Hugos IV: Han of Iceland

[melannen]

Best Editor, Short Form
All puppy, No Award

Best Editor, Long Form
All puppy, No Award

(and thank goodness because there's no way I'd have the context to judge these fairly.)

Best Professional Artist - 1 nominee

Julie Dillon

1. Is it SF/F?

Yes, indubitably. (I am not very eloquent about art, guys, but there's future-societies and sea monsters and stuff.)

2. Is it good?

I really liked it! It's exactly the sort of art that I'd love to see more of on SF bookcovers, too. And for people who've been wondering why the artist noms aren't the people we see on Tumblr and DA, many of these images are in the six-digits in reblogs already (including some that are mine.) ^_^

3. Is it good SF?

I liked it, and I like her SF/Fantasy vision! Sadly I'm not familiar with any of the books she's done covers for, but she's done some good pro sf work. And I did skim the puppy entries; while some of them are also quite good, I'd happily have voted Julie Dillon above them anyway, I really like her stuff.

The only caveat is that she won last year too, but it's not like that doesn't constantly happen with the Hugo downticket categories, and always has.


Best Fan Writer - 1 nominee

Laura J. Mixon

1. Is it SF?

She's writing mostly about events that have gone on among people in the SF community (occasionally spreading out to other geekish communities as well) so I guess so, yeah.

2. Is it good? Is it good SF? (I'm combining these because of the way my thoughts are spinning out on it.)

Okay, so, here is where I say: I'm desperately conflicted about this one. It's pretty clear she was nominated for her investigation of Requires Hate & sockpuppets thereof, if only because she hasn't done much fanwriting to speak of other than that in the past two years. She also did a really powerful series about her history with sexual assault, but only one of three entries had anything in particular to do with SF - the one included in the Hugo voter's packet. So basically, unless she has some hidden somewhere else and unlinked from any of her webpages or bibliographies, she did two pieces of SF fanwriting in 2014, both of them in the packet.

If this was an award for a single piece of fanwriting - like, say, the investigative journalism Pulitzer - I would be pretty happy voting for her. The RH piece was an amazing bit of investigation, that clearly involved a lot of work and a lot of personal investment, and really needed to be done, and she handled the inevitable backlash about as well as anyone could, too.

But it was the factual content and bravery that made it good, not the writing per se. And when I compare it to other great pieces of the art of fandom reportage - Charlotte Lennox's ouvre, yes, but also such classics as Up To Now: A History of Fandom as Jack Speer Sees It or the epic collection summed up by 'Gentlemen do not read other people's mail!' - it doesn't really rate.

And then there's the fact that this is meant to be an award for a year's output, not for a single piece (or two). And I totally get that when your big piece is that, you may not have the energy for more. And yet. One big piece doesn't really seem like it's what this award is for, especially when I know lots and lots of people (many of them on my DW...) who are putting out really good SF related fanwriting on a weekly basis.

Anyway I'll probably go ahead and vote this, but I wish there were other noms to compare it with.

Comments

[jadelennox]

I adore Julie Dillon's work.

[melannen]

I didn't realize until I looked through her stuff yesterday that so much of my favorite tumblr art was the same person! ...which is one of the things about Tumblr, I guess.

[seekingferret]

I mean, last year, Kameron Hurley won Best Fan Writer essentially for "We Have Always Fought", even though she also won Best Related Work for "We Have Always Fought". So there's precedent for winning Best Fan Writer on the basis of a single essay, though I'm not convinced it's the best precedent (and I voted for Abigail Nussbaum over Hurley last year).

I agree that Mixon's report was valuable to the community, but I also don't think it's all that well done. There's weird data presentation stuff, weird argument structure, and general scatteredness. I've read the thing through a couple times and still don't quite have a handle on the overall timeline of RH's activities. So I'm planning to No Award.

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of information she wanted to get into that post, and I understand she was rushed - she wanted to get the best post she could written as fast as possible, so wasn't necessarily going to polish it for the ages - but I'm not sure that's what goes into a "best writer" award.

And Kameron Hurley at least did other fan-related writing in 2013; she's got extensive book reviews and musings about being a pro writer and so on. I can buy "You do one piece that gets you the attention and gets people to look at your more day-to-day writing"; that's how the internet works these days anyway.

But when I say there's only the two pieces, I mean, literally, everything not in the voters' packet that Mixon posted in 2014, at least that I could find, was either RH followups or one-line updates or links or similar things. Best fanwriter should maybe actually do fanwriting on a regular basis :/ (Maybe she has a third blog under yet another name that I couldn't find or a locked facebook or she's been publishing in 'zines that she doesn't list on her website. Maybe she's secretly RH! But it seems unlikely.)

I'm also not excited about how this award seems to regularly go to pro writers. I mean, fair enough, they can be fans too, and it's been happening since forever, but it would be nice to occasionally use this category for people who aren't also selling novels.

I think she might still go above No Award for me, as the 'wank report' is a fannish writing format of great antiquity and tradition and this certainly wasn't a stand-out *bad* example, plus I have a soft spot for graphs and stats even if they're pretty gratuitous. But only just barely above No Award.

[cahn]

Ugh. Thank you for doing these; I kind of ran out of steam after reading the fiction, and I really need to be thinking about all these other categories too. *sigh*

[melannen]

I mean, you don't have to vote everything! I'm going to have to skip the Campbell (not a Hugo anyway) because I am out of steam on reading more long novels right now.

But yeah, doing these posts is the main thing that's motivating me to do a proper job on the votes.

[dhampyresa]

I am forever in awe of Julie Dillon.