Thanks to Strange Horizons for posting a robust collection of links to commentary about the 2011 Hugo Award winners.
Some of it is harsh enough to make you feel like not winning isn’t such a bad thing. (Did Abigail Nussbaum blog about the winners in 2008? I’m afraid to look.)
Reading all the linked posts at one time hammered home the polar extremes of affection and disdain inspired by Connie Willis’ novel Blackout/All Clear. While Abigail Nussbaum asked “is this the very worst best novel decision ever made by the Hugo voters?”, Jamie Todd Rubin affirmed it as “one of the best novels I’ve ever read, regardless of genre.”
It makes sense that anybody who feels passionately about the outcome would write about it. What prompted some others who didn’t really care to pass their palsied hands over the keyboard? There are several links to shallow analysis from jaded gnostics offering the ignoble reasons they conceive to be the true explanation for each victory – unwilling to believe that anything ever wins just because people think it’s good.
Kat Howard addressed this better than anyone:
But if you hated the results, if you feel they are a travesty, or a joke, or nothing but a popularity contest, or whatever has made you so grumpy that you do nothing but complain for paragraph after paragraph (yes, I’ve seen this. No, I’m not linking to it. The sad thing is, examples aren’t hard to find)…
No day is an appropriate day to try and cast tarnish on the shiny rocketship trophies.
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Yeah, I didn’t like Blackout/All Clear (I have a video review on my site that I’ll hold off on recapping at the moment). I feel like that it should have been just one book instead of two, and publishing it like that would have fixed some problems I had with the pacing.
What struck me wasn’t so much the venom directed at the Female Person from Colorado as it was the venom directed at the fan awards. “Old people”!
What I presume is that the bloggers who decried the awards as “old people’s awards” didn’t vote, didn’t nominate, didn’t even join the con. And of course the idea of actually participating in these “old peoples'” works is like so five minutes ago . . .
@Joseph: Considering that one fellow’s complaint about the fanzine category being an “old man’s award” was posted two days after Chris Garcia and James Bacon won for The Drink Tank, I wondered if we ought to chip in and send him a pair of spectacles.
@Mike: But by him, they are, like, old-timey? I mean, tweets and vlogs and other like now types of communication are, like, ignored by those old fogeys?
@Joseph: You’ve got me. Everybody knows where Chris works they use a copy of Babbage’s difference engine. No way he’s going to fool the cool kids.
I expected no better of the Hugos, but liked Allen Steele winning for novelette & Claire for fanwrtier.
But…where were the Vegas fans? Didn’t see a one.
I saw two Vegas fans: Linda and Ron Bushyager.
I suppose if you’re young enough, Chris Garcia is an old guy.
Well, I have been around for about 35 years, though for the first few I was in diapers!
Chris