Yay! Gary Wolfe is on the Locus blog:
for 2008, Locus reports having listed 1,669 new titles in SF, fantasy, horror, and its various cross-pollinations. There were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone. Anyone who actually tried to read all of those probably needs a hug, but isn’t someone I want to be trapped in a bar with for very long.
I shall use those numbers next time someone tells me that you shouldn’t vote in the Hugos unless you have “read everything”.
To heck with the numbers, quote the whole thing!
It might be interesting, if not illuminating, to get some idea of how Hugo nominators and voters pick they stuff they read. Do they get publishers lists? Do they listen to their friends’ recommendations? Do they randomly walk the bookstores and magazine racks? Do they haunt efanzine.com?
It might also be illuminating to find out who the nominators and voters are. Not by name, but by “status” – writers, reviewers, publishers, “just” fans (with no slight meant! I’m one of those!).
I know some geographic stuff has been done – mostly related to the Yokohama and Glasgow Worldcons, but I don’t recall (if I knew) how fine-grained that information is. e.g. “How many from northern California vs. how many from greater London…”.
Some interesting demographic play could be done there.
You’ll never get that sort of data out of WSFS, Bob. It would cause a riot on SMOFs if anyone suggested it.
Obviously each individual Hugo nominator has their own way of coming up with their picks, but that doesn’t actually matter much. There is a common misconception that the process of nominating is a process of picking the five “best” items in each category. As I have pointed out on several occasions (most recently here), and Gary and Adam Roberts have also explained in their own way, reading the entire field is impossible. All that the nomination stage asks is that people say “I read these things and I thought that they were really good”. The exact definition of “really good” is, of course, highly variable, but if enough people participate then, by the magic of statistics, we will end up with the five nominees that the largest number of people liked, and those nominees can be reasonably described as the top five fan favorites of the year. (Remembering, of course, that the Hugos are a popular vote award.)
Unfortunately what we get instead is a whole bunch of people with over-inflated ideas about their moral purity who go round saying that no one should vote unless they have “read everything”, which of course means that no one should vote at all.
The idea of “reading everything” has struck me as being more of a punishment than anything else.