There’s been some talk on the Emerald City blog about someone taking over Hugo Recommendations for Cheryl once she closes the doors of EC. John Klima, meanwhile, has set up a SF/F Best Editor Wiki to help folks determine who edited what come Hugo voting time.

Might not the best option be a combination of these two ideas? What I think would be ideal is if someone setup a wiki devoted to Hugo eligible works. I know I’ve found it difficult in the past to recall all of what’s been published in a given year, and if I had an easy reference that would make things much simpler. This would be especially useful when it comes to the Dramatic Presentation categories, which I always find difficult to fill out.

A lot of people have been bemoaning the lack of Hugo voting — if you look at the vote tallies, it’s quite appalling to see how few of Worldcon’s some-6,000 attendees actually vote (it’s in the low hundreds in each category) — if this Hugo wiki was setup, and then linked to on the Worldcon/Hugo voting website, perhaps it would encourage more people to participate? Perhaps the current system is just too much work for most fans?

Thoughts? Ideas?

Read More

In case you missed it, SCIFI.com is airing a series of Battlestar Galactica webisodes — 10 short, web-only episodes, which take place between the end of season two and the start of season three. The series of webisodes is called “The Resistance,” and seems as though it will be detailing the human resistance against Cylon-occupied New Caprica. The first episode is streamable right now. New episodes will appear every Tuesday and Thursday at midnight (EST), leading up to the season premiere on October 6.

The first episode is three and a half minutes long, with a thirty second sneak peak at Season Three at the end. At just three and a half minutes, it is itself not much more than a teaser, but it’s good to see some new BSG action at long last.

Read More

As John Scalzi noted on his blog, it’s worth noting and celebrating that Robert Charles Wilson won the Hugo Award for Spin, which was an award not only well-deserved for the novel in question, but long-overdue when it comes to that writer’s career.   

Here’s what I wrote about Spin, when I read it back in June of last year:

Spin is a superb novel full of Big Ideas, but those Big Ideas don’t come at the expense of rich character development as is so often the case with books of this sort.  Wilson has a real knack for creating characters one can empathize with and can really grow to care about.  The family relationship depicted here, between the narrator, Tyler Dupree, and his childhood friends Jason (the genius) and Diane (his first, unrequited love), is the real driving force of this novel, and is what makes it such a compelling page-turner.  The prose is clean and fluid, and Wilson expertly paces the book, keeping the reader engaged and anxious to find out what comes next.  This can be tricky in a novel that spans several subjective years (and billions of relativistic years), but Wilson pulls it off marvelously. 

Spin is exactly the sort of novel that I think we need to see more of, one that infuses the reader with that gosh-wow sense of wonder that many writers seem to have forgotten is the reason we all fell in love with the genre in the first place. 

Read More