Don't ignore the flyover Hugo categories
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It's that time of the year: fans from around science fiction fandom are submitting their nominations (deadline is the 17th of March, I think) for this year's Hugo Awards. While I'm filling mine out, I'm reminded of a critical thing: don't ignore the 'flyover' categories.
The Hugos, if you're not aware, are one of the genre's biggest awards: the Academy Awards of science fiction / fantasy fandom, except that regular readers who attend (or pay for a supporting membership), can vote in them. The biggest share of the votes goes to the best novel and shorter fiction categories, but there's sections for film, television, fan writers and related works.
The past couple of years have seen some controversy over who's being nominated: a handful of factions of conservative to very conservative readers (read: Alt-Right) successfully gamed the system by bloc voting their own nominees and managed to cause an uproar from shocked liberalish fans who were asleep at the wheel. They were really only able to do this for the same reason that the US political primaries attract terrible candidates: nobody cares about the nominations process, and don't show up. When they do, they tend to ignore a whole swath of categories, like Fan Writer, Fanzine, Best Related Work, and so forth. These are pretty specific categories: your typical, casual bookstore patron won't know, if they know about the Hugos in the first place.
It's a shame, because these are areas where there's a lot of interesting things going on: internal genre commentary, fan work, or looks at genre history and production.
Best Related Work is one area that I particularly watch, because I tend to produce it. I write a column on genre history for Kirkus Reviews, write reviews and general commentary for places like Lightspeed Magazine and The Verge. There's a lot of good work out there. Last year alone, there were fantastic biographies for George Lucas, Bram Stoker, Octavia Butler, and Shirley Jackson, really intriguing histories on the book and the word processor's impact on writing, paper, and commentaries on women in the genre. That's all just by looking at my bookshelf next to my desk. There's numerous other works on blogs and fanzines as well. "Safe Space as Rape Room", SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth are just a couple of examples: Alt-Right authors with an ax to grind about the world who think that getting an award will validate their shitty view of the world.
It's frustrating, because there's plenty of solid books and works out there that *almost* made the ballot (and not necessarily liberal works, either). I'm thinking of books like Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century by William Patterson Jr., Masters of Modern Science Fiction: Greg Egan, by Karen Burnham (or any of the other books in that series!), or the numerous articles or essays that critically dissect the genre.
The real problem here is that not a lot of people tend to read the things in these categories. Who goes out of their way to read a novella? I think the fiction categories are beginning to change a bit with what places like Tor.com and others are publishing, which is a positive step. It's also an easy thing to fix: look around at the various categories that are out there and see what you're missing. There's a lot of good stuff out there that's well worth the time and energy to pick up.
As you're taking the time to fill out a ballot, don't skip those categories. Look around at what people have been producing, and take the time to read that novella that someone recommended, or that biography of that author.
