After a little too much New Year and birthday cheer we had technical difficulties, but Gary and I still found time to discuss birthday presents, Heinlein, 1967 as a transition year for science fiction, where non-academic cricitism has a role to play in modern SF, and previewed the Coode Street Best of 2010 (we name our top books of the year, but explanations wait for next week).
At the risk of becoming boring, here is my regular contribution on the obscure corners of the Hugo rules.
Hannu does not have a choice as to which edition of The Quantum Thief is up for the Hugo. He can ask people not to nominate him this year, and he might have a better chance of winning if all of his fans concentrated on next year, but he can’t stop people from nominating him if they want to.
Also there’s no guarantee that he will be eligible next year. The extension for works first published in English outside the USA is resolution that has to be renewed annually by the WSFS Business Meeting. It is probable that Reno will renew it, but not certain. If an author were known to be trying to game the system by asking people not to nominate the UK edition that’s exactly the sort of red rag that would get the BM excited and potentially cause them to vote down the extension.
Someone is probably thinking that if Hannu were to be nominated this year he could decline and ask people to nominate him next year instead. But I’m pretty sure that if he did so he would not be eligible for the extension, because excludes works that achieved the final ballot in the previous year (I think whether they were subsequently withdrawn or not is irrelevant). And besides, that would be daft, because by final ballot time the US edition would be newly published and everyone would be talking about it.
So if I were Hannu I’d be asking people to nominate me this year on the assumption that if I didn’t make the final ballot for Reno I’d probably have another chance in 2012, and if I did the release of the US edition would be perfectly timed to get my book in front of US-based voters.