Jay Maynard has proposed “An Award for SF Storytelling” in a post on Black Gate, essentially the anti-Hugos, copying many of the existing Hugo categories and rules but purified of the tendencies Maynard disapproves.
The rationale for the (insert name here) Awards is simple. Over time, the Hugo voters have considered other factors than the most fundamental when evaluating a work. They have chosen works based on their political emphasis, or the race or nationality of the author, or other criteria aside from that which defines SF/F. Attempts to turn the Hugo Awards back to the foundations of SF/F have been met with derision and outright hatred. Despite their previous claims to the contrary, the Hugo Awards voters and others now say that the Hugos represent the World Science Fiction Society’s choices, not those of fandom at large.
The Novelette category would be eliminated, with short fiction receiving just two awards in the new system. There would be no editor or semiprozine categories. On the other side of the ledger, there would be a new YA Story category – one category for all lengths.
- Best Novel – Written SF/F stories of 50,000 words or more in length.
- Best Novella – Written SF/F stories between 5,000 and 50,000 words in length.
- Best Short Story – Written SF/F stories 5,000 words in length or shorter.
- Best Young Adult Story – Written SF/F stories of any length intended to be accessible to and enjoyed by SF/F fans under 18 years of age.
- Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience of over 90 minutes in length.
- Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience in 90 minutes or less.
- Best Graphic Story – Works of graphic art, with or without accompanying text, that tell an SF/F story.
- Best Related Work – Any nonfiction or fiction work that is not itself a work of SF/F storytelling, but serves to advance the SF/F storyteller’s art.
Although he would make a logical ally for a new set of sf awards, none of Eric Flint’s suggestions for adjusting the novel category have been adopted — not that there’s anything keeping them from being considered in a later draft.
In the nominating phase, Maynard will implement the 4/6 and E Pluribus Hugo proposals given first passage at Sasquan. Then comes a most interesting twist — the finalists will be screened by a Judging Committee.
The judges shall evaluate each work solely by its storytelling. The judges may disqualify any work they find to have an emphasis on other than telling a good SF/F story. They may disqualify no more than three nominees in any category. The disqualified nominees will be replaced by reprocessing the nominating ballots from the beginning as though those nominees had never been submitted; the judges may not disqualify the replacement nominees. This power is expected to be used very sparingly, as the awards are intended to reflect the choices of fandom at large….
The Judging Committee shall consist of no more than five members. They shall be chosen by the Foundation Board of Directors, and selected for their knowledge of the fields of science fiction and fantasy and their commitment to uphold the ideals of the (insert name here) Awards. They may serve as long as they and the Foundation Board of Directors wish.
The final ballot will be voted on by the Single Transferable Vote method (which some traditionalists like to call “the Australian Ballot”).
Unlike the Hugo Awards, there will be no provision for No Award. (Take that, WSFSians!)
The awards will be administered by a nonprofit corporation with a 501(c)(3) tax exemption.
The voter eligibility rules seem difficult to reconcile with Maynard’s goal of truly representing all of fandom. To become an eligible voter for Maynard’s awards, a person must be vouched for by one or more existing eligible voters with sufficient status. A voter must have a “trust level of 1 or greater” —
When first registering to vote, a person’s trust level is 0. An existing eligible voter whose trust level is 3 or greater may raise or lower the trust level of up to three other people by 1 each, and this number rises by 1 with each additional trust level until a maximum of a trust level of 10 is reached. The undersigned, as well as prior recipients of a (insert name here) Award and current and past members of the Foundation Board of Directors and Judging Committee, may raise or lower the trust level of any person by 1. A voter may not raise the trust level of anyone who raised his own, nor of anyone in the chain of trust leading back to those holding unlimited trusting privileges.
What could be more welcoming?
Maynard still needs a name for his proposed awards, though he did express a preference:
Part of me wants to name it after Terry Pratchett and have the award be a silver asterisk on a nice mahogany base or some such, just to throw the asterisks back in David Gerrold’s face, but not only do I not know how Sir Terry would take it, the name would get people away from thinking about SF as well. I also want this to not be a Puppy thing, and that would detract from that.
Yes, it might. Have any successful awards been built on a revenge platform?
