Book prizes don't work how you think
rebeccamakkai.substack.com
rebeccamakkai.substack.com
I wonder how the reviewers feel when authors like Ursula K. Le Guin refuse awards
I understand that finding technical/mathematical solutions to social problems is usually pointless, but still...
What if we have, like, a lot of reviewers.
Each reviewer gets n books randomly assigned to them.
n is picked in a way that allows each reviewer to thoroughly read each of them without dropping it in the middle for bullshit reasons.
Each reviewer ranks n books assigned to them, then we use an Elo-like algorithm to produce the final ratings and pick a winner.
This would eliminate most of the randomness/unfairness described in the article.
Of course, reviewers wouldn't like it, because it would significantly reduce their power and people never give it away willingly.
Le Guin refused a Nebula Award for "The Diary of the Rose" by withdrawing the nomination in protest of the Science Fiction Writers of America's revocation of Stanisław Lem's membership. Le Guin attributed the revocation to Lem's criticism of American science fiction and willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc, and said she felt reluctant to receive an award "for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance" toward communism.[11][12] She withdrew the novelette shortly before the announcement of the winners. The SFWA pleaded her not to do that since she had in fact won, but Le Guin insisted on the withdrawal.
Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) in 1973. SFWA honorary membership is given to people who do not meet the publishing criteria for joining the regular membership, but who would be welcomed as members had their work appeared in the qualifying English-language publications. Lem never had a high opinion of American science fiction, describing it as ill-thought-out, poorly written, and interested more in making money than in ideas or new literary forms.[42] After his eventual American publication, when he became eligible for regular membership, his honorary membership was rescinded. This formal action was interpreted by some SFWA members as a rebuke for his stance,[43] and it seems that Lem interpreted it as such. Lem was invited to stay on with the organization with a regular membership, but he declined.[44] After many members (including Ursula K. Le Guin, who quit her membership and then refused the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for The Diary of the Rose)[45][46] protested against Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer.[42][44]
further interesting tidbits from Lem's page:
Lem singled out only one[47] American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick (as he did for the bulk of American science fiction) and would later say that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work, since Western literature was hard to come by in the Polish People's Republic.
Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect.[48] There were several attempts to explain Dick's act. Lem was responsible for the Polish translation of Dick's work Ubik in 1972, and when Dick felt monetarily short-changed by the publisher, he held Lem personally responsible (see Microworlds).[49][48] Also it was suggested that Dick was under the influence of strong medications, including opioids, and may have experienced a "slight disconnect from reality" some time before writing the letter.[48] A "defensive patriotism" of Dick against Lem's attacks on American science fiction may have played some role as well.[48] Lem would later mention Dick in his monograph Science Fiction and Futurology.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-...
> I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases.
Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.
I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like Dune and I think that's odd. Perhaps it's my tastes that are changing or my tastes are stagnating and the world is evolving. Ah well.
Oh and, about the cronyism angle in literary prizes, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Nobel_Prize_in_Literature is a good read. They picked members of their own academy that year and eventually one of the winners killed himself (perhaps over it).
For example: They’d Rather Be Right, The Wanderer, Stand on Zanzibar (some people might disagree), Harry Potter, Hominids, etc
And have had many winning books that are enjoyable without “big ideas” as well.
In the end it’s just a fan voted award and subject to marketing and politics. Judged awards are perhaps a bit more consistent in reflecting quality? (Though maybe not)
And not every year gives us a Dune or A Fire Upon the Deep :)
* 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022.
* 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns.
* 2025 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Bennett Jackson - a very bizarre Holmes & Watson take set in a land constantly invaded by sea kaiju, and where there's "magic" (or is it science) based on harvesting the dead kaiju's bodies.
These are all excellent books, each of which has something different to recommend them.
Are they as good as Dune? Well, it's very hard to say _now_. Assuming humans still exist in 60 years, will they still read them like we read Dune 60 years from its publication? Maybe.
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land won in 1961. I've read it, and I don't think it's aged very well. It's certainly not Dune.
