Several people, in their commentaries on my recent essay (“Do We Really Have to Keep Feeding Stupid and His Cousin Ignoramus?”), challenged or at least questioned the assertion I’ve made several times in my various essays on the Hugo ruckus that the Hugos (and other major F&SF awards) have drifted away over the past thirty years from the tastes and opinions of the mass audience. It’s a fair question, so I’ll address it in this essay as best I can.
It’s not an easy issue to analyze, though. That’s for the simple reason that popularity is gauged by sales, and there are no publicly available records on the sales of various authors. That’s information which is privately held.
When I published my first essay on the Hugo ruckus a few months ago (“Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards,” posted here on April 16), a number of people privately expressed their astonishment, or bemusement, or admiration at the amount of work I’d put into it. Or in the case of my publisher, Toni Weisskopf—although she never said a word to me about it—probably exasperation. (“What the hell is he doing writing this stuff instead of novels, dammit?”)
The essay does indeed represent a lot of work, since it’s 7,200 words long. (If word counts don’t mean much to you, that’s the length of two or three chapters in most novels.) But, in fact, I put very little work into it—this year. That’s because most of the essay had been written eight years earlier.
Here’s the history: Back in 2007, I wound up—I can’t remember how it got started—engaging in a long email exchange with Greg Benford over the subject of SF awards. Both of use had gotten a little exasperated over the situation—which is closely tied to the issue of how often different authors get reviewed in major F&SF magazines.
In the course of that discussion, I decided that being exasperated was pointless and that I should actually investigate the matter. Was it really true that the major awards (and major magazine reviews) had very little connection any longer to F&SF authors who were very popular? In my spare time—which is not copious, mind you—I delved into the matter over the next six months or so.
The essay I wound up posting this April is actually half as long as the essay I initially wrote back in 2007. That’s because I cut all the nitty-gritty empirical data I’d compiled to support my analysis because the drastic changes in publishing in the eight years that ensued made the analytical method I’d used obsolete. That doesn’t mean the analysis itself is obsolete, mind you. For reasons I’ll explain later I think nothing much has changed between 2007 and today.
But we’ll get to that. For the moment, I’m posting a chunk of the material I wrote eight years ago. Remember—what follows was written in 2007:
How in the world do you determine who the field’s “popular authors” are in the first place?
That’s a much trickier question than it looks, at first glance. On the one hand, almost anyone who regularly follows fantasy and science fiction has a fairly good sense of who the popular authors are. Or thinks they do, at least. But if you ask them to explain exactly why and on what basis they formed those conclusions, they will fumble for an answer. In the end, their explanation is likely to echo the famous comment by former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart with regard to pornography, when he said that he found it very hard to define “but I know it when I see it.”
Likewise, most F&SF readers are well aware that authors like Raymond Feist or Mercedes Lackey or David Weber are “very popular.” But most of them would have a hard time explaining exactly why they “know” that.
The first thing we can eliminate as a possible basis for establishing who is and who is nor a popular author is the thing that would actually be the clearest defining criterion: sales themselves.
The problem is obvious. The figures are simply unavailable to the public. Occasionally, an author (or his or her publisher) might disclose that author’s sales, at least for a specific period. But, for the most part, that information is held privately and even then is not held in the same pair of hands. The only central authority you could go to in order to find out the sales of various authors is the Internal Revenue Service—and they won’t tell you. (Nor should they, of course.)
Still, it can be done, although we have to approach the matter indirectly. There’s no way for the audience as a whole or any individual person in it to determine what every author’s sales are. But what they can determine—each and every one of them who is inclined to do so, using very simple tools and methods—is which authors in the field can and do regularly maintain the greatest shelf space in bookstores.
That’s easy to do. Just trot down to your local Barnes & Noble or Borders with a tape measure or yardstick in hand. Then, go down the shelves, and record which authors have a full shelf of books available for sale. Let’s be a bit more precise and specify three feet of books on the shelves, since not all shelves are the same length. The general standard length for bookstore shelves is indeed about three feet—usually 34 or 35 inches, to be precise—but sometimes four foot shelves are used.
Having done that, repeat the same process in as many other bookstores as you can get to easily. And then repeat the process again if you travel elsewhere in the country, just to make sure you aren’t running into regional variations.
You can expand the search to include independent and specialty bookstores, but I’d recommend you keep it restricted to B&N and Borders. First, because for good or ill at least 75% of all sales of F&SF nowadays happens in B&N and Borders brick-and-mortar bookstores. (For all the publicity it gets, Amazon sales are still considerably less than 10% of the total.) Secondly, because there is a general consistency to B&N and Borders stock, just because they’re huge chains, and by and large their orders are determined by sales and nothing else—whereas what any independent bookstore might have on the shelves in the way of F&SF is notoriously fickle and subject to the whims of that store’s buyer.
You can also expand your investigation by making it more precise. Instead of just looking for “three-foot authors,” break your search down into more categories:
Authors who can regularly maintain four feet or more of books on the shelves, in most bookstores.
Authors who can regularly maintain three feet of books, in most bookstores.
Authors who can regularly maintain two feet of books, in most bookstores.
You can even extend it to those authors who maintain one foot of books, but what you’ll discover at this point is that you’re running into so many variables that it makes it hard to draw any general conclusions.
The general rule is this:
The more bookshelf space an author maintains, the more consistently they do so in bookstores across the country.
Those authors who maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space are almost always the very same ones, no matter what B&N or Borders bookstore you go into in any town in the country. Once you get down to two feet of shelf space, the situation starts to fluctuate. Some authors will be there very consistently—Robert Asprin or David Drake or Tad Williams, for instance—but others will come and go. And by the time you get down to one foot of shelf space, the fluctuation gets pretty extreme. An author might have eighteen inches of shelf space in one store and only a couple of copies in another. Or even none at all.
