Giving Awards to Everything

I see from Locus Online that the rest of the categories of winners of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were recently announced. On the one hand, diversity is nice, and I don't want to be telling any group or organization how to run their awards.

But...and you knew a "but" was coming...both the Best Short Fiction and Best Other Work categories have a three-way tie for the "winner," which is really much too much. On top of that, each category has a quite long "short list" of other nominees (eight in one case, thirteen in the other).

Again, it's not for me to tell them what to do with their awards, but -- no one is going to take seriously an award that goes to three things, and gives an honorable mention to more than a dozen others. It's spreading what little prestige they might have too far, until it's meaningless.

(But I'm a bit torn, since one of the many winners is David Gerrold's story "In the Quake Zone," from Mike Resnick's anthology Down These Dark Spaceways -- which my old boss Ellen Asher acquired and published back at the old place. So that's kind of like seeing a child -- OK, a stepchild -- grow up and make good.)

Perhaps the thing to do might be to create a "Gaylactic Recommended" reading list each year, of stories that they think are really excellent and promote diversity. That would allow them to put out a long list that doesn't look like a mistake. But an award should go to one thing -- or, in rare cases, two -- not to a laundry list. Any award that wants to be taken seriously needs to keeps its final lists tight -- I'd say no more than six, maybe seven nominees, and one winner.

We don't live in Lake Wobegon, and saying that we're all equally tall, handsome, and smart does no one any good.

Also? As long as I'm already complaining? The "Other Work" category includes a poem, an entire series of one TV show, two episodes of another TV show, yet a third TV show in its entirety, several movies, both American and Japanese flavors of comics, and some anthologies. That's not a category; it's a random list of stuff.

The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards could have the importance in the genre of the Tiptrees, and help to focus debate and thoughts about the genre the way the Tiptrees have. But that will only be if they first focus themselves.