The 2024 Hugo Awards announced at Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland and the Paris Olympics closing ceremony–both last night–reminded me of something that I wrote in 2008 about the circulation of cultural capital and the erosion of the science fiction genre via awards to writers who are not considered SF writers. I had taken issue with popular, mainstream works winning genre awards that could, I believe, go further to helping promote authors within the genre instead of sending the field’s cultural capital to genre interlopers. My question was should the metric of “best” be the only qualifier in an awards contest, or should there be some kind of policing by the field about what should be considered “best” when the circulation of cultural capital is considered.
