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... )

MidAmeriCon II, this year's WorldCon now in full swing in Kansas City, has published a retrospective count of the Hugo nominations of the last two years as they would have been if the proposed new EPH system had been implemented. This is to an extent a counterfactual exercise - particularly for last year, when a number of finalists withdrew ( Read more... )

This is just to correct one of the many talking points floating around the Hugo nominations. There is a conspiracy theory that Loncon 3 informed the Guardian ahead of time that Larry Correia's Warbound had been nominated for the 2014 Hugo for Best Novel, and as part of the evil conspiracy between Worldcon and the liberal press, the Guardian then ( Read more... )

Paul Cornell, God bless him, was introducing me to passers-by at Worldcon as the guy who predicts the Hugo winners. I retaliated by accusing him of writing fiction, of course. I don't actually claim to do any more than analyse the statistics already available to us, and those statistics are few and misleading ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

Summary of results here, PDF of full results here.

BEST NOVEL (1196 ballots)

1) The Sword in the Stone had a convincing lead on the first count, 473 to 273 for Out Of The Silent Planet and 267 for Galactic Patrol, finally winning by 690 to 419 for Galactic Patrol.
2) Out of the Silent Planet, 3) Galactic Patrol, 4) The Legion of Time, 5) Carson ( Read more... )

Both last year and in 2011 I did a survey of how bloggers had declared that they would vote for the four written fiction categories of the Hugo awards. I have done a similar survey for this year, presented below. I make the following excuses and caveats:

1. I'm sorry if I omitted your blog post. I did my best to be comprehensive using Google, but it ( Read more... )

I foolishly omitted Fiona Staples from my write-up yesterday as her work is not in the Best Pro Artist folder in the Hugo voter packet; however, it is in the Best Graphic Story folder, and basically you should go buy it anyway. Thanks to drplokta for pointing out my error.

I always feel slightly incompetent at discussing art; I know what I like, but have some difficulty articulating why. However, I'm not going to let that stop me from giving my views on the finalists for this year's Hugo for Best Pro Artist and Best Fan Artist, and for the 1939 Retro Hugo for Best Pro Artist.

To begin at the beginning:

1939 Retro ( Read more... )

Following up my post yesterday about how to get hold of the Retro Hugo finalists in the short fiction categories, these are the conclusions of my reading.

Best NovellaThis is by some margin the best of the fiction categories. I know that some argue that the novella is SF's natural length; I don't have strong views on that myself, but this list is ( Read more... )