Vote vote vote--and rec rec rec rec

[ellen_datlow]

Ok. Here's my impassioned plea/push/nag for anyone who reads this blog and is eligible to recommend stories and or novels for the various peer group science fiction, fantasy, and horror awards.
I know that some people feel that awards themselves are a bad thing and that they should all be abolished. I'm not talking to you. I don't believe that and I know I'm not going to change your minds.

Awards are NOT going to go away but they could become less visible (which I think is a bad thing). As an editor I really appreciate it when the stories/books I edit make final award ballots and win awards. And I think most writers are even more appreciative of this. It gives a sense of validation for what you're doing by your peers (for the Nebula and Stoker).

Right now is "award rec season" and there are discussions on both the SFWA Bulletin Board and the HWA Bulletin Board about how their respective awards are dying --not enough members are recommending works to even make a preliminary ballot.

Now some people think that this might be because no one likes the work being published.
Others that no one is reading enough short fiction to be interested in recommending works in those categories.
I have a really difficult time believing the first reason. I've been reading sf/f/h short fiction for twenty five years and have found no drop off in quality in any of those fields.

I can't answer for the second but I hope it's not true because if so my profession will die and I love editing short fiction.

If you care at ALL for the genre short story then I urge you to recommend the stories that you think are worth bringing to the attention of your peers.

This is totally off the cuff and I know if I thought about it more I'd have more to write--but I'd also probably just delete the whole post...

Comments welcome!

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

You're either confusing liking something with being a "fanboy" or suggesting that only fanboys would like SF/F.

The former is easily corrected: one may write SF/F because they enjoy playing around with certain forms, because the magazines pay whereas many lit journals don't, as an artifact of their own interests (i.e., they write what they like, and find out after the fact that only SF/F venues will publish it), because they write a whole lot of things for a wide variety of venues, etc.

As far as the latter possibility, I fear that increasingly that is the attitude. A by-fanboy-for-fanboy SF would quickly crawl up its own ass and cater to a shrinking audience. Indeed, that may well be what is happening after all.

And while you may not want to reread the Tolkien, etc., what some fraction of the audienc is just that. They want to read stories that remind them of being seven years old and discovering Tolkien. This is not the majority of the audience of readers, but this fraction does have more of a specific weight inside SF than in fiction in general and may be approacing a plurality of readers of the short stuff at least, which would go a long way toward explaining the otherwise confusing editorial choices made each month by editors who are more interested in keeping the last few rats on the sinking ship than they are for striking out to shore.

As a bit of an aside, I think it's pretty clear that for the last generation or so, everyone has had the same recipe for success in SF: get novelists that can appeal to TV-watchers, and then buy short fiction from those novelists if they manage to get popular. Needless to say, however, many TV-watchers don't want to read novels and many novel-readers don't want to read short fiction. The recipe has been a failure for the thirty years since Star Wars suggested it.

So, here's another recipe: if SF/F takes up about 7% of the marketplace for fiction consumption (in the US at least), why not publish SF that might appeal to the other 93% of people who are already in bookstores, looking for something to read, as opposed to chasing after people who enter bookstores only to buy DVDs or use the toilet?