alecaustin, posts by tag: awards - LiveJournal

I didn't read a lot of short fiction this last year, so I'm not going to talk about those categories much other than noting that mrissa's Tor.com story, "Uncle Flower's Homecoming Waltz", was awesome. I did read a lot of books, though, and these were my favorites that were eligible.

In no particular order:

Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. Arguably a sequel/follow-up to Memory, this is Bujold in fine form.

Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts. A really solid non-western epic fantasy, full of changing skies, steppe ponies, and hungry ghosts.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe. Manages to make American-inflected epic fantasy work, which is no small task. The teen protagonist made me wince with recognition.

Kameron Hurley, Rapture. God's War got all the attention last year, but Infidel (the second of three books) was better. Rapture, the trilogy's conclusion, is better still.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The Steel Seraglio. Not horror, despite being published by Chizine. 1001 Nights as filtered through a city of women - warriors, traders, diplomats, spies. I love this book to bits, and it deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Honorable Mention:

Ben Aaronovich, Whispers Under Ground. I love this series, and this book was just killer. That said, it didn't quite rise above the others on my shortlist.

Anyway, that's my novel ballot for this year.

...to papersky, for her well deserved Nebula Award win for Among Others.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Hugo Award nominations are due on March 11, so I have less time to read things for nomination than I'd thought, or would like. My nominations list hasn't changed much, though I'm going to be nominating Ken Liu's "The Man Who Ended History" for Best Novella now, and Kameron Hurley's Infidel for Best Novel, because it's even better than God's War, and I'm already nominating God's War.

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It turns out that trying to nominate responsibly is work. Who knew?

Anyway, have a video:



I have lots of favorite lines from that song, but I really do like "Disgusted with Nearly All That He Sees". Which was nearly the title of this post, except I didn't want to give people the wrong idea.

...what? Once you have that many 'N's already, it's hard to resist the alliteration.

Seriously, though, congratulations to all the Nebula nominees, and especially those I know personally, who I believe are just papersky and kameron_hurley. I'll be nominating both Among Others and God's War for the Hugo this year, and I'm really glad to see them getting Nebula nominations, both because their books deserve it, and because it makes it more likely that both might make it onto the Hugo ballot as well.

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(My internet continues to be horrid, which is why this is going up at nearly 3 am rather than any kind of civilized hour.)

I keep meaning to write this post and not getting around to it, so I am going to hack out a draft in order to prevent The Perfect from being the enemy of The Good. (The spur that got me over the hurdle of beginning was this Greg Benford guest post, which is sufficiently loaded down with unexamined appeals to taste hierarchies that I felt a full and proper demolition of it would require me to acquaint my readers with the concept in question - though awards season is a highly relevant motivator as well.)

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the sociological idea of taste hierarchies in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste - a study of the tastes of the French public, as determined by survey, published in 1984 by Harvard University Press. Taste, Bourdieu argued, is a social construct that exists within a specific cultural context, such as (in this case) that of the French class system.

The tendency of the French upper classes to (for example) prefer classical music over popular music, Bourdieu argued, was a learned social behavior, and whether deployed consciously or not, the associated taste hierarchy - wherein classical music is deemed 'better' or 'more refined' than tunes favored by the vulgar mob - reinforced class distinctions, separating the world of music-listeners into the cognoscenti and the plebes. (The plebes, of course, had their own taste hierarchy, which while not supported by social institutions like orchestras or opera halls, had both economic consequences and a real presence in society. To claim to subscribe to the upper class's taste hierarchy would be read as "putting on airs".)

One hopes that the relevance of this idea to literature, especially in the SFF vs. Mainstream discussion (as well as the endless SF vs. Fantasy conflict) is immediately clear.

Some points about taste hierarchies before we go on:

1) Taste hierarchies are not inherently bad or good. The idea that works of literature written by authors fully literate in a language, which are properly copy-edited, and are not near-copies of prior works are better than illiterate, error-ridden works of plagarism is a taste hierarchy. So is the idea that the most tedious mimetic tale of faculty adultery is superior to any science fiction novel, by virtue of its "realistic" subject matter. I think most people reading this essay would subscribe to the former hierarchy and abominate the latter.

