Pretty interesting post. I guess I'm surprised that it's just like 5 people doing most of it and the most complex structure is still just 2 stages usually (Pulitzer: 5 judges send 3 books to a special council to pick a winner). It makes me think you probably get as much value from following a few specific critics as you would from following these prizes
I wonder how the reviewers feel when authors like Ursula K. Le Guin refuse awards
Aggregating preferences isn't easy. Are you sure you wouldn't get a book which is agreeable to almost anyone but not particularly exciting? This might work for e.g awards for the most important non fiction book, but for fiction, I'd rather try a book someone is excited about.
I've read for screenwriting contests and it is pretty much the same thing. During the first round of reading, they usually expect you to read a minimum number of pages (usually 20 pages). Only one person will read your script during the first round, so if it doesn't catch their attention you will be cut. During the subsequent rounds you are generally expected to read the whole thing, but most of the worst stuff has already been eliminated. In some contests you can see the coverage from previous judges and some you can't. It all depends.
Do you have any recommendations on which screenwriting contests are worth submitting to for a first-time historical fiction screenwriter? I've previously published a nonfiction book and am familiar with that side of things but am brand new to the screenwriting world and there are far more film festivals and competitions than I expected (and almost all seem to charge a submission fee)
Related read; a first hand account by one of the 2012 Pulitzer jury members giving a good account of the process and attempting to explain why no literature prize was awarded that year.
> 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
I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.
It’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.
Most certainly. I used to hear people call usb drives zip drives (and thumb drives) a lot ~2 decades ago. Truthfully, I didn't even know zip drives were their own thing until this comment chain. I just though it was an older term for usb drives.
> In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies.
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.
Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good.
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).
The Hugo awards have had a lot of weak winners in the past as well.
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 :)
Haha, Hominids! That was definitely one where I was left thinking "Oh that's it?" haha. Fair point fair point. I do think Harry Potter is like the Murderbot series. And to be clear, I really enjoyed Harry Potter when I was young. Can still recall getting the book at my maternal grandparents' place as a present.
Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years:
* 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 haven't yet read the last few ones because I found the Aztec ones underwhelming. The Calculating Stars to A Desolation Called Peace was when I started feeling they were not so strong and decided I'd go read prior years instead. But I suppose the vagaries of 'winner' vs. shortlist probably take this. It is true that all those others you're talking about are much stronger. I do think that The Ninefox Gambit, The Fifth Season, The Three Body Problem are all just as strong as the ones you've mentioned.
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.
I love both the Murderbot books and Piranesi. I think they're excellent for _very_ different reasons.
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.
Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?
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
I think the most interesting point was that there are no (or very few) rules specific to each prize and that's it's mostly up to the idiosyncrasies of the unique small group of people who are part of the panel. So the prestige of a specific book prize is really superstition. It makes sense rationally, outside of having the same group of people judge the same book prize every year (and then they'd have to live forever?) there's no real way to keep consistent. And their tastes would I assume change from year to year. The other way would be to have a sort of constitution or set of rules, but that would be interpreted differently by each group.
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.
Seems to work close to how I think, would be interesting to know what people actually think instead of relying on what the author thinks people think
> 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.
When you are judging something you are judging the whole thing. If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. Even if the rest was decent the chance of it being the best overall is small.
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?
And we mostly get neither. Some stores do offer drm free ebooks and audiobooks.
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)
Selling books doesn't require DRM at all. I buy DRM-free books all the time.
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.
> The real disruption of books haven't really happened.
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.
As an indie author (https://frequal.com/novels), this makes me glad I haven't submitted my novel yet to any of these contests. The chance that a submission fee could be wasted by chance (not a match for the reviewer's interest or mood that day) is just too great. It seems that the larger publishing houses are more willing to shell out on the chance to win this lottery, according to the article.
I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but this post comes across a little like you already assume you deserve to win such a prize and it’s just those fickle judges standing in your way.
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’m a very casual reader, nothing heavier than Murakami.
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)
> Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.
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.
Except for the prize committees outsourcing roughly the same sets of judges, they work a lot like how you’d expect. The judges pickup a bunch of books and choose the ones they like the most. Since the author makes it clear how subjective the process truly is, you can assume that personal biases play a huge part in how winners are chosen.
Yes, as someone who has read the literature section of the (small) national newspaper with some regularity, this is pretty much all old news -- could glean most of this from reading for a year. You hear about the longlists and shortlists and panel of judges (after the winner(s) is chosen), and one would hope that at least the literary prizes are highly subjective.
What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not taking you seriously would be bad for their careers and reputations. Only 0.01% of people have that kind of access, though, and you don’t write your way to getting those agents and publicists—you’re either born into it or you’re not. The rest of us poor loser fuckers get tossed at the first bump, which could be a minor copy error like a missing comma.
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.
This all sounds informed and authoritative. And it’s believable. But can I ask how you came to these conclusions? Did you attempt this? Do you know authors getting 500k every two years?