As crude as it is and with its inevitable distortions—which I’ll explain in a moment—the great and over-riding advantage of this measure-the-bookshelf-space method of determining the popularity of authors is that it’s objective and can be duplicated by anybody. You don’t have to take my word for it. If you don’t believe the results I’ll be presenting you with in the course of this essay, just grab a tape measure and go check for yourself—and you can do it in any town in the United States or Canada.
That said, there are certain distortions. There is no direct correlation between shelf space and actual sales, although there is obviously a lot of overlap.
Basically, what happens is that authors who are very popular but who don’t (comparatively, at least) write very much, get penalized. Unless a book reaches such phenomenal levels of popularity that bookstores order dozens of copies which they have stacked all over the floor—and that usually only happens for a short stretch of time—even a very popular title is going to have only so many copies on the shelves. The bookstores will usually keep just enough copies to make sure there’s always a copy available to the customers, but no more than that. And since the author only has a relatively small number of books available in the first place, they only wind up with so much shelf space.
On the opposite side, an author who sells very well but doesn’t have what you’d call really stellar sales—but is also very prolific—will have an advantage. Since each book they produce sells well enough that bookstores want to keep at least one or two copies on the shelves, and they often have dozens of titles available, they’ll wind up with a lot of shelf space.
So, to use one specific comparison, in almost any bookstore in the country you will discover that Mercedes Lackey has more shelf space than Robert Jordan. In fact, she usually has more shelf space than any author in our field. Lackey enjoys excellent sales, of course, but she’s never been in the stratosphere when it comes to sales the way that Robert Jordan has. The difference is that Jordan wrote only about a dozen books, and Lackey’s output is many times greater than that.
To a lesser degree, there’s probably also a distortion produced by the specific publishers for any given author. As a rule, the smaller independent presses like Baen Books and DAW will tend to keep an author’s books in print longer than most big corporate houses.
That said, the distortion only goes so far. In the nature of things, an author simply can’t regularly maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space in bookstores all over the country unless they’re very popular. And, on the flip side, even an author who writes very little will have a lot of shelf space if they’re popular enough. An example, as you’ll see in a moment, being J.R.R. Tolkien—who maintains as much shelf space as almost any author, despite the fact that there are only three main titles involved and a few less important ones.
As far as publishers go, that distinction can’t bear much weight either. As we’ll see in a moment, there are authors published through every major publishing house in the field who maintain a lot of shelf space in bookstores.
****
Okay, it’s time to start naming names.
There are exactly seven authors today [Note: remember, this was written in 2007] in fantasy and science fiction who, in hundreds of bookstores all across the country, can regularly maintain at least four feet of shelf space for the sale of their books:
Jim Butcher
Orson Scott Card
Raymond Feist
Mercedes Lackey
Terry Pratchett
J.R.R. Tolkien
David Weber
I should make clear, by the way, that the reason I’m not including such very popular authors as J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or Laurel Hamilton is because they are not usually sold in the F&SF section. It’s the same reason I’m not including authors like Michael Crichton. You have to draw the line around “the field of F&SF” somewhere, and I think the simplest and clearest line is just to accept the judgment of major bookstores on the matter. (Yeah, sure, that’s philosophically crude as all hell—but, whether anyone likes it or not, it corresponds pretty well to practical reality.)
Go into any B&N or Borders bookstore anywhere in the United States and Canada and you will find these same seven fantasy and science fiction authors have at least four feet of shelf space, almost each and every time. You will also discover, in some of those bookstores, that one or two or possibly three authors in the next category (“three-footers”) also have four feet of shelf space. But that’s erratic, whereas it’s not erratic whether these seven authors will be there. They will be, almost always.
From the standpoint of measuring these authors in terms of awards received, of course, we have to start by subtracting J.R.R. Tolkien. He pretty much antedates the awards altogether. (Although he did receive a very belated Hugo nomination in 1966 for “best series ever.” But he was defeated by Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.)
Of the six remaining authors, four of them—Butcher, Feist, Lackey and Weber—have never received a single nomination in their entire careers for any major F&SF award. No Hugo nominations—forget wins, they’ve never even been nominated—no Nebulas, no World Fantasy Awards. Nothing.
Terry Pratchett has been nominated. Exactly twice. Once for the Hugo, once for the Nebula. He didn’t win either time.
With the last figure in the group, of course—Orson Scott Card—we find ourselves in the presence of a major award-winner. Card has been nominated for sixteen Hugo awards and won four times, and he was nominated for a Nebula on nine occasions and won twice. And he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award three times and won it once.
But…
He hasn’t been nominated for a WFC in twenty years, he hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in eighteen years, and hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo in sixteen years. And he hasn’t won any major award (for a piece of fiction) in twenty years.
This is not because his career ended twenty years ago. To the contrary, Card continues to be one of our field’s active and popular authors. What’s really happened is that the ground shifted out from under him—not as far as the public is concerned, but as far as the in-crowds are concerned. So, what you’re really seeing with Orson Scott Card’s very impressive looking track record is mostly part of the archaeology of our field, not its current situation. As we’ll see in a moment, the situation is even more extreme with Anne McCaffrey and almost as bad with George R.R. Martin.
But first, let’s move on to look at the next category of authors. These are the ones I call “three-footers,” the authors who can regularly maintain a full shelf of books in most bookstores across the country.
There are fourteen of these authors, with a fifteenth now so close to entering their ranks—that’s Tanya Huff—that I think we should include her as well:
Terry Brooks
David Eddings
Eric Flint
Neil Gaiman
Terry Goodkind
Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
Robin Hobb
Tanya Huff
Robert Jordan
George R.R. Martin
Anne McCaffrey
L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
John Ringo
R.A. Salvatore
Harry Turtledove
Of those fifteen authors (counting Herbert and Anderson as a single author) eleven of them—that’s almost 75%—have never been nominated for any major award. Again, forget winning. These authors aren’t even on the radar.
