Pimpage Season Opens

Nominations for the 2012 Hugo Awards are now open, and my Twitter feed is starting to fill up with people listing their eligible work. People do have until March 11th to cast their ballots, and history suggests that the vast majority of them will wait until the last few days to do so. Partly that’s prevarication, but also people will still be frantically reading, so I guess it may help to get your book in the queue. If your intention is simply to remind people that your work is out there, however, you might as well wait until March.

There is one deadline before then, however. If you were not a member of last year’s Worldcon (Renovation), and are not yet a member of Chicon 7, then you must buy at least a Supporting Membership of Chicon 7 by the end of January. It’s only $50, and you’ll get the Voter Packet.

The things that was exercising people on Twitter this morning is the fact that Chicon 7 is using its right to add a one-off Hugo category to trial Best Fancast. This is a new category for fan-created audio and video that was proposed last year but needs ratification before it comes into effect as an official category.

The problem with this is that, until the constitutional change is ratified, podcasts are still eligible for Best Fanzine, and may still get nominated there. This is going to provide a major headache for the Hugo Administration Committee. It would, in my view, be quite wrong of them to move all podcast nominations for Best Fanzine to Best Fancast, because people who object to the Fancast category may with the make a statement with their nominations. What they may do is move nominations from the category where a work gets least votes and combine them with nominations in the category where it gets most votes. It would work like this:

Suppose, Notes from Coode Street got 20 nominations in Best Fanzine and 24 in Best Fancast. That means that 20 nominations from Best Fanzine can potentially be added to the 24 for Best Fancast. However, if a voter has nominated the work in both categories then their vote won’t be moved. Also, if a voter’s ballot already has 5 nominations in the Best Fancast category then their vote can’t be moved.

Of course the Admins could take the view that Fanzines and Fancasts are wholly different things, and that therefore nominations cannot be combined in this way. This is what happened in 2005 when Best Website was trialed. Emerald City managed to get on the ballot in both categories, which angered a lot of people.

So it is all a bit unclear, and I think needlessly unclear. I don’t think that there is any doubt that Best Fancast is a viable category. What’s at issue is whether podcasts are sufficiently distinguishable from fanzines to make having two categories necessary and desirable. What happens in the case of SF Signal, which has podcasts and a blog? What would happen if a podcast published a transcript of the audio and put it on efanzines.com? Trialing the category isn’t going to solve those issues, though I guess it may highlight them.

Kevin and I have already been asked if we’ll do another podcast talking through these issues. We probably will, but I think we’ll wait until February to see if anything else contentious pops up.

9 thoughts on “Pimpage Season Opens

  1. Back at Renovation, I talked with Steven Silver, another supporter of the fanzine/podcast split and one of Dave McCarty’s “flying monkeys.” The question of running a trial for a category where constitutionally the nominees could be eligible in an existing category was something the Chicon committee was already thinking about.

    I do think podcasts are significantly distinguishable from fanzines. Writing and editing for audio or a/v is somewhat different than writing and editing for print. Production is drastically different. The experience of consumption is different. It’s only distribution that’s really converged.

    SF Signal is a great example. SF Signal’s blog is a blog that embraces the periodical nature and structure of many print ‘zines, and is one that I wouldn’t consider out-of-place for nomination for Best Fanzine (even if traditionalists would have kittens). SF Signal’s podcast, well, it’s a podcast. The team at SF Signal might be nominated for two awards, but it would be for two different works.

    Then again, we already have that possibility. An author may be nominated in multiple fiction categories for different works. Short and long works in a single series of works by an author could be nominated in the same year. There’s almost always some overlap between Best Fanzine and Best Fanwriter nominees. It’s technically possible for overlap between Best Dramatic Presentation Short and Long forms of works in the same series.

    So while there’s a real issue with the special category (because it can’t modify the Fanzine category eligibility), I think the long-term issues of overlap are overblown.

    As to viability? I’m sure there’s enough good works out there for this to be a viable category. I’m concerned that nominators might focus on a few high-profile possibilities and create a failure of the nominating body as exists with Best Graphic Story. I’m concerned that there may be too many good works and the nominations may be too diffuse to create a final ballot slate.

    I think that’s what the trial will uncover (well, the too-shallow potential, at least).

    1. I appreciate the concern, but I don’t think a single-year trial will prove anything one way or another in that regard. You need to have several years, as was done for Graphic Story. My own view is that you will see mostly the same nominees year after year, because that always happens in fan categories. That’s not indicative of lack of depth, it is indicative of an electorate not paying much attention.

      I’m not sure I agree about production issues either. If production quality had been important in Fanzine then Emerald City would never have won anything. People tend to discount production quality when looking at fan productions, in part because they don’t want to privilege people who can afford posh tech. I think it is the words that will matter. And who says them, of course.

  2. There’s an opposite precedent from 1988; the one-shot Other Forms Hugo aka “Somewhere Other Than Best Novel To Put Watchmen”. which otherwise would’ve gone into either Best Novel (while one can’t know for sure, I’d wager enough people would’ve nominated it here to get it on the ballot) or Best Non-Fiction Book (yes, Non-Fiction. That would’ve been under the previous year’s precedent that put Dark Knight Returns there under the theory that it was an “art book”).

    1. Interesting, but I note that it didn’t result in a permanent category. The point of this trial is to prove that a new category will work.

  3. You know we want a podcast about it – it would be so meta! 😀 The thing we were wondering about, over at GS, was the term Fancast – what it includes and, frankly, where the heck it came from. This is going to be (as ever) a very interesting Hugos season…

    1. Fancast is a new coinage which the makers of the motion came up with this year. But it seems pretty obvious to me that it’s meant to be parallel with “fanzine,” which itself is a contraction of “fan magazine,” and thus “fancast” = “fan podcast.” Contrast “fanzine” and “prozine” for more parallel cases.

      1. The formal definition is included on the nomination form (although it should be read in the context of the rest of the constitution of course)
        See https://chicon.org/hugo-awards.php#categories

        Best Fancast, defined as “Any non-professional audio- or video-casting with at least four (4) episodes that had at least one (1) episode released in 2011.”

        So that would seem to exclude e.g. F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury (still in Best Dramatic Presentation “Short Form”), as it isn’t (one of) a series of ‘casts’. You could kind-of imply the ‘devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects’ part of the fanzine definition (see https://chicon.org/constitution.php#hugo-awards 3.3.13), but Chicon presumably left it out on purpose?

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