For three of the last four years, I carried out a survey of how bloggers were planning to vote in the Hugos. Last year this proved a fairly effective methodology, calling Best Novel and Best Short Story correctly and pinging the actual winners as front-runners for Best Novella and Best Novelette. In 2013 two winners were clear and two were missed ( ( Read more... )

One of the reactions to this year's Hugo crisis has been the proposal of a tweak to the system for selecting Hugo Award finalists, with the goal of preventing slates from dominating as they did this year - as if you needed reminding, around 15% of voters got a clean sweep of the ballot in half a dozen categories, and would have done better if some ( Read more... )

I usually enjoy tracking down the various entries in this category (I rarely have time to watch the movies nominated for the Long Form equivalent). But unfortunately three of the finalists in this category were helped to get onto the ballot by a campaign led by a misogynist racist whose declared intention was to destroy the Hugos. I am not going to ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks back I crunched some numbers to look at the question of whether this year's Worldcon voters might be measurably either more liberal or more conservative than last year's, comparing the membership figures for Sasquan with those from Loncon 3. This is an update with some new details which I found interesting; there was more to the ( Read more... )

Best Fan Artist is the only category which was left un-piddled on by the slatemongers. As usual, it's a mixture of familiar names and new; also as usual, I find the new ones more interesting. And they managed to get on the ballot with no need for an organised campaign...

( My ranking )

Thanks to the Hugo Voter package, we can now read most of the finalists. This one is a collection of thoughts, mostly Tweets and comments to other people's blog posts I think, on the ballot for Best Related Work, where the slates managed to fill all five available slots.

Wisdom from my Internet is a really bad book. I will admit that I disagree ( Read more... )

I thought I might start by looking back at the last 15 years, which is the period in which I have really paying attention to the Hugo process year on year. My strike rate at choosing winners has been rather poor.

2000: Best Novel award won by A Deepness in the Sky. I preferred A Civil Campaign.
2001: Best Novel award won by Harry Potter and the ( Read more... )

After Sasquan's spectacular intake of new Supporting Memberships following the announcement of the Hugo shortlists, I've seen a great deal of speculation on what this might mean in terms of votes. I think we can all be certain that most of these new members have joined with the intention of participating in the Hugos; how will they do so ( Read more... )

I have often whined about the quality or suitability of some of the Hugo finalists in previous years. For instance, I considered that two of last year's short fiction finalists were not very sfnal, and I voted them down accordingly (as did, I note, the voters as a whole - neither won in its category); and the pool of nominators and candidates for ( Read more... )

Before I go into this year's choices, I want to observe that the Best Graphic Story category has really improved. I was dismayed by the dominance of one particular series which won the first three awards made in this category, and which I never really liked; and I was also concerned that this category's finalists in general in general didn't seem ( Read more... )