Harry Turtledove has gotten some recognition: one WFC nomination; two Nebula nominations; and three Hugo nominations, one of which he won.
But, being blunt, six nominations and one win is a pretty screwy record for an author with Turtledove’s popularity, wide range of output, and longevity. Forty or fifty years ago—thirty years ago, for that matter—he would have been nominated at least as often as Gordon Dickson.
Anne McCaffrey has gotten quite a bit of recognition in her career, taken as a whole. She’s been nominated for a Hugo eight times and won once; and nominated for a Nebula on three occasions, of which she won once.
But she hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in thirty-eight years and hasn’t won in thirty-nine years. And she hasn’t won a Hugo in forty years. The last time she was even nominated for a Hugo was sixteen years ago—and that was her only nomination for any major award in the last quarter of a century.
A quarter of a century, mind you, in which she kept writing and never once lost her popularity with the mass audience. But, as with Orson Scott Card, she long ago lost the favor of the in-crowds.
The situation’s a little better with George R.R. Martin. Martin, of course, has a very impressive track record when it comes to awards. He’s been nominated for a Hugo on seventeen occasions and won four times; nominated for a Nebula thirteen times and won twice; nominated for a WFC nine times and won once.
And, true enough, Martin did pick up some nominations recently, unlike Card or McCaffrey. Several of the novels in his very popular A Song of Ice and Fire series were nominated for Hugos and Nebulas in this century, although none of them won.
Still, even with Martin, most of his award history is now far in the past. Of the many nominations he’s gotten in his career, the great majority date back to the 70s and 80s, and most of them are now a quarter of a century old.
****
Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.
And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.
With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.
But he’s the only one, out of twenty-two. In percentage terms, 4.5% of the total. (Or 4.8%, if we subtract Tolkien.)
There’s no way now to reconstruct exactly what the situation was forty years ago. But I know perfectly well—so does anyone my age (I’m sixty-one) with any familiarity with our genre—that if you’d checked bookstores in the 1960s and 1970s to see how shelf space correlated with awards, you’d have come up with radically different results. Instead of an overlap of less than five percent, you’d have found an overlap of at least sixty or seventy percent.
Nor does the situation get much better if you keep going “down” the list and look at those authors who maintain two feet of bookshelf space. A little bit better, but not much.
Here, you do get more fluctuation in the authors who show up, from one bookstore to the next, than you do with authors who maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space. Still, there are a number of authors who show up very regularly. Nine, in particular:
Piers Anthony
Robert Asprin
Anne Bishop
David Drake
David Gemmell
Charlaine Harris
Dan Simmons
S.M. Stirling
Tad Williams
Of these nine authors, Simmons is the only one with a significant record when it comes to awards. In the course of his career, which has now lasted more than a quarter of a century, Simmons has gotten four Hugo nominations and one win; one Nebula nomination; and six nominations for the WFC of which he won two. And although most of those nominations date back fifteen years or more, at least one of them came in this century. His novel Ilium was nominated for a Hugo award in 2004.
Piers Anthony did pick up a few nominations in the course of his career, although he never won anything: four Hugos and one Nebula. But the last of those nominations came in 1970, almost forty years ago. So, again, we’re just dealing with archeology here.
The only other author in this group of nine who ever got any recognition of any kind in terms of awards was David Drake, and that was about as skimpy as it gets, given that he’s had one of the steadiest and most successful careers in the history of fantasy and science fiction. Drake was never nominated for either a Hugo or a Nebula, but he did receive two nominations for the World Fantasy Award. Both of those nominations, however, came in the 1970s, at the start of his career. Again, something of purely archeological interest.
The remaining six authors, two-thirds of the group, have never received any nominations for any major award in our field. And while it could be argued that Anne Bishop is still relatively early in her career, the same certainly can’t be said for the other five. And even Bishop has been a published author for well over a decade.
Two of these authors, in fact, no longer have careers at all. Both Bob Asprin and David Gemmell died recently—after, in the case of Asprin, a career that lasted thirty years and, in the case of Gemmell, a career that lasted twenty years. In both cases, quite successful careers.
Steve Stirling and Tad Williams have also been around for a long time. Stirling has been a published professional author for about a quarter of a century, most of that period working as a full time writer and quite a popular one. The same is true of Williams.
Before I break off my analysis of this group of “two-footers,” I need to discuss one important author who is something of an oddball because he’s one of the small number of authors who simply doesn’t fit well into this method of gauging popularity by the crude measure of bookshelf space.
That’s Neal Stephenson. The reason Stephenson is something of an oddball as far as shelf space is concerned is because he writes comparatively little, but what he does write tends to be very popular. So—as may be true with a few other authors, like Ursula LeGuin and Lois McMaster Bujold—it’s a little hard to correlate his popularity by using the method of measuring bookshelf space. Stephenson’s space will vary widely, from one bookstore to another, unlike most authors as popular as he is.
So, just to make sure we’re maintaining a proper balance, let’s include him in this group. Stephenson does occasionally get nominated for awards. He’s gotten two nominations and one win for the Hugo, and one nomination for the Nebula. All three nominations came within the past twelve years, too, so this is not archaeology.
****
All right. Let’s summarize the situation.
Including Neal Stephenson in this last group, and subtracting Tolkien, we’re looking at a total of thirty-one currently active authors. (Or, in the case of Asprin and Gemmell, authors who were active until very recently.) All thirty-one of these authors can regularly maintain at least two feet of bookshelf space in most bookstores in the country, and two-thirds of them can maintain three feet or more. And…
They’re the only ones who can. Other authors may be quite popular—that’s just impossible to determine directly—but, for whatever reason, they can’t maintain the same shelf space.
