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.
Could you use online sales rankings, broken out by genre and tracked over a long period of time, to do such a comparative analysis today? Isn’t such information at least available via amazon? Granted, it’s not a perfect metric–few metrics are–but I wonder if you couldn’t use it as a proxy for shelf space in 2015.
Eric:
It may take me a bit to get to my point, but bear with me here please.
I regularly eat at Outback Steakhouse. Regularly enough that they pour me my drink as I walk in. I’m not the only person – Outback the company has over 1,200 restaurants in 23 countries. They make a good steak, which I enjoy. But if you asked me “what was the best steak I ever ate,” Outback would not even be in the top five. They’re not Gino and Georgetti’s, or Ruth Chris, or Morton’s. Outback delivers a good (not a great) product for the money. It’s not in my mind award-winning.
My point is this – popular is not necessarily the same as best. If it were, we’d all say that the best restaurant in the world was our local McDonald’s. So, how much of the shelf space in the essay above is given over to SF/F’s equivalent of Outback Steakhouse – popular but not considered award-winning?
Your analogy is interesting, but I think it fails due to one reason:
Price.
Outback does not cost the same as any of the other steakhouses you mention. Pretty much every hardcover costs 25.00 and pretty much every paperback costs between 8 and 12 dollars. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tired effort to continue a dying series or if it’s a mind-blowing masterwork; you’re paying 25 bucks when it comes out or 8-12 bucks after the initial printing.
You missed volume and opportunity.
It can be much harder to find a copy of a writer like say Cixin Liu. He’s new and foreign. Its much easier to say find a copy of David Weber.
The other thing is someone like George RR Martin I might prefer to David Weber, but George RR Martin can take years between books, while David Weber tends to get 2-3 large novels a year out.
So in this analogue, we’re comparing a decent steak at Outback versus an obscure single location restaurant which might be much better, but harder to get to and which has a backlog of reservations. The French Laundry beats Outback, but you can get an Outback Steak now, rather than waiting 3 months for your reservation.
That analogy fails as well, though.
Access.
It is frequent that a bookstore will not have the particular Weber, or Ringo, or Turtledove, or Scalzi story I want. They seem to have about half the total works of any multi-foot author. So, what do I do? I either go to a website and purchase it – either an electronic copy or a delivered one – or I go to the front desk and request that they order a book.
You can’t go to Outback and request a French Laundry meal in a week, you can’t go online and request a 3-star Michelin meal instantly, you can’t go to the French Laundry website and request a delivery that day for a perfect meal that you can track online.
Basically all I am gathering from this exchange is that if you want to make an analogy for book sales, don’t use a location-dependent perishable commodity like steaks.
Price is a factor in steak, but there’s also the broadness of taste.
For example, I like Jack Campbell AKA John Hemry’s Lost Fleet series, and I buy them when they come out. But I don’t nominate them for awards, because I find them the equivalent of cotton candy – fun while they last but not really “wow” or memorable. Same with Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer series – and Jim is a personal friend.
What I’m getting at with the Outback analogy is that Outback “broadcasts” it’s food. They deliberately attempt to have something for everybody, while a Morton’s says “this is what a good steak is, if you don’t like it go elsewhere.”
Your analogy still doesn’t make any sense, though. It seems to be an apology for the kind of disconnect between sales and in-crowd “quality” that this article discovers by using a wholly inapt analogy.
Outback doesn’t just appeal to a large audience by making the same steak, over and over. They appeal to a large audience by having an atmosphere, by having prices a middle class family can afford, and by having many locations.
Only the consistency argument applies to novels. Novels are post-scarcity (not the creation itself, but the text once it has been penned). Once Eric Flint publishes his novel, there are effectively infinite copies for the consumer available to anybody with two hours worth of minimum wage pay and even the most tenuous internet connection. Once a Michelin rated chef cooks his steak, it is gone as soon as it is consumed. Not so with novels. In addition, this consumable nature of steaks means that the cooks who are most in demand can charge ever more for their steaks. Not so for novels. Finally, the very best chefs are limited and the mediocre chefs abound. This is true with writing. However, only the very best writers see a large audience – there is no reason to have a mediocre writer on every corner when everybody can consume the very best author for exactly the same price. A mediocre author may sell 10,000 copies lifetime while a great author can see over a million lifetime copies sold.
You’re dismissing popular novels as common and akin to a cheap (or mid tier) restaurant, while the truth is, restaurants and book sales are enormously different. The best authors see their works explode in distribution while the authors who are mediocre can’t make enough to hold a full-time job. The best chefs and the mediocre chefs both cook about the same amount of food. Certainly, the best chef can have more production- but not orders of magnitude more production.
Your only argument seems to boil down to the idea that the average of the masses don’t have true taste, and that it’s obscure auteur writers with niche markets that have the truly “best” work. To this I reply: well, that is a point of view. In my view, though, once you have a post-scarcity market, as publishing has been at or near for at least a decade, the works that sell the most are the ones that touch the most people somehow. Of course a more esoteric novel might affect you far more than a big seller, but it might also be repulsive or just a bore for the majority of buyers. I see affecting millions (hundreds of thousands?) a bit as more influential than affecting a few thousand a lot. It is obvious that some big sellers are neither groundbreaking nor influential. Not every groundbreaking, influential act sells big either- see The Velvet Underground. My issue is that the state of affairs we have today effectively tells people that almost no big seller is groundbreaking or influential. That doesn’t jive to me and from all the recent hubbub, it doesn’t jive with a lot of people.
No, my argument is that I read and enjoy a lot of stuff that doesn’t rise (in my mind) to the level of “give this thing an award.”
Paraphrasing what I said to a Puppy on another forum, “the award goes to the work of fiction that grabs me by the short hairs and says, ‘come here big boy, I’ve got something to show you.'”
Sure. But if 5000 people find a work electrifying and 1.5 million find it not worth the time it takes to read, can you always justify calling it better than a work 1.505 million people find charming? I’d say no, and that’s what we’re looking at with the awards today. I don’t think you can easily quantify the difference between “everybody likes” and “few love” but I do think you are erring if you always choose one side.
Is James Joyce’s Ulysses a better work than Skin Game? I’m going with yes on that one myself, is it better than, say, Guards! Guards! one of my all time favourite re-reads – again, yes, I believe it is.
There might not be a simple way of measuring this, but popular doesn’t mean it should get awards.
That said, Ancilary Justice actually was a good read, popular and worthy of an Award. IMO.
“Is James Joyce’s Ulysses a better work than Skin Game”
How does it matter? You’re not just comparing apples to oranges; you’re comparing apples from a tree dead for 70 years to an orange eaten today while we’re talking about contemporary awards.
For that matter, more copies of Ulysses are sold than of Skin Game. So, your already flawed point is moot.
“There might not be a simple way of measuring this, but popular doesn’t mean it should get awards.”
Nor did I say it should. I said that it’s a mistake to always assume that popular means it should not receive an award and that touching a million people a little is at least comparable, if not superior, to touching a thousand people a lot.
By that argument Dan Brown’s award shelves should be bulging :)
Or Clive Cussler?
I think popularly of a work is a really meaningless metric, unless the award is purely for popularity.
You seem incapable of understanding the point that excluding popular authors is as stupid as solely including them.
That analogy is a bit off, though. If you like steaks, it’s pretty unlikely that you will love Outback but hate Morton’s; they’re the same thing, except Morton’s uses better meat. The only reason to pick Outback over Morton’s is price or location convenience. I suppose you might really love the rub Outback uses, but they use it largely because their steaks aren’t great quality.
Now, where the analogy does make sense is The French Laundry. You might like Outback, like Morton’s a lot, and love say Craftsteak, but not like The French Laundry very much at all. Because unlike the Steak Houses, they don’t specialize in the-same-but-better; they specialize in fancy stuff with novel ingredients prepared in fancy ways and presented beautifully.
Or consider the molecular gastronomy places like WD50, which included (when I went there) ice cream that looked and tasted like a bagel. Except it was ice cream. (Topped with lox and cream cheese, similarly transformed.) Fancy food, but weird.
Offer a steak lover free dinner at either Outback or Morton’s, and he will probably choose Morton’s. Offer the same person Outback or The French Laundry, he might choose Outback because The French Laundry type cuisine just doesn’t appeal to him. And a place like WD50 probably has an even more narrow appeal, even among people who like fancy food.
I hate to admit this, but I actually liked (for example) Ancillary Justice, and while I’ve enjoyed a number of Eric’s books, I do understand why it won the Hugo Award and why his didn’t. (No offense, Eric. You have more of my money than she does.) But I totally get that it’s less accessible than, say, Honor Harrington.
And some of the short story nominees and winners have no appeal to me at all. Like the story of the gay Chinese guy going to visit his parents, who he thinks won’t like that he’s gay. I get that it’s a good story, well-written, but that sort of small family drama just doesn’t appeal to me — I want to fight for the love a Martian Princess beneath the hurtling moons of Barsoom, or visit the star that turns out to be (spoiler), or . . .
You get the point. To me, great SF stories are also great adventures, and some of the recent nominees aren’t. (Ancillary Justice kinda was, actually.)
I have never said — not once — that “popular” equals “best.” All I said was that in times past — the 50s, 60s, 70s and well into the 80s — “popular” (measured by sales) and “best” (measured by awards won) overlapped enormously. They were never identical, no. But the almost complete separation that exists today didn’t exist back then.
Why? That’s the question.
I will add one other thing. It is certainly true that “popular” does not automatically mean “best.” But it is also true that “best” — measured by awards won — does not automatically translate into “best” either. Just as the records are full of authors and works which were once very popular and have now largely been forgotten, those same historical records are also full of authors who won a lot of awards and are also now largely forgotten.
In the end, there’s only one really objective measure of whether an author or a work of literature is really “the best.” Are people still reading them a century or two later? The problem, of course, is that nobody currently debating the issues will ever live long enough to know the answer.
I have never said — not once — that “popular†equals “best.†I sit corrected.
But I wonder how much of this disconnect between popular and best is due to the explosion of works. SFSignal was doing some tracking and reported over 300 SF books per month being released. Presumably somebody’s buying them, so I wonder if the (conscious or not) to appeal to a wider audience is feeding the disconnect.
That may not be the most coherent post I’ve made – I’m unclear in my mind as to what causes the disconnect. All I am clear about is that there’s a bunch of stuff I read and like that I don’t say “Hugo-worthy” when I’m done.
A lot of the disconnect is indeed due to the explosion of works. If you go back to my very first essay on this subject (“Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards,”
posted on April 16, 2015), the massive expansion of the genre was the first objective factor I pointed to as one of the explanations.
All I’m trying to do is this most recent essay, given that several people questioned my assertion that there’s a big gap today between popularity and awards, is substantiate my claim. Thazzit. If you want to see the conclusions I draw from that, go back and read (or perhaps re-read) that original essay.
I read that original article. I’m not entirely sure I’d use shelf-space to measure popularity. Scalzi doesn’t have huge shelf space, but Tor didn’t give him $3.4 million for his good looks. Which gets us back to not having objective sales figures…
Al Reynolds got $1.5m a few years back for his next 10 novels and, near as I can tell, he’s practically unknown in the US. His stuff is also amazing.
For novels, the biggest source of the disconnect seems to be (A) series are extremely popular and (B) series novels are at a big disadvantage at award time. Many of the award winners turn into series after the initial win. But a later series novel really has to stand out in order to win–either by virtue of exceptional quality or being nominated in a year with weak competition. (Belated adulation for an aging author occasionally enters into play also.)
And in the world of series, the ones with the overarching plots get more respect than the ones that are “just” episodes about a recurring set of characters. Holmes and most detective series fall into the latter category, which contributes to the lack of respect some really fine writers get. If anything I would argue these episodic series are more popular (in a more low-key way) than the volume-spanning epics…because a lot of writers have tried to write epics, but you almost have to hit the jackpot with them or get tagged as a bad investment by the publishers.
Eric we do not even have to wait a century.
Ask this question who is reading the Best Novel in 2010? It is ranked at 21,035 and is being promoted as a “Random House Reader’s Circle.
What about Best Novel for 2005? It currently ranks respectable 8,262 on Amazon. Because it was turned into the basis for a TV Show. Anyone seen the show?
How about the Best Novel in 2000? It ranks 83,468 on the Amazon list.
lets see about the Best Novel for 1995? It ranks 293,078 on the Amazon Best Seller.
If you have to look up the names of these books then obviously they were not that important to you. I will admit that 1995 Best Novel is on my eventual reading list.
But (looking solely at the numbers for 2009 works, because it’s late and I’m tired) all of the four-footer’s are below that number. The one one who isn’t well below is Butcher, who’s in the lower 30ks compared to the 15k-20k of the two 2010 winners.
So more people are still reading the winners than the most popular authors’ work from the same period.
Sometimes being popular means that the best will not be selected as “best.” Does anyone remember what film won the Oscar for Best Picture in the year Saving Private Ryan was nominated? (It was Shakespeare in Love.)
Which film fits the “embedded into society’s culture” criterion? Which had the more subsequent impact by almost any measurement?
Such occurrences almost certainly happen in writing awards, as well. It doesn’t take a conspiracy. It merely takes a general understanding of what values should be used for consideration as the “best. “
Eric, isn’t your definition of “best” just “popular over time”?
Note also that most of what’s in The Canon (to the extent we believe in The Canon) was enormously popular in its time — Dickens, Shakespeare, etc. I suppose a few people get rediscovered, or discovered after death — like Emily Dickinson — but they are a rarity.
And to respond to another comment, I tried to read Skin Game for the recent Hugo thing, and I bounced hard. Butcher may be popular, but not with me. That said, I’d pick it over Ulysses any time. I’m not convinced that humans voluntarily read Ulysses. I think it’s a pure English Professor thing.
