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Sanderson misses an opportunity
Apr. 21st, 2014 10:20 pmBrandon Sanderson has commented on the nomination of the Wheel of Time series for the Hugo Best Novel award. He makes some fine points about "don't be a dick to Wheel of Time" fans, which, sure, but also defends the nomination of the series as a single work.
I think Sanderson is absolutely right when he says that "serials are such a part of our collective culture in sf fandom", and I think there really should be an award that recognizes epic works - particularly epic works that are amazing as a whole but maybe don't have one particular sub-part people can pick out to nominate. But I don't think the Best Novel category should be that award. I mean, think about it - we feel like we need to distinguish works of 7500 to 17500 words from both shorter stories and longer novellas, because that's a distinctive length format and it's unfair to compare 4000-word short stories to 12000-word novelettes. (At least, I assume that's why. Maybe the category was actually created to honor Bob P. Novelette, I can't say for sure.) But Sanderson is arguing that we can judge a 4.4 MILLION word series against - I don't actually have wordcounts at hand for any of the other novels, but they could potentially be as short as 40K words, and I believe many SF books come in around 100K. That is, Wheel of Time is over *one hundred times as long* as a hypothetical short novel, and over forty times as long as an average novel. Again, we don't think we can compare a 10000-word novelette to a twice-as-long novella, but the Novel category is supposed to span two orders of magnitude?
Here's what I think should have happened: I would have liked to see Sanderson say that he was deeply honored on behalf of Robert Jordan, but he was withdrawing the work from consideration, BUT the Jordan estate would like to endow a new award to be voted on with the Hugos (much like the Campbell, which isn't technically a Hugo), the Robert Jordan Award for Epic SFF, to honor completed series of at least 4 volumes/600K words (ish), to recognize the unique qualities and significance to fandom of such works. In the long run, I think that would be a better memorial to Robert Jordan than shoehorning his work into an ill-fitting category.
I think Sanderson is absolutely right when he says that "serials are such a part of our collective culture in sf fandom", and I think there really should be an award that recognizes epic works - particularly epic works that are amazing as a whole but maybe don't have one particular sub-part people can pick out to nominate. But I don't think the Best Novel category should be that award. I mean, think about it - we feel like we need to distinguish works of 7500 to 17500 words from both shorter stories and longer novellas, because that's a distinctive length format and it's unfair to compare 4000-word short stories to 12000-word novelettes. (At least, I assume that's why. Maybe the category was actually created to honor Bob P. Novelette, I can't say for sure.) But Sanderson is arguing that we can judge a 4.4 MILLION word series against - I don't actually have wordcounts at hand for any of the other novels, but they could potentially be as short as 40K words, and I believe many SF books come in around 100K. That is, Wheel of Time is over *one hundred times as long* as a hypothetical short novel, and over forty times as long as an average novel. Again, we don't think we can compare a 10000-word novelette to a twice-as-long novella, but the Novel category is supposed to span two orders of magnitude?
Here's what I think should have happened: I would have liked to see Sanderson say that he was deeply honored on behalf of Robert Jordan, but he was withdrawing the work from consideration, BUT the Jordan estate would like to endow a new award to be voted on with the Hugos (much like the Campbell, which isn't technically a Hugo), the Robert Jordan Award for Epic SFF, to honor completed series of at least 4 volumes/600K words (ish), to recognize the unique qualities and significance to fandom of such works. In the long run, I think that would be a better memorial to Robert Jordan than shoehorning his work into an ill-fitting category.
