Pixel Scroll 1/9/17 Old King Cole Had A Merry Old Scroll

spectrum-24-call-for-entries

(1) SPECTRUM 24 CALL FOR ENTRIES. John Fleskes, Spectrum Director, has issued an invitation for professional and student artists, art directors, publishers and artists’ representatives to submit entries to the 24th Annual Spectrum International Competition for Fantastic Art.

All artworks in all media embracing the themes of science fiction, fantasy, horror and the surreal are eligible for this show. Fantastic art can be subtle or obvious, traditional or off-the-wall, painted, sculpted, done digitally or photographed: There is no unacceptable way to create art, and there are no set rules that say one piece qualifies while another does not. Imagination and skill are what matters. Work chosen by the jury will be printed in full color in the Spectrum annual, the peer-selected “best of the year” collection for the fantastic arts.

Entries will be accepted until January 25. Click here to submit.

The Spectrum 24 jury is a five member panel of exceptional artists working in the industry today, Christian Alzmann, Laurie Lee Brom, Mark Newman, John Picacio and Victo Ngai.

Spectrum represents such a rich visual history and standard of excellence for what we collectively dream in the fantastic art field,” states John Picacio. “I’ve always been grateful any time my work was selected for inclusion in the annual, and it’s a profound honor and responsibility to give back to the book this year as a juror.”

(2) GOLDEN GLOBES. Although there were a lot of Golden Globe nominees of genre interest in the December announcement, all lost except one:

Best Motion Picture – Animated

  • Zootopia

(3) ERIC FLINT HEALTH. Flint did not get the best possible news from his medical tests:

I’ll have more to report by the end of the month, when all the tests and biopsy results finally come in. But here’s what definite:

I do have a form of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, although they still don’t know exactly what type. (That’s what’s taking so long for the biopsy to be finished.) Once they know what kind it is, they’ll start me on a chemotherapy program.

Sadly, my hopes in the hospital that since the surgery had gone so well maybe the cancer was completely gone turned out to be childish delusions. (Which I suspected myself, but…) Lymphoma is what they call a systemic cancer, which means that surgery by itself can’t do anything but arrest the malignancy for a while and provide the material needed for a thorough biopsy. But to really fight lymphoma, you need chemotherapy.

The good news is that lymphoma generally responds well to chemo, and it’s not uncommon for people to be cured of the disease altogether. We’ll see what happens in my case, but even in the worst case scenario it looks as if I’ll have quite a few years to fend the cancer off.

However, he says frankly that after chemo he may live for years to come —

if you look at it the right way. I’ll be 70 in a month. I don’t have to fight off lymphona indefinitely. I just have to fight it off long enough for something else to bump me off.

(4) EYES WIDE WHAT? Myke Cole’s next tweet will explain how his stories are like radio except with no sound.

(5) HOMAGE. The late Gordon Archer did a lot of commercial art for Weetabix cereal involving Doctor Who, Star Trek, Asterix and other pop culture subjects which his son now has on display on a website[Corrected, because Archer is still with us, as his son states in a comment below.]

weetabix-dr-who

(6) HITLER UNBEARABLE. “A A Milne letter features in Imperial War Museum’s anti-war show”, from The Guardian.

Winnie the Pooh creator’s letter reflects moral dilemma of pacifists faced with rise of Hitler in interwar period

…The Milne letter has been retrieved from its vast collection of documents and reflects the conflict felt by many pacifists who had experienced the horrors of the first world war and earnestly hoped “never again”.

“It encapsulates the moral dilemma that a lot of pacifists had in the interwar period,” said curator Matt Brosnan. “Milne opposed war but increasingly saw Hitler and the Nazis as an evil that had to be met by force.”

In his letter, Milne declared himself a “practical pacifist”, writing: “I believe that war is a lesser evil than Hitlerism, I believe that Hitlerism must be killed before war can be killed.”

(7) KOWAL INTERVIEW IN LOCUS. An excerpt of Locus’ interview with Mary Robinette Kowal has been posted at Locus Online.

