Despite what you might have read elsewhere, Hugo Award nominating is open until Saturday, March 26, 2011 23:59 PDT.

Of course it is a good idea to vote earlier, because it would be embarrassing if your internet connection went down tomorrow when you were trying to cast your ballot.

There are plenty of places with suggestions as to how to vote. I’d like to highlight a few people that you may not have thought of.

My friend Gary K. Wolfe has a book of reviews out: Bearings, published by Beccon.

If you are looking for Editor: Long Form candidates, how about Marc Gascoigne at Angry Robot, or Devi Pillai at Orbit, who is N.K. Jemisin’s editor.

In Editor: Short Form Shelley Bond at Vertigo is responsible for some awesome comics, including Fables and The Unwritten.

Jullie Dillon and Kinuko Craft in Professional Artist, because we need some women on the ballot in that category.

Salon Futura is eligible in Semiprozine (which I mention because Kevin forgot).

YIPE!, the utterly awesome costuming fanzine.

And yes, podcasts are eligible as fanzines. Gary and Jonathan pride themselves on the amateur ethic of the Coode Street Podcast.

In Fan Artist my pal Andy Bigwood has done some amazing work for BristolCon.

And finally, please try to make some good nominations in the Graphic Story category. This is probably our last chance to save it. Ideas here.

And for the Campbell the very wonderful Karen Lord and Lauren Beukes.

The short list for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award is as follows:

• Zoo City, Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
• The Dervish House, Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
• Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness (Walker Books)
• Generosity, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
• Declare, Tim Powers (Corvus)
• Lightborn, Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)

I think it is a great list, but inevitably people will talk (and Tom Hunter keeps prodding us to do so). The first thing that everyone has noticed is that Tim Power’s Declare is an old book. It was first published in May 2000, when it co-won the World Fantasy Award and won the International Horror Guild Award. However, the Clarke is for books first published in the UK in the year of eligibility, and the first UK edition came out that year (thank you, Corvus!).

Also there’s a YA book on the list, which I’m sure someone will claim is evidence of “dumbing down”. It is not the first such book to make the Clarke short list — Stephen Baxter’s excellent The H-Bomb Girl was a nominee a few years back.

And of course there are two women authors listed, which is clear evidence of (all together now) Political Correctness Gone Mad! If you wish to further amuse yourselves, go take a look at the entries for the “Guess the Clarke Short List” contest over at Torque Control and see how many men guessed an all-male list.

Finally you may remember a few weeks ago some British fans getting hugely hot under the collar about the Locus Recommended Reading List being Anti-British. Why, Martin Lewis commented here that Adam Roberts’ New Model Army was “almost certainly” excluded from the list because it was only published in the UK. That, of course, was all the fault of Evil Americans like me. Fortunately the Clarke is good British award and can be relied upon not to succumb to cultural imperialism, can’t it?

Well there’s Lauren Beukes, of course — she’s South African. And Tim Powers is American. But that’s only two. What about the other four? Richard Powers is this year’s “who’s he?” entry, and it turns out that he’s American too, and lived for a while in Bangkok. Patrick Ness lives in London, but he was born and raised in the USA. Tricia Sullivan is a past Clarke winner, and also lives in the UK, but she too was born and raised in the USA. That leaves us with… Wait! Isn’t Ian McDonald Irish?

Actually, no. He was born in Manchester. He has lived most of his life in Belfast, but that too is officially part of the UK, even if a lot of its residents have objected violently to that fact. So despite having a Scottish name (or is McDonald an American name these days?) and living in Ireland, Ian represents our one True Brit entry on the short list. Churchill be praised!

Nevertheless, four Americans and a South African on a short list of six. That has to be suspicious, right? The jury must be made up of Evil Americans like me. Well, just in case the members of the BSFA want to grab torches and pitchforks and march upon the Clarke Mansion, there to drag the jurors out and hang them from the nearest oak tree, here are the people they need to look for: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Liz Williams, Phil Nanson, Paul Skevington, Paul Billinger and Martin Lewis.

Oh dear.

I’m not sure if I will be able to stop laughing.

Listening to the Coode Street podcast this morning reminded me of something I wanted to say about award shortlists.

