Well, I did it, I got through all the Hugo nomination categories, reviewed each one and put in my vote for what I thought were the best. I did it with no appeal to the No Award category. Sorry, I just feel that most uses of that category show one to be entirely too stuck up. It needs to be used, rarely, deliberately, and with serious reservation, with one still wondering if maybe you are missing something in the work that made it good enough for others to nominate.
I had intended to do a thorough read of each category’s works, and made a good start on it, commented here on the blog about several of them. But you will note that I wasn’t able to blog about most of them. By the end I was reading and skimming and seeing which items hit me as enjoyable and intriguing, and which just failed to capture my attention.
Some of the categories interested me more. Some of them I need to go back and finish works I skimmed, others I won’t take another look at. But I still feel I did my duty to the SFF world by seriously looking over the works and forming an opinion based on actual attempts to interact with and enjoy the works. Would I have picked them up off a shelf, would I have finished them if I wasn’t reading them for the Hugos, and would I have short-changed them by not reading them?
The voting closes today, and in August at the convention we will find out who won. By August I won’t remember for most of the categories which ones I actually voted for, though a few of the categories I definitely remember and will be curious to find out who actually won.
So I think this completes my Hugo-related postings until the week of the convention. I am intending to suspend my regularly-scheduled blogs that week to post daily updates on the convention and what I saw and experienced as a first-time convention-goer. Hopefully it is organized and interesting to my readers, and not disconnected and confusing.
At The Rainbow 