The Decline And Fall Of The Big Three Empire

My review of The Rise Of The Cyberzines by Mike Ashley was published in the BSFA Review #18. This will be available as a free download on the BSFA’s website in a couple of months and I’ll post a link then. But for now (and following the recent announcement of this year’s Hugos) I wanted to pick up on a point I make in the review:

Ashley writes that “this volume [became] longer than anticipated and has meant that I have had to prune the appendices.” As we’ve seen, there are other things he could have pruned but there are still near enough a hundred pages of appendices, almost entirely a list of every issue of every magazine covered by the book. This raw data is a valuable resource… for a small number of people. What would have been more useful was greater analysis but elsewhere Ashley doesn’t take a very data-driven approach to the book.

He opens the book with the killer fact that “the last short story from a traditional print magazine to win [the Hugo Award] was in 2012, and the last to be nominated was in 2018.” It is pretty eye-opening reading this now; from the standpoint of 1991, it seems miraculous. But the book contains only ten tables and not a single one of them compares 1991 to 2020.

The first table, right on the second page, summarises the venues responsible for the most Hugo and Locus nominations and Gardner Dozois ‘Year’s Best’ selections between 1991-5. This clearly shows Asimov’s domination of the field and is a fascinating and succinct snapshot of the first half of the Nineties. The exercise is repeated but in a different format and with a different scope of Hugo, Locus and Nebula nominations for 1996-2001. Then bizarrely we jump to Nebula nominees only for 2013-2016.

So I thought I’d do a few charts myself to accompany the review. Firstly, one that tells the whole story of the book:

Second, a variation on this theme highlighting the extraordinary fading of Asimov’s dominance over the last couple of decades (and particularly the last ten years):

And finally a pair showing the end of the print era and the rise of the online area, highlighting a potential successor Big Three but also the greater market diversity.

Hugo Best Novelette

I don’t attend conventions and I don’t read SF magazines so usually my interest in this award category is quite low. However, in the last couple of years those responsible for publishing the nominated stories have increasingly made them available to the public at large. This year all the stories are available and Torque Control have been running a discussion so although I’m still not voting I do feel informed and involved for the first time. Here is my ranking with links to the commentary:

1) ‘The Gambler’ by Paolo Bacigalupi
2) ‘Pride and Prometheus’ by John Kessel
3) ‘Shoggoths in Bloom’ by Elizabeth Bear
4) ‘The Ray-Gun: A Love Story’ by James Alan Gardner
5) ‘Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders’ by Mike Resnick

It is nice to feel like part of the community and I’m hoping to take part in the follow up discussions as well. Of course, if Resnick wins I will feel a lot less like I am part of the community…

Reductio Ad Absurdum

Damien G Walter has a piece at the Guardian Book Blog asking why editors don’t get awards. Now, obviously editors make an extremely important contribution to literature. However, I’ve never been convinced of the need for a fan award for editors and, in particular, I think the Hugo catergories for best editor are pretty meaningless. In the comments to this I’m somehow tricked into progressively coming out against more and more other Hugo categories until I finally get to the stage where I can now present the shortlist for the 2009 Hugo Award:

• Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
• “The Tear”, Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
• “True Names”, Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
• “The Gambler”, Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
• “Exhalation”, Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)

Speaking of which Niall is discussing ‘The Gambler’ over at Torque Control, along with all the other novelletes (including the dreadful ‘Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders’ by Mike Resnick).