By now, I imagine many of you have seen Gary Westfahl's File770 "open call" for the ironic establishment of a new award akin to the Razzies specifically for SF/F awards of "dubious and superfluous" character. At this point, I still don’t know if it is intended as a full joke or an intentional insult on the multitude of SF/F awards that now exist. It may not matter either way, as any joke or legitimate argument made certainly failed to meet its intentions. At best, one could say the post was mean-spirited, which is unfortunate coming from someone with as many substantial contributions to SF/F scholarship as Westfahl.
While I don’t want to make this post entirely about Westfahl’s “argument,” I do have a few short thoughts before I get to what is I’m really here for: talking about why awards matter. In brief, this is my current response to Westfahl’s piece:
As one commenter noted, this is a solution in search of a problem. Whatever “issue” necessitating the post is ill-defined, unsubstantiated, and/or non-existent. Since the stated intent of the post is to shame awards for a perceived lack of quality or value, I’m not sure the “problem” actually matters at all. This reads more like someone personally bothered by the existence of a thing (many awards of varying degrees of significance) and not someone willing or able to articulate why this matters at all. If the awards are insignificant or of questionable quality (I find this argument dubious), then, on the one hand, their insignificance immediately identifies them as “not actually a problem” (insignificant things having little to no impact on a broader culture) OR, on the other hand, their questionable quality, in assuming insignificance is not a factor, would either be readily understood by the community at large or would require one to defend the notion that they are of questionable quality without merely asserting it without evidence. The former negates the existence of the problem, and the latter mandates serious examination.
On multiple occasions, Westfahl merely asserts things without offering any reasonable defense of those claims. To suggest that nearly all awards exist for the purpose of self-aggrandizement on the part of its parent organization may be true, but, again, one would need to provide sufficient evidence and articulate an argument for why this is actually a problem.
I would assume that Westfahl knows that relying on a singular anecdote to support a point has the tendency to lead to bad conclusions (even fallacies). For example, he asserts that because Ted Chiang didn’t think his place of residence had an impact on his work, this meant the intentions of the Endeavour Award (to honor writers from the Pacific Northwest) were false. It does not occur to him here that perhaps this only applies to Ted Chiang and not necessarily to all recipients or nominees of the award OR that Ted Chiang is unaware of themes in his work which appeal to the PNW region. Regardless, why this matters at all is unclear: Why should it matter if an award dedicated to writers living in a specific region should grant the award specifically to those for whom that region is an influence when the award itself does not claim that this is its goal?
Lastly, Westfahl asserts that because there are so many other awards than the ones he thinks matter, this necessarily dilutes the achievements of the winners and the awards themselves. Again, it is unclear why this should be assumed. The mere existence of many types of a thing doesn’t necessarily result in the devaluation of more prominent members of that type of thing. Again, I return to the question of significance: this argument would only matter if we could demonstrate that lesser known awards are having a measurable impact on the valuation of well known awards. Perhaps that evidence exists, but none of it is on offer here.
Much of my other objections to the piece lead me to the real focus for this post: What purpose do awards serve, and why do awards matter?
Honestly, *these* are probably the more productive questions to ask. There are, I agree, an absurd number of awards. While there are many shared categories within these awards (i.e., almost all literature awards have some version of the Best Novel category), the character, intentions, and focus of awards (i.e., purpose) can vary (from the award with global ambitions to the personal award of a blog). Naturally, SF/F/H’s cultural awareness of awards varies, too — often in unsurprising ways given how widespread and fragmented its culture has become.
Broadly, I think all SF/F/H awards fall into one or more of these categories:
Global Awards
Awards intended to reach a global audience (in theory rather than in practice)Regional Awards
Awards which serve a particular region, usually by targeting authors from the region or content focused on itConvention Awards
Awards unique to an SF/F/H convention (this category may intersect with one or more of the others)Thematic or Subgenre Awards
Awards focused on specific topics, themes, types of narrative or character, etc. (this category may intersect with one or more of the others)Organization-Based Awards
Awards given out by a professional or fan organization (this category may intersect with one or more of the others)Personal Awards
Awards given out by an individual or fan group (typically found on blogs or similar limited spaces)
These are probably not the ONLY categories, and it is certainly the case that these categories are a tad “squishy” given that they may intersect, their levels of cultural penetration may vary wildly, etc. Additionally, we could break these down further to account for methodologies (such as fan-voted or jury-selected awards, within which there are varying types of hybrids) or other factors. Awards are, I think, a spectrum.
Within these categories, the intentions or purpose for the award may vary. In general, SF/F/H awards intend to present the “Best” in a given category (let’s stick with Novel from now on), but HOW they aim to do so reflects a subculture’s valuation of the Best. The Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel, for example, are broadly open to anyone who is a “member” of its voting community, which, of course, means they reflect the tastes of a readership rather than the tastes of a jury (such as the Philip K Dick and the Shirley Jackson Awards). In theory, populist awards don’t claim critical assessment of the work (though individuals may claim as such); however, juried awards almost always do because they are typically helmed by literary critics, editors, and professional writers, with some awards placing more interest in the first two categories (there are, of course, exceptions to this because, after all, there are a metric fuckton of awards). I suspect it’s obvious, then, that while there may be overlap between these styles of awards, they are using very different ideas of what it means for a novel to be “the best.”