2) The deployment and invocation of taste hierarchies is unavoidable if we want to make meaningful distinctions between works of literature. (Or movies, or games, or music, or...) Simply narrowing the field of what you're talking about invokes an implicit taste hierarchy, which is that what you are talking about is (at least momentarily) of more interest than the field of books or stories you're not talking about.

3) Taste hierarchies can be either implicit or explicit, examined or unexamined. Mostly they remain implicit and unexamined. This allows those invoking them to assert that their taste hierarchy is not a social construct they are deploying to bludgeon you into submission (or at least silence), but the one, singular Truth! Strangely, this often helps conceal the fact that they are defending their privilege, power, and/or economic position.

4) It is much better for critics and reviewers, even (or perhaps especially?) amateurs discussing which stories and books they liked from the last year, to be aware of what taste hierarchies they are applying to generate their lists of "the best" works.

Speaking of applying taste hierarchies, let's talk a bit about the hierarchies that are likely to be in play around Hugo and Nebula nominations, shall we?

The most obvious taste hierarchies within the field are those on display in the Benford post I linked to above - SF vs. Fantasy, Hard SF vs. that mushy soft stuff, Literature vs. SF (and of course, its popular converse, SF exceptionalism...), Boldness and Innovation vs. Comfort and Passivity. An observant reader will probably notice the tendency towards the unmarked, privileged, and male-identified being preferred to the marked, unprivileged, or female-identified in these oppositions, with the main exception being the attempted reversal of SF's marginal status re: mimetic literature via the (gendered) hierarchy of Boldness vs. Comfort.

There are, however, a variety of other, less obvious, taste hierarchies in play as well:

Seriousness vs. Humor: While there are exceptions, "serious" works tend to dominate humorous ones by virtue of the implication that humorous SF and Fantasy is frivolous and not addressing Important (i.e. Bold and Innovative!) topics.

"Ungendered" vs. Gendered: While the genre's core taste hierarchies and the conflicts around them can be read as gender oppositions, it's worth noting that sub-genres which are read as strongly gender-aligned haven't done terribly well in awards voting in the last few decades. This includes both romance and unalloyed military SFF, though alloying the two (Bujold's Vorkosigan books) seems to get authors past this hurdle, possibly because mixing the two allows more readers to perceive the "core genre" appeals that said books also possess.

Hip vs. Unhip: Very few SF fans were (or are) particularly hip. As such, when something in the field comes along that is perceived to have the luster of coolness, a certain portion of fandom usually latches onto it. See the New Wave, and Cyberpunk, and the New Weird. The rhetoric of literary movements nearly always invokes the Boldness vs. Comfort hierarchy, but it also positions the movement and its members as new and cool, as opposed to the (presumably) old and stodgy folks who haven't joined this decade's revolution.

Famous vs. Obscure: There's a reason people marketing books as bestsellers works, and it's because many people are willing to outsource critical thought to whether they have (or "should have") heard of someone/thing or not. (See also, nominating or voting for things one hasn't read based on the author.)

Print vs. Online: Arguably a subset of "Famous vs. Obscure", but there has historically been a lot of deference to 'The Big Three' magazines in awards nominations and voting, and I feel that said bias is worth keeping in mind.

I'm sure that my readers will be able to supply other taste hierarchies that are rarely made explicit but underly people's voting behaviors. ('Safe' novelty vs. unfamiliar/uneasy novelty is an interesting one. People think they know a lot of untrue things, and stories that challenge those false assumptions instead of playing to them often don't fare well.)

Once again, absent specifics, taste hierarchies aren't inherently good or bad. Speaking only for myself, I feel that most "humorous" SF is neither effective humor nor good SF. That said, I think very highly of Marie Brennan/swan_tower's Love, Cayce, and I expect to be nominating it for a Hugo this year. I could have gone, "Oh, right, that's not serious enough to be award-worthy," but I prefer not to leave my taste hierarchies unexamined. Humor isn't unworthy of awards: stories that fail to be funny, or that don't do other worthwhile things as well as their humor aren't. (c.f.)

As discussions about the best books of the last year and which stories should be nominated for awards continue, I ask only that we pause to consider the taste hierarchies we're invoking and supporting when we assert that a given set of works are worthy of recognition, and others are not.

