After reading a couple of recent Livejournal threads (here and here), I find myself wondering: do we need some new Hugo Awards?
How about anti-Hugos, to abolish misgiven prizes? Could be named for Clifton & Riley. (The Clifley? The Rifton?)
Alternative Hugos from a parallel universe where something else won? (The Para-gos.)
Awards openly purchased to advertise someone’s backlist. (The Pay-gos.)
Awards given by oneself to one’s own best work in a given year. (The Yugos.)
Awards given to the best works of science fiction actually hacked out of wood by an axe. (The Hew-gos.)
And for sword and sorcery…
The Mighty-Thew-Gos…
Great! And the prize could be in the form of a silver thew. And then maybe I’d figure out exactly what a thew is (but maybe that’s one of those things I don’t want to know…)
P.S. I haven’t forgotten about that Latin–I’ve just been swamped at work. But now I’m on break so, if it’s still useful to you, I’ll get back on rendering it into English.
Wooo!
We’d name the cut after you, but alas the terminolgy fosilized some time in the 1200s.
That’s okay–I’ll work it into a story and pretend Morlock invented it.
He’d have had to teach it to…
Meister Liechtenauer
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Liechtenauer)
Don’t forget the awards for books which are too large to be published in one volume and must be split in half…the Two-goes.
Excellent. This’ll be a popular category–maybe too popular.
How about an annual “Seabury Quinn” award for the author who best drops a major nude/kink/sex scene irrelevently into a story, purely for purposes of cover art, or just to liven up a dull piece of exposition. (Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind being major modern stylists of this type.)
Right–the sort of scene where the groans come from the writer’s desperation or the reader’s disbelief. The worst thing in this category that I ever read was a sexposition scene (is that a great neologism, or what?) from Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction. There the cold-blooded hero is briefed by his improbably nubile contact even as he simultaneously debriefs her, if you know what I mean. When I was eleven or twelve I just read past the scene without paying much attention to it; when I reread the book last summer this part stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t tell whether it was inept exploitation or self-parody or one masquerading as the other. Now there’s something worthy of a lifetime achievement award…