I see this afternoon via Peter Watts’ blog that the 2007 Hugo and Campbell Award winners have been announced. Looks like Vernor Vinge took the prize for his Rainbows End and Naomi Novik took home the Campbell. I’m also inordinately pleased that fellow Pyr author Ian McDonald took home a Hugo for Best Novelette. The full list of winners is here.
All the really interesting stuff comes from reading the full details of the final ballot and the full details of the nominations (both PDF files). Of course, being a self-absorbed bastard, my first priority was to see how close I actually came to getting nominated for the Hugo and the Campbell. Lo and behold, I see that I was only 4 votes shy of getting a Campbell nomination.
This means two things:
- If you’re one of those people who I pleaded and cajoled to nominate me, but failed to do so out of laziness, I can now shame and guilt you for the rest of your life. Yes, in fact, it was your lack of a nomination which prevented me from flourishing into the mega-million dollar career which we all knew I was otherwise destined for.
- Even though I don’t have any new work coming out in 2007, there’s a very good chance that I can still bribe, con, and/or sleep my way into a Campbell Nomination for my second (and last) year of eligibility.
Pursuant to #2, I will now begin my sinister disinformation campaign aimed at knocking down any other debut writers who might be eligible for a Campbell Award next year. Are you aware that Scott Lynch doesn’t recycle?
I’m a little puzzled that my own Infoquake isn’t mentioned on the list of runners-up for a Hugo nomination. The lowest-nominated books on the list received 4 nominations. I know of at least 4 eligible people (not to mention myself and my editor) who claim to have nominated Infoquake for a Hugo. Now I certainly wasn’t expecting to win the sucker, nor was I expecting to get more nominations than such widely praised books as Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns or Jo Walton’s Farthing, for instance, that also fell short of a nomination.
But now I’m curious if either a) there’s something about the nomination process I don’t understand, b) the folks who claim to have nominated me didn’t actually nominate me, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, or c) this is simply another example of Vernor Vinge’s longstanding plot to suppress my work and put me down. Some people just can’t stand honest competition.
A few other observations from the runners-up list:
- The number of people who actually submit nominations for these awards is embarrassingly low. 58 people nominated the book that ended up winning the Hugo this year. 58 people! You could have gotten nominated for a Hugo Award with just 35 nominations this year. Attention, Robert Stanek, you still have a chance.
- Kudos to my pal Tobias Buckell, who made a very respectable showing in the nomination department for his first novel Crystal Rain. Dude, you got more nominations for the Hugo this year than James Morrow, Robert Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, and Cormac McCarthy. That’s gotta feel good.
- The vote for the Campbell Award was a total blowout. Naomi Novik received almost four times as many votes as second-place finisher Sarah Monette, which is pretty astounding.
- You are hereby commanded to place this Elric cover by John Picacio on your desktop and stare at it until someone gives him a Hugo already.
- I’m not sure I’m reading the final vote tally grid correctly… but it appears that John Scalzi lost the vote for Best Fan Writer to Dave Langford by a single vote. Man, Scalzi, you can’t do anything right.
