(1) HUGO VOTER PACKET. Members can access the 2018 edition: “2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet Now Available”.
Worldcon 76 has issued the 2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet, a collection of finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards made available to members of Worldcon 76 to assist them in making informed decisions when voting on this year’s Hugo Awards. The packet is available for download from the Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards website in the “Hugo Voter Packet” section. Members of Worldcon 76 can sign in using their Hugo Award voting credentials that were sent to them when the final Hugo Award ballot was issued.
Only members of Worldcon 76 can access the 2018 Hugo Award Voter Packet and vote on the 2018 Hugo Awards.
…Worldcon 76 will shortly send an announcement regarding the availability of the Hugo Voter Packet to all members who registered their e-mail address with the convention. This mailing will include a copy of the member’s voting credentials (membership number and voting PIN). Members can request a copy of their credentials using the 2018 Hugo Awards PIN lookup page.
A 1943 Retro-Hugo Voter Packet is in preparation.
(2) “SNAPE” MEMORABILIA TO AUCTION. You Alan Rickman fans should get ready to empty your money belts. Taryn Ryder, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Alan Rickman’s frustrations playing Snape in ‘Harry Potter’ revealed in personal letters” says the actor’s archive is about to be auctioned off by Neil Pearson Rare Books for 950,000 pounds, which includes many Harry Potter collectibles, including Rickman’s annotated copies of Potter scripts, as well as scripts for other films and plays Rickman was in, like Die Hard.
Rickman — who died of cancer in 2016 — helmed the role in all eight films from 2001 to 2011.
One letter is from producer David Heyman, who sent Rickman a thank-you note after 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “Thank you for making HP2 a success,” it reads. “I know, at times, you are frustrated but please know that you are an integral part of the films. And you are brilliant.”
Alan Rickman's fan mail.https://t.co/piFuSXLIoI pic.twitter.com/zSshhR0yJY
— Neil Pearson (@RareNeilPearson) April 17, 2018
(3) MORE ON WISCON. From S. Qiouyi Lu. Thread starts here:
https://twitter.com/sqiouyilu/status/1001387473497288705
(4) CODES OF CONDUCT ELSEWHERE. According to Business Insider, “Programmers are having a huge debate over whether they should be required to behave respectfully to each other”. A lot of the objections are still current events in the Vox Popoli comment section, but not in most parts of fandom.
Last week, a software engineer publicly quit a very popular open-source project, setting off a firestorm of debate within the programming world.
Programmers are arguing about whether they should have to agree to a community code of conduct that requires them to behave respectfully.
They are also arguing about whether programs that aim to increase participation from underrepresented groups are “racism.”
The debate began on Wednesday when a developer named Rafael Avila de Espindola quit the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project, to which he had been a major contributor over the past decade.
Avila outlined several of his frustrations with the group but said he quit because it was requiring him to agree to a community code of conduct to attend its conference.
That code of conduct basically says the group is open to people from all walks of life and expects its members to be courteous.
Avila also said he was unhappy that the project had decided to accept an intern from a group called Outreachy, which offers paid internships to women, LGBTQ folks, African-Americans, people with Hispanic or Latin heritage, and those with indigenous American ancestries.
In other words, the internships are for people in underrepresented gender and racial groups in the programming/open-source worlds; white men and Asian men are the two groups best represented in tech, diversity reports have found.
…Despite that kind of rancor, large open-source communities and conferences are increasingly adopting community codes of conduct.
And for good reason — the open-source world has a reputation for aggressive, rude, and intimidating behavior.
In 2013, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the god of open-source programming, was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world.
He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.
(5) ERASURE FIGHTER. James Davis Nicoll’s personal Episode VII appears on Tor.com — “Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part VII”.
At this stage of James’ Tour of Disco-Era Women SF Authors, we have reached M. Certain letters are deficient in authors whose surnames begin with that particular letter. Not so M. There is an abundance of authors whose surnames begin with M. Perhaps an excess. In fact, there are more authors named Murphy than the authors I listed whose names begin with I….