Actually, I’ve read Joyce’s ULYSSES twice — in its entirety; I’ve read parts of it more often than that — and neither time was it because I was taking a course. Now, if you’d singled out SCARLET LETTER…
To go back to your first point, I said that “popularity over time” is the only _objective_ measure of what’s “best” and what isn’t. Any other way of gauging the matter relies on your own subjective judgment and is ultimately simply a matter of your own personal opinion.
Of course, that personal opinion is what usually guides a person’s reading habits. Most people who read a lot will read — or at least start to read — a book that has the reputation of being “one of the classics.” But they won’t keep reading that book or author if they find their personal opinion is at variance with that of “the objective historical verdict.”
For example, I don’t question the collective judgment of the English-speaking portion of the human race that has concluded over the course of a century that Henry James is a great author. I have read a number of James’ works — all of them because they were assigned in college courses — and I can abstractly appreciate the talent involved in his writing.
Nonetheless, I’ve often said that my definition of “hell” would be to get locked up in a room for eternity with nothing to read but Henry James novels. I find his work excruciatingly boring, not because I think he’s a bad writer — he’s not; he’s an excellent one — but because the subject matter that interested him bores me to tears. I just don’t CARE about the difficulties rich Americans have being accepted in European high society.
I have a similar reaction to Hemingway, whom I also dislike. The problem isn’t that he’s a bad writer, it’s that the focus of his work is usually on issues of “manhood” that I resolved while I was still in high school. So I consider Hemingway’s work essentially juvenile in its content, however well written it might be.
But those are just my personal opinions.
Eric,
Can’t resist (blame the wine) Just had to say that my opinion of Hemingway is much like the comments Twain made in his essay on the literary style of James Fenimore Cooper.
I still remember when we were assigned to read “The Venus deMilo Story” (aka “Farewell Two err.. to Arms” in High School we totaled up the space Hemingway took early on to basically say “It really, really sucks to be in a trench, in the mud, in the rain, in Northern Italy with Austrians shelling you.” Pages it took the great man to say that!
Of course we were just callow youths. But I had the same reaction 20 years later as an adult when I tried to re-read it…
What a flashback! I hadn’t thought about this in probably twenty years, but my friends and I had the same problem with Great Expectations. Chapters 1-6, summarized: “My name is Pip; my parents are dead.”
Two quotations on Henry James you might like, Eric:
“Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.” —Oscar Wilde
“The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.” —Philip Guedalla
I am a big fan of Jim Butcher and his Dresden Files books, as is my husband. But we both agreed that Skin Game was a disappointment. It sure didn’t deserve an award. (Sorry Jim).
There are some authors on that list that I read and enjoy, but I still wouldn’t vote for them for the Hugo–they were fun, but not the best book I would have read in any given year. I wonder for how many others that is true. It would easily lead to a popular author going unrewarded because they were easily readable but not deeply engaging and I don’t know that there’s a good remedy for that. The Gemmell awards are a completely open vote and even those have not gone to the listers above.
Some of the others I find to be utter crap whose popularity utterly baffles me, but I don’t assume conspiracy. There is some conspiracy in trying to manufacture sales numbers–see the recent exclusion of Ted Cruz’s book from the NYT bestseller list–but I doubt that’s a significant factor in genre works.
My main quibble here would be with the notion that there is anything like a single “mass audience” at all. Certainly there are some wildly popular authors of work that I would class as “lighter reading,” but even the authors that you list here don’t represent a singular taste.
Rather, I would argue that these lists present a sort of snapshot of the evolving tastes of readers. This is definitely reflected in my own experience.
In middle school I was crazy for Piers Anthony’s Xanth books. I was super into R.A. Salvatore when I was a teenager. I read Terry Brooks in high school. I read all of the Pern books published before 2005 or so. In the early 2000s I found Neil Gaiman’s stuff. In recent years I’ve read GRRM’s ASOIAF several times.
What I find as I get older, however, is that I read a lot more serious/literary work and less of the lighter stuff. The more I read, as well, the more I find myself of the opinion that there really is a real difference between work that I find fun and entertaining and work that I think is worthy of a literary award for excellence in its craft.
I can’t imagine a scenario where I’ll ever get rid of the three feet of R.A. Salvatore books on my own bookshelves (or about the same of Terry Brooks and Anne McCaffrey), but I stopped reading Forgotten Realms (and Shannara and Pern) some years ago. Increasingly, these works (formative for me as they were) have been displaced by work that is newer, fresher, and smarter. I also find that, the older I get and the more widely I read, the more I have a better perspective for judging what is good and what has literary value and significance.
When I read nothing but Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms for like two years straight in 7th and 8th grade, I might have said those were the best books ever. Reading more diversely–as I think most serious readers do as they age–changes the way we think about books.
And diversity in reading is easier and more accessible now than it’s ever been. The internet has revolutionized the ways in which we talk about books. Online ordering and ebooks have revolutionized the ways in which we buy and consume books. Self-publishing, especially of ebooks, is easier and cheaper than it’s ever been, and crowdfunding and Patreon and so on have made it easier than ever for people to be writers. It’s not all rainbows and flowers, but from the perspective of a reader we’re in the midst of a really fascinating publishing renaissance that is really amplifying a lot of historically marginalized voices.
Even in book stores, my observation is that the days of any author besides Tolkien getting 3-4 feet of shelf space are basically over. Instead, diversity is increasingly the rule there as well, with a much broader range of authors and seldom more than one or two copies of any single title. Things ARE changing far more than I think you give credit to here.
In the end, though, I would mostly just say that the idea that popularity is an indicator of quality is absurd to begin with. Popularity is more a sign that a book panders to some lowest common denominator, which is fine. But when it comes to giving out literary awards, I think the preference has always been (and hopefully will continue to be) to reward work that is inventive and fresh. Which is almost besides the point anyway.
You’ve listed all these authors off as if they are somehow indicative of the tastes of a mass audience, but I can’t think of anyone who has read more than a handful of these authors. Jim Butcher and Charlaine Harris and R.A. Salvatore might all have wide followings, but there’s not a lot of overlap between them. And the majority of the authors you’ve listed are most popular with adolescents, which is, again, fine, but not what I think most adults would consider the best work in the genre. I loved Terry Brooks’ Shannara books, but every trilogy in the last twenty years has been basically the exact same story with different character names–hardly award-worthy.
And regarding the Puppy slates in particular, I don’t think there is anyone suggesting that people–even theoretically adult persons in such a state of literary arrested development that their tastes never evolved past the age of 14 or so–shouldn’t be allowed to vote for work that they genuinely enjoy. By all means, let people vote for whatever they want. But the slates were bullshit, and such a completely indefensible action that I can’t help but feel incredibly disappointed at these sort of continued attempts to humor the Puppies and act as if they had anything sensible or useful to say about the state of the genre.
I note that in this comment you ascribe your changing tastes to age and maturity- and, no doubt, they play a part. However, you also note that “Increasingly, these works (formative for me as they were) have been displaced by work that is newer, fresher, and smarter.”
If the works you loved are being replaced by newer works, doesn’t that indicate, at least somewhat, that the “new and fresh” is what draws you in instead of any difference in quality? Pern was new and fresh in the ’60s.
I’d say it’s some of both, although at least some of the authors listed are very much one trick ponies, retreading the same ground with their work over and over again.
I would compare the work of someone like Terry Brooks, for example, to romantic comedy movies. Sure, it’s great when you’re young and don’t know any better, and it’s fun to consume sometimes for a change or a break from more serious stuff, but it’s basically the same formula over and over and over again. It’s a formula that works, and people often have a great appetite for it, but it’s not good, particularly.
Which is totally fine, and my shelf of Shannara books isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, just like I’m not going to stop watching Katherine Heigl movies anytime soon.
I wouldn’t say it’s any objective difference in quality, but I do think that there are sets of qualities that differentiate between pop work that is widely read and commercially successful and literary work that should be saved for posterity. I just think there are two very different types of cultural significance here, that are both valuable in their ways but that I don’t think can really be judged against each other.
You also bring up that Pern was new and fresh in the 60s, which is definitely true. And Anne McCaffrey won and was nominated for some awards for it then! Good for her! I love Anne McCaffrey, and the Michael Whelan cover for Dragonflight caused me to have maybe my first feminist awakening when I was about 11. But stuff that was fresh and new before I was even born isn’t still fresh and new now.
And literary awards generally tend to reward what is new and fresh. It’s not necessarily strictly a young person’s game, but the Hugos in particular have always tended to favor what was new and different. The types of authors who have 3 feet of shelf space have a tendency to write the same book over and over and over again, and that’s not how you win awards. It IS how you make a decent living as a popular novelist, though.
Hmm, interesting. So do you think that the Hugos could act more as a bellwether for up and coming authors (or trends)? I don’t have the inclination to come up with hard numbers on that count but it is a neat concept.
Nope. There are books I go back to which I see now are hackneyed in concept and execution, or simply bad writing. I read Ayn Rand as a teen and found her stimulating (and I was a liberal back then, too). I tried to re read it about ten years ago and I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages. It’s just terrible writing and plot, I don’t care what your political bent is.
Dear Lord Yes!!! “Atlas Shrugged,” one of those books I read as a teenager because I was told it was important. What a waste of time it was.
“Das Kapital” and “Wealth of Nations” had more plot, and wre a better read too.
Heck, even “Paradise Lost” was less turgid!
Jim Butcher and Charlaine Harris and R.A. Salvatore
For the hell of it (and I understand if this gets deleted as cruft), here are the authors from Eric’s lists I have read more than one book by (I’ll read one book by almost anyone) in my 57-year lifespan, a lot of it spent reading: Butcher, Card, Lackey, Tolkien, Weber, Flint, Herbert/Anderson, Huff, Martin, McCaffrey, Modesitt, Turtledove, Drake, Gemmell, Simmons, Stirling, Anthony (and Le Guin and Bujold, who are mentioned but not listed). For most of these, I’ve read something close to their complete works (burned out on Weber, Drake, and Martin).
Just one fan’s view.
Where was JK Rowling in that discussion? If she didn’t have four feet of shelf space in the SF&F section, it’s only because she had her own huge display table up front.
J.K. Rowling is generally shelved in the middle grade fiction section or under YA rather than in the regular SFF section.
She’s in YA or Teens or otherwise segregated from the SF&F shelves.
Though she also highlights another barrier between best-sellers and Hugos. Almost everyone Eric mentioned in his post writes series. Often epic unending series, or at least unfinished ones. But Hugos are not fond of installments in on-going series (unless they’re written by Bujold). The market seems to require one feature which is almost guaranteed to hurt the book’s chances at winning an award.
there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants
Indeed. Whereas in fact, like the Democrats in 2004, they were beaten but not robbed.
I’d add Seannan McGuire to the list of popular/shelf-filling/award nominating authors. Tons of books, loads of Hugo nods, a Campbell win, and she’s writing in the highly populist genres of urban fantasy and zombie apocalypse. The fact that she’s broken up into McGuire/Mira Grant may make shelf space measurements a two-step process. I’m not so sure we aren’t seeing a shift away from the literary and towards a different kind of populist/popular, but driven by a changing fandom.
As for myself, when I was a wee SF reader in the 1980s and 90s, I recall not thinking much of a “Hugo nominated” sticker on a book. It seemed to me that in the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of the stuff getting Hugo nods was lesser works by aging writers. (Note 1983, when Foundation’s Edge won. Who remembers the later Foundation novels that well? And Friday was a nominee, too, and far from Heinlein’s best work.) I loved Heinlein and Asimov, but it was their earlier stuff that hooked me. The stuff getting nominated later and turning up at my library wasn’t necessarily the best. The Nebula awards seemed a marginally better guide, and they weren’t perfect either.
I also agree with those commenting above that there are plenty of books I like that I wouldn’t necessarily nominate for a Hugo myself, even if I go back to that author over and over again.
Agreed. I used to take the Hugo as an indication of the author’s quality, but not necessarily the work’s, back in the 70s-90s. Many of the stories in The Hugo Winners, Vol. I are wince-worthy nowadays, but most of them are by very good authors.
Thanks for this detailed, factual piece. I’m still pondering the main message, but I’ve got one nitpicking question:
“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.”
I’ve heard that the online e-book market has sparked a new interest in short stories. Is this correct?
Yes. Well…
More precisely, the online e-book market has expanded the range of material that can be commercially published. Short novels in paper editions nowadays exist pretty much only in the venue of shared universe anthologies. Almost no print publisher will publish a 50,000 words story as a stand-alone volume, but you can sell that length successfully as an e-book.
The big advantage with electronic publishing is with novellas and short novels, not short stories. The problem with publishing short stories is that all the major commercial venues — Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc — will whack the author with a 65% distributor’s commission if they price something below $2.99. That makes selling single short stories something of a losing proposition unless you package several of them together.
The other day I reread Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. It was once a “normal” paperback . . . but I found it so refreshing that the thing wasn’t 900 pages long. 200 pages, in and done.
(Have no idea how many words that is.)
Yes, but that picture will almost certainly look different in a couple of years. Your points in the original post are more interesting.
The problem with all these analogies to Outback is that they’re missing the point altogether. Which is this:
Why did Hugo voters in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s vote for so many popular steakhouses and today they rarely do? That’s the key question.
many popular steakhouses and today they rarely do? Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe, just like the whole idea of a “chain steakhouse” didn’t exist in the 1960s, something has changed with the market such that we now have in writing the equivalent of “casual dining.”
You’re right. The market has shifted enormously in the direction of favoring series rather than stand-alone novels. That’s the literary equivalent, if you will, of popular restaurant chains.
It does not thereby follow, however, that all series are the same in terms of quality. As with the restaurant analogy, there are chains and there are chains. The same is true everywhere today: there are dollar store chains that sell clothing, but no one thinks a chain of stores like Nordstrom’s or Neiman Marcus sells the same quality clothing.
The problem is that there’s no award for series so there’s no good way for people who vote for awards to handle the issue of which series are better than others. The best anyone can do — which works occasionally but not most of the time — is to cram a series into the pigeonhole of “best novel.”
