I don’t think I ever have filled in or voted for a Hugo Award – I’ve only ever been to three Worldcons in my entire life, and if I’ve read (or have an opinion on) even one nominee in each category, that’s unusual. Since I decline to vote for someone just because I’ve heard of them, I don’t.

I certainly never have been to a Hugo Award ceremony, not least because when I go to a convention, I’m not ever packing dress-up clothes – I’m definitely a jeans-and-tshirt kind of fan. I go to conventions to hang out with friends, have fun, go to panels (the specialised kind of “fun” that conventions provide) – I don’t go to sit in the audience and watch other people getting awards.

All in all, really, I’ve tended to regard the Hugo Awards as a big lump of nothing to do with me. They’re not an effective indicator of quality or a measure of whether or not I’ll like a book. They’re just that area of fandom’s way of patting itself on the back. Sometimes, from an outsider’s POV, those back-pats are merited (Sue Mason definitely deserves a Hugo by that standard, as well as deserving one for the quality/quantity of fan-related art she’s done for zines and cons for years now) and sometimes, again from an outsider’s POV, there seems to be no particular why-or-wherefore.

Years ago two friends of mine edited an anthology of “best UK fan writing”. It was published at the 1995 Worldcon. They ran into me not long after and asked me when I’d be buying a copy. “Never,” I said, “I’m not in it.”

I didn’t just mean that they hadn’t used anything I’d written: I meant that their “best UK fan writing” excluded as a group not worthy of consideration all the best fan writers I knew in the UK – the fan writers who were writing and writing about fanfiction, especially slash.

“We were covering all of UK fandom!” they said.

“You weren’t covering my area of it,” I said. “Just yours.”

“All of it!”

“Then where was Sebastian?” I asked. “Where was Eva Stuart?” I went on to list quite a number of fan writers whom I knew they wouldn’t even have considered – and most probably, indeed, hadn’t even heard of or read, but wouldn’t have considered if they had: just as they hadn’t considered my writing fit for inclusion.

“Well, we weren’t covering media fandom.”

“Then you shouldn’t claim you were covering UK fandom,” I said.

Obviously this is an idealized and tidied up memory of a conversation I had nearly 12 years ago, but I’ve had similiar conversations on the same line with other fans in that area of fandom: fans who Glottologgishly cannot see that, outside their walls of air and darkness, there are whole other realms of fandom carrying on with their fannishness and paying no attention to what they do.