(Note: voting closes in a bit more than ten days from now on 7/21/19. Membership sales (required for voting rights in most cases) also close soon. Visit the Dublin in 2019 website for more information.)
This being a Monday, and Mondays being slow, I figured it was about time to share my 2019 Hugo Awards Finalist Ballot, which ballot will be used to help tally the vote for the 2019 Hugo Awards, which will be presented – for the first time ever – in my ancestral lands of Ireland.
(Start at 30 seconds in; the important part comes at 54 seconds)
Sadly, I will not be in attendance, but I am a supporting member and therefore, get to vote.
Below are screen captures of the individual categories and my placements (the Hugo Awards use a preferential voting system where you rank your picks).
The Retro Hugo Awards follow the contemporary Hugo Awards.
Some general comments: I don’t vote for works I’m not personally familiar with, which happens for one reason and another; I also don’t consider reading an excerpt from a longer work to be sufficient exposure to judge it properly.
This also means that I don’t necessarily rank everything in a category.
There are a handful of categories I didn’t vote in or opted to select No Award for – excercising my Ghu-given right to “vote” by not selecting anyone or picking No Award to indicate that I disagree with the inclusion of the category in the awards.
This is not pique over disagreeing with a categorie’s inclusion when I campaigned against its inclusion but lost the vote. It’s actually three reactions: 1. I really don’t think that it should be an award category, find it problematic for various reasons and see it as more (eventual) trouble than it is worth – which gets a “No Award”; 2. I disagree with the category but don’t care enough – or think it harmful enough – to bother with it and 3. I’ve no interest in the category and therefore can’t vote because I really don’t engage with it. Let those who do decide who should win without interference from me.
Note: the screencaps are a bit difficult to read, so the email summary of my ballot is included after them. I’m showing the screen caps first because the summary only includes those Finalists that I actually voted for.
*I’ve been vocal on the AO3 “controversy”. Early on I asked that they detail the “sufficient” changes made to the site that would make it eligible in a year in which it was not first produced. (In fact, I think its TEN years AFTER it was first created that we are being asked to vote for it. As if The Martian appeared on the ballot AFTER the film rolled out, in a year in which the novel itself was not first published in English.)
I am not objecting to “new voters” coming into the fold here. We absolutely want that. What I am finding issue with is an internet community that does not normally engage with the awards doing so to get their “thing” a win. Just like the gamer gaters that were recruited by the Sad and Rabid puppies. (No, they are not pups; some of their actions are ‘puppy-like’.)
If this kind of thing becomes common (and I suspect it may), the awards turn into a defacto “popularity” contest: how many people who never heard of the Hugo Awards before can we get to vote because their “friends” are up for an award?
But putting that argument aside for a moment: the public display on the part of AO3 members (yay, all of my fan fic works are now Hugo Nominees: I’m a Hugo Finalist author – gonna put that right up on my website!) AFTER being informed that they are not entitled to such honors individually, is, to me, more than enough reason to not vote for it.
Prior coverage of this debate here
Finalist Vote Summary:
Novel:
The Calculating Stars
Trail of Lightning
Space Opera
Novella:
Artificial Condition
The Tea Master and the Detective
Binti: The Night Masquerade
Novelette:
“The Thing About Ghost Stories”
The Only Harmless Great Thing
Short Story:
“The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”
“The Court Magician”
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington”
Related Work:
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards
Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
www.mexicanxinitiative.com: The Mexicanx Initiative Experience at Worldcon 76
The Hobbit Duology (documentary in three parts)
No award
Dramatic Long:
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Sorry to Bother You
Black Panther
Avengers: Infinity War
Annihilation
A Quiet Place
Dramatic Short:
The Good Place: “Janet(s)”
The Good Place: “Jeremy Bearimy”
Editor Short:
Gardner Dozois
Neil Clarke
Semiprozine:
Strange Horizons
FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction
Fireside Magazine
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Uncanny Magazine
Shimmer
Fanzine:
Rocket Stack Rank
Galactic Journey
Journey Planet
nerds of a feather, flock together
Fan Writer:
Foz Meadows
James Davis Nicoll
Alasdair Stuart
Fan Artist:
Spring Schoenhuth
Series:
No award
New Writer:
Jeannette Ng
Lodestar:
No award
The Retro Hugo Awards
(The older I get, the closer the Retros come to being THE Hugo Awards….)
