SF Tidbits for 4/2/07
By John DeNardo |
Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at
12:04 am
- John Joseph Adams profiles Richard Bowes, author of From the Files of the Time Rangers, at SCI FI Wire.
- Jeff VanderMeer interviews Jonathan Strahan.
- Tobias Buckell interviews Derryl Murphy.
- It’s Robert J. Sawyer Interview Day! Both SciFiWeekly and SF Revu interview Robert J. Sawyer, author of Rollback.
- Critical Mass has a conversation with Julie Phillips, author of the biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
- IEEE Spectrum profiles “Lord of the Geeks”, Joss Whedon.
- Paul Levinson latest Light On Light Through podcast, “Galactica Dylan” covers the season finale of Battlestar Galactica.
- The Time Traveler Show podcast has a 1977 conversation with SF Grand Masters Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl on the “the art, science and combat of collaboration”.
- Parody: John Glenn Installed In Smithsonian.
- Hugo Awards Nominations Correction: Nippon 2007, the 65th World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Yokohama, Japan, has announced a correction to this year’s Hugo Awards nominations, adding Pan’s Labyrinth to the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category, and removing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. [via Locus Online] Also: Nippon has finally posted the nominees online.
- Guess which 2 books by female authors sparked a great discussion at a book club? Eleanor Arnason has the answer.
- Free online fiction: The Star Conquerors by Ben Bova. [via Specualtive Fiction Online]
- FreeTube offers SciFi Free TV, a live movie station that is devoted to playing classic older SciFi films.
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits Part LXIV
- SF Tidbits for 8/27/06
- SF Tidbits Part XXI
- SF Tidbits for 2/12/06
- SF Tidbits for 2/10/07
Filed under: Tidbits
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Any explanation for how they could make a mistake like that in the Hugo nominations? Almost seems like an April Fools joke…
http://www.nippon2007.us/hugo_correction_faq.php – has the explanation. Interesting – ‘error in the data’. I like the acknowledgement that it could have been construed as an April Fools joke though
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My first thought was that it was an April Fools bit, but so many others (much closer to the process than I am) confirmed it — or they are in on the joke or were similarly duped. In the end I decided that Pan’s Labyrinth made a better nominee than PotC: Dead Man’s Chest…based solely on critical acclaim, or course, since I have seen neither.
It’s not a joke. The announcement itself says that is it not an April Fools joke. The Administrators wish it was, because it’s very frustrating and annoying to discover errors like this. I don’t have the specifics, but I was told that the data in that category was corrupted in such a way that the totals appeared to match the way they should. It wasn’t until they audited the figures that the found the error. They decided it was more important to get the corrections out as soon as they possibly could than hold off announcing for another 24 hours so that the news broke on April 2 instead of April 1.
I’ve been a Hugo Awards administrator myself. I can certainly see how one could make an error counting ballots. It is an intensely manual process, and actually quite difficult to automate, particularly at the nominating stage, where there is lots of variation in nominee names. There have been nominating ballot errors in the past, as a matter of fact. The Hugo Administrator deserves nothing but praise for notifying people as soon as she found the error.