Wasn’t it Athenian democracy that voted to execute Socrates?
Well, just as an update the organizers of the Gemmell Award have gone in for the hard stuff — that is pure, uncut, democracy — when voting for this year’s book that best exemplifies David Gemmell’s fiction. I blogged a bit about my anxiety over the prior arrangement over at Black Gate, which did at least have judges deciding on the winner after the fans had voted and narrowed the list. I worried then that the fans might not vote for any books that actually fit the theme of the contest.
I suppose I should worry more now, but really it’s pretty low on my list of priorities. So, the award is yet another popularity contest — popularity contests can still be good things for the genre, and for readers. I would have liked an award that took heroic fantasy, and Gemmell’s own sensibilities, more into consideration — but I’m reserving judgment until the final selection. I will say this is a big vote of confidence from the award’s organizers in the fans, which is itself rather a nice thing — but how will a popular vote play out in the age of social media and e-fraud?
Let’s just see how the democratic experiment works. I do, however, hope the fantasy reading public is more informed about fantasy fiction than the typical electorate is about the issues they are voting on . . .
Anyway, the bottom line is this should still be a win for the genre, and a nice tribute to one of fantasy’s best.
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Those kinds of democratic contests do suck, but Gemmel didn’t win a huge number of awards in his own career. He was just massively popular. So I suppose a popularity contest is kind of fitting in his case.
Yea, that is sort of the one thought that makes the whole thing seem appropriate. As I said over at BG in my first post about this, I suppose the real ambivalence I feel toward the ‘popularity’ aspect of the award is, that if an award with Gemmell’s name popularly selects books that aren’t the sorts of things he wrote — say by not picking heroic fantasy — what does that say for his own popularity? Fans of heroic fantasy like to point to Gemmell and say “See, this is what people want, why don’t publishers publish more of it?” But if the fans consistently vote for something other than that, what does that imply?
Anyway, my ‘anxiety’ is more about following the logic of the argument, and I think the list they already have is pretty good. I don’t really have any illusions that the way this contest falls will have a huge impact one way or the other, beyond how it may help the careers of a few writers, and maybe get some fans excited about reading some things they may not have heard of.
I predict that this will not end well.
Shouldn’t all books be some kind of adventure fantasy/heroic fiction/sword and sorcery to qualify? There should be restrictions on the types of stories that are allowed to enter, and they should be short listed much sooner. Then voters could actually try to read a few of the contenders.
Iin this scenario I’m with Nik.
BTW, I am far too reliant on spell checkers.
Jason Waltz just echoed all my own concerns about this award here: http://www.jasonmwaltz.com/thoughts/2008/12/23/david-gemmells-legend-award/
I agree with him; I’ve just decided to remain arbitrarily and rather absurdly optimistic about the whole thing.
See I’m a day behind, as usual. Good for you staying positive, Bill. I was there with you the first post, but now that they’ve gone and changed the focus of the award I just can’t. Without the distinction of ‘heroic’ and ‘Gemmell-like’ it’s not a new award – so we don’t need it. Sorry, sounds harsh I know, but it’s now the way I feel.
I agree with you — but I’m hoping there are enough fans that do care about his name to make it mean something. As Jordan said, he was extremely popular. Note I said I hope that’s the case, not that I’m confident it will be.
And I’m happy to see his name preserved, even if some books won’t fit his mold.
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