Nominations for the 2012 Hugo Awards are now open, and my Twitter feed is starting to fill up with people listing their eligible work. People do have until March 11th to cast their ballots, and history suggests that the vast majority of them will wait until the last few days to do so. Partly that’s prevarication, but also people will still be frantically reading, so I guess it may help to get your book in the queue. If your intention is simply to remind people that your work is out there, however, you might as well wait until March.
There is one deadline before then, however. If you were not a member of last year’s Worldcon (Renovation), and are not yet a member of Chicon 7, then you must buy at least a Supporting Membership of Chicon 7 by the end of January. It’s only $50, and you’ll get the Voter Packet.
The things that was exercising people on Twitter this morning is the fact that Chicon 7 is using its right to add a one-off Hugo category to trial Best Fancast. This is a new category for fan-created audio and video that was proposed last year but needs ratification before it comes into effect as an official category.
The problem with this is that, until the constitutional change is ratified, podcasts are still eligible for Best Fanzine, and may still get nominated there. This is going to provide a major headache for the Hugo Administration Committee. It would, in my view, be quite wrong of them to move all podcast nominations for Best Fanzine to Best Fancast, because people who object to the Fancast category may with the make a statement with their nominations. What they may do is move nominations from the category where a work gets least votes and combine them with nominations in the category where it gets most votes. It would work like this:
Suppose, Notes from Coode Street got 20 nominations in Best Fanzine and 24 in Best Fancast. That means that 20 nominations from Best Fanzine can potentially be added to the 24 for Best Fancast. However, if a voter has nominated the work in both categories then their vote won’t be moved. Also, if a voter’s ballot already has 5 nominations in the Best Fancast category then their vote can’t be moved.
Of course the Admins could take the view that Fanzines and Fancasts are wholly different things, and that therefore nominations cannot be combined in this way. This is what happened in 2005 when Best Website was trialed. Emerald City managed to get on the ballot in both categories, which angered a lot of people.
So it is all a bit unclear, and I think needlessly unclear. I don’t think that there is any doubt that Best Fancast is a viable category. What’s at issue is whether podcasts are sufficiently distinguishable from fanzines to make having two categories necessary and desirable. What happens in the case of SF Signal, which has podcasts and a blog? What would happen if a podcast published a transcript of the audio and put it on efanzines.com? Trialing the category isn’t going to solve those issues, though I guess it may highlight them.
Kevin and I have already been asked if we’ll do another podcast talking through these issues. We probably will, but I think we’ll wait until February to see if anything else contentious pops up.
