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I shouldn’t be prolonging or teasing about this; so I’ll start by saying that I feel slightly embarrassed to admit not having read H.P. Lovecraft, one of those writers it seems that everyone else read when they were 16, until just this past month. More precisely, I’ve read 3 or 4 HPL stories in anthologies over the years, but I’ve never before sat down to systematically read his works, or even one complete story collection. I think I knew that I would someday, or should: I’d picked up a couple of the Ballantine editions first published in the ’70s, and had acquired the 3 authoritative Arkham House collections in the years since then.

I say this with due humility, because there’ve been a number of times when I’ve chatted with this writer or that hardcore fan at conventions and been rather amazed at their casually mentioning never having read Isaac Asimov, say, or Robert Heinlein. (And they let you write a novel?) It’s not that surprising, I suppose, to hear this; the field is too vast for any but the most dedicated (and senior) readers (John Clute, Don D’Ammassa) to have read everything worth reading, and obviously young writers are responding to the field as it exists today, without having necessarily spent time studiously learning its past history.

Still, for those of my generation, HPL is perhaps a significant omission. In my golden age, beginning of course around age 12, I discovered and sought out and read everything I could find by Bradbury and Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, and then Silverberg and Ballard and others. I suppose I considered myself a hard-headed SF reader, open to literary writing but skeptical of wishy-washy fantasy, and the passing encounters I may have had with HPL left me unmoved. (I bought a 1970s Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy’ edition of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, whose title story I now realize is perhaps the least characteristic major story by HPL.)

But something a couple months ago led me to pick up one of those Ballantine editions and read a story or two. And discovering that electronic texts are available online — albeit uncorrected and sometimes corrupt texts — contributed something (which you may guess at but I’ll not further explain) to my sudden intention to finally pay attention to HPL. And so since early August I’ve been reading my way through the stories, at first haphazardly but then systemically, chronologically that is, which means that as of this evening — after having spent a week working my way through “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and then finishing “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” just a few minutes ago — I still have yet to read many of the ‘major’ HPL stories such as “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Shadow Out of Time”, not to mention a handful of titles I’d never even recognized until this current project, such as “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”. The best is yet ahead, perhaps? — not that I haven’t been fascinated by all those before, the way HPL themes recur over and over, the way as with some writers every story seems a variation on every other story, all of them accumulating to some great whole.

And so I expect to spend another week or two finishing the last dozen or so HPL stories, closing off the Ballantine editions and the Arkham House editions and the Library of America and Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Wheeler editions, and then posting another entry here about what I find fascinating about HPL, as if anyone needs my impressions, and then returning to current reading and current projects.

Running behind as usual, especially with jury duty and the flu this past week, in addition to the usual. Still planning a post about HP Lovecraft; have comments to Cory’s latest column to post on the site; New in Paperback listings are about ready.

Some links related to the last couple posts…

Time Magazine has an article on Snooping Bosses: “Think your employer is checking your e-mail, Web searches and voice mail? You’re probably right.” The article doesn’t mention the most insidious technique I’ve heard rumored: keyboard monitors. They track every keystroke you make, and analyze/filter the results. Good thing my friend isn’t trying to write a novel in the time he used to surf the web.

And here’s a page about ISBN-13, which formally goes into effect January 1, 2007.

Yes, I recall the advice about pertinent blog post titles. That doesn’t mean I always care to follow it…

What I learned at Worldcon: Chatting with Bill Contento, Locus Index compiler, at the Locus table at the Anaheim Worldcon one day, I learned that the formula for computing the checksum digit of the new 13-digit ISBN is different than the old formula.