Sondra Marshak is best known for her Star Trek-related activity. Star Trek, an American science fiction television show akin to Raumpatrouille—Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion, was cancelled after seventy-nine episodes in the mid-1960s. An anthology of original stories commissioned a decade after a show’s cancellation seems unthinkable and yet in 1976, Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s co-edited collection, Star Trek: The New Voyages, was published by Bantam Books, soon followed by Star Trek: The New Voyages 2. This suggests that the show’s fandom managed to survive the show’s demise. Perhaps some day there will be a revival of this venerable program—perhaps even a movie!—although I must caution fans against getting their hopes up…
Fans of John Scalzi’s Redshirts may find the New Voyages story “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited” of interest, as yet another example of science fiction authors independently hitting on very similar ideas.
(6) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Mary Robinette Kowal and Lawrence C. Connolly on Wednesday, June 20, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) in New York.
Mary Robinette Kowal
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: Ghost Talkers, and The Glamourist Histories series and the forthcoming Lady Astronaut duology. She is also a three time Hugo Award winner and a cast member of the podcast Writing Excuses. Her short fiction appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.
Lawrence C. Connolly
Lawrence C. Connolly is one of the writers for the anthology film Nightmare Cinema, premiering next month at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Produced by Mick Garris, the movie goes into wide release later this year. Connolly’s books include the Stoker finalist Voices (scheduled for re-release this summer), This Way to Egress, and Veins. More at LawrenceCConnolly.com.
(7) FUNDRAISER. Tessa B. Dick is trying to raise $5,000 through YouCaring to “Keep my home”. She’s got $4,205 in contributions as of this writing. Her May 28 update said:
I really need your help, or I am not going to make it. I don’t know how to explain that I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see that gang banger with a knife to a boy’s throat. I can’t go anywhere because every time I walk out the door, I see his gangster buddies coming after me because my testimony put their buddy in prison. I got crisis counseling and I coped for twelve years, but I can’t cope any more. I went through major forest fires in 2003 and 2008, a severe burn to my foot in 2007, a head injury in 2010, a broken leg in 2012, and more stress than I can describe. I got a settlement for the head injury that didn’t even cover my medical bills, which is why I had to go bankrupt.
I should qualify for disability, based on my severe weight loss alone, but they keep turning me down. My only hope is to get this house in good enough shape to get a reverse mortgage.
(8) GAME MAN. Rich Lynch was tuned into tonight’s Jeopardy! In the category “Award Winning Books” one of the answers was:
(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.
Crayola crayons’ distinctive smell — ranked 18th in a list of the 20 most identifiable smells in a 1982 Yale University study — is largely due to the stearic acid used to make the waxy consistency. Stearic acid is a derivative of beef fat.
Source: Mental Floss
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY
- Born May 29, 1906 — T.H. White, best known for his Arthurian novels including The Sword in the Stone
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- JJ finds Tolkien and Middle-Earth deconstructed in Existential Comics’ “Council of Elrond”.
- John King Tarpinian found one voter’s party preference was not all that surprising in Bizarro.
(12) THE OLD STOMPING GROUNDS. ExCeL, the site of the 2014 London Worldcon (aka Loncon 3), was the host site of MCM Comic Con this past weekend (25–27 May 2018). Newham Recorder has the story: “Superheroes and spandex squeeze into ExCeL for MCM London Comic Con”
Tens of thousands of pop culture buffs took a pilgrimage to the ExCeL this bank holiday weekend for the UK’s largest comic book convention.
…Monolithic entertainment brands seemed keen to continue cashing in on the nerd demographic, wheeling out a long list of stars for the event, including Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, The Defenders’ Rosario Dawson and Khary Payton and Cooper Andrews from zombie series The Walking Dead.
(13) MAINSTREAMING FAN REFERENCES. Karl-Johan Norén found a “Sign that the Hugo awards and sf fandom is, or at least is becoming, mainstream: we are used in a joke but not as the butt of it” in NewsThump’s headline “UK Brexit proposals nominated for Hugo Award in Fantasy category”.
(14) FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT. BBC reports “Fortnite sued for ‘copying’ rival game PUBG”.
The makers of Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games, have been accused of copying rival title PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).
The studio behind PUBG has asked a court in South Korea to determine whether Epic Games copied its intellectual property.
Fortnite and PUBG have both attracted millions of gamers with their huge “last player standing” online battles.
Epic Games has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
PUBG was first released in March 2017. It was inspired by the Japanese thriller film Battle Royale, in which a group of students is forced to fight to the death by the government.
