2005 Hugo nominees (short fiction now online)

[Aitch Eye]

Just announced this afternoon -- or evening, really, since it was at Eastercon in the UK.

Note that all five novels are by British authors (though Iain M. Banks might prefer a more specific label), perhaps partially due to Worldcon being held in Glasgow -- though members of last year's convention were also allowed to make nominations. It's probably as good or better a list of novels as most years, so please don't read anything disparaging into my pointing it out.

In the pro categories Charles Stross has the most nominations with three (two of them in novella), followed by Mike Resnick (both in short story), Michael A. Burstein, and Angel, all with two. Cheryl Morgan, who posted this list at Emerald City, has three (fanzine, website, and fan writer).


http://www.emcit.com/hugo_nom.shtml


EDIT: Links to the short fiction nominees that have been posted online can be found at the official site:

http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/hugolink.htm



BEST NOVEL (424 ballots cast)
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)

BEST NOVELLA (249 ballots cast)
“The Concrete Jungle” by Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives, Golden Gryphon Press)
“Elector” by Charles Stross (Asimov’s 09/04)
“Sergeant Chip” by Bradley Denton (Fantasy & Science Fiction 09/04)
“Time Ablaze” by Michael A. Burstein (Analog 06/04)
“Winterfair Gifts” by Lois McMaster Bujold (Irresistible Forces NAL)

BEST NOVELETTE (215 ballots cast)
“Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories Wheatland)
“The Clapping Hands of God” by Michael F. Flynn (Analog 07-08/04)
“The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link (The Faery Reel Viking)
“The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fantasy & Science Fiction 02/04)
“The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe (Sci Fiction, scifi.com 5/5/04)

BEST SHORT STORY (269 ballots cast)
“The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly (Sci Fiction, scifi.com 5/26/04)
“Decisions” by Michael A. Burstein (Analog 01-02/04)
“A Princess of Earth” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s 12/04)
“Shed Skin” by Robert J. Sawyer (Analog 01-02/04)
“Travels with My Cats” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s 02/04)

BEST RELATED BOOK (263 ballots cast)
The Best of Xero by Pat and Dick Lupoff (Tachyon Publications)
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction ed. by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge University Press)
Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn, Volume 3 by William Tenn (NESFA Press)
Futures: 50 Years in Space: The Challenge of the Stars by David A. Hardy and Patrick Moore (AAPPL; Harper Design International)
With Stars in My Eyes: My Adventures in British Fandom by Peter Weston (NESFA Press)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION: SHORT FORM (161 ballots cast)
“Heroes Part 1 & 2” - Stargate SG-1 (MGM Television / The Sci Fi Channel) Written by Robert C. Cooper; Directed by Andy Mikita
“Not Fade Away” - Angel (20th Century Fox Television / Mutant Enemy) Written by Jeffrey Bell & Joss Whedon; Directed by Jeffrey Bell
“Pilot Episode” - Lost (Touchstone Television / Bad Robot) Story by Jeffrey Lieber and J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof; Teleplay by J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof; Directed by: J.J. Abrams
“Smile Time” - Angel (20th Century Fox Television / Mutant Enemy) Story by Joss Whedon & Ben Edlund; Teleplay by Ben Edlund; Directed by Ben Edlund
“33” - Battlestar Galactica (NBC Universal Television / The Sci Fi Channel) Written by Ronald D. Moore; Directed by Michael Rymer

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION: LONG FORM (340 ballots cast)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Focus Features) Story by Charlie Kaufman & Michael Gondry & Pierre Bismuth; Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman; Directed by Michael Gondry.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Brothers) Written by Steve Kloves; Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling; Directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
The Incredibles (Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar Animation Studios) Written & Directed by Brad Bird
Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (Paramount Pictures) Written & Directed by Kerry Conran
Spider-Man 2 (Sony Pictures Entertainment / Columbia Pictures) Screen Story by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar and Michael Chabon; Screenplay by Alvin Sargent; Based on the comic book by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko; Directed by Sam Raimi

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR (296 ballots cast)
Ellen Datlow
Gardner Dozois
David G. Hartwell
Stanley Schmidt
Gordon Van Gelder


BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST (232 ballots cast)
Jim Burns
Bob Eggleton
Frank Kelly Freas
Donato Giancola
John Picacio


