{"id":11372,"date":"2008-08-11T20:50:09","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T00:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/08\/11\/11372.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:14","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:14","slug":"hugo-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/08\/11\/hugo-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo there"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has in the past been on about the Hugo-nominators and voters and the general specfic-chattering classes having a blind spot for works that are marketed to people who are not sf fans. As you may already know, this year’s Hugo went to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union<\/a>, by Michael Chabon, a novel that was clearly marketed as literary fiction rather than genre. Mr. Chabon himself seems to be a genre fan; certainly there doesn’t seem to be the hostility there that there is with, say, Margaret Atwood. Anyway, I’m happy enough that the book won, as (a) I think it’s a fine book, and (2) I like the idea that it is fully accepted in the Hugo-voting community as a specfic book within the meaning of the act. I will be curious to see whether HarperCollins pushes the Hugo as a marketing tool; they haven’t yet added it to either the main HarperCollins page or the TYPU<\/I> page, but that could well be tardiness, as they still have the Locus award-winners up on the main HarperCollins page.
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Anyway, Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu probably have lots of opportunities to chat with people who know their specfic about the Hugos, or to read the on-line conversations of such people. It was interesting to me to read a thread about the Hugos over at the McCovey Chronicles<\/a>, a SportsBlogs Nation site for fans of the San Francisco Giants. Not many fans of the specfic novel over there, not many people with any real knowledge of the genre. There seems to be some bewilderment that alternate history of the TYPU<\/I> kind is eligible for a Hugo at all (to be fair, I believe this is the first time that a straight-ahead alternate history novel has won the Hugo), and it might be interesting to view the confusion over genre definitions from the point of view of people who don’t know much about the genre and don’t care much, either. At least, it has to be as interesting as the same old conversation with the same old people, right?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger has read four of the last five Hugo-winning novels, three of them before they won, if I remember correctly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specfic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18463,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11372\/revisions\/18463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}