know that the awards themselves label themselves “Best Novel” and so on. But the Hugo Awards are no more representations of the “best” in the field than the Oscars are a selection of the “best” films produced in a given year. The one adjective that I think can comfortably be applied is to say that they are all “worthy” titles.
And the purpose of the Hugo Award (honestly, even of a Hugo nomination) is to designate a title as worthy.
Who is the primary audience for the Hugo Awards?
This question, I think, is much more difficult for me to answer than the last. One can make an argument that the Hugo is addressed to many audiences: to cognoscenti, to authors, to booksellers, to librarians, to non-readers of the field, etc. And while the Hugo does reach and communicate to each of these audiences, I think its primary audience is rather insular. I think the Hugos speak most loudly to the authors whose works are being celebrated.
This is – I suspect – a fairly controversial viewpoint. I would like an award addressed to broaden the fold, but the Hugos aren’t it. They have never been designed to reach or communicate beyond the borders of a particular subculture (fandom). Their procedures have always been built to select for more creatively conservative works that operate solidly within the genre’s historical conventions. Consider the arguments for a new sub-genre put forth by Gareth L. Powell in The Irish Times.
The Hugo Awards’ primary audience is the authors and editors who produce the works that win them. In this, they are like the Nebula Awards and the Oscars. They are a selection of worthy works, and the communication of their worth to the authors who created them. There is nothing wrong with this. This is not a complaint. It is merely an observation of the practical audience to whom the Hugo Awards seem to matter most.
Outside of the science fiction and fantasy community, the Hugo Awards are sadly irrelevant. Even in neighboring genres (like YA), people fail to differentiate between the Hugo Awards, the Clarke Award, and the Nebula Awards. That doesn’t happen with the Booker Prize. That doesn’t happen with the Newbery. It doesn’t happen with the National Book Award.
It is comfortable for us to lament this as the continuing ghettoization of our genre, but I think that’s overly simplistic. The Hugo Awards are not addressed to new readers of the genre. Nor are they (like the Newbery) targeting actors in the supply chain, such as librarians or booksellers. They are relevant solely to the authors, and to a lesser extent to the vocal minority of fans who wish to support them.
One can make the argument that the Hugo Awards should be targeting new readers, to widen the fold, so to speak. But that would mean changing their primary audience, which would have dramatic consequences for longstanding procedures.
Who are the Hugo Awards valuable to, and why?
A corollary to the question of audience is the question of addressed value. If the primary audience for the Hugo Awards are the creators themselves, who are they most valuable to? At first blush, it would be easy to say that they are valuable to those authors because it gives them a boost in sales.
But anecdotally, I have heard that Hugo awards offer a minimal sales bump. Is this true? When YA/MG titles win the National Book Award for Young Readers, or the Newbery Medal (or even get nominated), they typically see a significant sales bump. It is that sales bump which motivates their imprints to slap medal seal stickers on their covers or to accelerate their paperback reissue: the added expense is justified by the virtuous cycle of the even bigger sales bump thereafter. Even decades after their win, books like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
I haven’t seen science fiction and fantasy imprints do this with the Hugo, which supports the anecdotes that Hugo Awards don’t offer a significant sales bump. What’s the truth of this? I suspect that the Hugo Awards fail to yield significant sales dividends (which further supports my belief that their primary audience is not the broader public), but I’d love to see hard data if anyone’s got it.
The lack of a sales bump would suggest that the Hugo Awards have little value in the genre publishing supply chain. If they were valuable to booksellers, you’d see more active promotion of the Hugo Awards at the retailer level. And we just don’t see that, outside of a limited number of specialist booksellers. If the Hugo Awards were valuable to librarians, you’d see libraries touting them in the local library. I’ve been to four libraries in the last three weeks, and not one of them had a “Hugo Award Winners” section (they had award-winning sections for other genres, though). Because they are not valuable to booksellers or librarians, they are likely of marginal value to publishers: Nice to have, but only important inasmuch as they secure a “floor” for a title among a core group of readers (the in-group of fandom).
So who then, are the Hugos truly valuable to? I believe they are most valuable to the authors themselves, because they provide some measure of creative validation and spark creative discussion. I also believe they are valuable to the cognoscenti in fandom because it likewise celebrates a genre tradition and gives us an outlet for expressing our tastes and values. Both are culturally important: the former feeds into and shapes future creative endeavors, while the latter helps cement bonds within the subculture.
