Semiprozine Hugo followup and other Hugo notes

Two main bits of news:

The main WSFS Business Meeting on Saturday voted to not ratify the amendment to eliminate the Semiprozine. This means that the Semiprozine continues indefinitely. A committee is being formed, tasked with reforming the Semiprozine category "and related categories"; I intend to be on the committee, and Chris Barkley, the SMOF who with Ben Yalow was responsible for the amendment, seems to want me on it. I am now officially SMOFfing with both hands.

As to the award itself, this year's winner is Weird Tales, now in its 86th year and the 21st year of its modern revival. This is the fifth time (out of 25) that the award was not won by Locus. NYRSF came in second, which it has done before, but it beat Locus, which I'm sure hasn't!

(On a semi-related note, the Best Graphic Story Hugo will be continued for at least the next three years; there is a built-in sunset clause such that the Business Meeting in 2013 must affirmatively move to renew the category or it will not continue. The award was won this year, its inaugural, by Girl Genius: Cathedral of Bones, which I definitely found to be the most deserving nominee, and a deserving nominee; now the work begins to make the nominee list stronger. I'll try to publish a year-end roundup of the best eligible works.)

Three of the winners of "body of work" award--Frank Wu for Fan Artist, Cheryl Morgan for Fan Writer, and David Hartwell for Professional Editor Long Form--withdrew themselves from consideration for next year's award, at least; Hartwell definitely withdrew himself permanently from the category, saying that three times in a single category was enough. (My inner pedant points out that he actually won once as Professional Editor and twice as Professional Editor Long Form, but my inner sane person is busy bludgeoning my inner pedant.)

Interesting set of winners. Lots of good stuff. Makes me wish I read books.

Pinning down a quote

Huh--I'd never seen this in the original, though I had seen its target correctly identified:

It was Lord Melbourne . . . who said, "I wish I was as cock-sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is cock-sure of everything."

--anon., The Spectator, 30 November 1889.

(Amazingly, the Spectator included the Wikipedia links. Very forward-looking magazine, that.)

Best Graphic Story Hugo: Ooopsie!

From the final issue of Voyageur, the Worldcon newsletter produced by the Plokta Cabal:

While formatting the Hugo nomination list this morning, we discovered that Plokta fave author Paul Cornell (the next Neil Gaiman™) was apparently incorrectly bumped from the Hugo for Best Graphic Story.

Paul's Marvel comic Captain Britain & MI-13 received six nominations for Best Graphic Story and [his] Captain Britain & MI-13: Secret Invasion received eight nominations--but they are effectively the same thing, and fourteen nominations would have been enough to secure a place on the shortlist. Hmph!

Footnotes: CB&MI-13 was a short-lived ongoing series which debuted in 2008. It starred Captain Britain teamed up with MI-13, a group of agents of Britain's counter-magical forces special service, lead by Pete Wisdom, a Warren Ellis creation and former boyfriend of Kitty Pride. MI-13 were introduced in the earlier Cornell-scripted miniseries, Wisdom, in 2006-07, and featured, among other figures, Skrull John, a Skrull who habitually assumed the form of John Lennon. The current series ran 15 issues plus an annual and just finished last month. One of the evil forces they fight is the demonic Plokta. So it all ties back together, see?)

"Secret Invasion" was Marvel's big summer crossover for 2008, and drove the story line in the first four issues of the MI-13 ongoing, all of which appeared in 2008. So, yes, those are overlapping nominations and should definitely have been counted together. If the nominations for this work had been counted correctly, both Fables: War and Pieces and Serenity: Better Days would have been pushed off the final ballot.

What an appalling oversight!

I am not volunteering to administer the Best Graphic Story Hugo. No. I am not. I am not. No. Just bloody kill me if it looks like I'm doing that. If I volunteer to consult, please at least mock me.

ETA: In a comment on a later post, despot_liz points out that it's likely that the administrators who counted the nominations in this category tossed out the nominations for Captain Britain and MI-13 because it wasn't a nomination for "a single story". Given a) the small number of nominated items, b) the clear overlap between CB&MI13 and CB&MI13: Secret Invasion, and c) that this is the first year that the category was part of the Hugos, it seems astonishingly unsound to hold all the nominations to a standard of complete unambiguity.