It’s been two months since my last editorial here. I like to think it’s because the last one I wrote was such a fun time that I felt I could rest on my laurels for October. The reality is that I was in the midst of a horrible mental spiral for much of October, and actually a good deal of November so far. I’ve gotten better! At least well enough that I feel I can do this again, which is all well because I’ve had an itch to write about this particular topic for a minute now. It’s something that’s been gnawing at me, but I didn’t wanna jump into it in a white heat for fear of coming off as reactionary. As a disclaimer I want you to know that I’m pretty decidedly left-leaning. I used to be a royal shithead, both politically and just as a person, up to just a couple years ago, but I’ve been working since then to right some past wrongs. This month’s editorial is coming from someone who loves genre fiction and, perhaps more unwisely, the Hugo Awards in a way. Investing in discussing the Hugos is sort of like investing in a spider-themed restaurant.

The Hugos are of course like just about any award, in that they exist as a form of congratulations combined with exposure. Just as people become more interested (supposedly) in a movie if it won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the same might apply to a novel that has a “HUGO AWARD WINNER” sticker slapped on the cover. The Hugos are like the Oscars for genre fiction—except not really; rather it’s more accurate to say the Nebulas are the Oscars for genre fiction. What separates the Hugos from the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever the fuck is that the Hugos are voted on by fans and not necessarily industry people (although it’s possible to be both, as you know). If you buy a membership for a year’s Worldcon then you get voting privileges, regardless of whether you’re actually attending the convention. (That reminds me, I should buy my membership for next year’s Worldcon.) The result is that the voting process for Hugos is, by default, far more democratic than for a lot of other awards; but then there’s perhaps the biggest consequence of this, which is that the Hugos are also notoriously fannish.

I’m trying to remember who said this, but it goes something like, “E. E. Smith was considered a living legend in SF circles, and was a total unknown outside of that.” Of course, even avid SF readers under the age of, say, forty, probably have no clue who Smith is, but the point is that there’s sometimess a gulf between what’s popular among the SF readership and what’s popular with the general public. Ask a random person—better yet, ask someone who claims to be an avid reader—what the Hugo is and they’re unlikely to give an answer. Filmmakers, rather infamously, almost never attend the Hugos, even if they’re expected to win (for Best Dramatic Presentation), because most filmmakers simply don’t care about the Hugos. (It doesn’t help that the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo is looking to be split up YET AGAIN.) An ironic aspect of all this is that even voters don’t seem keen on acknowledging award’s fannish nature, because the fan categories this is relevant to me so throw me a fucking bone here have seen consistently low voter turnout. I’m not even gonna get into fandom politics here, which is another thing that separates the Hugos from most other awards.

However, I do need to talk about a specific category and in doing so I do have to bring up fandom politics nominally, if only for the sake of drawing comparisons. I have nothing against the examples cited per se. The Hugo for Best Related Work started out as the Hugo for Best Non-Fiction Book, and that initial name was straightforward enough if also a little contentious. I’m not sure if it’s fair to compare a biography with an art book, for example, and we could certainly argue over how broad an umbrella “non-fiction” is. However, the works that were in the running for this category were at least slightly comparable with each other; at the very least they existed in the same fucking medium. This would change in 2010 when the award was retitled to Best Related Work (it had been first retitled to Best Related Book, but this is not as big a change), which turned out to have radical (and I would argue disastrous) implications going forward.

In 2010 the nominees were all books; in 2011 you had four books plus one podcast. Now, I don’t think Writing Excuses counts as a fancast since it’s run by professional writers, but it is certainly not a book. Writing Excuses would win the Hugo for Best Related Work in 2013, beating out four books. Now riddle me this, Batman: How would you go about comparing a podcast with a book? How would you be able to say you prefer a podcast over a book, or vice versa? It’d be like if I said I prefer The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress over Ziggy Stardust; the two cannot be compared, despite both being SF, because they’re like athletes in completely different sports. As a voter, how are you supposed to give preference between an author podcast and a fantasy art book? THEY HAVE PRACTICALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER. Sorry, I’m getting carried away and we’re only just getting started, because Best Related Work would soon snowball into a horrible Frankenstein monster—a hodgepodge of wildly disparate works that have naught but the vaguest notion of genre relevance in common.

