Hugo Podcast

No, not a podcast nominated for the Hugo Award: a podcast about the Hugo Awards, primarily focused on procedures and (I hope) debunking many of the commonly-held-but-wrong beliefs about the procedures for the Awards. I recorded this with John DeNardo of SFSignal and Cheryl Morgan as part of SF AwardsWatch. As I say in the podcast, I speak for myself, not for any of the organizations on which I currently serve or have served in the past. My opinions are my own, not necessarily official policy of the World Science Fiction Society, the WSFS MPC, or the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, and anyone intimating that I'm somehow speaking out of turn by not getting advance clearance from someone else to express my opinions about how the Hugo Awards work is not going to get any sympathy from me.

Cheryl has done a fine job of compiling some extensive statistics, thanks to the good work of the past few years' Hugo Administrators in producing the raw data needed to produce the statistics. Whether we can draw any conclusions from the data we have so far is unclear, but I'm glad to have the information and I hope that as we accumulate more data we might be able to tell more about what the voters are telling us regarding the categories (as opposed to the nominees in those categories, which isn't the same thing).

By Jove, He May Have Got It

I think it's possible that bovil has come up with a way of dealing with the complaints about fannish podcasts being lumped in with traditional "print" fanzines in the Hugo Awards by creating a new Best Fancast category. This might just work. It would indeed create a fourth "fan" category, and would probably get the usual complaints about "too many categories," but I think it's more workable than the current situation and has a chance of pleasing more people than it annoys, for various reasons. Comments over on Andy's journal, please, since it's his proposal.