Talk:Hugo Award for Best Novel

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Well done for putting it up. But it seems to me that it should be on the Hugo Award page, since that is scarcely too long. The Nebula award uses that format. : ChrisG 14:18, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Possibly; however, the Novel award isn't the only recognition: if, at some future time, we choose to list each category, akin to Academy Award. That would also give plenty of room to list nominees as well, something I'm partial to. -- Seth Ilys 19:10, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The latest retro Hugos are for 1953 according to the Noreascon website but this page lists them as 1954. -- TRS-80 11:28, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's understandable confusion -- the retro Hugos are what would have been awarded in 1954 if any had been awarded then, for work published in 1953. -- Arwel 14:52, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Table/list formatting

Here's an excerpt from the current version:

2001 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Here's the same part from the old version:

In my opinion, the multicolumn table format doesn't work as well, since the entries are single lines of text, mostly. Does anyone besides Phil Boswell or myself have a preference? If the winner isn't emphasized enough, it could be bolded or set off vertically with a <br/><br/> afterward:

—wwoods 19:43, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nominations

  • About the 2006 nominations (or 2005), why wasn't Kazou Ishigura's "Never Let Me Go" nominated. It is science fiction if you read it. Is there some technical requirement I am unaware of.
    • I think it is sci-fi, but it has to be chosen for the shortlist by a judge, afaik, and perhaps none of them thought it was as good as the competition? -- Jon Dowland 10:45, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Hugos are fan-based awards. Those registered to attend the convention nominate the books they liked best, and the 5 books with the most nominations are put on the ballot. [Never Let Me Go] was actually nominated for a SF award, but probably didn't receive enough Hugo nominations. Fan-based awards sometimes overlook good writing in favor of an entertaining story. KennyLucius 14:17, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

As mentioned above, 'Never Let Me Go' *was* nominated for an award - the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I checked this year's Hugo nominations and it didn't appear in the top 15. See [1] VJDocherty 21:07, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] headers for years

I would like to be able to wikilink to this article and jump straight to a year (e.g. Hugo Award for Best Novel#2006. Would it be possible to re-structure the listing so that the years were headers? -- Jon Dowland 10:45, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Two comments on formatting

First, I don't much like the heading "Other nominees" as it feels too general to me. Every year many books get nominated for a Hugo, from which a shortlist is produced and voted on. It looks very much to me like the books in this column are the shortlisted books rather than also including books which were nominated but not shortlisted. However I am unable to verify that for many of the earlier years, which is why I haven't changed it yet.

Second, the list is upside-down. According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works), the first awards should be at the top, going down chronologically to the most recent awards at the bottom. H. Carver 03:48, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The Hugo Awards don't have a shortlist, (unlike some other book awards). The members of the current and previous Worldcons nominate works in various categories, including Novel, and the top 5 of these (more, only if there is a tie for 5th place) go onto the voting ballot as 'nominees'. So there are always only a limited number of nominees and these are the ones listed in the table, and no other 'shortlist'. The title 'Other Nominees' is therefore technically correct. VJDocherty 08:13, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for help

If anyone interested in this page would also be interested in helping me populate the winners with Template:Hugo/Best novel, please do so. I've gotten the most recent two novels in but I won't have time to do any of the rest today. See Spin and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for examples. Thanks, MrZaiustalk 13:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Order of Nominees

Is there an explanation for the ordering of the list of Nominees? Through most of the Hugo's history the various nominees are listed in order of which received the most votes— Usually 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place. See: http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/Hugos/ But this list has the nominees in an apparent random order. What would be the proper way to format the list to show that all nominees are not equal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by JW Bjerk (talk • contribs) 08:02, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


I've added the ranking from this official source: http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/Hugos/ It may look incomplete, but for some of the early years runners up were simply listed without any explicit ordering. Previously as noted above, many of the nominees were ordered randomly, neither alphabetically, nor according the the second-place, third-place, etc. which the novel won.JW Bjerk (talk) 15:56, 5 May 2008 (UTC)