Get Ready For The Kitschies

This year marks the third year of The Kitschies. After two years of paddling around in the shallows, we’ve taken the plunge into deeper waters. For 2011, we’ve added more judges, more categories, cash prizes and a (squiddy) sponsor in The Kraken Rum. We’re proud of the splash we’ve made, but, apart from the fun of it all, why?

Ranking things is the human condition. Desert island discs, favorite meals, and, of course, best books. There are at least seven active “Which is the best…” threads on the forums right now. When it comes to science fiction and fantasy books, there’s no shortage of “official” bests as well: Hugo, Nebula, Locus, David Gemmell Legend Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, SFX Award, BFA and BSFA Awards… This adds up to a lot of “best books”. Doesn’t it get crowded at the top?

The truth is, you can’t have too many good books. And as long as an award gets a reader to pick one up, it has impact – and therefore meaning. And being the newest and squiddiest kid on the block gives us an opportunity to study all the other awards and come up with, what we think, is the most effective model. That’s not to say that our best is the best best, but that there’s always room for one more.

By far, we thought the most important priority for The Kitschies was having clear criteria. As we all know, any pub (or forum!) argument about the best anything will always involve scrutiny of the criteria. Everyone means something different by the word. Most popular? Most sales? Most enjoyable? Most re-readable?! What does “best” even mean?

In our case, we chose a combination of three distinct factors. The Kitschies are awarded to novels that are intelligent, entertaining and progressive. The “and” is important, as we want the prize to go to a book that combines all three. We still bandy about the word “best” a lot, but we try to make sure that our criteria are emblazoned everywhere. In our case, the “Best Novel” is the “Novel that Best Exemplifies These Three Traits in Combination” (and “Best” is better than “NTBETTTIC”).

The tricky thing is, the argument over definitions doesn’t stop with “best”. The more people you have evaluating anything by any criteria, the more discussion you get over what those criteria mean. That’s one big reason we choose the prizes by means of a judging panel. Opening something to a popular vote would result in ten thousand individual interpretations of “progressive” or “intelligent”. Worse yet, there’d be no guarantee of anyone paying attention to the criteria at all. With a small panel, we know that everyone is taking it seriously. We all – Lauren Beukes, Rebecca Levene, Anne Perry and I – have our (strong) opinions but with only four of us, it is easy to keep the debate productive.

The other advantage of a panel is that it is more egalitarian for the books. This way, all the submissions can be treated equally; that is, read and reviewed by the same number of people. With a popular vote, we lose this guarantee, as well. The prize would invariably gravitate towards those books which the most people have read. The best-selling books already get to be best-selling. They shouldn’t have a head start for critical prizes, too.

On the other hand, the argument over criteria that we didn’t want to wade into was science fiction versus fantasy. We’re not sure anyone really knows the difference. Certainly we don’t, and we had nightmare visions of late nights spent arguing whether a book was orc-y enough or if it needz moar lazerz. The Kitschies are open to everyone – science fiction, fantasy, horror, whatever. Our official phrasing is “a novel that contains elements of the speculative or fantastic” which is deliberately generous and deliberately woolly.

An advantage of the broad definition is that we’re seeing submissions from all sorts of publishers. This helps us fulfilling our not-so-secret mission of bridging the genre/literature divide. Our shortlist has always been eclectic. This stems back to our first year, 2009, when we had finalists like The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a beautiful book that is never shelved as “SF”. But then, our winner that year, China Miéville’s The City and The City, is something that could be classified a dozen ways. So why classify at all?

Having our criteria nailed down is great, but we don’t want the process to be completely self-absorbed.

For the past two years, each of the shortlisted books has been reviewed by one of the judges online. This is done to invite feedback and comment, and invariably leads to great discussion. We learn a lot from these and hopefully, so do the readers. This year, we’ll be going a step further and taking part in a series of podcasts and feature articles that will go even further into the process. How can a book be progressive without being wanky? Can something be universally entertaining? Is it important that books be “intelligent”? How do you evaluate a book in a series? How much speculation does a speculative book need to speculate before it counts as science fiction? (Take that, woodchucks.)

As mentioned above, we’ve got our answers (well, mostly), but there’re not the right ones – they’re just the ones we use for us. If everyone thinks more about these issues, we become more thoughtful readers and, as a result, start demanding better books. Plus, and perhaps most importantly, debating this sort of stuff is really fun. Have a look at the forums – these are the discussions we all clearly enjoy.

This is a great time for science fiction and fantasy, but that doesn’t mean we should rest on our laurels. As readers we should think about what we think makes the best science fiction and fantasy, seek it out and then applaud it when we find it. That’s why you can’t have too many awards. It isn’t just about celebrating the books we enjoy, it is about looking for those books we haven’t enjoyed yet – and making sure there are always more of them on the horizon.

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