Last week was the World Fantasy Convention, which I attended, as I usually do, and I couldn’t help but reflect on book awards. No matter what anyone says, book awards are essentially popularity contests. The award may reflect the popularity of books among a large number of readers, as in the case of Goodreads awards, or the popularity among a small number of judges, as with the Pulitzer Prize, or by some combination, as in the case of the World Fantasy Awards. Now… judges of more prestigious awards may protest mightily, and cite various criteria, but the bottom line is whether they like it… and that’s popularity.
Sometimes a book wins awards, and after all the furor, it vanishes, like Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer. And sometimes a book that’s ignored by every critic and award giver hangs on… and is eventually recognized… like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was seen as mere light reading and critically panned for almost a century.
And sometimes, the controversies aren’t about the books, but the awards.
For the last two years, the Nobel Prize for Literature has also been plagued with scandal. In 2018, a series of sexual assault charges against the author husband of one of the Literature Committee members resulted in such disruption that no prize was awarded in 2018. Then, this year the 2019 Prize was awarded to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer and firebrand “infamous for his Serbian nationalist sympathies.” In 1996 Handke published two essays that blamed the media for presenting Serbs as the “evil” party in the Yugoslav Wars and Muslims “as the usual good guy,” despite the fact that Serb forces killed an estimated 100,000 Croatian civilians and Bosnian Muslims. Handke even spoke at the funeral of Serbia’s President Slobodan Milošević (Nickname: “Butcher of the Balkans”), who had died before his trial for genocide and war crimes was completed.
F&SF has had its own “award” dramas. The World Fantasy Convention had for years presented its annual awards in the form of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, a noted U.S. fantasy author who died in 1937. With the rise of a more diverse community of fantasy writers who became increasingly vocal about an award depicting a writer known not only for horrifying fantasy, but for stridently racist and xenophobic views, in 2015, the WFC announced it would replace the “Lovecraft” award statuette with another trophy, and in 2017 a “fantasy tree” award was adopted. Now, there’s a controversy about the John W. Campbell Award (for best new writer) given at the World Science Fiction because of Campbell’s anti-Semitic and misogynistic views.
In the meantime, the awards go on, and sometimes great books are often ignored, and sometimes fair but wildly popular books win awards… and, in the end, the fact that a book won an award, or didn’t, is lost, and the book has to stand or fall on its own.