People seem to have a strange habit of assuming that every book on a shortlist is a favorite of most of the people who nominated. Gary and Jonathan are by no means alone in this, it tends to happen every time a shortlist comes out, and other people have said similar things about this year’s Nebulas. In this particular case, one of the works people are scratching their heads over is the Jack McDevitt book, Echo. Similar puzzlement is often expressed over the regular appearance of Robert Sawyer on the Hugo ballot. Can it be that the same people who loved The Windup Girl and The City and The City are also big Sawyer fans?

Well no, and I think Jonathan was moving towards explaining this during the podcast. The way to think of an award shortlist is that it is representative of a number of different allegiances.

In fact politics is a good way to think about this. Suppose the UK had a proportional representation system that elected five members to much larger constituencies than we have now. You might end up with 2 Tories, 2 Labour and 1 LibDem. But no one would assume from this that a typical voter in that constituency liked all 5 candidates. The same is true of an award shortlist where voting is by a large group of people (juried awards don’t necessarily work in quite they same way).

What we can conclude is that within SFWA is there is a group of voters who very much like the sort of book that McDevitt produces, and will always vote for his latest novel. Pretty much the same sort of people, I suspect, vote for Sawyer in the Hugos. The system is designed to produce this sort of result. Indeed, I’m mildly surprised that the Hugos don’t see an epic fantasy book nominated each year, for every similar reasons. Maybe that’s because GRRM doesn’t write them fast enough.

The final ballot, where people are focused on only 5 books, rather than on the entire field, will produce a very different result. People will start reading outside of their comfort zone, looking at books they might never have bought otherwise. That’s where you find out which books really do have wide support, especially if the awards use a PR system like the Hugo final ballot.

By the way, the Nebulas are given for books published in the USA. As I have noted before, lots of British authors are published over there. I know that some of them are SFWA members. This year’s Nebula ballot has some commendable diversity, but aside from a Doctor Who episode and a Terry Pratchett novel I can’t see any British nominees. But I haven’t seen anyone complaining that the Nebulas are anti-British.

My friends at the Bay Area Science Fiction Association have a tradition of having Hugo Award discussions at the beginning of each year during which members can recommend works and people they think are worthy of nomination. Kevin has posted the results of the 2011 discussions to the Hugo Recommend Livejournal community. (There’s one post per category and I don’t want to link to them all. They should be fairly easy to find as they make up one big block of posts.)

My recommendations are on the list. They don’t necessarily represent what will be on my nominating ballot. I do, after all, still have reading time left. And in at least one case (Artist) I have made more than five recommendations as I’m trying to encourage people to think outside the box.

I should note that on my nominating ballot I’ll sometimes ignore a work that I expect to get on so as to be able to give much needed help to some outside candidates. Also I may also nominate works that I think have a chance of getting on the ballot rather than others that I think have less of a chance. Doubtless there are people out there who think that this is disgraceful and makes a mockery of the whole process and should be banned, but there are people who say that about recommendation lists too.

OK, this is my final day of nagging you all about the Translation Awards fund raiser. In a few hours it will all be over. But up until then you still have an opportunity to win some great books. Details here.

We have entered the final week of the Translation Awards fundraiser and I’m delighted to be able to announce that we have two very special new prizes. These are Nicola Griffith’s memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, and the original hardcover edition of John Wyndham’s Plan for Chaos. These books are both limited editions and go for $75 and $85 respectively on Amazon. Further details about both books, and all of the other prizes on offer, are available here. The draw ends of Friday night, so you have only a few days to donate.

And if you can’t afford to donate, please at least mention this in your blog or on Twitter. Other people may be very grateful for the opportunty to take part.

It being that time of year again, all of the usual muddle-headed ideas about the Hugos crawl out of the woodwork and have to be stomped upon. Kevin has made a good start here, taking aim at the idea that there is a shadowy “Hugo Committee” that makes up the rules of the awards and has the power to rescind an award should an outraged fan decide that the wrong person or work won, but there’s always more that needs doing.

One I have seen already this year is that only works published in America are eligible for the Hugos. This is completely wrong. I know that the word “world” occurs in both “World Series” and “World Science Fiction Convention”, but they don’t mean the same thing in those two phrases. There are all sorts of reasons why American writers and American-published works tend to win more Hugos than any other country, starting with the fact that the USA has a huge population (roughly 10 times that of the UK, for example), which makes a big difference in any international, popular vote award. But works published and people living outside of the USA are eligible for the Hugos. The works don’t even have to be written in English (though again voter demographics favor those that are).

