post cathedra prouncement

[calimac]

John Hertz in Vanamonde 774 (March 25, 2008, just a smidgen of a time ago) wrote,

Apollo 13 (R. Howard dir. 1995), nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation, was problematic because, although it was Space travel, it wasn't fiction.

To this I decided I should reply, thus. Perhaps in another year I shall learn how John abbreviates it.

*

Whether the film Apollo 13 was eligible for a Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation is more problematic than you imply. You state that "it wasn't fiction," but in fact it contained dialogue, episodes, and entire subplots (the hostility between Haise and Swigert and its resolution) that were frankly invented for dramatic purposes. As with many other films based on historical events, it occupies a space on the fact-to-fiction continuum rarely seen in print. Though the film is based on a memoir by Lovell that contains reconstructed as well as transcribed dialogue, had Lovell's memoir contained as much invention as the script did, publishers might have been uneasy to classify it as non-fiction, and if written as a narrative by other persons – as the film script in fact was – it would, I think, have to have been considered an unusually strictly fact-based historical novel.

In fact I would say that almost every acted film (as opposed to a documentary), no matter how historically veracious, can in practice be considered fiction by these standards. The only exception I can think of was a television program consisting of actors - if indeed they were professional actors and not simply readers - reading aloud verbatim the released transcripts of the Watergate tapes, in an attempt to restore the unavailable tapes to sound form for public edification. Lacking even stage directions, it contained no literary or dramatic invention by the filmmakers whatever. (And no artistic merit either.)

Once Apollo 13 is considered fiction, whether it is therefore science fiction is another question. Not all fiction concerning technology is science fiction. But my opinion is that anything which would have been unquestionably science fiction, if written as a story at an earlier date well within the memory of many persons living at the time of the film, qualifies as SF by the spirit of a field one of whose leading magazines once bore the slogan, "Extravagant Fiction Today, Cold Fact Tomorrow."

But both of these questions have enough subtleties and subjective points that, as the Hugo Administrator responsible for either letting Apollo 13 on the ballot or forbidding it, I decided it was not my place to speak ex cathedra on this subject, but to decide by letting the voters decide. By the nature of things it was necessary to make this decision in public before the nominating period opened, simply to allow voters to know whether they'd be wasting one of their limited nominating slots by entering it. One or two people were very upset by what they read as an implied endorsement of the film for a Hugo by the administrator, but they forgot that the voters still had to nominate it. I could not do so myself, even had I expressed a positive opinion of its merits – although my opinion was, and is, very positive.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

John doesn't have internet access, so how will he read this?

[(Anonymous)]

The is the movie that led to a re-wording of the elegibility requirement in BDP Hugo category.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Which John mentions, but which I had little or nothing to do with, so I didn't discuss it here.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

By means of a remarkable invention known as the U.S. Mail. What, you don't think I wrote this as a letter and then cut-and-pasted it into LJ?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And I had a variation of this discussion last night at BASFA, where I pointed out that every time in the past twenty-plus years that a Hugo Award Administrator has made a judgment call about a work (as opposed to a technical one like length or publication date), the Business Meeting has turned around and passed rule changes that amount to overturning the administrator's precedent. That seems like a very clear statement of legislative intent that it is not the administrator's position to make any decisions about whether a work belongs in a given category other than for narrow technical reasons, including publication date (and sometimes place) and the work's length where applicable. The person to whom I was telling this found this unsatisfying. I said, "It's because the Hugo Awards are a juried award -- it's just that there are about six thousand people on the jury" and "nobody trusts anyone other than themselves to make qualitative judgments about a work."

You did the right thing. If the voters decided the work was sufficiently related to the field to nominate it, then it's eligible. Vox Populi, Vox Dei

[ckd]

Given the winner of the 1970 BDP Hugo, I think there's solid precedent; that wasn't even lightly fictionalized!