Among Others Wins Hugo For Best Novel 115
The 2012 Hugo Award ceremony has completed at Chicon 7, and Among Others by Jo Walton has been given the award for Best Novel. The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson won for Best Novella, and The Paper Menagerie won for Best Short Story. Doctor Who had three nominations for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), and ended up taking home the award for the episode "The Doctor's Wife," which was written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Richard Clark. Season 1 of Game of Thrones won Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), edging out Hugo and Captain America. Ursula Vernon was awarded the Best Graphic Story Hugo for Digger. See below for the full list of winners.
Best Novel: Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (Asimov's, September/October 2011)
Best Novelette: “Six Months, Three Days” by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com)
Best Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011)
Best Related Work: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight (Gollancz)
Best Graphic Story: Digger by Ursula Vernon (Sofawolf Press)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Game of Thrones (Season 1), created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss; written by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, Jane Espenson, and George R. R. Martin; directed by Brian Kirk, Daniel Minahan, Tim van Patten, and Alan Taylor (HBO)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): “The Doctor's Wife” (Doctor Who), written by Neil Gaiman; directed by Richard Clark (BBC Wales)
Best Editor (Short Form): Sheila Williams
Best Editor (Long Form): Betsy Wollheim
Best Professional Artist: John Picacio
Best Semiprozine: Locus edited by Liza Groen Trombi, Kirsten Gong-Wong, et al.
Best Fanzine: SF Signal edited by John DeNardo
Best Fan Writer: Jim C. Hines
Best Fan Artist: Maurine Starkey
Best Fancast: SF Squeecast, Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Paul Cornell, Elizabeth Bear, and Catherynne M. Valente
For a full breakdown of how all 1922 ballots were cast, check this PDF.
No ePub direct from Tor? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't figure out the world of e-book publishing. I'm generally happy to buy the Hugo Award winners (and even nominees) figuring that half the work in finding at least some good SF has been done for me, but I can't just go to the publisher's website and buy the fucking book directly from them in an ePub version.
I find this especially weird for Tor given that they seem to understand DRM sucks and they made a big noise about all their ebooks going DRM free [tor.com].
But on their buy page [macmillan.com] (which I found from this article [tor.com] in the Tor blog after doing a Google search for the name) only lets me pick from a bunch of ebook retailers like Amazon, B&N, Google Books... and I know at least some of those won't be available as options for me because I'm here in Australia and not in the USA (Google Books for example is not available to us here).
Further, most of the other options are for specific devices - I happen to have a Kobo, but when I follow the link for that, it takes me to the Kobo search page - either the book is not available there at all, or it's not available for my region. I've tried buying "DRM free" ebooks from Amazon and could not figure out how to do it easily without a Kindle (you don't seem to ever got prompted to download a file; I assume it is all back-end device specific magic tied to your account...?)
In short - I just want to download an ePub file. I know many many users don't want to have to do this, but it is seriously the absolute simplest form of distribution you could come up with - just let me download a .epub file directly in my browser so I can do whatever the hell I want with it!
Re:Jo Walton? Dr. Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't what I find stranger, that Neil Gaiman actually took the time write a Dr. Who episode (part of a lame ripoff of The Time Traveler's Wife) or that people really think it counts as SF.
Gaiman is British, and Doctor Who is truly an icon of British SF. Just about every SF fan, and writer, was weaned on it and feels deep affection for it.I've been watching it since 1964 myself. Doctor Who is very soft core SF, but still tries to be SF.
If you held to strict definitions of SF, you'd hardly ever give out any awards for TV or movies. Game of Thrones is pure fantasy, for instance. "Gritty" fantasy, but still has magic, zombies, dragons, etc. I'm just glad it didn't go to a comic book superhero "franchise". Leave that stuff to Comicon.