Hey Scalzi, How Did You Vote For The Hugos?
Posted on August 1, 2016 Posted by John Scalzi 15 Comments
The voting for the 2016 Hugo Awards closed yesterday, and you may ask (and some of you have) — how did I vote? Why, the same as I vote every year: By ranking the works I liked highly, those I did not lowly and employing judicious use of the “No Award” option when necessary. This year, as with last year, the “No Award” option got more of a workout than it might normally, thanks to the inclusion of nonsense on the ballot put there by obnoxious people. But certainly in most categories there was good stuff to celebrate, and I happily celebrated it.
With regard to the obnoxious people incursion this year, it does seem after an initial flurry — and excepting Chuck Tingle’s glorious trolling of said obnoxious folk — things settled down quickly enough and people just did their usual voting thing. Which was nice! Lack of outside drama surrounding the Hugos are what they need at this point.
Aaaaaand that’s all I have to say about it this year. Good luck to most of the nominees, and we’ll see who takes home the rockets in about three weeks in Kansas City.
I was going to endorse various nominees, but two tweets in, it occurred to me that it might not be appropriate behavior for a Worldcon GoH, so I deleted them.
Indeed, and wise choice.
There was a lot of meh (IMO) on the ballot this year. Fortunately, three of the five novel slots were pretty good, and Fifth Season was just awesome.
The puppy picks dragged down the quality of the other categories, though.There was much better writing out there that got pushed off, we’re left with porridge and a terrible Steven King story.
I was disappointed to find the choices in several of the categories to be underwhelming at best. I voted regardless, of course, though I ranked “No Award” higher than some of the nominated works.
Also, we have arranged our travel plans to ensure that we arrive in KC early enough to participate in the business meetings as well. I think those votes are just as important as the votes for the awards.
Mmmmm. I just had half a bottle of a good wine with the steak I grilled for supper. It hasn’t made you less of an ass, however. Sad that. Too bad everyone is killing off the Hugos. I used to like them. A lot. But I liked a lot of weird stuff back in the ’60s.
A few bad years are not going to “kill off the Hugos”.
I look forward to seeing Zoe Quinn on the podium.
I really felt bad voting some of my favorite authors below no award because the instigator of the rabid puppies announced that he had voted for them also.
Oh, wait. Just like last year, I voted for nominees that I liked regardless of whether they were on a puppy slate, and voted no award above some of the nominees which were not on any slate.
TommyL, Bruce, the image I see when reading your posts is Baby Herman. I laughed then too. Enjoy your cigars…
Nice to see people not going crazy over a few whiny pups.
Still hope for a good show in August. Last year’s was great.
Oh.. thumbs up for Fifth Season.
Hey, I got big, grinning, flat-on-her-back Daisy for your banner photo!
Who cares about the Hugos when we have such a good doggy to love!
Speaking of Hugos, and Hugo nominees, and Old Man’s War, (nominated in its year) I really like how John’s comments have a green background because it makes me think of the skin colour of the Colonial Defence Forces.
At least this year, the Puppies’ Cunning Plan was to nominate a mixture of puppy chow and authors likely to appeal to the anti-puppies so we’d have to decide whether to No Award stuff that we really like and would otherwise vote for, and they could claim victory either way, cackling away while madly gobbling Cheezy Poofs in their secret lairs. So about half the categories they attacked had a reasonable fraction of readable material, as well as some that was of far lower quality even than last year’s worst.
For the novels, I rated Seveneves above No Award, but not first; I rated Jim Butcher’s Aeronaut’s Windlass below, because while it was fun, I didn’t think it was Hugo quality. For short stories, Cat Pictures Please was the clear winner, but I think I decided to put Chuck Tingle’s story above No Award, because while it’s not really Hugo quality, it and his other work are extremely good examples of science fiction as a conversation between authors and readers of the literary genre; maybe it would have belonged in Related Works instead.
The one I felt bad about was Marc Aramini’s Gene Wolfe collection in Related Works – it was broad, ambitious, and an unreadable cluttered mess. He really needed an editor, and while I agree that it would be hard to place his work with a traditional publisher, he was ill-served by the House of Those Who Will Not Be Named.
I worked really hard reading like crazy before nominating for the Hugos this year, particularly in the short fiction categories. I was really crushed that with only one or two exceptions (one which only made final ballot when an author declined the nom), nothing I read was on the finals list.
Did it colour my reading of the nominated works? It did indeed. I really tried to have an open mind, but in the end, I couldn’t support much that was tainted by the puppy poo.
Keeping my fingers crossed for “The Fifth Season.”
The only category to get a full no award was Related Work.