Of those thirty-one authors:
Only one of them gets nominated for awards regularly and frequently in the modern era: Neil Gaiman.
Only two of them—George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson—also get some nominations in the modern era. Martin’s very impressive record, however, is now mostly twenty years old or more.
Only two others have gotten any sort of award recognition in recent times—Harry Turtledove and Dan Simmons—and that’s not much.
Two others, Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card (especially Card) have very impressive career records, but those awards are now far back in the past.
And a couple of others have picked up a few awards, also far back in the past: David Drake and Piers Anthony.
The big majority, however, about 70% of them, have never gotten nominated—forget winning—for any major award in our field. This, despite the fact that almost no author in this group has a career that is less than ten years old. John Ringo and Jim Butcher are the two “youngest” authors in the group, measured in terms of length of career. (Not necessarily age, of course.) Both of them were first published in 2000, less than a decade ago.
The next “youngest,” depending on exactly how you look at it, is either me or Anne Bishop. Both of us first got published professionally in the mid-90s. To put it another way, both of us have been around for about fifteen years.
The point is, that with the possible exception of two of the authors, there are no spring chickens here. All of us except Ringo and Butcher have now had careers spanning well over a decade, and in the case of most of the authors, two or three decades—or even four or five decades, in some cases.
[Note by EF: what followed here was included in my essay published in April, 2015. I will resume with a section that I eliminated from the 4/15 essay:]
[T]he World Fantasy Award, which was supposedly set up a third of a century ago to counter-balance the presumed bias of the Hugo and the Nebula against fantasy, has an even worse track record than the Hugo and the Nebula when it comes to giving any recognition to popular fantasy authors.
Consider the following—there is no other way to put it—ludicrous situation.
The World Fantasy Award was launched in 1975. In the third of a century that has followed, the award has never so much as nominated the following fantasy authors:
Terry Brooks
Jim Butcher
David Eddings
Raymond Feist
Terry Goodkind
Robin Hobb
Robert Jordan
Mercedes Lackey
R.A. Salvatore
Granted, Robin Hobb—when she was still writing as Megan Lindholm—got one nomination for a Hugo and three nominations for a Nebula. (Three of the four coming almost twenty years ago.) Granted also that Jim Butcher’s career is still comparatively new. But the point is that as soon as Lindholm became a major factor in shaping fantasy as Robin Hobb, she stopped getting any nominations.
Consider the above list, and then ask yourself a question:
What other authors, in the modern era, have done as much to shape the field of fantasy?
You’ll be able to name a few. But no matter how much you try to slide around it, you will be unable to avoid the simple objective fact that—at least as far as the millions of paying customers who sustain the field in the first place are concerned—those authors listed above have formed the field’s center of gravity for the past quarter of a century.
And yet not one of them has ever even been nominated for the award which claims to be the award specifically set aside to honor fantasy writing.
Okay, back to the modern world—meaning today, August 30, 2015. I will add to the above, by the way, that Terry Pratchett got only one nomination for the World Fantasy Award in his entire career—and that came back in 1991. He didn’t win.
Yes, yes, he was eventually given a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010, a few years before he died. But everyone knew perfectly well that was a very belated recognition that the award had screwed up for decades. That included Pratchett himself, whose letter of acceptance was blisteringly sarcastic—and ended with him insisting that the presenter of the letter give his signature as Sir Terry Pratchett. Thereby reminding the audience at the award presentation (I was there myself, as it happens)—rubbing their noses in it, rather—that the queen of England had figured out the reality before they had.
So, by then, had eight universities in the UK and Ireland, with two more to follow before his death (one of them in Australia).
Compare Pratchett’s immense popularity, a career that spanned four decades, a knighthood and honorary doctorates from ten—count ‘em, ten—universities to the awards he got from the F&SF community. Those came to the following:
Hugo: two nominations, one declined, no wins.
Nebula: two nominations, no wins.
WFA: one nomination, no wins.
Yes, yes, there was also the Word Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, but I am no more impressed by that than he was. They might as well have just called it the Oops, We Really Goofed Award.
Five nominations, total, from the three major F&SF awards, with no award actually given to him—and ten honorary doctorates and a knighthood. That, in a nutshell, captures the problem with the awards in the modern era. Even academicians and the queen of England have a better grasp of what really matters than it seems the people who vote for awards do.
There’s a reason for this, and it goes back to the issues I discussed in one of my earlier essays. (“TRYING TO KEEP LITERARY AWARDS FROM FAVORING LITERARY CRITERIA IS AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY. GET OVER IT.” Posted on June 16, 2014.) It is almost inevitable that as time passes, any sort of literary or artistic award will drift in the direction of contemplating the glory of trees rather than those of the forest. As the saying goes, they lose sight of the forest for the trees.
What does that mean, really? What it means is that literature—and F&SF is part of literature; the division into “genres” has no objective significance beyond marketing concerns—has many aspect to it. Some are what you might call purely literary, others are intertwined with a society’s culture taken as a whole.
I can perhaps best illustrate what I mean by recounting an anecdote from my impetuous youth. When I was a sophomore in college I got into a wrangle with one of my English literature professors. I advanced the proposition in a term paper that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were now an integral part of English literature.
My professor disagreed very strongly. “How can you say that?” he demanded. The characters in the stories are one-dimensional, he argued. Furthermore, the issues taken up rarely if ever involve anything that really concerns—here, you could hear the capital letters—The Tragedy of the Human Condition. The stories are nothing but popular fiction aimed to titillate the masses.
I didn’t particularly disagree with any of the specific points he made. It is in fact true that the characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories are pretty one-dimensional. (Okay, call them two-dimensional if we include Holmes’ addiction to cocaine.) It is also true that the thematic issues the stories deal with are not particularly profound. And it is certainly true that the stories are popular fiction.