How many people are still reading the 1969 winner, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar? I _have_ read it. It's good, but nowhere close to Dune. And how about 1978's winner, Gateway by Frederik Pohl? It's ... fine. It's not even in the same category as Dune, IMO.
Dune is an outlier among _all_ winners. It's one of the best SF books of all time, with a voice that still seems fresh today. Most Hugo (and Nebula) just don't live up to this standard. There are a few that do, like Left Hand of Darkness, Ender's Game, Hyperion, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (better than Dune, IMO). But those are outliers just like Dune.
I really like that the Hugos added a Best Series category in 2017 to hopefully avoid this sort of thing. It seems like a great series is a different beast than a great single novel.
All Systems Red won (Novella) in 2018, Network Effect (book) won in 2021, and The Murderbot Diaries (series) won in 2021. Wells and Hugo have a .. cantankerous relationship
Having read Network Effect and compared it to Piranesi, the two seem simply leagues apart. Perhaps the real thing here is that I'm over-indexing on taste instead of some object measure of quality. Piranesi was otherworldly in the way of Strange and Norrell but Network Effect was Yet Another Story in comparison.
And it's true what you say. Some of the past winners were also relatively weak. Downbelow Station seemed incomplete though I think Neuromancer was unbelievable.
It's just that when I went back and just picked old winners to read it felt like banger after banger after banger. The one where I only remember Kallikantzaros or Lord of Light or Dune or The Left Hand of Darkness. Ringworld I could see people being put off by, but it had this whole thing with the ringworld and the trifold symmetry thing and all that.
Then again, everything that comes now has to avoid everything that came prior, sort of O(n) problem. You can't be new when much has been written.
With Murderbot, the "corpos control everything" scifi future setting is nothing new. I think the brilliance is in its portrayal of the main character, primarily through its inner voice. Murderbot is a really unique character and it is written very well.
Conversely, in Piranesi, the main character is basically a cipher. He doesn't know who is, and we don't learn a lot about him or his psychology for most of the book. I felt like he was mostly there to let us experience the world, which as you put it was otherworldly and quite unique. The brilliance of the book is the prose and the world, not the character.
But like I said, I think comparing anything to Dune is pretty tough. Dune is a landmark work that still influences modern writers, and that modern audiences still enjoy reading. The recent movies have translated it to the big screen and captured an even larger audience (an amazing feat given how weird the books are).
Very, very few SFF books have had a similar impact. There's Tolkien, who is arguably the most influential SFF writer of all time. What other SFF works from the 60s or earlier are still as widely read and influential as Dune and LotR? Almost none, except Le Guin's Earthsea books, which barely squeaks in with a 1969 release for the first book.
As it is you've been given a way to respectably say "I'm more mature than you" and you've leapt at the opportunity, it seems.
Sure. But even seemingly broad guidelines deeply influence/constrain the judges' choices.
E.g., the Pulitzer was created when America was still insecure about its artistic output and stature compared to Europe. Judges of the music prize were consequently asked to choose from "music in its larger forms," meaning ambitious, large-scale symphonic or chamber works typically derived from conventional European forms/genres.
The problem is that 20th-century American musical innovation almost definitionally meant straying from those conventions. The most banal example: Conlon Nancarrow's complex tempo canons that required hand-punching rolls for the player piano. There's a hard limit to the thickness of a piano roll that necessarily limits the duration of any given piece.
Composers began making pilgrimages to Nancarrow's apartment in the 1970s just to hear his music. By 1982, he'd won the MacArthur Fellowship for his Player Piano Studies. Funny enough, that same year, octogenarian composer Roger Sessions-- a former teacher of Nancarrow-- won the Pulitzer. His piece? A concerto for orchestra.
> why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader.
Because that's literally your literaly job?
Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.
That's literally the opposite of what happens, you can't judge the whole thing if you've only read 1 paragraph!
> If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book.
That makes no sense, you don't know the quality of other books to make that determination! What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle? What's so special about the first one expect being helpful to the lazy judges?
> Think about judging a 3 course meal.
Don't, you just add more irrelevance her
> What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle?
Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?
