Scalzi on Fan Hugos
March 31st, 2008 by Editors
Journey Planet, the fanzine produced by James Bacon and Chris Garcia at this year’s Eastercon, includes an interview with John Scalzi about his nomination in the Best Fan Writer category. The interview took place before this year’s nominations were released, so parts of it read a little oddly now, but one things that isn’t affected is James Bacon’s question about Hugos for web sites and bloggers. Scalzi replies:
I’m not a very big proponent of expanding Hugo categories without excellent reason (the ceremony is long enough as it is), and I think that there’s no reason to add Web site and Blogger categories when there are categories that are sufficiently capacious to include them. Now, it may be that people will complain that Web sites are not the same as ‘zines and bloggers are not the same as fan writers, but to my mind this goes back to the point that everything about SF is undergoing evolution. These categories are just another example.
As we understand it, this is one of the positions being argued on the WSFS Digital Wilderness Committee, the folks charged with investigating the prospect of a web site Hugo. We think it is a very plausible solution. The only real issue here is that the Fanzine category contains language about the number of “issues” published, but that language was intended primarily to prevent people trying to win a Hugo by putting all of their efforts into a spectacular one-shot fanzine, which is not a charge that can be leveled at bloggers. What do you folks think?
John also notes that he thinks he’s the first person ever to get a fan writer Hugo nomination for a blog. We think he’s right. Now, of course, there are two (though Cheryl did also have an article in The Drink Tank last year), so this must be a tradition. Someone else did get a few Fan Writer nominations for a fanzine that was only available online, but that wasn’t solely a blog, and you could download it and print it out easily.
About the websites: I’d agree that there are enough categories-but I can think of a lot of good sf-related websites that I couldn’t stretch to describe as a fanzine. Most author websites to me don’t-and even if they have a blog, the blog is often a small part of it. There’re also things like Lee Whiteside’s SFTV pages-I’m not saying I’d nominate them, but they primarily consist of TV listings and news about SFTV-related things-not really articles, nor is there anywhere to comment, unless you consider the Yahoo! group part of it, and i’m not sure I do. The SFTV blog isn’t even part of the page anylonger(though it used to be). I’m not sure I think of this website as a fanzine primarily. Maybe I just don’t define fanzine widely enough.
I’m solidly behind fan writer blogger as fan writer. I’m not a fan of a “best web site” Hugo; some of my reasons overlap my dislike of the “best other work” category, which a “best web site” Hugo would parallel, IMHO–a vague catch-all category comparing apples and oranges (blogs, author sites, commercial sites like SciFi.com, news sites, review sites, … etc.).
Nadine’s right about not every web site or blog being a fanzine; in fact, I’m not sure most are. But on the other paw, the Hugos don’t have to reward everything. (They already don’t, and not just by lacking web site and blog categories.)
Kendall, Nadine:
You talk of blogs not being fanzines. It seems to me that you could consider every new posting on a blog to be an “issue” of that fanzine, with the added benefit of that “issue” having an instant letter column attached to it if commenting is permitted.
While I’ve been something of an advocate of Best Web Site as a separate category — I was involved to some extent with both of the Worldcons that presented it as a Special Category — I can also see that there’s nothing in the rules for Best Fanzine that preclude considering blogs as a certain type of fanzine. The rules don’t say anything about the format of a fanzine, only that the people nominating it consider it to meet the criteria of publication (at least four “issues” total and at least one in the eligibility year).
Kevin:
Part of the appeal of fanzines for me is that when an issue comes in, it contains articles on several different topics, often from different voices. The problem I’d have with considering a blog to be a fanzine is precisely one of delineating the “issues”. I don’t feel like a blog post carries the same variety of content as an issue of a fanzine, despite the similarity of the responses to a letter column. A further difference comes with the nature of the letter column — a typical loc responds to not just a single idea or article from the zine, but to the zine as a whole. The best ones I’ve seen take the time to respond to the zine piecemeal, carefully marking paragraphs to note what’s being addressed. While I’m aware of blogs with many authors covering many topics, I haven’t noticed the format lending itself to a designation of “issues” or the variety of a zine’s letter column. I’d rather see a “Best Website” Hugo than trying to lump blogs in with the fanzines (which I doubt would be terribly good for the traditional zines or even ezines in the long run).
“John also notes that he thinks he’s the first person ever to get a fan writer Hugo nomination for a blog”
Probably. The one earlier similar I can think of is in 1991, when Teresa Nielsen Hayden was nominated for Best Fan Writer in a year where she’d had one tiny piece of printed fanac published, but an enormous amount of writing online in the GEnie SFRT.
Patrick, thank you! That’s a fascinating piece of history.
John is, I think, still technically correct, because the term “blog” didn’t exist in 1991. (Wikipedia says 1997 for “weblog” and 1999 for “blog”). My nominations were largely for online writing, but Emerald City only had a blog in its later days, and was always much more than a blog. But Teresa certainly pre-dates all that.
Warren: I remember years ago being lectured endlessly by people who maintained that the primary appeal of fanzines was that they came on paper through the mailbox, and that therefore Emerald City couldn’t possible be a fanzine. The efanzines.com happened. As Mr. Scalzi says, things evolve.
