Ditmar Award

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Award
Name: Ditmar Award
Date(s): 1969 - today
Frequency: annually
Format: Offline Award
Type: professional, semi-professional, and non-professional
Associated Community: Australian National Science Fiction Convention
Fandom: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
URL: Ditmar rules at sf.org.au (via Wayback, Mar 20/12)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.
Ditmar Trophy by Frames White (2018)

The Ditmar Award has been given out every year at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention since 1969. It is compared to the Hugo Award, only at a national, not international, level.

History

When the awards began in 1969, there were only four categories:

  • Best Australian Science Fiction of any length, or collection
  • Best International Science Fiction of any length, or collection
  • Best Contemporary Writer of Science Fiction
  • Best Australian Amateur Science Fiction Publication or Fanzine

The best "Best International" item remained in one form or another until 1986 - as an award for Best Contemporary Author that did not require nominees to be Australian which was presented in1969; an award for Best International Publication was that presented in 1970; and as the William Atheling Jr Award when it was introduced in 1976, which did not require nominees to be Australian, whereas it now does."Best International Fiction" appeared again in 1989, and since then the emphasis has been on Australian science-fiction, fantasy and horror works.

No awards were made at the 1974 Natcon (Ozcon in Melbourne), although it is unknown why exactly.

Prior to 2001/2002, there were no set rules or categories for the awards; it was left up to the Awards Sub-Committees of the individual convention committees hosting the NatCon that year to develop both on a year-by-year basis. This resulted in situations such as the Best Fannish Cat category, but also confusion and the perception that the sub-committee were able to manipulate the situation to their own benefit. In 1996, Greg Egan and a number of other prominent Australian sci-fi writers, raised the need for a more structured system in order to maintain the awards' reputation in the business and make things more fair. See Ditmar Award#2000 Rules Controversy for more details.

Name

The Ditmar Awards

The awards are named after Martin James Ditmar Jenssen, also known as Dick Jenssen, who wound up funding the awards accidentally: during the committee meeting to discuss the formation of the awards, things got bogged down when it came to naming them. The possibility of naming them after an individual was raised, with someone noting it could mean that individual could fund it. As a joke, Ditmar suggested they call them the Ditmar Awards, and he would fund them.

His offer was accepted by the committee, and he would up funding the awards for a lot longer than he'd thought he might.[1] As compensation, however, he did win twice - in 2002 he won Best Fan Artist and in 2010 for best Body of Work, Fan Artist[2].

William Atheling, Jr. Award

This award was first awarded at Bofcon, the 15th Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in August 1976. The Athelings (as the award is also known) was awarded for excellence in SF and speculative criticism. It is named after William Atheling, Jr. the pseudonym used by SF author James Blish for his critical writing. While officially the Athelings are still Special Awards, they are treated as part of the categories of the Ditmars.

Procedure

Similarly to the Hugo Awards the Ditmars are nominated by attendees at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention (the Australian equivalent of WorldCon) and ballots are then sent out to members for voting:

Award-eligible works and persons are first nominated by "natural persons active in fandom, or from full or supporting members of the national convention of the year of the award". Nominations are compiled into a ballot (currently by a sub-committee composed primarily of standing committee members elected at the National SF Convention business meeting) which is distributed to members of the convention, and the previous year's convention, for voting, which may continue into the period of the convention ("at-Con voting") at the discretion of the committee.

Ditmar Award - Process - Wikipedia

The process involves separate rounds for nominations and votes, as opposed to in the 1970s where it was one round with a points system. The rules and the categories themselves can be amended, removed or added to during the business meeting of the convention committee, which has led to situations like the Best Fannish Cat award of 1991. The current set of rules was ratified in 2001 after a controversy beginning in 1996 about the lack of formal rules, eligibility and withdrawal of works from nomination.

