Hugo Awards and Other Stuff

Posted on | August 2, 2015 | 23 Comments

The deadline for voting on the 2015 Hugo Awards was midnight on Friday, and I got my votes in. The CHORFs and their allies tried to get in some last-minute shots, notably the Grauniad, only to be met with derision and an excellent fisking by the International Lord of Hate.* Also worth noting was the triumphant tweet by Mary Robinette Kowal that they’d succeeded in handing out seventy supporting memberships. Seventy out of over three thousand supporting memberships? Great job there, guys, we’re just shaking in our boots. Oh, wait, no we’re not.

The Empress protects! 🙂

So what did I do with my ballot? Well, for one thing, I read pretty much all the fiction in the voter packet Sasquan sent out, with the exception of samples (screw you, Orbit) and one short story from The Baen Big Book of Monsters, which was an oversight on my part. And this is how I rolled:

BEST NOVEL

1. Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
Skin Game, by Jim Butcher

BEST NOVELLA

Big Boys Don’t Cry, by Tom Kratman
One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright
The Plural of Helen of Troy, ditto
Flow, Arlan Andrews
Pale Realms of Shade, John C. Wright

BEST NOVELETTE

The Journeyman: In the Stone House, Michael F. Flynn
Ashes to Ashes Dust to Dust Earth to Alluvium, by Gray Rinehart
The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale, by Rajnar Vajra
Championship B’tok, Edward Lerner

BEST SHORT STORY

Totaled, Kary English
Turncoat, Steve Rzasa
The Parliament of Beasts and Birds, John C. Wright

BEST RELATED WORK

Wisdom from My Internet, Michael Z. Williamson
Transhuman and Subhuman, John C. Wright
The Hot Equations, Ken Burnside
Why Science Is Never Settled, Tedd Roberts

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (LONG)

Edge of Tomorrow
Interstellar
Guardians of the Galaxy
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
The Lego Movie

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (SHORT)

Game of Thrones, “The Mountain and the Viper”
Orphan Black, “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR (SHORT)

Vox Day
Mike Resnick

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR (LONG)

Toni Weisskopf
Vox Day

…and you can take it as given that I voted No Award in the rest of the categories or (in the case of Best Fanzine) only voted for one (Tim Bolgeo’s The Revenge of Hump Day). Hopefully there’ll be enough fans like me who want to recapture the Hugos for people who want them to mean something entertaining and good again, so we don’t have to do as Wendell the Manatee suggests:

“Yes, Wendell!”

Aside from all that, I did read some other stuff. James Pylant’s In Morticia’s Shadow: The Life & Career of Carolyn Jones is a very, very detailed biography of the actress most famous for playing Morticia Addams on the original “Addams Family” TV series, but it would have benefited greatly from an editor who would have made sure the photographs didn’t slide off the bottoms of the pages. Pylant obviously did his homework, interviewing a lot of people who worked with Miss Jones throughout her career, and I doubt there’s anything he missed.

I am into the third volume of the Winston Churchill biography, Winston S. Churchill: The Challenge of War, 1914-1916, which is the one uniquely done by both Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert, as Randolph died while this volume was in process. It covers WSC’s tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty in the opening years of World War I and his downfall, which was not solely rooted in the Gallipoli disaster – that hadn’t yet turned sour – but rather in vile partisan politics and the treacherous, erratic personality of Admiral “Jackie” Fisher, who Churchill had summoned out of retirement to serve as First Sea Lord. An excellent, excellent book.

Later this week I’ll have something to say about Stanley Payne and Jesus Palacios’ biography of Franco and William Forstchen’s One Second After, both of which were kindly purchased from my wish list by Loyal Commenters.

*Correia and Torgerson really need to collect their essays and fisks into a book. They could call it The Peoples’ History of the Sad Puppy Revolution; wouldn’t it be great to see them and Mad Mike win Best Related Work back to back? 🙂

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Category: Books, Zeitgeist

Comments

23 Responses to “Hugo Awards and Other Stuff”

Dianna Deeley
August 2nd, 2015 @ 5:33 pm

I reviewed and finalized my ballot Friday. It’s not an exact match for yours, but it’s very close.
RS
August 2nd, 2015 @ 5:42 pm

Re: Carolyn Jones

IIRC, How the West Was Won was re-released during her run on The Addams Family. My parents took me to see it and I recognized Jones (George Peppard’s wife in the movie). My mom told me that her husband was a stunt man on the runaway train scene and was seriously injured during the shoot. For me, however, she’ll always be “Morticia Addams.”
John Rose
August 2nd, 2015 @ 5:46 pm

I’ll say thanks to the whole Sad/Rabid Puppy thing for this alone: I found out about John C. Wright.

When Larry Correia first wrote about Sad Puppies (it may have been Mk II, by the time I noticed the SP’s) a Hugo had been awarded to “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”. This… story… was counterbalanced by Wright’s shredding of it via his own Short: “Queen Of The Tyrant Lizards” which managed to incorporate True Love, Time Bending Paradoxes, an Eternal Sisterhood of Time Lords, and Rampaging Tyrannosaurs of Righteous Anger.

