By Chris M. Barkley
“When the mind is free, magic happens.”
— Young Adult author C.G. Rousing
“Harry Potter” blew the roof off of children’s literature. But that doesn’t mean the work is done — for YA authors, it just means more scope for the imagination.”
— Huffington Post reporter Claire Fallon, June 2017
Reading is one of the great pleasures in life. For a time in our modern age, it is seems as though young grade and high school kids had abandoned reading books.
Then, in 1997, along came J.K. Rowling and her creation, the world of Harry Potter. And now, after twenty-one years, it’s hard to imagine what might have happened to entire generation of young readers if Bloomsbury and Scholastic Books hadn’t taken a chance on the saga of a young wizard and his friends and deadly enemies.
The Harry Potter novels, which continue to sell, provided a mighty tide that raised the fortunes of a great many writers; new authors such as Suzanne Collins, Garth Nix, Veronica Roth, Rick Riordan and Tamora Pierce, led story hungry children to the older works of seasoned professionals like Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, Anne McCaffrey, Madeline L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert A. Heinlein.
In 2006, The Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America created the Andre Norton Award, which is given to the author of the best young adult or middle grade science fiction or fantasy work published in the United States in the preceding year.
Five years later, a serious effort was started to establish a Hugo Award for young adult books. The World Science Fiction Convention Business Meeting, which governs the WSFS Constitution that administers the Hugo Awards, several committees over several years, determined that the proposed award would better be served as a separate category, to be on par with the other non-Hugo category, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
The amendment to add the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book to the WSFS Constitution was first ratified last summer at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Finland by the members of the Business Meeting and must be ratified a second time at this year’s Worldcon in San Jose, California to begin it’s official trial run as a category.
This year’s Worldcon Convention Committee (headed by Kevin Roche) has graciously accepted to administer the Young Adult Book award in addition to the new Best Series and Campbell Awards.
The nomination period for the Hugos, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer opened February 5.
We, the undersigned, wish to congratulate the various YA Committee for reaching a consensus with their diligent work in crafting the parameters of the YA Award for the World Science Fiction Convention. However, we also think that the name of this new award should have a name which not only should be universally recognizable, but have an equivalent weight to the name of John W. Campbell, Jr.
We, the undersigned, will respectfully submit a new name for the Young Adult Book Award at the Preliminary Session of the Worldcon 76 Business Meeting on August 17, 2018 as a strike though substitution for the name ‘Lodestar’, under the rules governing the WSFS Business Meeting.
We will also embargo the name until the start of the Preliminary Session.
There is very good reason why the name will not be revealed at this time and that explanation will also be given at that time.
While we also understand that while this motion may cause a great deal of consternation, we also feel that this would be an excellent opportunity to generate a great deal of interest about the Worldcon and bring MORE attention to this new award to potential nominators, readers of all ages, booksellers and the public at large.
The proposed name will forever be known and honored in perpetuity with the Hugo Awards, the John W. Campbell Award, and the World Science Fiction Convention.
Proposed by Worldcon 76 Attending Members:
Juli Marr
Robert J. Sawyer
Steven H. Silver
Chris M. Barkley
Update 03/07/2018: Removed Melinda Snodgrass and Juliette Wade as signers. Also removed Vincent Docherty, who said in a comment his name was included in error, he never was a signer. // Subsequently, Shawna McCarthy and Pablo Vasquez have asked to have their names removed.
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Xtifr: As for whatzizface’s motives, part of my personal strategy for “trying to take the high road when I can remember to do so, which isn’t as often as I’d like” is to remember the old maxim, “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.”
That’s a beautiful maxim, and one that I always keep in mind. However, Barkley made the choice not to fully inform the people he asked to be sponsors — which tells me that he knew if he was fully honest with them, they wouldn’t agree to support the proposal. Malicious? No, but deliberately deceptive — and not involving the YA Award committee members, and just expecting Business Meeting attendees to fall into line, was an extremely disrespectful and manipulative move.
My impression is that his expectation was that the people who objected to renaming the award would feel that they had to support it, because they would otherwise appear to be disrespecting Le Guin, or to be rejecting her as a worthy author. And that sort of emotional manipulation really sticks in my craw. It’s shitty and disrespectful behavior.
What I don’t understand is why — given all the years Barkley has spent in fandom, and given the difficult process which achieving a YA Award entailed — he thought that Worldcon members would, on the whole, be quite happy to just accept his vague announcement and not feel manipulated. That bit I am quite willing to attribute to stupidity caused by being blinded by one’s own desires.
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