Wildly popular fiction, in fact. Which—this was the key, so far as I was concerned—had managed to retain that popularity for a century, with no sign that it was fading. (Nor did it. I got into this argument in 1966—forty years or so before the very popular Sherlock Holmes movies starring Edward Downey, Jr. and the equally popular TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch came out.)
And that, I argued, was ultimately what really mattered. Has a part of literature—no matter how limited it may be—become embedded in a society’s culture? If so, then it’s literature. Period.
If I’d left it at that, I probably would have suffered no penalty. My professor, despite his strong disagreement with my thesis, allowed that the essay was well-written and coherently argued. I’m sure his pen was poised to give me an “A” or at the very least a “B.”
Alas, I was a sophomore. My lip curled up in the way only nineteen-year-olds can manage a particularly insufferable sneer, and I added that so far as I could determine, my professor’s definition of “literature” seemed to be whatever author of the past was obscure enough in the modern world to make a suitable topic for a doctoral dissertation.
And… I got a C-minus in the course. I should have kept my mouth shut, I suppose, except…
It was such a nifty turn of phrase. Already I was clearly fated to become a scribbler.
To go back to the issue at hand, this is the inevitable tug-of-war that affects any literary or artistic award. Do we lean toward the tree or toward the forest? Do we focus on the way a story is written, or on the story itself?
That’s a simplistic way of putting it, granted, but it does capture the heart of the matter. What usually happens over time is that awards given out by a group of people who are a small sub-set of the mass audience for that particular form of literature or art tend to lean in the direction of contemplating the trees.
There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You just need to understand the phenomenon, not take it personally—and above all, not to characterize it as the product of foul play.
And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.
They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century.
The problem came with what the Sad Puppies did next. First, they insisted that Someone Must Be To Blame—when the phenomenon mostly involves objective factors. Secondly, being themselves mostly right wing in their political views, they jumped to the conclusion—based on the flimsiest evidence; mostly that some people had been nasty to Larry Correia on some panels at the Reno Worldcon—that the bias against their fiction in the awards was due to political persecution.
Neither proposition can stand up to scrutiny, as I have now demonstrated repeatedly in the course of these essays.
****
All right, so much for the past. What about today? Is the analysis I made based on comparing bookshelf space still valid?
I believe it is, although I can’t prove it. That’s because of several factors:
First, the economic crisis in 2008 hammered the publishing industry in general. Publishing is normally rather impervious to the business cycle, but the 2008 crisis was so big it did have a major impact. All across the country, the bookshelf space enjoyed by most authors declined unless they were extremely popular.
Secondly, one of the two giant bookstore chains went out of business (Borders).
But, finally and most importantly, after 2007 the publishing industry began shifting more and more toward electronic publishing. To use myself as an example, more than 50% of the royalties from my latest novels comes from electronic sales.
Electronic sales are all but invisible to the public. And by the way, don’t think you can use Amazon sales rankings to determine anything. Unless you reach the stratosphere of sales rankings in the top few hundred titles, they don’t mean very much. Most of the fluctuation amounts to statistical noise.
That said, however, none of the developments in the publishing industry since 2007 should have changed much when it comes to the relative popularity of authors. If anything, in fact, the shift has probably been in the direction of a still greater chasm between popularity and awards. That’s because those authors who have been able to carve out very successful careers based on electronic self-publication—Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey, to name two—are completely off the radar so far as the awards are concerned.
Granted, there’s also been movement that goes in the other direction. John Scalzi’s rise to prominence as a popular author, for instance, mostly postdates 2007, as did all but one of his Hugo nominations. And while Charles Stross started picking up nominations for Hugos as early as 2002, I don’t think his popularity started matching that until quite a bit later. I may be wrong about that, of course. I haven’t asked Charlie because it’s none of my damn business. But I think I’m right.
Still, no matter what shifts there might have been in either direction on the part of some authors, I see no reason to think that there’s been any sort of profound transformation of the reality as of 2007, when it comes to the match-up (or lack thereof) between sales and awards.
Keep in mind, furthermore, that my investigations based on measuring shelf space in bookstores focused almost entirely on novels—whereas the major F&SF awards are primarily oriented toward short fiction. That is a large part of what causes the disconnection between any given author’s popularity and her or his prominence when it comes to awards. For that small subset of the F&SF audience which does follow the awards, an author who wins a lot of Hugos or Nebulas or WFAs looms very large in their personal pantheon of who’s important and who isn’t. But unless those authors are winning awards for novels, they will be all but invisible to the mass audience because the market is oriented almost entirely toward novels.
People have an evitable tendency to assume that authors who really matter to them also matter to many other people. Sometimes that’s true, but even when it is the reality tends to get exaggerated. That’s why I took the time, some years ago, to crosscheck my own assumptions against objective reality. As it happened, in that instance I discovered my assumptions were by and large valid. But the reason I expended the effort was because experience has taught me that you always need to do that. It’s the same reason I try never to criticize someone for saying or doing something unless I’ve double-checked to make sure my memory is accurate.
A lot of times it isn’t. There’s a natural tendency—I have it just as much as anyone else—to lapse into paraphrasing based on a predisposition. Thus someone knows—without bothering to double-check—that because someone else is a dirty rotten leftist (or rightist, or libertarian, or Mormon, or Catholic, or Scientologist—fill in the bête noire of your choice) they undoubtedly said or did X, Y or Z. But when and if they go to cross-check themselves, they often find they can’t actually substantiate the charge.
It’s the same way with things like assessing which authors are very popular and which ones aren’t. If people don’t take the time to double-check their assumptions, they’re very likely to misgauge the reality. That’s especially true because we’re dealing with a continuum here. It’s not as if the world is divided between Bestselling Authors and Can’t-Sell-Anything Auteurs. Any number of authors who win a lot of awards sell quite well. But it’s just a fact that most of them don’t have the kind of sales that dominate the genre when it comes to popularity.