The moment I knew I was setting something during the First World War, I knew that darkness was going to be part of it, and that I would have to work really hard to keep the darkness from completely overwhelming Ghost Talkers. When you do any reading at all about the First World War, it becomes very clear why it made such a huge, permanent mark on Europe – and the US less so, because we were not directly touched by it. It wasn’t even the death tolls, because in England a lot of men actually came home, but everyone came home wounded in some way, either physically or emotionally. I read interview after interview of survivors saying, ‘I went over the top of the trench, and everyone in my platoon died. I don’t know why I lived.’ I knew going in that dealing with someone who deals with ghosts as her job, during WWI, would mean a darker book than people are used to from me. On the other hand, the last book in the Glamourist series, I jokingly refer to as ‘Regency Grimdark.’

(8) DIVERSITY DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN. Nalo Hopkinson’s advice “To Anthology Editors”.

But here’s where those voices have a point: if you wait till after you’ve put out your call for submissions to run around trying to fill in diversity slots for your anthology — you know, the “one of each so long as there aren’t too many of them” approach — you will more likely than not end up with a dog’s breakfast of a volume in which it’s clear that you selected writers for their optics, not their writing. That’s tokenism, not sound editorial practice. The time to be trying to make your anthology a diverse one is before submissions come in, not during or after.

On the other hand, if you just put your call for fiction out there and cross your fingers, you’ll end up with mostly the usual suspects. It’s not enough to simply open the door. Why? Because after centuries of exclusion and telling us we’re not good enough, an unlocked door is doing jack shit to let us know that anything’s changed. Most of us will continue to duck around it and keep moving, thank you very much. We’ll go where we know there are more people like us, or where there are editors who get what we’re doing.

So make up your mind that you’re going to have to do a bit of work, some outreach. It’s fun work, and the results are rewarding….

(9) RARA AVIS. Definitely not on my bucket list.

(10) CHRISTENSEN OBIT. Artist Jim Christensen died January 8 of cancer. He was 74.

Christensen saw himself not as the “fantasy artist” label given him, but rather as an artist who paints the fantastic.

“I paint things that are not real,” he told the Deseret News in 2008. “But fantasy often ventures into the dark and scary stuff. I made a decision long ago that I would not go to dark places. There’s a lot of negativity in the world. I try not to be part of it.”

His honors and awards include being named a Utah Art Treasure as well as one of Utah’s Top 100 Artists by the Springville Museum of Art and receiving the Governor’s Award for Art from the Utah Arts Council. He had won all the professional art honors given by the World Science Fiction Convention as well as multiple Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Christensen had served as president of the National Academy of Fantastic Art, and he co-chaired the Mormon Arts Foundation with his wife, Carole.

christensen-art

Dave Doering paid tribute: “I loved this man. For various years he was our Artist GoH at LTUE but also quite well known in all fantasy art circles.”

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 9, 1493 — On this date, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.”

(12) WORLDBUILDERS. At Tor.com, David Weber discusses five authors who he says are “great world-builders.” All five of the authors are women: Anne McCaffrey, Katherine Kurtz, Mercedes Lackey, Barbara Hambly, and Patricia McKillip:

“[McKillip] is, without a doubt, one of my two or three all-time favorite authors. When I first read The Riddle-Master of Hed in 1978, I immediately went out and found Heir of Sea and Fire and then waited impatiently for Harpist in the Wind. In many ways, the Riddle-Master’s world is less fully articulated than Pern or Gwynedd, but I think that’s because so much of the detail is cooking quietly away in the background behind the land rulers. There’s a sense of an entire consistent, coherent foundation and history/backstory behind all of it, but the struggles of Morgon, Raerdale, and Deth take front stage with an intensity that reaches out and grabs the reader by the shirt collar and shakes him or her to the bone. Patricia’s prose is absolutely gorgeous and evocative and her stories fully satisfy the deep love for the language my parents taught me as a very young reader. I literally don’t think it’s possible to over-recommend this series … and the rest of her stuff is pretty darn good, too.”

(13) ST. ELSEWHERE. But did it work? “This Brazilian Grandma Has Been Accidentally Praying to a ‘Lord of the Rings’ Statuette”  —

Saint Anthony of Padua’s the patron saint of Brazil, Portugal, pregnant women, and the elderly. He wears brown robes, and he usually holds baby Jesus and lilies. And – as one Brazilian woman discovered – a miniature figure of Santo Antônio also vaguely looks like Elrond, the elf lord of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings. Brazilian makeup artist Gabriela Brandao made the hilarious discovery last week and posted about it on Facebook for all to see. Brandao explained that her daughter’s great-grandmother prayed to the Elrond figurine daily, erroneously believing it was Santo Antônio.

