Hugo Nominees announced

[netmouse]

Denvention has published the Hugo Nominees and I think it looks like a terrific list, with a lot of interesting things to look at. Especially interesting that Shaun Tan made it on both the best Artist and best related book lists (for The Arrival, which everyone ought to get and read right now. and while you're at it, get me a copy, would you? I'd love to have my own copy...).

There are a lot of terrific nominees for best pro artist, and I know I don't have a huge audience, but I want to say anyway that I desperately hope this year's voters will not (again) give it to Bob Eggleton. I know he's a great guy, at least I've heard it over and over, but there are many amazing artists in the field and we need to work on recognizing a wider range of them. What does this translate to? Don't vote for him. (At all would be my preference.) Especially, don't go, "Well, I know two of these other artists, and I know Bob, so I'll put him third." If you don't know all the artists, don't assume Bob should outrank the ones you don't know in terms of work done in the past year. Best would be to familiarize yourself with all the nominees and what they've done.

In the Fan writer category, also, I'm hoping this year we can stop calling this the Dave Langford award. I personally don't read Ansible but I do read Scalzi's Whatever on a regular basis, and not just because he's a friend of mine. It's a great place to catch announcements and discussion of books, writers, cons, SFWA, and other goings-on in the SF community. And, well, you know, he posts pictures of his cat. The important things. I'm also pleased to see my good friend Steven Silver in this category, who publishes Argentus and regularly does all kinds of other wonderful fannish writing things, like helping me get material onto the SF Editors wiki and being part of the science fiction project on wikipedia, but I have to admit, I'm really hoping it might go to Cheryl Morgan, who has come back from a period of relative quiet post the retirement of Emerald City to put a ton of work into the fantastic fannish site SF Awards Watch and maintains a wonderful blog there in addition to her personal blog (which also continues to carry much fannish writing), and who also participates in various online discussion communities, such as the one over on Whatever, for instance.

Anyway, enough soapboxing.

Congratulations to everyone who's been nominated!

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I went to WorldCon, each time I looked online for the pro and fan artists. I didn't want to vote for the name that sounded most familiar. The problem was, some of the artists didn't have any discernable online presence at all. I haven't checked this year. I hope that's no longer the case as it was in '02 and '04, because -- we're talking '02 and '04 and science fiction here. Total lack of web presence means that people who want to familiarize themselves with your work are hamstrung.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

hmm. Interesting note for me and Cheryl, who are about to put out an sfartists wiki like the sfeditors one (only with pictures, ahem), and I think had not thought (she may have, I hadn't) about including fan artists as well as pro. Obviously, we should, duh.

I expect all the pro nominees to be easily findable this year, in things like the Locus Directory of Cover Artists (http://www.locusmag.com/2007/DirectoryCoverArtists.html), but I also hope Denvention illustrates the nominees list with links to their work.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Many thanks. I'm very pleased that Argentus received a nomination.

[grimfaire.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhh.... "Captain Jack Harness" AND "Blink"

How is anyone suppossed to choose between those 2?

I mean Razor and Family of blood are good enough most other years... ahhhhhh

*head explodes*

[bovil.livejournal.com]

You don't have to. It's preferential (IRV) balloting. Just rank them in the order you would like to see them win, and let God the administrator sort them out.