So 2014. Kameron Hurley’s “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” is probably a very good article, but it’s also just that—a single article. Beating out three books and a podcast. Hurley also won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer that year (fair enough), so I’m not sure if this second win was necessary; more importantly, I’m not convinced one can pick between (checks notes) an essay, three books, and a podcast. I’m not even gonna dig deep into 2015 and 2016 since a) there was no winner chosen, and b) due to fandom politics it’s pretty obvious the voting had been massively skewed towards—let’s say sources of ill repute. I’ll only say that for 2015 we have three books and two essays, then for 2016 we have three essays and two books. That these nominees were pretty much all shoved down voters’ throats by the same two or three publishers who had an agenda in mind is sort of beside the point, but it does illustrate the insular nature of the Hugos, especially for a category like Best Related Work where only enthusiasts are likely to care enough.

Things go back to “normal” for a couple years, but then there’s 2019. This is a fun one, and by that I mean I would love to show the list of nominees to a small Victorian child because it would probably send them into an epileptic fit. The winner was Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is a pretty great fanfiction site and I even have one or two stories published on there (don’t ask me how to find them). But that’s the thing: it’s a fanfiction site, only realized as a massive collection of works by mostly anonymous contributors. I don’t even know where to begin with this. It’s such a patently absurd idea for a Hugo winner that it’s easy to miss the fact that this was the first year a YouTube video was nominated for a Hugo, with Lindsay Ellis’s video on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. I like Lindsay Ellis and I like that video, but… how? How does this mesh with anything else? Then we have another website, www.mexicanxinitiative.com, which going by its mission statement is a noble effort, but again… where does this fit? “I think I prefer the website with She-Ra porn over the immigration assistance website.” Then we have three book nominees, as if to remind us what category this is.

I feel like I could keep going, but I don’t know how much that would help. In the past five years we’ve had a fanfiction site, an acceptance speech, and a deliberately bastardized translation of Beowulf as winners for Best Related Work. Three winners and I have no way of comparing them past some super-abstract fashion that would only go so far. Jeannette Ng’s speech on accepting the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (an award that had its name changed because of said speech, which says something) is certainly tenacious and broke the ice (not to mention her call for Hong Kong’s liberation was actually a noble statement, although people have overlooked that part) on what had become an increasingly uncomfortable subject in genre history, but is it really fair to compare it with biographies on Joanna Russ and Robert Heinlein? Clearly something is amiss here. The label of “related work” is so broad that it can mean damn near anything. It’d be like if you had a Hugo for Best Fiction and you pitted short stories up against novels, except it’s even more broad than that because we’ve had videos and podcasts go up against the written word. We have single articles—even blog posts—go up against entire books, and I’m supposed to think that’s not broken. This blog post you’re reading right now could theoretically get nominated for Best Related Work and I’ll be the first to say that’s bullshit.

We need a solution, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. The most obvious option (to me, anyway) is to revert the title to Best Non-Fiction Book or Best Related Book. I really don’t think it’s wise to make books share space with videos and websites. That then brings up another problem, though: What do we do with these related works which are not books? We have a few fan categoriess, why not add a couple more to accomidate videos and blog posts? Certainly the maturing of the internet in the 2010s has made it so that some of the best genre-related content comes in the form of video essays. The problem is that we already have too many Hugo categories as is and goddamnit, we’re about to get at least one more. An oversaturation in categories negatively affects voter turnout, and really it’s asking too much of people to keep track of all this shit. I know a few people who spend a good portion of their lives tracking the Hugos, but they’re an extremely small minority and the vast majority of people in fandom (including myself) don’t have the time or energy to deal with there being more fan categories than there are stars in the sky. My point is that this system is broken and it needs fixing.