That's rather ironic because you both can't do that with a fantasy of a simplistic world of "first line bad = whole book bad"
> more or less likely
In the real messy world the correct answer is "you have no clue" neither when it comes to the whole universe of books nor to the specific subset of books that were accepted for the competition.
But I'm aware of the allure of the simple nature of a fantasy world where there is a very simple way to judge the quality of any art work, and where such quality is necessarily uniform, so a tiny sample is fine.
I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce.
The real disruption of books haven't really happened.
I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.
The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.
As an example: Kobo will tell you, at the bottom of each book's page, if it has DRM or not. And it will happily sell you a book without DRM and let you download it.
Some publishers require DRM. Which is entirely different than the false claim made earlier that "selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM".
My comment was mostly about the “steam for books” being lauded better as physical books. To me it would only be strictly better if you could sell and lend (which you can’t on steam)
Imo, this is one of the tech pathologies. The culture does not care about building and creating anymore, all it cares about is disrupting and destroying. Books were disrupted all right.
> I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.
Of course not. The culture of broad reading require people to show books they like to friends and share them. It requires culture building. Ebook devices are locked out, unnecessary expensive due to e-paper patent and an obstacle to any of that.
And it requires discovery. You used to pick a book and read several page at random places of your choice and then decide. Ebooks shop allows me to see a picture of the first page or some such.
I looked at your sample chapter and immediately bounced off a police officer in Maine calling in a murder as a 187 (California penal code).
I wonder if we'll have AI-judged book prizes in order to keep them more "value-free", you could have a group of authors write down a prompt file and then the AI could read hundreds of books in a day. But then there would be the implicit biases of the AI and I suppose most high-brow authors and readers would despise those particular biases.
How is that irrelevant? I don’t think the idea is that the previous information causes the book to be chosen next, but it should be an indicator that the book is good.
Just like a student writing a good exam isn’t irrelevant when deciding the next grade, even though the good grade itself doesn’t cause another good grade. But it still influences the expectation.
My surprises:
- it’s just 5 judges, who makes the shortlist
- it’s the _same_ 5 judges judging the short list
- there are generally no criteria
- Pulitzer Prizes favors American settings.
- edit: bonus surprise I expected judges to be mostly critics and professors of literature
While I’m not surprised it’s just a few people judging the short list I would have expected more eyes on making the shortlist (editors and publishers make a short list and critics and authors judging it)
I definitely expected different prizes to value things differently. Like a Novel prize winner I would expect to be heavy, with layers and quite frankly a bit intimidating to casual readers, like myself.
I would not expect a criteria to favor a setting. Maybe an authors background (again, I would expect Nobel to favor poor authors who somehow made)
The truth about the literary world is that, while a lack of talent can impose a ceiling—no one gets book awards in fiction for being rich or famous if they can’t write at least as well as an above-average college grad—there is no level of talent that overcomes the lack of access, and it’s a kind of access you’re born into, to get a fair read from anyone who matters in the industry.
It’s all a scam and even most people who succeed spend more trying to fulfill the expectations of the published-novelist/public-intellectual role than they’ll ever get back from it in royalties or options or anything else. It’s an exhausting, dismal life in truth. The lifestyle costs of being someone who can get a $500,000 advance every two years run to… easily that rate.
If you actually want to write and have a decent life, you have three options:
1. Write genre and go back in time to the 1970s when getting a literary agent (as opposed to a schmagent who can’t get anyone to read anything) was possible.
2. Figure out the self-publishing game and get really, really good at it.
3. Take a job that has absolutely nothing to do with writing and accept that you’ll take three times as long to produce a book as a career author. Self-publish or work through university presses and don’t expect to be read by more than a few hundred people.
I don’t love Silicon Valley but if they had done something about publishing in the era of “disruption” I would have cheered it on.
$500k every two years seems great for a job that so many people romanticize, but the money goes fast. The writing is the easy part. Self promotion becomes a full-time job, and you do the writing in your off hours.
Also, you don’t get to take all that money home. Your agent gets 15%, but you’ll never get published at all without one. And there is an unspoken rule that you must put a certain fraction of your advance into marketing yourself, the proportion depending on genre and level. Most authors at the $500k level (“major deal”) have to retain publicists and live in New York to sustain it. The publisher might give you one hour per quarter with a publicist if you’re really lucky. If you want favors called in and arms twisted to get your book coverage, you have to pay for that on your own.
