God, I wish I didn’t find this stuff so fascinating.

My last post way back in January went something like this: “hey, you know, I had a couple stories published last year, how’s about y’all nominate them jokers for an award”.

Obviously no one did so, because no one cared. I didn’t care enough to nominate anybody for anything, either.

Flash forward to April, when the 2014 Hugo nominees are announced. Kerfuffle ensues. Rampant point-missing and reading-comprehension fails overtake various comments sections across the internet (but then, what else is new).

For various reasons that I won’t go into here, I won’t go into the subject of this year’s awards.

I would, however, like to go ahead and make some recommendations for next year’s awards. (And for anyone reading this who might be suffering from the aforementioned issues of point-missing and reading-comp fails, I should probably spell out that no, this is not a ‘voting slate’.)

To wit, my nominations for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Related Work are:

“A Detailed Explanation” by Matthew David Surridge in Black Gate

http://blog.sadpuppies.org/ by ‘Noah Ward’ (get it…? eh…?)

Granted, the second of these is a piss-take that flirts dangerously with Poe’s Law (i.e., that “without a clear indicator of an author’s intention, it is often impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of such extremism”).

The first, however, is a thorough and well-reasoned dissection of ideology and notions of literary quality in ‘genre’ fiction, awards, and popularity in general. Indeed, the most thorough and well-reasoned piece of writing you’re likely to see on those topics this year, methinks.

I will now returned to my regularly scheduled rubbernecking. This trainwreck isn’t going to gawk at itself, you know. Or is it.