Hugo Awards 2014: A bit more detail

[nwhyte]

Details here.

Headlines:

• Sarah Webb crushes all opposition for Best Fan Artist.
• Closest result among winners is 16-vote margin putting Apex Magazine ahead of Strange Horizons for Best Semiprozine.
• Other close results:
  • John Picacio and John Harris tie for 3rd place in Best Professional Artist;
  • Coode Street Podcast takes 2nd place for Best Fancast by 1

Comments

[newandrewhickey]

It's nice to see that the awards all went to people who don't go around publicly saying that women should have acid thrown in their faces... and also that in the supermajority of cases the award went to good work. Not always the stuff I gave my first preference to, but something worthy of winning -- which was not a foregone conclusion given the nominations...

[alitheapipkin]

Oh, is *that* what the Vox Day stuff was about. I was just debating whether I dare google it considering it's a sunny morning and I'd quite like to stay in a good mood for more than 5 minutes. How delightful :(

[newandrewhickey]

That's not all of it, but one of the many revolting things he's said. The man's a vicious racist, homophobic, misogynist, "Dark Enlightenment" troll. Basically, think of any opinion held by decent, civilised, human beings, and he's espoused the opposite, either seriously or just to get attention. And unlike, say, Dave Sim, he has neither the excuse of mental illness nor the mitigating factor of actual talent -- he's a tenth-rate writer, as well as a tenth-rate human being, and managing to come sixth out of five nominees is probably still going to be the highlight of his "professional" career. He's not worth thinking about.

[kaberett]

(I have multiple mental illnesses that have significant impact on my day-to-day life; I still manage not to be a bigot [beyond the extent to which I am immensely privileged along several axes plus internalised -isms, etc]. I am really unconvinced that mental illness is an excuse for being vile.)

Nicholas, thank you (1) for number-crunching and (2) for panel moderation :-)

[newandrewhickey]

Sorry, I phrased that badly, and didn't want to give the impression that mental illness is either a cause or an excuse for being a horrible person. In the case of the person I was talking about -- in an aside I probably shouldn't have made, because it really wasn't germane to my main point, and I don't know why I brought it up looking back -- I was talking about someone who has repellent beliefs as a direct result of the symptoms of his illness. But yes, that is exceptionally rare, not at all typical of people with mental illnesses, and not something I should have even brought up. Reading the comment back, I honestly don't know what I was thinking...

[naath]

I was actually enormously surprised when I read it that OVA was actually *not* a piece of vile trolling in story form. But it was also really shit (it's bland, and boring, and pointless). I think it says something perhaps a bit sad that that was apparently the best Correia could dredge up for the category.

[newandrewhickey]

I don't imagine for a second that it *was* the best he could find -- I think it was nominated as a deliberate "fuck you", and a way to make sure the slate was controversial, so that when it failed to win anything it would be because of those hysterical liberals. Nominating anything by anyone else, no matter how much better, wouldn't have had the desired effect.