One of the things I mentioned in the SMOFcon report is that a number of the attendees had a lot of difficulty with the “Words we use” panel because they tended to assume that if a word had negative connotations to them then it would have negative connotations to everyone. Marketing is, of course, about understanding how other people think, but fandom isn’t always very good at this.

We can see the same sort of thing in action in the “debate” about the Lifetime Achievement Hugo. I use the scare quotes deliberately, because while some people are talking seriously about how the award might work, many people aren’t making much sense at all.

For example, it is very clear that the whole point of the proposal is that there should be a Hugo for lifetime achievement. Everybody knows that there are other lifetime achievement awards, and that things such as Worldcon Special Awards and Worldcon GoH status are a similar kind of thing. But this proposal would not exist if it wasn’t important to some people that there be a Hugo for lifetime achievement, because to them the fact that it is a Hugo, not something else, is very important. Banging on about how there are other, equivalent awards, or that the SFWA Grand Master is more prestigious, is no more likely to change the minds of those behind the proposal than you can change the mind of someone complaining about lack of chocolate by offering them ice cream when that person has clearly said that they don’t like ice cream. The fact that you prefer ice cream to chocolate is irrelevant to them.

And then there are all those people demanding that the Lifetime Achievement Hugo is too important to be left to a vote of Worldcon members, it must be decided by a select committee of experts. What are they thinking??? Especially those of them who, knowing a little about how the Hugos work, are demanding that this judging committee be appointed by the WSFS Business Meeting. Do they have any idea what sort of literary taste the average SMOF has?

So why are people so keen to give up their democratic right to vote on the Hugos and hand the decision over to a small cabal of uber-SMOFs? The only thing that I can think of is that they are assuming that a committee of SMOFish experts will, of course, think exactly like them, and will therefore award the Hugos to the people they want to win them, not to anyone else. And then, of course, they will be outraged when this doesn’t happen. I suspect that the Business Meeting the first year after such a committee-judged Hugo was given out might be quite entertaining.

But hopefully it won’t happen. I’m still ambivalent about the value of a Lifetime Achievement Hugo, but I am absolutely certain that I will turn up to vote against any proposal that involves the Business Meeting appointing a committee to decide who should win Hugos.