Culture Clash Returns

[kevin_standlee]

In one of the places complaining about Fred Pohl winning Best Fan Writer, we run across something that came up last year and indeed comes up fairly often when you see people who have made professional writing/art sales appearing in the "fan" categories.

Here's the basic issue, in my opinion:

As used in the WSFS Constitution, "fan" is not the opposite of "pro."

Fan and Pro are not radio buttons; they are check boxes. You can be one, both, or neither. "Fan" <> "Amateur."

This troubles many people for whom "fan" and "pro" are polar opposites, and once one becomes a pro, one is never again a fan. I don't agree with this.

It also troubles some people that while the WSFS Constitution uses the descriptive term "professional," it doesn't try to define it in a technical sense. Just as no two people are likely to be able to agree on a definition of "what is science fiction," it turns out to be very difficult to have a clear and objective definition of "professional" that applies in all cases. Therefore, just like we let the voters decide what is SF/F, we let the voters decide what is "professional" and what is "fannish."

I've been accused of advocating a "tyranny of the majority" with a negative implication. This annoys me. Frankly, the Hugo Awards voting is a tyranny of the majority, and majorities have rights, too. Disagreeing with the taste or judgment of the voters is not the same thing as saying the rules themselves are wrong. Since the Hugo Awards are popularly voted by the members of the World Science Fiction Society, they will have all of the perceived faults of a popular-vote award. You can avoid those by having a small select jury select the winners, and then you trade the popular-vote faults for the small-committee faults. You can't please everyone.

What many people don't seem to realize is that advocating for Hugo Administrators to be more activist and to "make the right decision" (in this case, some say that Pohl this year and Scalzi last year two years ago should have been disqualified because they are "obviously not fans,") is a hugely slippery slope. Such authority is great when the Administrator rules your way, but what about if s/he rules that your favorite fan writer isn't sufficiently fannish enough and disqualifies him/her? You've got no recourse if that happens, since the decisions of a Hugo Administrator have no appeal.

It is precisely because we give the Hugo Award Administrators strong authority over certain aspects of the Awards that we also strongly discourage them from actually exercising many of those rights. Indeed, it occurs to me that most non-techincal actions by Administrators (such as disqualifying A Brief History of Time back in 1989 because it wasn't sufficiently SF/F/Fandom) are analagous to the British Monarchy's residual powers such as the power to withhold Royal Assent: you can do them once and once only, because you'll never be allowed to do it again.

Update: Fixed reference above from comment.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

The fact that many pros are fans is one of the best aspects of the field, and I like to rub people's noses in it when I get the chance.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yeah this. I've been a pro for ever, but I've been a fan longer than that and I'm damned if I'm handing in my fan credentials just because people pay me for my work.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

To be fair to the critics, I don't think they (or most of them) are saying that a pro can't be a fan, or, more precisely, that a pro can't produce fan writing. I think they're saying that Fred won the award because he's a pro, i.e. that he got votes because he's an order of magnitude more well-known.

And this may well be true. But I don't think there's a thing that can be done about this phenomenon, nor should there be. The Hugos are a popular-vote award, and that's how they're supposed to work.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

To be fair to the critics, I don't think they (or most of them) are saying that a pro can't be a fan, or, more precisely, that a pro can't produce fan writing.

I think that's exactly what most of them are avoiding drawing attention to.

What they're explicitly saying is that a professional writer shouldn't be eligible for a fanwriting award.

On what grounds does that make sense?

Well, if being a pro makes one no longer a fan, disqualification follows.

If being a pro makes their output prowriting, disqualification follows.

But neither of those makes sense.

The pros we like most are also most often fans. While they've gone pro they haven't stopped reading F&SF, watching F&SF, participating in fanac.

The pros who are engaging in fanwriting have professionally-polished writing skills, but the're writing about the field of F&SF and about fandom.

Give it a year or three. We'll probably have a motion before the business meeting to add a "best fancast" award (because if it's "podcast" folks will nitpick over audio, video, transmission media) to answer the screams over Starship Sofa's win. Then we'll get the same argument over Fanwriter when a podcast writer is nominated.

It's the content, not the writer, not the medium.

[gvdub.livejournal.com]

And here I was hoping this would be an announcement that the great sketch comedy group Culture Clash was getting back together and going on tour. I'm totally crestfallen.

[amysisson.livejournal.com]

I agree that the two are not mutually exclusive. I consider myself both a fan and a pro.

I also agree it's too much of a slippery slope to have administrators start determining limiters on something like this, when there is obviously a lot of disagreement.

However, I personally feel that it's likely that two writers who make their entire living from writing are probably claiming as a tax deduction the cost of the internet access that allows them to blog, which is why they've been nominated for this award. I know that a lot of blog sites/software are free, but it seems likely that their actual internet connectivity is a tax write-off because they're professional writers and they likely claim they use the internet connection for their income-generating purposes.)

I absolutely could be wrong about this; for all I know they they could pro-rate their personal and business internet use and pro-rate the write-off. Maybe they don't write-off their internet access at all.

But I have to say, I'm disappointed in the voters that they have awarded the fan writing Hugo to people who have been full-time professional writers for years, and I'm honestly a bit disappointed in those two writers for accepting the nomination and the award. I believe they are winning based on the familiarity of the names they've made writing professionally.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And I think that's a perfectly valid opinion to have of the writers in question and of the voters' taste. I think we agree that there's a difference between rules-based approaches (somehow make it illegal for "pros" to win best fan writer) and voters showing judgement and perceived pros showing some restraint.

[randy-smith2.livejournal.com]

I pretty stongly believe that making a distinction between who is a fan and who is a pro is not something we would ever want to do. It would further weaken the sense of fandom as "community," which is at the heart of who we are as a subculture. There are many fans out there who have strong writing skills, but have specifically chosen to not write SF/F as their career. The argument that someone might win an award based primarily on name recognition is a possibility in every category, not just the fan categories. That's a possibility that I'm willing to live with for the sake of the greater good.

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

Scalzi was Best Fan Writer two years ago. Cheryl Morgan won the Hugo last year.

And as onee corollary to Murphy's Law states, once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is with a larger can.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Whoops. Thanks. Fixed.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that the majority of winners of Best Fan Writer have won fiction Hugos as well (i.e. Dave Langford won Best Short Story in 2001).

It does occur to me that the "name recognition" issue works two ways. Not only are voters likely to be more familiar with bigger name pros who do fan writing, but due to the increased ease of mass distribution offered by the Internet and blogs, there's incentive for pro writers to blog to keep up recognition between books. As I recall, for example, Neil Gaiman's blog started out as being associated with his then about to be published book. Not that I think any of the significant "pro" bloggers would be blogging near as much if they didn't enjoy it, but there is added incentive from the pro side of their lives to do so.

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

I have to admit to a chuckle that Fred won "best fan" because I do tend to think of it as "non pro" oriented - OTOH, he's one of the oldest fans we have in the community - if he doesn't deserve it, I don't know who does :>.

[(Anonymous)]

Name recognition is one of the main reasons that the Retro Hugos don't measure the same thing as the Hugos. For example, Kelly Freas's Retro Hugo for 1951 seems to be based entirely on his later work and fame--from what I heard, he produced only one eligible piece in 1950.

I do not think the Administrators should be disqualifying people because of this, though, just as they shouldn't be disqualifying people who won the same award year after year (the previous complaint in this category, IIRC).

-Evelyn

[chocolatescifi.livejournal.com]

I read the article to which you linked, and I think the writer needs to be asked if he wants some cheese to go with that whine.