(14) IMAGINARY HUGO RECOMMENDATIONS. There is no such work, except in your mind:

Well, and Chuck’s mind.

(15) BRIANNA WU’S CAMPAIGN. She’s already gaining media attention in Boston.

Brianna Wu was at the center of “Gamer-Gate” and received some horrific threats over social media. But instead of keeping a low profile, she tells Jim why she’s now planning on running for Congress.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, Andrew Porter, Rob Thornton, Arnie Fenner, and Dave Doering for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]

98 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/9/17 Old King Cole Had A Merry Old Scroll

  1. @Jack Lint
    I saw this comment on the Finn post which convinced me it’s what Amanda Green was talking about:

    Migly January 10, 2017 at 2:17 PM
    Nobody at File 770 has said one thing about your post up til this moment. And if you hadn’t stepped on your dick by making this post, Amanda Green at Mad Genius Club wouldn’t have had to publicly correct you. Which is where all the conversation really happened, as you know, Pinocchio.

    I thinking that when she spoke about a post on Facebook she must have meant she replied to someone on Facebook who posted a link to Finn’s blog posting.

  2. Just a note–I finally read Correia’s “Monster Hunter International” and it was actually a fun pulp read. But Lord have mercy, enough with the gun porn already. It interrupted the story for me.
    I’ve since learned that he apparently wrote it for the other people in a gun group he was in but for me–ehh.
    But it certainly wasn’t Hugo worthy.

  3. I suspect that Chuck’s trolling of the puppies was sufficiently real to count as existing outside his or my mind, and it’s definitely related to science fiction or fandom.

  4. 12) I’ll add Martha Wells to that list. The worldbuilding in her Raksura books is just mind-bending. I have no idea how large that planet is, but from the number and diversity of cultures it feels as though it ought to be the size of Jupiter! Although of course if it were, then the gravity would be too high for the Raksura to fly…

    @ Cat: Seconding the love for the Benjamin January books. The past is a different country, and Hambly’s worldbuilding skills are as much on display WRT 1930s New Orleans as in her science fiction.

    The Puppies are reminding me more and more of my parents, who never did manage to figure out that just because I was the center of their universe didn’t mean that they were the center of mine. They were utterly convinced that whatever I did was All About Them, and spent endless amounts of time and energy angsting over it and trying to figure out what they had done that caused me to do X that they didn’t like, and how they could get me to stop. And in the meantime, I went about my life doing things as I saw fit, without reference to them at all.

  5. Greg Hullender: I saw this comment on the Finn post which convinced me it’s what Amanda Green was talking about

    That does seem likely, however, one of Green’s comments at MGC made it a little ambiguous — something she said left open the possibility that she was complaining about J.C. Carlton again (but not by name; they never do names at MGC: everybody’s just supposed to know, and usually does.)

    So in my post about today’s Puppy news I didn’t make the Green-Finn connection as explicit as I had intended.

  6. Mark on January 10, 2017 at 1:10 pm said:

    ETA – nope, this is literally the first mention of Declan Finn here for at least a week. Camestros hasn’t covered it on his blog either, and he’s the only other possibility I can think of.

    Nope – not me 🙂
    I’ve been stuck in Tudor England for the past few days.

  7. @Camestros

    Tudor England? I hope you at least got some decent ale out of your visit.

    @Mike

    It’s perfectly obvious. It’s a certain someone who wrote a certain article. They just keep on writing that article again and again.

  8. Mark on January 10, 2017 at 3:07 pm said:

    @Camestros

    Tudor England? I hope you at least got some decent ale out of your visit.

    The latest crazy trend was to add hops of all things to the ale (as tis the fashion in the low countires)! Not sure if that trend will last.

  9. Camestros Felapton: I’ve been stuck in Tudor England for the past few days.

    I’ve visited there twice lately. First, reading The Rise of the Tudors. Then, binge-watching Wolf Hall. That was not a pleasant place!

  10. Mike Glyer on January 10, 2017 at 3:21 pm said:

    Camestros Felapton: I’ve been stuck in Tudor England for the past few days.

    I’ve visited there twice lately. First, reading The Rise of the Tudors. Then, binge-watching Wolf Hall. That was not a pleasant place!