I was happy to see his stories get a shot this year, and I hope he comes up with an award. Transhuman & Subhuman deserves the award, if only for “The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Tolkien.”

Nice to see that you also have a little love for Orphan Black, too…
🙂
Bob Belvedere
August 2nd, 2015 @ 5:48 pm

Hubba-hubba.
JeffWeimer
August 2nd, 2015 @ 6:33 pm

Dinosaur didn’t get a Hugo (thank God). It did however garner a Nebula and a Hugo nomination.
John Rose
August 2nd, 2015 @ 6:35 pm

Thanks! Like I said — came in late; apparently got my awards mixed. Nonetheless, it did introduce me to Wright, so, I guess it deserves SOMETHING!
JeffWeimer
August 2nd, 2015 @ 6:48 pm

I’m pretty similar, but I put Goblin in 4th – I don’t reward novels that depress me and that never got into any groove other than “woe is me, poor little emperor”. Dark would have been higher if I didn’t need a scorecard.

Kary English deserves Short Story and the Campbell, IMHO. Totaled was quite good.

I put GoG above Interstellar. Interstellar was cloying in it’s “we’re an Important sci-fi movie” way. It was ridiculous in how seriously it took itself.

Anyway, it’s all over but for the crying. And Lord-almighty, will there be a LOT of crying. Between the CHORF “no award” strategy and RP’s ok-fine-blow-up-one repudiation of the Graphic Novel category (well deserved, BTW), that one may very well be the first no-award in a category since 1977.
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 7:46 pm

You and me both.
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 7:47 pm

I admit to not having seen that particular episode, but much like folks voted for Skin Game to recognize Jim Butcher’s work with the Dresden Files, I voted for it because that is one weird-ass series…but you can’t look away.
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 7:52 pm

Goblin Emperor got a LOT better around the middle and kept getting better, otherwise like my friend Maggie Hogarth I just would have given up.
Absolutely agree about English. I was originally leaning toward “Turncoat”, but “Totaled” kept gnawing at me.
I probably would have done the same with “Guardians” if I’d seen the whole thing, but all I saw were bits and pieces; never actually got to see the whole movie.
The graphic novels sucked this year. There wasn’t even one that I was slightly interested in reading. I, too, am looking forward to the delicious taste of CHORF tears.
John Rose
August 2nd, 2015 @ 8:18 pm

I was hooked from episode one. That girl, Tatiana Maslany (sp), what’s she up to? An even dozen different characters?
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 8:25 pm

Something like that, yeah.
JeffWeimer
August 2nd, 2015 @ 8:38 pm

I kept waiting for him to take charge and do something about the Chancellor. Instead, he benefited from, once again, something happening *to* him and not *by* him. He was just so damned passive throughout the whole book. The only active thing he did was send the investigator.
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 9:37 pm

Going to have to agree to disagree there; I thought as he gradually figured out how the hell things worked, he got more assertive, but until he had some grasp on how everything worked, he was a fish out of water.
Matthew T. Mason
August 2nd, 2015 @ 10:08 pm

I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard she got that Emmy nom.

With all due respect for the five others, Tatiana leaves them all in the dust. She plays 4-5 different characters in every episode. AND she does it convincingly.

It’s gonna get real ugly if she doesn’t win.

BTW…did last season’s finale not give you serious feels?
Wombat_socho
August 2nd, 2015 @ 10:40 pm

Indeed it did.
Matthew T. Mason
August 2nd, 2015 @ 10:46 pm

Evelyne Brochu has another show called X Company, about how the allies helped in the French resistance during WWII. They are filming season 2 now.

Alas, it was produced for Canadian television and I have heard nothing about it being broadcast for US audiences. =(
Zakn
August 3rd, 2015 @ 12:47 am

You got a source link for that Vivian Photo?
Wombat_socho
August 3rd, 2015 @ 10:27 am

I wish. I caught it off my Twitter feed a month or so back. I’d like to know who the artist is myself.
Quartermaster
August 3rd, 2015 @ 11:48 am

The “Dark Lord” has posted his Hugo predictions. They’re worth about what anyone else’s predictions would be.
Daniel Freeman
August 3rd, 2015 @ 6:30 pm

If you mean this, it’s neither his nor a prediction. It’s one way of using the results to gauge who had the most influence, since the large number of supporting memberships make for a huge question mark.
Quartermaster
August 3rd, 2015 @ 7:38 pm

We’re both right, and both wrong. The first line says “A Puppy Predicts.” I should have said Vox day had published a prediction, rather than saying it was his. My bad. But, it’s kinda hard to say it’s not a prediction when the first line says that what it is.
Daniel Freeman
August 3rd, 2015 @ 9:57 pm

It was not a prediction of the results, but of their meaning, so it would have been more accurate to say that he was offering a rubric for their interpretation.

But that’s a really pedantic quibble and I grant your general point.