Trophy

1992 Ditmar Award, design by Lewis Morley

Like the rest of the awards before 2000, there was not a specific trophy from year-to-year. In the past, the trophy has been made from ornamental stone, cut glass and stuffed cane toads (see the Ditmar Award#Stuffed Cane Toads controversy). Since 2000, all winners are given an A4 certificate plus a standard trophy. While the Rules don't specify the actual form of the trophy, they did foreshadow that the "trophies shall be of a physical form that is constant from year to year. The design shall be in the proportions of 1:4:9 (the proportions of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and shall include a motif of the Southern Cross. Possibilities include the popular Lewis Morley design and the 2003 Ditmar Awards.[3]"

Categories

The current award categories are:

  • Best Novel
  • Best Novella or Novelette
  • Best Short Story
  • Best Collected Work
  • Best Artwork
  • Best Fan Writer
  • Best Fan Artist
  • Best Fan Publication in any Medium
  • William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review
  • Best New Talent

Winners

A full list of the Ditmar winners can be found via Wikipedia. The fan awards can be found at the following sub-page: Ditmar Award/Fan Winners

Controversies

Best Fannish Cat

1991

The 1991 Ditmar Awards also included a section of "Best Fannish Cat" due to a conflict between the serious/academic fans of Brisbane-based organising committee (Suncon) and the less-serious Melbourne fans. The Brisbane contingent felt the Ditmars were skewed towards Melbourne fans and held a vote for new award categories. The Melbourne contingent then took advantage of the vote to include an award for the best cat owned by fans and known to the fannish community[4]. Typo won the award.

2010

The cat-egory reappeared in 2010 at DudCon III, held in Melbourne, as a non-Ditmar Special Award of the Convention. The nominees were required to be “natural members of the species Felis Catus” alive and resident in Australia at the time of the nomination[5]. Peri Peri won the award.

Stuffed Cane Toads

Another controversy, again from the 1991 awards, was the use of stuffed and mounted cane toads as trophies for the Ditmars awarded that year. It was intended as a joke (again by a member of the Melbourne contingent, Mark Loney), but when the actual trophies weren't ready in time for the ceremony the cane toads were the only prizes available. Again, the serious fans were unimpressed, even though the actual trophies were handed out at a later meeting of the Nova Mob.[6]

2000 Rules Controversy

1996 Open Letters

In 1996, author Greg Egan wrote an Open Letter in Australian sci-fi fanzine,Thyme (Issue 108, p 3)[7] regarding a controversy surrounding the eligibility of his book, Distress for nomination. It had been published in the U.K. in 1995, but was due for publishing in Australia in March/April of 1996 - if the UK date was accepted, there were few copies in Australia available for voters to make a choice; if the Australian publishing date was accepted, it was a year too early to be considered. Egan had his own personal opinion on the matter and on the Ditmar rules in general, but didn't feel comfortable stating those opinions as long as he was a candidate for the award - he asked in his letter for his works not to be nominated or voted for in subsequent Ditmar awards indefinitely.

Accompanying this letter was another Open Letter proposing Ditmar Award rule changes which signed by Damien Broderick, Greg Egan, Stephen Dedman, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, Lucy Sussex, and Sean Williams. They were requesting that "a consistent set of guidelines be applied to the awards from year to year" in order to avoid controversy.

(11 March) We, the undersigned, believe that the standing of the Ditmar Awards would benefit greatly from a consistent set of guidelines to be applied to the awards from year to year. Although there are advantages in the flexibility of allowing each year's National Convention organisers to choose the categories and rules for the awards as they see fit, this has often led to a degree of controversy and uncertainty which threatens to undermine the value and credibility of the awards. As a starting point for discussion, we have drafted a possible set of guidelines for the two categories of Ditmar which have been awarded to fiction in recent years. We believe the guidelines below are simple and fair, but we would very much welcome any constructive suggestions for improvement. We would prefer that any suggestions and comments be published in Thyme, to allow the widest possible debate.


We would also very much welcome a discussion as to whether there is any merit in amending the Constitution for the National Convention in order to create "official" guidelines, or whether it would be preferable simply to adopt as a de facto standard whatever guidelines succeed in attracting the widespread support of the fannish community.

