Welcome to Fantasy Friday! Every week, you are invited to write and post something having to do with fantasy, science fiction, etc., right here in the comments. This week’s theme is: The Hugo Awards.
It’s time for nominations, and people are posting recs for books, stories, authors, and films/TV. Wouldn’t be awesome if someone nominated you? Not for any of the usual categories, but for something you posted right here on Fantasy Friday. Give us your best Hugo-worthy words. Convince us that you should be a nominee (but keep it to 500 words or less!).
At 5 p.m. PST today, if we’ve got at least ten participants, we’ll choose the day’s most award-worthy writer and PayPal them $10 on the spot. Go start your weekend off with a cold one on us! (Minors, make that a couple of hot chocolates.)
First, a quick clarification. Anything you write here counts as fan writing. That makes you eligible to be nominated for Best Fan Writer. However, this year’s Hugos are for work published in 2007, so anything you (or I) write here should not be considered for nomination this year. Next year is another matter.
What I’m really here for, however, is to encourage you to participate, particularly if you have a Worldcon membership. When the Hugo results come out there is often a storm of protest, and one of the most common themes is that the Hugos are voted on by a small and unrepresentative minority. Obviously the price of a Supporting Membership, at $50, is an issue. I’d like to see that come down. But typically only 15-20% of the people who have Worldcon memberships bother to vote. That’s some 4000 potential voters gone missing.
Now, despite what you may have read, the Hugos are not decided on by a secret panel of judges. They are voted on by fans, and that means you. You don’t have to be an expert in order to vote. That’s not the point of a popular vote award. Nor do you have to have “read everything”. The field is huge. No one can get anywhere near reading everything. All you are asked to do is vote honestly about those areas of the field you know about. If we get enough people voting, then those snapshots of the field will combine to give a good overall picture of the field. But if you don’t vote, then you surrender control of the process to those who do. And they might not like the same works and people as you.
Finally, membership aside, it need not cost that much. For the nominating stage, just nominate what you know and like. For the final ballot these days you can find most of the short fiction, most of the art, most of the fanzines and fan writing, all available for free online. Even some of the novel nominees are starting to be made available as free ebooks. So keep an eye on the Denvention 3 web site, and the official Hugo Awards web site, after the nominees are announced. You should find a lot of helpful links.
Remember, they are not Their Hugos, they are Our Hugos. Let’s keep them that way.
Dispatches from the future John O. come from the year 2048 and are made possible by the Jobbsian Earpiece upgrade, which allows Future John O. to send information back in time via the Central Consciousness Carapace, also called the CCC, or 3c, but which most everyone calls The Sea. It was invented in 2045.
The sea canal won’t stay open long on this piece of crap AJO earpiece knockoff I bought, so I’ll matrix-thought quick. I’m currently in Red Bull Skyport on the outskirts of Mosul in Iraq – America’s 51st state. It’s an election year, and Chelsea Clinton is attempting to unseat a brain imprint of Ralph Nader (circa 1979). So let’s see – what advice can I beam back to 2008… Well, first off, invest in brain imprint technology as soon as it’s available. Actually, the inventor is currently (your time) a real loser of a pimply math geek at Farina High in Baltimore, so if you happen to be a hot chick in Baltimore, for God’s sake, go make all his sweaty little dreams come true. If you aren’t a hot chick in Baltimore, but you’re still interested in financial security, go out and buy several cases of Havoline, bury them in the back yard, and forget about them for a few decades. The rent on my dacha outside Putingrad is two teaspoons a month. We make gasoline out of algae in the future, but engines still need motor oil. Go figure.
And Americans? Stop eating. There are over three billion people in India as I write this, but the US still contains the most humanity by weight. Miss America weighed 240 pounds this year. I weigh over seven hundred, and like most Americans rely on anti-gravity pads (thanks, Ivanka Trump!) to move around. I seem to remember a lot of agitation back in your day for America to have an official language, so I’m happy to report that we do now. It’s Chinese. Also, ease up on the whole “gay marriage” controversy. In the future, we’re all gay, and I’m married to a cactus. Why a cactus? See below.
Thanks to global warming I can now tell you that Atlantis was actually under the North Pole, and Antarctica turned out to be fertile ground for marijuana production. Also, it turns out that humans actually can survive 130-degree summers. Thanks to genetic engineering we have that gasoline-shedding algae I mentioned, dogs that wash dishes, and supple, thorn-free cacti that are shaped like Vegas showgirls but consume even less water.
Cats can fly. This was hell on the avian population until we went ahead and made all birds the size of eagles, except eagles, which are the size of biplanes. Non-Americans (and skinny Americans, still found in LA and Manhattan) use them for commutes. The flying cats formed their own country – Cattistan. They declared war on
Please hold for the 3C operator—we hope you enjoy this timeless classic, Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey”…
I made the mistake of doing a straight C&P – I lost the italics and boldface and some nonsense words…
Fyn set me to wait here.
He went to the drys to get stuff for News. No stuff, no News. Wish Fyn would come. What if the drys say no? No News?
Mar sez the drys fraid of us, of wet. Fyn sez they fools, wet is where we come from, is where we go…but Mar makes me fraid, fraid. She says traps, cuts, like we do for fsh! How can they? We have thinks! We have says! We are not fsh.
Fsh make News with no stuff. Fsh dont need drys. Wish we were fsh.
Wish Fyn would come.
Sadness! Not enough of you were inspired to awardness for us to declare a winner. However, I do want to thank Cheryl for coming and clarifying/rallying us (she should win a special Hugo) and Gillie for that awesome bit of flash.