It’s the Little Things that We Count

There has been a lot (yes, way too much) time and energy spent the last several months on the Hugo awards, and what’s supposedly wrong with them, and the ancillary (pun intended) issues that have arisen since, like the latest nonsense about suing the Worldcon over a supposedly invalid ballot. As has been reiterated many times, and specifically (if incidentally) pointed by the latest “legal” kerfuffle, these things are really a tempest in a very small teapot. Honestly, as much as we’d all love to have one, who wins the Hugos matters to very few people. (Mostly, the people who win one, or don’t.) The same goes for whether the ballot was fairly drawn, or voted on, or if the system can be reformed.

Now, ironically, all the hoopla and hollering has not failed to engage and entertain a lot of people. Or maybe “enrage and entertain” would be a better description. (And I will be the first to admit I am among that number. Of course, my interest has been wholly academic, particularly in the latest skirmish, since I am a legal professional.) But why?

Why is it, that we, the SF community, self-charged to be the farseers, the chosen few who at least try to predict the future (however poorly), are so caught up with present-day minutiae? Come to think of it, why is the world so caught up in present-day minutiae? Obsession with movie stars, for example, is nothing new; when my great-grandmother’s closets were cleaned out years ago, we found stacks movie tabloids dating back to the 1950s. (And yes, I wish I had been allowed to save them.) But now, we have television channels devoted to this kind of thing, and we make stars out of people who’ve never been in movies. (And then we put them in movies, with predictable results.)

Sure, this is all for fun, and everybody’s entitled, but there are issues out there that we should be paying attention to: climate change, record refugee migrations, wealth distribution, a presidential election season being run by reality stars. (Somebody has probably actually predicted this somewhere along the line.) Why should we care if No Award got the Hugo for Best Short Story when right outside the auditorium record forest fires, fueled by unprecedented drought, made the air seem less like Spokane than Beijing?

And why isn’t anyone blogging about that?

I have a simple theory: It’s too big. We can’t handle this stuff. This is the sort of thing we elected those guys in Washington to solve for us. See how well that’s worked out.

But you know what? We’re Science Fiction. We think about the big issues, the future. Up until now, instead of the guys in Washington, we’ve let the guys in SFWA do the heavy lifting, so we can concentrate on nominating patterns and voting blocs. Except now the guys in SFWA are right down there with us. We’re letting a thousand ant-like problems distract us from the elephants in the room. Because it’s easier.

I’m not going to sit here at my computer and claim I have the way out. I’m not to claim that I’m any better than anyone else, that I’ve been fighting the good fight while everyone else sat at their bivouac. I don’t, and I haven’t. I’ve fed the monster of small concerns like a lot of others.

But it’s time to stop. It’s time for us in science fiction to stop squabbling about petty matters and get back to bigger things. The kind of looming apocalypses that we can imagine, because we’re not afraid to. The kind of doomsday scenarios that used to be science fiction.