...and, as usual, I'm doing all the reading I'm going to do in the last month before the deadline. Most of it in the last week before the deadline. Over the next few days I'm going to finish reading the five novels and post a few words about each. I might do the short fiction as well, depending on how my reading time pans out. I haven't even started the short works, but I have a holiday weekend coming up with my first days off since mid-May and feel entirely justified in spending at least one of those days in bed reading.
A few thoughts on some of the nominations before I go on to serious vote-planning:
Fiction categories
Four women. Sixteen men. Not as bad as last year (when hot new phenom Naomi Novik was the only women up with nineteen men), but still a sizable gap. I'm not ready to call this prejudice, since the data to back that up are either not available or not crunched and there are several other possible explanations, but it's certainly noticeable. I've taken to compensating for this by actively seeking out women to nominate, but neither of my two novel candidates this year (Catherynne Valente's second Orphan's Tales and Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms) made the ballot. I will be very curious to see the longer lists of nominees.
Dramatic Presentaton - Short Form
This is a weird year for me. I've seen more nominees in short form than in long, which has never before been the case. It's the first time I've ever nominated in the category, too, and more than one of my suggestions is on the ballot. And yes, I will cop to being one of the people who nominated the New Voyages episode, though in the company it's keeping it will be at the bottom of my final ballot. Why the nomination, then? Because while its appeal may be limited to a very narrow demographic of people with huge amounts of Classic Trek nostalgia, I'm one of those people, and I sat in the audience at worldcon last year and cried as it played.
Editor - Long Form
I was pretty grumpy about this category and voted against it at Los Angeles for several reasons, the most important of which was that it's the one category where the information one needs to vote is difficult for the average person to dig up. Not every company lists the book editor inside its novels, which means the category is going to be skewed to the single company (Tor) that does list them and promote them fairly consistently, since those are simply going to be the best-known names. I may know that (for example) Toni Weisskopf edits everything in the Baen line nowadays, but a reader won't find that out just from reading books from Baen.
There was some pushing of the "if we build it, they will come" idea that by establishing this award publishers would begin to list the editor's name as well in order to increase their chances, but that doesn't seem to be happening consistently. I'm still having to pull editors' names out of the author's acknowledgments or industry gossip. Not every voter is in a position to know or find out this stuff, and while I am all in favor of well-informed voters, I don't think informing oneself should require a research project. I still haven't figured out who edited the Chabon novel on this year's ballot, and I made a point of looking while I had the book checked out from the library.
Last year Locus made a very helpful directory for 2006, which I leaned on when nominating. This year, the 2007 editors page still says only "this page not initialized," as I found to my dismay when I went to nominate. It shouldn't be the responsibility of Locus to provide this information every year, and in the absence of any sort of master list (so readers can make comparisons), nominators and voters are going to skew towards the names they know. So it doesn't surprise me much to see three out of five nominees coming from Tor. I don't think those three are undeserving, but I bet I'm not the only person who can't name four books each one edited this year right off the top of my head, and I'm not sure they're among the five most deserving. I just don't have enough data to tell.
There's a related problem, as Andrew Wheeler wrote back in March:
I think this category is being used by Hugo voters to work down the list of "people who should have gotten one a while ago, but didn't" -- at least, I hope that's the case, and that it's not going to settle down to going to the same one or two people ad infinitum like Best Artist and the old Best Editor did.
Without disagreeing in the slightest with the idea that there are long-form editors who really should have won in the unsplit Best Editor category over the past umpteen years, I feel the need to remember that the award as it stands is for work in the current year, not a lifetime achievement award for people who've made contributions to the field historically, even if those contributions are significant. But I think it is being thought of that way, and has been from the first proposal of the long/short split. How many times did I hear split proponent Patrick Nielsen Hayden say in person that while he hoped for a Hugo (which he has since received), it would be a travesty if David Hartwell didn't get one first? Certainly enough times to notice that "first" really implies "because he's done great things over the length of his career" not "because he's better than me in this particular year." There's no requirement that everyone doing Hugo-quality work get a Hugo; if five fabulous novels all come out in the same year, only one is going to win, even of the other four might have won against a different field in a different year. No one is owed a Hugo because they didn't win one when they deserved it in the past.