BEST SEMIPROZINE (238 ballots cast)
Ansible ed. by David Langford
Interzone ed. by David Pringle and Andy Cox
Locus ed. by Charles N. Brown
The New York Review of Science Fiction ed. by Kathryn Cramer, David G. Hartwell and Kevin J. Maroney
The Third Alternative ed. by Andy Cox

BEST FANZINE (218 ballots cast)
Banana Wings ed. by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
Challenger ed. by Guy H. Lillian III
Chunga ed. by Randy Byers, Andy Hooper and Carl Juarez
Emerald City ed. by Cheryl Morgan
Plokta ed. by Alison Scott, Steve Davies and Mike Scott

BEST FAN WRITER (241 ballots cast)
Claire Brialey
Bob Devney
David Langford
Cheryl Morgan
Steven H Silver

BEST FAN ARTIST (179 ballots cast)
Brad Foster
Teddy Harvia
Sue Mason
Steve Stiles
Frank Wu

BEST WEB SITE (311 ballots cast)
eFanzines ed. by Bill Burns
Emerald City ed. by Cheryl Morgan
Locus Online ed. by Mark R. Kelly
Sci Fiction ed. by Ellen Datlow, Craig Engler, general manager
Strange Horizons Susan Marie Groppi, editor-in-chief


JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER (187 ballots cast)
Elizabeth Bear (second year of eligibility)
K.J. Bishop (second year of eligibility)
David Moles (second year of eligibility)
Chris Roberson (second year of eligibility)
Steph Swainston (first year of eligibility)

The John W. Campbell Award, sponsored by Dell Magazines, is not a Hugo Award, but appears on the same ballot as the Hugo Awards and is administered in the same way as the Hugo Awards.

 

[Staffan]

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION: SHORT FORM (161 ballots cast)
“Heroes Part 1 & 2” - Stargate SG-1 (MGM Television / The Sci Fi Channel) Written by Robert C. Cooper; Directed by Andy Mikita
“Not Fade Away” - Angel (20th Century Fox Television / Mutant Enemy) Written by Jeffrey Bell & Joss Whedon; Directed by Jeffrey Bell
“Pilot Episode” - Lost (Touchstone Television / Bad Robot) Story by Jeffrey Lieber and J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof; Teleplay by J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof; Directed by: J.J. Abrams
“Smile Time” - Angel (20th Century Fox Television / Mutant Enemy) Story by Joss Whedon & Ben Edlund; Teleplay by Ben Edlund; Directed by Ben Edlund
“33” - Battlestar Galactica (NBC Universal Television / The Sci Fi Channel) Written by Ronald D. Moore; Directed by Michael Rymer

Ouch! This is some serious competition. The only thing I can be reasonably sure of is that neither of the Angel episodes will win unless they withdraw one of them from the competition, because otherwise they will compete too much with one another (happened to B5 in its first year).

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Here is Locus Online's Hugo info page. http://locusmag.com/2005/News/03_HugoNominations.html
There are some interesting stats at the bottom of the page about previous wins and nominiations for this years nominees.

 

[Pielorinho]

Very interesting! And here I was thinking the Hugo was specifically science fiction; guess that list of nominees destroys that thought!

Here's hoping that Jonathan Strange takes the novel category.

Daniel

 

[Aitch Eye]

Ouch! This is some serious competition. The only thing I can be reasonably sure of is that neither of the Angel episodes will win unless they withdraw one of them from the competition, because otherwise they will compete too much with one another (happened to B5 in its first year).

Not necessarily, as they use an optional preferential (or "Australian") ballot, where voters rank the nominees in order of preference, to the extent they have one. Here are the official rules from the WSFS constitution, and Charles Stross has a nice clear walkthrough of how this works out for those who are competing against themselves.

The gist of it is that so long as the people ranking one of the Angel episodes as their first choice also list the other as their second choice (though I'm not certain they all would), there's effectively no splitting of the vote, because the higher ranking episode will receive all the votes that went to the other one when the lower ranking episode is eliminated.

In 1999 Michael Swanick had three nominations in best short story, and he still won, despite the fact that his "The Very Pulse of the Machine" actually came in a distant third to Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko" in first place votes. It edged ahead by two votes at the very end. You can follow the sequence of the ballot redistributions it went through here. If you look at the other categories, you'll see it's not at all unusual for the nominee with the most first place votes to lose, sometimes ending up quite far down the list.