I don’t want to get into the argument over which award style is better than the other. Those are arguments the SF/F/H community has had on and off for years, and it isn’t an argument I’m particularly interested in. That said, this does get me to that second part of the question: Why do these awards matter?
Two things we need to take as given:
There are too many awards for any one person to care about.
There are too many books (or movies or TV shows) for any one person to read or watch.
Part of the debate over whether a populist or a juried award is “better” has to do with what individuals value in literature and value in how literature is assessed (substitute this for any other awards category as you see fit). Some folks prefer the critical focus of a juried award because they have niche tastes and many juried awards could be said to reflect a very specific set of tastes (some far more than others). The same could be said for folks interested in specific subgenres (this seems obvious to me). For folks with such tastes, a populist award is likely not to meet their interests. More importantly, we’re unlikely to agree on which juried awards cover the variety of these niche tastes because the whole point of a niche taste is that it isn’t shared widely by a populace; otherwise, a populist award would fit the bill.
Meanwhile, readers who tend toward the mainstream in their reading interests (or at least mainstream for now) are far more likely to be interested in the populist awards. When your tastes more often than not align with what a lot of other people enjoy, it’s very likely you’ll find more of that in awards voted on by many people. The Goodreads awards are probably the most populist of the populist awards for SF/F/H. In 2022, over 5.7 million ballots were cast, and the resulting winners were, by and large, some of the most popular writers for that year (Sarah J. Maas and Emily St. John Mandel, to name two).
One practical note here: Both of these categories can help a potential reader cut through the sea of things released in a given years. While this isn’t the stated intent of almost any award, that is how they are sometimes used, and there is immense value in having a mechanism for finding the things you’re likely to want to read anyway. This is especially true for self-publishing awards because the dominant medium for SPed work is the eBook, and there are, as far as I can tell, no good systems for browsing such books. Awards help narrow the field.
The point in talking about all of this is to get at why awards matter differently to different people. In almost all cases of the major awards, the intent is to recognize quality from the perspective of the person deciding (and, by extension, in the aggregate for populist awards). Awards allow a community to express its tastes to itself or to the world AND to those being recognized. Those tastes do not need to be culturally widespread, though some awards aim for this exact thing; they only need to be relevant within its specific community. For this reason, many smaller awards given at conventions or within subcommunities are simultaneously irrelevant to the wider culture and exceedingly relevant to the people to whom the award belongs. More importantly, this is sufficient for the award to have value: that the people who love it do so regardless of its reach. To them, it matters, and while some of them may want the award to matter to others, including awardees, it isn’t required for the award to be valued by its “fans.”
Here, one cannot escape self-aggrandizement (a concern for Westfahl), but this isn’t a problem because all awards technically do this no matter their significance. I’m not aware of any awards (certainly not many awards) deliberately seeking to leverage their value on the backs of high profile writers, but there are almost no awards for which the act of awarding isn’t also an effort to draw attention to the awarding entity. And since this is a thing all awards have, including awards I suspect everyone would want to keep (the Hugos, Nebulas, etc.), this feels less like a meaningful criticism than an acknowledgement of a core function of an award whose end result is the recognition of work deemed of value by the awarding body.
It’s also worth adding here that many small awards are personal. They may reflect individual tastes or the tastes of a fairly small body of fans who want to give recognition to works they deem valuable. Most of these awards are irrelevant outside of its core culture, and so their existence can’t be said to meaningful dilute the value of awards nor could it be said to be doing anything but reflecting the tastes/values of an individual or group or small institution. This is, after all, the point of an award.
I’ll use myself as an example: for several years, I gave out the WISB Awards when I was still a heavy blogger on, well, Blogger. Yes, these awards drew attention to my blog, and, yes, I knew they could do that. But my real interest was in sharing what I thought were the best works across a range of categories according to me so I could confer some recognition to the creators of those works and draw more attention to them for others who placed some value in my tastes. In the grand scheme, these awards were irrelevant outside of a small number of readers, but they were relevant to me, to the people reading, and, in some small cases, the authors and creators who found out. It gave that small community something to talk about and gave the awardees some happy feels.
And at the end of the day, that seems to me to be enough. An award need not do more than make the people who care about it engaged and/or happy for it to have value. It can simply be, and if it isn’t something you find of value, you don’t have to engage with it (though let’s not forget the irony of complaining about awards you think are irrelevant, thereby granting it wider attention and, thus, relevance). Instead, you can let that award be what it is for the people who like it and focus your attentions on the awards that matter to you.
And now that I’m here at this point in this newsletter, I’m amused that I have come to what has become my fandom mantra: talk more about the things you actually love and less about the things you hate.
I happen to love a lot of SF/F/H awards, including the ones I can never have influence over. There are entirely too many things to read and not enough time to do it, and so looking at some of the niche awards helps me find things that might scratch my weird and challenging SF/F/H itch. And at the end of the day, I’d like to talk more about the stuff I actually love and a lot less about the stuff I don’t. The world is stressful enough as it is…
Now I leave it to you. What are your thoughts on SF/F/H awards?
Thanks for reading The Joy Factory. If you like this or any of my other projects (podcasts, blogs, and Twitch streams, oh my!), consider hitting the subscribe button below and supporting my work on Patreon or Ko-Fi. You can also find me on Twitch most Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 PM Central at AlphabetStreams and most of my other things (socials, blogs, etc.) via my Linktree!