An invitation all fans to take part in the 2016 Hugo Recommendation Season.
The 2015 Hugo Awards are over and it certainly wasn’t pretty. However, it is what it is, and many of us are looking towards 2016 and moving forward. There seems to be even more anger and deeper divides now that the awards are over and that is not healthy for fans or the Hugos. Don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in listening to the same arguments that have been regurgitated for the next year.
Personally, I’m interested in the works and know I’m not alone in that. Also, this year many more eyes will be on the nominating process, but like other fans, I have rarely nominated anything. I tend to be a slow reader, and usually far, far behind in my To-Be-Read pile. Embarrassingly behind, in fact. It’s somehow even worse than my To-Be-Watched pile (speaking of which, I *really* need to get watching Orphan Black!).
On top of that, I am one the newer arrivals to the Hugos having only followed them closely for the past few years, and I will admit that I wouldn’t recognize a “semiprozine” without a prescription (#DadJokes). I’m also glad I’m not the only one with no idea on how to pick Best Editor nominees without a lot of research or following the herd.
I am suggesting to the wider SFF community that we have a Hugo Recommendation Season. Let’s talk about what works and creators we think are great from this year and share our enthusiasm with everyone. Most everyone seems to agree that the Hugo Awards should be about great work even if we disagree on what makes it great. So let’s make this year be about great work.
I’m sure there will still be plenty of accusations and name-calling flying around, but it’s gotten so nasty, I no longer care about that. I want to help make a space for EVERYONE to be able to talk about what works they enjoy and why – for ALL categories. I see some people already listing off some novels they like, a short story or two, maybe some TV episodes. But I also want to know which artists are doing great work this year. I want to hear people talk about their favorite ‘zines – both fan and semipro. And, please, tell us what editors are doing great work this year and why! And so on.
There are already a wiki and a spreadsheet with people listing eligible works – which will certainly be useful – but I want more. Plus, there are countless comments buried in forum posts where people mention “Hey, this is cool”, but it’s not easy finding all of those, and they are usually little more than statements of “I liked this.” I want someone who loves a work tell us why they love it. I want to read a fan geeking out over something that excites them.
I’m still working out the details over the next couple weeks, but my idea is to use this blog to collect links to recommendation posts. I will post links to anyone’s recommendations. Anyone. As long as they are talking about why they enjoyed a story or ‘zine or admire an artist or editor, I will include it. As long as it’s not an attack disguised as a recommendation (e.g. “This book is great because it’s not the usual garbage [fill in the blank with some derisive name for some other group] likes!”), I will include it. Sad Puppy, non-Puppy, whatever. Tor, Baen, self-published indie, it’s all good. I don’t care about affiliations, or campaigns, or whatever. I just want posts from individual fans being fans.
Since the nomination window will be from early January to late March, I was thinking in October or early November starting the 2016 Hugo Recommendation Season with a focus category every week. We can lead off with Best Novel and work back, both because that gives people more time to read longer recommended works (or ask for them during one of the gift giving holidays) and to gather interest at the beginning with one of the most popular categories.
Each week, people could post on blogs, Facebook, or whatever, the works they enjoyed in that category and most importantly WHY they enjoyed it. Send me the links (in a form I will make to help coordinate this) and I will post collections of them during that week. At the end of the Recommendation Season we would include additional focus days for works that came out at the end of the year or other late additions.
Let people have their arguments and their mocking and their accusations. I’m tired of it. I want to spend this Hugo Recommendation Season reading positive articles about what people love. How about you?
-Ken Marable
P.S. Checking the MidAmeriCon II site, I just noticed this is also a Retro Hugo year! They will “be soliciting and publishing articles by members of the SF community to provide an overview of the works from 1940 that are eligible for nominations,” so hopefully that should inform us well. I will certainly be keeping a close eye on that and signal boosting as much as possible!
2018 Hugo Recommendation Season 
What a fantastic idea! Kudos. Following, and I’ll try to get something written up somewhere for my humble few favorites so far.
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Hope you are able to pull this off.
You may have one difficulty in executing this. As a Sad, I read for entertainment. I’m not reading for literary qualities. Nor am I interested in lengthy discussions of plot development, character development, etc…. I just want to know the general genre, is it well written and is it a fun read. Some of the Worldcon trufen who go on at length that sales /= quality discuss literary features (not fun) that is partly the core of what the Sads hate about recent Hugo Nominees.
Hopefully you will not take this as a flame. I’m attempting (as the son and double grandson of English teachers) to point out that literary versus fun read is one of the core elements of the central dispute between the Sads and the truefen.
I wish you the best in this endeavor. I’ve bookmarked your site for future reference.
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I’m a newcomer to nominating/voting too (last year was my first time). I didn’t vote in a couple of categories, notably editor short form or long form, but I did –eventually — figure out that Short Form could mean anthologies. I’ve already read two anthologies this year with enough good and fun stories in them to earn the editors a nomination: Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow (due out in October) and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, edited by Sean Wallace; it’s out now. Both of these will be discussed on my blog deedsandwords.com where I’ve created a Hugo 2016 category.I also review for Fantasyliterature.com but those might not be Hugo-specific.) I am so glad you are doing this! It is so exciting… and so stressful, as my TBR pile climbs ever higher…
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A lot of us have the same idea, but it’s quite a challenge to put something practical together. My husband and I launched our own site this week, but we’re limiting the stories (for now) to things that have been published in one of the six main magazines. Opening it up to letting people nominate anything they want seems really challenging technically. We’d love to compare notes as things progress.
Something we’ve done that might help everyone is that we’ve hunted down just about every possible way to get hold of back issues of magazines. It turns out that you really can get online copies of back issues of Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/welcome-to-rocket-stack-rank.html
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Hey, I saw your site was launched and was planning on contacting you sometime! But I will gladly stay in touch to see in what ways we can help each other if possible. Good luck, and if nothing else, I will be keeping up with your site!
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