Hugo Awards: Prestige or Popularity

There has lately been another round of the perennial hand-wringing over the mediocrity of Hugo Award nominees and winners. Noting this, Strangelove4sf asks is there is a constructive way to improve the nominating process Toward Better Hugo Award Winners.

I am shocked, simply shocked, by the very suggestion that such an august body as the dues-paying membership of the World Science Fiction Society could ever mistake popularity for excellence. Perish the thought that the selections are swayed by the affections of fans (fanatics, etymologically speaking) whose enthusiasm is in any way narrow or facile. Who could imagine, upon strolling the aisles of SF at the mega-bookstore, that formulaic YA fodder could even begin to push serious literary works into the background?

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Oh, wait, WSFS is an open-membership fan club. The award is a popularity contest. Mediocrity is popular. Serious literary works, groundbreaking works, challenging works, works that are among the "best" in any sense orthogonal to popularity will win about as often as pop culture rises above mediocrity — the point of intersection is small and, well, point-like.

The Hugo Award is promoted as the most prestigious SF award, but this is a bit of a misnomer, one that, were it even possible, might further contribute to the dismissiveness of the wider literary world toward the genre. Setting aside the forgivable boosterism, in actuality it is the most popular SF award. This is nothing to be bashful about: popularity is a Good Thing™. Take heart that there are enough readers, who turn off the boob tube and disconnect from the interestnet long enough to read a book, to actually rent a convention center and talk about it.

If the nominating process yields only the most widely read works, attempting to do otherwise would run perilously counter to the populism that is essential for the success of fan clubs. Better works might be in contention if they were more widely read before nominations open, but here I beg the question.

Take the Hugo Award for what it is — popular acclamation — with a grain of salt.

Anathem

I commented at the strangelove4sf blog on Anathem by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow, 2008).
This must be one of the most compelling science fictional treatments of a cloistered community since Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960), and is the most ambitious fictional treatment of the history of ideas that I recall. Its theme is fairly abstract, and will appeal most to readers who find something intriguing and immediate in this question:
   What of praxis if epistemology is ontology?

The fine print

Images:

Halite_Salt_4.jpg — Adapted from Wikimedia Commons. The image has been cropped and the color altered.
The original image is a work of the "Minerals in Your World" project, a cooperative effort between the United States Geological Survey and the Mineral Information Institute. The images were featured in the "Minerals and Materials Photo Gallery" on the website of the U.S House Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.


Salt-cristalls-3.jpg — Adapted from Wikimedia Commons. The image has been cropped and the color altered.
The original work by Björn Appel is described as Salzkristalle, alle etwa 3 x 3 mm groß. Gewonnen durch Eintrocknen von Salzlösung auf schwarzem Teller. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.

Miscellany:

The date of this page should be taken with a grain of salt. It has been altered to make it appear as the first post in the blog, even though it was actually posted at a later time and may be updated at any time in the future.