I’ve been busy handling work at home while recovering from a back injury, so I’ve left this posting a little late. That being the case, let me be brief.
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention is being held in Helsinki this year, and as per usual, the Hugo Awards will be given out there. The Helsinki convention committee has elected to trial a new category of Hugo: Best Series. The qualifications for this award are as follows:
An eligible work for this special award is a multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, which has appeared in at least three volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2016, at least one volume of which was published in 2016.
The Young Wizards series, containing elements of both science fiction and fantasy, has since the publication of So You Want To Be A Wizard in 1983 appeared in ten volumes totaling approximately a million words. The most recent volume, Games Wizards Play, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February of 2016.
So the Young Wizards series is eligible to be nominated for the 2017 Best Series Hugo Award. If you’re a Hugo nominator (and / or possibly a Young Wizards fan), I cordially invite you to consider nominating the series — long praised both by critics and by a cross-generational audience who’ve grown up with the Young Wizards, and are now introducing them to a new young readership as the series continues to grow in depth and complexity..
Per the Hugo Awards page at the Worldcon 75 website:
Members of Worldcon 75, and also of MidAmeriCon 2 (the 2016 Worldcon) and Worldcon 76 (the 2018 Worldcon), will have the right to nominate up to five candidates in each of the Hugo categories. Nominations will close on 2017-03-18 06:59 UTC (at 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time on 17 March).
Those who joined one of the qualifying conventions before the start of January will have already received their unique personalised link to make nominations. (31 January was the cutoff date to join the qualifying conventions in order to nominate; Worldcon 75 members who join after that date will be able to vote on the Final Ballot when it is announced, but will not have nomination rights.) You can also vote by post using a paper ballot: please download and print the A4-size paper ballot (PDF, 160 kB) or the letter-size paper ballot (PDF, 160 kB). Postal ballots must also be received by the same deadline.
The final ballot will be announced in April, and voting for the Hugo Awards will continue until July. Only Worldcon 75 members can vote on the final ballot. Because Worldcon 75 is in the first half of August, it is likely that the deadline for Hugo votes will be in mid-July.
Whether or not you intend to nominate the Young Wizards series, thanks in advance for your support of one of SF’s oldest and most prestigious awards: and thanks for your time and consideration!