In PUBG, up to 100 players parachute on to an island, search for weapons and kill one another until only one player remains.
Fortnite was first released in July 2017 but its Battle Royale mode was not added until September 2017.
(15) WARPED TRUTH. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently released a 2010 study document entitled “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions” [PDF file]. The report was originally marked Unclassified, but For Official Use Only (U/FOUO) and was publicly posted by (among others) by KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas NBC affiliate (“I-Team: Documents prove secret UFO study based in Nevada”).
So, does the document provide a roadmap to a working warp drive engine? Probably not, according to at least one physicist. Quoting a Science Alert article “The US Military Has Released a Mysterious Report on ‘Warp Drives’. Here’s What Physicists Think About It”:
The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or “dark energy,” a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.
“Control of this higher dimensional space may b? ? source of technological control ?v?r the dark energy density and could ultimately play ? role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, ? warp drive,” the report says, adding: “Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years.”
However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report’s optimism.
“It’s bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn’t,” Carroll said.
“This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we’re going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground – this is real physics. But this is not something that’s going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever.”
(16) THE VASTY FIELDS OF GALLIFREY. Io9’s James Whitbrook advises everyone about “The Best Stories to Watch During Twitch’s Absurdly Ginormous Classic Doctor Who Marathon”.
Today, Twitch begins a seven-week endurance run/celebration of all things old-school Doctor Who, live streaming over 500 episodes worth of adventures in Time and Space. Unless you happen to have seven weeks of free time starting imminently (in which case, I envy you), you likely can’t sit down and watch all of it. So here’s a few must-watch storylines to dive in for….
(17) ANOTHER BUYING OPPORTUNITY. From Mental Floss we learn: “An Original Doctor Who TARDIS Is Hitting the Auction Block”.
If you’ve ever wondered if there’s really something to this whole “dimensional transcendentalism” thing, a.k.a. the explanation given as to why Doctor Who’s TARDIS is so tiny on the outside but enormous on the inside, now’s your chance to find out for yourself. A TARDIS created for Peter Cushing for the 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks is getting ready to hit the auction block at Ewbank’s as part of its “Entertainment & Memorabilia” auction, which kicks off on May 31.
(18) DIVIDENDS. Absolutely true.
https://twitter.com/realtegan/status/1001586146261061634
(19) INSTANT CLASSIC. Applause for Matthew Johnson’s latest filk in comments:
Also, for the Nick Lowe/Johnny Cash fans among us:
The beast of squees
Obsessed with old, forgotten Bonds
And whichever one you like
Is one of which he isn’t fond
God help the beast of squeesThe beast of squees
Knows more than you on Doctor Who
Which host was better on Blue’s Clues
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might declare a Mary Sue
God help the beast of squeesSometimes he tries to kid me
That he’s just a normal fan
Or even that he’s run right out of things to pan
I feel pity when I can
For the beast of squeesThat everybody knows
They’ve seen him out in fannish clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s A New Hope or New Year
God help
The beast of squees
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rich Lynch, Cat Eldridge, Bill, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, James Davis Nicoll, Matthew Kressel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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(8) Speaking of Mr. Gaiman, he was a fitting choice to provide the voice of God, Lucifer Morningstar’s father, in the Lucifer episode “Once Upon a Time,” broadcast on May 28, inasmuch as Gaiman created this version of Lucifer in Sandman # 4.
I saw some people complaining about this in the last pixels thread, but if you’re having trouble with the Packet’s links to netgalley books, copy and paste the links rather than clicking on them – the Robert Bennett books have a bad link if you click on them but it works if you copy/paste
(6) “I Have Nine Mouths, And I Can’t Stop Screaming!”
True Fifth!
And 80 proof too!
Now to read.
“Are we not scrolls? We are Pixel!”
Warning: that DIA report is 17 megabytes (17,852KB, according to my computer).
PJ Evans: Good point. I didn’t pay attention because my computer gulped down some of those HVP files almost as fast as I could click. (Not the Series files, of course….)
It didn’t take long to download, but it wasn’t instant. But it is a large file, and I thought a warning might be useful.
Tenth is the new Fifth.
Clickity
Pro tip: Don’t give blood and then go spend time in the heat. Bad move. Really bad move.