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Ginger, I spotted it in one place and one place only. There’s one line by a character fairly late in the book, and I read it and said: “Huh. I think a person with that background, in this circumstance, would have used a gendered noun there.” By that point, Scalzi was committed to the gender-neutral protagonist and used a gender neutral noun. But not only is it one word in one line, it’s possible to imagine a reason why even that character would have used it . . . and it doesn’t matter. I liked visualizing the main character as all sorts of different androids, and realizing that people’s appearances were disconnected from their identities (really enjoyed the masculine character who “borrowed” a decidedly female body for a dinner party at one point, for example). And especially given that it’s a first-person narrative, I can’t see how it distracts from the story, in any case. Does it distract from DuMaurier’s Rebecca that we never know the Second Mrs. DeWinter’s first name? (Though I admit it makes a few moments in the movie a tad awkward . . . )
It occurs to me that Manly Wade Wellman is an honored writer of the pulp era of SFF. He won a Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Award in 1980, one of his short stories was nominated for a Hugo in 1959, and he’s won other awards as well. He had an extensive output, most of which seems to be straight-up adventure stories, as far as I know without any of the ideas on gender that seem to make the proponent of this proposed award uncomfortable.
And as far as I know, no one has named an award after him.
If this award proposal gets any traction, the backers may want to consider naming it after him. (Either his first or his last name would make for a fine nickname.) It would serve the useful purposes both of honoring a significant author from the “classic” era of SF that they seem to favor, and also of giving a fairly clear idea of what kinds of stories the backers have in mind for the award.
Too late to edit, I noticed that in fact the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation already has a Manly Wade Wellman Award, for SFF novels by North Carolina authors, and it’s been covered here. So I guess that one’s already taken.
I see the first two have both gone to Durham-based writer Mur Lafferty, in 2014 for The Shambling Guide to New York City, and in 2015 for Ghost Train to New Orleans.
Re Pern: My 12-year-old-self was actually really EXCITED when she realized that what appeared to be fantasy was actually science fiction. I thought it was a neat trick.
I have frequently gotten into arguments with fans who really want there to be a hard dividing line between science fiction and fantasy. But there just isn’t one — I’ll assert that as a point of fact. Any case you try to make for an SF/F binary falls apart on the specifics, especially once you consider older SF with known scientific impossibilities (life on Mars, etc.)
There are characteristics that tend to mark something as more SF, such as a story that is concerned with the relationship between technology and other aspects of life — but that would make some of the Discworld “industrial revolution” books SF. And maybe they are, in a way, but not according to the sort of clear binary some people seem to want.
Which reminds me a little of the argument Jay Maynard and Cat Valente are having over on the Black Gate thread — Mr. Maynard really seems to want there to be a clear (and objective) binary between “good storytelling” and “bad message fiction” but there’s simply not one, so every go-round comes back to “it’s bad message fiction if I say so.”
@JJ:
As someone else said, they believe they represent the Silent Majority of SF/F readers, while the majority of Worldcon voters represent a fringe hardly larger than themselves. Protest Manager was explicit about this belief in the still-sputtering post-awards thread.
For a lot of American conservatives it’s always 1972 or 1980. They are always about to shock the liberal elitist vanguard with their real numbers. And they think bubbles are something only progressives get trapped in.
Someone like Dave Freer sees his own sales figures and considers them good, and figures that this must be the way to be successful. Even one of the more thoughtful Pups like Ken Burnside will write that “all the authors I know who are making a living writing full time” are writing heroic-engineer competence porn, seemingly not stopping to consider that there may be successful authors he doesn’t know doing something quite different.
At bottom there’s a misunderstanding of The Market here. I may be a social democrat, but I have a healthy respect for functioning consumer markets. What functioning markets do is not reveal what is objectively “best” through sales figures. What functioning markets do is match supply to demand across the whole range of preference niches. In music terms, the market will get you Katy Perry if that’s your thing, but it will also get you Neko Case if that’s your thing. Neither Perry’s relatively higher sales volume nor Case’s relatively lower one reveal either as “better” than the other. They just reveal the size of the preference niches.