I'm not immune to this, by the way: I was rooting for Jim Baen to win last year, even though on the basis of strictly the one year's work I think Hartwell deserved it more (two books of his editing, including my personal favorite, Eifelheim, were on the ballot under Best Novel, which seems a reasonably objective basis on which to judge this difficult category.) Baen was such an innovator in the field and with his death will never again be eligible.
These two problems (and other concerns as well) make me rather queasy about the whole category.
Wheeler also noted in the same post:
...the last chance for Ellen Asher to win a Hugo has quietly slipped by the wayside. Bad form, Hugo voters.
I nominated Asher this year and was sorry not to see her on the ballot, though in honesty it was more a thank you from my isolated teenage self who found the Science Fiction Book Club a lifeline (I dropped out over a decade ago, but I still remember the membership number I carefully filled in so many times: 10-017-863605) than any idea of what exactly she edited for the SFBC last year. See the problem? I can't even practice what I preach. And Wheeler's right in there with me. This suggests to me a real problem with the category.
Professional Artist
This category suffers from some of the same difficulties as the BE-LF category as far as identifying artists, but the artist's name is usually somewhere in a book and Locus came through in spades with a beautiful cover art directory that helped me immensely in my nominating and will guide my voting as well.
I suspect Phil Foglio is on the ballot primarily because of the legions of Girl Genius fans. I'm not tremendously fond of Foglio's style and haven't managed to click with GG yet in my first couple of tries, but I have enough friends raving about it that I should give it another go, and I certainly think it's legitimate grounds for a nomination.
My problem in this category isn't visible on the ballot.
Let me back up for a bit. In this category, as in a couple of others, there have occasionally been long stretches of time when a single person (Michael Whelan, in this category) won for several years in a row (seven, to be specific) and there was grumbling that voters were voting solely on name rather than on body of work. I've no strong opinion on that; I find much of Whelan's work rather chilly, but his skill is immense and I have no magical insight into the minds of past nominators. But back when this was happening (in the early 1980s), I do recall people muttering that he ought to withdraw his name from the ballot to "give someone else a chance," and on this sentiment, I call bullshit. The Hugos are awards for the best work in each year, not a bag of candy to be equally divided between children because of some peculiar idea of fairness. No legitimate candidate need or (in my opinion) should withdraw; that simply turns the award into the "best of the rest."
That said, people have certainly withdrawn in the past (including Whelan in 1987) and will no doubt continue to do so for whatever reasons they feel are appropriate. And if a multiple-Hugo winner feels that he or she is being nominated (or might win) on the basis of past fame rather than the merit of that year's work, withdrawing is certainly a gracious and honest thing to do. I found Frank Wu's discussion of why he would refuse a Fan Artist nomination this year both sensitive and thoughtful.
Withdrawing one's own name is one thing, and no one's decision but the nominee in question's. Attempting to shame other nominees into doing the same crosses a line. I'm not talking about people muttering that so-and-so ought to withdraw or making cracks about the "Best Issue of Locus Award." I'm talking about a nominee or potential nominee in a category actively calling, publicly and privately, for specific nominees to refuse their nominations. I'm talking about sending email out when nominees were notified, urging people to withdraw so that fresh faces could appear on the ballot. I'm talking about sending it to multiple people, not even blind-copied, to try to invoke peer pressure. Donato Giancola, I'm talking about you. Withdraw your name if you like; that's your prerogative. You're not so dominant in the category that anyone would have muttered about another nomination (two Hugos is not exactly a Whelan- or Eggleton-sized streak), but it's your call. But trying to shame others into refusing nominations for an award for which they are legitimate contenders is a tasteless and unprofessional attempt to make "best of the rest" the standard for the award. I sincerely hope that no one you emailed went along with it.