****
I apologize for the length of this essay, but the questions and objections raised to my assertion that there’s a big difference (with some overlap) between what the mass audience thinks and what the much smaller awards-voting crowd thinks is an important and valid one. And so I thought it was necessary to take the time to address the matter thoroughly and explain the source of my claim.
One more thing needs to be said. The biggest problem in all of this is that way, way too many people—authors and awards-bestowers alike—have a view of this issue which… ah…
I’m trying to figure out a polite way of saying they have their heads up their asses…
Okay, I’ll say it this way. The problem is that way too many people approach this issue subjectively and emotionally rather than using their brains. With some authors, regardless of what they say in public, there’s a nasty little imp somewhere deep in the inner recesses of their scribbler’s soul that chitters at them that if they’re not winning awards there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants. Or, if they don’t sell particularly well but do get recognition when it comes to awards, there’s a peevish little gremlin whining that they’re not selling well either because somebody—publisher, agent, editor, whoever except it’s not them—is not doing their job or it’s because the reading public are a pack of morons.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax. There are many factors that affect any author’s career and shape how well they sell and how often they get nominated for awards. Some of these factors are under an author’s control, but a lot of them aren’t. And, finally, there’s an inescapable element of chance involved in all of this.
The only intelligent thing for an author to do is, first, not take anything that happens (for good or ill) personally; secondly, try to build your career based on your strengths rather than fretting over your weaknesses.
And, thirdly, always remember that in the final analysis there are only two awards that really matter:
Are you enjoying yourself?
Are people still reading something of yours fifty years after you died?
You’ll never know the answer to that second question, of course. All the more reason to center your career and your life on the first one.
Loved your analysis, Eric, but I do think the shifting nature of media and art/entertainment is a complicated issue, affecting all of society, not just SFF. For instance, look at 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It was a huge hit the year it came out, indicating people then considered it very mainstream and enjoyable. And yet now it is considered by a lot of people as avant garde.
There’s so much more content being produced in general today. And the Internet has created a much stronger “Meta” awareness of it all. Look at the Subreddits for scifi or fantasy, where there is endless discussion of “worldbuilding” and “magic systems” — very inside baseball, compared to how I would have talked about SFF writing back in the 1970s.
Point being, I don’t know whether any award can better match short-term tastes, long-term-tastes, popularity, and critical acclaim. I think society and technology is just moving in a much more fragmented direction.
Personally, I think the Puppies, if they had any real ambition and honor, would have started their own award and let the market decide whose award better reflected the stories being created and people’s tastes. It would have been the simplest and more free-market solution (and therefore in line with many of the organizers’ ideology).
By the way, is there any way to get a look at Pratchett’s acceptance speech for the WFA? I’m a bit of a fan…
Oh, and, I suspect that the sad puppies do have ambition and honor. If, and this is a real if, someone observed harsh reactions by the liberal fringe of a predominately relatively free-thinking group and concluded that the reason that recent awards sucked had something to do with the people driving that reaction, it would be perfectly reasonable and honorable to list stuff you liked. Well, at least not less honorable than fairly common practices by other authors. Eg, Stross, when up for best novel, dismissing the nominated Mira Grant while praising her other work… (On one hand, I love her Velveteen series…on the other…definitely presents a smarmy appearance.) I would even call the SP brave, by comparison – if wrongheaded. Then, assuming that a few things got nominated… And that you got criticized for trying for an award by putting a single nominee into each category…it would be somewhat reasonable to broaden your suggestion list. Expecting someone to predict the dawn of rabid puppies would be…unrealistic. I suspect that RP was far more slatelike than SP – as RP displaced SP whenever the slates were in conflict.
I’m skeptical of condemning SP while acknowledging that there’s a problem with the Hugos. I suspect they didn’t even vote as blocs (though I’d like to see the voting records.) I think they’re wrong – but don’t see much evil on their end. Probably less evil than there’s been on the puppy kicking side. Now, a bit reckless, probably. But, um, RP was a surprise. And, well, the Hugo nomination process was kind of similar to my friend’s old method for saving money shipping explosives home. Fun fact, strapping blasting caps, et cetera, inside your coat would get you through the old-style metal detectors on airplanes, no problemo. (Don’t try this now.) See, sure, you can do it, and it could work for a long while…but it far from the most stable method you could use. I seriously could get a Hugo nomination by writing some dreck and inviting my extended family to Worldcon.
Now, the real problem is that most of the divergence between popular taste and the Hugos is most likely an emergent phenomena. Sure, a Saga award would help – because people would be nominating things they actually read… But, the group of people who nominate and vote on awards is self-selected by caring more than others – and those people are likely to read more and by artsier than others.
Sitting around and whining that a lynch mob forms whenever conservatives get together and nominate someone for the Hugos…is useless because it isn’t the main problem.
As someone who works in an indie bookstore and is in charge of the SFF section (all 8 shelves of it, one entire stack!), I can tell you right now that I carry very few of those ‘super popular’ authors. And we sell a lot of SFF. As we are an indie store, that means we decide what gets to be a full display – unlike those chain stores, where the publishers buy the display space. That’s right, those big displays when you walk in the front door? They are paid for, which means their ‘popularity’ sometimes is just down to money because the publishers believe that if you build it, readers will respond. And they do. 100th monkey and all that.
What you, bookstore shoppers, don’t see, are the returns of all of those copies that don’t sell. They get remaindered and/or pulped and turned into new books.
Current shelf taker-uppers: Tolkien, Erikson, Scalzi, N.K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Gaiman, Rothfuss.