(7) At the link, Tessa Dick mentions monthly payments to lawyers. I wonder whether this involves her circa-2009 battle with Electric Shepherd Productions (www.courthousenews.com/philip-k-dicks-ex-battles-stepdaughters-over-rights/). When I first heard of ESP, I’d thought all three of PKD’s children (including Tessa’s son Christopher) were involved, but I suppose if that were (still) the case, he could help her out.
By the way Mike, do you plan to do a post of what you included in the Hugo packet for the curious ?
(1) It took me a loooong time to download everything.
I would like to commend Oor Wombat for providing her novel in SEVEN (7) different formats, including 5 different flavors of .epub. That’s service!
(4) Oh noez. They have to be polite?! What a terrible burden!
(5) Well, I’m confused right off, since the first thing on the list says it’s a translation into English of Campbell’s “Tales”… but those were all English translations. It must have been a different translation from the original stories.
(1) Good thing my modem upgrade arrived early.
(4) Oh, Open Source Dudes. Try that at a company that pays you to be there, see how far it gets you.
4)
Techies, especially Free Software and Open Source ones, are at the point now where SFF was about 10 years ago. Some people are trying to point out problems while everyone else is going “Lalalalaaa, can’t hear you!” or even doubling down. It is a distressing environment even for me, and I am a white cishet guy.
I’m pretty unhappy about having to download everything in the packet in every format. I’ve tried part 1 of the Series packet 3 times now, and the download has failed each time — and there are 4 more parts to go. And did they seriously put the Pro Artist images in the packet in ultra-high res?
(4) CODES OF CONDUCT ELSEWHERE. ::eyeroll:: As a programmer, I apologize on behalf of programmers everywhere (well, most-where) for this dufus.
(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. Beef fat? Mmm, tasty, tasty crayons.
@Lurkertype: I did not realize that, absent DRM, there were so many flavors of EPUB. Gak.
@JJ: I’m baffled that Galen Dara included two formats/resolutions. And why anyone would include ginormous TIFFs in this day and age (most of them 58 MB and one of them 201 MB!) is beyond me. Dara and Sana Takeda went a little overboard there! Shoot, even most of Steven Stiles’s TIFFs aren’t that big (though one is a whopping 82 MB!). File, Save As, artists! We’re not printing the art for our walls or a gallery or whatever; we’re looking at the art on computer screens. 😉
[ETA: Well, okay, maybe I’ll print it now that I have a 200 MB TIFF, who knows. /s]
P.S. Lest that sound overly grumpy, I do appreciate the contributes to the packet! But, like @JJ, I feel giant files just don’t make sense.
BTW cover & description for the next “Wayward Children” book. 🙂 If I’m just the last to know (again), sorry. 😉
4. So is it that he can’t be civil or that he doesn’t want to work with minority and women interns?
It may be inconveniet from a downloadable point-of-view, but it seems reasonable to me that artists competing for an award are going to want their work available in the highest possible fidelity.
Cliff Ramshaw: It may be inconveniet from a downloadable point-of-view, but it seems reasonable to me that artists competing for an award are going to want their work available in the highest possible fidelity.
For art awards like the Chesleys which are juried by art professionals, absolutely. For the Hugos, people can still get high-quality images at less than ultra-high resolution.
There’s something wrong with the Oathbringer PDF. It’s over 211MB, and it should be around 15MB.
And NetGalley is telling me that the first two Divine Cities novels are not available to request; I was able to get the third one.
Okay, three hours of downloading, and I’ve got 19 of the 26 packets so far, with the two Graphic Novels, three Pro Artist, and two Semiprozine mega-packets yet to go. 😐
Downloading … whirr ta-packeta-packeta-packeta…
My hardcopy of Six Wakes arrived yesterday, so I’ll read that while doing the download….
My own, no doubt selfish, view of the Hugo packet is that it’s a convenience, and will hopefully fill in gaps, of stuff that’s hard to find for geographical or other reasons. Six Wakes, and last year’s Too Like the Lightning, are cases in point… it would be good if the contributors to the packet took a look at the situation, realised “hey, this thing is not available right now to all the voters, maybe it should go into the packet in full so that potential voters can get a good look at it”.
