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.