For anyone not into cataloguing books, the ISBN, International Standard Book Number, has been the unique identifier for books published in the last 30 years or so. A typical ISBN runs 0-679-45077-7, where the 0 is a domain or continent ID [the US typically being 0, except for small presses and some newer publishers], the 679 is a publisher ID [this one is Knopf], the 45077 identifies the particular title, and the final digit is a ‘checksum’ computed from the previous digits according to some arcane formula. Responding to a kind of Y2K crisis, the publishing industry is migrating to an expanded, 13-digit ISBN system, and for a year or so now many US publishers have printed both the old-style ISBN-10 and the new-style ISBN-13 on the back covers of their books, right by the bar code. I have here, for example, a copy of the elusive Infoquake by David Louis Edelman (which despite all the publicity, I never have seen a copy of in a physical B&N or Borders store, and which I finally ordered from Amazon), which has these numbers:

ISBN-13: 978-159102442-2
ISBN-10: 159102442-0

Now at first glance it would appear that all that has been done is to tack 978- onto the front end of the 10-digit ISBN number, and this does seem to be the case for all the examples of current US books I’ve seen. But… a more careful glance reveals that the final digit, the checksum digit, is different. I hadn’t realized this, until Bill mentioned it. The new formula, he claimed, is different, one effect being that in the new system the final digit will never be ‘X’, has it was once every 11 times or so under the old system. (The checksum was a sum of products of the earlier digits, modulo 11.)

Now aside from the obvious, inherent fascination of these details, the reason I discuss this here is that one way I compile ISBNs for new books is by scanning reviews on the Publishers Weekly website every Monday or Tuesday, and tagging titles reviewed there in my Books database. If I don’t already have an ISBN for some title, I copy and paste the ISBN from the PW review into my database. For some time now…weeks? months?… I’ve been cropping the 978 off the 13-digit ISBNs listed by PW and pasting the result into the database.

Oops. That doesn’t work. You can find a book via ISBN on the Amazon site, with or without embedded hyphens, but search for 159102442-2 (from the example above) and you find nothing. The checksum digit is wrong. Which means…. some number of ISBNs in my database, reflected in the weekly New Books listings and in the Directory pages (which include forthcoming titles I haven’t yet seen), may be wrong.

I will be double-checking the Amazon links for new listings as I generate them for the website, but if some errors slip through, if you click on an Amazon link and get an error, this may be the reason. Of course if you do encounter such an error, let me know.

On a separate but related topic, I see that Amazon has changed the way it generates links to books, at least for current titles. To illustrate, if I search for Infoquake, the page I’m directed to has this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Infoquake-Trilogy-David-Louis-Edelman/dp/1591024420/ref=sr_11_1/002-9246679-5340063?ie=UTF8

This URL has a huge chunk of text in the middle identifying the title and author. You’d think the ISBN number — see, they’re still relying on the 10-digit version, there right after the /dp/ — would be sufficient to identify a path to the book. Why is Amazon doing this? I have no idea. To make it more difficult for automated spammers to assault their site, perhaps?

My concern is that, as an Amazon associate, who gets a commission from every order to Amazon via a locusmag.com link, any change in the format of links might disrupt that revenue stream. It’s not a lot, but it does allow me to pay the reviewers — Howard and Lawrence and Gary and the others. Fortunately, the associate link format doesn’t seem to be affected; the link I’d build for Infoquake, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591024420/locusmagazine, still works.

(And I thought this would be a short post.)

A quick note to mention that this blog is currently a “featured blog” on the Analog and Asimov’s blog pages, here linked. Willie Garcia of Dell Magazines sent me a form to sign and fax back, as if permission to link were some official legal thing. In contrast, I’ve always assumed that anything accessible on the web is free game, public knowledge, no permission required, as I tell those occasional e-mail inquirers who think that they need my permission to link to Locus Online. (Of course most such e-mails have other ends in mind.)

Meanwhile, three forthcoming posts here are in work or in thought, one on ISBNs, one on reading HP Lovecraft, and one on reading metrics. In work for weeks or months, in the latter cases. Perhaps I take this blog too seriously..? As if anyone is reading?

