by Doctor Science
One of the things the Sad Puppies said an awful lot last year was that they just wanted the works they’d nominated for Hugos to be read and judged “on their merits”. In many ways the most surprising thing for me about last year’s Puppy nominees was that none of their horses was fit to race. None had what I think of as baseline qualifications for an award for literary (including science fictional) merit. What I still don’t understand is *why*: why a group of people who wanted me to judge works “on their merits” would nominate things without significant merit. And, especially, things that are *objectively* bad.
You may think there’s no such thing as an objective standard of literary quality, but it’s quite possible to tell the basic difference between competent writing and the stuff that isn’t.
It might be easiest to think of this in the context of Sturgeon’s Law:
90% of every human creative endeavor is crud.
With fanfic, if it’s a very large fandom and/or the fan writers are generally very young (median age 20 or younger), you’ll be lucky if the “Sturgeon factor” is only 90% — it’s often more like 95%, with barely 1 in 20 stories being not-crud.
But just because something is crud doesn’t mean I won’t read it, and even like it. It depends on what I’m in the mood for; it’s quite possible for a story to be enjoyable or just what I wanted right then, while still being objectively bad.
When I recommend stories, though, I kind of insist on not-crud, and the recs lists I trust come from people who have similar standards. But sometimes I’m just, “gimme everything you’ve got with time travel” or whatever, and I’ll at least look at them all — even though around 90% of them are going to be cruddy. There’s nothing wrong with reading and liking crud.
The problems come when writers and people who make influential recs lists don’t seem to grasp the difference between crud and non-crud. In fanfiction, I think of that line as tracing “basic competence in English prose”. Is the text laced with SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) errors? Do verb tenses and POV shift a lot? Are character names misspelled? Are names misspelled in the summary? (this is usually a sign not to read the story at all, or you’ll be s-o-r-r-y.) Are words chosen poorly or mistakenly? Are the sentences clumsily constructed?
As far as I’m concerned, the interesting part of voting for the Hugos or other awards is taking a nominations list that is all not-crud, and deciding which is best in my opinion. What shocked and even offended me last year was that the Puppy nominations didn’t pass the basic, not-crud standard.
Cut for length, including some close, editor-like reading.