Personally, I'm going to be doubling down on supporting literate, non-plagarized works that didn't bore me to tears. A partial list of which may, internet willing, be posted soon.

So my home internet is being horrid - possibly a recurrence of the temperature-based issue I was having when I first moved in, though it's hard to say - which means that my book post for December is languishing because I don't have my list of books and internet access and time to post simultaneously.

For those who care, and weren't previously aware, these are my publications for 2011:

Poem - The Vigil, in Stone Telling #4.

Short Story - Volition, in Daily Science Fiction. Time traveling Nazis!

I'm also eligible for the Campbell Award, but nominating someone who has a vague chance at making the final ballot (like a novelist or someone with more than a single story out) seems like it'd be a better use of resources than nominating me, at least this year.

I'll be posting lists of stories I liked from 2011 soonish, internet access and time permitting. My hope is to also get a post in about Taste Hierarchies and how they influence our sense of what is "Award Worthy", and how some emerging trends in "Award Worthiness" unsettle me.

So at Farthing Party this year, I was on a panel about the (relative) lack of young award-winners in the SF field. I'm not going to talk about the panel particularly, as if people have read Rene Walling's stastics posts on Tor.com re: ages of winners and nominees, you've heard most of the relevant information that was presented there. Rene minimized the upwards trend in terms of nominees and winners, but there is one, and what significance people attribute to that is mostly a question of where they're coming at the question from.

What I want to talk about here is instead something that I noticed while preparing for the panel, to wit: The degree to which the 'Big Three' (Analog, Asimov's, and F&SF) have (until very recently) utterly dominated the short fiction Hugos (i.e. short story, novelette, and novella).

This is something which is probably obvious to people who've been paying attention, but over the course of my lifetime, there has been one year that non Big 3 markets held under 50% of the Hugo nominations for short fiction, and that year was 2010, with 3 nominations from Asimov's and 14 from everywhere else. 2011 was evenly split between Big 3 and non-Big 3 markets, and there are only 4 other years (1986, 2005, 2006, and 2009) when over 2/3rds of the nominations didn't come from the Big 3. (All of those were a 9-6 split in favor of the Big 3, except for 2006, which was 8-7.)

There are several things one can learn from this, especially if you take a closer look at the data, but the first is this:

If you wanted to be nominated for a Hugo, it really helped to be published in Analog, Asimov's, or F&SF.

Oh, and did I mention that the editors for those magazines have (respectively) been in their posts for 33, 7, and 15 years, and that the 7-year veteran (Sheila Williams) has worked for Asimov's since 1982?

I don't have anything against any of those editors. But when you realize that two of the markets that used to get a reasonable number of non-Big 3 nominations in the '80s, '90s, and '00s were Omni & Scifiction (both edited by Ellen Datlow), it starts to become painfully obvious that for much of the last 30+ years, if you wanted to be recognized as a standout writer of short fiction, you were more or less required to try to tailor your material to the tastes of several specific editors. And if they didn't like your work? Unless your name was Rachel Swirsky (whose first nominations were stories from Tor.com), you had to have a career as a novelist if you wanted to win anything.

The results in recent years are somewhat heartening, I will confess, though I feel the seeming diversity of nomination sources in 2010 is misleading (a lot of stories were original to well-established authors' collections, or out of anthologies of much the same stature as Starlight back in the day). The data set is too small to draw any real conclusions from it, but it looks like the ranks of the magazines Hugo nominators deem as award-worthy now include Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Lightspeed - and maybe Subterranean, but that's more their line of original novellas than the magazine. Strange Horizons isn't on the list, despite one nomination back in 2007 (Benjamin Rosenblum's "The House Beyond Your Sky"). Jim Baen's Universe, Science Fiction Age, Omni and Scifiction were, but they're all dead now. Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fantasy, IGMS, Apex, or Daily Science Fiction? Not on the nominators' radar, to all appearances. Interzone barely is, with 4 nominations since 1989.