    Have the Wolf Hall DVDs but haven’t watched it yet (read the books though – after the second one I felt like I had Thomas Cromwell stuck in my head)

  11. The more I think about 3SV, the worse it looks to me. Here we are at nomination time rushing around looking desperately for things worth nominating, and the proposal (not the formal proposal, but the apparent plan for implementing it) threatens to massively reduce the time available for doing this. This is not a problem for those who regularly read new stuff as it appears, but many of us don’t; we read a lot during nomination season, guided by recommendations, best-of-year lists and so on, and the general developing sense of what are the most significant works. 3SV would deprive us of the chance of doing this. I think it could well help slaters, both by reducing the number of organic nominations, and by making them less convergent.

    In any case I don’t think it is very powerful against slates as such, because I don’t think people will vote down OK works that are on a slate (although a preponderance of such works still skews the ballot). Its only usefulness is against abusive slating, and that may not be something we have to worry about if VD has gone away. Attempts to skew the ballot in a particular direction are likely to be a permanent hazard, now that the possibility has been revealed; actual abuse, we may hope, is less so.

    EPH is more of a puzzle. I don’t see it as self-evidently superior, so for me the proof of the pudding is in the eating: and that probably means we can’t finally judge it until we have seen its effect in several non-slate years. I can certainly see circumstances (involving single issue campaigns like Black Genesis) where it would produce worse results than the historic system; but one may hope they will be rare. On the figures we have right now, any serious disruption it might cause in a non-slate year is likely to be reversed by 5/6. Assuming no disasters, it makes sense to keep it as a deterrent against slates; it presumably is doing some work in deterring VD now (though the decline of his support between 2015 and 2016 no doubt also had a effect).

  12. the Dragon Award, which is in the process of becoming the more significant SF/F award

    In much the same sense as Castalia Press being in the process of becoming the dominant publishing house in the genre, yes.

    Those grapes are so sour that no one cares about them any more, no they don’t, you betcha.

  13. Note that the provisions to allow single-year suspensions of certain Hugo-related rules apply to those individual items only, and are not a general change to the requirement that any change to the WSFS Constitution must be passed in two consecutive years.

    I know that requiring two consecutive years to change anything is extremely frustrating to many people. If anyone wants to try and change that to something faster, you’d need to put it through the same two-consecutive-year process for changing the Constitution as any other change. (Constitutions are, by their nature, not usually supposed to be easy or quick to change.) Contact me if you want more details, given that I’m chairing this year’s meeting. Any changes passed this year will be up for ratification at San Jose in 2018.

  14. @Kevin Standlee

    I have no issues with the two year process – it’s a right and proper safeguard against knee-jerk reactions, allows for full consideration, etc.
    My point – well, more of an amorphous undefined concern really – was that we now have a general purpose defence against slating either in place or within a year of going into place, but it had it’s opposition even when there was a clear ongoing problem, and I’m hoping no-one proposes that recent events mean we should regress to a point where we have to start from scratch with the necessary two-year process again.
    I’d be very happy to be proved a pessimist here, and I probably am being.

  15. I’d put money on Vox’s reference to the “Best Series” award being in regards to Larry Corriea’s Monster Hunter International, Which I think is eligible this year.

    It’s pretty good action pulp, though there’s a LOT out in 2016 that it has a hard time against. (Wild Cards, Vorkosigan Saga, Incrypted…) Larry’s stated he wouldn’t accept a Hugo if he were awarded one, which seems like it’s just the thing to tickle VD’s funny bone.

  16. Brendan: Except Castalia House doesn’t publish Larry Correia. First I’d look over its author list to see if anybody there *coff*John C. Wright*coff* is eligible for Best Series this year.

  17. @Andrew M

    it presumably is doing some work in deterring VD now (though the decline of his support between 2015 and 2016 no doubt also had a effect).

    Actually as far as nominations go, I think his support doubled from 2015 to 2016. Or are you talking about votes for him personally in the final voting round?

  18. @Seth Gordon: I will be at Arisia. How much mind I have, and how long I’m there, will depend on circumstances (e.g., there’s a couple of hundred boxes of citrus to be unloaded on Saturday some distance away).

  19. @Mark (Kitteh): Thanks for the Tor.com info/link; it’s handy to have stories in one package like that, though whether I’ll find time to read them is another question. 😉

    @Seth Gordon: Wait, it was Vox’s plan all along for us to pass EPH?! Aristotle, indeed, LOL!