The fact is that the supply of people wanting to write books greatly exceeds the demand of readers. It’s inevitable that most books barely get read by anyone. You either accept it or you find something else to do.
Not exactly. I have some voracious readers in my family, but none of them ever tried to publish themselves (despite, in my sister's case, winning an award for a novella written as schoolwork).
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.
Right, one could make pretty much the same observations about how hiring / promotion decisions are made, how investment decisions are made, and probably any number of other things that people like to pretend are objective/scientific but are actually just a matter of opinion.
I think she's missing the point here. First she says:
> 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.
No, she's pointing out that when you have a dierse prize committee, you end up with more diverse results.
> 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.
Not strictly speaking a quota, but they do say that they do look over their shortlists for diversity (of some unspecified kind) and that they never had to adjust their lists because of it.
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.
It does not explicitly admit it, and seeing the quotes pulled separately make it harder to infer. But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win).
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.
> But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists
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.
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.
Pretty interesting post. I guess I'm surprised that it's just like 5 people doing most of it and the most complex structure is still just 2 stages usually (Pulitzer: 5 judges send 3 books to a special council to pick a winner). It makes me think you probably get as much value from following a few specific critics as you would from following these prizes
I wonder how the reviewers feel when authors like Ursula K. Le Guin refuse awards
> it's just like 5 people doing most of it
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.
Aggregating preferences isn't easy. Are you sure you wouldn't get a book which is agreeable to almost anyone but not particularly exciting? This might work for e.g awards for the most important non fiction book, but for fiction, I'd rather try a book someone is excited about.
I've read for screenwriting contests and it is pretty much the same thing. During the first round of reading, they usually expect you to read a minimum number of pages (usually 20 pages). Only one person will read your script during the first round, so if it doesn't catch their attention you will be cut. During the subsequent rounds you are generally expected to read the whole thing, but most of the worst stuff has already been eliminated. In some contests you can see the coverage from previous judges and some you can't. It all depends.
Do you have any recommendations on which screenwriting contests are worth submitting to for a first-time historical fiction screenwriter? I've previously published a nonfiction book and am familiar with that side of things but am brand new to the screenwriting world and there are far more film festivals and competitions than I expected (and almost all seem to charge a submission fee)
Related read; a first hand account by one of the 2012 Pulitzer jury members giving a good account of the process and attempting to explain why no literature prize was awarded that year.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-...
Sorry, I laughed... :)
> 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
I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.
I briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy.
And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.
Amazing, until you got the "click of death"
Also had a lot less worries about a random bad sector turning up with USB.
It’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.
I'd guess she probably means USB flash storage devices.
Most certainly. I used to hear people call usb drives zip drives (and thumb drives) a lot ~2 decades ago. Truthfully, I didn't even know zip drives were their own thing until this comment chain. I just though it was an older term for usb drives.
I've heard "gumstick drives" or even just "gumsticks" in addition to USB/thumb. Never really heard zip though, since those are/were actually a thing.
Pretty sure they mean zip files, not drives.
> In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies.
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.
Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good.
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).
The Hugo awards have had a lot of weak winners in the past as well.
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 :)
Haha, Hominids! That was definitely one where I was left thinking "Oh that's it?" haha. Fair point fair point. I do think Harry Potter is like the Murderbot series. And to be clear, I really enjoyed Harry Potter when I was young. Can still recall getting the book at my maternal grandparents' place as a present.
Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years:
* 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 haven't yet read the last few ones because I found the Aztec ones underwhelming. The Calculating Stars to A Desolation Called Peace was when I started feeling they were not so strong and decided I'd go read prior years instead. But I suppose the vagaries of 'winner' vs. shortlist probably take this. It is true that all those others you're talking about are much stronger. I do think that The Ninefox Gambit, The Fifth Season, The Three Body Problem are all just as strong as the ones you've mentioned.
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.
I love both the Murderbot books and Piranesi. I think they're excellent for _very_ different reasons.
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.
Hmm, the inner voice didn't feel particularly novel and had a young-adult feel to me, but ah well. Quibbling now. Apparently just a matter of taste.
Young Adult is a marketing term. It's a really terrible idea to leave classification to marketers.
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.
Murderbot Diaries (the eight books) start in 2017[0], Murderbot series (TV) started in 2025[1]. Where are you getting 2021 from?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderbot_(TV_series)
Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?
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.
The Murderbot Diaries, you mean? Won best series
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
I was just referring to Network Effect in 2021 and looking at what other novels won in nearby years.
So.. what I said?
Agreed on Murderbot, it's a fun read but there's no big new ideas there and that's what Hugo used to be about.
That's exactly how I feel, but perhaps as others point out, I have simply tinted my glasses rose.
