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 section:His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. “Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!”
This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from ( 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... )

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... )

My survey of bloggers called two out of four fiction categories correctly, the No Awards for Best Novella aand Best Short Story, with two near misses; The Three-Body Problem was essentially level-pegging with The Goblin Emperor in my survey, as in real life, and No Award, which was the winner in my survey, actually got most first preference votes ( Read more... )

Mike Glyer over at File 770 has a tremendous assembly of reaction to the Hugo Awards, including some truly epic whining from the Sad Puppies (and my own post from Sunday morning). The votes were clearly cast against the slates on principle (apart from BDP) rather than on the quality of the work - there is no other way to read the figures. I'm sure ( Read more... )

There were very few close results this year. Hugo voters delivered decisive verdicts on what they wanted and didn't want to win. Outside the Dramatic Presentation categories, not a single Puppy nominee beat No Award. No Award won five categories, all on the first count, and also got the most first preferences for Best Novelette. Also worth noting ( Read more... )

It all could have been more difficult. The campaign to No Award the Puppy slates this year was made much easier by two factors, both of which were eerily predicted by Cat (I think catsittingstill) in a comment on Brad Torgersen's blog after last year:
Next time, bring your best game. Read a lot, talk among each other, pick your *best* stories. No bland ( Read more... )

As promised, I'm squeezing in a final survey of bloggers in the last 24 hours before Hugo voting closes. This final snapshot doesn't change the picture much; the three front-runners for Best Novel remain close to each other, and No Award remains in front in the other categories. To repeat a caveat from my previous post:Again, I want to emphasise ( Read more... )

We're now at the halfway point between my previous survey of bloggers' voting intentions for the Hugo fiction categories, and the actual deadline for votes on 31 July. Quite a lot more prople have come forward to say how they plan to vote, and it shifts the balance in a couple of cases. Apologies to anyone who I have missed; at this rate, I expect ( Read more... )