There is a committee to come up with a suggestion for series award put together at this year’s Worldcon.
Eric and I are on it.
Mortan’s and Ruth’s Chris are both chains
I think you already answered this elsewhere. Amount of choice.
There was far more selection available in 2007 than in the 60s. There’s an order of magnitude more available today than in 2007.
With a smaller selection sample you’re more likely to have an award winner/shelf space overlap.
Another thing to consider is that the original ideas of the 50’s and 60’s are the cliches of today.
Back then, they were forging the genres we’re reading today. They didn’t have 60 or 70 years of classic SF & Fantasy to read, be inspired by, and then riff on. So a higher percentage of what they did wasn’t derivative. Thus the appeal to the new and novel that is a big influence on awards like the Hugo.
And at the same time, there were less books produced, so each individual books was more apt to be read by a larger percentage of the reader base. Thus the mass market was much more likely to be reading those books which also got awards. (They also had more time to read long, involved books, with less distractions of today.)
Today we have a mature genre that has a whole playground of toys, cliches, ideas, themes, plot points, and character types to play with. Science Fiction and fantasy has developed an entire vocabulary that readers of the genre implicitly understand and bring to everything they read.
This shared vocab creates a fertile ground that allows for generating much more “comfortable reading” like a lot of the popular authors mentioned above write, IMO. (For example, Terry Brooks Shannara is basically Middle Earth by way of the Dying Earth. It’s why I enjoy his books. I love Tolkien. I love Vance. Why wouldn’t I? But he doesn’t break new ground the way his forebears did.)
At the same time you have both an EXPLOSION of books produced each year, and a mass market that is competing for the attention of a populous with TVs and movies on their phone! Such a hectic, distracting environment makes people more apt to buy what is comfortable and easy to understand and therefore quickly consumed a few pages at a time just before bed.
Sure, they may read a couple of challenging books a year if they are deeply invested in the genre or the challenge. But the mass market is going to read a lot more of the comfortable stuff because they’re faster, more quickly consumed and, well, more comfortable. How many leave the rat-race each day and not long for something comfortable to relax with?
But the Hugo awards (as they did in the 60’s & 70’s) still attempt to award the new, the groundbreaking, the challenging.
Thus does mass market and award quality diverge.
That’s my theory, anyway.
If there wasn’t a mismatch between popularity and Hugo performance, then there would be no point to the Hugo awards. We already have awards that are a pure popular vote (the Locus awards), and if the Hugos were also intended to go to the most popular works then any difference between the results of the Hugos and the Locus awards would simply indicate that there was something wrong with the voting methodology in at least one of them. In fact, of course, the Hugos are the awards given by the members of the Worldcon, not by popular vote of all SF readers, and one should certainly expect some differences between the tastes of Worldcon members and those of the wider SF-reading public.
But this is at the heart of the current confusion. Anybody can, and should, vote in the Hugo process for the cost of a membership – but that’s been parsed by some as the Hugo’s are voted on by the nebulous concept of ‘all fandom’.
Hugo Fandom is a small subset of all fandom and will always be so.
If people think it’s missing something they’re free to set up an alternative Award but basically people want to have their cake and eat it. They want the Hugo Awards to be what they think they ought to be because the Hugo’s mean something, and the reasons Hugo’s means something is because what they mean is rather tightly controlled and has been for decades.
I’d go further — you wouldn’t need awards. Just have the big publishers compare sales numbers and offer awards for the year. “Best Selling SF Book of 2015” and “Best Selling Author of 2015”, etc.
I own a LOT of David Weber books. Like a lot. (In more than one format, as I switch to electronic form). I wouldn’t nominate him for awards, unless it was a very specific type of award. (He’s good at what he does, he scratches a particular itch, but that itch ain’t ‘Best Sci-Fi of the Year’. Now if there’s an award for ‘Best Sci-Fi Age of Sail’ book? He’s got a couple of candidates there…)
There’s also the concept of investment. I get invested in a series. I LOVED Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. That kept my buying OSC books even as the quality (in my subjective opinion) declined, up until some point where I went ‘Eh, not worth it even in paperback’ and stopped.
Robert Jordan? The first three books had me buy the next five, up until I went “I just read 300 pages of people reacting to the events of the last 20 pages of the previous book. I’m out”.
Because, especially with series, you want to finish the story, you know? See what happens next. Not exactly a new concept (I do believe there’s this Arabian Princess that used that little bit of human psychology to keep her head).
So I’ll keep reading Honor Harrington books, for instance. I like the universe, the characters, I want to see where it goes. And cheerfully find it worth the money. But award winning? No.
Honestly, with the more prolific authors the only one who really kept me hooked, book after book, was Bujold. She’s a bit of an outlier to me personally.
In general, sequels sell. Like movies, they’re generally not as good as the original — even as the creator gets better at his craft. (Indeed, assuming they don’t fall afoul of self-editing or get anvilicious, they do get better technically. How could they not? Practice makes perfect).
I do think the Hugos would be improved by removing Best Editor Long Form (how am I supposed to vote on that?) and adding Best Series (three+ works), and then adding a best Young Adult award.
But I think the “shelf-space” metric is just inherently flawed, because as I said — readers get invested in a world or character and will happily devour ‘MORE’ even if the quality is not the highest. Heck, comic books live by that! And that doesn’t even get INTO the concept of ‘beach reading’ or ‘casual reading’.
Comfort food for the mind, perhaps.
Morat20 I agree with you mostly. I still read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series (and when is the next one, darn it?) but it’s not mind-expanding the way Stranger in a Strange Land, or Dune, or even Starship Troopers was.
But I don’t think that Weber could never write a Hugo-worthy book. The guy has a very offbeat imagination. Aliens invade and they are met by — Vampires! The Moon is a giant Space Battleship! A future warrior is possessed by — A Fury from ancient Greece! In my view, only one of those actually worked.
But . . . he could come up with something way cool and end up with a Hugo-worthy work. Now, if he does that, will he win? Thirty years ago, maybe. Today, doubtful.
The Hugos are a pure popular vote also — and neither the Hugos nor the Locus awards are based on the opinions of a mass audience. Both awards represent the opinions of very small subsets of the entire readership of F&SF.
But do we even *want* convergence of awards and popularity? Consider what is (arguably) the most famous annual award for a cultural work given today: the Academy Awards. What is the overlap between Nominees for the Big 4 (picture, director, actor, actress) and the top 10 box office earning movies? Here, at least, the data is reasonably public, where I took my data from boxofficemojo.com and wikipedia, if only for formatting ease. Abbreviations for Nominees shall be {P, D, Am, Af} for Best_{Picture, Director, Actor, Actress}, with (!) added for winners.
2000– overlap of two movies, _Gladiator_(P!,D,Am!) and Cast_Away(Am).
2001– overlap of one, The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring(P,D)
2002– overlap of two, _Chicago_(P!,D,Af) and The_Two_Towers(P)
2003– overlap of two, The_Return_of_the_King(P!,D!), and Pirates_of_the_Carribbean_1(Am)
2004– None
2005– None
2006– overlap of one, The_Pursuit_of_Happiness(Am)
2007– None
2008– None
——— here they expanded the nominee list for Best Picture
2009– overlap of two, _Avatar_(P,D), and _Up_(P)
2010– overlap of two, _Inception_(P), and Toy_Story_3(P)
2011– None
2012– None
2013– Overlap of one, _Gravity_(P,D!,Af)
2014– Overlap of one, American_Sniper(P,Am)
Basically, even with actual money at stake, (an Oscar does give a boost to sales, rentals, and ticket sales for movies still at theaters) the only way Hollywood found to signal boost the popular movies is this; they expanded the shortlist. Otherwise, the odds were 4/9 that the top ten movies wouldn’t even crack the Big 4 award categories. And actually looking at the list of top earners, I’m ok with the status quo.
And yet, we all have memories of rooting for a favorite series/movie at the Oscars; so how does Hollywood convince/fool us that the Oscars are relevant? By including awards for best song, costumes, special effects, and other ancillary roles. In a really odd year, sometimes the Supporting Actor(M,F) overlaps with the top 10, and so Heath Ledger’s Joker looms overlarge in our mind, but that still isn’t the truly coveted Best Actor award…
If we are to align the Hugos/Nebulas with popularity, we need to find new categories for the popular novels and series to win. As simple as that.
Jonathan Fisher
It’s not just movies either. TV shows on major networks have a lot more viewers than the shows on cable, pay, streaming networks. And yet the shows on cable, pay, streaming networks are the ones winning awards.
To complain about books popularity not matching up with awards is missing the point that in almost all popular culture, awards and popularity aren’t matching up. You can argue whether or not it’s a good thing, but it’s not related to any cabal or group, it’s everywhere.
The Academy Awards are notorious for playing games and not actually awarding the best work that year. Not the best example IMO. What do you remember better: The Dark Knight or Slumdog Millionaire? Which has a more lasting cultural impact?
Or, as I mentioned above, Saving Private Ryan or Shakespeare in Love.
Shakespeare In Love. That was a great movie! Hilarious and touching and sly.
Well, I myself chose to see Slumdog and Shakespeare (there’s a great title) and deliberately avoided Ryan and Knight (sounds like a couple of lawyers), so you know what my answer to that is.
I’m not a film buff, but I’ve read articles claiming that this divergence from popular taste in the Academy Awards is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before 2000, box office and Oscar winners overlapped much more frequently. If so, one wonders if there’s a shared cultural change going on in the background that’s affecting the Oscars and Hugos (and maybe other awards?) in a similar way. Not sure what it might be, though.
I’m a long time fan of SF/F (we are talking 55 years at least) and I’m familiar with just about every author on all your lists, except Feist. They might have at least three feet of books but I found that their subsequent books hardly ever live up to the first two or three. While now I will buy and read everything written by two or three on each list, I have quit reading a few of them, and some authors I make myself still read hoping for the best.
If others feel as I do, that there is a decline in quality over the years, this fact might explain the lack of additional awards.
Forgive the stilted English, but I’m a ESL reader.
(Trust me, I work with a lot of English-as-a-iFirst-Language writers, and your English is far above average.)
That was an excellent essay.
I think a key aspect of the issue you raise is novelty. Stepping away from your bookstore analysis consider Ursula Le Guin. She still has a profile and has been writing books, she is deeply loved by fandom and her books from the 1960s and 70s are regarded as key parts of the SF/F canon. Yet it is safe to say she isn’t going to win a Hugo.
I think the issue is less literary v popular as NOVELTY versus predictability. Jim Butcher writes great and entertaining books but none of them stand out. It is like a kind of reversal of the safety in a herd you see in wild animals. The same can be said of Anderson. Likewise Robin Hobb – I really enjoy her books but which one is the one that really stands out?
I think this were your shelf space analysis works really well despite the change in the world of bookstores since 2007. Commercially people would like to read another book just like the one they just read but different. Robin Hobb releases a new installment in her Fitz/Fool books then I’m happy (genuinely) because I like those characters and I like the complex world she has built around them (and extended in other series) and I will pre-order on my Kindle and gobble it up when it appears. But…that isn’t the same experience as I have when I find something different, like Jeff Vandemeer’s Annihilation or even something different by virtue of a classic style of story done really well such as The Martian. In a field in which there are acres of quality the Awards are going to act as a kid of reverse of the tall-poppy syndrome – the works sticking out are the ones that get picked.
It isn’t just about sagas or long running series. Even if we go back to an earlier age a multiple winner and nominee like Heinlien didn’t just write lots of book but he wrote a lot of very different books: Starship Troopers versus Stranger in a Strange Land. Contrast Heinlien with Philip K Dick – Dick was prolific and was a rich seam of concepts and ideas that has been repeatedly mined by others, but many of his books (which I adore) have a similar quality with similar characters placed in mind bending situations. It is notable that Dick’s most awarded book (The Man in the High Castle) is not a book that is most typical of his books.
Er, Le Guin has quite a few Hugos, one of which was also a “clean sweep” with the Locus and Nebula. She’s unlikely to win one today because she writes very little. I’m not sure what point you’re making.
(Although it is worth noting that this is yet another fatuous thing about the Puppy position; the awards now have been taken over by “SJW message-fic”, as opposed to all those years when Le Guin kept popping up on the ballot, because she never wrote anything about gender politics, race, etc?)
Oh, I would like to remind folks that Ennio Morricone, one of the most prolific Soundtrack Composers ever, has never won Best Soundtrack. If a giant like him can get overlooked even in a category tailor-made for him, is it really surprising that Sir Terry Pratchett missed out?
Awards are weird and fickle. They still have value, but no award system is perfect.
Jonathan Fisher
Sir Terry Pratchett is a special case though, he started turning down nominations as he didn’t like the process of waiting to find out if he won, and arguably he received the highest accolade that the WSFS can bestow when he was a Guest of Honour.
He was also a UK writer. Hugos have been pretty US centric — and I know Prachett has some troubles originally getting a US publisher, even after he had become pretty popular in the UK.
Hard to win “Best Novel” for a book that’s three years old by the time the mostly-US Hugo Audience gets a US version of it.
Indeed, which is why amazing writers of just the stuff that I’m assured the Puppies like, like Asher, Reynolds, Hamilton and others never get a look in.
But Morricone was nominated for an Oscar five times, and he won many, many other awards, including three Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, and five BAFTAs. He was hardly overlooked by the award-bestowing establishment. He was just up against tough competition.
What a fascinating discussion! Certainly “popular” is quantifiable, where “best” is subjective. I think any divergence between the two in the past could be put down partly to apathy. I have friends who have attended multiple Worldcons and never nominated or voted for the Hugos. They might love science fiction but they didn’t care about who won.
My only quibble with your post would be suggesting there s anything odd in Orson Scott Card not being nominated for a WFC award. I thought he wrote purely science fiction, and unlike the Hugos and the Nebs, which lump fantasy and SF together, I think WFC requires the winners be actual works of fantasy, doesn’t it?
