Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each year.
Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.
Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work area.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.
Andy Weir - The Martian. Possibly the most well researched science fiction book I've ever read. Well worth reading even if you've seen the movie, since that leaves out about half the things that go wrong and the large majority of the technical details.
Andy Weir - Artemis. Weir managed to figure out a way for a city on the moon to make economic sense, while physics makes it almost impossible.
Neal Stephenson - Seveneves. First sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." What follows is the brutally, unforgivingly hard consequences.
Oh man. So many.
Anything by Brandon Sanderson. Most of his stuff takes place in the same fantasy universe, and some of the series are starting to cross over. Stormlight Archives is the crown jewel. Edit: each series takes place on a different planet in the universe with a separate (well thought out) magic system. Different books in different series start to reveal the why's and how's and how it is all linked.
Enjoying the Expanse series right now by James Corey, sci-fi with us living on Mars and in the belt, when a dangerous alien self-replicating molecule shows up.
If science fiction is your thing, I can't recommend higher the Hyperion series.
Freedom and Deamon by Daniel Suarez were really fun, a muder mystery where the murderer is dead and uses an advanced AI to do his dealings.
The Martian was fun, if a little shorter than I typically like. Better than the movie, as nearly always.
I could go on. Gaah! So fun!
Edit: usually not a history person, but also really enjoyed The Right Stuff read by Dennis Quaid. The start of the space program.
Hacker Cinema
5 comments on Hacker News
Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each year.
Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.
Can't say I agree? There's tons of self-published novels that likely never would have made it to publication.
Just to give some examples...
The Martian - Andy Weir
Wool (Silo TV series based on this) - Hugh Howey
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers
Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work area.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.
Andy Weir - The Martian. Possibly the most well researched science fiction book I've ever read. Well worth reading even if you've seen the movie, since that leaves out about half the things that go wrong and the large majority of the technical details.
Andy Weir - Artemis. Weir managed to figure out a way for a city on the moon to make economic sense, while physics makes it almost impossible.
Neal Stephenson - Seveneves. First sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." What follows is the brutally, unforgivingly hard consequences.
Oh man. So many. Anything by Brandon Sanderson. Most of his stuff takes place in the same fantasy universe, and some of the series are starting to cross over. Stormlight Archives is the crown jewel. Edit: each series takes place on a different planet in the universe with a separate (well thought out) magic system. Different books in different series start to reveal the why's and how's and how it is all linked.
Enjoying the Expanse series right now by James Corey, sci-fi with us living on Mars and in the belt, when a dangerous alien self-replicating molecule shows up.
If science fiction is your thing, I can't recommend higher the Hyperion series.
Freedom and Deamon by Daniel Suarez were really fun, a muder mystery where the murderer is dead and uses an advanced AI to do his dealings.
The Martian was fun, if a little shorter than I typically like. Better than the movie, as nearly always.
I could go on. Gaah! So fun!
Edit: usually not a history person, but also really enjoyed The Right Stuff read by Dennis Quaid. The start of the space program.