Cheryl:
I do believe things are evolving, and I maintain that the essence of a fanzine is its content, not it’s form. BUT, should the form dictate a change in the content (the difference between the current uses of a blog and a PDF, for instance), the essence can be shifted with it. If a multi-writer blog were, for instance, to start doing themed months, it would become somewhat more like a fanzine, as it would if comments were grouped in a different fashion to encourage commenting on multiple posts at once. I don’t think it’s impossible for something that would still resemble a blog enough to bear the name to also resemble a fanzine enough to bear the name, but in their current forms, there’s still something of a divide, enough so that I don’t think there are blogs which are fanzines yet.
Kevin:It’s not the issues thing that makes me not see blogs at fanzines necessarily. The blogs I don’t think of as fanzines are single writer ones with comments disabled, as I think of a fanzine as having multiple voices. I have in fact nominated blogs for best fanzine.
Kendall: No, the Hugos don’t need to honor everything, but I think that websites are becoming an integral part of the way fandom works, and not just for media fans either. I do think the Hugos ought to be able to honor a tool that is widely used and important to fandom.
Nadine @9:
That suggests to me that you might consider that Ansible wasn’t a fanzine even before Langford moved it up a “weight class.” It was written by one person, with one voice, and (mostly) had comments disabled.
I’m not trying to be snarky, really! I’m trying to see where the differences are between per-zines (fanzines published by one person with a single editorial voice) and blogs.
I’ve also become increasingly persuaded that the existing categories mostly already extend to electronic media in various forms, and that it’s no more necessary to create a standalone “web site” category than it was to create “best photocopied fanzine” to differentiate it from “best mimeographed fanzine.” I’m not completely convinced, and I’ll freely admit that this is the opposite of the argument I used in favor of Best Web Site when we tried it in 2002 and 2005. While some people could accuse me of “flip-flopping,” I would prefer to say that I’m still considering the arguments and have not reached a firm conclusion.
In all honesty, I’m not sure Ansible is a fanzine as I personally think of them. For example, I would nominate Dave Langford or Neil Gaiman as best fan writer for his blog, but neither as best fanzine.
You know, this discussion, as much as anything else, makes me think we need to rename “Best Fanwriter” to “Best Fanwriting”
Fanzines have been such a variety of things. Locus started as a fanzine, Ansible is a fanzine. The Alien Critic (Geis) was a fanzine.
There were and are genzines and personalzines, big zines and small zines, club zines, news zines, semi-pro zines.
Many of the people expressing like for one kind of fanzine seem to be talking as if that’s the only kind of fanzine there was, and that’s historically inaccurate.
And the Hugo for best fanzine wasn’t restricted to any one type (though eventually the semi-pro category was split off).
I think it’s plausible to think that the very broad category of fanac once expressed largely in fanzines includes most of the types of fanac being expressed on the web; so that what makes the most sense is to broaden greatly the rules for what is now the ‘best fanzine’ Hugo, and perhaps change its name (because some of the things included pretty clearly *aren’t* fanzines, even if they’re expressions of the same sort of fannish impulses). I find it so plausible that it’s currently my own position on the topic, in fact.
Doing this properly will include things not previously eligible for a Hugo; I think that’s fine, many of them are worthy fanac, and quite likely those that aren’t won’t get nominated or voted a Hugo.
No doubt there would be angst; but that’s inevitable anyway.
A case could be made that single-person blogs and personalzines should NOT be eligible for this new aware replacing best fanzine, since the real point there is the editorial/community aspect (it doesn’t say that anywhere I can find in the definition, but one might think it anyway), and since Best Fanwriter already exists to recognize people who write especially well wherever (fannishly) published.
DDB:
Very interesting. Some awards might have the sort of thing you suggest. The Ditmars have a “fan production” award, while the Auroras have several categories of “fan achievement” (one of which is for con-running). As I understand it, you want to leave Fan Writer for doing writing, Fan Artist for doing art, and change fanzine to something like Fan Production, which would be for making things happen (e.g. editing a fanzine, building a web site, chairing a con, producing a video about a Giant Space Chicken and so on). Right?
Kevin: I have believed in the past that all blogs were fanzines, etc. Just wondering if perhaps it’s more of a stretch than I used to think (it works as a technicality, but most folks not examining the Hugos like this probably don’t consider a blog posting as an issue of a periodical
.
David & Cheryl: Interesting concept!
(Though it gets to what I dislike about Best Related Book–comparing apples and oranges.)
I’m a little late to this thread, but I want to add another historical note. In 1989, Chuq Von Rospach was nominated as best fanwriter and his fanzine, OtherRealms, was nominated as best fanzine. OtherRealms had both a paper version and an electronically-distributed plain-text version. Chuq was active on usenet, Delphi and GEnie. I’m sure some of his nominations came from fans who were reading his online fanac.
Dennis – thank you, that’s good to know. What interests me, of course, is whether Chuq was willing to mail copies of OtherRealms to anyone who asked for one. The thing that infuriated fanzine fandom about Emerald City was that is was only available online (although as with efanzines.com you could always download an print a copy that looked just like what you would have got in the mail had I been prepared to mail it).
Cheryl, some googling finds your answer. This from a 1987 issue of the electronic version. Scroll down to the sections “Subscriptions” and “Electronic OtherRealms”:
http://www.plaidworks.org/chuqui/downloads/OtherRealms/18-09.txt
I should point out that, unlike your zine, the two versions weren’t exactly the same. The print version had artwork that wasn’t contained in the plain-text electronic version.
OK, thanks. That’s very clear.
Emerald City was actually available as a txt file for the duration of its run. Some people preferred it that way, and it was obviously an advantage if you were on dial-up. One of the reasons I never ran artwork was because I didn’t want those people to miss out on anything.