Card certainly does not always write science fiction. His whole Alvin Maker series, for instance, is a magical (and Morman) fantasy version of the settlement of Ameria.
Card’s written fantasy, definitely. I remember Hart’s Hope, which was pretty consciously literary, and Songmaster. And more ambitiously, his Tales of Alvin Maker series — the first of which was a World Fantasy Award nominee, according to Wikipedia. (And the first four books in the series each won Locus’s best fantasy novel award.)
I suspect that Orson Scott Card is the exception that tests the rule. Eric has made an excellent case for nominations originating in factors other than judgments about the author’s political opinions. But Card, in recent years, has gone so completely off the rails that he could come out with the Greatest and Most Popular SF Novel Ever Written next year, and I’d still be shocked to see him get a nod for either Hugo or WFC.
Interesting analysis. Thank you for sharing it.
As the first person who suggested Jim Butcher’s SKIN GAME for Best Novel on the SP3 suggested slate, I saw the trends you mention years ago. I’ve been involved in the genre and conventions for quite a while, and let me bring up one instance of the disconnect between perceived quality and readability by the buying pubic as an anecdote.
At a major convention I was given a copy of Paul Park’s A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA. There were cases of this hardcover novel printed up to give out; nothing wrong with that. Tom Doherty himself lauded to me it in the green room, extolling the author’s “sentence-level writing.” I took it home and read it.
Sure, the “sentence level” writing was lovely but there were maybe two teaspoons full of plot in the entire book. I ended up not only muttering, “That’s IT?” but I threw it out rather than give it away and subject any of my genre friends to it. It was that hollow to me: all style and no substance.
Paul Park is a lovely person. I’ve been on panels with him. He knows his craft. Tastes differ, sure. But the fact cases of that particular hard-cover book were printed up and given out at a major convention tells me one thing. Part of the disconnect seems to be publishers hankering after the approval of a very small subset of genre readers. I got the impression that the publisher was not looking for bookstore shelf space. They seemed to be trying for a literary award.
In the case of Gaiman, for example, you see that literary and popular can overlap. But it’s rare.
Just to add another pothole to the discussion, I think that popularity can’t really be measured accurately until we figure out how to add libraries to the mix. I probably read 3 or 4 books a week, but 95% of them I get from my local public libraries. There are maybe 5 or 6 authors whose work I’ll buy when a new book comes out. Most of the time, at least (sorry, Eric, I don’t always buy your stuff, but pretty regularly).
Libraries rightfully refuse to publish lists of books read by their patrons. So that means that some unknown percentage of readers like me read many works which are never reflected in sales numbers. And without that, there’s no way to tell whether more people are reading John Wright or John Scalzi (I’ve read both, and I’ll keep my opinion of each to myself, thank you very much).
For what that’s worth. I live to over-complicate things.
You can’t find out what books library patrons read, but you can use the proxy information of what books do libraries buy. Are libraries buying Piers Anthony and Neil Gaiman books? Are they buying one copy or multiple copies? The more copies they buy, the more books and copies of books they believe their patrons will want to borrow (similar to the bookstores having books on shelves they think people are going to buy).
Ah, but there’s the rub: “The more copies they buy, the more books and copies of books they believe their patrons will want to borrow (similar to the bookstores having books on shelves they think people are going to buy)”. The operative term there is “believe”. We have NO idea how many people actually borrowed The Martian, for example, and read it. I, at least, did just that. At least for bookstores, there’s an argument to be made that sales figures are used to correlate shelf space used to sell new copies, which will more closely reflect popularity. If it doesn’t sell, it’s gone.
At best, basing an estimate of library readership on the number of copies bought by libraries presumes that the folks who read the same author’s last book will be reading their next book. It’s backwards looking twice removed. The library presumes a level of readership based on the performance of the last book, and we’re supposed to presume that every book purchased by the library is read at the same level. I suspect that it often doesn’t really reflect the actual reading stats of the latest book. The only thing it will reflect is how the author’s last book performed.
Which is my point. There’s no good way to estimate just how many people actually read Eric’s latest Ring of Fire book after borrowing it from the library. At best, it’s a guesstimate. At worst, it’s just a guess.
Hello Eric,
I’m posting this here because this is probably the best analysis of the whole issue and I’d like your opinion on something.
I came at the Sad Puppies / Hugo controversy as a fan of sci-fi books but a complete outsider to conventions and awards. However I came to the conclusion that Sad Puppies were right when Entertainment Weekly posted an article titled: “Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign”
(They’ve since updated the article, but you can find the origonal archived at: http://archive.is/0NH1i)
There’s also the case of Irene Gallo who called both Sad and Rabid puppies “They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic” I’ll give her Rabid but not Sad. (Source: http://www.themarysue.com/tor-irene-gallo/)
I’m pretty certain that the Sad Puppies are not particularly racist, (Brad Torgersen is in a long term successful interracial marriage for gods sake).
So my question to you is – where do these accusations of racism come from? If non-racists get that kind of abuse for running a voting slate (maybe unsportsmanlike-like but hardly on the level of racism) then it looks like the Sad Puppies successful exposed something rotten; perhaps not the rot they thought they’d uncover – but something rotten none the less.
So Eric, what did they uncover?
“If non-racists get that kind of abuse for running a voting slate (maybe unsportsmanlike-like but hardly on the level of racism) then it looks like the Sad Puppies successful exposed something rotten; perhaps not the rot they thought they’d uncover – but something rotten none the less.”
So with Sarah Hoyt calling anti-puppies “little Hitlers” have we successfully exposed something rotten on that side of the fence?
Eric is to be applauded for trying to squash this kind of back-and-forth and focus the discussion back onto the works and the awards themselves. Stop making it about the culture wars and make it about SFF.
The problem with the Sad Puppies is that they are their own worst enemy. Ordinary goofs shoot themselves in the foot, but the Sad Puppies insist on machine-gunning their legs below the knees — and last I saw, are still blasting away.
Let’s start with the fact that from the very beginning Larry Correia allied himself with Theodore Beale (aka “Vox Day.”) He began his “Sad Puppies” project by nominating one of Beale’s stories for a Hugo, knowing full well that Beale’s views on issues of race and gender would make his selection toxic to most people. Correia then used the reaction against Beale as “proof” that the Hugo voters are biased against political conservatives.
The charge was absurd — and was disingenuous on Correia’s part. He could have nominated works by such authors as Gene Wolfe or Mike Resnick, who are political conservative and FAR better writers than Beale, but he wouldn’t have gotten the explosive opposition he was looking for.
Since then, the Sad Puppies have continued to play footsie with Beale. Correia and another Sad Puppy, Sarah Hoyt, joined with Beale and the almost-equally toxic John C. Wright to form what they called the “Evil League of Evil Writers.” (To the best of my knowledge, Wright has never made the kind of statements on race that Beale has, but his violent statements concerning homosexuals are grotesque.)
I guess Correia and Hoyt thought that was witty as hell, in a juvenile ” épater la bourgeoisie” sort of way. The problem is that the association continues to tarnish them. That’s not helped by the fact that, although they have tried to distance themselves since from Beale — Correia posted a statement on his web site that “I’m Not Vox Day” and Torgersen and Hoyt have made similar disclaimers — they have never, to the best of my knowledge, severely criticized Beale’s stances in public.
A side note, here: The next time I see Brad Torgersen I’m going to demand that he explain why he’s never done what I did when he came to me and complained about Irene Gallo’s slander of the Sad Puppies. I criticized her statements bluntly and forthrightly and did so publicly. What I _didn’t_ do was weasel out of it by saying “Well, gee, I’m not Irene Gallo.”
Frankly, I’m tired of hearing them whine that they keep getting tarred by Beale’s brush. That’s because they’ve never made a clear and sharp break with him.
So that’s part of the problem. The other part is the bizarre insistence on the part of the Sad Puppies that the F&SF establishment is some sort of leftist cabal that is hell-bent on forcing all F&SF to be subordinated to the goals of the so-called “Social Justice Warriors.” For reasons which I have now laid out in great detail in several of my essays, this charge is simply laughable — not to mention disingenuous again, because the writings of the Sad Puppies or authors they like are ALSO characterized by the same sort of diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation that they decry in others.
Yet, they keep doubling down on the charges. That leads plenty of people — understandably if incorrectly — to suspect that there’s something else going on under the surface. Lots of people, especially ones who haven’t read the fiction written by the Sad Puppies and others they like, start assuming that if Brad Torgersen keeps shrieking about “affirmative action” being shoved down the throats of innocent readers that he has some sort of racial or gender bias and his public charges are simply the usual sort of right-wing dog whistles.
In point of fact, I don’t think such a bias really exists, at least in any major way. I think the real problem is that the Sad Puppies are pig-headed, self-righteous, seem to have a complete inability to even consider how they might look to people who don’t agree with them — and they are the most tactically inept group I’ve run across in a long time. The truth is that Theodore Beale has been playing them for damn fools from the beginning, and they still don’t seem to realize it.
Well said, Eric.
When the Sad Puppies characterized their liaison with Beale as “we’re Churchill and FDR, and he’s Stalin,” my eyes rolled so hard that I thought I might need medical attention. Uh, no, the Puppies are some chums who have ineptly tried to gain ground in a genre literary award, compounded with the inexplicable blunder of inviting a notoriously vicious hate-blogger and talentless writer/editor to be part of their effort.
Do we all see how this was not QUITE analagous to leading the world to Allied victory in WWII?
My impression of the Sad Puppies is that it’s a collective of seething anger that has no clear focus or direction, and which just keeps ricocheting incoherently through a collection of chosen touchstones (Hugo Awards! SJWs! John Scalzi! That dinosaur story! TNH! SFWA! WorldCon! CHORFs! We’re being persecuted! Tor Books! PNH! Marxists! Affirmative action! They started it! Etc., etc.)
Of COURSE Vox Day played them. This was so predictable, my cat could have foreseen it. And my cat isn’t very bright.
Sad Puppies: the pinball game?
That does it, somebody needs to design a pinball table now. I’m imagining giant dinosaurs and a huge caricature of Scalzi looming over the board, with side trips to Finland for extra points. The basic design of the CHORF monster I leave to the artist.
And the fact that PNH and the like have played let’s give Hugo’s to our friends mean nothing to you. And if you actually looked at those claims you just dismissed you might actually change your mind. And if you can’t see how the SJW’s played the let’s slander everybody card through various Online magazines you may actually be as bright as your cat. These same people were so kind to your father but who holds grudges.
There is for a fact an affirmative action movement institutionalized in SFF. How do you think these folks vote Hugos? The 30 locked out of the nominations by SP/RP push the exact same thing, and they do it every single day.
