(don't forget to visit the site)I have a post up on the Save the Semiprozine website. The site is there to help educate people about the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, which is currently up for elimination from the Hugo ballot. Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and nominee in the Best Semiprozine category this year, asked me to write something months ago and I finally got around to it.
Fellow Best Fanzine nominee Mike Glyer over at File 770 commented on my post recently. He takes my final sentence to task, trying to suss out what I meant by it. Actually, why I phrased the closing in such a way. To quote myself, "Shame on you for wanting to take that from them."
Glyer writes:
“Shame on you” for what? Where is the shame in advocating the elimination of a Hugo category? Of all the unorthodox ideas science fiction fans entertain themselves with, we have to draw a line before we reach that one?And he's right. What is the shame in it? They've followed all the proper channels, and done everything correctly. In some ways, it's nice to see science fiction fans get organized and work to make change. If the appropriate thing to do is to eliminate the category, then let's do it.
However, I'm not so sure that's the appropriate thing to do. What bothers me about this movement to get rid of the Semiprozine category is overriding mindset that it's being done to punish LOCUS for winning so many times.* Unfortunately, you're also punishing anyone else who might get nominated in this category. And I don't think that's fair.**
Rather than advocate getting rid of the award, why not advocate nominating and voting? Why not try to make the category something that the Hugo voters know more about?
To me, the purpose of the Best Semiprozine category, like all awards categories, is to recognize people doing exceptional work in that area. If the award goes away, then so does that feeling of accomplishment for the people who were formerly being recognized. Yes, the editors can get nominated for Best Editor Short Form . . . IF they are a fiction publication.
So the question I need to answer for myself, should everything be eligible for a Hugo award?*** Obviously, Gordon van Gelder can win Best Editor, Short Form; but John Joseph Adams (his assistant editor) is left out in the cold concerning his work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as F&SF itself is not eligible for a Hugo.
I don't know all the background, so perhaps my reading of this as a punishment for LOCUS winning so many awards is off base. But, if that is the case, I think there are more productive ways to go about combatting that problem over eliminating the award altogether.
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* Since the inception of the Semiprozine category in 1984, four different publications have won the award. LOCUS has won every year except: 1993 Science Fiction Chronicle, 1994 Science Fiction Chronicle, 1995 Interzone, and 2005 Ansible. Both the 1995 and 2005 Worldcons were in Glasgow with a very likely large non-American voting base.
By contrast, since 1984, there have been nine different publications to win the Best Fanzine award. File 770 and Mimosa have won six times each, Ansible five times, Plotka and Lan's Lantern have each won twice, and Emerald City, Science-Fiction Five-Yearly, Texas SF Inquirer, and The Mad 3 Party have each won once.
What's my point? It's not like Best Fanzine has some record of handing out the award to a wide variety of publications, either. I realize that the Best Fanzine numbers pale in comparison to the 21 Hugos that LOCUS has won. That's almost four TIMES as many as the closest Fanzine winner.
From 1992 - 1999 when Mimosa won Best Fanzine five times out of eight and Ansible won the other three, I don't remember there being an outcry to get rid of the Best Fanzine category because there was no variety in the winners.
But maybe this is just comparing apples to oranges and I should be quiest down here at the bottom of the post.
** as a father, I constantly point out to my kids that life isn't fair. This is an instance where perhaps I need to listen to myself.
*** I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
6 comments:
Obviously, Gordon van Gelder can win Best Editor, Short Form; but John Joseph Adams (his assistant editor) is left out in the cold concerning his work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as F&SF itself is not eligible for a Hugo.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you wrote here, but there's no reason that John Joseph Adams would not be eligible for the Best Editor Short Form Hugo Award. The fact that the magazine for which he is an editor is not itself eligible for a Hugo Award is irrelevant. The definition of the BESF category is "The editor of... anthologies, collections or magazine issues primarily devoted to science fiction and / or fantasy...." and doesn't say anything about such works having to be separately eligible for a Hugo Award.