I read somewhere not long ago that people who read blogs tend to be middle-class white-collar workers who surf the web from their computers at work. They have time on their hands, in the sense that they don’t make widgets and so don’t have to be ‘productive’ every minute of the day. I suspect many Locus Online readers are like that too.

But I have this friend, see, who called me the other day to complain about his workplace situation. Apparently his company got sold from one big-name corporation (a well-known West Coast-based manufacturer of passenger aircraft, as it happens) to another (a somewhat lesser-known East Coast-based conglomerate, whose subsidiaries manufacture, among other things, jet engines and elevators) about a year ago. The change in corporate culture has been dramatic. “These people are uptight and paranoid,” my friend complained. “They’re obsessed with regimented procedures, with labels on file cabinets and bookshelves, and they wear suits.” I sympathized; I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone in a suit in my own southern California company.

“And basically,” he went on, “these new corporate overlords of ours are just not on our side. They don’t trust us. They’ve said so explicitly. They filter our e-mail for key words–like ‘breast’ !–and if they find something, you get a Phone Call to ask what’s going on. They’re watching us every moment. And of course, they’re blocking the Internet.”

Blocking the Internet? Well, my company has always taken a dim view of surfing porn at work.

“Oh not just that,” my friend went on, “they’ve got three guys sitting in a room scanning web access logs and manually blocking anything they find that they don’t consider work-related. I went to Salon the other day and got this big warning on my screen instead– THIS SITE HAS BEEN BLOCKED PER CORPORATE POLICY…. It’s classified as an ‘entertainment’ site, see, and obviously entertainment is not a suitable activity for the workplace.”

Well, I responded, that’s not unusual corporate policy, is it? I mean, you’re supposed to be there to work, right?

“Yeah well, sure, like the admin next to me who yaks for hours on the phone every day with her friends isn’t supposed to be working too? Like we can’t just take a break once in a while?? Anyway the Internet blocks are in effect 24/7. I used to spend my lunch hours surfing the web, reading blogs and other websites — like Locus Online — but lately so many sites are blocked, I’ve given up. They’ve won. I don’t even try anymore. We’re in a lockdown situation here.”

He sounded so forlorn. Well, that’s rough, I agreed, but there’s not much you can do about it. Get a cellphone with internet access perhaps?

“They can’t win!” my friend agreed. “Technology can’t be suppressed!”

Well just don’t risk your job over it, I advised. Thinking about it, I suppose I would be greatly inconvenienced if that happened to me; I mean, suppose I were running a website, say, and were used to spending my lunch hours gathering content for it. To be cut off like that would really hurt. I’m not sure what I would do. There are only so many hours in the day.

Coincidentally I saw an article recently claiming that younger jobseekers

will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access.

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist. …

“Companies all over the world are saying, oh, you can’t be on the internet while you’re at work. You can’t be on instant messaging at work…” she said. “These are digital immigrant ideas.”

Kirah defines ‘digital immigrants’ as people who were not born into the digital lifestyle and view it as a distraction rather than an integral part of life. The younger generation of workers have been using computers and mobile phones since birth and she calls them ‘digital natives’.

Microsoft obviously has a vested interest in letting people use computers, but I’m not surprised that young people might think this way.

The final condolence I offered my friend was that, maybe without the distraction of the Internet at work, he might really become a lot more productive, and be suitably rewarded in coming pay raise cycles.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

My editor here at Views from Medina Road — that would be myself, reading my own posts the next morning — has raised a few issues that need follow-up response.

Did Russell Letson and wife Cezarija Abartis ever show up? No. I’d thought, the last time I saw Russell (when was that?) that he’d reminisced about Anaheim a decade ago and expressed his plans to be there this year. Apparently he changed his mind, or my memory is mistaken. On the other hand, Locus senior editor Tim Pratt and his wife Heather Shaw arrived over the weekend, having held the fort at Locus HQ in Oakland during the preceding work week. I saw them in passing two or three times, though alas they did not attend the Hugo ceremony, when CNB brought all the attending magazine staff and reviewers up on to stage with him. Tim’s online journal has more.

