Two Hugo Arguments that I really wish people would stop using ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weve inevitably had a number of Hugo category discussions here, which is great and I dont want to suppress that conversation in the slightest. However, over the decades, Ive heard a couple of arguments for any number of proposed changes or against proposed changes which I think dont hold much or any merit. Without respect to any particular proposal past or present, I think people should understand why these arent convincing to many, myself included. 1) The Dilution Argument. This argument says that the more award categories there are, the less value each one has. The fallacy here is in asserting that the value of a Hugo is a zero sum quantity, like a fixed volume, that must shrink portions as it divides by larger numbers. Theres absolutely no evidence of this even as the number of categories have grown over the years and I would cite two pieces of evidence to this. The first is that the Dilution Argument is a latitudinal look at the number of Hugos in a single year, but a longitudinal study shows that, for example, sixty years of a Best Novel category actually increases the value of the award by putting people in the same company as the giants of our field. The other evidence is how people outside the conrunner community view the Hugos. We know that when someone puts Hugo Award Winner on their works, their sales go up. The consumers of these works do not look at the rocket on the book cover and say to themselves, Yeah, but that was the year there was 17 categories instead of 16. That kind of calculus just doesnt go on in peoples heads. The Hugo Awards have value because we have a technique for accurately choosing great examples of the best in their respective fields and that doesnt change based on the number of respective fields. ---------------- 2) The Weight Class Argument. There are people who believe that the Hugos have Fan and Pro categories because fen cant hope to compete with the Pros in their fields of expertise. Im sympathetic to the motivation of this argument, but it just doesnt hold water. When we give an award for Best Novel, thats for a particular kind of writing, with well known formats, topics and rules. When we give an award for Best Fanzine, that is for a completely different kind of writing, arising from a completely different tradition with completely different formats, topics and rules. All of the discussion that goes on in this group, for example, constitutes fan writing to me and it seems to me that many of us express ourselves clearly enough and persuasively enough without being published authors and the few professionals who have posted here dont seem to be at any particular advantage. The other problem is a great deal of blurring between what is fan and what is pro, particularly when one person is wearing different hats. A great amount of weeping and wailing occurred when Scalzi won his Fan Writer Hugo in 2008, but these same fen curiously never complained when Dave Langford won more Fan Writer Hugos than anyone else, and is also a published author of both fiction and non-fiction. If what is really being argued is that Langford belongs to a certain subcommunity that Scalzi does not, thats a completely different argument than what Weight Class is supposed to be about. (It is also one I reject, but thats for a different day.) Lastly, just because a pro or two has won a fan Hugo, is no reason to believe that fen cannot compete in either the Pro or Fan categories and that The Pros Are Coming To Take Our Fan Awards away. Two people who are in no way Pros (Morgan and Brialey) have won since Scalzis win and the nominations for the category are filled with a much greater diversity (a good thing!) since the end of the Langford Run in 2007. So despite all of the trepidation, these great fears are simply not panning out. If anything, people should look at the presence of authors in the fan categories as a challenge, a way of raising the bar for the quality of fan writing, which can only benefit fandom as a whole.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 18:41:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015