The Future of the Best Fanzine Hugo

The proposal to eliminate the Best Semiprozine Hugo has gotten so much attention it’s been easy to overlook the major surgery that the Best Fanzine category will undergo if the final product of the “Making the Web Eligible” motion, the language shown in underline, is ratified at the 2009 Worldcon Business Meeting:

3.3.12: Best Fanzine. Any generally available non-professional publication devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, and which does not qualify as a semiprozine.

Before you suspect me of being only a guy with a paper zine trying to deny the electronic future, let me say that I actually agree that internet publications – such as blogs and websites — need to be brought into the Hugo Awards.

The problem is introducing the “making the web eligible” changes without any attempt to define new criteria that will align commercially-motivated internet publications in another category.

I worry about fanzines and fannish websites/blogs being shut out of competition by a combination of trade publications and mass-media-promotion websites. If the voters in the Business Meeting intend a laissez-faire approach, I suppose the chips will fall where they may. But having made a point of preserving existing semipro critiera in the other major rule changes they may be open to a suggestion.

Look into the future. You’re at the 2010 Worldcon in Australia attending the Hugo ceremonies. Someone is announcing the five nominees for the Best Fanzine Hugo. But which of these three lists are they reading?

List A:

Argentus
Banana Wings
Challenger
The Drink Tank
File 770

List B:

eFanzines
Locus Online
SF Site
SF Signal
Whatever

List C:

io9
SyFy.com
SCI FI Wire
SF Universe
Tor.com

The rules are being changed to make paperzines share the glory, so List A, a rerun of this year’s slate of nominees, is unlikely.

List B is a realistic possibility. I’m impressed that eFanzines already dominates its category in the FAAn Awards. The others are just a few examples of online publications that have a lot of fan support.

Everything depends on what Worldcon members vote to put on the final ballot. One smof is fond of quoting the axiom Vox populi, vox dei. A Hugo Administrator would need nerves of iron to rule out List C if voters ranked these pro sites in the top five. So if this list isn’t anyone’s ideal, more concrete rules would help.

The change throws a great burden on the Hugo Administrator without providing much guidance. Controversy always stalks the awards to some extent, a prospect that deters most administrators from any action not required by a black letter rule. The probable outcome is that voters will be the ones deciding the categories where internet nominees belong. 

The 2008 Business Meeting minutes say very little about the scope of the change or how to administer it. When somebody questioned the Chair whether blogs would belong in Best Fanzine or Best Related Works (amended from “Best Related Book” by the same legislation), the Chair said that would be up to the Hugo administrator. But on what terms? The minutes are silent.

Voters have the semiprozine criteria for paid material and more-than-half-of-one’s-support to filter some things out of the fanzine category. Unfortunately, those aren’t good tools for the work.

Consider: Is Locus Online semipro? It repeats some material the magazine presumably paid for. Does it fulfill any of the other criteria? There’s advertising, but mainly at the top of the landing page – so, far less than 15% of the site’s overall space. There’s no way of determining if Locus Online provides more than one-half of anyone’s support (or any support at all) without them announcing it, but how likely is that when editor Mark Kelly has day job in aerospace? Very possibly Locus Online is not semipro as the Hugo rules define the term, even though one of its goals is to steer business to the magazine.

Next, consider Whatever. It’s popular with tens of thousands of readers. Most fanzines and fannish blogs have about one percent of that readership. Otherwise, they have in common a devotion to sf and fandom in their own way. Whatever carries no advertising and pays nobody to write, to my knowledge. Instead of drawing a distinction between Whatever and other publications I’m practically delivering a sound-alike for the “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” speech from “The Merchant of Venice.” Where should it compete?

A lot of the other high-traffic sites are easier to classify. Poke around and you eventually find a reference to the top editor having been hired away from a big-name pop culture magazine. Click on the “advertising” link and you’ll be taken to a corporate webpage declaring that millions of people read its spectrum of special-interest sites. But will this circumstantial evidence be enough to empower a Hugo Administrator to disqualify something as a fanzine?

