41 Comments on “2010 Hugo Nominees”

1. Congratulations on your nomination. Good luck to you and all the other nominees!

2. Congratulations on the nomination. Best of luck.

   That screenplay category would be a really tough vote. Love that “Up” was nominated.

3. Interesting. I have seen 4 of the 5 nominated long form dramatic presentations, and none of the short ones. Wonder what that means, if anything. Out of those 4, I would have to vote for Star Trek (if I was a voting member). Didn’t like District 9 much, didn’t like Moon at all, and Star Trek has a much better story to go with its special effects than Avatar has.

   As for God Engines, that is the only one of the nominated novellas I have read so I can’t have an informed opinion.

4. @2 PeterM: The Nebulas have (had?) a screenplay award, but the Hugo is for the best dramatic presentation–not just for the screenplay itself. The formatting above (nothing distinguishing movie title from credit info) doesn’t make this totally clear; see the list on the AussieCon 4 site for a slightly clearer presentation.

   (No offense intended to John and sorry if this seems overly picky; I’m just trying to clarify.)

5. P.S. Congrats to John (and all the nominees)!

6. (Hmm, my “P.S.” sounds weird since my first post hasn’t shown up yet, which is probably due to the link I included, to AussiCon 4’s list.)

7. Congrats!

   Is it me, or is the number of nominating ballots falling. When I worked on MilPhil/Philcon there had to be 5,000 people eligible to nominate if not more?

8. Yay, John! And Schlock Mercenary got nominated again, too!

   Frederik Pohl as fan writer, though?!?!!

9. Can I just say, what an amazing ballot list? I mean, like for everything. Wow. Great stuff this past year.

10. Jay Maynard @#7: Fred Pohl has a blog and spends a lot of time recounting his time spent with folks like Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard and others. I don’t know how much of the “historical” work is original and how much derives from his book “The Way the Future Was”, but it’s interesting reading none the less. He also includes posts about his more recent activities as well.

    http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

    I’d love to see him win the award, even if he can’t travel to accept it. It would probably be one last filigree to adorn the monument of his career.

11. @Jeff there was a record number of nomination ballots received this year – 864 total.

12. Jeff L. asks: “Is it just me, or is the number of nominating ballots falling?”

    It’s just you. In fact this is the largest number of nominating ballots ever cast.

13. Thank you for the update. I was operating on bad numbers, back in 2001 I was hearing things like 1500 nominating ballots, but obviously that was incorrect information…

14. Congratulations John on your Hugo Nomination for The God Engines. I am reading it now and think that it is a great story. I wish you and my other favorite author, Nancy Kress were not in the same category for Best Novella. I love both of your writing! I was a little surprised that her book Steal Across The Sky did not make it for Best Novel. Best of luck with the upcoming Nebula Awards!!!

15. Hey, John! I just wanted to add my congratulations to the list. And also to “thank you” that you chose to run for SFWA President this year. Mary is much more persuasive than I am, and I’m grateful she only uses her powers for good (or has at least persuaded me to believe that’s the case).

    Regards,

    Lawrence

16. Jeff L @13: You may be confusing voting on the final ballot with nominating.

    SMOFInfo.com has nominating and final ballot counts 1971-1999 and a separate details 2000-2006 in a different format.

    Much of this could be puzzled out of the Historical Hugo Award list, but I don’t think anyone has had the patience to bring George Flynn’s table (the first one I referenced above) up to the present.

    As noted, this year’s nominations set a new record high. I think this is even more impressive given that neither of the two Worldcons whose combined membership was eligible to nomination were held in the USA. (Although of course Americans have always make up a plurality of the membership.)

17. Looks like a good year for palimpsests. (Is that the plural of palimpsest?)

18. What a challenging ballot.
    Which is to say, congratulations, John! You’re in good company!

19. Congrats on the novella nom, it’s well-deserved. TGE is the best thing I’ve read of yours, by a country mile.

    And I just need to squee about Valente’s Palimpsest making the cut. It’s such a challenging, subversive, and gorgeous little novel – I am SO pleased that enough people read it and “got” it that it could get the nomination.

20. Yeah, I’m pleased about Valente’s, too. I liked Mieville’s TC&TC a lot as well, but I think Valente should get the edge.

    I also dug Non-Zero Probabilities quite a bit in the short fiction category, but alas, a bit disappointed that “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” didn’t make it.

21. Congratulations, John! Just read your novella and it was a fun one.

    Also…anyone want to bet on the Short Form category? My money’s on Dr Who…

22. Also…anyone want to bet on the Short Form category? My money’s on Dr Who…

    Which is too bad, really, because IMHO either of the non-Who nominees is better than the best of the three Who nominees, which is definitely “The Next Doctor”. 2009 was not a good year for Doctor Who, and I’m a bit mystified at its prevalence among the nominees.

