Thoughts on the 2023 Hugo Awards

This video gives a pretty good recap of the endless fountain of scandals surrounding the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon and Hugo Awards. Larry Correia also gives an interesting take on it on his blog, and in his writing podcast.

My initial thoughts:

• Schadenfreude is one hell of a drug.
• Accusation = confession = projection, no exceptions.
• This scandal vindicates the Sad Puppies 110%. Remember how they called us the racists? How they said we were the ones manipulating the system? …yeah.
• Wow, schadenfreude is one hell of a drug.

Laying aside all of the knee-jerk internet outrage (and schadenfreude), though, I do find it tragic that there doesn’t seem to be a way to recognize excellence in the SF&F genres that isn’t totally given over to in-group politics and petty fannish controversies. At the end of the day, I think that’s really what the Sad/Rabid Puppies was all about: a small and exclusive group of insiders (aka “true fans”) refusing to give any space to outsiders who also wanted to be part of the awards process. The fact that most of these outsiders happened to be politically conservative was incidental; we might as well have been Chinese, for how the in-group treated us.

With all of that said, though, I don’t necessarily think that the best solution is to burn the Hugos to the ground. For all the scandals, and how terribly woke the Hugos have swung in the last few years, the system itself is still pretty good. I mean, can you imagine how much different things would be if our national elections were decided by ranked-choice voting, with “none of the above” as an available option? As much as I have a problem with the people who organize and run the Hugo Awards—the people who are rightly being slammed for arbitrarily discounting hundreds of Chinese ballots and arbitrarily disqualifying several titles from the final ballot—the system itself is actually a pretty good one.

A couple of years ago, I read every Hugo and Nebula award-winning book. It was an enlightening exercise, to say the least. Since then, I’ve dabbled with doing something similar with other wards, like Goodreads Choice, but I’ve never really made the plunge, since most of these other awards are either too young to really give a comprehensive overview of the genre, or too narrow or cliquish. Many of them are thinly-veiled popularity contests, where the author with the most rabid fanbase wins.

Is it possible to have an award that recognizes true excellence that doesn’t devolve into a thinly-veiled popularity contest on the one hand, or else isn’t taken over by a small and snobbish group of elites on the other? I can see how these sorts of concerns might have driven many of the concerns about “slate voting” during the Sad Puppies controversy in 2015. Unfortunately, they clearly took it to the opposite exteme, turning the Hugos into their own exclusive club, un-personing conservative and Chinese fans alike.

In the end, it probably comes down to who we are as a people more than what systems have been put in place. If fandom really was the kind of place where people could come together over their shared love of science fiction and fantasy, regardless of politics, religion, nationality, or anything else, then perhaps the Hugos actually would be a marker of excellence, and not just identification with a very small (and snobbish) in-group. And I do think there have been times in the past where that has been the case.

So, in a funny way, this whole controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards actually makes me want to go back and read a bunch of the older Hugo-nominated books from previous years, to see how I would have voted (and how my own vote differs from the votes that were actually cast). I think it could be a useful exercise, not so much in determining how useful or authoritative the Hugos ought to be (I figured that out a couple of years ago), but in determining my own reading tastes, and how they may or may not have fit in with previous generations of Hugo-award voting fans.

One of the most difficult things I’ve recently had to wrestle with is the realization that my own tastes and values run almost completely contrary to the culture in which I live. I don’t think the Hugo Awards have ever represented mainstream culture, but it is still an interesting bellweather of a subculture that I love, plagued as it might be by in-group politics and petty infighting. And I do think there were periods where my own tastes and values aligned pretty well. I’m curious to see which periods those are.

All of this is to say that I’ve been going through all of the old Hugo nominations for Best Novel, reading through them to see how I would have voted for each year. I’m mostly just doing it for myself, but I may post it here if you guys are interested, since it probably would make for some good blogging content.