One way of looking at the Hugo Awards mess

So we’re once again having Hugo Awards drama. It’s confusing, because the people who packed the ballot with their choices have a bunch of vague explanations about why they’re upset. (Ranging from “OMG SJWs” and “affirmative action” to “we just want fun stories.”) They generally keep their grievances vague and nebulous (no pun intended), and it’s hard to pin down what they’re upset about. And this year, they changed tactics slightly, putting more “mainstream” choices on the ballot except for some of the short fiction categories.

So I figure one useful way to look at this issue is to ask: What’s changed? If there’s a group of people who are upset, what recent changes could possibly account for their being upset? Here are a few things that occur to me.

1) Short fiction has changed. So one of the frustrating things about discussing this whole Hugo mess has been that novels and short stories get lumped together.

The Hugo Awards only have one novel category, but they have three short fiction categories. And the Puppies have proved that it’s easy to pack Best Novelette and Best Short Story with your own preferences if you have a small group nominating in lockstep, because very few people actually nominate for those.

Fewer people pay attention to short fiction than novels in general, in fact. This is true in literary fiction, as well as genre fiction. And short fiction has always been where more experimental and daring work has happened – and occasionally, one of those more unconventional stories makes it into awards ballots. This has always happened, I think.

But it’s definitely true that short fiction has changed tremendously in the past decade – mainly, because everything has gone digital. Magazines like Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Lightspeed have become much more important, and they get a lot of stories onto ballots. (When the ballots are not stuffed.) There’s also been a changing of the guard at the “Big Three” digests, but the digests still have an incentive to publish stuff that will sell on magazine racks – whereas the online magazines have an incentive to publish stuff that will get passed around on the internet.

The Big Three have also increasingly moved towards iPad-friendly e-book editions that they can sell on Amazon. The internet is where short fiction gets most of its attention nowadays. And it’s reasonable to think that there’s been some change in the type of short fiction that gets published as result, although my recent experience has been that action-oriented, plot-heavy stories are still easy to sell, and people still like them.

2) Book publishing has also changed. Borders went under. Wal-Mart stopped selling most paperbacks. Independent bookstores made a huge comeback. People started reading more e-books, and a lot of the most fun, action-adventure-y novels are being self-published on Amazon now. The midlist is finally, completely, dead, and people who made a comfortable living writing novels that only sold moderately well have been pushed out.

For all that, though, I don’t think the changes in book publishing have been as transformative as what’s happened with short fiction. Because short fiction is a smaller arena, and never had as robust a retail presence – apart from a few big anthologies every year – the move to internet venues was a massive shift, and probably did change the kind of short stories being published in major markets. But to the extent that Clarkesworld is the new Asimov’s, Amazon is the new Ace/Roc. And yet, the same kind of books that were popular a decade ago are still popular – even accounting for fads, and shifting tastes, and all that. Kameron Hurley believes we’re in the middle of a new “New Wave,” but I don’t quite see it – there is a healthy amount of genre-defying, experimental, literary-tinged SF being published, but there was also quite a lot of that in the 1990s and 2000s, what with Slipstream and the New Weird and whatnot.

And book authors who were a big deal 10 years ago are still a big deal. Neal Stephenson and Lois McMaster Bujold are still just as important, and successful, as they ever were. If anything, it’s harder now than ever for a new author to break out, and the field is tilted towards established pros. (In his big piece on “popularity versus awards” in SF, Eric Flint went to a Barnes & Noble and discovered that… established authors who have a huge backlist are taking up a lot of shelf space. But he just proved my point – it’s harder for new authors to break in, because Mercedes Lackey owns half a shelf.)

Anyway, I guess my feeling is that the changes in bookselling would, if anything, make it harder for a bunch of brand new authors, peddling “message fiction,” to take over anything. And the book nominees in the Hugo Awards mostly reflect titles that have done well, and gotten a lot of review attention, in the previous year. Which has always been the case, I think. The “Best Novel” category hasn’t really changed that much in the past decade – except for one important shift:

3) More women getting award nominations. This is the single measurable change to big SF awards that I’m aware of. From 2000-2009, women accounted for roughly 20 percent of the Hugo fiction nominations, but from 2010-2014, women crept up towards parity. This was a huge change, and it’s been totally reversed in 2015 and 2016, thanks to the Puppies. (And the fact that this year’s Nebula winners were all female just proves that there hasn’t been any drop in quality among female writers in 2014 and 2015.)

This year’s Rabid Puppies fiction slate was pretty much male-dominated, except for Bujold. When you look for “What actually changed in the past several years, that might cause a group of people on the internet to feel as though science fiction awards were heading in the wrong direction,” this is the thing that sticks out like a sore thumb.

The Hugos still were not doing a great job of recognizing writers of color, but they did make huge strides towards acknowledging the incredible work that women writers have been doing in genre fiction. And this is the trend that the Puppies have more or less put a stop to. So if I had to put my finger on one thing that seems to be behind the Puppy movement, I wouldn’t reach for “fiction is getting too literary” – even in spite of the changes in short fiction – when there’s another explanation, that’s so obvious and quantifiable.