The 2015 Hugo Voter Packet can now be downloaded by members of Sasquan here.
The packet contains the full text of three Hugo-nominated novels, The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, and The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, plus excerpts of Skin Game by Jim Butcher and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie.
All of the nominated short fiction and four of the five graphic novels are included in their entirety. (Sasquan’s press release suggests Zombie Nation may still be coming).
Complete copies of four of the five Related Works nominees are in the packet, together with an excerpt from Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli.
There is some material in each of the other categories except the Dramatic Presentations, but as Sasquan notes in the release, “not everyone wanted us to include their work in this packet.”
This download is supplied by the creators and publishers of nominated works to allow Hugo Awards voters to make an informed choice. It is free to Sasquan members, including new members who join before July 31.
Voting on the Hugo Awards is open to all Supporting, Attending or Young Adult members of Sasquan. Information about voting and a ballot may be found here [PDF file]. Voting requires a membership number and Hugo PIN, and can be done online here.
The full press release follows the jump.
MEDIA RELEASE #2015-7
Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention
19-23 August 2015 at Spokane WA USA
http://www.sasquan.org [email protected]
HUGO NOMINEE PACKET AVAILABLE
Spokane, Washington, 18 May 2015
A digital file of many of the Hugo Award nominees is now available for members of Sasquan to download at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/packet_download/. This free download is supplied by the creators and publishers of works that are nominated for the awards. It is free to all current Supporting, Attending and Young Adult members of Sasquan, and those who become members before 31 July 2015. Its purpose is to allow those who are voting on the Hugo Awards to be able to make an informed choice among the nominated works.
All of the short fiction and graphic novels are included in their entirety (((assuming Zombie Nation comes through!))). The packet contains the full text of three of the novels: The Dark between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, amd The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Skin Game by Jim Butcher and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie are represented by extensive excerpts. One of the five finalists in the Related Work category is represented by an excerpt: Letters from Gardner, by Lou Antonelli. There is some material in each of the other categories except the Dramatic Presentations, but not everyone wanted us to include their work in this packet.
Voting on the Hugo Awards is open to all Supporting, Attending or Young Adult members of Sasquan. More information about voting and a ballot may be found at http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2015-Hugo-Ballot.pdf. In order to vote, you will have to enter your membership number and Hugo PIN at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting.
Sasquan membership and registration information is available at https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php
ENDS For general media enquiries about Sasquan please contact [email protected].
To unsubscribe, click here: [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
ABOUT THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers, and fans of science fiction and fantasy. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by the Worldcon membership and presented during the convention. Sasquan is organized under the banner of the SWOC: http://swoc.org/contact.php
“World Science Fiction Society”, “WSFS”, “World Science Fiction Convention”, “Worldcon”, “NASFiC”, “Hugo Award”, the Hugo Award Logo, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Trophy Rocket are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.
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Ach. No joy downloading the packet to my iPad. Anybody else have any luck?
Jonathan: In case it’s a useful data point, I was able to download everything to a desktop PC using Windows.
Thanks, Mike. However as I rather dislike reading anything of length on the desktop, I had high hopes although I saw the notice that it might not work for phones and tablets. Oh well.
If you can download it to a desktop, you should be able to convert it to a friendly format for whatever your reading preference is.
I was able to download to the PC, and just sideload it to my phone and Nexus.
Boy howdy did I just fall down a reading hole. This is gonna be fun.
Yippee! I’ve been waiting for this – loads to read, good and bad. Watch me get bruises on my bottom from sitting and reading all day.
For those on Windows, Calibre is a great ebook management programme and is useful for getting ebooks to your phone or pad.
And me with a 10 hour train ride tomorrow. It’s like Sasquan just knew….
I am so surprised. Not.
I don’t read as much SF as I used to (nothing like as much: my parents were called in by the head teacher because I spent every break time reading, and I found out the hard way that reading and cycling to/from school should be done sequentially). I was very active in the SF society at university, and helped run a couple of small cons, but it’s nearly 30 years since I voted on the Hugos, and over 20 since I had even a supporting membership. Parenthood and career and everything kinda took over that whole chunk of my life. Then the Puppies came along, around about the same time I found myself single and with an empty nest. So I heard about the slates and the effect on the Hugo ballots and I wondered: maybe SF has gone downhill while I wasn’t looking; maybe it has been taken over by preachy message fiction, nannying nonsense, and dull political tracts. And somewhen in the lost decades, the cost of a supporting membership got to be pocket money, and also teh intarwebs brought us these new-fangled Hugo Voter Packets. So what the heck, I thought I’d see for myself.
In the meantime I read the Best Novel from last year, and that was pretty good: war, death, adventure, double-cross, galaxy-spanning empire, and a couple of good ideas (admittedly ones which have been done before, by Delany and Vinge, but there’s nothing wrong with that). And I read the runner-up, and that was pretty good too (who knew that the economics of interstellar colonization could make a good plot device?). Both were competently written, with plot, characters, motivation, pace, action, believable dialogue, and a general lack of info dumps. Neither were preachy, neither were dull, neither were “message fiction”.