Part of this is a question of which markets actually publish Novellas and Novelettes. Pretty much all the pro-rate online magazines except BCS and IGMS (and Tor.com, I guess) cap stories at 10,000 words or less, giving the Big 3 a huge boost because they publish multiple stories at that length each year. Another factor is genre - Analog only publishes SF, Asimov's skews heavily towards it, while F&SF is about 50/50 - and SF has consistently proven to be more popular with the Hugo votership than fantasy. As such, it's not surprising that Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy, and BCS haven't gotten Hugo nominations, while Lightspeed got them in its very first year of existence.

Another part of it is obviously what large portions of the nominating pool are reading. There have never been more than 1000-odd people who submitted nominations for the Hugo, and it's important to note that from 2007 onward (the years for which I have easily accessed stats, via this page) 30 nominations almost always got works onto the short fiction ballots. Up until very recently, being published in the Big 3 was the best way to get past that nomination threshold.

I'm personally hoping that in years to come, word of mouth about stories in other online venues will spread the net wider, so I can't just point to six or seven markets* where there used to be three, and be able to say with confidence, "The majority of nominees will come from these sources, and will be authors who are already well-known."

But I wouldn't bet on it.

*: It's too early to draw conclusions, especially because 2010 had neither Analog nor F&SF on the Hugo ballot, but F&SF had no stories nominated for a Hugo in 2011. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues in 2012.

To get it out of the way: Blackout/All Clear sweeping both the Hugos and the Nebulas strikes me as a pretty dubious outcome in critical terms. But that's the nature of popular awards, and Feed came within 27 votes of taking home top honors, so it's not like everyone was falling over themselves to give Connie Willis another Hugo.

More to the point, some loudmouths have (as always) taken the opportunity to berate people who aren't happy with the outcome by telling them that a supporting membership was only $50, and that if they didn't vote, they should shut up about not liking the outcome. Even discounting the fact that people are going to complain no matter what (often with reason), this strikes me as incredibly privileged behavior. While $50 is functionally pocket change to me at this point in my life, there have been times when dropping most of a single day's take-home on the right to vote on the Hugos would have been laughable, and not in the good way.

(Yes, you get a packet of e-books as a part of your membership. What if you don't have a home computer or e-reader, or already own some or all of said books, though? What is that packet worth to you then? I don't mean to discount the work that goes into putting said packet together, but back when my income was minimal, I would much rather have spent that $50 on books I'd chosen. And I'd have gotten at least 7 more books for it, too.)

That said, I'm probably going to buy a supporting membership for next year's Worldcon - not, I must emphasize, because I expect to have any impact on the actual awards voting, even though several categories were closely contested this year - but because of the kind of ridiculously narrow margins I'm seeing in award nominations. If you look at the Hugo voting stats, available here as a .pdf, Who Fears Death missed out on being on the Best Novel ballot by 4 nominations, and Kraken by 6. While there was a 10 nomination gap between the last nominee in Best Novella and the closest runner-up, the Nebula-award winning "That Leviathan" was just 2 nominations away from the next two runners-up, and there are another 3 novelettes (including davidlevine's "Pupa") within 5 nominations of being on the ballot.

That strikes me as... well, unhealthy, but that's the least of it. Not only could a 30-person nominating bloc could have controlled the last 3 spots on the Best Novelette ballot (and the last 3 spots on the Best Short Story ballot, the last 2 spots on the Best Graphic Story ballot, and the last X spots on the Best Editor, Long Form ballot...), but the vast discrepancy between the number of people nominating for Best Novelette and Best Novella (382 & 407 - less than half the 883 Best Novel nominations) and the number of people who voted on them on the final ballot (1469 & 1467, vs. 1813 for Best Novel) indicates to me that hundreds, if not thousands of voters are using the list of nominees as their primary list of short fiction to read. (Best Short Story's nomination-to-final votes ratio is slightly better, at 515 to 1597, but still suggests that ~1080 voters were using the nominees as a reading list.)

What this tells me is that Hugo nominations, especially in categories where fewer nominations are received, have a disproportionate influence on what short fiction actually gets read.

Anyway, that's my piece for this afternoon. Discussion of any of the topics I've brought up here - as well as further parsing of the 2011 voting and/or nomination stats - is welcome. (I'm kind of blown away that out of 2100 valid ballots, only 1813 bothered to vote for Best Novel, personally...)