 [8]

The suggested guidelines were the following:

  1. Two Ditmar awards for achievement in fiction; any written work of science fiction/fantasy by an Australian citizen or permanent resident would be eligible, regardless of where the word was published. Best Short Fiction would be under 40,000 words, Best Long Fiction would be equal to or more than 40,000 words;
  2. Works of fiction would be eligible for nomination at the end of the calendar year they were published in. However, the author/editor would be able to request in writing to postpone the year of eligibility until the following year on the grounds it has not been adequately available in Australia.;
  3. The Awards Sub-Committee to publish an official nominations form making clear which works would and would not be eligible for nomination that year, including postponement requests and, if the request was refused by the Sub-Committee, the reasons for that veto;
  4. In no case would a work of fiction be eligible for more than one ballot.

Reactions and Discussion of the Ditmars

The response to the suggestions in Issue 108 were mixed. Terry Frost in his Frostbytes column in Issue 109 was scathing in his review of the award and its processes[9] and in particular the Festival of the Imagination 1996 Sub-Committee responsible for running it that year:

Fact Number One: The Ditmar Awards belong to fandom.

They don't belong to the convention that gives them out or the awards subcommittees who want to impress us with their individuality by making the categories a little too baroque to be taken seriously or even [to] winners emeritus like me...
...Fact Number Two: Having Ditmar voting at NatCon encourages dishonest results...
...I'm not saying that any given work or person isn't worth a cup full of Ebola virus, just that there are those among us who, when their egos get a few hunger pangs, forget where they left their integrity and dignity, then go out there to hustle for votes. Vote for me! Vote for me! Here, have my fanzine and vote for me!...
...In the professional categories, this kind of behaviour is justified by blustery pronouncements that "Having a story with a Ditmar looks good on a CV. It can sometimes make a difference between being published and not being published."...
...What I'm suggesting is that there be at least a three month window of opportunity for voting for the awards,. Not nominations, voting. Let's get some discussion going on relative merit. Let's lean books or stories to our friends if we like them and think these works should win... If you think a fan writer or a zine or an illustrator deserves a gong, show their work around and give them some positive feedback too...

...The Ditmar SubCommittee this year has about as much credibility as John Howard sympathising with an unemployed dope-smoking gay teenager. The nomination forms I did see didn't even have a mailing address attached to them. You people have done a big disservice to fandom and you automatically win my 1996 Dubious Achievements in Australian Science Fiction Award. The turd is in the mail.

 [10]

Greg Egan responded in Issue 110 to acknowledge a point made by Sue Bursztynski in the LOC column of Issue 109 (that the 40,000 word count would push young adult books into the same category as short stories)[11] with a suggestion that Long Fiction include novels and serialised novels, anthologies and single-author collections and that Short Fiction should only be individual stories. He also added these clarification:

Perhaps I should make clear a few things that might not have come across with the original proposal. Firstly this is not about a change of rules. There are no existing rules to be changed. At present, each NatCon Awards SubCommittee creates their own Ditmar rules from scratch each year. So the proposal is that a fixed set of rules be adopted, either by amending the constitution, or as a de facto standard.


Secondly, as a group of writers we confined ourselves to suggestions on the Fiction Dtitmars. This was not meant to imply that the other categories wouldn't benefit as much from a consistent set of rules, and personally I think it would be great if a group of artists, a group of fanzine publishers and a group of critics each got together and thrashed out some proposals for the relevant categories. I'm not suggesting that writers alone should decide the rules for the Fiction Ditmars, or artists for the Artwork Ditmars, etc., but it seems as good a way as any to come up with a starting point for debate among fandom as a whole.

 [12]

2000 Rule Revisions

The Ditmar nominations were announced in March 2000, with the following categories:

  • Best Written Work
  • Best Written Work (Unpaid or Fan)
  • Best Professional Production in Any Medium
  • Best Non-Professional Production in Any Medium
  • Best Artwork (Professional)
  • Best Artwork (Unpaid or Fan)
  • William Atheling Award for Criticism or Review

The announcement was quickly followed by a number of withdrawals by nominees and a decision by the Swancon 2000 awards sub-committee to postpone the awards and withdraw the previously-received nominations. Committee member Grant Watson posted the following email:

"It is with great regret that I announce that the committee of Swancon 2000 have postponed this year's Ditmar Awards. Numerous conditions and complaints have made it impossible for this year's awards to continue in any acceptable fashion and we have therefore elected to declare the current nominations null and void, and recommend that they be re-nominated and voted upon later in the year. This is not a decision that was taken lightly, and our heartfelt apologies go out to all nominees and fans who are affected, disappointed or upset by this action.