Then, the Voter Packet.
My God, it’s full of crap.
I read some clunky garbage in my youth (I read ingredients lists when there was nothing else to feed the beast). But some of this stuff is *really* bad: barely literate. Don’t these guys have editors? I mean, this is worse than Black Genesis. I doubt that anything as bad as this has *ever* appeared on a Hugo ballot.
And at least one nominee has literally *nothing*, *nothing* to do with science fiction.
There are a few items in the written categories which stand out as possibly worth while: possibly Hugo worthy. Oddly enough, not a single one of them, that I’ve seen in these few hours of skimming, appears on a Puppy slate.
So: I’m going to vote this year, and I’m going to nominate next year, and I’m going to keep on voting and nominating until this kind of worthless trash doesn’t appear on the ballot any more. I’m going to read everything, and I’m going to rank everything which I think is even vaguely Hugo-worthy, and then I’m going to No Award.
Hi Mike,
Right, I got it downloaded to the Desktop anyway (Yay!). As far as cross polinization to the iPad, we’ll see – this is why I’m a Luddite who prefers print! When I walk into my library I just pick up a book and go. Defiently Not A Computer Guy! ????
I do have a couple of questions, though. During all the tedious downloads, I did get a message saying that not all files could be extracted due to computer safety concerns. Did anyone else see this? And secondly, did anyone get anything from Mr. Beale in the Editor categories? I confess I’m rather surprised that nothing was included in my packet.
I find myself basically in the same position as cmm: I read yesterday’s post regarding coming back to SF&F because of this one, and it’s like I wrote it myself. I think I may be quicker to mallet though, since most of what I’ve been reading so far falls under the general category of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time and in some cases from authors who have done much (Much!) better in the past. Surprisingly enough, Puppies Leaders write better than their nominations. Who’d uh thunk it.
Jonathan K. Stephens,
From the notes files that accompanied the downloads:
and
There is a small part in the note file in the editor packets about what should be considered Beale’s submissions (mainly the John C Wright stories over in the short story area.)
I was surprised that was the extent of his participation in the packet. Not even a bibliography.
The packet is not a right, of course and publishers don’t have to participate if they don’t wish to do so. I just found it surprising that Mr. Beale choose not to do so in a more substantive manner.
” I just found it surprising that Mr. Beale choose not to do so in a more substantive manner.”
Given that, as far as I can see, people’s liking of his editing work steadily diminishes with exposure to it, by and large, this seems a tactical decision. 🙂
OK, then, what they heck did Beale edit last year that qualifies him for Best Editor–Long? Is there even a list in there? (I haven’t downloaded much yet) I assume he *does* qualify.
I bought a supporting membership a few weeks ago and am yet to receive my registration number/pin. I didn’t get today’s email about the nomination packet either. Is anyone else in the same boat?
The Rabid Puppies slate listed not just what works and people should get nominated, but also what specific works the editors and fanwriters were being “honored” for.
Morris Keesan (or someone else),
Do you have somewhere the list of what VD was honored for the Long Form editing for?
I am not going to go dig through a ton of posts on VD’s site to find a post from months ago – he seems to be making sure that people send him under No Award for not being able to figure out what he had edited…
I’ve downloaded the packet, but certain files won’t unZip:
Campbell
EditorLong
EditorShort
FanArtist
ProfessionalArtist
Any suggestions as to how to get them to unZip? I’ve downloaded them twice, same result.
Kurt – My computer just unzipped them with no effort on my part, I just double clicked the zip, and then the files inside it.
The Hugo PIN lookup site is here, for those who haven’t received theirs yet:
http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/pin-lookup/
Kurt,
What are you using for the unzipping – winzip, 7zip, something else?
Try another zipping program?
Kurt Busiek: No helpful suggestion to offer, just the data that I was able to unzip the EditorShort and FanArtist files, and the novels — haven’t gotten around to trying the rest.
Annie – I’m using The Unarchiver, apparently. I’ll look for something else.
I saved a copy of the Sad and Rabid Puppy ballots, but the Rabid Puppy one doesn’t list what works the editors were nominated for.
ULTRAGOTHA at 4:55 pm:
Other members please correct me if I’m wrong, but most Editor finalists will include in the packet a summary (or even just a list) of works that qualified them. That Beale hasn’t bothered now has me wondering if he had edited enough last year (per the Hugo Rules below) to qualify. Does anyone know what those works are?
[Aside: I’ve always struggled with the editor categories especially long form as that information is often unavailable. How can we be expected to know who to nominate/vote for without good data?]
