Hugo Awards Follow-up

Interesting.? The complete nominating, balloting and voting information for Anticipation’s 2009 Hugo Awards are now available as a downloadable PDF HERE (via Save the Semiprozine) and a quick check of the Novel category nominations reveals that -

Four of the six Arthur C Clarke Award finalists were nominated for the Hugo – MacLeod’s Song of Time, McAuley’s The Quiet War, Reynold’s House of Suns and Stephenson’s Anathem (which made the Hugo’s final ballot).

Two-thirds of the SF novels selected by a juried panel that is supposedly far better able to judge the merits of SFnal prose than any random collection of unwashed,? simpleton fans, ended up being nominated by those self-same peons for their own worthless, clueless, meaningless? award (The Hugo).

(In fairness, the ‘better able to judge’ attributes of the Clarke jurists – based on experience and academic credentials – was generated by third parties, not by the judges themselves and I am most specifically not impugning the Clarke judges in any way with the previous.)

I’m tempted to come to some conclusions based on this information.? So I will.

It could be that the Clarke jurists are themselves responsible for the Hugo nominations of those novel.? If they participated, they support it.? Which would of course lend the lie to any supposition that when compared, the Clarke Award means all and the Hugo Award means nothing.

It could be that sheer statistical probability was responsible for the convergence – though the numbers themselves tend to negate that possibility:? Anathem received 93 nominations, House of Suns received 26 nominations, The Quiet War 24.? All three are in the top 25% of all nominees (#2, #18 and #19 out of 82 unique works).? Only Song of Time didn’t make the top 50% (10 nominations, #48).? But of course, even idiots get things right once and a while and even the broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.

(On average, each of the voters appears to have nominated slightly more than three works each; given that each voter can nominate five works and that there is absolutely no penalty for filling out all five slots, this indicates that the voters were fairly discriminating in their selections.? I say ‘on average’ because another explanation is that lots of voters just filled out their five slots with any old piece of eligible pulp, while an almost equal number only nominated a single (GREAT) work. BUT.? If that’s the case, then 46 idiots voted only for Anathem, 13 only for Quiet War, 12 only for House of Suns, 5 only for Song.? 76 out of 639 voters (11.8%) are actually ABOVE average idiots. (These numbers could also be used as a near-proof of Sturgeon’s Law in reverse: 90% of all readers like crap, but while that may be true, empirical evidence suggests otherwise.)

Or it could be that there isn’t nearly as much divergence between those works selected by a juried panel and those selected by the peons of the science fiction world as some have ranted suggested.

For further background on this subject – visit here and here .

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UPDATE:? FINAL NAIL.

Sir Arthur in his own words “I want to be remembered most as a writer who entertained readers and hopefully stretched their imaginations as well.” (Sir Arthur then goes on to quote – of all ‘literary’ writers the whole world over – Rudyard Kipling.? Youtube video at about 7:45

Entertaining and inspiring imagination.? Isn’t that what makes for great SF?