[Snow Crash], proof that the Hugo Awards are paid for?

I read Snow Crash after seeing it mentioned in the Whole Earth Magazine years ago while that was still extant. I had not read any science fiction in a long while and wanted to see what was contemporary. I, of course, thought the novel was fantastic and waited for all the top SF awards to be dutifully handed over.

I was surprised to see it win hardly any mention by SF awards that I was familiar with and use to point to novels/short stories to sample on rare occasions. Seems I remember reading somewhere a whiner complaining the the Hugo awards are tossed around to a clique of authors by publishers who put up money for promotion etc. of SF novels.

I agree with the whiner, Am I misinformed ?

I've never heard that claim before, but it's not entirely implausible. I spent several days adding all of the Hugo nominees to CK, and noticed that the same authors were popping up over and over and over again. It was rare to find one who was only nominated once. I had something of a head-scratcher moment there, because I know there are tons of great sci-fi and fantasy authors floating around out there. Who knows?

Well no one has paid me for all the bloody votes I have cast.

The only time I can remember when someone tried to buy a Hugo (well they seemingly bought the nomination from the accounts) was in '87 with Black Genesis.

The process is completely transparent. For some years you can find detailed voting and nomination records on the web very easily.

There are a couple of facts -

a) Snow Crash was up against some tough competition - Doomsday Book, A Fire Upon The Deep, Red Mars to name but three in the same year.

b) Views on what makes a great book change. Simple as that. This is true in the mainstream world as it is in the SF world. I still think Snow Crash would have a tough job to beat the three books I mentioned.

c) Snow Crash didn't match the tastes of the people voting that year - indeed IIRC it scraped onto the prelimnary list.

d) Snow crash was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the BSFA and the Prometheus. It didn't win any of them. Maybe people had just begun to get bored of cyberpunk by that time.

On to philosojerk's observations about multiple nominations over the years. There is a case that some nominations are somewhat sentimental - people vote for people they like, and because they enjoyed their previous works.

andyl,

I guess you could buy a nomination, or even a Hugo, by buying enough Worldcon memberships. Was there an unusually high number of paid memberships for Brighton? Not enough to pull it off, anyway. :-)

#4

Yep the story is that there was a lot of supporting memberships from people outside UK fandom but with UK addresses.

See this section of Conspiracy Theories for a quote by the administrator that year.

There is some indication that there may be some advantage in having a home worldcon.

Robert Sawyer (a Canadian) won when the worldcon was in Canada.
In 2005 all nominations (Glasgow) for novel where British writers (although one book had not had a UK publication before nominations closed).
Locus winning sequence for semiprozine is often interupted by no US Worldcons.
The Year after Sawyer, won with the Canadian worldcon members able to nominate but not vote, Humans came top of the nominations and last in the ballot.

We're with andyl, no one's paying us for our vote/s. Of course, we tend not to pick the books that win:-)

Stephenson's Diamond Age won in 96, so perhaps he was just too new the year of Snow Crash, and he was up, as andyl mentions, against perpetual Hugo favorites Willis and Vinge.

I would suggest that any whiners should pay from a supporting membership to the Worldcon and vote! What are the chances that Harry Potter pulls off next year's Hugo.

If you want to be skeptical of any award be skeptical of the Nebula, as that is much more susceptible to "social engineering" then the Hugo is susceptible to being bought.

Keep in mind too that the Hugo is by definition a consensus award, seeing as the vote is done by Australian ballot, meaning that the vote order matters. Thus Rainbow's End won this year despite the fact that His Majesty's Dragon and Glasshouse were better novels; at least in my opinion. And I generally like Vinge.

DugsBooks at #1 I agree with the whiner, Am I misinformed ?

(First things first: Welcome to LibraryThing.)

What you've discovered is that your tastes don't perfectly align with that of fandom.

You might want to consider that to be a feature, rather than a bug.

More seriously: Did you read the other titles that WERE nominated for the various awards in 1993? It's hard to complain that book you thought was great didn't win awards if you haven't read the books that DID win. (It's at least possible that maybe they ARE better.)

You might want to read the various winners and see for yourself if Snow Crash's loss was due to its not being quite as good as the winners. (AFTER that, then maybe you can turn to conspiracy theories.)

Some of the winners of major awards for books published in 1993:
Green Mars, Red Mars, Glimpses, Vurt, Elvissey Growing Up Weightless. (And btw, I'm not arguing that Snow Crash is not as good as any of those. But, clearly, some people were willing to make that argument.)

Everybody who reads in the field has a book that made their head explode. If you're lucky, it's a book that other people also think is good. It's also entirely possible to get enthused about a book that others think is, er, not so good.

(So: you were lucky to stumble upon Snow Crash...this would be a slightly different conversation if your fav wasn't actually a plausible contender.)

If the Hugos were bought and paid for, major publishing houses would win every year (HarperCollins, Random House) and they do not. Though it is certainly true that Hugo voters tend to go to worldcons and they tend to vote for authors that tend to go to worldcons (and other science fiction conventions). So new authors (without a track record and without many appearances at conventions), do have a slight disadvantage. As in all matters of taste, some authors have huge fan bases (George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling). If their followers actually vote (and not many Rowling fans do), then their works will win.

Well, thanks everyone for the responses and now that I have been educated on the matter I guess I should rephrase my question and ask "Snow Crash, proof that the Hugo and Nebula Awards are paid for?" :-)

I would like to thank you all for the thoughtful & factual responses. This is the only time I have talked about SF without someone wanting to take my temperature.