The best way to be a writer is honestly to get a 9-5 you don’t hate and that stays 9-5, and then self-publish and accept the likelihood of obscurity. The book world is toxic and the proportion of actual smart people isn’t zero but it’s no higher than you’d find in a decent high school.
If you go trad and you genre-maxx, you’ll get typecast to one niche and be treated like shit the moment the house no longer sees you as a reliable 7-figure line item. If you try to go literary, you’re forced to write within the narrow confines of a social class and format you probably won’t enjoy for the next forty years.
I know 2-3 published authors --- published at all, not fulltime authors, just people who got a book published. In my history of acquaintances I know of one mildly successful fantasy author who is making a living at it (parent of a classmate of my child).
So 36 seems like a very high number to me... maybe you sell typewriters? or Wite-Out?
> I actually am a top 1% writer
Ah, i see.
The thing is that we want to read the same books. And it's not just about quality. It sucks to be the only one to enjoy a great book, to stand there feeling like you're a Star Trek nerd trying to explain your obsession to a group of rural Siberians.
Meanwhile, the talentless jokers who run the industry continue to promote mediocrity, and the world slowly loses readers.
Book Prizes Do Work How I Think.
It's just like, someone's opinion, man.
> Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.
OK, so the judging panels are not picking books based on diversity quotas, cool. But then she admits that the longlists are subject to diversity quotas:
> It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.
> It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.
To be honest, I don't pay much attention to book prizes, but I'm well aware of claims that it's not just that "white men don't get 95% of prizes anymore" but rather that in some cases, white men are not included at all, despite making up a fairly large chunk of the population. For example, apparently no white men born in the last 40 years have published literary fiction in the New Yorker. [1]
Are there book prizes with similar track records? I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine that whoever is deciding on publishing at the New Yorker is probably pretty similar to the people handing out book awards.
1: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...
Are these quotas or just nudges? It's hard to say. But I've been in the room when decisions like this were made, by institutions that are legally barred from even considering race. But in reality, race wasn't just part of the decision, it was determinative.
First it is not pretty clear, what is clear that long list is not composed of white male only.
> (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win).
And second, this really come across as hidden "we should not be competing with them anyway" argument. Yes, if long list contains other people then just white males, it makes it more likely for those other people win. It makes super huge role, sure, but that is not something nefarious.
It's easy to win arguments when you get to put words in the other person's mouth. Congratulations! Victory is yours!
That second part is presented as damning evidence that there's nothing like quotas - but all it really means is that they've fully internalized the requirements, whatever they were.
(It reminds me of Nate Silver's recent statement that Disney had almost never interfered in their editorial policy. Nate also thought that was a defense, even though what it really shows is that Disney was willing to interfere but almost never had reason to - Nate being almost perfectly aligned to their interests already.)
I don't know the exact process by which judges are picked, but it's not surprising that they should be so aligned on diversity and what kinds of diversity, just as they will be fairly aligned on ideas of what makes a book enjoyable or good.
> For example, apparently no white men born in the last 40 years have published literary fiction in the New Yorker. [1]
How many writers under 40 have published literary fiction in the New Yorker to start with? New Yorker skews heavily toward more experienced writers, and the average age of debuts for fiction writers is already mid to late 30's. The pool of experienced writers under 40 is small.
Couple that with the New Yorker publishing a very small number of writers in total, and white men making up a minority of the possible pool of writers (New Yorker does not publish only American writers), is it actually surprising if you can't find any in the small subset of writers in the New Yorker under 40 that happens to belong in one specific group?
The New Yorker does publish a lot of white male writers - to make this into a thing, the young white male published writer who loves to publish writings about how young white male writers don't get published had to specifically point to a publication that publishes few young writers in general.
There is room for LLMs to disrupt book judging by being able to read every single book.
An LLM is not as good as a skilled human who has already committed to giving your work a fair read. It is far superior to the quality of read you will ever get from a literary agent unless your parents are Manhattan old money.