Science Fiction Awards Watch

The Gemmell in Numbers

June 22nd, 2009 by

The Guardian has picked up on the news of the Gemmell Award result, and by far the most interesting thing in their coverage is that the award attracted “Over 10,000 fans from 75 countries”. Now that’s an international award, even if the eligibility criteria limits the candidates to works in English.

The Gemmell has set out almost from the start to be a popular vote award. It has little in the way of literary pretensions. From that point of view it has succeeded very well in getting mass participation. There has been some rumbling (see comments here) that Sapkowski benefited from a large block vote from Poland, but no voting figures have been produced so there’s no evidence of that.

So, all you people who claim that the Hugos have no validity because so few people participate, is the Gemmell what you would like the Hugos to be? Or is mass participation not the good thing you thought it would be?

3 Comments »

3 Responses to “The Gemmell in Numbers”

  1. on 22 Jun 2009 at 6:33 am1 steve davidson

    10K plus votes sounds pretty darned good, even if there may have been some flaws in the system.

    There are any number of ways that voting can be tabulated to achieve ‘fair’ and ‘representative’ results.

    Right now I’m not so worried about focused influence being brought to bear on who makes the shortlist as I am interested in the number of votes.

    First year and its got participation that is orders of magnitude beyond most other genre awards.

    I also think that the system used may actually help bring under-represented (non-english language) works to wider attention, and that itself is never a bad thing.

    I’d like to see a ‘faux’ popular vote for the Hugo run parallel to the actual one as a test. Maybe 2010 is a good year for that since the Worldcon is at an international venue once again…

  2. on 22 Jun 2009 at 10:17 am2 Cheryl’s Mewsings » Blog Archive » Gemmell Reaction

    [...] presentation has garnered at least two mentions in the Guardian Book Blog. Earlier today I put up a post at SF Awards Watch in reaction to learning that the Gemmell drew in over 10,000 voters from 75 countries. I now learn [...]

  3. on 25 Jun 2009 at 12:59 am3 Ausir

    The award website is pretty bad, though. There’s still no newspost about the winner.