Now that the awards have been made, here are my reactions.
(Also, hurrah, Helsinki in 2017!)
Numbers are taken from
the official record.
Something like my preferred voting strategy seems to have prevailed:
all of the puppy nominees are below No Award, except in Dramatic
Presentation. I won't go over the No Awards in detail, or the cases
where the only non-slate nominee was the winner, though I note that
five No Awards equals the total previous No Awards ever given by the
Hugos.
Best Novel
Three-Body Problem Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor Books)
Rather surprising; I was torn between Ancillary Sword or The Goblin
Emperor but I thought this a much inferior work.
Best Graphic Story
Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt (Marvel Comics)
Is this simply Marvel reaching a wider audience than other publishers?
I wouldn't have thought that was true any more. I thought this was all
right, but twice as good as anything else here?
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Guardians of the Galaxy. Again, a popularity thing, I guess. Though:
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Orphan Black: "By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried" written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett (Temple Street Productions; Space/BBC America)
Very much to my surprise. Other people have finally stopped
indiscriminately loving Doctor Who, apparently. (But even that was
more popular than Game of Thrones.)
Best Semiprozine
Lightspeed Magazine John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
For me nothing much to choose between them; for the voters, a strong
preference here.
Best Fancast
Galactic Suburbia Podcast Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
Still means little to me, and a very close race.
Best Fan Artist
Elizabeth Leggett
By a mile. Well, yeah, she's a pro artist who does stuff for fan
publications rather than an amateur artist.
Everything Else
Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Laura Mixon, Julie Dillon and Wesley Chu join the
"winner by being only sensible nominee" club, probably with pretty
mixed feelings. The supplied Chu was so ghastly that it caused me to
start the In Brief, Avoid category in my
reviews, for works on which I actively recommend people not waste
their time. Maybe the first one was better. I hope so.
Looking down the nominees that didn't make the top five, the first
novel I know about is The Martian (which I didn't nominate because I
thought it wouldn't be eligible, having been published in 2011). And
Weir might have been in contention for the Campbell, too. There are
some interesting-looking Related Works which I may track down at some
point.
So are the Hugos saved? Eh, the same people will probably do the same
thing next year.
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