Final Hugo Ballot 2015

Less then a week to go to Hugo voting closes, so here’s my final ballot. First, to recap, the categories I’ll be no awarding for Puppy-related reasons:

  • Best Novella
  • Best Novelette
  • Best Short Story
  • Best Related Work
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
  • Best Editor, Short Form
  • Best Editor, Long Form
  • Best Professional Artist
  • Best Fanzine
  • Best Fancast
  • Best Fan Writer
  • John W. Campbell Award (not a Hugo)

Which leaves Best Novel:

  1. The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison.
  2. The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu
  3. Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie

Best Graphic Story:

  1. Ms. Marvel, v1 — Adrian Alphona, G. Willow Wilson
  2. Saga, v3 — Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples
  3. Sex Criminals, v1 — Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky
  4. Rat Queens, v1 — Kurtis J. Wiebe, Roc Upchurch

Best Semiprozine:

  1. Strange Horizons — Niall Harrison
  2. Lightspeed Magazine — John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
  3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies — Scott H. Andrews

Best Fan Artist (the only category with no Puppy infestation):

  1. Ninni Aalto: cute cartooning, in a mix of Finnish and English
  2. Elizabeth Leggett: gorgeous paintings
  3. Spring Schoenhuth: also nominated last year for her jewelry, a reminder that fan art doesn’t need to be two-dimensional
  4. Steve Stiles: a regular nominee, decent enough but nothing special
  5. Brad Foster: another Fan Artist regular, with the most nominations and wins of everybody. He doesn’t need any more, does he?

And that’s the Hugo Awards dealt with for another year. Thanks to the Pups, it cost less time than last year, but I’m still filling my ballot in at the last possible moment.

Outer space linkage

Some quick links to interesting stuff today that don’t need their own post. First up, the annual Strange Horizons fund drive. Strange Horizons is an excellent science fiction/fantasy site, publishing fiction, poetry, reviews, etcetera, with the staff all volunteers but with paid contributors. I use the site quite a lot when doing science fiction or fantasy reviews for the booklog, as their reviewers usually have their heads screwed up straight and I’m always curious to see what they think of the book I’m reviewing.

The Guardian has an interview with noted science fiction writer and friend of the blog Charlie Stross, in which the following quote jumped out at me:

“Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas, rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition,” he says. “I’m not entirely at ease with that self-description.” But with a background in biomedical and computer science rather than literature, his fiction always returns to science. “I just can’t help myself,” he explains. “I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being
content to examine them in their native habitat.”

That one paragraph explains so much about Charlie’s books.

Way back in February, Brad Hicks blogged about a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s live action science fiction series. No, not Space:1999, but UFO. When he described it, it sounded like it had provided a lot of the inspiration for the only computer game that ever gave me nightmares: UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-Com 1 as it was also known), which I played a lot in
the mid-nineties. Finally having tracked down the DVD set of the series myself and watched the first episode, it does remind me a lot of X-Com. Of course, it’s quite dated, as it’s a 1969 idea of what the far flung future of 1980 would look like, full with men in Nehru suits smoking and drinking in the office while purple wigged women in silver miniskirts watched out for ufos on the moon, while their counterparts on earth wore tight jumpsuits, which showed cameltoe could be a problem in the future as well…