The Wrong Way to Vote a Hugo

It’s pretty much a truism that if you get three science fiction fans (or probably fans of anything) together, you’re going to have a controversy. Controversies probably bind various fandoms together more than do the things they are celebrating. It’s a weird facet of human nature that we like to get together with other people who love the same things we do, just so we can argue about them.

And now it’s the Hugos. Again. Specifically the Best Related Work award. A couple of years ago, an author made a speech at the Hugo ceremony condemning John Campbell, the man whose name was on the award she had just received, as a racist. She had a point; Campbell’s influence on the genre and the way he used it have been sore points in the field for a long time. In fact, his name was pulled off the award almost immediately. At the next Hugo ceremony, her speech won the Best Related Work award.

In 2021, a blog post excoriating George R.R. Martin for his performance at the previous ceremony was nominated. Martin had, in fact, done a bad job (and whether it was his fault or he was let down by the convention committee is open to debate). Was a blog post a worthy nominee just because people were mad at him?

And now there is a burgeoning attempt to nominate the best of the anti-Raytheon blogs and tweets responding to the corporation’s sponsorship of this year’s Hugo ceremony. The trend is becoming known as the Best Protest Vote.

Enough already. There is a place for dissension among science fiction fans and Hugo voters; if there weren’t, it wouldn’t be a competition. But to use the Best Related Work itself as a protest vote–against something that’s already happened–is (a) a waste of your vote, and (b) an insult to anyone else on the ballot who has spent months or years out of their life to create a piece of scholarship, only to see it edged out by a blog that took a half-hour to compose. The length of time of creation is not a criterion by which to gauge a work’s value, but there are common sense considerations at work: Flash fiction is great, but have you ever seen a piece of flash fiction win a Hugo?

The Hugos are meant to be a celebration, not a protest. You don’t expect to see the best man at a wedding stand up and give a speech trashing the wedding he went to last month. If you want to vote for a blog post, go ahead, if it’s the best genre-related nonfiction of the year. But if all you want to do is protest an action that’s already past and will not be repeated because the next awards are given out by entirely different people…

…please reconsider.