Annie Y, I’m not going back there — I made the mistake of following someone’s link yesterday to his “Alpha Male” blog, and my stomach still hurts. But when I google “rabid puppies voxpopoli”, these are two of the top three results:
voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rabid-puppies-2015.html — “What follows is the list of Hugo recommendations known as Rabid Puppies.”
and
voxday.blogspot.com/2015/03/rabid-puppies-final-notice.html?
(The middle of the top three results is something claiming that “Will [sic] Wheaton endorses Rabid Puppies”. If one were kindly disposed, one might say that this misspelling is irrelevant to evaluation of editing ability, being something that a copy editor should have caught.)
Kurt Busiek, I just opened the files directly in Windows Explorer, and had no trouble.
Soon Lee: “Other members please correct me if I’m wrong, but most Editor finalists will include in the packet a summary (or even just a list) of works that qualified them. That Beale hasn’t bothered now has me wondering if he had edited enough last year (per the Hugo Rules below) to qualify. Does anyone know what those works are?”
You can go to Amazon and search “Castalia House” and deduce that he probably has four qualifying novels. I assume the Spanish translations of the English novels get counted as novels in their own right — can’t see any reason they wouldn’t.
iZip seems to have done the trick. Thanks for the suggestions!
@Jas: I did. If you go to the packet URL, you can find a link to “If you’ve forgotten/didn’t get your PIN”. Which worked for me.
I am a huge fan of the ability to send emails to my Kindle device with whatever compatibly formatted works attached and have them show up right on the device.
Alexvdl: I’m pretty damn happy about that myself.
@ULTRAGOTHA Thanks for the link to the pin look up feature. It worked and I’m now good to go.
Mike Glyer at 5:45 pm:
He probably has four qualifying novels; I was hoping someone else had done the homework because with a bunch of re-issues, different lengths, and translated works, it’s hard to filter out the right ones, not to mention that editor information of novels is not normally provided.
I am less certain about Editor Short Form: “Riding the Red Horse” is the only anthology I’ve found (co-edited with Tom Kratman), so lacking magazine issues, there should be at least three more anthologies/collections to qualify. Any idea what those might be?
Soon Lee: He put out all kinds of short form stuff last year. You can track it at Castalia House or Amazon as well.
O.K. then, but that would be a pretty loose reading of Rule 3.3.9.
@Soon Lee Vox Day qualifies, he put out a lot of work as editor of Castalia House last year. Sasquan says he qualifies as well. Vote for him or don’t vote for him, but quibbles over whether he qualifies are irrelevant at this stage.
I was able to get them all downloaded to my PC, and then I emailed them to myself to get them to my iphone. The epubs work best, they open right up in the default book app. The pdfs/Word docs are readable but I hang on the mobis, luckily most of the submissions come in several formats. Persevere, fellow device readers!
Jonathan (and others who want to have the material on their tablet or phone): If you use for example Dropbox you can easily download and extract the stuff to your desktop computer and share it to your mobile by way of moving the files to the Drop box folder.
Morris Keesan: “The middle of the top three results is something claiming that ‘Will [sic] Wheaton endorses Rabid Puppies’.”
That is a photoshopped version of an image that Wheaton gave to The Bloggess, and I am quite sure that Wheaton would not be at all pleased at being used in this way. But good luck getting VD to comply with a DMCA takedown notice.
Here’s a more believable reference regarding Wheaton’s opinion about the Puppies:
https://twitter.com/wilw/status/590573407181352960
“They suck. That’s pretty much all you need to know.”
Note that rule 3.3.9 as quoted above only requires that “at least one” of the anthologies, etc. was published in the previous year.
Morris: True, but he didn’t have any before 2014, so he needed 4 in the year to qualify.
So Zombie Nation gave up on Best Graphic Story. Not part of the package in any way. Not surprising.
Charon D. Thank you so much for that explanation. I’ve been scratching my head wondering how I could accomplish getting the material onto my i-pad. I’m a newbie to the Hugo reader pack.
Guys can you all stop downloading for half an hour so I can actually keep a connection open? Keeps timing out. 🙂
Hmmm, excerpt only, delivered in pdf only. Jim Butcher, you do not up your chance of getting my vote.
nickpheas: “Hmmm, excerpt only, delivered in pdf only”
Yes, and the pdfs always have 2 inch margins all the way around. What these publishers don’t understand is that those pdfs are almost impossible to read on an e-reader, because the font ends up being tiny.
I have Acrobat Pro and can usually crop those to make them readable on my Kindle (except for the ones which are completely change-protected). But most people unfortunately don’t have the luxury of being able to reformat in that way.
Some pdfs can be quite easily converted to a more flexible format by Calibre, but sometimes there’s a lot of effort been put in to making the layout Just So, which means a long reformatting session if you want something that’s not going to continuously annoy.
I generally use Sigil for those times when I’m looking to present the end result to others. But it’s not worth it for this. Second strike just pushes it down my reading pile.