Karen Burnham

This weekend, awards season really geared up. The BSFA and Ditmar awards were announced, and the Hugo award nominations were revealed. Congratulations, by the way, to all the winners and nominees reading this!

So what do awards do for us as a community? Do they help shape the dialog, or are they just something to argue over? Along the way, do you have any gripes, praise, or handicapping for this year’s season?

This conversation engendered lots of discussion in several directions (and I’m still experimenting with the best/most readable format for these posts) so I’ve decided to split the topic over three days. Check back Thursday and Friday for more Awards talk!

As usual, if you’d like to see the whole conversation on one page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see a drop down menu above, click here and it should show up.

Liz Hand

I think it says a lot about how far we’ve come in terms of cultural respectability that we can, after all these years, at last see a work like “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” on the final Hugo ballot.

Brett Cox

Liz: Ain’t it the truth!

Unfortunately I can’t immediately lay my hands on a copy of the book to quote accurately, but there’s a passage in Charlotte’s Web that says, approximately, that it is a fine thing to receive an award and gain the approbation of one’s peers.  And that is indisputably true.  No matter how we gripe and shrug and downplay it, people love awards; they love receiving them, and yes, they love witnessing them being received.  They are also a boon to the statisticians among us.

Liz Hand

Oh, I love that quote and have always wanted to use it!

“It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.”

I think that in the SF/F world, awards may have compensated a bit for the lack of validation that  quote-unquote “literary” mainstream writers and novels receive.  That’s changed somewhat more recently, as genre writers more often find a place at the table alongside mainstream writers.

But as Brett said,  we all still like awards.  And I do think they serve a serious purpose, in that they can give encouragement and a sense of validation to artists who too often receive very little of either, in terms of financial and commercial success.  They can also help with marketing — publishers like them, too — though, sadly, you can’t live on awards.  Except for the Tiptree …

Andy Duncan

I agree with everything Brett and Liz already said, but I can’t resist throwing in my two cents anyway.

I have spent five years of my life to date on various awards juries within our field.  I also have been on countless similar judging and evaluation bodies, from scholarship committees to the distinguished panel that determined, many years ago, the winner of a battle of the bands at Cowboys Nightlife in Kernersville, N.C.  The experiences are similar; the conversations among the judges are similar; the outcomes are similar:  Someone worthy gets honored this year, and someone else who (arguably) is equally worthy does not.

Over the years, I have decided the primary purpose of an award is not to celebrate individuals, but to celebrate the field those individuals work in.  We squirm when this is made overt, as in the sanctimonious aren’t-we-great speeches about the universal appeal of motion pictures at the Oscars every year, or that endless Grammys tribute this year to the music charities supported by the recording industry.  Yet it’s true anyway; it’s less important who wins, say, the Hugos in any given year than the fact that, once again, the Hugos are given out, generating another opportunity to see one another, and applaud one another, and talk to one another about our field and how it’s doing — and, yes, to kvetch about who got robbed and who’s overrrated and who the real winner is.

Let me immediately acknowledge that this distanced attitude of mine falls to bits whenever I get nominated for one of these things, whereupon the entire exercise becomes entirely a referendum on ME, and so I spend weeks riding a rollercoaster of ego.  Gardner Dozois hits it on the head when he says that even if you know that a fellow nominee will win the award, even if you have seen that person’s name engraved on the base before the dinner, you nevertheless can’t help your hopes spiking in those final moments as the list of nominees is being read:  “Maybe they were playing a prank on me!  Or maybe there was a tie!  Ties happen!”  But then it’s all over, and somebody takes home the trophy, and I go back to my cool assessments.

Writers who have won lots of awards, and have been nominated for lots more, have told me that you never get over awards anxiety, including the anxiety that you might not be nominated for the umpteenth time, whereupon you would immediately think, “Oh, I must be past it; the field has moved on.”

Many years ago, I was talking to Bruce Sterling about that year’s nominees for something or other.  After enthusiastically handicapping the race, I asked him, “What do you think is the smart money this year?”

“The smart money,” he replied, “is not to care.”

Even if you don’t care, awards and nominations do generate excellent lists, very helpful when you’re trying to decide what to read next or watch next, or get a handle on what was preoccupying a given field at a given time.

I like Spielberg’s line at the Oscars this year, when he was announcing the Best Picture winner.  He said, basically, that one of these nominees momentarily will join the illustrious ranks of Casablanca, On the Waterfront, and Lawrence of Arabia — while all the other nominees will join the illustrious ranks of Citizen Kane, 2001, and Raging Bull!  It really is an honor to be nominated — and to have the honor of nominating, a way of giving back, a way of saying, “I’m part of this field, too.”

Liz Hand

Bruce’s comment is dead-on.  One needs to keep all this stuff in perspective — I’m always reminded of the scene in A Christmas Story, when the father opens the huge wooden box disclosing the hideous lamp shaped like a woman’s leg, and exclaims (to his irritated wife’s question, “What IS it?”)  ”Why, It’s a MAJOR AWARD!”