“Want non-white, non-Eurocentric, fantasy that’s really fucking good?†– TheOtherTracy
“Sofia Samatar â€@SofiaSamatar 1h My list (which is already growing, & will have to be updated!) of #horror by non-western writers/writers of color …â€
“Retweeted by Foz Meadows Nnedi Okorafor, PhD â€@Nnedi Feb 25 60 Black Women in Horror now on Smashwords (Free) …â€
“Retweeted by M J Locke A.C. Wise @ac_wise · Jul 11 My latest Women to Read post is at @sfsignal with @CarolineYoachim @erinmorgenstern @AlyxDellamonica & @mamohanraj …â€
“Dandy McFopperson @rosefox · 15h 15 hours ago @JonathanStrahan It was a really good year for queer and feminist SF/F.â€
“Rose Lemberg retweeted prezzey *Bogi Takács @bogiperson · Sep 29 just a reminder that i have a SF story with two #nonbinary #trans* protagonists :)… because yes.â€
“Rose Lemberg retweeted Daniel Fredriksson @thelovelymrfred · Sep 29 I’ve decided to start a book group celebrating queer, feminist and postcolonial SF/F. It shall be called @fabulations. RTs appreciatedâ€
“Bee Sriduangkaew â€@bees_ja 6h Just cobbled this together quickly – a very incomplete list of queer SFF published in 2013 I liked! …â€
“Alex D MacFarlane â€@foxvertebrae 7h I look forward to following it up with THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SF STORIES BY WOMEN in 2014, which, trust me, is going to be fucking brilliant.â€
“D Franklin @D_Libris · Sep 6 Impact of my reading habits; 4 books by women in a row feels normal, 3 books by men feels weird, wrong, and abnormal. 2 by men just about okâ€
“Feminist FrequencyVerified account â€@femfreq Really enjoyed the engaging mysteries set in compelling worlds full of people of colour found in Amanda Downum’s The Necromancer Chronicles.â€
“Aliette de Bodard retweeted Stefan Mohamed @stefmowords · 14h 14 hours ago HI TWITTER. Requesting recommendations for SF / fantasy / horror books from women / POC / LGBT writers please! TBR pile needs diversifying.â€
“Kameron Hurley retweeted Jenn Brissett @jennbrissett · 5h 5 hours ago 19 Science-Fiction And Fantasy Novels By Women Of Color You Must Readâ€
“Justine Larbalestier retweeted BGD @BlackGirlDanger · 17h 17 hours ago Here for #DiversifyAgentCarter. My partner and I love the show and it needs PoC, especially WoC, for us to keep loving and supporting it!â€
“Kameron Hurley retweeted Sofia Samatar @SofiaSamatar · Dec 12 a handy how-to guide: How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion by @kxraâ€
“Mikki Kendall retweeted Marjorie Liu @marjoriemliu · 13h 13 hours ago VONA, the nation’s only multi-genre workshop for writers of color, is now open for applicationsâ€
“Shveta Thakrar retweeted Foz Meadows @fozmeadows · 2h 2 hours ago Straight white male voices are the cultural default. Encouraging people to a) recognise this fact and b) step outside it is a positive thingâ€
“Jessica Valenti retweeted Jazmine Hughes â€@jazzedloon May 8 us again: here is the Writers of Color list. send it to friends, professors, Obama, but most of all, yr EDITORSâ€
“Retweeted by Natalie Luhrs Beth Wodzinski â€@bethwodzinski Feb 17 Today’s a great day to buy books by @maryrobinette and the other terrific women of SFF.â€
“Retweeted by P Nielsen Hayden Laurie Penny â€@PennyRed Apr 3 Fans, say it ain’t so – every writer and every director in the upcoming Dr Who series is a man?â€
“Retweeted by Kate Elliott Léonicka @leonicka · Aug 26 Are there advocates for diversity in publishing/literature in #NewZealand and #Australia? I wanna connect!â€
“Retweeted by Kate Elliott Léonicka @leonicka · Aug 26 I want to reach the point where all editors and publishers at Frankfurt are seeking projects by marginalized writers.â€
“I was trying to de-white my reading list a little bit, and was searching for writers of color…†– SFF author Andrea Phillips
“Malinda Lo @malindalo · May 1 #WeNeedDiverseBooks because only 10% of 2013 YA bestsellers were about characters of colorâ€
“Retweeted by Aliette de Bodard Tor Truslow @toritruslow · 14h SFF readers, check out @bees_ja’s timeline for recent series of tweets recommending stories featuring women & queer characters, good stuff.â€
“K Tempest Bradford retweeted Anna Hutchinson â€@anna_verity 23h23 hours ago White dudely authors being white and dudely and gross, get out of my life.â€
“Saladin Ahmed â€@saladinahmed 16h Here are ten of my favorite epic fantasy novels with ‘nonwestern’ settingsâ€
“Retweeted by Jaymee Goh Crossed Genres â€@crossedgenres 5h We just backed @ceciliatan’s Best Bi Short Stories: Anthology of Bisexual Literary Fiction Two days left!â€
Is the fact that Sarah Hoyt was in no way involved in Sad Puppies 2, or that she has publicly stated her “revulsion” at the views of Vox Day at all relevant to your description if her juvenile attitude and dedication to “machine-gunning” herself? Or the fact that you AND Tom Doherty were accused of “misogyny” and “public shaming” for having the gall to denounce (or even disagree with) Irene Gallo’s description of the Sad and Rabid puppies as “Neo Nazis”? When you find yourself on the opposite (or at least less critical of the opposite) side of an issue from a man whose least impressive accomplishment is killing actual Nazis, chances are you’re on the wrong side. Sad Puppies 1 had nothing to do with Vox Day. Sad Puppies 2 had Vox Day as a nominee because Larry felt he represented the other side of the coin from folks like Mary Robinette Kowal and Requires Hate, plus he was happy to piss off people who had (in and after Sad Puppies 1) already called him a rape apologising, victim-blaming misogynist whom they didn’t “feel safe” (Mary Robinette Kowal, in one of her finest moments) going to the same con or being in the same room as. Sad Puppies 3 was supposed to be led by Sarah (Larry wasn’t interested anymore) but she has a severe autoimmune disorder (or something in that vein) and had to step down. Brad, boyscout that he is, stepped up and decided he would try and show it was possible to get Hugoless but Hugo-worthy authors and editors etc on the ballot without blowing the whole thing up. He was proven wrong, as the “antipuppy” folks proceeded to naively dance to Theodore Beale’s tune. You say we Sad Puppies were used by Beale? Remind me, who voted “No Award” in five categories again? Oh. Right. The folks who *didn’t* shoot themselves in the foot. The non-sad-puppies. I’ll stick with Dave, Sarah, Amanda, and Kate, thanks. They (even the Impaler, Kate) make for more pleasant, intelligent and less generally revolting company. I’ll include you in that, as well (more pleasant, etc company than the antis) if saying so doesn’t make me sound too boorish. Damn it’s hard writing comments on a phone!
Be well. :)
“When you find yourself on the opposite (or at least less critical of the opposite) side of an issue from a man whose least impressive accomplishment is killing actual Nazis, chances are you’re on the wrong side.”
To whom are you referring? A bunch of Stalin’s generals killed metric tons of Nazis, and yet I feel free in opposing at least some of their (and his) beliefs and actions. The mere fact that someone was a valiant warrior in a good fight doesn’t render them incapable of error, nor does it mean we can’t criticize them if necessary. One could, in fact, argue that many of the classic Greek tragedies were based on this unpleasant reality.
Not yelling. Just curious.
Peter Grant. He killed Nazi’s, served as a prison chaplain, saved lives and was shot in the process. (I’m summarizing from memory, so pardon if the events are out of order or otherwise imprecisely expressed) He’s a damn fine human being, and while he doesn’t consider himself a “puppy” he has certainly been less critical of us (our goals or our methods) than Mr. Flint has. He has shed at least as much (of his own) blood in defense of freedom and “social justice” as any of the keyboard warriors involved in this kerfuffle. Quite possibly more. But even if we say that Peter is oon the same side as Mr. Flint (neutral) I still would feel uncomfortable standing on the opposite side of the table (or issue) from Dave Freer or Sarah Hoyt.
(pardon the alias jumping. I posted the comment you replied to from my phone. Now I’m on my PC.)
PS: of course being a good warrior doesn’t render one invulnerable to disagreement or error, etc. But when being a good warrior, and having fought such an evil enemy, are only the beginning of the impressive list of good things you’ve done for the world, I become significantly more inclined to give serious thought to the things you (or Peter) say before deciding that I disagree with them. If that makes sense. *shrug* ;-)
Are we talking about the same Peter Grant? According to the Goodreads bio I found, he was born in 1958. That is, of course, 13 years after WWII ended and most Nazis stopped fighting. Which makes him my age more or less.
My father fought Nazis. But he’s been dead for 10 years.
Not to deny Mr. Grant all possible encomiums for his good works and Christian behavior, but from a review of his blog, I think it fair to say that he may be of the conservative persuasion. I note, in passing, that he posted in October 2012 a post entitled “Societal collapse – A DEADLY SERIOUS WARNING” in which he stated that so far as he was concerned, the odds were very good that by the end of 2012 there would be a “breakdown in the basic structures of society, to a greater or lesser extent.” So I’m not particularly persuaded by his support of the Puppies and Vox Day (you can find his thoughts on the same if you click on the tag “Political Correctness” under Blog topics).
So, meh. Likewise, name checking Dave Freer (whose work I like) or Sarah Hoyt (whose work I don’t like) doesn’t do much to convince me. There are so-called SJWs whose politics I agree with whose work I don’t like. And there are folks like Mr. Freer and others whose work I like a lot but whose stance on this whole fracas leaves me saddened. Oh, well. As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, Selah.
I’m sorry. I’ve spent too much time on this argument already, and frankly I find it rather tiresome. As I said in another post below, this strikes me as way too much of a tempest in a teapot, with much vituperation and little calm. On both sides. Oh, well. To quote Hunter S. Thompson (quoting the Bible), Selah.
And I double-quoted HST. Shows you how tired I am.
Peter Grant fought Nazis (the “neo” brand, but just as evil and genocidal.) in South Africa. As for the rest of your post…well, I’m sick and tired of this bull$h!t too. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to lend my vote to No Award next year and hope at least two categories are no awarded two years in a row, thereby eliminating them. They can keep whatever ruins (or fully intact trash) remain after that. I’m done and fed up. May David Gerrold choke on an asterisk. After next year I wash my hands of this particular front of the ever growing, increasingly violent culture wars. Sadly, I see nothing but clouds on the horizon for this world. I could wish I wouldn’t have to be here for the rain those clouds will produce, but I fear that’s a luxury I’ll not be granted. Be well.
(on the PC this time)
Oh, by the way? Peter Grant survived an *actual* collapse of civilization and society. In South Africa. So I think it’s understandable he’d be a little more inclined to pessimism on that front, wouldn’t you agree? If I’d been through that disaster, *I’d* be jumpy about the possibility of it happening again myself. But hey, what’re logic and basic empathy good for if they don’t let you disparage the value, worth and validity of another person’s opinion by implying they’re “the end is nigh!” style nutjobs? Good on ya for that one. (sarcasm)
Good day.
Eric,
I was in a discussion one someone else’s page (I’m drawing a blank, not Foz, but someone similar) a couple weeks back that I think explains the difference between the Puppy authors diversity and what they’re criticizing.
A lot of it comes down to how the book is sold/advertised. You provided alternate descriptions of several Puppy-author books int your “Do We Really…” post. But their books aren’t sold with those descriptions, and I probably would have skipped some of those books after having been bored by some books that Were sold with that style description. When a book is being sold, for example, as “Half-asian in poly relationship navigates starting a family and her military duties” (aka Honor Harrington, At All Costs), that description signs to me that the military duties are secondary to the ethnic and alternate family arraignments in the story and plot.
While the other blogger (whats her name damnit) and I disagreed in how much those signals should be in a description, we both agreed that it is something that affects how a book is viewed and publicized.
I think that is what is driving the view that there is “affirmative action”. When books are primarily being advertised using those categories, people who aren’t interested in those categories can easily feel that it’s those categories that are causing the book to be advertised, not the plot or storytelling ability of the author.
Peter –
Ah, but advertising isn’t the same as word of mouth.
Here’s the blurb from Amazon for each of the last 5 Hugo winners for Best Novel:
2014 – Ancillary Justice: “On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren – a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.â€
2013 – Redshirts: “Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on “Away Missions” alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to realize that 1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces, 2) the ship’s senior officers always survive these confrontations, and 3) sadly, at least one low-ranking crew member is invariably killed. Unsurprisingly, the savvier crew members below decks avoid Away Missions at all costs. Then Andrew stumbles on information that transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.â€
2012 – Among Others “Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment. Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled–and her twin sister dead. Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England-a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off…â€
2011 – Blackout-All Clear: “Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, and dive-bombing Stukas—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.â€
2010 – (Tie) The City and he City: “When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.â€
The Windup Girl: (No amazon blurb, but Publishers Weekly blurb on Amazon site); “Noted short story writer Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories) proves equally adept at novel length in this grim but beautifully written tale of Bangkok struggling for survival in a post-oil era of rising sea levels and out-of-control mutation. Capt. Jaidee Rojjanasukchai of the Thai Environment Ministry fights desperately to protect his beloved nation from foreign influences. Factory manager Anderson Lake covertly searches for new and useful mutations for a hated Western agribusiness. Aging Chinese immigrant Tan Hock Seng lives by his wits while looking for one last score. Emiko, the titular despised but impossibly seductive product of Japanese genetic engineering, works in a brothel until she accidentally triggers a civil war. This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, which recalls both William Gibson and Ian McDonald at their very best, will garner Bacigalupi significant critical attention and is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.â€
None of these books is advertised as a win for diversity, although some, but not all, of them include diverse characters and/or settings. I suspect a better argument could be made that there’s lots of fantasy in the list versus hard SF, but the Hugos themselves are described as “…awards for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy†(the Hugo Awards website). So what you seem to be saying (correct me if I’m wrong) is what drives decisions is the word of mouth (or the Internet buzz) about the books in question. Or it could be that some authors get people so wound up, either positively or negatively, that the advertising doesn’t matter at all.
I could go into a long discursive argument about what the Sad Puppies (note I’m leaving the Rabid Puppies out of the mix) said they wanted at different times versus what they promoted, and how what they said they wanted seemed to change as Mr. Torgersen wrote in his blog and his responses to others’ blogs, but that’s all been worked over and over. I will point out that to my relatively non-involved eye, a lot of this came down to something along the lines of “We/I didn’t like these books, and they won. That’s not right!â€
Seems like an awful lot of hard words, bad writing and hurt feelings have been expended in the last six to twelve months over something so ultimately small.
… although
The Evil League of Evil Writers appears to be a witty reference to the ELE from Joss Whedon’s Hugo winning “Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog” Well it amused me anyway.
“Why did Hugo voters in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s vote for so many popular steakhouses and today they rarely do?”
Did they? You say anyone your age knows perfectly well they did. Well, I’m not quite your age, but I’m not so sure– I’d like to see statistics that show that there *was* such a big overlap, and this isn’t just an artifact of selective memory.
I am old enough to look back at things like the Billboard top hits of the 1970s, and being surprised at what turns up there. There are some things I expect– classics, and things everyone remembers as emblematic of the time. But there are also lots of entries where I go “I can’t believe *that* song was #1 for weeks” or even “I have no memory of that song at all, even though it clearly sold lots of copies.”
There’s also a list at Berkeley of the overall best-sellers each year in the 20th century, alongside other books that got wide critical acclaim or are remembered as significant: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~immer/booksall A lot of the books on the “best-seller” side are almost entirely forgotten now, despite selling many more copies the year they came out than those on the “significant” side.
If anyone does have statistics (or shelf photographs) showing what really were the biggest sellers in SF of the 50s through the 80s, I’d be interested in seeing it. I would guess there would be a number of surprises– books that sold very well at the time, but that now hardly anyone remembers, and that didn’t get awards or other lasting acclaim. And while I’m sure there would be some overlap between top sellers and award winners, I’m not sure how much there actually would be.
Well, Heinlein won four Best Novel Hugo Awards, and he was always a top seller. He busted out of the SF ghetto with his short fiction; his juveniles sold like crazy, and then his later work hit the NY Times bestseller list on a regular basis — really the first SF writer to do that.
Today he is less relevant, but his sales were huge.
“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.”
Eric, forgive me, but this statement is . . . asinine. Absolutely asinine. You think it is “objective truth” that these authors have shaped the field of fantasy? REALLY? You think that these authors are producing the most popular (under any rubric) works of this past quarter of a century?
