Second paragraph of third chapter:Part 1 of our Debarkle saga is estories [sic] about the past. Most of them take place this century but some of the precursors to the events in our saga take place in the Twentieth Century. I can’t hope to do justice to the full breadth of science fiction’s history but I will be looking at selected events from that ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: My music studies were a big excuse for my being homeschooled, so I would theoretically have more time to practice and become a world-renowned soloist, traveling around the world in a red velvet coach. Unfortunately, I didn’t take it seriously enough to earn the coach, and my parents didn’t force me to try. Which I ( Read more... )

As someone once said, it's always hard to make predictions, especially about the future. This year I tracked several possible indicators of who might win this year's Hugos - the Goodreads/LibraryThing statistics, the views of bloggers, and the instincts of two commentators (one of them me).

Goodreads/LibraryThing statisticsThis turned out to be ( Read more... )

Several significant changes to the Hugo rules were ratified by this year's WSFS meeting. Although discussion has tended to focus on the new tallying system dubbed EPH (short for E Pluribus Hugo) by its creators, two of the other amendments can also be retrospectively applied to past voting results - specifically, that there will now be (at least) ( Read more... )

I normally like to do these posts on the night, but circumstances prevented me this year. Next year will likely be a different matter...

Results are listed here, full details here; and analysis of the effect EPH would have had on the ballot (absent any other changes) here.

Headlines:

• All four written fiction categories went to women who had never ( Read more... )

Have you recovered from Worldcon? Good. I was travelling all weekend, and then back at work last week, so even if the statistics had been out earlier I couldn't have easily processed them. This is the first of three posts about what I take from the figures, in this case concentrating on the 1941 Retro Hugos. Official results are here, full stats ( Read more... )

I really loved the style adopted by Kyra when making her predictions this time last year. Based on a little more than gut instinct (ie reading every public blog post that I could find by anyone which mentioned the Hugo in the last couple of months), I am copying her example and making my predictions for this year's Hugos, in the order that the ( Read more... )

An update to my previous post, surveying the 2016 Hugo votes in viction categories published by bloggers. I think that one of the categories has a very clear winner. It's also clear that there is a serious Rabid Puppy attempt to generate a block vote, with two other bloggers (and who knows how many others) following the lead set by Vox Day (whose ( Read more... )

I picked up a tweet from a Puppy supporter the other day complaining that there is a media blackout of the Hugo Awards this year "because they can't smear Chuck Tingle like they did Brad Torgersen". Of course, to those who had not heard of the Hugos before last year, it seems odd that there is less coverage this year; in fact things are pretty much ( Read more... )

In 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2011 I carried out a survey of how bloggers were declaring their Hugo votes in the written fiction categories. This has got a bit more accurate over time - in 2011, I didn't spot any of the winners in advance; in 2013, I didn't find a single blogger voting for the Best Novel winner (Redshirts); in the last two years, I had ( Read more... )