I am no zealot Neal Stephenson fan. I read a couple more of his books but they did not entertain as much as Snow Crash. I think it was the second cyberpunk novel as Andyl mentioned I had read. Neuromancer by Gibson was the first, because you could not log onto the internet without hearing about the novel and upcoming movie. I liked Gibson's novel a lot but think SC vastly more entertaining.

BTW what was all that shiny silver book Quicksilver by Neal about that was part of a Trilogy? One of the few books I picked up but did not have time to finish, and I usually like shiny things.
He literally spent 3 pages describing the articles of clothing worn by a 16th century? person by just using the garments name and not its function, I had no idea what he was talking about. Had it been ladies lingerie with a "dance of the seven veils" erotic description of a winsome lass then maybe but I just could not read fast enough to make the book flow.

> #11

Ah, yes, Quicksilver and it's two siblings! The books were a conceit. They were written to investigate the origins of our modern way of thought as if some of the historical characters thought as we did (rational, scientific, fingers on the economic pulse) rather than as most people did in those pre-Industrial times (religious, superstitious, looking for patronage, not wealth). He used the language of the pre-Industrial ages, but the mindsets of the twenty first century. I found his characters fatally flawed (people in that age were NOT appalled by slavery or death and don't pretend they were just because we are today). Some of the later scenes were hysterically funny. After all he is a very good writer. But in the end I stopped somewhere about 100 pages from the end of the third book and never picked it up again.

BTW, anyone know what or if Neal is working on something now?

#12

I think you may have missed the tiny bit that might have made it marginally SF then.

Well, I let it under the "SF" tent because the "science" in question was "economics".

(As an aside - I've noted this elsewhere on the internet: there are books that have all of the characteristics of "Science fiction", without actually being "science fiction". There are enough of them (Quicksilver, Pattern Recognition, etc.) to constitute a distinct sub-genre, but I can't for the life of me come up with a name for this stuff.)

(sorry for the accidental double post)

#15

I've heard of that kind of stuff being refered to as "slipstream". Stuff that's sf shaped without being sf. The Baroque Cycle (which I love) clearly isn't sf IMO, though the trouble is that Stephenson apparently thinks that it is!

Here's another two cents for "nope, I don't think the Hugos" are "paid for." I attend Worldcon most years and vote for the Hugos those years. (I probably wouldn't get a supporting membership just for the privilege of voting.)

The Hugos are a popularity contest, for better or for worse. Sometimes what is popular is also high quality; sometimes it probably isn't. But the big publishers aren't buying up lots of supporting memberships. The "supporting membership" vote is usually only a small portion of the overall vote -- i.e. most voters are in attendance at Worldcon, and believe me, the publishers are not paying to send people! (I wish! -- those memberships are expensive! But you get your money's worth.)

I absolutely think there's a home court advantage. The closer a Worldcon is to your hometown, the more likely you are to go.

To quote Top Chef season 1, "it is what it is."

I think the Nebulas are a bit more problematic, with a few people possibly trading nominations. However, I don't think it likely affects the final outcome.

Yeah, there's slip-stream as a genre, but I find the stuff labeled "slip-stream" to have more of a magical-realist quality. (China Mieville, and so forth).

I'm talking about a book like Pattern Recognition, which has near-zero real science-fictional (...or fantasy, or magical-realism/slipstream...) content, and yet which manages to scratch the itch for "SF" anyway.

I seem to be encountering more and more of them, and don't know what to call them.

Dearest Bob, I'm afraid China Miéville can't be classed as 'magical realism' because MR requires a movement from realism to fantasy. None of Miéville's novels have a bit of realism in them, it's pure, delicious fantasy (although instead of dragons and elves, he has steam-powered robots and robots. Wait! Un Lun Dun could be stretched to fit a magical-realist category in an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of way:-)

OK, sure, I stand corrected - but I was just making the point that 'slipstream' is more off toward 'MR' than it is off toward what I think of when I think "SF".

And China M might not be "MR", but he sure is what I think of as "slipstream".

I've put China in the descriptive grotesquerie genre featuring economics. He's a oner so he gets a genre to himself.

This is going to sound like a strange comparison but to me Kim Stanley Robinson and China Mieville are the two of the best descriptive writers out there. Their styles are completely different but at heart they are descriptive writers. And both feature economics.

> #22

I think I see what you are proposing. Both China and KSR can write in such a manner as to make you feel that you are living the experience of the book. They not only describe what the world looks like, but what the world FEELS like. That said, I LOVED The Years of Rice and Salt although I know a lot of Hugo voters didn't think it was SF at all. I voted it Best Novel anyway.

I disagree that KSR writes about economics. He writes about social and political systems, where economics plays a part, but not the whole as does Quicksilver.

Heheheh... I'd like to see someone pay for Hugo Award votes! Worldcon voting memberships are amazingly expensive and you've got to pry those votes from the hands of some die-hard fans!

No big surprise that authors are nominated multiple times. You've got to look at who is actually voting for the Hugos. They are people who go to Worldcons and the memberships do change from year to year, depending on the location, but there are also a core of folk who go every year. If they have certain tastes they will be nominating and voting for certain authors.

Anyone can vote if they buy a voting membership in a Worldcon. You all might try getting to a Worldcon once in a while. They can be a lot of fun and you can see how the process works instead of just sitting at home reading about conspiracy theories on the internet. ^___^