SF Signal has a Mind Meld up about the Hugos. I’m in it. Expect much yelling and screaming.

In haste, plane to catch.

Over the last couple of years the Andre Norton Award – the YA award that SFWA runs alongside the Nebulas – has been a bit of an embarrassment. This year, for example, the Nebula Best Novel short list included Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Powers by Ursula K Le Guin, both YA books, and both of which failed to make it onto the Norton short list. But SFWA’s new management is continuing its program of reform, and part of that program is to reach out to the community to get better information on what YA books are eligible. If you have a book you’d like to put forward, go read this.

Dave and Barry at Geek Syndicate have posted episode #130 of their podcast series, and in it you can hear part II of their discussion of this year’s Hugo nominees. As I said last week, I find their outsider’s view of the Hugos quite fascinating.

In this issue the boys zero in unerringly on the two hot favorites for Best Novel. They loyally support Doctor Who but can’t decided between Moffat and Davies, and have a long discussion about the Graphic Story category. I was pleased that Dave agreed with me about Fables, but I do understand Barry’s point about there being too many volume-N-in-long-series nominees.

This year’s Booker Long List was released yesterday (see The Guardian for the nominees). While this year’s list isn’t entirely “about post-colonial guilt, Irish poverty or English middle-class Islingtonians having Terribly Important Thoughts about their boring love lives” — it does include the autobiography of a chimp, and a book by Tiptree winner Sarah Hall — it is certainly light on the speculative fiction. So the fine chaps at the Guardian Book Blog have decided to launch their own rival contest. We, the people, get a chance to nominate books we think ought to have been on the long list, and then we get to vote on them. Current nominees include China Mieville and Gwyneth Jones, and the current hot favorite appears to be the excellent John the Revelator. Feel free to add your own suggestions (and please check the eligibility criteria). Let’s encourage people to read some interesting books.

The nice guys at Geek Syndicate have been looking at this year’s Hugo nominees. The first part is in Episode 129 and occupies around the last third of the program. The second part is apparently already in the can and will be online soon.

The interesting thing about this is that while these guys are clearly massive science fiction fans, their interests are very different from mine. They know comics inside out; know film TV and video games better than I do; but know rather less about written SF. So I’m happy to take Barry’s word that Dark Knight is head and shoulders about the other BDP: Long Form nominees, and I’ll be very interested to see what they have to say about the Graphic Story nominees. But it was their response to the fiction that made me sit up and take notice.

Firstly they loved Mike Resnick. Amongst the circles I move in, Resnick’s stories have begun to attract yawns. But to Dave and Barry they contained interesting ideas told in a simple and straightforward way. The boys didn’t like “Pride and Prometheus” or “Shoggoths in Bloom” because they didn’t get the references (to Pride & Prejudice and Lovecraft respectively). And this isn’t coming from people who have no taste: Dave loved “26 Monkeys” and “Exhalation”.

Personally I still think that “Pride & Prometheus” is head and shoulders above everything else in the Novelette category. However, in future when thinking about how the wider fannish world is likely to react to Hugo nominees I will try to remember to ask myself what background knowledge is required to appreciate the story.

Possibly building on the panel discussion at Finncon (in which he made very similar points) Adam Roberts has taken a pot shot at this year’s Hugo nominees. It is an interesting analysis, and much of the subsequent discussion focuses on the fact that the Hugos are a popular vote award, whereas the Clarke, whose nominees Roberts prefers, is a juried award. (It is also the case that several of this year’s Clarke nominees were not widely available outside of the UK, and indeed the winner was published by a small press and was not widely available inside the UK). A couple of comments, however, stood out. It appears that the mysterious “They” who control the Hugos have been at it again. Abigail Nussbaum:

Adam, you’re assuming that SF fandom = Hugo voters. It’s clearly in the Hugo administrators’ interests to maintain the perception that Worldcon membership is representative of fandom at large, but that hasn’t been the case for some time

Nicholas Whyte adds:

primary responsibility lies with those who currently run and promote the Hugos to entice those potential voters to participate.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact the Hugo Administrators are different people each year, and that they generally have little or no PR function, where exactly is the evidence that anyone is trying to pretend that Worldcon membership is representative of fandom as a whole, as opposed to, say, trying to get more of fandom to participate in the Hugos? Can you say “voter packet” anyone? Is that not, perhaps, enticing people to participate?

It is clearly in Ms. Nussbaum’s and Mr. Whyte’s interest to maintain the impression that the Hugos are controlled by a mysterious and shadowy cabal, rather than by ordinary fans who are trying hard to improve the awards. That makes it so much easier to play victim and whine when the results of the awards don’t turn out the way you want. But actually pretending that people who have been tasked with promoting the Hugos are doing nothing, or are actively trying to cover up the lack of participation, is downright inaccurate. More than that, given the amount of time that Kevin and I, and John Scalzi, and several other people, have put into doing this, it is fucking insulting.

The irony is that this year’s Best Novel short list has attracted far more attention than most years I can remember. It has got that attention precisely because all of the people on the list are very popular: Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross. They are people that I would expect to see at the top of the pile if there was wider participation in the results. (Not vastly wider participation – that would bring in Stephanie Meyer.) And indeed the statistics (which Neil Clarke dug out and I quoted on SFAW recently) show that participation in the nominating stage of the Hugos rose by 65% from 483 last year to 799 this year. That suggests that some of what we have been doing has had an effect.

Like Adam, I wasn’t hugely enthralled by the books that made the short list. It could have been better. Like Adam, I would have liked to see The Quiet War on the ballot (and I very much hope that its forthcoming US publication means it will be there next year). But I recognize that my tastes (and Adam’s tastes) are somewhat different to those of fandom at large. Indeed, if the Hugos regularly reflected my tastes, rather than the tastes of several hundred people, I suspect that there would be far more suggestion that the results were unrepresentative of fandom as a whole.

(None of this, by the way, negates Adam’s point. He’s not saying that the nominees are unrepresentative of fandom’s taste, he’s saying that fandom’s taste is boring.)

I’ll continue to try to influence what other people read (go out and buy Palimpsest, all of you), but as far as the Hugos go I’ll hope for them to reflect which books are actually popular each year, not what I happen to think should get an award. And if The Quiet War and Palimpsest and The City and The City don’t make the ballot next year, I won’t go around muttering about mysterious conspiracies and complaining that those responsible for promoting the Hugos are failing in their task. That would be rather pointless, because I’d be complaining about myself.

And by the way, getting to be one of the people responsible for promoting the Hugos does not require knowledge of secret handshakes, massive bribes, or having been in fandom for the past 75 years. All it requires is that you should ask me, or Kevin, if you can help. Or indeed you can just do something yourself by talking about the awards an encouraging people to get involved.

If you haven’t sent in your nominations for this year’s World Fantasy Awards, today is your last chance to do so. You can find details here.

Also the deadline for the Hugo Award final ballot is Friday. Yes, Friday. You do not have the weekend in which to make up your mind. And if you are heading out to a convention over the weekend, you probably have even less time. Vote now and get it done.

Yeah, I know, I haven’t finished reading everything either. I’m also not planning to say too much before the panel at Finncon. But it did just want to say that I think John Kessell’s “Pride and Prometheus” is particularly splendid.