If you have any questions or comments relating to this decision, please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected] or to the Swancon 25 committee at [email protected]

The above statement is our official one, but I would like to express my own personal regret over this action. I am very aware that there are many people who will find this decision completely unacceptable, but considering every factor we have found no option other than to cancel the Ditmars - for now, at least. I apologise sincerely to all nominees - please do not hesitate to e-mail me if you wish to speak to me about it. I suggest that a new date and schedule for this year's awards be assembled at the Natcon AGM during Swancon 2000, along with the preparation of some more specific rules and guidelines. The Swancon 2000 committee is quite happy to co-ordinate these awards if desired, and are equally happy to give the responsibility over to any other person or persons nominated at the AGM."

 [13]

Between April 18 and May 31, the Natcon annual general meeting was held at Swancon 2000 and a set of rules for the Ditmars were established[14]. Then in September, nominations were reopened with expanded categories; with the below announcement:

Swancon 2000 is proud to announce the re-opening of nominations for this year's Australian Science Fiction Achievement Awards, otherwise known as the Ditmar Awards.

The original nominations, published earlier this year, have been officially declared null and void. As such any works previously nominated for this year's Ditmars must be re-nominated in order for them to be considered.

Following the original, aborted, Ditmar Awards, a new set of rules for the awards were agreed upon by the Business Meeting of the Australian National Science Fiction Convention, Swancon 2000. While these rules do not officially come into effect until 2001, the awards subcommittee of Swancon 2000, Ditmar 2000 have elected to follow them in the interim. It should be noted, however that Ditmar 2000 will not be accepting nominations in four of the new categories this year (being the Special Award, Best Professional Achievement, Best Fan Achievement and Best New Talent) on the recommendation of the Business Meeting of the National Convention.

The categories are:

Best Novel Best Novella or Novelette Best Short Story Best Collected Work Best Artwork Best Fan Writer Best Fan Artist Best Fan Production

Only works published in calender year 1999 are eligable for nomination.

 [15]

Winners were announced in late 2000 with most of the physical trophies handed out during Swancon 2001.

In the second set of voting, Greg Egan's book Teranesia won for Best Novel, and Egan declined the award, in accordance with his desire to permanently withdraw his works from Ditmar consideration. It had been determined that under the rules an author could refuse an award, but not a nomination.

Links and Resources

Wikipedia

Others

Notes

References

  1. ^ Ditmar Awards - History - Fancyclopedia 3
  2. ^ Dick Jenssen - Fancyclopedia 3
  3. ^ Ditmar Rules - Australian SF Information - Wayback May 20/12
  4. ^ Best Fannish Cat - File 770 - by Mike Glyer, Mar 13/19
  5. ^ Ditmar Awards - Ditmar Award for Best Fannish Cat - Fancyclopidea 3
  6. ^ Ditmar Awards - Stuffed Cane Toads - Fancyclopedia 3
  7. ^ "An Open Letter to Australian Literary Fandom", Thyme, Issue 108, 1996
  8. ^ "We the Undersigned..." Thyme Issue 108, p3, 1996
  9. ^ "Frostbytes by Terry Frost", Number 3 of 1996; Thyme Issue 109, p18
  10. ^ "Frostbytes by Terry Frost. Number Three of 1996 - Thyme, Issue 109, p18, 1996
  11. ^ "Thyme LOCs" Thyme Issue 9, page 20
  12. ^ "Thyme LoCs", page 18, Thyme Issue 110, 1996
  13. ^ Aust SF Bullsheet 141(long) [email protected], Apr 18/00
  14. ^ A SF Bullsheet 144(gross - and long), aus.sf@googlegroups, May 31/2000
  15. ^ Ditmar 2000, [email protected], Sep 14/00
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