Hugo ballot up
The Hugo ballot is now online. Remember, votes are due by July 31, 2002. If you have a Hugo PIN, you can vote online; otherwise you have to mail in a paper ballot. Anyone who is a member of this year's ConJosé can vote. [Note: this entry used to say that members of last year's WorldCon could vote as well, but that turns out not to be the case.] Both supporting and attending members can vote.
Some of the short fiction nominees are available online at Fictionwise. On the one hand, this is a Good Thing, because it's pretty much impossible to locate anything that was published only in a print magazine if the magazine's no longer on the shelves. On the other hand, it's a little annoying that only five of the stories are available so far, and only two of them are free, and two of the for-pay ones cost nearly $3 apiece. I'm all for authors making money from their work, but for the past couple of years, all of the short-fiction nominees have been made available for free online by the authors and publishers. I suspect that requiring readers to pay $3 to download a novella (that originally appeared in a magazine costing maybe $5) will hurt the story's chances, since many people just won't read it and therefore won't vote for it.