grumpyIn any event, for someone who insists that the Hugo Awards are completely and utterly irrelevant, he sure spends a lot of words and effort on them.
Again to his credit, he says somewhere down these comments that we need a New Award. I told him, honestly and earnestly, how much I hope he goes out and creates the Real Awards. But I don't think he will, and in fact, I don't think any of them will. Or at least, I don't think they'll be able to create a viable award that actually gets anyone paying attention to it. That's because in the end, I think the people enthusiastically claiming that Hugo Is Dead because Their Guy Lost will fall into a bunch of bickering over the results of the Real Award. After all, when you have a bunch of people who are convinced that they are all Rugged Individualists and that each one of them is the One True Human Being, how can you possibly resolve a disagreement among them equitably?
Besides, creating a new Award would require quite a bit of work, and honestly, I don't think these would-be Competent Men are actually all that competent. They want someone else to do all of the work, but they want to give all of the orders and take all of the credit. Ironically, their Official Literary God, the sainted Robert Heinlein, described them quite well in one of his stories: "Coventry." I doubt any of them are sufficiently self-aware to realize that many of them map quite well onto the story's lead character, though.
