Tiptree Award 2003 longlist

[redbird]

The kerfuffle I mentioned in my previous post was sparked by a fanfic being long-listed for the award this year. One of the odder assertions was that putting a "bad" work (whatever that means--I haven't read it, so have no opinion on its quality) somehow will make people take the award less seriously, or respect it less. And I'm wondering how many of the following works people who are worrying about that have read, and whether they read any of them because they were long-listed:

• The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson


• The Braided World


• "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet"


• The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein


• "Walking Contradiction"


• "Under the Lunchbox Tree"


• "Bernardo's House"


• "Poor Man's Wife"


• Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton


• Fitcher's Brides, Gregory Frost


• The Kanshou


• Wraiths of Will and Pleasure, Storm Constantine


• All Over Creation, Ruth L. Ozeki


• "The Wild Girls," Pat Murphy, Witpunk


• "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine[...]" Ed Park, Trampoline


• Heredity, Jenny Davidson


• "Path of the Transgressor," Tom Purdom, Asimov's June 2003

Those are in no particular order, and half the author names are omitted because I'm tired, don't feel like digging out the ones that weren't in the email I was looking at and that I don't remember offhand, and don't want to postpone this post. A lot of my Tiptree reading material is not in easy view of my keyboard.

Note that this is a separate question from whether the story in question should have been long-listed: from what matt_ruff has posted, his jury's criteria/definition of the long-list differed from my year's. This is not a flaw in the award process: by policy, the Motherboard doesn't tell the jury how to do its job, except to the extent that they provide a deadline.

P.S. Yes, papersky, I'll do that panel.

Comments

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

oops, I guess I don't owe Sally Miller Gearhart an apology after all.

[redbird]

Well, this post has served a purpose, anyhow.

[goldcube.livejournal.com]

What on earth does 'long-listed' mean & why is it bad?

[redbird]

In the context of the Tiptree Award, and some other awards, it means "here are some more works that are of interest."

It's not bad, unless you're of the mindset that winning a silver medal is bad, rather than the one that says it's an honor to be nominated (though the Tiptree doesn't exactly have nominations--the jury doesn't select and publish a shortlist, then pick one or two of those as the winner).

The complaints about a specific piece of fanfic being long-listed seem to be of two categories: either people don't think it's good enough, or they're worried about too much attention being drawn to fanfic. On the latter, I think they're overestimating how much anyone outside the fannish and feminist sf communities notices the Tiptree longlist, or even the shortlist.

[jenett]

And whether they read any of them because they were long-listed

I am not fanatical about tracking down stuff, but I do make a point of reading the stuff I know is Tiptree listed (short or long) if I come across it or it's reasonably readily accessible.

(In other words, I don't generally ILL for it, I do request it if it's in the library system, I do sometimes pick up anthologies that I know contain a specific work, and I've been trying to remember to dig the stuff in SF&F out of our back archive at work without much success.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's in the lists at the back of the Tiptree First Anthology or whatever it's called, that's how I found out to my surprise that T&C was on it.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

My understanding was that the kerfluffle was more about the fact that the fanfic was a) unfinished, b) not very well-written, and c) not particularly original, even in the way that apparently the judge thought it was. Male characters trying to impregnate each other is not, I have been told, an unusual theme in fanfic.