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An Unexpected Bonus of Hugo Voting

Colin Harvey, Photo by Carole Pinchefsky

Posted by
Colin Harvey
May 5, 2009

Recently I took out supporting membership for Anticipation, the 67^th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Montreal in early August 2009. I already had voting rights from attending Denvention, and one unexpected benefit that I discovered was that as well as having the right to vote for the Hugo Awards, I also get a Hugo voting pack. This comprises a zip file of most of the novels, short fiction and non-fiction books on the ballot.

A quick trawl around Amazon shows that the four novels (out of five, as Neal Stephenson’s Anathem isn’t included) retail at about £25, while each of the non-fiction books costs close to that each.

So all told, the material available on Amazon has a retail price of £70 -over one hundred dollars- while much of the short fiction isn’t available there at all.

That’s not a bad little bonus for my fifty dollar fee. And if the WSFS (World Science Fiction Society) repeat the deal next year, it’ll be even better as I’ll still be eligible for that one as well.

I‘ll still buy some of those books, especially the Hugo winners, because a downloaded pdf –even if it’s printed out—just isn’t the same as a proper book.

But it’s still a heck of a deal, and kudos to the WSFS for arranging it.