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Leper In A Tumbledryer
Mar. 22nd, 2006 08:18 pmI think I've become completely disillusioned with awards. It happened sometime around the Oscars, and may possibly be related to the fact that so few of the movies that were nominated were ones I was really interested or likely to see anytime. ("Walk The Line", maybe.) I'm not much for watching a lot of movies, being more into TV these days, and begrudging the time spent watching that enough that we've been progressing through the last two discs of Buffy Season VII at the rate of about an episode every three weeks. So what I've been seeing for movies is about one a month for our movie date, a very occasional rental, taking the kids out to see a few children's movies, and of course bits of the Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter movies over and over again.
It was also spurred by going to the Locus Poll web page and discovering it also included the Locus Award voting. Out of the whole Locus recommended books list, I believe I had read one--Olympos by Dan Simmons, which I didn't actually like that much. (Though I suppose China Mieville's Iron Council might also have been on there--didn't like that one much either.) Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is something that I'm planning to read sometime in the near future, but who knows about the rest? I don't buy hardcovers, so I tend to miss a lot of new books, except for those authors I particularly enjoy, often in series, where I may buy them or I may get them from the library.
The number of movies, or albums, or books, that come out in a given year is near-impossible for one person to keep up with, IMHO, without being obsessive about it and/or getting paid to do it. Anyone who hasn't experienced everything is potentially underinformed on what's come out that year...but anyone who can and does is in danger of morphing into a Critic, getting jaded by exposure to the common and ending up only liking the different.
There's basically three types of awards, right? The juried award(like most literary awards), which is mostly populated by Critics, the peer award(like the Oscars or Nebulas), which are made up of people too busy working to experience everything themselves, and often possessing different tastes from hoi polloi in any case, and the people's choice awards(under which I include the Hugos), which are voted on by the underinformed.
For the last 16 or so years, I've concerned myself with the Canadian science fiction/fantasy awards, the Auroras. One year I made an honest effort to read absolutely everything that was eligible--a fairly small subset of the genre, written by Canadians and those with Canadian citizenship. I didn't manage to find everything(nor could I have afforded to buy it all, I warrant), and I doubt I would've been able to read it by the nomination deadline in any case. Since then I've settled for the humbler goal of reading the most recent works at least by the authors that I know and like and can find easily. In recent years, as my reading rate has dropped, I haven't even managed that.
Thus I grumpily announce that all awards are bunk, awarded either arbitrarily, by people with weird tastes, or as a result of marketing to get it on people's radar. ...Not that I wouldn't go on a jury if it was offered to me, I suppose. If I was getting paid to read for the Sunburst Award(the juried Canadian SF/F award), then I'd shoulder the burden. Because my tastes, I assure you, are absolutely typical and not weird in any way.*
It was also spurred by going to the Locus Poll web page and discovering it also included the Locus Award voting. Out of the whole Locus recommended books list, I believe I had read one--Olympos by Dan Simmons, which I didn't actually like that much. (Though I suppose China Mieville's Iron Council might also have been on there--didn't like that one much either.) Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is something that I'm planning to read sometime in the near future, but who knows about the rest? I don't buy hardcovers, so I tend to miss a lot of new books, except for those authors I particularly enjoy, often in series, where I may buy them or I may get them from the library.
The number of movies, or albums, or books, that come out in a given year is near-impossible for one person to keep up with, IMHO, without being obsessive about it and/or getting paid to do it. Anyone who hasn't experienced everything is potentially underinformed on what's come out that year...but anyone who can and does is in danger of morphing into a Critic, getting jaded by exposure to the common and ending up only liking the different.
There's basically three types of awards, right? The juried award(like most literary awards), which is mostly populated by Critics, the peer award(like the Oscars or Nebulas), which are made up of people too busy working to experience everything themselves, and often possessing different tastes from hoi polloi in any case, and the people's choice awards(under which I include the Hugos), which are voted on by the underinformed.
For the last 16 or so years, I've concerned myself with the Canadian science fiction/fantasy awards, the Auroras. One year I made an honest effort to read absolutely everything that was eligible--a fairly small subset of the genre, written by Canadians and those with Canadian citizenship. I didn't manage to find everything(nor could I have afforded to buy it all, I warrant), and I doubt I would've been able to read it by the nomination deadline in any case. Since then I've settled for the humbler goal of reading the most recent works at least by the authors that I know and like and can find easily. In recent years, as my reading rate has dropped, I haven't even managed that.
Thus I grumpily announce that all awards are bunk, awarded either arbitrarily, by people with weird tastes, or as a result of marketing to get it on people's radar. ...Not that I wouldn't go on a jury if it was offered to me, I suppose. If I was getting paid to read for the Sunburst Award(the juried Canadian SF/F award), then I'd shoulder the burden. Because my tastes, I assure you, are absolutely typical and not weird in any way.*