Jim Butcher has done a lot for urban fantasy, and Robert Jordan helped form the standard of massive epic fantasy tomes. Robin Hobb has some popular and well-loved series. But tell me, when has Terry Brooks ever been cited as anything but a hack? What did David Eddings add to the field of fantasy that other (and far more popular) authors had not already done, and better? When has Terry Goodkind ever been cited for anything but a quick slide into self-indulgent writing (and that ridiculous chicken scene!)? Which of Mercedes Lackey’s long backlist do people immediately jump to recommend when discussing fantasy? How many people can even cite a single one of Raymond Feist’s books without having to look it up?
Part of the issue is the fact that award systems aren’t yet set up to reward series. But a REALLY major part of the issue is the fact that no award has a “Best Author” category, yet you’re trying to talk about authors here instead of talking about their books. Just because an author is prolific, it does not follow that any single one of their books is popular, important in shaping the genre, or anything of that sort.
And these “popular” authors you cite here have, with a few exceptions, produced a large body of incredibly forgettable work. Nobody’s angling to give them awards because the whole point is that their books HAVEN’T shaped the body of fantasy work. They’ve been producing largely disposable work, books that you read once and then promptly forget about. (And there’s nothing wrong with that! But why should a book that people forget about quickly be given an award, just because its author writes a lot of books that people forget about quickly?) I’m sure Mercedes Lackey is a lovely person, but which of her books do you think will still be read decades from now? What about Raymond Feist? If they’re so popular, surely we can give a good list of some individual books that are particularly popular, right?
Or the other authors you list. Piers Anthony is known for his Xanth series, but which of them do you think was ever the best book of the year, by any conceivable metric? I haven’t even heard of Robert Asprin. Anne Bishop is known for her Black Jewels series—a series probably better known for its romance aspects (well, rape-y aspects) than for its fantasy content. Also, it’s a series, which the award systems aren’t set up to reward. (Though it looks like she did win the Crawford award for the first three books.) David Drake? I can’t even name a single one of his books, and I’ve READ his books in the past—they were that forgettable. David Gemmell, the same situation. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books are, again, part of a long-running series whose individual components aren’t seen as award-worthy because they don’t stand on their own. (And the later ones were not very good, in the eyes of many.) SM Stirling has produced some interesting series works, but it seemed to me that some of them (I’m thinking of his “Draka” series and his “Nantucket” series) could have been better-written. Tad Williams is best known for his “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” quartet. If Tad’s upcoming trilogy is up to par, it’ll probably be in the running for awards. (If he fills it with forgettable cliches, it won’t be.)
Awards reward books, not authors, so why in the name of all of sanity are you talking about authors without even mentioning their books?
Every single part of your long post consists of your personal opinions on various authors. You are of course entitled to those opinions, but they have nothing to do with objective reality.
YOU don’t decide which authors do and don’t play the biggest roles in shaping fantasy. Neither do I. That decision is made by the collective judgment of the mass audience. So, while YOU may not have a high opinion of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, for years now millions of people have been watching a very popular TV series based on the books. Likewise, while YOU may dismiss Terry Brooks as a “hack,” a huge number of people disagree with you.
The term “shapes fantasy” has an objective meaning. The sort of fantasy that will get produced in the future will be heavily influenced by the sort of fantasy that’s very popular today. Whatever you may think of the authors who produced it. Your opinion is simply one of millions. Thazzit. It has no greater weight than that of anyone else.
Let’s forget books for a moment. Your stance is equivalent to saying that it’s “asinine” to claim that the STAR WARS movies had an enormous impact on since fiction and continue to shape the way SF develops. And the reason it’s “asinine” to say that is because….
Well, dammit, YOU DON’T AGREE.
But leaving aside opinions of the worth of particular authors, Tracy has a point.
You keep saying, “this author has not won an award”, but the Hugo is given to books, not authors. An author who writes a lot of quite-good books is going to take up a lot of space on the shelves. But the award is not for having a long career, or consistently being better than mediocre. The award is for the best book written that year (in the eyes of the voters, of course)
Your thesis presupposes a disconnect between popular authors and Hugo (well, any fantasy award) winners. You claim that certain authors are incredibly popular and have objectively shaped the genre, and cite as evidence . . . shelf space. You never ONCE discuss any of these authors’ books. If they are so incredibly popular, and they actually shaped the genre, it should be pretty easy to state why, wouldn’t it? (“Merely because they exist” isn’t a good answer, though. And that’s all I see in this essay.)
What’s more, you got angry when I gave my opinions on these authors’ books (I gave those specific book opinions intentionally, because I was amazed that you’d be willing to speak up for these authors but seemingly didn’t want to even mention their books!), and tried to claim that 1) neither of us can tell what’s shaping the genre while 2) “Shaping the genre” is actually an objective thing. THAT MAKES NO SENSE.
People DO base the future of the genre on what’s popular now. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series (still incredibly popular, decades after its publication) spawned hordes of imitators, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games popularized the YA dystopia, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series reconfigured the vampire genre, Rowling’s Harry Potter series coined an entire lexicon and created the prototypical “wizard school” (among many other accomplishments), Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is famous for recontextualizing fantasy tropes and is one of the literary parents of the grimdark movement, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series was the prototypical comedic fantasy with social themes. They created famous characters, famous locales, famous plotlines. All of these have objectively shaped the genre in some tangible way, because all of these have had lasting effects ON the genre. (“Shape” is a verb, after all. You don’t shape anything merely by showing up.) Future writers will (and some already have) base their writing on these works.
But who is basing their books or writing on the works of Raymond Feist? (Seriously, if you can list some books, that would go a long way toward bolstering your argument.) Terry Brooks has been writing the Shannara books for decades now—if he were shaping the fantasy genre, we should be able to see it by now. The same for Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, and the rest. But nothing in your essay actually delineated anything popular or famous or influential about these books.
Because it seems to me that, with a couple of exceptions (Jim Butcher, Robert Jordan, potentially Robin Hobb) you gave a long list of authors who AREN’T popular enough to actually shape the genre. You didn’t list the “Star Wars”s of the SFF genre, you listed the soap operas: long-running, yes, and popular in a particular metric, but not even CLOSE to the popularity of the tv series and movies that are actually shaping the field.
I can’t speak for Eric, of course, but the reason why I’ve been thinking about this whole subject for the past 6+ months in terms of authors is because that’s how it was initially presented by the Puppies: as a criticism of the awards on the basis of popular authors never having won an award, and, in the more disgusting subset of Puppydom, on the accusation that the award had been given on an “affirmative action” basis (i.e., as a “reward” for the author’s race/ethnicity/gender/etc. rather than on the quality of the work)
I agree with Eric here. I don’t particularly care for some of those authors but their impact on the new epic fantasy from the late ’70s on is undeniable. It doesn’t matter if someone reads them today or 50 years from now. Their influence is already baked into the generation which came after. The Thieves’ Worlds anthologies were huge successes. My memory says a couple million sold. I may be remembering that wrong. Who knows them now?
Thank you for a very thoughtful and informative essay on the this subject.
ttyl
Farrell
Interesting analysis, Eric — thoughtful and backed up with data. But I do think you skipped really quickly (as in, one paragraph) over a key point: that most Hugos and Nebulas go to short fiction, which does not usually occupy space on bookstore shelves. (I have six Nebulas and two Hugos, ALL for short fiction.) Thus, adding up “wins” and comparing them to shelf space is a bit misleading over-all. Some writers, and I am one, I think, are just better at shorter lengths than at novel length. And many very popular novelists don’t write short fiction at all, further diminishing their chances to win an award.
I’m not making any value judgments, Nancy. You’re not the only author who’s more comfortable — and probably better, although “better” is a value judgment — at shorter lengths than at novel length. Probably the classic illustration in our genre is Harlan Ellison. Mike Resnick produces a lot of novels but I personally think his best writing comes at shorter lengths — and obviously the Hugo voters agree.
The only point I’m trying to make, and have been since I wrote my first essay, is that _whatever_ is causing the divergence between popularity in terms of the mass audience and the focus of F&SF awards, it causes a problem for the awards themselves because over time a smaller and smaller percentage of the audience for F&SF pays any attention to them. If people don’t recognize many of the names being nominated, they tend to ignore the awards altogether. For good and ill — and, again, I’m not making any judgments — that’s how it works. The same phenomenon is very noticeable with the Oscars. The number of people who watch the Academy Awards varies greatly from year to year depending on which movies are nominated.
Personally, I think the only viable practical measure to diminish the gap is to create at least one new award that recognizes the huge changes in the industry over the past few decades. The simplest and most straightforward would be to create an award for series.
Nancy (can I call you that?) don’t sell yourself short. I would have given After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, a Hugo Award for Best Novel. In a weird way, it reminds me of The Three Body Problem, which I voted for this year, and which did win.
But it wasn’t SF comfort food, by any stretch.
Looking at isfdb.org, almost all of the 22 writers cited above write little or no short fiction now. Some, like George R. R. Martin and Anne McCaffrey, used to write a lot of short fiction but switched to novels. Some have never written much in the way of short fiction (Ringo, Salvatore, Lackey, Feist, Goodkind, Huff, Bishop, etc). Orson Scott Card still published short fiction but mostly in his own magazine. Eric Flint’s short fiction is almost all in the 1632 universe and published in the Grantville Gazette. Two of the authors on those lists are still extensively publishing short fiction in the “major” short fiction markets. One is Harry Turtledove, who works in the often overlooked genre of alternate history (as do you, Eric – I adore the 1632 universe). The other? Neil Gaiman. Coincidence? Maybe.
I think there’s one other factor missing: series. If the first book in a series was nominated, later volumes sometimes are, but it’s rare to see a mid-season work nominated, especially if the earlier volumes weren’t.
I didn’t Skin Game this year because I’m way behind that series and didn’t have time to catch up. I also didn’t read Ancillary Sword because I didn’t especially like Ancillary Justice – had it been in the packet, I would have sampled it, but with limited time and money, I didn’t get around to it.
Most of the authors with a lot of shelf space write series rather than standalone. They well because people like those series. But award nominations are tilted toward standalone works – not 100%, but enough to go a long way toward explaining the predominance of newer and less well known authors.
Eric, you’ve taken this analysis forward very well. I’m used to steering physics grad students into productive problems for their thesis, and you’ve performed admirably. Using real data is essential.
“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.” Yep!
I never sought popularity, just wanted to enjoy writing, so as you say, I’ve won the only award that really matters. So have you, my friend. Thanks for all this!
Might I suggest perusal of USED bookshops? Particularly authors sorted into the genre versus those in the “All Titles $1” section?
Irrelevant nitpicking:
The reference to “Edward Downey, Jr.” as the star of the recent Sherlock Holmes movies should be to “Robert Downey, Jr.”.
Slightly relevant nitpicking:
One of the things that can distort the bookshelf-tape-measure metric is the possibility of some books being thicker than others. David Weber comes to mind rather quickly as a representative of the thick end of the spectrum, and I’m fairly certain that there are others on both ends. Also, anthologies, multiple-story collections, and multiple-author works can raise the issue of which author to attribute them to. I’m fairly certain that these can’t be taken into account, because if they are, the issues would never stop, and we’d go on ad infinitum.
Agreed: “shelf space” is not the same thing as “number of copies”. In Eric’s survey, Terry Pratchett is a 4-footer, while George R.R. Martin is a 3-footer. But Pratchett’s books tend to run about 340 pages (less than one inch wide), with quite a few while Martin’s most popular books (at least recently) regularly exceed 700 pages and can be twice as wide.* So does Pratchett deserve a special, honorary “virtual 5-footer” category? Does Martin belong in a “more like 2-footer” category?
I know it’s not a fair objection, since the shelf-space rule is nowhere near an exact ranking anyway. But it’s worth mentioning.
And PS to Eric: what bookstores do you shop in that ANY author gets even three feet of shelf space, much less four, and can I go to one of these stores without taking air transport? (I’m possibly handicapped because my local bookstores are in the Chicago Loop, where real estate square footage is extremely limited).
___________________
* In the spirit of getting actual data: a survey of 40 of Pratchett’s books at the local library yields an average 324 pages, with a median 348 — call it 355 to cover the difference plus front- and back-matter. The average length of ASOIAF paperbacks s 842 pages. My paperback copy of Small Gods (the Pratchett book closest to my desk) is 383 pages including f&b matter and is just shy of an inch wide. My copy of A Game of Thrones, the shortest in its series, is 1 3/8 inches wide, and that’s with ultra-thin paper that I suspect more recent editions.
…that I suspect more recent editions have improved upon.
Well done sir, and it’s been interesting to read the comments. I’m a little older than you, and I agree with the premise/documentation you’ve provided. Thank you!
On one hand, many of the authors you listed have, in my opinion, produced mostly forgettable work – which probably hasn’t changed how SF&F is written. I suspect that producing unforgettable work consistently over long periods is not manageable for most people. (Vinge might be an example of this…) That said, I think the awards would be more relevant if they stuck more closely to my judgement of good tradeoffs between literary merit/experimentation and readability. :)
On the other hand, many of the recent nominees and winners remind me very much of an exhibit I visited at a museum. The artist had chosen to make some sort of point by painting lightbulbs dull colors and then photographing them. I’d characterize that work as worse than forgettable – and simply, painfully, almost clever. (Reds…cough)
On the third hand, even the Oscars are subject to Oscar vehicles as movies – which I’d define as lousy movies structured to win their participants awards.
To be fair to the SP, if your books aren’t winning and you are experiencing the sort of hostility directed at an obnoxious conservative by a largely liberal audience, it isn’t crazy to jump to SP-like conclusions. Wrong, overall, but not crazy or particularly a sin. [Well, until you posit a sustained conspiracy run by literary types…]
Used bookstores are interesting. Unfortunately, there is a strong anti-correlation between stock and quality. (so frustrating…) So, I don’t think they are a good direct measure of influence. If you controlled for stocking in bookstores and compared the used stock, it might give an idea of quality? Probably way too much noise.
A series award would reduce the gap and recognize the medium in which most professional writers work. Did it pass/fail/or is it yet to be voted on?
