On the irrelevance of awards

[fjtorres]

Eric Flint brings reason, logic, common sense, and evidence to the subject of awards, literary and otherwise:

http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2...her-sf-awards/

The core focus is SF&F but he covers other fields, too.
Long and well thought out and presented, no excerpt can do him justice.
Do check out the whole piece.

What’s involved here is essentially a literary analog to genetic drift. Biologists have long known that the role played by pure chance in evolution is greater in a small population than a larger one. The same thing happens in the arts, especially those arts which have a huge mass audience. The attitudes of the much smaller group or groups of in-crowds who hand out awards or do critical reviews are mostly influenced by other members of their in-crowd, not by the tastes of the mass audience. Over time, just by happenstance if nothing else, their views start drifting apart from those of the mass audience.

This is by no means peculiar to F&SF. In just about every field of literary or artistic endeavor—hell, just plain hobbies, when you get down to it—you tend to get a division between the interests and concerns of the mass audience involved in that field and the much smaller inner circles of aficionados.

Forget high-faluting literature, for a moment. Consider…

Dogs.

Hundreds of millions of people own dogs. If you ask those people what constitutes a “good dog,” you will get a range of answers but they will mostly focus on a dog’s behavior toward the humans they deal with.

But now go to a dog show, attended by the comparatively tiny number of people who are hobbyists when it comes to breeding and raising dogs. Most of the criteria by which Dog X or Dog Y gets chosen as “best dog of show” are going to be criteria that the average dog-owner around the world thinks are esoteric at best and often downright silly or even grossly wrong-headed.

I think of it as the movie reviewer’s syndrome. I noticed many years ago that almost all movie reviewers will automatically deduct at least one point from their rating of a movie if it contains a car chase. Why? Well, it’s not hard to understand. Seeing three or four or five movies a week the way they do, they get sick and tired of car chases.

But the average movie-goer doesn’t watch new movies four times a week. For them, movies are a relatively occasional experience—and, what the hell, car chases are kinda fun.
What you get with literature, including any and all forms of genre fiction, is the following division:

What the mass audience wants, first and foremost—and this has been true and invariant since the Sumerians and the epic of Gilgamesh—is a good story. Period.

“Tell me a good story.” Thazzit.

But, sooner or later, that stops being sufficient for the in-crowds. At first, they want more than just a good story. Which, in and of itself, is fair enough. The problem is that as time goes by “more than just a good story” often starts sliding into “I really don’t care how good the story is, it’s the other stuff that really matters.”

Eventually, form gets increasingly elevated over content. “Originality” for its own sake, something which the mass audience cares very little about—and neither did Homer or Shakespeare—becomes elevated to a preposterous status. And what withers away, at least to some degree, is a good sense of what skills are involved in forging a story in the first place.

Much more at the source.
A seriously good read in and of itself.
Highly recommended.

[Apache]

He has always been a great writer in my opinion and this shows his understanding of what makes good writing for the masses. I is one of the masses.
Apache

[ebusinesstutor]

Great article - I read it all the way though. He has written about many of my own reservations about awards and has many insights I hadn't thought of.

I don't base my reading on rewards and have ignored them for years.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Apache

He has always been a great writer in my opinion and this shows his understanding of what makes good writing for the masses. I is one of the masses.
Apache

IMPO, Eric Flint is a writer who greatly benefits from having a co-author who counter balances his excesses. He's just a little bit too fond of the over the top character who loudly extolls his view and apparently wins his arguments by pure bombastic style. A little bit of that goes a long, long way, IMPO. With that said, I have a a lot of Eric Flint books and really liked the first few books of the 1632 series and am very fond of his collaborations with David Weber and David Drake.

Where he really shines is in his knowledge of the history of SF&F and of the older somewhat forgotten authors from the 50's and before.

I tend to agree with his point that a number of very popular, very good authors who are both left wing and right wing get ignored by the awards system.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Apache

He has always been a great writer in my opinion and this shows his understanding of what makes good writing for the masses. I is one of the masses.
Apache

He is one of the very few tradpub authors who gets ebooks, DRM, and the internet and has practically from day one.

Of course, he is no longer, strictly speaking, a tradpub author these days. His 163x franchise has expanded beyond what BAEN and his GRANTVILLE GAZETTE can support so he's moved in Indie publishing for the spillover anthologies.

[k_b]

It was a good read; thanks for sharing. And, after tracking down more of the background, I'll adhere to the "Notice - Discussion on politics and religion are inappropriate..." and refrain from saying more. Ignorance was indeed bliss.

[Geralt]

I don't consider awards to be irrelevant, but I think they are more for the authors benefit than readers. To me they are a nod of acceptance and recognition by the peers for the peers.