    @Mark (Kitteh), redux: Yes, nominating interests me more right now. Well, I mean, I have time – don’t rush me, heh.

    @Mike Glyer: “First I’d look over its author list…” – Good point, Mike.

  20. @Brendan
    Did you get an e-mail from “Hugo Awards 2017” with a link to a page where you can make your nominations? Everyone gets a different link (personalized to them) this year.

  21. Huh. Not yet. I was a supporting member last year, so I should be able to nominate this year.

  22. @Brendan
    Look in your junk mail folder. Without that e-mail, you cannot nominate.

    Note that there are no passwords this year. If you share that url with anyone else, they can see what you nominated and even make changes, so when you do get the e-mail, remember not to share your personal URL.

    By the way, that password-free design is brilliant. Even if someone accidentally shares his/her url, the damage is limited to that one person. If an unauthorized person uses that URL to make changes, the owner will get e-mails about the changes and will know to ask for a reset, so problems would be easily detected and easily fixed.

    But as a result of this design, the system is very, very user-friendly. It’s also nice that the ballot is a single HTML page with no internal scroll bars. It’s very clean and very simple.

    The only improvement I could suggest (a controversial one) would be to add autocomplete.

  23. I can’t quite agree with the “brilliant” assessment, though I could agree with it if it was re-worded as “completely insecure but easy to use.”

    I found my email in my junk folder. Thanks for the suggestion. I’d assumed that, like last year, it would be a few weeks before all the emails were sent out.

  24. Mark:

    Not everyone is convinced that the solution that WSFS adopted is the best one. It’s going to be nearly impossible to tell whether it’s a good solution until after we “test it in production” with actual results.

  25. @Greg Hullender: “ask for a reset” – so I presume this generates a new magic URL and the old one stops working? If so, groovy. I liked the old interface, but it sounds like the new one’s good as well. (I’ll get around to entering my preliminary ballot Real Soon Now.)

  26. @kathodus: Nope, all the Hugo nomination mails went out in a single day this time (well, except for the undeliverables, but they were also sent).

    From a security standpoint, most password-protected sites are rather weak. Most chosen passwords are weak and it puts extra effort on the individual user, especially as there is a risk of a data breach impacting other places they frequent. Here the site owner takes more responsibility for security and data breaches will be more limited in scope.

    Password security feels secure because many users feel in control and that they can understand it, but that does not mean it really is secure.

  27. Mike Glyer on January 10, 2017 at 4:59 pm said:
    Brendan: Except Castalia House doesn’t publish Larry Correia. First I’d look over its author list to see if anybody there *coff*John C. Wright*coff* is eligible for Best Series this year.

    Just getting one of his pet authors onto the shortlist doesn’t really gain him very much though, does it? Fandom will just go ‘meh’ and move on, and he needs a reaction.

    He’s more likely to try and block out the shortlist in habitual Puppy style (EPH permitting) so that the first attempt at the Best Series award is a damp squib.

  28. Yup, and I’m not sure it even makes top three in the list of Dr Who Aliens That Look Disturbingly Like Genitalia.

  29. From a security standpoint, most password-protected sites are rather weak.

    Sure. However, putting the password in the url creates some extra problems – in particular since people aren’t used to it. First, people using a shared computer have to take extra steps to avoid leaving the url in browser history. They also can’t bookmark the nomination page. Second, the probability of someone answering a question like Kendall’s “how do I nominate?” with “try this url” is significant.

    It’s not a big deal – the nomination data is not highly sensitive, and the mail receipt means tampering will be discovered. Most browsers have a Private Browsing-mode that doesn’t store history, so it’s easy to protect yourself as long as you’re aware of the issue. But in terms of privacy and security, the url scheme is a step down compared to regular passwords.

  30. I wonder how many people actually used a shared computer in this day and age. Especially if you exclude “shared with someone you trust.” Anyone doing that has lots of security issues to worry about.

    Otherwise, I disagree entirely that it’s a step down. A bad guy might write a program to deduce the user names and passwords of hundreds of members, but he/she will almost certainly not be able to guess hundreds of URLs.

  31. rob_matic: He’s more likely to try and block out the shortlist in habitual Puppy style (EPH permitting) so that the first attempt at the Best Series award is a damp squib.

