Hugo predictions
The SF Weekly Unofficial Hugo Poll ended up correctly predicting 8 of the winners, and incorrectly predicting 6 of them. But I can't point any fingers; my own predictions got 7 right and 5 wrong. (I didn't make a prediction in the Novel or Related Book categories because I knew almost nothing about the nominees in either category.)
Mary Anne asked me why I'd been so sure of my predictions in some categories, and I said it was because I was usually pretty good at predicting how the Hugo voters would vote. On further thought, that's not entirely true; it would be more accurate to say that for the past couple years, the Hugo voters have largely agreed with me, which is to say what I've voted for has often won, even though I wouldn't have predicted that. So instead, I'll note that my predictions this year were based largely on my sense of the buzz about the nominees. For example, I think "Undone" and "Lobsters" were on every published list of the year's best stories, and I think they appeared in all three major year's-best-sf anthologies (though I don't have TOCs handy at the moment to check); almost everyone appeared to adore at least one of the two, and most people appeared to love both of them. The buzz around "Hell Is the Absence of God" has been much less; people liked it, but I didn't see it getting nearly as much attention as those other two. (And it seems to me that science fiction per se generally tends to do better in the Hugos than fantasy—but that may be a totally false impression, based more on hearing people grouse about the amount of fantasy on the ballot than on actual results.)
(A quick skim of the Locus Hugo Award Winners by Category page suggests that no fantasy novel had won the Hugo prior to Harry Potter (last year) for at least thirty-some years, possibly ever; I'm not sure which side of the divide some of those books fall on. Oddly, I'm much less familiar with the Hugo-winning short fiction over the years, so I can't say for sure, but the vast majority of the Hugo winners that I've read in the short-fiction categories are science fiction rather than fantasy.)
(Still more evidence, as if it were needed, that my memory isn't very good: for years I've been thinking that Mercedes Lackey won several Hugos in a row for Valdemar books. It turns out that not only did she not win any, she wasn't even nominated for any. I have no idea what really happened that I'm misremembering here. I think I must, bizarrely, have confused Lackey with Bujold.)
Anyway, so maybe my ideas about what Hugo voters like are just wrong, or maybe Hugo voters' tastes have been changing lately. Not sure. Or maybe I'm being silly by thinking about "Hugo voters" in any kind of monolithic way, since fewer than two-thirds of the voters in a given year tend to vote in any given category (except Dramatic Presentation and Novel).
Or maybe I'm being obsessive again and should go home, have dinner, and do some editing.