The other recurring meme that I want to stop heavily upon is the “I’m not qualified to vote” meme. This one cropped up in the latest episode of Galactic Suburbia. Tansy did a fine job of stomping on it then, but I’m sure other people will be promulgating it so I’m going to add my 2c here. (And Tansy, yes, you are right, it is almost always women who disqualify themselves from voting using this meme.)

The basic form of this meme is that people complain that they are not qualified to vote in awards because they haven’t read enough of the field.

People, this is not what a popular vote award is all about. If you have a juried award then the judges have a duty to read all of the books submitted/recommended to them. If you have a list of nominees to choose from, such as the final ballot in the Hugos, then there is an expectation that you will read all of the nominees because there are only a few of them. But an open popular vote award, such as the nomination stage of the Hugos, or the Locus Awards, does not work like that.

Because if the requirement was that you read “all of the field”, or even a majority of it, then no one would be qualified to vote. Remember, the Hugos are open to every work of science fiction and fantasy published in the previous year, regardless of where it was published or what language it was published in. No one can possibly read more than a tiny fraction of that, ergo no one is qualified to vote. That’s clearly a ridiculous conclusion, so the argument must be ridiculous.

Popular vote awards are designed to find out what is popular. So when an award says “best” what it really means is “most popular”. The process of finding out what is “most popular” is statistical. You ask a large number of people which books (or stories or movies, etc.) they liked, and you add up all of their individual votes. Those works that get the most votes are, by definition, the most popular.

So to be qualified to vote in a popular vote award, all you have to do is to have read (or viewed) something that you thought was good. No other qualification is required.

Now of course you may think that the whole idea of a popular vote award is stupid, and that awards ought to only be given out by experts who are in a position to know what is “best”. But there are plenty of awards out there, and if you think that way all you need to do is pay attention to the World Fantasy Awards or the Clarke or the other awards that have juries.

One thing, however, is certain. If you don’t vote in a popular vote award then your views as to what is good won’t be included in the statistical process, and so the sort of works you like will be less likely to win. The only effect of taking this high moral stance and disqualifying yourself from voting is to hand control of the process to other people. And if you do that then you have no right to complain about the results.

(Some of you may remember that large chunks of this post appeared on SF Awards Watch a couple of years back, but these things need saying every year.)

One of the nice things about the SF&F community is the way people rally round to support good causes. My tweeting about the Translation Awards fund raiser caught the attention of Mary Anne Mohanraj and the nice folks at the Speculative Literature Foundation. The net result of this was today’s announcement of a $250 annual grant. Woot! And thank you, SLF!

We are now more than half way to our fund raising goal, and there’s just over a week to go before the deadline. The current list of prizes on offer is here. Remember, it only takes $1 to qualify you for the draw.

Hugo nominations are open for business, and the once-derided practice of doing pimpage posts has exploded across the blogosphere. I’m trying to keep track of them here, and probably failing dismally.

In addition you can make your own recommendations at SF Awards Watch or in any of the other recommendation sites linked to from there.

Various projects are also underway to educate voters. Hopefully a lot of effort will be lavished on the Graphic Story category. I certainly have something in the pipeline.

The discussion on the proposed YA Hugo is still going strong and a couple of points are worth highlighting. Firstly, Chris Barkley has created a Facebook page for the discussion. You still have to join Facebook to use it, but you don’t have to be on Chris’s friend list. You can find it here. (And yes, the work linked for me.)

Also there was a very interesting comment by Elspeth Kovar who had gone outside the fannish community for a reaction. Here’s the salient bit:

I was chatting with the manager of my local bookstore yesterday and it occurred to me to ask if she thought if this Hugo would be a good idea. She said “Yes!” so quickly and emphatically it rocked me back on my heels. I asked for a brief explanation I could post here.

Her reasoning is that while there are hundreds of awards almost none go to the books young adults actually read. A Hugo for childrens/YA books would change that. Those readers would finally have a solid basis for choosing books. It would also make them more aware of the Hugos which would help them choose from books that aren’t shelved in age-specific areas.

All to often these debates take place in a relatively small community and people make assertions about the effects of a change without any effort to test those assertions. (I have, for example, seen people assert that a YA Hugo would do nothing for the profile of the awards.) So thanks to Elspeth for widening the discussion.