Lady Business+ - Episode #10: Planet Hugo

[helloladies]

Episode #10 — Planet Hugo

Grab your ballots and your pin numbers and hold on tight as Justin and Renay tackle the 2014 Hugo Award Debate Season and all associated tickle fights. Self-promotion wank, category wank, and the inevitable unpredictably of it all due to the non-U.S. Worldcon are all up for analysis. Download the episode if you're way too invested in Best Related Work category.

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Comments

Planet Hugo

[(Anonymous)]

File 770 made a post about this this podcast.

Some ramblings.

-The last time (2005) the Worldcon was in Britain, there was skewing in the nominations in the novel category. All the novels were British and unfortunately two of them were not available in the US. I doubt this is going to happen since I also pretty sure Ancillary Justice will be on the ballot.

-Neil Gaiman has turned down nominations for the Hugos before. He only accepted a nomination for The Graveyard Book on the advice of Charles Brown of Locus. Now he did accept the Nebula nomination so who knows. The Ocean on the End of the Lane is a great book.

- I am a big supporter of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugos. Star Trek was my first Science Fiction thing grwoing up. When I heard that it won something called a Hugo, I was curious to what this Hugo is. In my young mind I thought "Well if Star Trek won a Hugo other stuff that won a Hugo should be just as good." I started reading the novels that won the Hugo and Asimov's Hugo anthologies. I want to see the award continue since it will hopefully continue to bring in new readers.

-Some people have shown up to collect the Dramatic Hugos or send in speeches. The producers of GalaxyQuest picked up their Hugo. Gene Roddenberry, Steven Moffatt,Jane Espenson, and Joe Michael Straczynski came to accept the award. Joss Whedon, Christopher Nolan,Peter Jackson and many other sent representatives to accept the award.

-I do like the short fiction as structured. I can understand that novelette is a tricky category. I have the advantage of reading Locus and they break down short fiction by category. If we remove it we take away an opportunity for some authors to stand out. There have been some really great stories in the category: "Unicorn Variation" by Roger Zelazny, "Paladin of the Lost Hour" by Harlan Ellison, "Enter a Soldier, Later Enter Another" by Robert Silverberg, "The Martian Child" by David Gerrold.

This was a great podcast. You gave a lot of food for thought. Thank You.

Re: Planet Hugo

[(Anonymous)]

I did not intend to post that last post anonymously.

My name is Juan Sanmiguel. (sanmiguel@earthlink.net)

Re: Planet Hugo

[renay]

No worries! :D

Interesting that so many people came to accept the award! (Although I still remain annoyed that Vaughn couldn't even manage a rep for Saga, grrr.) I tend to look on the Dramatic Presentation as awarding everything, but particularly writing/directing. I wouldn't necessarily want to limit it, because I think fans should be able to go "dramatic presentation, okay, I want to nominate X because the acting was awesome, Y because of the directing, and Z because wow, what an awesome script!" I'm sure some would disagree with my read on that, though. *g* Although I do see Justin's point that outside the community at large we are sort of niche, so we're easier to ignore/blow off. But I love that Dramatic Presentation was your in (mine was Best Novel, predictably)! :D

It's less that I mind how the short fiction categories are structured and more that novelette complicates the process because you have to figure out how many words are in a thing, so instead of one cut off (everything before X count is a short story, everything after a novella) there's an extra one in the middle. I would totally be in favor of keeping the novelette category if publications would always include metadata for each piece along with the author information in some sort of standard way. Clarkesworld does this, but you sort of have to hunt for it. *waves flag for standardization*