Saturday, January 24, 2015

Revised Hugo Nominations Ballot, version 2

After Nick Mamatas explained to me that Hugo nominations are tallied according to ranked-choice, instant runoff voting, and thus that multiple nominations would not dilute one's top choices, I started revising my nominations ballot. (That is a good thing, or otherwise I might not have learned from the Sasquan folks that a "known bug" had deleted some early ballots. If you submitted your nominations early, you may want to double-check.)

So far, the only category in which I have filled in all five slots is the Short Story category, in part because two of those slots are taken up by my own work. Here's my ballot for that category thus far:

  1. "Bonfires in Anacostia"
  2. "Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self" from Phantasm Japan
  3. "Resurrection Points" by Usman T. Malik, from Strange Horizons
  4. "Five Stages of Grief after the Alien Invasion" by Caroline M. Yoachim, from Clarkesworld
  5. "Dharmas" by Vajra Chandrasekera, from Shimmer

Of course now I'm agonizing that I may have missed something even more worthy. So readers, tell me: If those are the sorts of things that I like, what are some stories I may have overlooked that are worthy of my attention?

The same goes for the other categories. In novels, I still have Station Eleven at the top, and put Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle as my second choice. While the Matsuura is basically noir, in the genre-spanning way of much good Japanese fiction, it has more than a few fantastic elements along the way. Anything else that I read and enjoyed in the last year is not Hugo-eligible. In the Novella and Novelette categories, I still have only Phantasm Japan pieces: The excellent "Sisyphean" (novella) and "From the Nothing, with Love" (novelette), as well as the not-quite-excellent but still intriguing "The Last Packet of Tea" by Quentin S. Crisp (novelette). What am I missing?

For the Campbell award, in addition to myself, I have also nominated Usman T. Malik (to whom I would be honored to lose), and Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is in her second and final year of eligibility, and who I fear is unlikely to win due to some ridiculous drama). Who am I missing?

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