Well, that’s interesting: The 2015 Hugos
I’m a couple days behind, what with detaching from the internet for the past week, but I see tor.com has a post up about the Hugo nominees. So does everyone else, apparently. Wow.
My first take:
A) YAY THE GOBLIN EMPEROR MADE THE LIST. Now I guess I will buy a voting membership so I can vote for it. Also, I guess I’ll find out whether Skin Games stands alone at all well, because I sure as blazes do not plan to read the first 13 volumes in the series, or however many there are. I’m virtually certain I will put The Goblin Emporer first, Ancillary Sword second, and then sort out the others. My brother tells me that the one by Anderson has 14 pov characters in the first 16 chapters, so . . . probably that will not work for me terribly well. I read Kloos’ first book and liked it quite a bit, so this will be the time to read the sequel.
B) Yeah, I am NOT PLEASED to see six entries by a single author in the short forms. I really did not like to see that kind of single-author dominance when Seanan McGuire had five works on the nomination list, and I don’t like to see it here. It doesn’t matter how good an author is, how productive, whether I like their writing or like them as a person. It doesn’t matter to me whether this dominance is produced by slate voting or by a cohesive fan club voting. I hate it with a passion. No one ever has or ever will write one-fifth of all the award-worthy stories in one year and it is outrageous to see that implication with a nominee list of this kind.
C) What I expect to happen now is that A LOT MORE fan clubs and dedicated author-bloggers and who knows who all will make a very serious effort to plug slates in the future, since it evidently works very well. I hope this will happen fairly soon — like next year — thus producing vastly more involvement from all directions and a much larger number of nominations fighting it out. I don’t expect to be able to move the needle personally, but next year I will definitely be plugging 2015 books that I think deserve nomination. I would especially like to see something that is purely self-published make the final cut (as long as it deserves to, obviously).
D) But I am very disappointed that none of the short works I nominated made the list. Very disappointed. I put a lot of time into reading short work, and I liked my choices a lot, far better than most of the stories I see on those list. So speaking personally, that’s too bad.
