Hugo Housekeeping

Statistics: Mary Kay Kare, Denvention 3 Hugo Administrator, received 483 valid nominating ballots. She will release all the other statistics after the ceremony in August.

While the WSFS Constitution does not require the release of additional statistics at this time, I pointed out to Mary Kay in an e-mail earlier in the week that Worldcons commonly have announced the nomination ranges in each category of the final ballot. I sent her the text of Nippon 2007’s press release, and she exercised her prerogative not to follow the example.

When John Lorentz, who was L.A.con IV’s Hugo Administrator, put together the final ballot in 2006, the information for each category included the high low end of the range of votes for the items in that category, the number of ballots received with items in that category, and the total number of items in that category that received votes.

Rockets: The final ballot lists all the writers from the Hugo-nominated series Heroes. Is the committee thinking about ordering lots of extra rockets, just in case?

Mary Kay wrote online, “Nope, we won’t be giving them all rocketships should Heroes win. We could have just listed the name of the show’s creator and the studio but I thought it would be nice to list them on the ballot. I like someone else’s idea of providing two rocketships and letting them sort it out.”

What else are superpowers for?

Additional Names on the Ballot: Evelyn Leeper asked about the policy of listing, in addition to authors and editors, those who wrote the introductions and forwards to books.

Mary Kay answered her, “Those additions were specifically requested by the writers of the books. We honored the author’s requests where we could but do not consider those people Hugo nominees as such.”

Links to Read Nominees: Asimov’s has already posted links to the three 2008 nominees it published, Nancy Kress’ Fountain of Age and Safeguard, and Karen Joy Fowler’s Always. Others have already been added to the official web page, and more are coming.

Update: 3/22/2008: Webmisstress Laurie Mann says a few thousand people have read the nominee list at the Denvention 3 site, but only one of them, a Swede, noticed that Chabon’s book title contained a typo (it should be “Policemen’s”). Mary Kay says even Chabon made no comment about the same misspelling in his notification e-mail.