A few days ago - possibly on April 13th? I'm not entirely certain - the Hugo ballot for 2021 was announced. I've been voting and nominating for the Hugos since either 2015 or 2016, and if last year hadn't been one ginormous global trashfire, I would have been at my first ever WorldCon last year in Wellington, NZ. (Oh well, I'm not bitter, she says, grumpily.) I kind of hadn't been planning on getting a supporting membership for this year's Worldcon, DisConIII, which is what provides the right to vote - but then the ballot came out, and (in my opinion) it's a good ballot. With the exception of a few items that I have no plan to read (for reasons I may get to later - or may not), a lot of the fiction finalists are books/stories that I had already planned to read someday, some of which I already own, others of which I'm just waiting to get from the library when I have the reading time. Also this year, WorldCon is in December rather than its usual July/August timing, which means that there's a lot more reading time than there usually is.
And then I discovered that the vast majority of the short stories and novelettes are available online, and all of the novellas and novels and Lodestar (YA, Not a Hugo) nominees are available via my local library, and a grand piece of foolishness was born.
I'm going to try to actually do all my Hugo reading this year.
There are five main fiction categories that I'm looking at: Short Story, Novelette, Novella, Novel and Lodestar*. There is also the series category, but that involves way more reading than I have time for, as I have other reading goals for the year that do not revolve around SFF! As a supporting member I will eventually have access to the Hugo Packet, which may include full versions of the various stories and books, or may include excerpts, as determined by individual publishers, but as I said, I actually already have access to a surprising amount of the material. (Seriously - I was stunned to find every novella, novel and Lodestar* nominee was available. Someone in the Libraries Victoria consortium knows their stuff!)
Each of those five categories has six nominees, so we're talking 30 items, total. Of course, said 30 items are not all of similar lengths! I've finished the short story nominees already (more whereof in the next post) but of course each of the Big Four categories get progressively longer, and then the Lodestars* are not all short books, either.
That said, I'm not going to be reading all 30 items. Looking at my spreadsheet (yes, I have one) I currently have two items marked as "Will not read", and three as "Not sure", although one of those is about to get shifted back to neutral which is, essentially, "at least give it a go". I have a tracking category for "Abandoned" as there will be some, I'm sure, that are simply not to my taste, and while you can persevere with a short story (and I did so in at least one case), life's too short to do that with a novel you know you don't want to read.
However even with exceptions that's still at least 25 items, of varying lengths, to be read between now and the closing date for voting, which is 19 November, US time. Thankfully, I've already finished six.
I'm also scrapbooking this project, and posting mini-reviews to my Instagram account, should you be interested. I'm very bad at writing reviews, so mini ones are basically the best I'm ever going to manage. I'm also counting everything - including the short stories - as "books" for the purpose of my yearly reading goal, which I think I'm going to have to increase as a result of this project.
So, wish me luck, should anyone actually be reading this screed. My intention is to post wrapups of each category when complete, and you can expect my wrapup of the short stories fairly soon.
* The Lodestar Award is not an official Hugo Award, but is administrated by the Hugo Administrators, appears on the same ballot, and is announced at the same awards ceremony.
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