Entry tags:
dead dogs
I missed the Hugo announcements because I spent all day floating around in ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lindentreeisle's mom's swimming pool, which was definitely a better life choice, let's face it.
I'm still catching up on liveblogs and stuff, but looking at the numbers that were released, something occurs to me: the puppies may not have been 100% wrong. Because if you look at the nominations numbers, it really does look like a small group of people (~70-100) are all nominating from the exact same relatively small group of works, all of which share the trait that they are very thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, imperialism. Whereas when you looked at the other (non-puppy) works nominated, there are a lot more of them, but fewer of them hit that nominations threshhold, because the votes are spread among more works, so they are each less likely to get a nomination.
And the taste of that small group of people, while it isn't entirely different from the tastes of the wider fandom, isn't exactly convergent, either. Just look at some of the stuff that did get wins this year. And the effect is that it almost looks like slate nominations.
I mean, obviously it *isn't* : what it is, is that if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn worldbuilding, then you still have a WHOLE LOT FEWER stories to pick from. And so there's a lot less less spread in the noms.
And obviously the answer isn't to have a competing slate, because that's a solution to a different problem. The answer is for the Puppies and their friends to make sure there are SO MANY books published every year for the diversity-aware bloc to pick from that their nominations are as spread out as the straight-white-men's nominations.
Get on that, Puppies. Please.
(That might actually happen anyway, if all the people who bought first-time votes this year nominate next year, and nominate a lot of less-printsff-mainstream stuff. We'll see.)
lindentreeisle's mom's swimming pool, which was definitely a better life choice, let's face it.I'm still catching up on liveblogs and stuff, but looking at the numbers that were released, something occurs to me: the puppies may not have been 100% wrong. Because if you look at the nominations numbers, it really does look like a small group of people (~70-100) are all nominating from the exact same relatively small group of works, all of which share the trait that they are very thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, imperialism. Whereas when you looked at the other (non-puppy) works nominated, there are a lot more of them, but fewer of them hit that nominations threshhold, because the votes are spread among more works, so they are each less likely to get a nomination.
And the taste of that small group of people, while it isn't entirely different from the tastes of the wider fandom, isn't exactly convergent, either. Just look at some of the stuff that did get wins this year. And the effect is that it almost looks like slate nominations.
I mean, obviously it *isn't* : what it is, is that if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn worldbuilding, then you still have a WHOLE LOT FEWER stories to pick from. And so there's a lot less less spread in the noms.
And obviously the answer isn't to have a competing slate, because that's a solution to a different problem. The answer is for the Puppies and their friends to make sure there are SO MANY books published every year for the diversity-aware bloc to pick from that their nominations are as spread out as the straight-white-men's nominations.
Get on that, Puppies. Please.
(That might actually happen anyway, if all the people who bought first-time votes this year nominate next year, and nominate a lot of less-printsff-mainstream stuff. We'll see.)
no subject
The Hugos were a terrific set of awards when the core of the SFF fandom community--as sparse and diverse as it was--did their community-building at SFF conventions. They don't, anymore, so it's a bit weird for the broader community, including publishers, to give much credence to an award that's always been a popularity contest among a specific subset of fans.
Forty years ago, that subset was more-or-less representative of SFF readership as a whole. Now, it's not; there are huge genres completely ignored by Worldcon and the Hugos. (I'm waiting for the year when "Best Video Game" gets on the ballot. You think we've got drama now...)
Other than that, though, I agree. There's a problem in that the convention-going community's standards for groundbreaking, thought-provoking, innovative-worldbuilding stories are being met by a relatively small group of authors. And the solution is obviously to get so much diverse fiction published that there are hundreds of amazing choices every year, instead of hundreds of variants of formulaic military fic or space-opera fluff, and a only handful of books that can change the way people look at the world.
no subject
I don't know that the worldcon makeup is that much less representative now than it used to be, though. Certainly the Worldcon in the Golden Age wasn't giving awards to comics, for example. And there was always a huge amount of diversity in the readership that wasn't well represented by congoers - if you look at, for example, the letter-columns of old issues of Astounding in the 50s, you see a much better gender ratio and class diversity than you do in the memberships of those old cons. And that's after the letters have been winnowed by male editors. But the internet is making that non-con-going segment a lot harder to ignore and a lot harder to exclude from the core, so even as the cons are getting more diverse, their lagging diversity is a lot more visible.
Also, of course, there's just a lot more people now, and therefore a lot more stuff being published so it's a lot harder to feel like you've got a handle on everything.