I was engaged in an online discussion about the relative popularity of novels that were nominated for the best novel Hugo award. This discussion was sometime last August (2020).
The primary assertion being made last August was that Larry Correia's works aren't as popular as those selected for the Hugo best novel shortlist. A couple of other conservative-leaning authors were included for comparison purposes by one interlocutor. I am interested in not seeing authors excluded from critical evaluation based on their politics. Also, I'm not a specific fan of Mr. Correia. His Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series is on my TBR pile.
These discussions frequently end in pointless goalpost shifting, confirmation bias, and very selective cherry-picking of data. A book that sells a lot of copies will be called great as long as the right sales numbers can be used to buttress a person's perspective; "my book is so good that everyone read it". Once sales volume information runs against their perspective, there will be a switch to how the book is underappreciated and better than some best-selling bit of popular drivel; "your sales numbers don't matter because popular drivel isn't as good as my obscure book". Or two different sub-genre categories will be used to "prove" something.
Watching two people, or two groups of people, flip and flop over what defines a book as "great" was once entertaining, but now is just tiring. Given the growth in the number of genre titles published each year, it is becoming easier and easier for a reader to find a quality piece of genre literature that has not come to their attention previously.
As an exercise, here were the books for the 2019 Hugo Best Novel award along with their rankings via Amazon. These are overall Kindle rankings as I couldn't find a good method for limiting it to the SF/F genre. The data was pulled on 4/7/2021.
#65,263 - The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
#144 - Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
#15,771 - Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)
#38,356 - Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)
#66,783 - Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
#166,183 - Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
I was partial to Grey Sister by Mark Lawrence; also published in 2018. It didn't even make the long list for the Hugo best novel category. I would easily put it above at least half of the short-listed works.
#31,699 - Grey Sister - Mark Lawrence
[An aside. I pulled data last August for those same books and got VERY different results. The Calculating Stars was closer to the #10,000 to #15,000 range. Spinning Silver wasn't nearly that high in Kindle sales as it was on 4/7/2021.
Perhaps Kindle rankings aren't a great comparison method as it shifts over time.
My original point was that Grey Sister was an equally popular book that was largely ignored by the pool of Hugo nominators. I think the point is worthwhile even if the shifting sands of the Kindle ranking algorithm aren't of any utility in proving the point.
End aside.]
Simply focusing on a few, select conservative-leaning authors is a distraction from the larger point that there are a lot of really good books out there. When making comparisons, it is better to compare a book with the contemporaneous cohort of books published that year. As an example, I think The Legend of Huma by Richard Knaak was a big miss by those with an interest in awards. It was on the NYTimes bestseller list in 1988. I found it to be a satisfying read with both an entertaining tale and engaging subtexts. Yet it didn’t receive any recognition from the various “literary” awards. As a guess, this is because the Dragonlance series and Wizards of the Coast (publisher) were not seen as being capable of producing a literary meritorious work.
Using a similar Amazon yardstick, The Legend of Huma fairs fares[1] pretty well against all of the Hugo Best Novel finalists from 1989 as well as almost all of the works listed in the 1989 WorldCon report of nominations. (I believe these numbers are from Kindle Books - Science Fiction/Fantasy sub-category. But it's been a while. Again, sorry.] The only book with better sales was by Isaac Asimov. And...well...he was Isaac Asimov! The data was pulled on the same day in August of 2020.
#26,458 The Legend of Huma by Richard Knaak
Not listed in KS – Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh [winner]**
#488,544 – Red Prophet, by Orson Scott Card
#67,218 – Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold
#106,791 – Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling
#53,799 – Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson
Not listed in KS – The Guardsman, by P.J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton – [withdrawn]
[from the long list of 1989]
#1,851,058 – Orphan of Creation, by Roger MacBride Allen
#1,326,895 – Deserted Cities of the Heart, by Lewis Shiner
Not listed in KS – Alternities, by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
#67,483 – Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCaffrey
#464,446 – The Gold Coast, by Kim Stanley Robinson
#487,340 – Ivory, by Mike Resnick
#12,177 – Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
#175,591 – Hellspark, by Janet Kagan
#245,495 – The Paladin, by C.J. Cherryh
** There was a 3-book collection that seems to represent the nominated work. It was only available in audiobook and paperback. No Kindle edition.
This is an apples-to-apples comparison in that all of the books are from the same year. But it’s cherry-picking because I picked 1989 and of course the Amazon ranking algorithm can significantly shift the ranking from week to week. My point remains that there is a wealth of quality works of SFF literature that do not attract the attention of Hugo nominators in any given year.
In the 1970s, the SF/F genre was small enough that having authors present as repeat nominees was normal. The number of authors has exploded since then as have the total number of works published each year. It should be harder for a specific author to be a repeat nominee unless their work is incredibly special - every author can't be Connie Willis. Given the expanded competition and even taking Sturgeon's Rule into account, a pool of nominators with broad experience in the genre should find it harder to repeatedly nominate the works of any specific author.
This problem gets worse when it comes to some of the less active categories such as "fancast" and graphic novels. There are fewer nominators for those categories. Those nominators appear to be focused on a limited range of works.
Either expanding the range of works experienced by Hugo nominators or expanding the number of Hugo nominators to cover an expanded range of works would improve the quality of the works that make the shortlist of nominations. I do not know how to make that happen structurally other than to continue advocating that nominators push themselves to experience a broader range of works.
What is counter-productive is the occasionally seen response that the shortlist for any given year is an excellent representation of the best of the field. In my opinion, it may be a good representation of the best of the field but it can, will, and does omit equally worthwhile works by dint of the biases present in the limited pool of nominators. A pool of nominators with a broader range of experience would provide a better quality shortlist.
[1]At least I have mastered "there, they're, and their"!
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