I’m all for supporting the writers and publishers, and wherever it’s possible, I’ve bought the books (in several cases, before they were even nominated – like many others here, I’m quite sure). But the real advantage of the packet, it seems to me, is in filling in the gaps where I can’t buy the books… and publishers would benefit, I think, from filling those gaps. Excerpts are all very well, but some of us don’t want to pass judgement until we’ve read the whole story. And if I can read (and hopefully enjoy) five finalists but not the sixth, it seems to me that the sixth is at something of a disadvantage in the voting….
@Steve Wright
Absolutely quite a few books fail to stick the landing as it were. I never judge on excerpts. Fortunately I have already read Six Wakes – I bought it in paper last year. I haven’t read (or bought) Stone Sky yet.
I am also not a fan of PDF only as I find that more of a pain to read. I know I sound grumbly, it wasn’t so long ago that I would have been overjoyed to receive PDFs.
As someone who does not have broadband Internet, having to download giant files (instead of being able to choose between high and low res images, or pick a single ebook file format) basically means having to take myself to a coffee shop or library to do my downloads. Which isn’t the end of the world but is annoying.
@JJ:
Oathbringer:
The graphics are big, each of them more than 1MB, including 130 chapter headings. Extracting the first 150 text-only pages gives me a (unfortunately useless) file of 3MB.
Divine Cities:
Garik’s hint to copy and paste the link instead of clicking worked for me, I was able to download all three.
1) Huzzah! As noted above, a lot of downloading though.
16) Judging from yesterday and talking with Michael Lee, they apparently are repreating three stories a day on a loop. So yesterday was Unearthly Child, Edge of Destruction and The Daleks.
I do wish for the nth time that they would animate Marco Polo…
GiantPanda: Garik’s hint to copy and paste the link instead of clicking worked for me, I was able to download all three.
I copied and pasted all three in exactly the same way. The first two go to the right page for each book, but the message says “This widget is no longer valid”.
(3) From the Twitter feed:
There was no opportunity given to “back down” before the ban was issued. This was in fact a civil disagreement, not a case of micro-aggression. Wiscon is acting as a censor here, which isn’t making anyone safer.
@ World Weary:
There are many possible reasons, ranging from “I do not think any type of discrimination is OK, so will flat refuse to have anything to do with any-thing/one that explicitly mentions having filter criteria” (very principled, probably misguided, the keyword here is “explicitly”), all the way to “they’re letting $MINORITY in? not on my shift!”, meandering through a variety of offshots of many possible opinions.
Taking the day off work. I was up past 1am getting revisions to a journal article done. One of the reviewers was a real piece of work. Actually used the word ‘wantonly’ when discussing my article (it is for a scientific publcation. Wrote and deleted many unprofessional responses to this before I settled on leaving the note (? word choice) next to it. This was amid other bits of teeth grinding stupidity.
Should be sleeping but it is already too hot. So downloading Hugo Packet instead. At least until I fall face down on the keyboard snoring.
Woah. Big files.
Clearly sleepy and stupid because I keep trying to wait for downloads by doing things that take up more bandwidth. Sigh.
@4: I’m disheartened but not surprised that this is still being debated. In 1995 I started working for a software company with a pathological culture; it gradually improved, but went through huge turnover (one year had ~1300 new hires, ~800 departures out of ~3000 total employees) in the process — which according to rumor had been started by the board firing the founder because he drove away so many people. I especially note the article’s stating that Red Hat is famous for its meritocracy, defined as
As I’ve found the hard way, without some constraints that can be an invitation to getting one’s way by shouting over and down other people. Red Hat’s boss seems to get some of this:
(Note to @Ingvar: the actual reasons in the full article include something that isn’t explicitly your 2nd but just barely avoids using the words “reverse discrimination”.)
@8: so did anyone get it? Were there at least any amusingly (e.g., egregiously) wrong answers?
RedHat, systemd. Hmmm…
@ Chip Hitchcock:
Yeah, my reading of the meaning behind the words falls more squarely towards the latter interpretation, but the actual words are (annoyingly) readable to mean something much closer to the first. In the original email (towards the bottom), the developer writes
With no other information than what I have at hand, I can only guess as to where between (1) and (2) the mindset behind these words come from. I would lean more towards (2), since I am not seeing any wordage making an interpretation closer to (1) more likely. Even so, I think both of the positions are, at best, misguided.