Terry Bisson

Hey, gang!
We just got nominated for the Montgolfier Award!
(Best SF Discussion Blog).

It’s an honor etc …

Gary Wolfe

I think Liz and Andy and Brett have covered much of the territory I’d cover, but I’d especially like to second the notion that awards help define and validate the community, even though I don’t think they do much to shape the literature, or the art, or the filmmaking.

I don’t think there’s another field that likes to gives itself as many different awards as the SF/fantasy field.  There me be what seems like several hundred categories of Grammies, but they’re all Grammies.  Every year I seem to discover another SF/F award I haven’t heard of before, and I have to admire the indefatigability of Cheryl Morgan at SF Awards Watch and Mark Kelly of Locus Online of being able to keep track of these things.  It seems like too many–until I find myself nominated for one, and then it seems like there aren’t enough.

But back to the community validation thing.  Two awards that I’ve been involved in for many years are awarded by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.  One is a career achievement award for scholarship, and may be a little off-topic for most of this thread, but one in particular sticks with me:  we’d decided to give the scholarship award to a very major critic and scholar of folklore and fairy tales–I shouldn’t mention the name, but people can figure it out easily enough–whose reputation was such that we weren’t sure he’d even bother to come to receive it.  But accepting the award at the banquet, he told us it was the first award he’d ever received, and felt validated.  I think those of us at ICFA felt pretty validated as well, when we learned that.

The other ICFA award, which I administer, is the Crawford Award for a new fantasy writer.  I keep administering it year after year, even though it can sometimes be nerve-wracking, because I get to make those wonderful phone calls.  A fair amount of the time it feels like you’re inviting someone to a huge and wonderful party they’d known little or nothing about previously, and I’ve seen Crawford winners become very active and highly valued colleagues for years afterward.  Whether it really does much for a career isn’t really the point:  it does a lot, in terms of validation, for those who win, and for those who get nominated, and for those of us lucky enough to be able to hand them out.

Paul Di Filippo

The only award I’ve ever won and received–a BSFA for Best Short Story–misspelled my name on the trophy.  My “validation” of all I knew about my career was complete.

Cecelia Holland

There are literally hundreds of awards, but since I never get any, I don’t pay a lot of attention.

John Kessel

I also agree with the comments of Andy, Brett, Liz. I guess I might say a few personal things.

I was so lucky as to win the Nebula Award for best novella in 1982 (for “Another Orphan”) on my very first nomination. At that point I was probably one of the most obscure writers ever to win the Nebula. I was of course overjoyed, but I also was intimidated. It took me some time to figure out what this meant about me as a writer. What should I be writing? How could I best use this as a springboard for my career? My god, what would people expect from me next? Was it time to do a novel?

Self-involved as I was, given the fact that the winners of these awards are a matter of happenstance and luck, and that three months later nobody remembers who won, my fretting about this was ludicrous. I eventually got over it, wrote whatever I was likely to have written anyway, and the world kept turning. I was grateful to have won, and that was that.

Winning for “Pride and Prometheus” twenty-six years later was an entirely different experience. I was very happy to have my story appreciated and spoken of. It made me feel that I was still at least somewhat relevant to the field. But mostly what I felt was a great affection for the unruly community that is science fiction and fantasy, of which I am and have been a part since long before I ever published a word.

When I was a kid I spent much of my emotional life submerged in the world of sf, and  then later I was a fan, then later an aspiring writer, then eventually a published one. I also to some degree developed an identity completely outside the field; I became a lit professor and an academic and a teacher of fiction writing regardless of genre.  But winning a Nebula in my late 50s re-affirmed my sf identity, and meant more to me than the recognition I have received outside of sf. I felt at home among my fellow sf writers, and very grateful to have their acknowledgment.

Cat Rambo

I agree with much of what’s been said already but find it hard to comment on awards, because I am somewhat cynical about them. It does seem to me that while most of the time many are rightly given, there are times when the amount of career savviness, ability to self-promote, and even economic means may prove major factors that skew results.

At the same time, often we live such solitary existences as writers that it’s immensely wonderful to be reminded of one of the reasons we’re writing – to reach other people – and it’s a delight to know that we’ve succeeded.

Like others on this list, I really like the idea that the awards are celebrating the field as much as the individual writers, both uniting the field and helping compensate a bit for the abuse that gets heaped on genre fiction. I look to the award lists when I’m trying to catch up on reading or find new stuff, and find them very useful in that regard.

Ellen Klages

When I think about awards, I keep remembering Con Jose in 2002. Neil Gaiman had just won the Hugo for Best Novel (his first, I believe), and after a few minutes of talking about how much he’d loved SF as a kid, and how much he’d day-dreamed about being part of the field, he suddenly stopped, looked down at the rocket ship in his hand, and said, rather in the voice of the astonished eight-year-old who had once day-dreamed: “Fuck. I won a HUGO.”

I also think that awards ceremonies are an excuse to show ourselves, the world, and each other that although we are geeks and nerds, we clean up pretty good.

With a job where you can work in your bathrobe, or in the clothes that DO NOT GO OUTSIDE any more, dressing up can be fun.