The Aesthetics of the Best Fan Writer Hugo

Browsing responses (mostly on John Scalzi’s Whatever) to the two posts directly below, I’m struck by a few themes that pop up over and over in the negative ones (that is, in most of them). First is that it is insulting to the nominee and his nominators to state bluntly that I don’t think his fan writing is up to Hugo Award standards. Second, that my criticism must have an unstated motive: snobbery, sour grapes, belief that the nominee isn’t or ought not to be eligible, a desire to keep pros away from the “fan” categories, political animus, etc. Third, that, because the choice of Best Fan Writer is a “popularity contest”, there’s no point in arguing about the quality of the nominated bodies of work.

Aren’t those reactions a little odd? If the discussion turned to the Best Novel nominees, everybody would be talking about plot, characterization, style, imagination and the like. No one would suggest that preferring X to Y, or even asserting that Z is wretched, violated protocol. In fact, we’d all find it bland and unsatisfying if the interlocutors avoided ranking the candidates and incinerating those that they found badly wanting.

There must be a reason why so many people feel that the Best Fan Writer category is different. What that reason is, I can’t begin to fathom.

Comments

[Tom Veal]

Granted that all discussions, whatever the topic, have their irrational outliers, in most Hugo debates I’ve seen those have been a few standard deviations from the mean; in this one, they are the mean.

[Kevin Standlee]

Don't be too sure about the assumption that people would understand your talking about the nominees in Best Novel that way. I've been watching this for a while, and people get seriously irrational about the Hugo Awards. If you criticize the work they like, they accuse you of all sorts of ulterior motives, whereas if they don't like the nominee, then obviously:

A. The "Hugo Committee" is stupid and should have made a different decision.

B. The entire process is badly flawed and must be completely changed.

C. It's all a Plot by the SMOFS to give the Hugo to that work, when all Right Thinking Fans know that something else is really the Best Thing Evar.

You think I'm exaggerating? After Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won in 2001, there was at least one person I recall demanding that the Hugo Committee rescind "their decision" and give the Hugo to something more worthy, and of course, it had to be Science Fiction, because the Hugo Award (which hasn't even been officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Award since 1992) is obviously only for science fiction, not that icky fantasy stuff.

Basically there area a whole lot of people out there who are convinced that they are the final authority on SF/F and that anyone who disagrees with them is either a knave or a fool.