Note, that these values are irrespective of whether one agrees with or disagrees with a given nominee/award winner. Consciously or not, our attitudes towards recent winners (in essence, the “headliners” of our narrow field) influence or at least shape the fiction we ourselves create. We may emulate their aesthetics or reject them, but they still influence us. Similarly, for every defensive SMOF who bristles at the suggestion that the Hugos are irrelevant or “broken”, their bonds with other SMOFs of similar outlook are strengthened by their shared defensiveness. The same goes for the “complainers” who attack the Hugos and gripe about the system. The genre contains multitudes, and even in their controversy, the Hugo Awards help to tighten the bonds between and among members of the genre community.
Where do we go from here?
So if that’s what/who the Hugo Awards are for, where do we go from here? I think that given the above, the Hugo Awards are doing their job just fine. I would like to see more works nominated from the younger, newer, and particularly vibrant online genre community. I would like to see more works from diverse backgrounds, particularly from outside of the English-speaking world. I would like to see more works by women.
But the current Hugo nominating systems will get us there, eventually. I wish we’d get there faster, but I think that history is on my side.
Do I think that speculative fiction needs a prominent award that will reach across the genre aisle and communicate to the broader literary community outside of our insular little world? Yes. I would love for there to be an award like that. The Hugo Awards simply ain’t it, and if we ask them to be then we really should re-examine the entire system that produces them.
The King of Elfland's Second Cousin 
So do we need a juried award something like the Newberry for F/SF? And who would set up such an award?
Once upon a time, I used the Hugos as a barometer of books I might want to check out. I’m not sure that it fails that test, even if it is a popularity contest.
That’s a fascinating question. Personally, I think that the field would be well-served by such a juried award on many fronts.
First, it is comparable in kind to most awards outside of speculative fiction. The Newbery, NBA, Caldecott, Man Booker, Nobel, etc. are all juried awards. They gain in stature and prominence through the prestige of the jury members (to whose own prestige they also add). Basically, it is in everybody’s interest (the jury members, the award administrators, the authors nominated, the publishers of nominated works, etc.) to promote the hell out of the awards. A popular award – like the Hugos – is owned by all, which means in practice it is owned by none.
Second, a juried award would give rise to a different kind of debate than that which the Hugos gives us every year. There would be less debating the process and more debating the judgment. Debate wouldn’t be lesser – if anything, I suspect it would be even more strident and vocal (see the Newbery or the NBA, for example). But the focus of the debate would be more on the merits of one work over another, helping to push the genre in new directions.
Third, a juried award gives the jurors themselves a greater platform to move the cultural needle. Some might not like “activist jurors”, but any juror on a juried award has some responsibility to apply their values in their judgment: that’s why they’ve been selected as jurors.
Fourth, the combination of those first three factors would give the awards better coverage in the media outside of the spec. fic. community.
For all of these reasons, I think that a juried award would do a better job (a) selecting for more interesting and innovative works, and (b) reaching out to the as-yet unconverted out there. However, it faces massive logistical and organizational challenges, including:
a) Financing the work of administrators and jurors.
b) Promoting its legitimacy and brand amongst the speculative fiction community.
c) Recruiting jurors who are both able and willing to do the work and promote the award appropriately.
All of these are logistically doable, I think. But they cost money and time (which sometimes may be even more valuable). And considering that a sizable minority in fandom is firmly wedded to the significance of the Hugo for a variety of complex reasons, I think it would be an uphill battle. The field would benefit from the fight, though. At least I
thinkhope it would.Of course, given the controversy that erupted over the Clarke Award shortlist this year, a juried award has its own problems
Oh, absolutely! Every award system is going to elicit controversy. What I find interesting is how different award systems focus the debate on entirely different facets of the award and the field. Is one “better” than the other? I think each does a better job at some functions, and a worse job at others. I definitely don’t think it is (or should be) an “either/or” situation.
Obligatory insertion of my take on the awards: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/08/ceremony_and_fantastika/
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/the_hugo_award_as_cultural_object/
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/some_musings_on_the_cultural_work_and_siginificance_of_the_hugo_awards/
To sum up, the Hugos are a key part of the field’s economy of prestige, a ritual of validation and taste, and a social nexus for producing the field itself.
I wish I wasn’t chasing a deadline right now, but I’ll try to respond more specifically later.
Thanks for commenting with those links! I really enjoyed those essays, and they have all shaped my thinking in quite interesting ways (most immediately the post I wrote a year ago, though by extension they’ve shaped my thinking on this year’s Hugo post).
I’m looking forward to more of your thoughts on this year’s debate!
