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Informal History of the Hugos
Jul. 5th, 2019 09:10 pmThe next of the Related Works, An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000, Jo Walton. I read this whole thing, through, in order, which I don't really recommend to anyone else, just pick a few years and see what's in them. I mean, I don't regret reading through it all myself, but I also spent the past week pretty crushingly exhausted from taking my children on a variety of educational/recreational/keep-them-occupied-al excursions, and paging along through the years in a semi-stupor was about all I could manage in the way of reading anyways, demanding basically three reactions: "huh, that person was writing that early?", "huh, that person was writing that late?", and "whoa, that and that were in the same year?". That's it, that's the book. Actually it's slightly less of a Traditional Book than I had assumed at first - just like the Le Guin was originally radio interviews, this one was originally a series of weekly posts that Walton did for Tor.com in 2010 and 2011, and she's kept in some of the comments, mostly from Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton (who edits a Year's Best series).
To engage a little bit more with the actual content, goddamn there's a lot of science fiction I've never read. I would have claimed to be decently well-read in short fiction in the years in which my dad was collecting year's-bests, since I powered through that shelf in high school, but wow, while there were some titles that sounded familiar there were only a small handful of stories that I could recall even the first thing about. (Although when I turned to wikipedia, there were more that made me say "oh yeah, that", so possibly it's just that I can't remember a lot of stuff I read in high school any more.) And, honestly, there's so much I haven't read but there's also a lot I *have* read, enough to have plenty of opinions of my own along with Walton and Dozois.
In very meta Related Work relevance, one piece of historical context I got from this that I hadn't really had before was that the Nonfiction Book/Related Book has always vexed people with apples-and-oranges problems... hearing Walton complain about "how can you compare these rationally when they're not working in the same space" about the 1994 books or "another helping of comparing kumquats to parakeets" in 1997 or "I'm really glad I didn't have to vote on this, I have no idea how you can compare things this different" in 2000 makes this year's problem feel less extraordinary and more like business as usual. Also Kevin Standlee commented at one point to mention that the 2002 and 2005 Worldcons trialed a Best Web Site category but that websites "might be eligible in Best Related Work, but we won't know until one gets enough nominations to make the ballot and an administrator rules on the subject", which felt a little bit like Word of Standlee showing up to smack me personally about my qualms about Nominees That Are Not Like The Other Ones. So. Hm.
Finally, it was wild to spot Steve Stiles in the very first Fan Artist nominees back in '67 and '68 - he then didn't start getting nominated again until his long runs post-2000, but, like, that's got to be the longest lag between first nomination and first award ever, right? I kind of have a better feeling now for why people kept putting him back on the ballot.
To engage a little bit more with the actual content, goddamn there's a lot of science fiction I've never read. I would have claimed to be decently well-read in short fiction in the years in which my dad was collecting year's-bests, since I powered through that shelf in high school, but wow, while there were some titles that sounded familiar there were only a small handful of stories that I could recall even the first thing about. (Although when I turned to wikipedia, there were more that made me say "oh yeah, that", so possibly it's just that I can't remember a lot of stuff I read in high school any more.) And, honestly, there's so much I haven't read but there's also a lot I *have* read, enough to have plenty of opinions of my own along with Walton and Dozois.
In very meta Related Work relevance, one piece of historical context I got from this that I hadn't really had before was that the Nonfiction Book/Related Book has always vexed people with apples-and-oranges problems... hearing Walton complain about "how can you compare these rationally when they're not working in the same space" about the 1994 books or "another helping of comparing kumquats to parakeets" in 1997 or "I'm really glad I didn't have to vote on this, I have no idea how you can compare things this different" in 2000 makes this year's problem feel less extraordinary and more like business as usual. Also Kevin Standlee commented at one point to mention that the 2002 and 2005 Worldcons trialed a Best Web Site category but that websites "might be eligible in Best Related Work, but we won't know until one gets enough nominations to make the ballot and an administrator rules on the subject", which felt a little bit like Word of Standlee showing up to smack me personally about my qualms about Nominees That Are Not Like The Other Ones. So. Hm.
Finally, it was wild to spot Steve Stiles in the very first Fan Artist nominees back in '67 and '68 - he then didn't start getting nominated again until his long runs post-2000, but, like, that's got to be the longest lag between first nomination and first award ever, right? I kind of have a better feeling now for why people kept putting him back on the ballot.
