Lorem Ipsum

Well, okay, it's not quite that time of year, but that time is coming up soon. You all know the time I'm talking about. Yes, it's nearly time to nominate for the Hugo awards.

There are a couple of specific things I want to mention about the Hugos:

• If you want to nominate, you have to have been a member of the 2001 WorldCon or you have to be a member of the 2002 WorldCon. You don't have to attend; you can get a supporting membership and still nominate and vote. (Attending memberships are $160 US through 12/31/01; $180 US after that. Supporting memberships are $35 US. See the ConJosé membership page for details.) I have a vague notion that you have to be a member by a certain date (well before the ballots come out) to nominate; really, if you want to nominate (and you weren't a 2001 WorldCon member), you ought to go sign up for membership now.
• Stories published electronically are eligible. That means every story (except the reprints) that we published in 2001 (see the fiction archives) is eligible to be nominated. If you think we published something particularly good, by all means nominate it! (Likewise, you can nominate stories from Sci Fiction and other online magazines; also, there's no requirement that stories be published in a "professional" publication.)
• There tend to be only about 400 people making nominations. More than that vote (around 800 people last year, iIrc), but you can only vote on what gets nominated. So nominations are important, and very few people participate. If you can afford a membership, or if you were a member of the 2001 WorldCon, don't forget to nominate! Particularly in the less popular categories. As few as 15 nominations can get a work or a person onto the ballot in some categories. (I'm going by memory here; my numbers may be a bit off.) But btw, be careful not to cross the fine line between recommending works and bloc voting. It's fine to tell people "I'm voting for X, and I hope that if y'all like X, you'll also vote for X." At the far extreme of ballot-stuffing, it's not fine for one person to buy a bunch of memberships and use them all to nominate the same item. There are various gray zones in the middle. I feel that people shouldn't nominate stuff they don't feel is deserving (eg, don't nominate something you haven't read just 'cause a friend asks you to).
• This year, there's a special Hugo for Best Web Site. I think that's kinda exciting. There's no guarantee that this will ever be a category again, so we should make the most of it while it's here. I can think of half a dozen deserving sites off the top of my head; I'm not sure yet which five of those I'll nominate.
• And that brings up a tricky issue: what do you do if you want to nominate something that isn't a discrete unit? There are two areas I see this coming into play: Best Web Site and (for some of us, anyway) Best Editor.
• The reason it's a tricky issue for Best Web Site is the A.I. online game/story. I think that, considered as a whole, that game is a very strong contender for the award; but there's no one central umbrella site that all the game sites fall under. What to do? Could nominate the Cloudmakers site, but that's not really like nominating the game itself. I'm thinking that if the Cloudmakers people came up with an umbrella name for all the sites, and suggested that anyone who wants to vote for the game use that name, that might be the best approach; though of course that would still depend on the Hugo administrators being willing to accept nominations for a group of tightly-linked sites in this way. I'm not even certain, philosophically, that it makes sense to consider the sites as a nominatable unit; you can't nominate a trilogy, even if the books don't stand alone well. Nor can you nominate a comic-book series per se, though that's partly just 'cause there's no good category for it. Tricky. But I do think the fact that one of the most ambitious pieces of interactive hyperfiction ever attempted came out the year that the first Best Web Site Hugo is available is too much of an opportunity to pass up, if there's some way to recognize the sites. (And I say that even though it puts a serious dent in SH's chances.)
• One last item: SH counts as a prozine for Hugo purposes (complicated; see below for details), so our editors are eligible for Best Pro Editor nominations. Difficult thing is, nominating individual editors from a magazine with 15-20 editors doesn't make so much sense; even if there's one editor you like better than another, nominating individual editors is likely to split the vote and result in nobody being nominated. The chances of an SH editor being nominated are quite slim anyway; I think last year it took about 60 nominations to make the ballot, and there are plenty of major pro editors who are much wider known than we are. But to maximize that chance, it seems to me that anyone wanting to nominate an SH editor should consider nominating Mary Anne. It's her magazine; she doesn't make the selections of material in individual departments, but she did bring the staff together and she does oversee everything and keep things running smoothly. It's always seemed to me that the magazine editors make it onto the ballot in recognition of their magazines rather than in recognition of their editorial skills per se; I suppose it could be considered recognition of their taste in fiction (but no one SH editor's taste defines the magazine's fiction, since there are three of us), but on the other hand, it could also be considered a side effect of the size of the magazine's circulation. I dunno; it's a tricky question. But pragmatically, I don't think any individual SH department editor has a chance of making the ballot; I don't know whether Mary Anne does either, but I think she has more of a chance. Is that manipulation of the system for my own ends? I'm not sure. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me, though, especially since there's no way to nominate a set of editors as a unit.

Whew. Enough. I have errands to run and places to be. Oh, but just to give some background on the prozine thing: to count as a prozine by Hugo standards, you theoretically have to have a circulation of 10,000 (and of course it's literally impossible to tell how many readers SH has, regardless of what you mean by "reader"), but I'm told by reliable sources that the real thing you have to do is say "We're not a semiprozine." And I definitely don't want SH nominated in the semiprozine category; we want to be seen as a professional publication. So I believe we count as a prozine for purposes of the Best Editor award.