As I'm recalling, the people who buy memberships for the next Worldcon? or some con? are the ones who can nominate for the Hugo.
Yeah, I vaguely remember something like that as well, which bothers me. Because as past experience has already shown, cons are kind of self-selecting for a very specific, very elite subsection of fandom - namely the white, upper-middle class subsect that can afford a con and the time to go.
So there are a lot of fans, particularly fans of color, who are sorely underrepresented. Thus, the books they read and love are also sorely underrepresented in the awards.
Not to mention those of us who just plain ol' don't care about cons and couldn't afford to go and don't pay attention to who is supposed to be considered a "great" SF/F writer and just go ahead and read what we like.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 12:49 pm (UTC)Yeah, I vaguely remember something like that as well, which bothers me. Because as past experience has already shown, cons are kind of self-selecting for a very specific, very elite subsection of fandom - namely the white, upper-middle class subsect that can afford a con and the time to go.
So there are a lot of fans, particularly fans of color, who are sorely underrepresented. Thus, the books they read and love are also sorely underrepresented in the awards.
Not to mention those of us who just plain ol' don't care about cons and couldn't afford to go and don't pay attention to who is supposed to be considered a "great" SF/F writer and just go ahead and read what we like.