Sent to committee.
if your books aren’t winning and you are experiencing the sort of hostility directed at an obnoxious conservative by a largely liberal audience, it isn’t crazy to jump to SP-like conclusions
Except you’re confusing cause and effect. Fandom wasn’t a universal love-fest, but (in my experience at least) it also lived largely (and blessedly) outside of the binary culture war division that seems to infect every aspect of life these days. With the exception of particularly poisonous characters like Vox Day/Theodore Beale, the actual hostility from the liberal “side” didn’t begin until the accusations of political bias. (Indeed, the “sides” didn’t even form until the Puppy stunts began.) The hostility that Eric is so intelligently trying to dissipate was predictable – no one likes to be accused of unfairness, especially on the basis of evidence as flimsy as “Your tastes in literature don’t match mine!”
(And FWIW, if you are a conservative writer with an unappreciative “largely liberal audience”, then your problem isn’t the bias of your readers, it’s the competence of your publisher’s marketing department.)
As for the quality of offerings at used book stores – agreed, they are problematic. People tend to hold on to stories they enjoyed, and sell the forgettable stuff. There’s also a big showing of bulk-purchase overstock stuff, or books distributed by Book-of-the-Month type companies — also an indicator of publisher or bookstore estimates of the market rather than of reader enjoyment.
Sorry, you just didn’t see it. Toni confirmed that the Liberal bias has been there for many years. It didn’t start with the puppies.
Brilliantly done, and you proved your point: the awards have drifted away from the tastes and opinions of the main audience.
Today, there is one notable exception to the split between popularity and and awards, which is George R R Martin. He is enormously popular now, and is also the darling of the awards.
His popularity is due, however, not to his writings on their own merit, but to the fact that HBO picked them up and made movies from them, and that these high budget movies feature wimmin with nekkid +i++ies.
Hmm, that’s how he entered popular consciousness, true. He was selling millions of copies before HBO, however.
My hope is that the record number of Hugo voters this year (Sasquan) stick around and nominate what they like next year, and vote for their favorite nominees. There’s no way to know if that will change anything or not, which is what makes it interesting.
Excellent essay, Eric. But I’d add one point. Why would anyone think the Hugos SHOULD reflect the mass market in the first place?
As I told Brad early last year before I decided to clear the area from the coming train wreck, it’s their show. They (WSFS) make the rules, and if the puppies or anyone else doesn’t like them they are free to create and fund their own awards. I’ve seen awards that are explicitly only open to women or minorities or people who reside in Alabama. So what? Other awards are only looking for stories with certain outlooks or themes. So what? Clarksworld, Analog, Azimov’s, and the editors at Tor and Daw and Baen all have their own interests and tastes, their own slice of the market they believe they can serve, and so that’s what you send them. So what?
So what is the Hugos stare at the trees? The market already rewards the forest. And if the problem is that some up and comer thinks he needs a Hugo for the publicity boost–then he is free to write whatever he thinks the Hugo dominators are looking for–he or she or it.
That shouldn’t be such a problem, ight, for a such a great and and gifted creator?
I don’t disagree with you, in principle. There is no reason that the Hugos — or any other award — needs to reflect the tastes and opinions of the mass audience. It is perfectly legitimate to hand out awards based on purely literary criteria and damn what the mass audience thinks. In the same way, it’s perfectly legitimate to publish magazines that select stories which they feel are either of high literary quality or are in some way “cutting edge,” and to hell with whether they’re all that popular.
Just be aware of the inevitable consequences. In the case of literary magazines, their circulation is likely to be limited and they’re usually not going to pay authors very well. In the case of awards, if they diverge too far from the opinions and tastes of the mass audience, the awards will cease having much if any influence on what the mass audience thinks in the first place.
An SF convention is basically a bunch of fans announcing “hey, we’re throwing a massive party, if you can help us cover the cost of the venue you’re welcome to join usâ€. Only a particular kind of SF fan is going to be interested in cons; even among those, only a particular kind is going to be interested in Worldcon; and even among Worldcon members, not all of them vote on the Hugos. The Hugos are the part of Worldcon that are most visible to the rest of the world, but ultimately they are one limb of Worldcon as a party, not the crowning accomplishment of Worldcon as the parliament-of-fandom. Worldcon in no way depends on the prestige of the Hugos or the sales figures of Hugo-winning works, so I’m not sure why the people running Worldcons should care deeply about preserving or enhancing that prestige.
(I personally have never been to a Worldcon and didn’t start voting on Hugos until the Puppies made them a political football; if the Puppy movement evaporated I’m not sure how much longer I would continue my involvement. I mean, why spend fifty bucks on a Worldcon supporting membership when I can spend the same amount of money on BOOKS?)
Eric,
You are partly right, but you missed some stuff, which I cover in my essay on Zauberspiegel.
I strongly expect I’m going to have people screaming at me about what I’ve written, especially my comment that no one else in Science Fiction and Fantasy has the training to have worked it out, but hey, I’m half-ogre. I can handle it.
Wayne
SF&F is and always has been a highly intellectual genre. There are quite a few authors on the popular list who put out, among the works that they put out, some highly intellectual, memorable, influential and/or literary work… while being popular within the genre.
Orson Scott Card? You could call Ender’s Game a military adventure of sorts, but Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are in very intellectual-political-religious territory.
Mercedes Lackey recently (2010) put out one of the more interesting takes on the Arthurian story that I’ve seen. One with a great deal of literary merit and originality, in spite of the constraints of writing anew the Arthur story. She may be better known for teen-friendly fantasy, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t write memorable fiction.
Terry Pratchett wrote incredibly clever satire that displayed great intellectual depth. Those honorary doctorates didn’t appear by themselves.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a professional academic whose fiction was, to a large degree, an exercise in extending his intellectual work outside its usual boundaries.
David Weber writes treatises on naval tactics, history, and monarchy, interspersed with occasional action.
Eric Flint (that fellow up there at the top of the page) was trained as a historian, and some of his work displays very sophisticated intellectual content.
Robin Hobb writes entire sociopolitical systems that are interesting. Her failure to make them boring doesn’t make her works forgettable.
Anne McCaffrey’s dragonriders have spawned an entire subgenre of imitators building on the idea. Highly influential.
L.E. Modesitt, Jr. writes a number of very philosophical books. Many are interesting studies in the ethics of balancing ends and means.
Harry Turtledove? I think no small number of teens would learn more about history from reading his fiction than they will from history class.
Piers Anthony has probably used a larger number of original thought-provoking premises for books and/or series than are seen in ten years of Hugo nominees. The man may be best known for his Xanth books, but he is very prolific and keeps coming up with very novel ideas.
A number of people have said that the listed authors have produced lots of forgettable work, or work that doesn’t have special intellectual merit, or isn’t sufficiently high quality. I would say that while there is some forgettable work in the corpus of top-selling authors who dominated bookshelves in B&N circa 2007, there’s also a lot of very good work by those authors.
This is the genre of Clarke and Asimov. The “rank and file” readers tend to include a lot of people who are very intelligent, very well educated, or both.
I voted on the Hugo last year, and after casting my ballot, decided to look around to see what others had thought about those works. Quite frankly, after reading a number of blog posts where Hugo voters (many of them repeat voters) were reviewing works, I don’t think the regular Hugo voters are any more sophisticated than regular science fiction fans.
Thanks – very interesting analysis, but I suspect the shelve space may be over-interpreted.
I would read something new rather then get more of the same. I am sure my attitude is not an exception, but this is not what the publishers want, because it means all the time they have to take a chance with a new book/writer. Getting the readers “addicted” to a writer/setting/series is much more secure for them. So, I tend to look at the the long shelves as a promotion tool or a form of advertisement rather than a true indicator of popularity. And I suspect the publishers have way to press on the bookstores which book gets to be put on the table next to the entrance, and which book gets how many copies on the shelves.
I think you are missing a couple of things. The main one is that the award voters largely reward novelty. They want to see original work. Authors who write series are unlikely to be considered for awards except for the first work in a series. And for most authors the first work in a series rarely has the marketing backing needed to bring it to the voters’ attention. It will be interesting to see what happens with Charlie Stross. He is established enough that people look for his next book but he has a track record of producing very different styles of work. Publishers, booksellers and book-buyers typically want more of the same so as a series grows its sales tend to build and it gains shelf-space. So the thing that makes an author successful is the thing that keeps them out of the awards.
The second thing thing that I think you are missing is somewhat related. In many cases the first novel that an author publishes is better than anything they write later. Charles de Lint has never matched the quality of his first novel Moonheart. Moonheart didn’t have enough visibility to win an award and his later works, though good, aren’t good or original enough.
There is a proposal currently being discussed by the SMOF’s list, and elsewhere, to introduce a “best series” Hugo. If it can get past some of the practical issues it might go some way to bridging the gap.
Just small quibble with what you said. Moonheart wasn’t Charles de Lint’s first book and IMO isn’t his best book … Memory and Dream and Little Country are far better. But what amazes me about this whole debate is how many people are willing to put themselves up as the end all, be all judges of book quality. Its your opinion, its subjective — there is no qualitative testing scale that one can hold a book up and say “this book is better than that one.” Make me think of the scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams makes them rip out the essay in their poetry book.
However, the authors whose fourth book did not sell out their advances areunlikely to have three feet of shelf space for very long.
Electronic publishing has also greatly increased the number of works on sale. Some number of you have heard of Tom Clancy “Red Storm Rising”. How many are aware of Colin Gee, who has detailed maps of his battles?
It probably isn’t true that the most popular writers should dominate the awards. There.is a real tendency for popular works to reward a whole bunch of id-based thingies – and since those drives haven’t changed much…such work is rarely original.
On the other hand, focusing on the literary equivalent of experimental modern art results in awarding a bunch of stuff that doesn’t quite work for most readers. This makes the awards anti-correlate with perceived quality and therefore worth about as much as a hood ornament. Now, there is a question as to whether the Hugo’s should be perceived as relevant. I speak from a nostalgic viewpoint wherein I saw them as a reading list. Nowadays, a Hugo is mostly an indicator that I should demand a sample chapter before purchase or, more often, steer clear because the extra button click is too much work. At some point, along current trajectories, if people follow my reaction, people may start declining Hugo’s for economic reasons…
I vaguely remember that the Oscars divide some awards into ‘best film’ and ‘best original film’ or ‘best indie film’. It might be reasonable to divide best novel.
I also, while appreciating that it is politically impossible, of the opinion that there are too many short story categories and that many of the categories should be merged.
Do the majority of the readers care about the Hugo awards anymore? Judging from my conversations among my fellow fans, it’s popularity contest fought over by cliques of authors that are wasting their time not writing books.
Chris, after the events of this year, I’m not very inclined to argue against your assertion. Especially the “cliques of authors that are wasting their time not writing books” part.
Mind you, I appreciate the status, history, and prestige of the Hugo Award and have a lot of respect for it. I also appreciate the sentimental value of it, the sense of a winner joining the great names of decades of this genre, of standing on the shoulders of giants, and so on.
That said… I’ve been a full-time, self-supporting fiction writer for most of my adult life, and most of my writing friends are also career novelists (many of them not in sf/f, since I started out as a romance writer). And I keep watching Puppy activities and wondering, as do my friends when we discuss it… How do the Puppies think that these activities vi the Hugo Award is helping their writing careers?
I and everyone I know tends to keep prioritizing 3 main things (in various orders) in our career: (1) be more productive (write more, or faster, or more efficiently), (2) improve craft (i.e. write better), and (3) expand readership/sales, because that expands income. These are pretty much the things that I and most of the career writers I know talk about most of the time with each other.
And I don’t see any way in which Puppy activities, which appear to be very time consuming for the lead Puppies, further any of those goals. Mind you, those are not goals I’ve seen any of the Puppies state (and I’m not in contact with any Puppies)… But since these are the goals of almost everyone I know who is serious about their writing career, across multiple genres, I view Puppying through that lens. And whatever their goals, I don’t think (logically, at least) their Puppy activities can having anything to do with improving their craft, improving their productivity, or expanding their audiences (audience mostly gets expanded by releasing more good work and that’s published well, not by engaging in intra-genre feuding).
Laura:
Vox Day has probably helped his sales considerably. He is looking at a niche market.
Larry Correia likes fencing with people and does so on his blog for entertainment.
Both of them write combat/action/military SF or (for Vox Day) edit and publish it. For that audience (and I war game including game reviews – I really know that audience) sticking it to the leftists is a plus and helps sales on the margins.
Brad probably lost writing time. But he is also in the military and gets deployed.
So Vox Day probably has a clear business strategy in this. Larry looks at this as fun. Hope this answers your questions. Different things appeal to different markets.
I’m a marketing professor and consultant. Measuring shelf space in the manner described by Mr. Flint is part of the ABCs of marketing taught to undergraduate/MBA students.
Although some of you have complained or nit-picked about this measure – it is the standard way to measure retail sales when you have not subscribed to an expensive reporting service.
AC Neilson has a measure capturing 75% of total sales, including electronic. The subscription runs $8-$10,000 annually. It could give you a more exact number – at a price. This is very common in most consumer marketing.
So those of you who don’t think the awards are skewed, stop complaining about the message. Data is data. This is one of the major Sad Puppy complaints.
Mr. Flint – thanks for writing this. I would suggest that while I agree that Mr. Correia is acting in a humorous (or jerk-like) sophomoric way – he has the point that many of the most ignored authors are conservatives and the WorldCon voting group is rabidly liberal. IMHO he decided to tweak the WorldCon voters to prove his assertion that the Hugos were broken. I doubt that he wanted a Hugo for himself or any of his buddies (outside of some of the editors). I agree your observations of his tactics in terms of sticking a finger in the eye of many.
I think most people are saying that shelf space has nothing to say about whither a book is reward worthy, at least of anything other then bestselling book.
I have read a lot of David Weber, Robert Jordan, and Jim Butcher and I have never said to myself after finishing one of their books “That is an amazing book I have to keep it in mind for the Hugo” or any other award for that matter.