What was Michael’s reaction? Michael, my partner’s smart, good-looking 15-year-old son, exposed to the hardcore world of SF fandom for the first time Friday night after dinner and Saturday during the Hugo ceremony. Well, he was amused by the antics of the Hugo presenters and recipients, as far as I could tell during the event (I only saw him text-messaging his friends a couple times). He’d never heard of the books or stories or fans, but knew the film and TV nominees; and Connie and Harlan and Robert and others commanded his attention. According to my partner, his reaction later to wandering through the room parties was…. well, this is why I didn’t mention it before… amazement at how many fat, nerdy people there seemed to be there. And how I didn’t seem to fit that pattern. Which indicates how little he knows me, perhaps…

What was my reaction to Harlan’s infamous grope? I didn’t see it. We were sitting in the 6th row but way over on the left side, glancing back and forth between the direct live view of the stage and the screen projection above us, and somehow I didn’t actually see Harlan groping Connie. I did see him mouth the mic. It was gross and embarrassing for Harlan, but I’ve long ago stopped taking Harlan seriously, and my impression was that Connie did her best to handle the situation.

On another note, I should mention that the buzz about next year’s Worldcon in Japan is that the professionals, especially the US publishers and editors, sound disinclined to go. For expense reasons. The buzz is that the hardcore fans will go, to maintain their clannish annual connection, but that the US pro and semipro community will likely choose the ’07 World Fantasy Con, scheduled for upstate New York, to hold their annual convocation.

Myself, I haven’t decided. I’ve attended every Worldcon since New Orleans in ’88, and next year’s event sounds like a good excuse to go to Japan, a place I’ve never been. But I haven’t decided.

Friday evening (day 3) was the Eos party, this year held poolside at a Hyatt hotel about a mile south of the Convention Center/Hilton/Marriott complex. The whole Locus gang carpooled there, then wended our way through a ‘Junior American Miss’ pageant of some sort (reminding more than one of us of JonBenét Ramsey, again in the news) to reach the outside party area. I’d run into David Marusek in the Hilton lobby just as we were leaving, and was inclined to bring him along, but neither of us was confident of the feasibility of his showing up there uninvited… I think it wouldn’t have been a problem. Some parties are strictly invitation only, with guards checking at the door; others, like Eos’, seem open to anyone who knows about it, and certainly there were many SF celebrities there who weren’t directly associated with HarperCollins or Eos. I sat at a table chatting with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper and Andrew Wheeler, as the setting sun glared in my eyes. There wasn’t much food, but the bar was open. Over in a corner was Gordon Van Gelder and Julie Phillips (author of the Tiptree bio), experiencing her first SF convention; Gary Wolfe took me over to meet her.

Later that evening my partner, his work week over, met me at the Hilton with his 15-year-old son Michael. After dinner we wandered through the 5th floor parties, giving Michael — a goodlooking, popular student at a prestigious private high school, Junior Olympics swimmer and soccer player, smart but no more familiar with SF than via the occasional Flowers for Algernon read for class or superhero movie seen with friends — a glimpse into the hardcore world of SF fandom. We pushed our way through the Asimov’s/Analog party in the SFWA suite, saying hi to Ellen Datlow, and around through the hallway maze, but it wasn’t long before partner and son called it a night. But they both came back on Saturday for the Hugos (see a couple posts ago).