I think the most interesting point was that there are no (or very few) rules specific to each prize and that's it's mostly up to the idiosyncrasies of the unique small group of people who are part of the panel. So the prestige of a specific book prize is really superstition. It makes sense rationally, outside of having the same group of people judge the same book prize every year (and then they'd have to live forever?) there's no real way to keep consistent. And their tastes would I assume change from year to year. The other way would be to have a sort of constitution or set of rules, but that would be interpreted differently by each group.
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.
I think that proposed prize would be pretty “value-free.”
Seems to work close to how I think, would be interesting to know what people actually think instead of relying on what the author thinks people think
> 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?
When you are judging something you are judging the whole thing. If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. Even if the rest was decent the chance of it being the best overall is small.
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.
> you are judging the whole thing
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
This matches what was lampooned in Erasure(2001) by Percival Everett and adapted into the movie American Fiction.
Everything about the book publishing industry is antiquated.
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.
I love ebooks and audiobooks. But the fact that I can’t legally lend or sell them (same with steam btw) means that it’s at best a lateral step.
Lending or selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM. A large part of the community thinks having DRM is way worse than not being able to lend or sell.
And we mostly get neither. Some stores do offer drm free ebooks and audiobooks.
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)
Selling books doesn't require DRM at all. I buy DRM-free books all the time.
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.
> The real disruption of books haven't really happened.
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.
As an indie author (https://frequal.com/novels), this makes me glad I haven't submitted my novel yet to any of these contests. The chance that a submission fee could be wasted by chance (not a match for the reviewer's interest or mood that day) is just too great. It seems that the larger publishing houses are more willing to shell out on the chance to win this lottery, according to the article.
I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but this post comes across a little like you already assume you deserve to win such a prize and it’s just those fickle judges standing in your way.
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’m a very casual reader, nothing heavier than Murakami.
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)
> Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.
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.
This sounds similar to submissions for national science grants.
It sounds quite arbitrary and subjective, even if the judges believe they’re following a process.
I came away feeling like they acknowledged that throughout, save for the promotional bit at the end that I guess is there obligatorily
At least the judges read a lot. It could be worse…
Except for the prize committees outsourcing roughly the same sets of judges, they work a lot like how you’d expect. The judges pickup a bunch of books and choose the ones they like the most. Since the author makes it clear how subjective the process truly is, you can assume that personal biases play a huge part in how winners are chosen.
How could they not? There's no objective way to declare a book great (although there may be some objective ways of declaring a book bad).
Yes, as someone who has read the literature section of the (small) national newspaper with some regularity, this is pretty much all old news -- could glean most of this from reading for a year. You hear about the longlists and shortlists and panel of judges (after the winner(s) is chosen), and one would hope that at least the literary prizes are highly subjective.
What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not taking you seriously would be bad for their careers and reputations. Only 0.01% of people have that kind of access, though, and you don’t write your way to getting those agents and publicists—you’re either born into it or you’re not. The rest of us poor loser fuckers get tossed at the first bump, which could be a minor copy error like a missing comma.
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.
This all sounds informed and authoritative. And it’s believable. But can I ask how you came to these conclusions? Did you attempt this? Do you know authors getting 500k every two years?
The fact is that the supply of people wanting to write books greatly exceeds the demand of readers. It’s inevitable that most books barely get read by anyone. You either accept it or you find something else to do.
Not exactly. I have some voracious readers in my family, but none of them ever tried to publish themselves (despite, in my sister's case, winning an award for a novella written as schoolwork).
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.
I read the article.
Book Prizes Do Work How I Think.
It's just like, someone's opinion, man.
TL;DR: It's not fair. Just like every other competition. If you want to win, you ought to do not just better, but much better than others.
Right, one could make pretty much the same observations about how hiring / promotion decisions are made, how investment decisions are made, and probably any number of other things that people like to pretend are objective/scientific but are actually just a matter of opinion.
WHY are we capitalizing RANDOM words within MULTIPLE paragraphs?
For emphasis? That’s your takeaway?
They didn't.
I think she's missing the point here. First she says:
> 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-...
No, she's pointing out that when you have a dierse prize committee, you end up with more diverse results.
> 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.
Neither part of that quote mentions a quota for the longlists. Am I missing something?
Not strictly speaking a quota, but they do say that they do look over their shortlists for diversity (of some unspecified kind) and that they never had to adjust their lists because of it.
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.
It does not explicitly admit it, and seeing the quotes pulled separately make it harder to infer. But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win).
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.
> But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists
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.
>1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down.
There is room for LLMs to disrupt book judging by being able to read every single book.
I feel like LLMs are not quite equipped to answer "is this wonderful and delightful" yet.
You should meet literary agents.
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.
With comments like these I genuinely can't tell if it's a joke or not.
The book was rejected because it doesn't say "load-bearing" and "now here's the thing" enough.
[dead]
I think the last thing most authors would want is to have their book fed into an LLM, word for word, right when it's just come out.
I guess if you want the most average book to win
Good post which basically states the f*cking obvious about how any "prize" or "winner" of any subjective category works.