No. 3 / May 2014 Ecdysis Masthead
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No. 3 / May 2014 Ecdysis Masthead Ecdysis No. 3 / May 2014 Jonathan Crowe editor Zvi Gilbert Jennifer Seely art Tamara Vardomskaya Send hate mail, letters of comment, and submissions to: All content is copyright © their respective contributors. mail PO Box 473 Shawville QC J0X 2Y0 Photo/illustration credits: [1, 8, 17, 19, 24] Art by CANADA Jennifer Seely. [25] Photo of Samuel R. Delany by e-mail [email protected] Houari B., and used under the terms of its Creative web mcwetboy.net/ecdysis Commons Licence. 2 Some Twitter responses to a mass e-mail begging fellow SFWA members for a Nebula nomination in early January 2014. EDITORIAL The Value of Awards I’ll be honest: I have ambivalent feelings ess, or whether the wrong works or individu- about awards. als were nominated, or whether the wrong On the one hand, I find awards useful: works or individuals won, as so many fans when so much is published in science fiction seem to do every year. and fantasy every year, they serve to winnow No, the problem I have with awards is the wheat from the chaff. For the past few how much we talk about them, and how im- years I’ve made a point of reading as many of portant we make them. the award nominees as possible, even if I’m Which is to say: too much and too much. not in a position to vote for them. One problem with awards is that there But on the other hand, I find awards an- are so many of them. By my count there are noying. Not so much the awards themselves. I now more than thirty English-language specu- don’t spend time fulminating about the proc- lative awards (by which I mean Hugos and 3 Nebulas and Ditmars, not individual award and we end up talking about PR and proce- categories). That’s double the number of dure rather than art. awards that existed thirty years ago. And second, we end up being deluged This leads to the problem with awards by award consideration posts. season, which is that it’s always awards sea- I need to be careful about what I mean son. Nominations for the Nebula Awards here, because there was rather a lot of argu- open about two weeks after the World Fan- ment on this subject earlier this year. It wasn’t tasy Awards are handed out. In other words, too long ago that it was considered the nadir there are only a couple of weeks a year when of taste to campaign for awards in this genre. it isn’t awards season. But campaigning is not necessarily what we’re This leads to a couple of things that, I’d talking about here. I don’t think there’s any- argue, aren’t always healthy for the field. thing wrong with mentioning that your work First of all, we’re constantly handicap- is eligible for certain awards. (And when the ping the awards, talking about who should time comes, you’d better believe I’ll be men- get nominated, who’s going to win, who’s go- tioning Ecdysis’s eligibility for the Best Fan- ing to get nominated or win and shouldn’t, zine Hugo.) Having a problem with eligibility 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 The rise in the number of English-language awards in the field since the 1950s. 4 posts is about as silly as having a problem iour. Sometimes it’s passive-aggressive, pro- with the indexes Analog and Asimov’s publish moting award nomination and voting dead- at the end of each year for the purpose of vot- lines again and again to their loyal followers ing in their reader’s awards. without explicitly touting their own work. Amal El-Mohtar makes the valid point Sometimes it’s a little more blatant: that the people most likely to be shamed into “Nominations for the Retromingent silence are precisely the people who need to Awards are now open! Please consider my step forward and speak up: story, ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus.’” “Only five days left before nominations No hand-wringing or tut-tutting about close for the Retromingent Awards. Don’t for- reading widely or behaving with dignity get: ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus’ is eligible!” or integrity or what have you is going to “Last day to nominate for the Retromin- end the practice of brash, confident peo- gents! ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus’! Go! Vote!” ple telling other people, often and obnox- “Thanks to all who considered my story iously, to vote for them. But, crucially, for the Retromingent Awards. Sorry to say it the hand-wringing and tut-tutting does didn’t make the final ballot. But online voting have an effect: it discourages the people starts next week for the Przewalski Awards!” who already feel silenced and uncomfort- Rinse, repeat. Some people have less able from ever talking about or taking shame than others. And it doesn’t take many pride in their achievements. of them to make awards season an exercise in I believe there is a difference between not- online cacophony. ing your eligibility and shameless campaigning. A part of this is because writers, by and And a big part of that difference is how often large, are an insecure and needy bunch and you do it. tend to crave recognition in any form. But it’s When you have dozens of awards, and also because we glorify the life of a writer (i.e., hundreds of eligible writers, what is perfectly Being a Real Writer™) so much that anything acceptable—even imperative—for a single done in the service of Furthering a Writing Ca- writer becomes a nuisance in the aggregate. reer, no matter how antisocial, is fair game. It’s the tragedy of the commons. If you follow And, despite their being famously dis- dozens of writers, even if each of them makes missed as glorified bowling trophies, awards only a single, perfectly valid post noting their can have an impact on their book sales eligibility for awards, it can be a bit over- (though that seems to be limited to the Hugo) whelming. and on their career (which is harder to quan- But it gets worse if a few writers start tify). Or so they believe. (Though it does ap- pushing the boundaries of acceptable behav- pear that winning a major award is a good 5 Clarke 93% Hugo 92% Nebula 92% World Fantasy 86% The percentage of novels that have won a major award that are in print in English right now (ebooks included). way to ensure your novel stays in print; see Small wonder that it seems to take an the graph above.) award nomination just to get noticed. Publica- To be fair, it’s not like writers aren’t fac- tion in a professional market just won’t cut it ing long odds. More science fiction and fan- any more. Under such circumstances, it’s not tasy is being published than ever, in more ven- hard to see how things can get real Darwin- ues than ever before, and a lot of it is quite ian, real fast. good. No one can keep up with all the maga- But at the same time, all this online activ- zines and online venues publishing short fic- ity is probably not going to have any real ef- tion (I know: I’ve tried). The chance that some- fect. Adam Roberts worries that authors with thing excellent and award-worthy will be larger online footprints can dominate the overlooked is higher than it ought to be. award nominations. I don’t think he’s alone in For example. Because more short stories that belief. But the numbers don’t exactly are published than novelettes or novellas, be- back that up. cause most online publications won’t run Let’s use Twitter followers (as of 4 April longer fiction, the award-eligible pool of short 2014, when I did the math for this) as a stand- stories is simply enormous compared to other in for the size of an author’s fan base, since categories. Last year 568 of them were nomi- the numbers are public and easy to find, and nated for the Hugo, compared with 135 novel- compare it with the number of nominations las and 252 novelettes, but only three of those each Hugo finalist received last year. short stories were above the five percent cut- Note that two authors got on the final bal- off to make the final ballot. lot without any Twitter presence at all. And (I wonder how many of those 568 short while John Scalzi leads in number nominations stories received just one nominating vote.) and has the second-most Twitter followers, it’s 6 not proportionate: Scalzi has 6.1 times as many be sure, and he did eventually win, but he Twitter followers as Saladin Ahmed, but had only had 15 more nominations than Nancy only 1.6 times the nominations. Kress, who has 40 times fewer followers on The Hugo numbers reveal an important Twitter. Or to look at it another way, Nancy but overlooked truth: the nominating popula- had one nomination for every nine Twitter fol- tion is extremely small compared to the lowers, whereas Brandon had one nomination authors’ online fan base—it’s a tiny subset, for every 600 followers. one that must actively opt into nominating for Correlation? Not really. an award (and pay for the privilege). By that logic, Neil Gaiman, with nearly So while Brandon Sanderson has tens of two million Twitter followers, should domi- thousands of social media followers, that only nate every non-juried genre award.