They write(wrote) good books but they write books that you know mostly what you are going to get before you ever open the covers. And that going to be about the same thing as their last book. That is good for selling series but it is death for any kind of award not just the Hugo.
And yet no one had any problem giving the award to Guardians of the Galaxy… the movie equivalent of a Jordan or Butcher book…”Great” is a matter of opinion and nothing more.
I just think this argument is wrong from top to bottom.
The Hugo has always skewed young. The awards from the 60s and 70s seem to reward popularity in most awards now because (a) authors who got Hugos for their first or second novels, such as Zelazny, Le Guin, Haldeman, and McIntyre, went on to fine careers, (b) Niven, who won for his third and first major novel, went on to a fine career, and (c) the voters recognized two authors who after a decade of publishing many novels with only moderate commercial success, had made big breakthroughs with their first majorly successful works–Phillip K. Dick and John Brunner. None of these authors would have passed the Flint shelf test at the time they won their first Hugos for the novel.
Now look at 2000-2009. The winners were Vinge, Rowling, Gaiman, Sawyer, Bujold, Clarke, Wilson, Vinge II, Chabon, Gaiman II. According to Flint, only three of these meet his popularity test: Bujold and the Gaimans. So much the worst for the test. Rowling, Chabon and Clarke are unpopular only on the technicality that they were marketed outside the science fiction section of your bookstore. Rowling is the most popular author of the era in any genre, the Chabon book started its first week of sales as #2 on the NY Times best seller list, and surely I am not the only one one to remember the Clarke book in several 5 foot stacks at the front of my bookstore–which rather trumps 2 feet of shelf space at the back.
The only arguably nonpopular picks in 2000-9 are the 2 Vinges, the Wilson and the Sawyer. And I am unconvinced that Vinge in 2000-2009 sold less than many of the Flint 2 foot stable.
On the other hand, I am not opposed to a second Hugo for novels, whether it be for juveniles, series, or splitting fantasy off from sci-fi.
A nitpick on Tolkien and Hugos.
In the 1950s, the Brits had their own award, the “International Fantasy Award”. Tolkien won one the year of Loncon 1, when the con committee deliberately did not give out Hugos that competed in category (such as novel) with the IFAs.
In Tolkien’s letters somewhere he mentions he got a “rocketship” , so it seems both awards were using the same trophies.
Interesting analysis, thanks for your thoughts (both here and in previous essays and comments).
I think when I start my own awards I will begin by considering books/films/stories published/circulated 50 years ago. That gets us half way to the “Will they be read in a hundred years?”
So the inaugaural awards given this year will be for 1965. This approach would also assist in arguments over whether and when new categories would be necessary – I’ll know in plenty of time about changes to the types of books getting written.
I have a vague recollection of seeing someone review all the old Hugo awards over the course of a few months and it was interesting to see books and authors I have never heard getting nominated and winning versus books that would later be getting republished in SF Masterworks editions and the like. Can’t remember where I saw it but I think it was on the internet somewhere.
Ah -http://www.tor.com/series/revisiting-the-hugos/
I knew it was on the internet somewhere.
I fear I’m not convinced the shelf-space methodology is good enough to tell us very much. There are too many confounding factors – even the quality of the paper a given publisher uses.
I commented on the last post that the number of languages that a book has been picked up for translation into might be an interesting metric. Doing so implies a degree of confidence on the part of the publisher that it will sell – and, if you will forgive me saying so, I think some of your fellow Baen authors do not enjoy quite the same appeal outside the US as inside it, which also distorts the shelf-space metric. One tires of “liberals” as the universal bogeyman.
(There is a series of books – I won’t name them, but you’ll probably know – where the good guys’ space empire has once before genocided irrevocably hostile aliens.
In one of the books, a bunch of religious fanatic aliens turn up and start conquering and indoctrinating everyone. The “liberals” immediately want the genocide button pushed, but it turns out the aliens have some honourable upstanding military officers who get in touch with ours, and the situation is resolved.
In another one, a bunch of uncommunicative aliens turn up and start eating people. It is established that the invasion “can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.”
It turns out that blowing up entire planets of them conveys a tactical advantage. Naturally the liberals are outraged at the very thought of pressing the genocide button…
Another series gets about ten books in before we meet a “liberal” who is neither a villain nor a poltroon… and she was written, not by the series author, but by one Eric Flint.)
Assuming I’ve pegged the series you’re referring to in your last example correctly, may I point out that from the very 1st book in it “Conservatives” are portrayed as self-centered, short-sighted and greedy? Not to mention being generally incompetent and given to nepotism.
The arrival of a competent & honest “conservative” in that series has been more recent than of that of the “liberal” you cite! (Lady P’er. 2003 vs. Cap’n O. in 2005)
In-fricking-deed. (Indeed)
That may be so, but it’s a bit besides the point.
All I’m saying is that many more European readers will align to some degree with the position that the author can’t go ten pages without preaching about the evils of. (Curiously, the Puppies don’t think that’s “boring message fic” because reasons.)
Now, I happen to have bought (and enjoyed, for the most part) about a dozen of them and the spinoffs, but there’s no denying the author’s constant explanation of how terrible a person I am does stick in my craw a bit.
If I’m not entirely atypical of Europeans, I’m guessing the shelf-space metric would show considerably lower figures over here – indeed, I cannot think I’ve ever seen four feet of Weber. (Yes, well, we all know who I mean).
My point would be that, unlike some others on either end of the spectrum, he hits the follies of both sides equally. Not to mention that most of his veiwpint characters are professional military, a group whic tends to be more conservative (in the old sense of the word, not the wierd one used in this country since the late 1970’s or so) than the general population.
And I can’t say that I’ve noticed him puting in a political lecture every ten pages either.
Now if you want pure ideological swill that overwhelms the story completly, I’d suggest a certain series of books about a Sword of Something or Other. I gave up reading those on book 6, which might as well have said “Socialism is Evil, only unregulated Capitalism can make people happy and free.” Annoying, the first few books were kinda fun. In fact I got rid of books 4-6, since the main characters got married at the end of the 3rd book, I figured the series could end there for me. I sometimes notice it’s still going strong though. (haven’t taken a tape measure down, but I’d guess it at about 3′)
IÂ think the first mistake you made was going by bookstore categories. King and Rowling have been mentioned repeatedly. You point out that they’re not shelved in the proper section, but both have won SFFÂ awards. Rowling has been nominated for the Hugos twice, and won once. King only has one Hugo nomination (it was a win), but 21 World Fantasy Award nominations (and four wins). Clearly, SFFÂ fans consider these to be genre works, even if the bookstores don’t.
Second, IÂ think you’re ignoring the fact that the Hugos are supposed to be awards by SFFÂ fans, rather than the general public. It is entirely possible for the general public to like something that isn’t anywhere near as popular with SFFÂ fans. The obvious case would be non-genre works, but it’s just as true of some genre works. So IÂ think it’s important to ask, not just how popular some of these works are, but how popular are they within SFFÂ fandom, vs. the general public or other fandoms.
One important factor is undoubtedly cross-genre works. King writes supernatural horror, which is popular with horror fans as well as SFF fans. So he gets a huge boost in sales from all those horror fans. You can’t really compare him to someone whose appeal is almost entirely within the field. Furthermore, a lot of people simply don’t like horror, so his appeal within SFF fandom may be more slightly more limited than his sales figures would suggest.
Other obvious cross-genre categories that may appeal to those outside of SFF fandom include paranormal romance, MilSF, fantasy noir, and LitSFÂ (in which category IÂ would include people like Atwood, Chabon, and even Delaney, Vonnegut, and Pynchon).
Let’s take paranormal romance as an example. It’s a genre generally aimed towards women, which means it has a lower appeal for approx. 50% of SFF fans.[1] (It’s also a particularly interesting case, as some examples are shelved under SFF, while others are shelved under Romance. Harlequin even has their own paranormal fantasy line. All of which, I think, just emphasizes that it’s a mistake to go by shelving.) But Romance is a hugely popular genre on its own, so the sales figures are not going to correlate with popularity among SFF fans.
Now look at MilSF—a genre that seems to be particularly popular with puppies. First of all, again, this has an obvious sex bias. MilFic in general is aimed at men. But beyond that, well, I’m male, and MilFic doesn’t generally appeal to me. And with the recent squabbles in SFF fandom, I started thinking about why that is. And I realized that it’s partly because MilFic is full of jocks! It may be a bit stereotyped to say so, but stereotypes often contain a grain of truth, and the stereotyped view of an SFF fan is a nerd who was picked on by jocks in high school. I was more socialized than many nerds, but there’s an element of truth to that in my life. Jocks make me uncomfortable. I suspect that’s true of a decent percentage of SFF fans. So it’s not at all unreasonable that sales figures for MilSF would not reflect its popularity with general SFF fans, if both women and nerds tend to dislike it. (And note that “nerd” does not equate to “SJW”, which suggests that some of the puppies’ anger may be entirely misplaced.)
Unfortunately, IÂ think it’s hard to determine which works have a strong appeal within SFFÂ fandom, and which rely more on outside-the-genre appeal. Most bookstores probably don’t poll their buyers on what sort of works they prefer when they buy something. Rewards programs may allow them to collect some data on that, and Amazon probably knows all sorts of things about their customers, but that information isn’t generally made public. Which makes it really hard to say whether your thesis is plausible or not. But IÂ tend to think it’s flawed at best.
[1] It’s true that some paranormal romance may appeal to men, but at the same time, there are some women who don’t care for romance novels. IÂ would guess that those factors more-or-less even out, at least for the purposes of this debate.
addendum:Â Laurel Hamilton is shelved under SFF in all the local non-specialty bookstores IÂ regularly visit (two Barnes and Noble, and one Half-Price Books). And of course, she’s also carried in the specialty shops (Dark Carnival and Other Change of Hobbit). This may actually support your thesis, but IÂ figured it was worth mentioning.
I think the comments about needing to take library readership into consideration is a good one. I read a LOT more back when I was a student (starting in grade school and all the way through college) than I do now (mostly because I had a lot more spare time then), and during that time I almost never actually bought a book–I just checked them out of the library.
I also strongly suspect that readers who buy books skew as older and better off financially than those who read library book. In fact, I’d be shocked if that isn’t true. It’s also possible that library readers might skew as slightly more intelligent overall, though I admit that’s bit iffy. There are probably other demographic difference, too.
Oh, I don’t know. I used to buy more books when I was younger than I do now. I usually don’t buy any books now unless I’ve checked them out from the library several times and still want to read them yet again.
On the other hand, I live in the library district that has the highest circulation of any library in the US, so I have really good options when it comes to the library.
Just a side note, almost totaly OT: having been born in the early ’60s and come of age in the ’70s (too old for a Boomer, too young for an X’er, btw whatever happened to Gen Y?) I came of age with several terms marked in my mind whose use as perjoratives signaled that a discussion was probably going to short on real discussion and long on thoughtless invective. The two prime examples back then being “Facist” and “Communist.” It was my observation as a pre-teen that most people using these as labels had no knowledge of what they actually meant. (To start with, both are economic systems, not political ones)
Over the years of my alleged adulthood the list has kept growing. At this point “Liberal” and “Conservative” are often found there. Also “SJW,” “patriarchy” and some other terms I have seen in this discussion.
Oh and may I just state that “Socalist” is now used in certain circles to mean what “Communist” meant back in my youth?
(For the record, I consider both Socalism and Capitalism as deeply flawed systems. Fortunatly, IMHO, each contains cures for the problems of the other. Now if we could just get back to creating a new system that blends the best of both…)
We’re in a system that blends the best of both…
It is my opinion that we lost the balance after the tragic event of November, 1980 and have been moving steadily in the wrong direction ever since. Or was it November 1968? Memory, the second thing to go.
Yup, the release of the White Album cemented the ruination of rock’n’roll.
John Mark Ockerbloom says:
“Why did Hugo voters in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s vote for so many popular steakhouses and today they rarely do?â€
Did they? You say anyone your age knows perfectly well they did. Well, I’m not quite your age, but I’m not so sure– I’d like to see statistics that show that there *was* such a big overlap, and this isn’t just an artifact of selective memory.
I am old enough to look back at things like the Billboard top hits of the 1970s, and being surprised at what turns up there. There are some things I expect– classics, and things everyone remembers as emblematic of the time. But there are also lots of entries where I go “I can’t believe *that* song was #1 for weeks†or even “I have no memory of that song at all, even though it clearly sold lots of copies.â€
Eric’s memory of the early Hugos matches my own. Was I Billboarding the Hugos?
I put it to the proof with the help of Jo Walton’s Revisting the Hugos. http://www.tor.com/series/revisiting-the-hugos/
I read through the Hugo contenders and winners from 1953 to 1975. They were as I remembered them. Those books and stories were familiar to me. I’d read most of them. Most were good. Some were not. So what? On the whole, the Hugos reflected and rewarded the good stuff.
When I shopped the—tiny by modern standards—SF shelves, I noticed a Hugo win. Many a time Mr. Gernsback helped separate me from my pocket change. (In the late ‘60s, paperback novels sold for fifty to seventy-five cents.)
That is drastically different from recent Hugo awards. I stopped paying attention to them years ago.
Did I Billboard the old Hugos? I don’t think I did. I don’t think Eric did.
As I am also turning 62 I would read the SiFi/Fantasy in the library but only when I could sneak into the Adult Side. It wouldn’t do for a child to read such advanced subjects as rocket ships and hidden worlds . when I got older I saw the Hugo’s and other awards as a reading list . But by 1967 their taste and mine parted RAH, Poul Anderson ,Lin Carter, And ERB corrupted my mind. Eric’s Authors list looks like my library 5,000 + books old reliables an new friends .how many remember Seabury Quinn as an author. The Hugo’s nominating made themselves and the award an embarrassment to fans just like a good STORY instead of a literary statement.