My Nominations for the Hugo Awards

One of the perks of having registered/purchased my membership for Anticipation - the Worldcon this summer in Montreal - nice and early is that I get to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards. Why I've waited until just before the deadline to actually get around and submit said nominations is (as I've noted in my previous post for my Aurora Awards nominations) due to wanting to give myself a little more time to read a couple of more books/stories published in 2008, giving everything I have read and seen some thought, and, of course, a healthy dose of procrastination.

But having finally made some decisions, and most importantly, finally receiving my Hugo pin number from the Anticipation organizers, I've finally put in my two cents. And so my nominees are:

Best Novel:
"Very Hard Choices" by Spider Robinson
"Firstborn" by Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter
"Valley of Day-Glo" by Nick DiChario
"Victory of Eagles" by Naomi Novik

(I left the 5th nomination space empty because I haven't read anything else eligible, or at least nothing I can recall, which means it wouldn't be worthy of nomination anyway.)


Best Novella:
"Ancients of the Earth" by Derryl Murphy
"Wylde's Kingdom" by David Nickle
"Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang" by Gord Sellar

(Not entirely sure if these three are eligible - not sure if Tesseracts Twelve ever got published in the US, but I'm nominating them anyway on the off chance this will work. At any rate, I've left the other 2 nomination spots empty because no other novellas have jumped out at my from this year's reading experience.)


Best Novelette:

(Nothing here. The distinction between Novella and Novelette has always pissed me off - it's not like the medium-length works I read in anthologies or magazines come with word counts beside them! Because of that, I'm not sure if a kind of longer story I've read is in fact a Novelette, or whether it's too long and actually a Novella, or too short and thus a Short Story. Is your head spinning too? No nominations!)


Best Short Story:
"Empire" by Simon Brown
"Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn" by Jason Nahrung

(These two stories from the Australian anthology Dreaming Again just kick ass. Empire, because who doesn't love a smart take on life under the Martian occupation from War of the Worlds, and Smoking because it made me think of John Carpenter's Vampires tempered with the thoughtfulness of Coppola's Dracula. No other nominations because most of the short stories I've soaked up this year were in On Spec, which isn't published in the US.)


Best Related Book:
"The Savage Humanists" edited by Fiona Kelleghan

(I nominated this one for its long, but thoughtful and accurate opening essay about several authors' use of science fiction for social commentary. Didn't read anything else this year that stood out that was non-fiction concerning the genre.)


Best Graphic Story:

(No nominations here because I haven't had the time or resources to read many comics or graphic novels.)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
"WALL-E"
"The Dark Knight"
"Cloverfield"
"Iron Man"

(No nomination in the last slot - again, nothing was good or really stuck out.)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
"BSG: Revelations"
"Reaper: Unseen"

(Nothing else really sticks out)


Best Editor, Short Form:

(Again, no-one really comes to mind from this year.)


Best Editor, Long Form:

(Same as above.)


Best Professional Artist:

(As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't follow the art scene in the genre that closely.)


Best Semiprozine:

(I don't follow this end of things much.)


Best Fanzine:
"SF Signal"

(Assuming, of course, that websites count as 'zines, the boys at SF Signal deserve a nomination!)


Best Fan Writer:

(No-one really jumps out.)


Best Fan Artist:

(Same as above.)


John W. Campbell Award:

(I'm not sure I can think of a new writer who would qualify, so unfortunately, I've got to pass on this one too. Pity, because if I could think of an eligible new writer I'd like to give them a boost.)


Now it's a matter of waiting until voting time.