Face-outs: Elizabeth Bear, Tanith Lee (BECAUSE I LOVE HER THAT’S WHY), Scalzi, Brian Staveley, Cixin Liu, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Nnedi Okorafor, James Cambias.
New Books Table: Neal Stephenson, Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), David Mitchell (All the Light We Cannot See), and that other one I can’t remember the name of.
Floor display: GRRM (ASOIAF only, entire display), Andy Weir (boss’s decision) (we don’t sell much of the movie tie-in edition), Octavia’s Brood (anth.), Sisters of the Revolution (anth.).
Popularity in any genre does not necessarily equal awards, and using awards as a way to gauge what’s popular is a recipe for disaster. You’re going to miss a lot of good stuff, and read some mediocre stuff – YMMV.
Personally, I think the Puppies should TOTALLY create their own awards. Who knows, maybe they’ll have even more authors write the kind of stuff they want to read, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?
OK, so . . . . what’s a bookstore?
And by the way, Borders died several years ago so I know you didn’t measure shelf space there.
And in any case, this begs a major question — in the absence of major booksellers, how does one discover new authors? I’d rather hear about that than rehashing the goddamn puppies.
Reading comprehension isn’t one of your strengths, is it? Mr. Flint said, quite clearly, that he wrote this post (most of it) years ago. So you, to be clear, don’t actually “know” a damn thing. My suggestion? Reread the post and try to actually pay attention to its content this time around.
PS: in answer to your question, try Amazon. It’s a great resource. Also, the internet in general, unless you’re inclined to be overly credulous/gullible. (One needs a industrial-strength bullsh¡t filter when using the ‘net. Absent such filtration the ‘net is a dangerous place.)
I think there’s a third award that counts (with a nod to R.A.H.)–the one that is green and folds.
I am even older than Eric! I started reading F&SF when I shared an apartment in NYC in the 60s with someone who worked for John Campbell at Analog (I worked for Vogue).
Why the heck to we really worry about awards? The most important things are the stories themselves and the WRITING. One of the reasons I do not find the SF of this century all that attractive is that some of writers should have taken remedial English at some point. But, everyone should read what they like.
PS – Yes Mr. F your photo looks just like a union man! And as an historian, I love not only the Ring of Fire, but also The Song of Ice and Fire – all read at least twice because, like Tolkien, they are really well written.
OK, kids, calm down – –
I started reading hard SF in while in second grade, in 1953, and my library is now only about 4,000 volumes – – with content from Asimov to Zelazney. Reading has been my constant companion in life – “Ivanhoe” was read to me while I was too young to go to school; I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Mysterious Island” in the summer of 1954, followed by “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” in the summer of 1955 – – yes, I was reading beyond what “normal” people thought was “appropriate” for me at that time. I didn’t care; I liked reading. I read everything I could find of Kipling starting in 1953 – – now, while I know most of those works are not SF, it gives you an idea of what a young and voracious reader I was. Read “Doc” Smith’s “Skylark” and “Lensman” series, read Tolkein’s wonderful Ring – –
After reading the works of giants, I recognized that the unrealized potential of science fiction, more than fantasy, was that if the writers were careful and actually did their research, some of what they wrote might become everyday, commonplace hardware in the not-too-distant future, and might actually help influence the direction of real-world scientific endeavors. I had that flash of insight rather late, when I was in my junior year of high school, 1961-62. Since then as an engineering designer I’ve seen that insight confirmed every day.
I think – not sure – that while the idea of a Puppies award is excellent, unless such an award is voted on by a very wide sample it will wind up having no more general-market validity than Hugo or Nebula awards do today. Perhaps one could establish an on-line poll to determine annual award-winners: the voting open to the general public, but allowing each e-mail address only ONE vote per title. That way an individual reader might vote for several different works during a calendar year, and the overall reader responses could then be tallied. No, that wouldn’t accurately correlate with purchases unless a choice box was checked (bought / borrowed,) because there are such things as libraries and loaned books – but the results MIGHT indicate the actual popularity of a specific title or author.
Will such a polling system indicate which SF/F authors might be making important guesses about the future of real-world technology? No, most likely not. But such a poll should indicate which authors, and which stories, have reached the most people, and that could make valid an award for real-world popularity.
Perhaps a different award for SF writers could be retrospective, indicating which authors and which concepts over some time period most accurately foretold important or useful real-world scientific developments, but that’s an entirely different subject needing its own discussion.
Thank you for putting up with my rambling –
Again may I say how much I have enjoyed your level headed response to the furore over the Hugos. A breath of fresh air. I even blogged about it here:
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/hugo-reflections-part-7-future.html
I’ve pondered about what I’ve read and came to the conclusion that 90% of the SF&F books I’ve read never won a Hugo.
I’m commenting a bit late, but one thought that came to my mind while reading the list of authors…
Although I’m not familiar with the works of all of those popular writers, I do notice a bit of a tendency there: series.
Pratchett wrote 40 books of Discworld. Card wrote Ender, Alvin, Homecoming, Pastwatch… Jordan has Wheel of Time, Feist churns out Riftwar books, Brooks Shannaras, Anderson has written Dune prequels, Saga of the Seven Suns etc. Butcher of course writes Dresden Files, Hobb has the arc of Assassing, Ships, Fools.
I think this affects both the shelf space and the award nominations: once the series has you hooked, you’ll probably buy the sequels even if their literary value diminishes. On the other hand, judging a single book of a series, and considering it for an award, is a lot harder.
I personally own a dozen Card books, first nine of Hobb’s books, about 25 Pratchetts. I’ve enjoyed at least most of them, but, at the same time, how do you judge the merits of the 22nd Discworld book when there’s a huge body of work that predates it and adds to the experience of reading it? Is it good as a single book?