What does the future hold? As you can see, a lot is riding on the work fans will do at this year’s Business Meeting.

P.S. One other thing bothers me about the soon-to-be-ratified rule change. Why haven’t the knowledgeable fans who proposed it given the category a new name in order to avoid the clumsy anachronism of calling virtually every form of two-dimensional fanac a fanzine, as the rule will effectively do?

7 thoughts on “The Future of the Best Fanzine Hugo

  1. Well, I’m certainly not in favor of opening the flood gates there (I still say there needs to be a Best Website, but to me there’s a huge difference between a blog and a fanzine. The Drink Tank is an electronic fanzine, it has issues (and issues of it’s own) and is a cohesive single unit. Whatever isn’t a fanzine, it’s a blog. They’re completely different things, at least the way I see it. I always use Emerald City as the example of the distinction. Emerald City and Cheryl’s Emerald City Blog were a part of the EmCit.com website. The blog was not the fanzine, the fanzine. there was a clear distinction.

    Now, if someone puts forth a Best Blog category, I’ll vote for it.

    Are there websites that are also fanzines? I’m not sure I can think of one off th etop of my head, but I’m sure it’s out there. Should those be considered? Yeah, I’d say so, but not things like IO9, Tor.com or Locus On-Line. They should have a category, but it should be competing against other sites and not against periodicals.

    Yes, electronic zines should be eligible, but not all electronic places with writing are zines, and we should come up with a category to solve that problem.
    Chris

  2. Since they’ve already reached the second, ratifying vote for the change, clearly the power dynamic is not about preserving an exclusive category for issue-based publications. But there ought to be a way to keep the award focused on things fans do, and not lose that focus because some can effectively argue into absurdity every search for language that expresses the basic existence of such a thing as fanac.

  3. “Why haven’t the knowledgeable fans who proposed it given the category a new name in order to avoid the clumsy anachronism of calling virtually every form of two-dimensional fanac a fanzine, as the rule will effectively do?”

    Sounds like a good question.

  4. Pingback: In Great Linkage « Torque Control

  5. “A lot of the other high-traffic sites are easier to classify. Poke around and you eventually find a reference to the top editor having been hired away from a big-name pop culture magazine. Click on the “advertising” link and you’ll be taken to a corporate webpage declaring that millions of people read its spectrum of special-interest sites. But will this circumstantial evidence be enough to empower a Hugo Administrator to disqualify something as a fanzine?”

    For the record, my opinion is that Hugo administrator’s should disqualify in such cases, as being against the spirit of fanzines being “amateur,” but what’s my opinion worth? Naught, compared to that of an actual administrator.

    Again, I’d like to see a Best Website/Blog Award created and these issues clearly defined.

  6. My personal feeling is that, just as the science fiction genre is gradually being absorbed into the mainstream of popular culture — images of Buicks unfolding into robot martial-arts fighters and invoking the time-paradox are readily understood by almost everyone under 40 now — so fandom, bathed in the universal solvent of the internet, is apt to dissolve into nothing. It may be futile to distinguish between paper issues of Banana Wings, pdfs of Drink Tank, Tor.com on the internet, and ultimately the on-line version of Fox News. (There’s certainly more science fiction in Fox News than most issues of Banana Wings.)

    But its 4.45 in the a.m. and I’ve been writing all day. I have more writing to do, so I don’t feel like defending that statment here and now.

  7. “It may be futile to distinguish between paper issues of Banana Wings, pdfs of Drink Tank, Tor.com on the internet”

    You can distinguish, or not, as you want, depending upon the purpose you have in mind.

    Why I should be more interested in one of these than the other, that is to say, why I should be more interested in the delivery mechanism itself, rather than the quality of the content, and the shared experience I have in interacting with others through the mechanism and content, I’m not sure. But such decisions are for every individual to make for themselves, of course.

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