There remain huge problems for their Silent Majority delusion even taking into account their information bubble issues and misunderstanding of what the market actually means and doesn’t mean. For instance, even if the fact that the typical Pups love Jim Butcher aligns them with a large pool of readers, it doesn’t follow that the larger pool of Jim Butcher readers is also going to love “Pale Realms of Shade” or “Big Boys Don’t Cry” – precisely because Butcher appeals to a large swathe of readers. We can expect such a large group along the pro-Butcher dimension to break down across other dimensions. Plus, there’s literally no reason to think that the average reader of Dresden Files or Kevin J. Anderson is at all concerned that these authors be given awards from the World Science Fiction Society.
So the Pups remain a minority, for all that they enjoy some bestselling writers. Reading fiction is itself a minority passion; reading fantastical fiction is a minority of that. Wanting desperately to see the authors you love festooned with specialty awards is a fringe desire. Consider the following funnel:
Larry Correia’s legitimately large readership for his books
Larry Correia’s relatively large readership for his blog
Larry Correia’s couple of hundred nominators for the Hugo
Even if you define “normal” as liking Larry Correia books, the population who actually care whether Larry Correia gets a Hugo is miniscule.
Once you see the Pups as “fans of some bestselling authors about manly men who also like right-wing message fiction and Dominionist fables while abominating anything that could be remotely considered a progressive theme and demanding that a particular set of fan awards ratify their entire preference bundle,” the idea that they constitute some kind of Silent Majority becomes self-evidently absurd. But Pups apply such heavy filters to their selfies that they never see themselves as they are.
Count me as someone who, until now, had not noticed the protagonist of Lock In was not given a gender.
That was a big “huh” moment.
I notice that Jay just mentioned he had not read anything of Scalzi’s since Fuzzy Nation, because he was ‘chased off the blog’. (I’m sure the actual story there is fascinating if one cares to trawl through Whatever and find it).
So he hasn’t read Redshirts, hasn’t read Lock In, and I’m beginning to suspect hasn’t read Ancillary Justice.
He just knows they’re ‘message fic’ and shouldn’t win awards. How does he know? I don’t know.
I suppose that’s what the web of trust really IS for. If you’re gonna be a judge but don’t plan on reading the books, I guess it’s important to know how ‘highly rated’ a given vote is.
@jim Yeah, you hit on the head. The sometimes unspoken and sometimes explicit message from the Puppies is: We’re the real majority, we’re the real fans. Remember that graph that showed Worldcon as a pimple on the rest of SFF Fandom? Their unsubtle point is that they consider the majority of SFF fandom to be sympathetic, if not outright in *their* camp.
Silent Majority indeed.
@Jim, @Paul —
Also relevant to their obsession with pointing out how much bigger DragonCon is compared to Worldcon — as if the extra numbers at DragonCon represent people who would be puppy-sympathizers — or pointing out how much younger their demographic is — as if they assume younger people are more in line with their own thinking.
But the reality is that Worldcon is probably the MOST sympathetic crowd they’re going to find for the puppy viewpoint.
@McJulie: Yes! Their investment in Dragon*Con is adorable. I have a lot of friends who go to DC. Some of them are so progressive they make me look like James O’Keefe. “I’ll bet you this younger, more female, somewhat less white convention skews conservative,” said no sensible observer ever.
I have a soft spot for Clive James, of condom stuffed with walnuts fame; he used to live upstairs and we shared the same cleaning lady. My privacy was therefore perfect because no cleaning lady was going to gossip about me when she could gossip about somebody famous.
Admittedly, he had an unfortunate habit of forgetting that he’d left something in the oven, but the fires never got out of hand.
I do find people wailing about gender in Lock In pretty strange; gender is a social construct, and given the premise that people who’d drawn the short straw were completely locked in it’s difficult to understand how they could acquire it.
Incidentally, I was disappointed last year when our Black Sea voyage was curtailed; one of the people lecturing was even more disappointed because we were on the trail of the bona fide skeletal remains of a woman who had clearly spent much of her life on horseback, and much of her time using a bow…
Oh dear. I do feel a little sorry for Mr. Maynard.
He actually hasn’t read Lock In, so is getting hung up about the unspecified gender of the lead character. Who is, of course, completely paralyzed, unable to speak, and interacts through a mechanical body. I believe that the human body is only shown in one brief scene.