    You’ve got a point.

  32. @rob_matic

    He’s more likely to try and block out the shortlist in habitual Puppy style (EPH permitting) so that the first attempt at the Best Series award is a damp squib.

    Maybe, but in that case, he made a mistake by telling his followers not to register this year. That likely cuts his forces in half. If he then produces a list with the aim of dominating the short list again, he’ll be fighting EPH and 5-of-6 with reduced strength. I’d be surprised if he could get 3 of the 6 in all but the weakest categories, and he might not even get 2 of 6 in the major ones. I don’t see how he could spin that as anything other than a big defeat.

    It’s hard to be sure what he’ll do since he certainly hasn’t played rationally in the past, but just walking away seems like his best option.

  33. I’ve been worried about Best Series and slating for a while. It’s true that organic votes are likely to be very widely spread, since there’s less possibility of convergence here than in many categories; and that’s the situation where, even with EPH, slates are most likely to be successful.

    5/6 means that in any case he can’t get a complete sweep, at least with a simple slate; he would have to do something more conspiratorial. But one non-slate nominee is not a good situation to be in.

  34. I doubt sweeps in a major category are on his mind – he can’t expect to do better than last year. Bullet voting for either self-promoting choices or embarrassing titles may be a realistic limited target though. JCW has produced a trilogy for him this year, for example, and I’m sure he can find a new Tuck Chingle from the sea of Amazon.
    Without a guarantee of success then he may be hedging his bets – any limited success can be trumpeted, while failure is irrelevant because he’s said he isn’t playing.

  35. Mark: Well, how vulnerable a category is depends not only on the number of voters but also on how diverse their choices are; so although Best Series will presumably be considered a major category, it may be vulnerable in the way that minor categories are. So, just as a general worry about the future, independently of Day’s intentions, that’s worth bearing in mind.

    However, as Greg says, if he were planning an assault it would be odd that he advised his supporters not to register. So I now suspect that he intends to pay special attention to this category, not so much because it is vulnerable, but because it harmonises well with the Puppy agenda; real science fiction of the kind that real fans really like tends to belong to long series (and indeed many Puppy picks for best novel have come from them).

  36. Greg: What’s the advantage of Flint’s proposal? He wants to distinguish multi-volume stories from series – and it’s certainly a real distinction, though there are plenty of edge cases. But it would mean we would have to vote on two multi-volume entities every year, adding to the problem of when we read them all. And it doesn’t address what I see as the real problem; that one isn’t really in a position to nominate a series – or, often, vote on it – unless one is already familiar with it, so there’s no room for convergence; the process becomes simply a counting of fans, rather than a consideration and comparison of works, which is what I think is valuable about the Hugos.

    (It would make sense to have a series award in the Dragons, since they fairly clearly aim to be just a counting of fans.)

  37. I liked Flint’s proposal because it was a logical definition. You make good points that the whole concept is a bad fit for the Hugos, and his definitions don’t help with that.

  38. @Andrew M

    Yes, I agree with you about Series having the potential for being very diverse, I wasn’t very clear about it though.

  39. Frankly, I worry that with or without VD, the Best Series category will be a mess, at least from this fan’s POV. Because my tastes are somewhat out of touch with those of the majority of fandom. I don’t really read a lot of the series that are popular in fandom and that I’ve seen on recommendation lists, therefore I may well wind up not voting or no awarding the series category. My Mom will probably be even worse of, because apart from the Vorkosigan series, the only series she reads are urban fantasy series (and not the male-authored ones either) which are unlikely to be nominated.

    I like the idea of a best series award, but I suspect in practice it will turn out as “I’ve never read this and have no idea how to evaluate this.” for me.

  40. Cora: I like the idea of a best series award, but I suspect in practice it will turn out as “I’ve never read this and have no idea how to evaluate this.” for me.

    I’ve been imagining the Best Series Award is going to please those who just want to vote a Hugo to their favorite series, and frustrate those who feel they should evaluate the field before making a choice.

  41. Hi there,
    My Dad is Gordon Archer (the artist behind most of the Weetabix promos of the 70’s & 80’s).

    I notice that in the description of your number (5) post you refer to him as “the late Gordon Archer”. Please correct this as he is very much alive!

    Please also visit http://www.yellowplanet.co.uk for merchandise based on his work.

    Thanks,

    Jon

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