A couple of weeks ago, Eric Flint wrote up a lengthy
post getting at the oft-circulated idea, which appears to have been at least part of the motivation for the Puppy campaign at the Hugo Awards, that there is a divide between those SFF works recognized by the awards and those that are popular. Back in 2007, Flint set out to ascertain whether this divergence was in fact real.
As Flint points out, this is a difficult topic to analyze because popularity is typically defined to be sales and data on sales by author is not publicly available. In fact, if I understand the situation correctly, the data might not even be privately available to the author, and there is some doubt as to whether publishers have accurate sales data, too!
To get around this problem, back in 2007 before e-book sales were nearly as important as they are now and when amazon.com was smaller, Flint sought out to get around this absence-of-data problem by proxying for sales by looking at shelf space at major book chains like Barnes & Noble and then then-still-solvent Borders.
Flint he claims he went to multiple such stores all over the country and recorded the names of authors who were regularly able to command four feet of shelf space, as opposed to three feet of shelf space, or only two feet of space. This was taken as a measure of "popularity" which could be then compared with the names of the authors who won awards. For reference, Flint asserts that back-in-the-day the sets of authors who were popular and who won awards would have a large intersection. The question he wanted to answer was: is this less true today?
Back in 2007, Flint found that there were seven authors who could command four or more feet of shelf space in the SFF section:
- Jim Butcher
- Orson Scott Card
- Raymond Feist
- Mercedes Lackey
- Terry Pratchett
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- David Weber
Note that this excludes authors like JK Rowling, Stephen King and Michael Crichton who are typically not shelved in SFF.
As for the performance of these authors with awards:
From the standpoint of measuring these authors in terms of awards received, of course, we have to start by subtracting J.R.R. Tolkien. He pretty much antedates the awards altogether. (Although he did receive a very belated Hugo nomination in 1966 for “best series ever.” But he was defeated by Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.)
Of the six remaining authors, four of them—Butcher, Feist, Lackey and Weber—have never received a single nomination in their entire careers for any major F&SF award. No Hugo nominations—forget wins, they’ve never even been nominated—no Nebulas, no World Fantasy Awards. Nothing.
Terry Pratchett has been nominated. Exactly twice. Once for the Hugo, once for the Nebula. He didn’t win either time.
With the last figure in the group, of course—Orson Scott Card—we find ourselves in the presence of a major award-winner. Card has been nominated for sixteen Hugo awards and won four times, and he was nominated for a Nebula on nine occasions and won twice. And he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award three times and won it once.
But…
He hasn’t been nominated for a WFC in twenty years, he hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in eighteen years, and hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo in sixteen years. And he hasn’t won any major award (for a piece of fiction) in twenty years.
I seem to recall a rumor about Pratchett declining a nomination and I am not sure if that is included.
A similar pattern emerges if the list is expanded to authors commanding three feet of shelf space in SFF:
-
Terry Brooks
- David Eddings
- Eric Flint
- Neil Gaiman
- Terry Goodkind
- Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
- Robin Hobb
- Tanya Huff
- Robert Jordan
- George R.R. Martin
- Anne McCaffrey
- L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
- John Ringo
- R.A. Salvatore
- Harry Turtledove
According to Flint:
Of those fifteen authors (counting Herbert and Anderson as a single author) eleven of them—that’s almost 75%—have never been nominated for any major award. Again, forget winning. These authors aren’t even on the radar.
Harry Turtledove has gotten some recognition: one WFC nomination; two Nebula nominations; and three Hugo nominations, one of which he won.
But, being blunt, six nominations and one win is a pretty screwy record for an author with Turtledove’s popularity, wide range of output, and longevity. Forty or fifty years ago—thirty years ago, for that matter—he would have been nominated at least as often as Gordon Dickson.
Anne McCaffrey has gotten quite a bit of recognition in her career, taken as a whole. She’s been nominated for a Hugo eight times and won once; and nominated for a Nebula on three occasions, of which she won once.
But she hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in thirty-eight years and hasn’t won in thirty-nine years. And she hasn’t won a Hugo in forty years. The last time she was even nominated for a Hugo was sixteen years ago—and that was her only nomination for any major award in the last quarter of a century.
A quarter of a century, mind you, in which she kept writing and never once lost her popularity with the mass audience. But, as with Orson Scott Card, she long ago lost the favor of the in-crowds.
The situation’s a little better with George R.R. Martin. Martin, of course, has a very impressive track record when it comes to awards. He’s been nominated for a Hugo on seventeen occasions and won four times; nominated for a Nebula thirteen times and won twice; nominated for a WFC nine times and won once.
And, true enough, Martin did pick up some nominations recently, unlike Card or McCaffrey. Several of the novels in his very popular A Song of Ice and Fire series were nominated for Hugos and Nebulas in this century, although none of them won.
Still, even with Martin, most of his award history is now far in the past. Of the many nominations he’s gotten in his career, the great majority date back to the 70s and 80s, and most of them are now a quarter of a century old.
Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.
And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.
With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.
The situation is similar for those authors commanding two feet of shelf space, although as Flint notes there is much more variation in the set of such authors from store to store.
What does all this mean? Flint takes it as confirmation that awards have drifted away from recognizing purely story-telling skills, towards focusing on how the story was written:
To go back to the issue at hand, this is the inevitable tug-of-war that affects any literary or artistic award. Do we lean toward the tree or toward the forest? Do we focus on the way a story is written, or on the story itself?
That’s a simplistic way of putting it, granted, but it does capture the heart of the matter. What usually happens over time is that awards given out by a group of people who are a small sub-set of the mass audience for that particular form of literature or art tend to lean in the direction of contemplating the trees.
There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You just need to understand the phenomenon, not take it personally—and above all, not to characterize it as the product of foul play.
And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.
They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century.
I do not necessarily disagree with Eric's conclusions. But I am not certain.
For one thing, it is not entirely obvious to me that the situation was different back in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Of course, I wasn't alive and/or paying attention back then, and so I need to rely on the reminiscences of Flint and others instead. And they may be correct when they assure me that things were different. But there is also a tendency for people's memories to be distorted by time. Looking back, are we more inclined to remember the books that were
both popular
and that were given awards? Were the bookshelves of the period actually filled with books that were popular but that did not win awards and that have not passed the test of time? Perhaps John Norman's
Chronicles of Gor dominated the shelves (as far as I know, they never won any major awards)? I simply do not know and wish we had some hard data as a check on the reminiscences of others.
For another thing, even if we accept that popular best-selling work does not win as many awards these days, does it necessarily imply that story has been subordinated to form in the awards? One thing we know is true is that the market for SFF is more crowded today than it was in the past. As a result, it is harder for new authors to amass large followings. If many more good authors---authors who has mastered story as well as form---are having trouble finding their audience, then voters may have compensated by giving awards to works that have escaped attention. Or alternatively, maybe on average (there are obvious exceptions) it takes an author with a long career to be a best seller these days. If so, and if authors write their best books when young, then awards might inevitably be going to the work of younger, less established and hence less popular authors.
I don't know and in the absence of hard data we probably never will. But I thought Flint's solution to the problem of lacking hard data was a helpful step forward, in spite of all the problems that remain (and that Flint does a very good job of acknowledging in his post).