So of course Mr Maynard is unable to form a view of the persons’ character because he has no physical cues to go off. smh, as I believe the yoot of today say.
Edited to add – I did notice Chris’ gender wasn’t specified, but I also thought about it and realized that it is completely irrelevant to the story.
The fascination with Dragon*Con goes beyond mere Puppyism as well. I was talking to a newish writer last month who said that he doesn’t bother with Worldcon but goes to Dragon*Con because there are so many more potential readers there.
Even if that claim had evidence to back it up, the chances of any one writer meeting that many more potential readers is quite slim. Whether you’re in a convention center with 5000 people or 50000 your readings and panels and events and casual barstool conversations will only include a very small number of people.
Can we all just admire, for a moment, the idea of a bunch of people who are so paranoid that they think that something as transparent and open as the Hugos are actually being gamed by a nefarious cabal engaging in something called a web of trust?
@Nick Mamatas: Think how many more potential readers they could meet at Penn State football games!
I remember it well. Jay got a little pushback to his comments on health care and flounced. As a benificiary of socialist health care I still find the discussion mind-boggling.
The discussion also contains the now wonderfully out of date comment
On Science Fiction/Fantasy: I think that if you begin with the assumption that science fiction is about the possible, knowing whether a work is science fiction or fantasy is actually going to make a difference to how we read it; in trying to work out what happens, should we assume that the laws of physics are followed, or not? If you don’t make that assumption, it needn’t be a problem; a book is just what it is.
There are various kinds of edge case. There is science fiction disguised as fantasy (McCaffrey, Kirstein), and, more rarely, the reverse (Redshirts?). There is work which is genuinely indeterminate, because it’s unclear whether the basis of the story is scientifically explicable or not (e.g. 11.22.63, which was nominated for the WFA, not unfairly, though I would naturally have called it SF). And there is work that is genuinely both, since it includes some distinctive features of a scientific nature and some of a magical nature (Star Wars, original trilogy; some works of Gene Wolfe; and I think Jo Walton’s current series).
Wildcat:
This apparently applies to me. I have the first Reacher novel and made it about halfway down the first page before stopping, thinking, “I can’t read this. What on Earth are all those people going on about?”
Jay?:
However they like.
But if they want to preserve the non-specificity of the book, it wouldn’t be hard. Remember, the character has a robot body and voice, and we only see the real body in a life-support rig. Easy to make both robo-body and voice indeterminate, and shoot any scenes with the real body in an u revealing way.
If they wanted to go that route, the tricky part would be flashbacks.
But really, the likelihood is that they’d just pick one. They also won’t care that Chris is apparently black or bi-racial, which also didn’t get established until deep into the book.
Dragon*Con… was that the one which was, for a long time, co-owned by a child abuser?
Entirely coincidental I am sure. Doesn’t make it the kind of place I’d want to attend.
“Dragon*Con… was that the one which was, for a long time, co-owned by a child abuser?”
Ed was bought out. And it’s now called Dragon Con.
In a chamber dimly lit by flickering torchlight, a number of robed and hooded figures sit along one side of a c-shaped wooden bench. The central figure lifts a sheaf of loose-leaf paper. In a deep, stentorian voice, he proclaims “We declare this story—liberal.” Several figures murmur the word “liberal” in half-whispers, as if fearful of the very thought of giving it full voice. The central figure booms out again; “We remove this message fiction from consideration and cast it into outer darkness.”
An indifferent falsetto voice ululates a ceremonial dirge while the central figure tosses the sheaf of paper over the table, where it hits the floor with a thud and is snatched up by a crouched figure that quickly scuttles in from out of the shadows, and backs away. After a long moment of contemplative silence, the judges of the Tronguy Awards Sanctioning Committee turn to the next nominated story…
So… Tron Guy hasn’t even read Lock In. Hasn’t even read Ancillary Justice. But he’s totally okay with dismissing them both, unread, because PRONOUNS. Interesting parallel with that Sandifer gent, who is totally okay with ennobling works he hasn’t read, because REVIEWS or something.
With respect to the whole web-of-trust thing, Alexandra Erin’s comment cut right to the heart of the matter:
How can you possibly enjoy a book when the author doesn’t tell you the color of the protagonists eyes? That’s not something you can just make up for yourself, or ignore. Not knowing for sure what color the author intended the eyes to be just ruins a book for me.
