I woke up this morning with the realization that I wasn’t going to get all my Hugo Award reading done.  Apparently my brain spent the down time calculating pages left versus time.  I mean, I appreciate the effort, considering it usually chews on fantasy baseball stats, but if it was thinking about stock prices or something my life would probably be very different.

Anyway, I got an AussieCon4 membership (and with it, a Hugo vote) at the beginning of May.  I had three months to read the six novels up for the award.  Those were the priority, and I’d read whatever other categories I could get to.  Any category I couldn’t finish entirely I wouldn’t vote on. But instead of starting right then, I finished what I was already reading, then picked up another book which turned out to be a bit of a slog, and by the time I was able to start on any of the nominees, it was June.  Now, when I read fast, I probably get through a total of 200 pages a week.  And that’s the max end of the range.  Even if I definitely read that much (no guarantee), it’s past the point where I can hope to finish all the novels.  It’s not really even close.  I’d need another month.

It’s completely reasonable for an interested reader to thoroughly digest all the material between the nomination announcement and the voting deadline.  I lost a month after the announcement before I decided I’d make the effort to vote.  Then another month winding up my other reading.  Had I started right away, or even at the beginning of May, or if I’d just happened to have read one of the books beforehand, I’d have easily made it.  I don’t think you need to be a professional writer/reader/reviewer/publisher to participate.

I was talking with K about whether it would be ethical to read only half of each book and vote based on that.  K’s argument (well-taken) was that this is not enjoying the books, it’s an assignment.  My feeling is that I’m just not giving the books a fair vote.  Even though the chances of that my opinion would differ if I read only the first halves versus if I read all books in their entirety are exceedingly small, there is a chance.  It’s also not in the spirit of the voting, to my thinking.  Now, there’s no rule or enforcement of making sure everyone reads all the books.  And in fact, I am highly dubious that most voters do.  I find it really hard to believe that most voters read all of Anathem last year.  It just stands to reason that most read a piece of it (or less) and voted for the author they liked better.  It was a name-heavy year with Gaiman, Scalzi, Doctorow, Stephenson, and Stross all up for the award and all well-known in the SF world and at least Gaiman and Doctorow well known outside of it. Anyway, point is, I don’t want to vote unless I’ve read everything start to finish.

Conclusion: I’ll have to skip the novel vote this year.  I’ll read them all but won’t finish in time.  So, what I CAN do is read everything else from the other categories (novellas, novelettes, short stories, graphic novels, etc.), which will take a lot less time.  Then I’ll just vote on those categories and omit a novel vote.

One other thought along these lines.  There is an award for long-form dramatic presentation, i.e., movies.  I’ve seen two of the nominees already, Moon and Star Trek, of which I liked Moon substantially more, so that’s the leader so far.  One of the remaining nominees is Avatar, which I haven’t seen.  Facts:

1. I have heard over and over that seeing it is an overwhelmingly awesome “experience” (which is to say, the action and effects are mesmerizing).
2. I understand the the story itself is so-so, even from people who totally dug the movie.
3. I pretty much universally dislike long action-and-effects-oriented movies that skimp on the story.

So, the chances that I will like Avatar more than Moon are pretty much zero.  Nevertheless, is it ethical to vote for the category even if I don’t see one of the films which I am 99% certain I wouldn’t vote for anyway?  I think this is a slightly different argument from the one above about only reading half of each nominated book.  I’ll try to see Avatar but if I don’t, I still think I have a legitimate vote.