Here’s another exciting discovery at Comic Book Plus (all public domain material): a run of 133 Spirit Sections from 1940 onward. [Insert usual blather here about Mom’s collection of these.]
I’m in the early days now, and am seeing Eisner slowly pick up steam. This is as cool as reading a chronological stack of MAD magazines and watching Mort Drucker develop, to pick just one simile.
14) While normally I’d think there’s no way that will work, in this case EPIC Games, who make Fortnight, were contracted and providing technical assistance on PUBG prior to the release of the Fortnight Battle Royale mode. Originally Fortnight was a PvE game that wasn’t doing so hot before they released a Battle Royale Mode.
I suppose I could, though it’s a pathetic effort. I didn’t have 40 hours to make it into a little fanzine, the way I like to do, so it’s just a few pages of links.
If you scroll us, do we not bleed pixels?
(13) Not quite, since the Hugo doesn’t actually have a “fantasy category” —
but they did try, I suppose.
@Anthony
Systemd, blerch. Also PulseAudio and Gnome3…
The Hugos are for both science fiction and fantasy, thus, no separate fantasy category.
You can stop laughing now. But seriously, folks…. For years sf fans would get pissed off if fantasy got nominated. And the year a Harry Potter novel won — there are people who still haven’t recovered from that. All the same, the Hugos are for sff, not just sf.
I just re-downloaded the Fanzine category, and yup, the links now work for me when they didn’t before.
Now to go figure out the NetGalley stuff. *sigh*
(13) If one wants to nitpick properly, the Brexit papers should have been nominated to the Worldcon Young Adult Fiction Award (Not a Hugo).
I posted this link in yesterday’s thread in replying to Anna Feruglio Dal Dan’s mention, but after reading much of it (having merely googled it up earlier) I think the conversation about the WisCon situation in it is good enough to be worth posting again to today’s thread to give it a little more visibility.
Some supplementary Hugo packet notes for those struggling to figure out the big multi-part downloads and otherwise wondering what’s included (most tallying of fiction categories was already covered by filers yesterday).
SERIES:
Folder 1 has The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance from Stormlight Archive
Folder 2 has JUST the PDF of Oathbringer from Stormlight
Folder 3 has the MOBI and EPUBs of Oathbringer, plus the World of Five Gods inclusions (Curse of Chalion and Penric’s Fox)
Folder 4 has the Raksura inclusions (First 2 novels and a short) (Note: the file listed as “The Dead City” actually appears to be the entirety of Stories of the Raksura Vol 2, at least in MOBI – so that’s 4 bonus stories :)), plus the first 4 Lady Trent books, and the Divine Cities download links for NetGalley
Folder 5 has Lady Trent book 5, the InCryptid download links, and all the InCryptid short fiction not available for free on McGuire’s website.
GRAPHIC:
Folder 1 has Bitch Planet and Monstress (full, PDF)
Folder 2 has My Favourite Thing is Monsters, Paper Girls and Saga Vol. 7 (full, PDF)
(Not included: Black Bolt.)
SEMIPROZINE:
Folder 1 has both WRITTEN and AUDIO files for 5 Escape Pod stories.
Folder 2 has contributions from all 5 other entrants: Beneath Ceaseless Skies’ entry is their anniversary edition, the others are all “Best of 2017” compilations.
(I haven’t downloaded any of the artist folders, sorry…)
Other stuff I noticed:
Editor Short Form has a lot of content: notably, John Joseph Adams’ contribution includes literally all of Lightspeed magazine’s 2017 stories (850 pages in PDF), and Jonathan Strahan has included both his Infinity Wars and Best SFF of 2016 anthologies. There’s also issues of Clarkesworld (Clarke) and Asimov’s (Williams) and a selection of samples from tor.com novellas (Harris), plus the same best of Uncanny anthology as above.
Editor Long Form is mostly just lists of books, but Navah Wolfe has included samples from several novels she edited (no longer than you’d get from a Kindle sample, but still nice)
Clipping’s song is the only content in the BDP short folder, unsurprisingly.
Good luck to all wrestling with the internet and/or NetGalley – I registered for October Daye last year – I promise it IS worth having an account, especially if you have the option of reading on Kindle. Hope that helps with anyone wondering which giant folders to prioritise.