Thanks! Praise from a master is indeed gratifying. I know what you mean about award lists–they may not be absolutely “correct” in establishing the 12.4 best books about android beekeepers in the last 2.7 years (or whatever their specific mandate is). But they can point people in a direction–suggest work to potential readers that they haven’t thought of–introduce readers to a genre or new corners of a genre. So they’re more like search-engine results than a seal of approval; they give you something to sift through.

Hey Gabe–

The Hugos are totally fan-nominated and voted. Anyone can buy a supporting membership to WorldCon and cast their vote, even if they’re not going to attend the convention itself. (More specific info is online at the World SF Society website.) So Scalzi is right about this: Roberts is deliberately slagging fandom (or at least the section of it that participates in the Hugo process).

How does the Hugo nominate its books? If it’s anything like the Nobel prize, readers are never once consulted! I’ve had a beef with the Nobel comittee for some ten years now, and I’ve got a feeling it might be the same with the Hugo.

When I ran the SF Site, we had an annual Top Ten list every year (and the site still does). Administering that list taught me a great deal about both the inherent value of awards, and their entirely fickle nature. If I were more of a cynic I might dismiss them outright; instead I cling to the opinion that awards, and especially major awards, serve a valuable purpose: they are a wonderfully effective marketing tool for the genre.

I for one can’t read a decent Top Ten list without scurrying off to add a title or two to my Amazon Wish List, even today. Regardless of how effectively the lists draw attention to books of actual value (and I often remain fairly cynical about that), they help SELL books, and that’s crucially important, especially today.

Are they selling the RIGHT books? Well, of course. They’re selling the books that bring money to publishers and authors and keep our industry thriving, and they’re introducing readers to books that they might not otherwise have tried. And they’re doing both of those things outside the means by which they’re usually done - through expensive marketing campaigns that usual favor excusively best selling authors.

By those measures alone, the Hugo Award short list does a tremendous service. Expecting it to also be a perfect arbiter of taste seems like it’s asking a lot. I’ve learned to be content with the Hugo lists as they are, and it’s brought me more peace and contentment.

- John

I have a sense that some people (I’m not talking about Scalzi, but the attitude shows up a bit in the comment sections of the two posts linked above) are working out their hostility toward the Prof. Schmeckenfrauzer who gave them a C- in Interpretive Dance or something, and they can’t distinguish between any academic and that one (or those ones) who made them feel bad. A little tweed is like a red flag to them; they can’t help but charge at it. Those people are more to be pitied than censured, I guess. But I prefer to censure them.

Alice Walker may be the person who went looking for Zora Neale Hurston, but without hundreds of professors following Walker’s lead and assigning Hurston’s books to their students, those books would have stayed lost.

The assumption that we in the genres ought to meet academic hostility with hostility is outdated. The best of our forebears are getting welcomed into the canon just fine on their merits, and some of us will, too. Any genre writer who has a favorite forebear who’s being unjustly neglected is free to pull an Alice Walker. Geek culture is pervasive now, and there are plenty of fanboys and fangirls with tenured gigs who care what genre writers have to say. Being pissy at them because of anti-genre assumptions that were common among their long-retired mentors helps no one.