It’s a crazy debate.

This was a longlist, not a shortlist, let alone an actual award. All it means is that one person thought the piece worthy of note. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; I haven’t read it, and don’t especially intend to (and I believe it’s been taken down so I can’t now anyway), but I would bet that most readers would rate it as of higher quality than the worst stories on the Hugo or Nebula shortlists (let alone longlists). People make choices and sometimes other people disagree with them. There are many, many examples of stories and novels on the Hugo or Nebula long lists which are really bad; which fail to meet the criteria we would like to associate those awards with, in other words. Why should it be at all surprising that the Tiptree long list suffers from the same deficiency?

I don’t read fanfic myself but it is obviously a part of the genre and it is good to see, however grudgingly, the gatekeepers of the genre starting to acknowledge that.

Edited to add: OK, I’ve now read “Arcana”. It is slightly worse than the two Burstein stories on the Hugo short-list. It’s not that much worse (the Burstein stories also evoked my sub-editing instincts pretty forcefully). Its being unfinished should not really be an issue. To be honest I find Liz Henry’s defence largely convincing.