Went over to read the comment stream on the [Insert] Award, and found this gem of an exchange:
Jay, I see a couple possible failure conditions for the web of trust, and wonder if you have thoughts about managing them.
#1. Someone trusted bestows trust on others willy-nilly – say, everyone reading his blog, or everyone who comes to a reading of his. This brings in some folks in sync with the spirit of things, but others who really aren’t. It’s Usenet on a bad day all over again. At that point, what could people interested in maintaining a desired ambience do about it?
#2. Someone trust undergoes a religious conversion or other drastic change of worldview is now not merely out of step but actively hostile to the intent of the awards. They go around bestowing trust on other people who share their active hostile. Same question – at that point, what could others do about it?
It seems to me like you’ve got a well-enough established audience to make this work if the details can hang together, and I’d like it to.
Comment by Bruce B. – September 11, 2015 12:53 pm
Bruce, both of these issues are limited in their impact by the tight limits on how many others they can trust. When you have only between three and ten trust votes to cast, period, you can’t trust very many willy-nilly, and those can’t gain enough trust to spread the damage without assistance (since you can only vote on one other person once).
If somehow it got a foothold, though, then the people in question could be downvoted by others.
Comment by Jay Maynard – September 11, 2015 12:59 pm
It seems pretty clear here that what is being set up is a gatekeeping mechanism to bar any but true believers from participating. This isn’t saying these people are sock puppets, merely that they might disturb the “ambience.”
It’s an interesting contrast with this:
“The web-of-trust bootup issue is a good one. Matt’s correct about the limited pool of trust available from only those with fixed trust amounts to hand out. That’s why there are folks with unlimited trusting abilities. I envision booths at cons and the like where anyone can walk up, show some form of ID, and register, manned by folks with unlimited privileges. The same can be done for bookstores, other gatherings… and a mechanism for folks who can’t get to something like that in person can be worked out. This is not a new problem.
And to answer one objection: This is not intended to be a gatekeeper of anything but verifying that someone signing up is a real person who has not signed up before. I have named nobody as having unlimited trusting privileges yet, and will not do so until much later in he process – and I explicitly invite anti-Puppies as well as Puppies and those who support neither side to participate, so everyone who’s a real person and wishes to can become trusted.”
Seriously illogical, and contradictory.
Maybe they should name it the “Have One’s Cake and Eat It Too Prize,” as the best juried-popular vote-based award out there.
I have a question for those of you who didn’t notice the unspecificity of the gender of the Lock In protagonist. Did you envision Chris as male or female? (No big deal, just kind of curious since I had read about the “gimmick” before reading the book.)
“Back to the Hugos”
Been through the desert on a dog with no name…
“In Dog We Trust”
Charlotte’s Web of Trust
What a Tangled Web (of Trust) He Weaves
Cognitive Dissonance for Pleasure, Profit, and SF Awards
Morris Keesan wrote:
I don’t think it’s ever been revenge with the Hogus / Black Holes because if the people writing the ballot actually had been real-world harmed, they are capable of responding in a much stronger real-world damaging way than a fake award ballot.
The poorest aspect of the Hogus is when they de or she is down, and that mob action is something which always has been part of them.
escend below the level of “good fun” into Schadenfreude — they’re an excellent way to metaphorically kick someone when h
There’s are thin lines between jesting and trolling, teasing and bullying, and just as with the tone-deafness so frequently cited as a reason for flame-warring occurring in text or print, fans can be tone deaf to that particular thin line, too.
Morris Keesan wrote:
.
I don’t think it’s ever been revenge with the Hogus / Black Holes because if the people writing the ballot actually had been real-world harmed, they are capable of responding in a much stronger real-world damaging way than a fake award ballot.
The poorest aspect of the Hogus is when they descend below the level of “good fun” into Schadenfreude — they’re an excellent way to metaphorically kick someone when he or she is down, and that mob kicking is something which always has been part of them, in my observation. YMMV and all that.
There’s are thin lines between jesting and trolling, teasing and bullying, and just as with the tone-deafness so frequently cited as a reason for flame-warring occurring in text or print, fans can be tone deaf to them, too.
