This would make it the first Star Trek tie-in to ever be a Hugo finalist.
Spoilers LDS: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North & Chris Fenoglio Review Thread
- Thread starter David cgc
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The Hugo nomination finally inspired me to get the Kindle version of this last night. Once I finished the Star Wars collection I was reading I started this, and so far I'm loving it. I have no idea how far I am since I keep jumping back and forth as I finish up each plotline. I'm curious because it's really starting to look like the "interactive" element of it might actually be part of the plot. My only real complaint so far is with the Kindle formatting, the "locations" don't match up with the numbers on the pages, so I can't just jump right to page I'm looking for like I was hoping i'd be able to. And yes, I know that's how it works with the paper version, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain.
Considering finding the golden ending involves page number solutions that have t obe manually turned to?
Sounds kind of like the way film scores, for decades, were kept off concert programs and classical radio. People had to retire (and in many cases die) for that to change.
And the way science fiction films (and historical ones of a conventionally heroic nature) never win non-technical Oscars. (I will never get over how a movie by Woody Allen and his girlfriend, about Woody Allen and his girlfriend, written and directed by Woody Allen and his girlfriend, starring Woody Allen and his girlfriend as Woody Allen and his girlfriend, walked away with so many of the top Oscars, leaving SW and CE3K with only a handful of technical Oscars, and how Terms of Endearment beat The Right Stuff a few years later. What a stretch of acting chops Annie Hall must have been!)
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To be honest, as someone who has read every Hugo-nominated work of fiction since 2017 and has regularly consumed tie-in media since I was about twelve, I think you could count the number of tie-in works that would fit in on a Hugo ballot on one hand. I enjoy tie-in fiction a lot, but very little of it is doing for the genre what the vast majority of Hugo-nominated works are, even at its best.
Even if the tie-in fiction is good, I don't think "snobbery" is really the answer as to why it goes unnominated; the answer is more that the tastes of the vast majority of Hugo nominators just don't run to tie-in fiction, thus they don't read it, and they don't nominate it. The Hugo electorate is a community, with its own tastes and interests; there's a lot of good original sf&f they aren't nominating, either. No group repeatedly nominating John Scalzi could ever be plausibly accused of snobbery.
The only prose work of tie-in fiction to ever be nominated is, as far as I know, a Magic: The Gathering short story by Seanan McGuire, and I ended up ranking it below "No Award."
Tie-in works do often get nominated in the Graphic Story category—which makes sense, given how much comics are dominated by franchise fiction—but to be honest, a lot of what gets nominated for Graphic Story is inexplicably bad. The Hugo electorate has very weird taste in comics. (I have not yet read Warp Your Own Way, but I will this summer. It surely must be better than the umpteenth volume of Monstress.)
Even if the tie-in fiction is good, I don't think "snobbery" is really the answer as to why it goes unnominated; the answer is more that the tastes of the vast majority of Hugo nominators just don't run to tie-in fiction, thus they don't read it, and they don't nominate it. The Hugo electorate is a community, with its own tastes and interests; there's a lot of good original sf&f they aren't nominating, either. No group repeatedly nominating John Scalzi could ever be plausibly accused of snobbery.
The only prose work of tie-in fiction to ever be nominated is, as far as I know, a Magic: The Gathering short story by Seanan McGuire, and I ended up ranking it below "No Award."
Tie-in works do often get nominated in the Graphic Story category—which makes sense, given how much comics are dominated by franchise fiction—but to be honest, a lot of what gets nominated for Graphic Story is inexplicably bad. The Hugo electorate has very weird taste in comics. (I have not yet read Warp Your Own Way, but I will this summer. It surely must be better than the umpteenth volume of Monstress.)
Perhaps, but to be fair, is the percentage of original fiction good enough to be nominated that much greater? I mean, the whole point is to select the small number of works that stand out from the pack.
Besides, the Hugos nominate movies and TV shows all the time, and those tend to be relatively entry-level science fiction compared to the prose stuff. And the prose/comics tie-ins to those movies and shows are often on the same level of quality and sophistication as the movies and shows themselves.
Isn't that kind of the definition of snobbery, though? Deciding, often on an arbitrary basis, that certain categories of thing are not worthy of attention?
