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So. How about that Hugo award drama?
Feb. 15th, 2024 08:43 pmThe report written after one of the administers leaked the emails between the administrative team. Pretty sure everyone has seen it by now.
John Scalzi's blog post response to the whole thing.
And I'm biased, but I thought my younger sibling made a pretty good post about it.
(None of the above articles even go into what an absolute douchebag McCarty was to everyone asking them to elaborate on what made certain works ineligible. That's ultimately pretty small in the scheme of everything he did, but like, that wasn't completely nothing either.)
Like... what do you even say?
Certainly not the first time there've been issues with the Hugos or with Worldcon or anything, but... this is a real bad fuckin' look. Anything from this year certainly can't be viewed as completely legitimate (which is deeply shitty for all involved, including those who won awards this year!) Anything from previous years for as long as McCarty has been involved is also pretty suspect, since it's clear the integrity of the awards and the voting body's intent was not of primary importance to him. Is it even possible for the awards to reclaim any level of trust or legitimacy?
You can say what you want about awards in general: it's always the reflection of a certain group's opinions and sensibilities at the time, and it has elements of being a popularity contest, and it favors certain works over others... But it's also been a career-maker (or at least a hefty boost) to a lot of writers. Having something like this happen is very shitty.
(Jeff VanderMeer had a fairly snarky take, which was that the funniest outcome would be if the "Hugo Report" won a Hugo in the related works category, but nothing meaningfully changed. That would be a funny outcome, but only in the bitterest of ways, heh.)
John Scalzi's blog post response to the whole thing.
And I'm biased, but I thought my younger sibling made a pretty good post about it.
(None of the above articles even go into what an absolute douchebag McCarty was to everyone asking them to elaborate on what made certain works ineligible. That's ultimately pretty small in the scheme of everything he did, but like, that wasn't completely nothing either.)
Like... what do you even say?
Certainly not the first time there've been issues with the Hugos or with Worldcon or anything, but... this is a real bad fuckin' look. Anything from this year certainly can't be viewed as completely legitimate (which is deeply shitty for all involved, including those who won awards this year!) Anything from previous years for as long as McCarty has been involved is also pretty suspect, since it's clear the integrity of the awards and the voting body's intent was not of primary importance to him. Is it even possible for the awards to reclaim any level of trust or legitimacy?
You can say what you want about awards in general: it's always the reflection of a certain group's opinions and sensibilities at the time, and it has elements of being a popularity contest, and it favors certain works over others... But it's also been a career-maker (or at least a hefty boost) to a lot of writers. Having something like this happen is very shitty.
(Jeff VanderMeer had a fairly snarky take, which was that the funniest outcome would be if the "Hugo Report" won a Hugo in the related works category, but nothing meaningfully changed. That would be a funny outcome, but only in the bitterest of ways, heh.)
