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

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Stories are written by humans and edited and chosen by humans, not androids that never change and therefore they will vary, probabilistically.

If you don't understand that, then your grasp of simple early high school mathematics is very, very poor.

Stories are not chosen at random, no. They are chosen because they are better than the 99% of dreck that is written that isn't good enough, in general. Of those that are published, some are better than others. You have now said this twice. Even if you can't manage to go past that, then you have three ratings you have given already, not good enough, good enough to publish, better than what is usually published. If you are suggesting that everything you pick to publish is 5 star brilliant, and will be to everybody, that is just crazy talk in anyone's language.

To someone with , Crank! (which I have never heard of) would be chock full of crap, no matter what your opinion of it was.

You have sampled many fanboy critics with numbered rating systems then to have a large amount to judge from? :) If not, your methodology is flawed, and this would then be an exceedingly gross generalisation.

Just as flawed as suggesting that elitists with literati pretensions can assume to know how any given random person reads.

You want to get a large broad audience? They aren't going to care too much about allusions to Tolstoy or the brilliant use of semi-commas.

The quality that matters is do you not suck enough to read.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Stories are not chosen at random, no. They are chosen because they are better than the 99% of dreck that is written that isn't good enough, in general.

Nope. Some stories are chosen, for example, because they satisfy some need, such as the need to fill X number of pages, or because they are related to previous, better stories, or because there is a belief that a certain number of stories per year must be in spaceships, or because there haven't been any stories containing a wizard in a few months and this one is "good enough" to satisfy that, or because someone who doesn't write many short stories anymore sent in a two page flash fiction, etc etc.

Even if you can't manage to go past that, then you have three ratings you have given already, not good enough, good enough to publish, better than what is usually published.


Again, nope. There's good enough, good enough but not at the right time, not good enough, better than others, good but inappropriate for reasons of building an audience, good enough but too superficially similar to something else already published, not good enough but the publisher insists, good enough but the publisher says no, etc.

You'll note that a number of those categories have nothing to do with literary values.

If you are suggesting that everything you pick to publish is 5 star brilliant, and will be to everybody, that is just crazy talk in anyone's language.

Of course I'm not suggesting that. I am saying that anyone who is actually interested in reading quality fiction will acknowledge that the works I choose are of quality and ambition, even if they don't like the stories themselves.

This is not the case in most magazines. Some magazines actively militate against some attributes of quality, in that the audience they are hoping to retain is made up of people actively hostile to complex-compound sentence, or women characters, or certain types of politics, or "depressing" stories or "funny" ones, or stories that contain sex, etc etc etc.

You have sampled many fanboy critics with numbered rating systems then to have a large amount to judge from? :)


If the sample isn't large, it tends to be rather complete because of the small number.

At any rate, you've already spent a few posts fuming about literary fetishism, Tolstoy, semi-commas, etc., while also explicitly speaking only of satisfying ("do you not suck enough to read") so thanks for proving my implicit point.

Making a magazine that caters to your taste would exclude the broad audience of readers, most of whom read because they enjoy the act of reading, and not simply because they wanted to go into outer space when they were five years old, or because they stopped making Star Trek episodes.