It's a bad example, Kevin. JJA would be left out as far as his work with F&SF, but he's certainly doing enough editorial work on his own to warrant being nominated alongside Gordon.
Perhaps a better example, for my point, would be someone like Kevin J. Maroney for the New York Review of Science Fiction. If the Semiprozine award goes away, Kevin's hard work at NYRSF will go unrecognized, while David G. Hartwell would potentially still be on the Hugo ballot for one of the editorial awards.
Does that make sense?
(I suspect I'm chasing my tail some in this argument, so don't feel that you need to agree with me or cede any points to me.)
Does that make sense?
No, because in neither case would either person be ineligible.
1. "Editor" of a publication need not be singular nor only The Lead Editor. JJA, if he's doing editing in the SF/F field of any sort, is eligible currently and will continue to be eligible for Best Editor, Short Form regardless of whether the pending changes to Best Semiprozine are ratified.
2. If Kevin J. Maroney remains an editor with NYRSF, he would continue to be eligible for BESF even if the pending amendment is ratified. Although the pending amendment makes semiprozines themselves ineligible for the Best Fanzine award, it doesn't affect the eligibility of the editorial teams of those works for the Best Editor Short Form award.
Where did you get the idea that removing Semiprozine from the Hugo Awards would make the editors of such works ineligible for a Hugo Award for their editing work? There's no words in the amendments that do this that I can see.
OK, I see where I'm not explaining my thoughts fully. I do not mean to say that people Kevin J. Maroney or Brian Bienkowski, or John Joseph Adams, et al would be ineligible for being nominated for Best Editor Short Form, but it would be very UNLIKELY that they would be nominated over or in additional to the more well-known editors with whom they work. (again, JJA being a bad example as many people know him now for his own editorial work)
Whereas right now a publication may end up on the ballot for Best Semiprozine (thereby recognizing everyone who worked on the publication) whereas the two editor awards seem to be relegated to only singular nomination.
Again, I am perfectly willing to be shown to be wrong, but I think that it is more likely for NYRSF to be nominated for Best Semiprozine than for any non-David Hartwell person from NYRSF to make the ballot for Best Editor Short Form.
And I apologize for interjecting a different thought here, but the WSFS Constitution clearly states "The editor of at least four (4) anthologies, collections or magazine issues primarily devoted to science fiction and / or fantasy, at least one of which was published in the previous calendar year" and specifically DOES NOT state "short fiction" but almost every place I see a description of the Best Editor Short Form category says that the award is given to someone for editing short fiction. In fact, I see it so often that I just assumed that Short Form = Short Fiction, and it does not. Just something I noticed tonight.
The Business Meeting went to a great deal of trouble to come up with technical wording that specifically did not require that the works making one eligible for BESF had to be exclusively short fiction.
You may be right that they are unlikely to be nominated, but they are eligible. Right now we already have a situation where any publication other than Locus is unlikely to win Best Semiprozine, even though is may be eligible. It's a fine distinction, I know.
(Note: I'm chairman of the WSFS Business Meeting this year. I'm not advocating either side of the debate, but I do tend to get passionate about technical issues that many people see as needless hair-splitting, for which I apologize.)
You may be right that they are unlikely to be nominated, but they are eligible. Right now we already have a situation where any publication other than Locus is unlikely to win Best Semiprozine, even though is may be eligible. It's a fine distinction, I know.
Exactly, and I think getting rid of the semiprozine award will further muddy the waters and make it even more unlikely that anyone associated with the semiprozines will achieve recognition, much less win an award. But who knows?
No need to apologize, I'm glad to see passion about this and other WSFS matters. It's passion that's made it very hard for me to articulate my thoughts on this subject. I keep going back and forth between not wanting an award that essentially one person/publication/thing wins year after year (I felt the same way about all the Dozois Best Editors and Langford Best Fan Writers) but also not wanting to discount all the hard work that goes into putting this stuff together; INCLUDING the people/publications I complain about.
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