    (Doctor Who in 2010 has started with a bang, however, so there’s hope for next year.)

23. I think Fables and Girl Genius are going to be perennials in the Graphic Story category, because they are consistently good, and have solid fan bases. That said I really think it should go to What Ever Happened To The Caped Crusader.

24. I’m pleased to see Seanan McGuire nominated for the Campbell Award. Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation work some of the same territory (Faerie’s intersection with 20th and 21st century America) that Laurell Hamilton does in her Meredith Gentry series, without devolving into softcore porn. And, McGuire has written some of the most affecting and haunting scenes I’ve every read.

25. What’s the difference between a novella and a novelette? Is it just the length of the work?

26. From The Hugo Awards own website:

    “Best Novella: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.
    Best Novelette: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seven thousand five hundred (7,500) and seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) words.”

27. *nod* I get that it is length of work but I was wondering if there was any other difference.

28. No other difference. It’s just the length.

29. Great Hugo ballot! I’m just glad that I’ve actually either read or have acquired a method for reading about 50% or so of the written nominees this year. I’m usually at 10-20% and miss a lot of good stuff.

30. Hello, John, congrats to you on your nomination, and I am inwardly squeeing at my first Hugo nomination. If anyone had told me a year ago that I’d be on the Hugo ballot up against Fred Pohl, I’d ask what drugs they were on, and why weren’t they sharing with the rest of us. Strange but happy days.

    Lloyd

31. MattMarovich @27: I think there are certainly other differences between novels and shorter forms, mostly having to do with things like pacing, character development, world building, etc., but these factors are impossible to quantify for purposes of awards categories. Word count is easy to quantify and is therefore what is used.

    Publishers have to be concerned with how a story will typographically fit into the pages of their magazine or book, and use word count as a starting point to judge this. The terms novella/novelette/short story are basically terms of art developed by publishers and writers to further divide shorter fiction into subcategories. Awards have largely used the same categories, probably for convenience.

32. A more subtle unofficial distinction between novella and novelette is the markets you can sell them to. Writer of the Future goes up to 17,000 words, and some of the majors get up above 20,000 words for a limited number of stories, but in general it is harder to find a market for novellas. Which is why something like Herr Scalzi’s The God Engines can be published by a small press like Subterranean.

    Having the categories broken down to short stories, novelettes and novellas also recognizes the constraints that length give an author in terms of how big a playing field they can work in. Only in the Campbell-That-Is-Not-A-Hugo do short stories compete directly against novels.

    As I understand things.

    Dr. Phil

33. @all, especially Dr. Phil,32

    Thank you for answering my question, that gives me a bit more info to work with in answering that question for others.

34. I don’t understand why they list the names of the John W. Campbell award nominees and don’t list the book they are nominated for.

    some of these are fairly small users. I could not find one of them on amazon at all. he may have written short stories. Which is why it would be nice if they listed their stories.

35. “I don’t understand why they list the names of the John W. Campbell award nominees and don’t list the book they are nominated for.”

    The clue is in the name – the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The award goes to the person, not to anything they’ve written.

36. Nick H. @35: The award goes to the person, not to anything they’ve written.

    Or to look at it another way, the award is for everything they’ve written, not any one specific book or story.

37. @Nick H. but they get the award for writing something. so they should list their work.

38. More Hugo love for Robert Charles Wilson? I *loved* SPIN but haven’t been able to finish ACCELERANDO or CHARLES COMSTOCK.

    I just don’t get it.

    I’m a huge China Mieville fan but THE CITY & THE CITY is flawed.

    Wake by Robert J. Sawyer *sounds* good, but all his books sounds good (he’s great with the ideas, not so great with the execution) and I’ve never even heard of PALIMPSEST or BONESHAKER before.

39. I just have to comment on one thing. How on earth did Palimpsest get a nomination? I feel a little odd criticising a book I never finished, but that in itself is perhaps the most damning criticism of all. I managed to grind through maybe 2/3 of the thing and then, having still found no sign of a plot, gave up in disgust. While overall I think it’s a pretty good crop this year, this one has me utterly baffled.

40. Scott:

    There’s usually a few nominees spread across the categories that people fine inexplicable; the thing is which nominees they are is usually different depending on the person. And I liked Palimpsest, myself (both of them!). Which goes to my point.

41. I’ve been reading in various places that people wonder if the Best Fan Writer nominees have some kind of online presence. I write lots and lots of letters of comments for the various fanzines out there, plus articles, fanzine reviews, etc. The letters make up the majority of my output, and if you’d like to see the letters I’d write, I use my LiveJournal as an archive. Check out lloydpenney.livejournal.com and you’ll find that I wrote just over 300 letters in 2009.

    Lloyd