That’s something I had to think at this year’s Hugos: Skin Game was 15th of the Dresden Files. I’ve never read that series, so I had a fresh view, and the end result probably isn’t a surprise: even though I can appreciate Jim Butcher’s writing skills, it isn’t a book you enjoy on its own, and being required to read 14 books before being able to judge the merits of the actual nominee is a bit much.
By contrast, I think Kevin Anderson’s Dark Between the Stars did a much better job at setting the stage – although that’s probably at least partly because it’s the beginning of a new series. I think Ancillary Sword, being the second book of a trilogy, also did an admirable job of at least trying to get a reader up to speed regarding the past events (although I have read Ancillary Justice so my view here is tainted ;)
And, if you take a look at the popular authors who have received nominations, my observation seems to hold at least reasonably well: Gaiman doesn’t write (novel) series, Stephenson’s nominations have come mostly for one-off books (Baroque Cycle books seem won Locus awards but weren’t even nominated for Hugos or Nebulas). Simmons has written mostly one-off books or short series (although his single books of late haven’t really garnered nominations).
There are obvious exceptions: Martin’s all Song of Ice and Fire books have been nominated for Hugos. And to tell you the truth, if you look at the individual books, particularly the last two, it’s really hard to understand, why. McMaster Bujold has been nominated multiple times for Vorkosigan series, and that I can mostly understand – they are just unbelievably good books.
On the whole, though, I’d argue it’s not too much about “popular, therefore not eligible for in-crowd” but more about how that popularity was achieved and whether it translates to something that is powerful enough on its own to win an award.
Which, of course, brings us right into the discussion about the Hugo categories being frozen in time and no longer representing the kinds or lengths of works which are popular and read by the majority of SF&F readers.
Mr. Flint, I’m not sure if you’ll ever see this, but I found the link to the *un”corrected”* (slander and lawsuit-bait not yet removed/memory-holed) version of that EW article. Maybe you won’t give a $h!t, maybe it’s old news, maybe it’s beating a dead horse. But look when it was published. They didn’t stop to zip their fly before starting to shout their lies. (unintended rhyme…I’ll leave it in, lol) Anyway, I thought I should link this, because I’m an obstinate fool. Here: http://archive.is/0NH1i
God bless. :-)
Oh, and this: http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/08/24/lots-of-hugo-losers/
is bloody fantastic. Unbiased from my admittedly biased perspective.
I do not care about Hugo’s or Oscars. I never buy or read a book because the author won such and such award and I am the same about what movies I watch. If it interests me I will read or watch. If not I save my money which is more important. In the past I was given books like Outlander and Game of Thrones neither caught my interest and I donated them to a local hospital reading library for the patients. My wife and I walked out of the movie “titanic” within the first 15 minutes; why because we both came to the same conclusion, the old lady and the necklace and the ship was going to sink anyway.
What is important to me about authors is not the awards but “if” they can catch and retain my interest through the entire book. If they can I keep the book to read over again, if not it is donated.
What I think is important to an author is sales, royalties, and the bottom line. Ego does not stop the stomach from growling, pay the mortgage, and keep the lights burning. Just MHO for what it is worth. Be a Sad or Rabid Puppy if you must…
The Neffy Award (National Fantasy Fan Federation Speculative Fiction Award) was first given in 1949 to Ray Bradbury. Since then it has occasionally been given (including continuously since 2005) for outstanding contributions to the Science Fiction field.
The 2015 Neffy Award, a
Heroic Commendation,
Was Won by
All of Hugo Fandom
for reviving the most ancient and honorable of all fannish customs, the all-hobby fan feud.
The ballot resolution read: To all of Hugo Fandom, for they are all fen: A Heroic Commendation for reviving the most ancient and honorable of all fannish customs, the all-hobby fan feud.
The 2015 Neffy Award for
Best Editor
was won by
Toni Weisskopf, Baen Books.
The ballot resolution read: Mindful that editors are judged on their extended record, not a single work in a single year, and that other editors may in future years be honored for their work in the same time period, the nomination for 2015 for Best Editor is to Toni Weisskopf, Baen Books .
George Phillies
President, National Fantasy Fan Federation
I read Connie Willis’ book on time travel to the middle ages…and I hated it. My husband who has done a lot of study read her one about time travel to WWII…and hated it. His major complaint was that even with her characters being somewhat trapped in another time period, instead of exploring it and being fascinated they spent all their time looking for each other, worried that they might change something and whining about being trapped. And yet she won the Hugo award. Another book that won, couldn’t even figure out why it was considered a sci fi book. You know those reading lists in school for great literature that you’re supposed to read for class? Usually, I hated them and couldn’t get past the 2nd chapter because of boredom, (Dickens), the animal died (Red Pony, Where the Red Fern grows), or it had something else that was incredibly depressing: (1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm). The 1st (and I think the only) time I read something that I liked from those lists was Lord of the Rings. The problem IMHO is that ‘official’ critics… of ANY genre and medium see / read so many stories that in order to have something stand out for them has to be ‘worthwhile’ ie: boring, depressing, confusing, ‘dramatic’, ‘artistic’. While what most regular folks want is a bit of fun. Frankly, I’m surprised that Robin Hobb has never been nominated for fantasy, Her Assassin series and the rest of that world is fresh and imaginative with plot lines and characters as complex as Tolkien. And Sherlock Holmes should definitely be considered in the top of literature as it’s influence can be seen in every cop / detective show/ book since.
About your prof on Holmes not being literature. How many writers have a museum exhibit devoted to them? I just went to the traveling exhibit on Sherlock Holmes at the Denver museum of Nature & Science. One note was that Doyle created Holmes because he didn’t like that the most popular detective tales at the time relied upon coincidence or didn’t tell you how the conclusion was reached.
Thank you. I am a right winger but I love your stories and you have once again nailed it. Thank you.
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