The Hugo Awards have been awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention for decades, and serve to recognize the works of authors, editors, directors – fans and professionals – in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. The Hugos are unique in being a fan-driven award that has as much process – if not more – as juried awards.
That process has two main steps. First, there’s a nomination period where members of Worldcon select works to appear on the final ballot. Second, members of the upcoming Worldcon vote on the final ballot and the awards are given out at the convention.
Typically, rather more folks vote on the final ballot than nominate – and that means that small, organized groups of people can unduly influence the nominations. However, there’s been surprisingly few attempts to actually do that.
Many of the nominations this year match the slates of two groups, the “Sad Puppies” and the “Rabid Puppies.” Not only that, some of the categories contain nothing but Puppy nominations.
The s.f. news site File 770 has a comprehensive collection of back-and-forth about the matter, but suffice it so say that the Puppy slates are have a primarily political motivation – and one, in the interests of full disclosure, that I personally despise.
There are a lot of people saying smart things about the situation, so I’ll content myself with the following observation:
Slate nominations and voting destroy the utility of the Hugo Award lists for librarians who select science fiction and fantasy.
Why? Ideally, the Hugo process ascertains the preferences of thousands of Worldcon members to arrive at a general consensus of science fiction and fantasy that is both good and generally appealing. As it happens, that’s a pretty useful starting point for librarians trying to round out collections or find new authors that their patrons might like – particularly for those librarians who are not themselves fans of the genre.
However, should slate voting become a successful tactic, the Hugo Awards are in danger of ending up simply reflecting which factions in fandom are best able to game the system. The results of that… are unlikely to be all that useful for librarians.
Here’s my suggestion for librarians who are fans of science fiction and fantasy and who want to help preserve a collection development tool: get involved. In particular:
- Join Worldcon. A $40 supporting membership suffices to get voting privileges.
- Vote on the Hugos this year. I won’t tell you who the vote for, but if you agree with me that slate nominations are a problem, consider voting accordingly.
- Next year, participate in the nomination process. Don’t participate in nomination slates; instead, nominate those works that you think are worthy of a Hugo – full stop.
Preserving the usefulness of the Hugo Awards as a selection tool for libraries by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.