Splitting Best Novel Hugo?

[kevin_standlee]

According to this entry on the Emerald City blog, an entry on the Locusmag blog suggests splitting the Hugo Award for Best Novel into best SF and best Fantasy Novel. Cheryl heaps scorn upon this proposal for good reasons, and I mostly agree with her and amplify on this in my comments to her blog entry.

The key reason it's unlikely to happen anytime soon is that the regular attendees of the Business Meeting are very likely to "spike" the subject by an Objection to Consideration if it's proposed. Any proposal that can't get at least one-third of the attendees present willing to vote to debate dies a quick death, and the WSFS BM regulars have shown a tendency to kill a lot of proposals without a hearing. Some have decried this practice, complaining that they're not being given a fair hearing; however, I think it's the right way to go. Deliberative assemblies have rights as a whole, and one of them is not having their time wasted with proposals that have the support of small minorities.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

If we contemplate adding an overlength-novel category, I will push for it to be called "Best Tome" so that the existing inverse relationship between work length and category title length is maintained. (This is the only way I can ever keep "Best Novella" and "Best Novellette" straight.)

According to Mark Olson, Tony Lewis suggests that it be called "Best Novelissimo."

IMO, we're more likely to merge the two middle fiction categories than to either add a new longer one or split novel in two; however, none of these changes has a high probability of success.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

I'm not advocating the change. I'd be easy to persuade that combining the middle categories would make sense. For the long-novel category, I would have to be persuaded that worthy mid-length novels were being ignored in favor of the blockbuster fat books; I'm not convinced that's the case.