Hugo nominating ballot

In my email box this week was a ballot for nominating the Hugo Awards for the best of 2010, so I need to think about my choices...

Best Novel. Going through my list of novels which I read in 2010, only two were actually published in 2010–I tend to be a few years behind in my reading–and only one of them seems worthy of a Hugo nomination to me, Jack McDevitt’s Time Travelers Never Die. So that was the extent of my ballot.

Best Short Fiction. I am even farther behind in reading short fiction than reading novels. I have not read a single issue of F&SF from 2010 yet, and all my other short fiction reading comes from best-of-the-year anthologies, which obviously have not been published yet.

Best Dramatic Presentation. I do not watch much television at all, except for Jeopardy, which cannot be classified as f&sf no matter how wide I stretch the category. So that eliminates Short Form. For Long Form, I saw about a half-dozen movies this past year, the best one being The Social Network, again not being f&sf by any description (although it might have had it been released 15 years ago, lol). But two of the movies I saw do qualify for the Hugo Awards, and both were excellent movies: Toy Story 3 and Tangled, so they made my ballot.

Fan Categories. There are too many outstanding fanzines, fan writers and fan artists to fit onto a ballot. Since several of my favorites make the ballot fairly regularly (Challenger, Argentus, Lloyd Penney), if I have to leave anybody off my ballot, I might as well leave them off since they do not need my support as much as some other deserving nominees. So my fan ballots looked as follows:

Fanzine: Visions of Paradise / The Reluctant Famulus / Lofgeornost / Feline Mewsings / Trial and Error. I admit that one of the five nominees is far from a major fanzine, and likely does not belong in the august company in which I placed it, but since I am the editor (and mostly sole writer) of VoP, I would not mind getting at least one nomination for a Hugo Award in my lifetime, so now I have it, lol.

Fan Writer: Fred Lerner / Dale Speirs / Gordon Eklund / John Purcell / Tom Feller. Four of these are fellow members of FAPA, and all are outstanding fanwriters who deserve a bit of recognition. It would be nice to see at least one of them actually make the final ballot.

Fan Artist: Brad Foster / Taral Wayne / Alan F. Beck / Terry Jeeves / José Sánchez. These are the artists who have given me illos for Visions of Paradise in the past year, so I wanted to honor them in a small way by nominating them. Actually, Foster (22 nominations, 7 wins), Beck (1 recent nomination) and Wayne (9 nominations) probably do not need my support, but they’ve earned it, as have all five artists.

Unless Renovation gives me a reason to join this year's convention, such as sending me all the Hugo nominations again as Aussiecon 4 did last year, it might be too expensive for me to join as a Supporting Member, so this could be my last time nominating the Hugo Awards for awhile (unless I convince myself I should attend my first worldcon since 1981). Oh, well...