Is the Gemmell Bad for Fantasy?
April 14th, 2010 by Editors
At the Speculative Horizons blog James Long argues that the David Gemmell Legend Award is bad for fantasy fiction. There’s already an active comment thread and at least one blog post elsewhere vehemently disagreeing.
James might be right. The voters on this award( i am one of them) as a rule have no bona fides to decide the winner. Only about a dozen are published writers, but they control the site as much as possible. Now, most of us are long, long time readers of the genre and can discuss quality with anyone. But the site is open for voting to anyone who can access the website subject to scrutiny for padding(that actually happened last year.
That said, last years winner was not the best i read among the nominees. This years winner will also not be the best of the lot due to being nominated late by Oz Publishing. Hopefully next year the noms will all be made in time for careful consideration.
joe