Helsinki or Trust
The Trust-Us League
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Cryptographically Secure Gift-Giving Process in Place for the Holidays.
The Trust is Out There
The Trust-Verification Problem
Vouching Tiger
Vouching Tiger, Hidden Tyrant
yeah, riffing off of one of Will R’s
Lyle,
Male. Which could be because I am a man myself, or I suspect more likely because the name of my brother is Chris.
So if you say “Chris” I’m gonna think the the long-haired, bearded annoyance that is my brother. Or these days, the delightful niece and nephew of mine that he had some minor hand in creating. (I kid. I do love my brother, failings and all. But seriously, his kids are awesome. More awesome than mine, although perhaps that’s because mine is of the age wherein he is very expensive, very opinionated, and has done horrible, horrible things to my car insurance payments).
To honor what Jay Maynard, and others like him, fear they have become;
And also, to honor the award-winning story that has so inspired them;
The new award should be called “The Dinosaur.”
Will the Circle Be Unvoted
Die Hard 6: Diebold
Avengers: Age of Scantron
Trust Never Sleeps.
Re: Secret Majority
This was also a misapprehension Gamergate worked under; they thought they represented the majority of gamers, whereas the majority of gamers probably hadn’t heard of them and was none too fond of them even when they had. It’s a bit odd, really, since they (and to some extent the Puppies) combine it with a particular brand of nerd exceptionalism which would, if true, render them a very small minority indeed.
I tried to keep from getting too hopeful pre-ceremony that most of the new voters were those defending the Hugo’s. I didn’t think the Puppies had a majority in fandom, but I didn’t know whether they’d be able to recruit heavily from the Culture Warriors. It’s best not to assume The Lurkers Support You until there’s solid proof (similarly, I’m hoping some way of testing EPH on the actual data is found, because I’d rather not assume it would work now that we know slate discipline was variable).
Re: Lock In & Casting
Most of the time Chris looks like a robot, and for any brief time the biological body is shown I’m sure someone androgynous could be found.
As I said in the other thread, if anything, the themes about disability are much stronger than the one around gender, which just doesn’t get attention drawn to it for much of the book.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
I’m not dragon sizeist. All dragons are good dragons, even very small ones.
YES GOOD. My work here is done.
Also: Yay Corbyn. 🙂
Burn Before Reading (Or At Least, I Do)
One Does Not Simply Browse the Stacks of Mordor Imperial Library
CHORFs, Mr. Rico! Billions of CHORFs!
Cat Valente’s had an interesting idea:
Short fiction watch: I’m done with the short stories in the September Apex, and about to turn to the novelette by Liu Cixin. There one short story I liked a great deal, a slipstream number by Isabel Yap called “Find Me”, and another by Tade Thompson, “Child, Funeral, Thief, Death” I found pretty decent. There’s also a short-short/prose-poem, “Six Things We Found During the Autopsy” by Kuzhali Manickavel, that may work for some people. The last short story on offer, “Frozen Planet” (Marian Womack), I thought genuinely terrible.
I don’t think I like any of these as well as the two best new stories from the September Galaxy’s Edge, but “Find Me” is a dark-horse Hugo nominee for me right now, and “Frozen Planet” is the only one I regret wasting my time on.
I love Cat’s idea for story-related awards. 🙂
Male – hadn’t heard about the gimmick, and when I did, actually re-read the book as I was sure there was a gender-specific term used in one section (IIRC, “son”, but turns out to be “kid”)
Re: informal poll on the gender of Chris in Lock In.
I think I identified Chris as male at first, despite the fact I’m female. About halfway through, a very slightly awkward phrasing made me notice that no gender pronouns were used for Chris. I then went back and RE-read the first half of the book, explicitly looking for gender pronouns, and realized what Scalzi had done.
Reasons I initially identified Chris as male, as best as I can determine: I’m old enough that I’m too used to “action heroes” being exclusively male. This is getting better these days, but early imprinting is still strong. Also, as it happens, while I know that Chris is about as gender-neutral a name as you get, I don’t personally know any female Chrisses (is that the correct plural?), but I know two male ones.
I would LOVE Cat’s “best twist” and “best ending” and so forth awards. Love it, love it, love it.