 

[Staffan]

Not necessarily, as they use an optional preferential (or "Australian") ballot, where voters rank the nominees in order of preference, to the extent they have one.

Ah, nifty. Is this a relatively new thing? Because I definitely recall JMS griping about losing the Hugo one year due to splitting the vote (and the next year, withdrawing one episode from the ballot to prevent it from happening again). Or maybe that was earlier, in the nominations stage, or something like that.

 

[Aitch Eye]

Checking here it seems that in 1997 there were three Babylon 5 episodes that "received enough votes to be nominated but J. Michael Straczynski declined." But he doesn't seem to have received multiple nominations in previous years.

I'm not quite Googly enough to find exactly when they started using this system, but I did find reference to it being in place for the 1996 Worldcon. Perhaps JMS wasn't aware of it, or was afraid that if voters were confused about it they might have been less likely to vote, which Stross still thinks is a risk.

 

[Staffan]

Checking here it seems that in 1997 there were three Babylon 5 episodes that "received enough votes to be nominated but J. Michael Straczynski declined." But he doesn't seem to have received multiple nominations in previous years.

I'm not quite Googly enough to find exactly when they started using this system, but I did find reference to it being in place for the 1996 Worldcon. Perhaps JMS wasn't aware of it, or was afraid that if voters were confused about it they might have been less likely to vote, which Stross still thinks is a risk.

Looking around some more, I see at The Lurker's Guide that the year in question would be 1995. B5 won the Hugos in 1996 (Coming of Shadows) and 1997 (Severed Dreams). What JMS had to say (this was after the Hugo for Coming of Shadows):
[bq]One of the problems we had with the Hugo last year was that whereas only a couple of TNG episodes were good enough to get nominated, eight B5 episodes made it to the final cut. Because folks went for their favorite episodes, and they had a number that year. The result was that the choices got split so much that TNG won, since it had fewer good or great episodes that season. ("All Good Things" won with, I think, 57 votes; the top two B5 episodes on the list had 32 and 27 votes between them, enough right there to have won if combined. That was for "Signs and Portents" and "Chrysalis," with "And the Sky Full of Stars" at 21, "Babylon Squared" at 19, "Believers" at 10, "Mind War" at 9, "Voice in the Wilderness" at 8, and "Soul Hunter" at 6.)

So basically, we lost because we had too many solid episodes to choose from.

As a result, a lot of folks this year have been campaigning to have participants go for "The Coming of Shadows," which is the highest rated episode in all the informal polls on-line and elsewhere from that time period. It's the one nearly everybody seems to agree upon.[/bq]

 

[Aitch Eye]

Ok, so he was talking about the nominations phase (as no B5 episode was on the final ballot). Nominees were and are determined just by the number of nominations they get, without all the complications of the final voting.

However, his constituency were allowed to make 5 equally weighted nominations in the category, so I wonder if it really affected things as much as he seems to think. He said "the top two B5 episodes on the list had 32 and 27 votes between them, enough right there to have won if combined", but we don't know how many people voted for both. Since people could possibly have nominated several episodes each, adding up the nomination numbers doesn't show much, other than that the show had at least 32 supporters -- who had more than enough votes between them to cover all the B5 nominations. Not that I think that's what happened, but he overstated his case.

Also, I'm unclear about what he means by "eight B5 episodes made it to the final cut" and "enough right there to have won if combined" (Won...the nominating process?), since these statements don't have any clear relation to the rules and procedures. I don't know whether The Lurker's Guide quoted his comments in their entirety or if there might be some missing context, so I shouldn't comment further.

 

[Aitch Eye]

Short Fiction nominees available online

Most of the nominees in the shorter categories have been posted online by the authors and publishers to increase their exposure to voters. The stories from Asimov's will be soon, and I assume the other Analog story will as well. The official 2005 Hugo page has the links:

http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/hugolink.htm

I'd particularly recommend "The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe, not necessarily as the best story, but as the most generally recommendable. The Charles Stross, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Kelly Link, Bradley Denton, and James Patrick Kelly stories are also worth reading. Not that the others aren't.


The Nebula Awards nominees are also up online, you can find them and a lot of other stuff here:

http://freesfonline.de/