And with that said, back to my reading!
I intend to do my bit next year to help correct the female-vs-male disparity among authors. For the first time ever, I'll vote in the pre-selection phase. Had I done that for this year's Hugos, maybe M.K.Hobson would have made it to the final list for Hotel Astarte.
About the Best Editor category... Wouldn't the solution be for people who pre-nominate someone to have to list at least one book edited by their nominee otherwise that nomination is to be ignored? When posting the names of the finalists, the Hugo committee would then list the books that the editor is nominated for.
Maybe it's too obvious.
(As for Lifetime Achievement awards... Did you know that the only Oscar that Cary Grant won was one such Lifetime Achievement, awarded long after he had retired from acting? That's what happens when someone is so good at what he does that he makes it look easy.)
As for the Best Artist category... I'll confess to being a Foglio fan. I was, even 20 years ago, long before there was a Girl Genius. I'll also confess to also being one of those who got others to become fans of Agatha Heterodyne, including a 7-year-old boy.
By the way, what are your thoughts about the Best Fanzine category? That's one category that needs to reflect the fact that, just because a blog isn't printed, it can still be a fanzine. After all, SF is the literature of Change.
Posted by: Serge | July 06, 2008 at 08:37 AM
Serge:
Best Fanzine: I often don't vote, because I'm typically only even slightly familiar with two of the nominees (I used to get File 770 and I've enjoyed the one or two issues of Plokta that I've come across.) The treatment of print vs. (say) webbed fanzine-like-things is a topic I was saving for next week.
Best Editor: Since each is required to have four long-form works, listing those on the ballot would be an option (but one that would make for a messily crowded ballot). The problem for me is that I want to compare body-of-work in the calendar year and have no way to get that information easily except for (some) Tor editors. And I think that's unfair. If someone edits my top choice for Best Novel (Buchanan - Halting State) does that make her the best editor of the year or just someone who had a lucky acquisition amidst a sea of dreck? Should I judge Hartwell on Rollback and drop him to the bottom of the list after thinking him a god last year for editing Eifelheim? I'm guessing he did other stuff this year that I'd like better, but I don't know for sure. What if the three books I've read by Nielsen Hayden from 2007 are, respectively (1) Hugo material, (2) good but not great, and (3) throw-it-across-the-room material that I'm going to write a really brutal post about sometime soon? Those three are hardly his total output for the year, but are they even a valid sample set? Should I average them to get my opinion of his talents? And how am I supposed to judge Meacham when I don't think I've read a single thing she edited? Reputation? Should I move all Tor people down one spot on the grounds of unfair advantage in that Tor actually provides this information and other companies don't? (I think Anders is the only editor for Pyr, but I don't know for sure, so don't know whether to credit him with Brasyl or not.)
Even if I'm just too behind in my reading to vote in this category, I honestly don't see how anyone who has to actually work for a living can manage to read enough of a sampling of what each editor produces in a year to make a rational vote in this category, so I think it comes down to guesses and reputation and personal popularity rather than specific work. And I think that's a crappy basis on which to vote. At least in the Artist category you can develop a reasoned opinion based on artistic style; the editors generally work with such a range of material that I can't really tell you what a "Hartwell novel" is. The Locus list that didn't appear this year was some help, but even working with that just mostly transferred the voting basis from hearsay about the editor's talents to hearsay about the virtues of books that I mostly hadn't read.
This is a problem in all the "person" categories (as opposed to "works" categories like Best Novel), but I think it's particularly acute in this one.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | July 06, 2008 at 10:06 AM
In the end, I abstain from voting in that category because I just don't have the necessary information for even a half-baked decision.
Posted by: Serge | July 07, 2008 at 09:56 AM
I will vote in it with extreme grumpiness.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | July 07, 2008 at 01:35 PM