Noreascon 4: exit Redbird, pursued by a ballot

[redbird]

I've sent in my Hugo ballot, electronically. Having put everything off to the last minute, I voted for novelette and short story, but not for the longer forms (because I didn't have the time to do the reading), and followed cattitude's advice on movies (since he doesn't have a membership, it seemed fair). I also voted for best fanzine, semiprozine, and fan artist, but skipped professional editor, professional artist, and related book.

The retro-Hugos took about two minutes, most of that on filling in the identifying information at the top of the form: a straight "No Award", because I don't think they're a useful/meaningful concept (not least because I felt, and I'm sure others feel, an impulse to vote for Clarke and Bradbury over Sturgeon or Asimov not because I think Childhood's End or Fahrenheit 451 is a better book than More than Human or The Caves of Steel but because Clarke and Bradbury will know if they won, and Sturgeon and Asimov won't. And that's at least as dubious an argument as voting for a friend purely because I like the person, without having read the work in question.

There was a definite old-fashioned feeling to the short fiction: explicit homages in the case of the Haldeman and Gaiman, David Levine's extremely Cordwainer Smithesque story, and Swanwick playing with time travel paradoxes.

Tomorrow, I'll send them my membership transfer; I already have trinker's payment, but she said I should keep the voting rights.

Comments

[quietspaces.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad that you journaled this. I'd forgotten in the midst of our activities that today was the deadline for voting. I usually don't get to the short stories (allergic to newsprint), but read many of the novels. I'm always surprised, though, how few of the finalists I've come across.

That's an interesting point about the retros. It never had occurred to me that whether an author was alive or dead would influence a person's vote one way or another. I had definite favorites on the retro list, including The Caves of Steel. Is fun to look back at the books I was reading when I was young. :-)

[redbird]

That's another factor--not only would I have been voting in the context of 50 years of discussion of those books, but I hadn't read any of them in years.