Yes, seems that this year I have a ‘thing’ for Don Wollheim, Eric Frank Russell and C. L. Moore.
(Pretty sure I’ve always had a thing for them.)
Symbiotica (EF Russell) makes me laugh. Every. Single. Time. I think it takes the prize for most vomitous novelette in the history of the genre (though Sturgeon’s The Girl Had Guts comes a very close second). And by vomitous, I don’t mean on the part of the reader. I mean, more people vomit in that story than in any other.
Summary
Retro Novel:
Conjure Wife
Earth’s Last Citadel
The Weapon Makers
Gather, Darkness!
Perelandra
Retro Novella:
“Attitude”
“Clash by Night”
The Little Prince
“We Print the Truth”
Retro Novelette:
“Symbiotica”
“Mimsy Were the Borogoves”
“The Proud Robot”
“Citadel of Lost Ships”
“The Halfling”
Retro Short Story:
“Q.U.R.”
“Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper”
“Doorway into Time”
“King of the Gray Spaces” (“R is for Rocket”)
“Death Sentence”
Retro Graphic Story:
Flash Gordon: Fiery Desert of Mongo
Buck Rogers: Martians Invade Jupiter
Wonder Woman #5: Battle for Womanhood
Retro Dramatic Long:
Phantom of the Opera
Münchhausen
Heaven Can Wait
Batman
Retro Dramatic Short:
Super-Rabbit
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
The Ape Man
Der Fuehrer’s Face
Retro Editor Short:
Donald A. Wollheim
Mary Gnaedinger
Dorothy McIlwraith
John W. Campbell
Raymond A. Palmer
Retro Pro Artist:
Margaret Brundage
Hannes Bok
J. Allen St. John
Virgil Finlay
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
William Timmins
Retro Fanzine:
The Phantagraph
Le Zombie
Futurian War Digest
Guteto
Voice of the Imagi-Nation
Retro Fan Writer:
Jack Speer
Morojo (Myrtle Douglas)
Wilson “Bob” Tucker
Donald A. Wollheim
Forrest J. Ackerman
Art Widner
The Best Related Work Category was a bit of a mess this year, wasn’t it?
I mean, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards and Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing are each solid… but an entire fanfic website and a short series of YouTube videos?
Those last two puzzled me, and I have a feeling the latter only got nominated because there was a sizable push for votes from their Twitter following.
I’m pulling for Astounding because that was just phenomenal work, but I’ll be disappointed if it ends up being one of those two.
I feel much the way you do, though I’ve no beef with the video presentation being nominated.
Nevala-Lee’s histobiography is a monumental achievement and should NOT be finding itself competing with an electronic archive, no matter what the focus of that archive might be, nor how vibrant its community is.
The fact that enough of AO3’s membership posted online about being “Hugo Finalists” for it to be noticed, without checking or internal circumspection regarding the advisability of doing so strongly suggests to me that they have little to no actual engagement with Fandom (as in, original Fandom that created all this stuff AND hosts and votes for the Hugo Awards since 1953), equally strongly suggests to me that we should not be honoring this crowd with an award.
That’s harsh, I know, but: it does not qualify for the category (despite the admin’s ruling that it does) for several reasons (can’t substantiate the “significant” change from earlier versions, don’t believe the changes cited now qualify it, should be in the fanzine category).
If they’d published, as loudly and as widely “individual members are NOT Hugo Award Finalists; your individual stories are NOT Hugo Award Finalists” as they bruited their nomination, I’d have less of a problem with it, but since they did not, all it looks like to me is campaigning for the vote – which (again), if they were really familiar with the award and Fandom, they would know is something that We. Do. Not. Do.
Like you, I am hoping that the traditional crowd of voters is able to overcome whatever influx may have been generated by AO3’s promotion and gives the win to Astounding.