As a reader I find awards useful for pointers and guidance of possible reads but I don't let Hugos, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy Award or any others in the similar vain determine my reading completely.

Have these awards been useful to me in finding great sci-fi and fantasy books to read? YES.
Have they determined all of my reads? Hell NO.

[DiapDealer]

I don't disagree with many of F!int's points. But I do find it ironic (and a bit humorous) that anyone would focus on--and write at such great length about--the "irrelevance" of ... anything. It's almost as if convincing people of the irrelevance of awards is quite the relevant topic these days.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Geralt

I don't consider awards to be irrelevant, but I think they are more for the authors benefit than readers. To me they are a nod of acceptance and recognition by the peers for the peers.

.

That might theoretically apply to the Nebulas but not the Hugos. They are not even intended to be a peer award. They were originally intended to express admiration by the fen. But as the field has matured and expanded the fen are no longer representative of the readers so an award from the fen tells the author nothing about what their peers think about his work or what the majority of buyers or (more importantly) non-buyers think.

Not to rehash what is being debated elsewhere, but the Hugo nominations were rigged by a gang of less than 100. Last year's winners barely registered more than a thousand votes. Hardly representative of a market of millions of readers.

It's better to be liked by somebody than by nobody but awards committees tend to be fickle, clannish, faddish, and just plain unreliable. Consider the Oscars, where the best indicators of likelihood of winning are being passed over before and time in the business. If you're nominated against an aging star who was passed over before (or Merryl Streep) you're toast.

The Emmys have produced such spectacle as an actress getting nominated 20 years in a row and never winning. (Apparently somebody in the committee doesn't like her.)

Or as Flint pointed out, great and popular authors (and artists) can go entire careers, decade upon decade, satisfying readers, selling books by the million, and going unnoticed by award voters while one-hit wonders and non-entities get voter approval. That pretty much spells irrelevance.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't disagree with many of F!int's points. But I do find it ironic (and a bit humorous) that anyone would focus on--and write at such great length about--the "irrelevance" of ... anything. It's almost as if convincing people of the irrelevance of awards is quite the relevant topic these days.

It was a worthwhile endeavor.

Self important cliques of pretentious snobs deserve to be mocked.
Why not do that well?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Self important cliques of pretentious snobs deserve to be mocked.
Why not do that well?

Because it encourages the formation of new, self-important, pretentious snob-mocking cliques who in turn, deserve to be mocked?

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Because it encourages the formation of new, self-important, pretentious snob-mocking cliques who in turn, deserve to be mocked?

I don't know that it does.

Anymore I use keyword searches and read reader reviews to find new authors.
Reader reviewers are a pretty large group of people to try to form a clique from.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Because it encourages the formation of new, self-important, pretentious snob-mocking cliques who in turn, deserve to be mocked?

A worthy endeavor right there.
The world definitely needs more mockworthy targets; idiot politicians and their acolyte warriors can't be expected to bear all the world's snark by themselves.

As for Flint, note that he clearly states his motivation: being a prominent BAEN author he is being dragged into a catfight he has no stake and interest in, so trying to defuse the sniping by pointing out the bone of contention is worthless is pretty sensible.

[Pulpmeister]

Here in Australia we have the Miles Franklin Award, a sort of literary Oscar. It's been going for years, and you know what: practically all those literary "masterpieces" are out of print. Arthur Upfield, hugely successful crime writer here, was despised as a hack writer by the Literary Set. A national magazine which reviewed literary masterpieces failed even to print his obituary. Yet "hack" Upfield's many Bony detective novels are still in print, and still good reads.

Upfield, in fact, had fun pulling the Literary set's collective legs with his book "An Author Bites the Dust" (1948), into which he inserted himself as Clarence B Bagshott.

An exchange between detective Napoleon Bonaparte and Bagshott:

"Did Mervyn Blake ever criticize your books ?”
“Mine! Lord, no! I don’t produce literature.”
“Then what do you produce?”
“Commercial fiction.”
“There is a distinction?”
“Terrific.”
“Will you define it, please.”
“I’ll try to,” Bagshott said slowly. “In this country literature is a piece of writing executed in schoolmasterly fashion and yet so lacking in entertainment values that the general public won’t buy it. Commercial fiction— and this is a term employed by the highbrows— is imaginative writing that easily satisfies publishers and editor because the public will buy it."

Upfield no doubt enjoyed making his fictitious lion of Australia's literary set his murder victim.

[murg]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Because it encourages the formation of new, self-important, pretentious snob-mocking cliques who in turn, deserve to be mocked?

I'm sorry, is there a mock shortage?