I really like your reasoned approach. The Hugos are not broken but need to continue to change to be relevant. So I like the British system which has two major SF awards – the BSFA awards and the Arthur C. Clarke awards. Both are valuable. The BSFA awards are more like our Hugos while the Arthur C. Clarke awards are the juridic approach that you speak about. Both get fans/writers/genre bloggers up in arms but one is considered a fairly prestigious prize in Britain (with a large prize) and one is for the insiders only. Both are valuable. Both are worthy and neither winner is best. But they are guideposts as to new authors to read or new “literary” works that use SF devices that don’t get reviewed in SF as much.
So keep the Hugos and let them grow as they always have and create a juridic award for recognition outside the field. Great idea.
Glad you like my reasoned approach! I know some folks call for much faster or more dramatic change, and while I can sympathize with their motivations and goals, I think actually making such change happen will take both carefully considered/articulated goals and a pragmatically constructed strategy for achieving them. There’s never going to be a “perfect” system – for any award – but I think it’s worth actually unpacking the arguments involved.
I see no problem with someone setting up juried awards for SF/F. There are of course many other juried awards for SF/F already, but there’s no problem with someone setting up others. I’m glad to see you haven’t understated the difficulty and expense of doing so. (Others people I’ve read seem to think that “We’ll do it on the Internet and it won’t cost anything at all!”) And I’m really glad to see you don’t think these juried awards should hijack the Hugo Awards’ name and history to suit you. (Not sarcasm; this last opinion is how I think a fair number of the gripers feel: the Hugos should change to suit them, but they shouldn’t be obliged to actually do anything to make the change.)
The Hugo Awards do in fact change over time. Indeed, a common complaint I hear is that they change too much and it was better back in the Good Old Days when there weren’t so many categories and Fen Were Fen, Femmefen were FemmeFen, and everyone knew their place. Just look at how much of the work on this year’s ballot is electronically published rather than in “traditional” media. There’s a category for fancasts. Even the fanzines are all electronically published. It wasn’t that long ago that people were saying that electronically-distributed-and-published works weren’t real and shouldn’t be considered.
The pace of Hugo Awards change is quite slow, and the World Science Fiction Society’s rules are deliberately designed to resist quick changes. But change they do, to the point that when they finally do change, most people don’t even realize that the change happened. Compare this year’s ballot to that of twenty years ago as far as the breadth and diversity of the nominees go and you’ll see.
Definitely! Any suggested change – incremental or substantial – needs to be examined in terms of its practical implementation. To do otherwise will just be shouting at clouds – and while that is intrinsically valuable as opinion-shaping rhetoric, it is unlikely to actually precipitate immediate change. It is very easy for those who of us who gripe about the Hugo Awards to suggest broad, sweeping changes and ignore the systems that are in place to maintain the institution. Quarterbacking from the bleachers is a time-honored pass-time, after all. 😉
Yet at the same time, it is equally easy for those inside said systems to dismiss such concerns as mere sore-loser whinging. Certain issues (most notably, those about the economic/geographical barriers to participation) are most likely to be raised from outside of the system’s institutional structures. The frequency with which such concerns get raised does make me wonder about the institution’s systemic ability to understand, learn from, and respond to them. I suspect that for those already seated at the table, the concerns of those still out in the cold are naturally less close to home.
Which raises the interesting question of what (if anything) can the Hugo’s current systems do to better engage with those who today have difficulty engaging?
You have a point. But I have little patience with people whose “solution” amounts to “tear down the entire institution and do what I want instead, because of course I’m always right.”
In fact, nobody in their right mind would set up Worldcon the way it runs. When you explain the mechanics, legal structure, and economic setup of the process, most people either have their eyes glaze over or say something like, “That’s insane! Nobody would ever do that!” It’s because Worldcon grew up over a long period of time and change was rarely anything but incremental that we got where we did. And there won’t be any other quick changes, either.
For instance, starting in 2014, Worldcons will be able to charge less for Supporting Memberships than they’ve been charging for most of the past ten years or more. The reason for that is due to a change to the WSFS Constitution first proposed in 2010 and ratified in 2011. Yes, it took four years from introduction to first implementation. That’s awfully slow for most people. But I would argue that such a decentralized organization at WSFS, whose membership is literally from all over the world and that has nearly no central government, must have a slow-moving, change-resistant governance structure to prevent what is known as “meeting packing” and a single year’s drama from wrecking the whole organization. That sort of thing infuriates people who want their change right here, right now, and right their way.
I may be perceived to most people here as a hidebound conservative, but to many of the Business Meeting regulars, I’m a radical lunatic with crazy ideas like keeping membership costs down and encouraging more people to participate. But not even I think that lowering the voting membership cost to $1 or free would be a good thing for the Awards.