Of course, all this is why I don't care much about awards. They're not objective measures of quality, but are based on the subjective, often arbitrary tastes of the people choosing the nominees and winners. (I also never understood the point of arbitrarily picking a single "winner" instead of just paying tribute to every deserving work. Not everything has to be a competition.)
I'm with you on not caring particularly about awards, and I'm particularly irritated with the whole "only one award per category" business. Even the Olympics have Silver and Bronze, and just getting to the Olympics is a major (and often life-changing) achievement, whether it involves outperforming a large pool of other serious athletes vying to represent your country, or whether it involves creating an Olympic program from whole cloth (as in British ski-jumper Michael David "Eddie the Eagle" Edwards, and the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team).
I don't really see how it's relevant what the percentage is, what matters is the absolute numbers. And though most years there's one finalist whose presence of the shortlist baffles me (e.g., Legends & Lattes), I'd say most of the finalists are heads-and-shoulders above tie-in fiction. No Star Trek books being published by S&S are competitive with Ancillary Justice or The Fifth Season or A Memory Called Empire or what-have-you. These books have ideas, characterization, prose, worldbuilding, and heft that's just not present in most tie-ins. Which is fine, I don't go to tie-ins for those kind of things, I go because I'm nostalgic for stuff I watched on the tv.
Indeed, a lot of the finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation are also risible. I still can't believe The Old Guard won, surely the most boring movie to ever be awarded a Hugo. (I'm not sure that "as good as mediocre entry-level visual sf" is much of an endorsement but okay.)
No, not at all. Liking some things and not others is not snobbery, it's taste. The Hugo electorate also tends to not go for hard sf these days. I don't think there's any snobbery in that, it's just not to the taste of the electorate.
No one ever claimed awards were objective, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. I find genre awards an interesting way to understand what people value and find interesting in genre, and how that shifts over time. Obviously that's all subjective, but given my enjoyment of fiction is also subjective, I'm not sure what objectivity could have to do with it in any case.
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I appear to be stuck in a loop, and I'm not sure how to get out of it. I got to the point where Mariner finds out what the human woman and Xindi Insectoid are up to, but no matter how far back I go after the kill Mariner, I can't find a way to get to any options I haven't already gone to. There was the equation that Mariner started to give, but she died before the end and I'm not sure how to find the rest.
Raw numbers are meaningless unless placed in context. Five out of fourteen is a big number, five out of 2,000 is not. I daresay there are probably a lot more original works in any given year than tie-in works, so a one-to-one comparison of absolute numbers would be invalid.
Do they have to be? Awards have different categories. Are the nominees for Best Fan Artist in competition with the nominees for Best Novel? As a rule, the entrants in a category compete with each other, not with other categories. Why not just add a Best Tie-In category? Why have categories for fan fiction, art, and podcasts but not for professional licensed fiction? Why nominate movies based on comic book universes but not novels based on TV universes? That seems quite arbitrary if you think about it.
That would be true if we were talking about how individual readers decided what they wanted to read, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an organization setting the standards that define who's allowed in the door. When it affects other people, you can't say it's just a matter of personal preference. It's elevating one set of preferences above others.
Uhh... the fact that they're not objective. Just because something has always been the case doesn't mean nobody's allowed to complain about it. On the contrary, the only way progress has ever happened has been when people complained about how things had always been done and fought to change it.
I mean, it's hardly unheard of for award organizations to alter or broaden their nomination categories in response to criticism. It happens all the time. The Hugos only added a Best Graphic Story category 16 years ago and Best Game or Interactive Work just 4 years ago. They're able to evolve and recognize new categories. As you say, they shift over time. And those shifts probably happened because people complained about the omissions and convinced the people in charge to be more inclusive. Complaining isn't a bad thing to do.
Thanks, that was able to get me out of my loop.
There's no standards that bar tie-ins from competing in the Hugos, so I am not even sure what you are complaining about here.
You're the one who expressed the belief that they can't measure up in the same category as original fiction, so you contradict yourself by saying that the lack of a distinct category for them is not a bar from competition. If there were a boxing tournament that only allowed welterweights and up, wouldn't that bar lighter weight classes from competition?
Saying they DON’T measure up is not remotely the same as saying they CAN’T measure up.