It is always interesting to see how one’s efforts are received around the blogosphere. Science Fiction Awards Watch, which Kevin and I launched last year, has been trucking along steadily for some time now. It rarely attracts a lot of attention, but every so often someone mentions it. With professional writers it is generally when we’ve turned up some award that they didn’t know they’d won, which is why today John Scalzi kindly described us as “increasingly-indispensable”. That should be worth a pile of referrals. As for fandom, outrage is often the order of the day. Yesterday, for example, we had the temerity to complain that Hugo voters had been “very unimaginative” in their choice of Best Professional Artist nominees. Oh Noez! Oh Horror! Cue Mike Glyer who has somehow managed to interpret that as us accusing the Hugo voters of corruption. Quite. And when the case comes to court we are going to ask for a dozen cases of genocide, treason, armed robbery and failure to enjoy the right episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be taken into consideration, your honor.
2 thoughts on “Two Worlds”
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You write clearly, it’s one your strengths, and you attributed the appearance of some unnamed finalists in the Best Pro Artist category to votes based solely on name recognition. That would be unethical, and would deserve everyone’s disapproval. I didn’t see that in the evidence, and gave my reasons why.
Ordinarily I’d find it irresistable to be portrayed as someone in opposition to one of John Scalzi’s opinions, you silver-tongued devil!And yet my reason for reading SF Awards Watch every day probably is identical to his — the steady stream of provocative views, engagingly written.
I thought you’d like the Scalzi juxtaposition. 🙂
As to unethical, that’s your interpretation, not mine. And even that is backing off from “corrupt”. I think people do vote on name recognition in the “people” categories, and I think it is understandable why they do so, especially in categories where, at least in the past, they have had difficulty finding samples of work. More on SFAW later, but I need to check some figures and Kevin’s offline for the weekend.