This weekend’s edition of The Coode Street Podcast was devoted primarily to discussion of the proposed Best Series Hugo award category. As you may recall, this is a proposal that was given first passage in Kansas City and will be up for ratification in Helsinki. Furthermore, the Helsinki committee has used its power to create one special Hugo category to trial this award so that we can all see how it works.

Jonathan and Gary have used their podcast to look at the proposed new category and, in time-honored fannish fashion, test it to destruction by finding the most ridiculous nominees possible. Obviously, as with all other Hugos categories, we have to hope that the sanity of the voters will prevail. But, as we know to our cost, this isn’t always the case. And regardless, Jonathan and Gary have thrown up a number of interesting questions about the category. Doubtless many of these will have been raised in fannish discussions when the category was first proposed, and I apologize for any re-opening of old wounds. Hopefully those behind the category will see fit to clarify matters.

As with any live recording, Jonathan and Gary weren’t able to edit their thoughts into a coherent argument before unleashing them on the world. That’s a limitation of the format. However, listening to their discussion, it seems to me that they have identified at least four different sorts of things that might be seen as a “series”.

Firstly there is the multi-volume novel. Works like The Lord of the Rings or The Book of the New Sun are at an obvious disadvantage in the Novel category because each individual volume is necessarily incomplete. The new category will be a boon to such works.

Then there is the multi-volume series, in which each volume is complete in itself, but all volumes feature the same setting and characters, and there may be some sort of over-arching narrative. Crime fiction is full of this sort of thing. So, for example, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books, Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye books, and Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books all fall into this grouping.

Next up there is the franchise. This is where one writer creates a world and then invites other writers to create stories set in that world. Gary and Jonathan mentioned George Martin’s Wild Cards and Ellen Kushner’s Tremontaine as examples. The suggestion was that if Wild Cards won then every person who had written for Wild Cards would get a Hugo.

Finally there is a thing that, for want of a better term, I shall call a mythos. In the show Gary and Jonathan speculated as to whether HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos could be regarded as a “series” for the purposes of the new Hugo category. There was also discussion as to whether Star Wars or Star Trek could be seen as a series from this point of view.

Some of these suggestions are clearly more sensible than others. I very much hope that the mythos idea doesn’t get included. The idea that every few years the Cthulhu Mythos would become eligible for Best Series and that every mythos story published in that year (possibly including one of mine) would automatically share in the win is patently ridiculous. So is the idea that every piece of Star Wars fanfic published in a year could become a Hugo winner if Star Wars wins Best Series.

Franchises are more complicated. There is a clear limitation as to what works can be included. Nevertheless, I am dubious about the idea that a writer can win a Hugo for a short story whose primary qualifying characteristic is that it happened to be part of a winning franchise. When a fiction magazine wins a Hugo we don’t give a trophy to every writer who had a story in it that year. Equally if a collection of essays wins Related Work the trophies go to the editor(s), not all of the contributors. And we don’t give a Hugo to everyone listed in the credits of a movie.

There is far less of a problem to an on-going series, but there are still questions hanging over them. What happens, for example, when a writer publishes a new book in a series created by someone else years ago? Could a writer who had a successful series years ago make it newly eligible by publishing a short story based in that series? What about a book such as Songs of Dying Earth in which a whole bunch of writers extended Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series? Here we are getting into the sort of grey area where fandom demands that the Hugo Administrator should be very proactive and exclude anything that is against the spirit of the category, right up until the point where the poor Administrator actually does something at which point they will discover that what they did was WRONG!!! and the Internet falls on their heads.

Still, this is why we trial categories, and why why debate them. Do have a listen to what Gary and Jonathan had to say, especially if you have nominating rights in Helsinki and can be part of the first year’s trial.