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Book prizes don't work how you think

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Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#41

Post by arjie »

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good.

I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like Dune and I think that's odd. Perhaps it's my tastes that are changing or my tastes are stagnating and the world is evolving. Ah well.

Oh and, about the cronyism angle in literary prizes, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Nobel_Prize_in_Literature is a good read. They picked members of their own academy that year and eventually one of the winners killed himself (perhaps over it).

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#42

Post by crackercrews »

deanputney wrote: post #40
crackercrews wrote: post #39

I think she's missing the point here. First she says: > Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense. OK, so the judging panels are not picking books based on diversity quotas, cool. But then she admits that the longlists are subject to diversity quotas: > It’s true that…

Neither part of that quote mentions a quota for the longlists. Am I missing something?

It does not explicitly admit it, and seeing the quotes pulled separately make it harder to infer. But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win).

Are these quotas or just nudges? It's hard to say. But I've been in the room when decisions like this were made, by institutions that are legally barred from even considering race. But in reality, race wasn't just part of the decision, it was determinative.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#43

Post by TurdF3rguson »

arjie wrote: post #41

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good. I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like D…

Agreed on Murderbot, it's a fun read but there's no big new ideas there and that's what Hugo used to be about.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#44

Post by SoftTalker »

epihelix wrote: post #27
sanswork wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.

I briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy. And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.

Amazing, until you got the "click of death"

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#45

Post by dundarious »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #24

Except for the prize committees outsourcing roughly the same sets of judges, they work a lot like how you’d expect. The judges pickup a bunch of books and choose the ones they like the most. Since the author makes it clear how subjective the process truly is, you can assume that personal biases play a huge part in how winners are chosen.

Yes, as someone who has read the literature section of the (small) national newspaper with some regularity, this is pretty much all old news -- could glean most of this from reading for a year. You hear about the longlists and shortlists and panel of judges (after the winner(s) is chosen), and one would hope that at least the literary prizes are highly subjective.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#46

Post by zeroonetwothree »

arjie wrote: post #41

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good. I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like D…

The Hugo awards have had a lot of weak winners in the past as well.

For example: They’d Rather Be Right, The Wanderer, Stand on Zanzibar (some people might disagree), Harry Potter, Hominids, etc

And have had many winning books that are enjoyable without “big ideas” as well.

In the end it’s just a fan voted award and subject to marketing and politics. Judged awards are perhaps a bit more consistent in reflecting quality? (Though maybe not)

And not every year gives us a Dune or A Fire Upon the Deep :)

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#47

Post by autarch »

arjie wrote: post #41

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good. I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like D…

Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years:

* 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022.

* 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns.

* 2025 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Bennett Jackson - a very bizarre Holmes & Watson take set in a land constantly invaded by sea kaiju, and where there's "magic" (or is it science) based on harvesting the dead kaiju's bodies.

These are all excellent books, each of which has something different to recommend them.

Are they as good as Dune? Well, it's very hard to say _now_. Assuming humans still exist in 60 years, will they still read them like we read Dune 60 years from its publication? Maybe.

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land won in 1961. I've read it, and I don't think it's aged very well. It's certainly not Dune.

How many people are still reading the 1969 winner, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar? I _have_ read it. It's good, but nowhere close to Dune. And how about 1978's winner, Gateway by Frederik Pohl? It's ... fine. It's not even in the same category as Dune, IMO.

Dune is an outlier among _all_ winners. It's one of the best SF books of all time, with a voice that still seems fresh today. Most Hugo (and Nebula) just don't live up to this standard. There are a few that do, like Left Hand of Darkness, Ender's Game, Hyperion, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (better than Dune, IMO). But those are outliers just like Dune.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#48

Post by zeroonetwothree »

neponeko wrote: post #14

What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not…

The fact is that the supply of people wanting to write books greatly exceeds the demand of readers. It’s inevitable that most books barely get read by anyone. You either accept it or you find something else to do.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#49

Post by gnabgib »

autarch wrote: post #47
arjie wrote: post #41

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good. I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like D…

Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years: * 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022. * 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns. * 2025 - The Tainted Cup by R…

Murderbot Diaries (the eight books) start in 2017[0], Murderbot series (TV) started in 2025[1]. Where are you getting 2021 from?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderbot_(TV_series)

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#50

Post by autarch »

gnabgib wrote: post #49
autarch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years: * 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022. * 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns. * 2025 - The Tainted Cup by R…

Murderbot Diaries (the eight books) start in 2017[0], Murderbot series (TV) started in 2025[1]. Where are you getting 2021 from? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderbot_(TV_series)

Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?

I really like that the Hugos added a Best Series category in 2017 to hopefully avoid this sort of thing. It seems like a great series is a different beast than a great single novel.

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