After the Hugos on Saturday (day 4), partner driving son back home, I stopped by my room to post the winners. I’d had the page ready, needing only to delete all the non-winners from the listing, though as it turned out, I’d guessed every one of the fiction category winners (to mention in the homepage headline) wrong, and had to rewrite that. Still, I made it up to the 19th floor in the Marriott for the Hugo-Losers party just as the Locus gang arrived, which was good since this party was closely guarded by officials checking paper invitations, and I’d not received any such invitation. I coat-tailed in with the Locus gang. The party was hosted by a Japanese contingent associated with next year’s Worldcon, and they provided plum wine, sake, sushi rolls, and various crackers and tofu slices whose tastes belied their appearances. I passed Craig Engler for about the third time that day, who said again that we’ve got to get that website category back!, and chatted with Jonathan and Geoff and Mary and Rick and others.

Sunday morning (day 5) partner and I met Mark Budz and Marina Fitch for breakfast. They’d driven down from Santa Cruz just for the weekend, having come part-way Friday night and the rest of the way by early Saturday. After breakfeast we ducked into the convention center to grab the latest newsletter and say goodbye to the Locus table folks (Bill and Amelia), then met Diana Gill for brunch at the Hilton, talking about the convention and what’s to see in SoCal and what HarperCollins is planning for their website. Then — the close timing of events the past couple days being almost uncannily successful — I checked out of the hotel just before noon, rendezvoused with Mark & Marina, and departed Anaheim to drive home, about an hour’s north of Anaheim, with Mark and Marina stopping by for a couple hours before they headed on north to home.

Convention Over.

I see via links on other sites that the complete Hugo Awards voting breakdown, along with the list of nominees and honorable mentions, are available online. (I understand these files were provided on CD ROM by the con committee to members of the press, but apparently Locus Online was not on their list.) Thus there’s no need to describe the results in detail; I’ll just point out a few things that strike me as significant.

Novel– Despite predictions that Martin might win the award, as a sort of cumulative honor for his series to date, his book came in last. Many people predicted Stross would win, and he came in second, but Wilson’s lead was solid from the first round. It’s interesting, tracking the ‘no award’ totals in each round, that while 17 voted for ‘no award’ as first place, and 18 others ranked it ahead of the second, third, and fourth placing novels, some 43 others ranked ‘no award’ ahead of Martin’s novel.

Novella– Link tied with Willis in the first round of counting, then dropped behind as second-place votes from eliminated nominees were added to the totals. Several commentators said that, however much they liked reading Link’s story, it was difficult afterwards to say just what it was about, whether it was SF or fantasy or what. That may have turned off some voters, but I would guess that Willis’ story benefited from her personal popularity to win, as more than one good but not great previous Willis story has done.

Novelette– I thought Doctorow’s online and personal popularity would swing the result his way, even though I liked Beagle’s story better. As in the novel voting, there were a chunk of voters who chose ‘no award’ ahead of the nominee that eventually placed last, the story by Michael A. Burstein.

Short story– Lanagan led in the initial count of first place votes, then dropped behind as others were eliminated. In this category the jump in ‘no award’ votes came ahead of the Resnick and Burstein stories. I’d actually thought Resnick would win — it’s the sort of sentimental story Hugo voters have gone for in the past, and Resnick is a popular presence at conventions, and nothing else on the ballot seemed really strong (except for Lanagan’s story, but it was non-sf/f).

Related Book– Gary Wolfe’s book, interestingly, had the most nominations (29) in the category; Wilhelm’s had only 19. I have no explanation for Wilhelm’s win, except to wonder if the number of Clarion students who’ve learned from her, or perhaps simply the general availability of her book (compared to Wolfe’s or Ashley’s), tipped the votes her way.

Editor– Hartwell led all the way. Why did voters finally come around his way this year and not before? Perhaps Dozois’ absence from the ballot (he did place 7th in number of nominations) made the category more of a mix-up than it has been in many years. Or perhaps, to give voters a bit more credit, the repeated observations year after year that the same candidates win in certain categories year and year, despite other worthies, finally sunk in. [Update: Or more likely the ongoing debate about splitting the category raised awareness of who should win; see Patrick Nielsen Hayden's comment below.]

Semiprozine– Almost the same candidates as last year (with Emerald City replacing The Third Alternative). Ansible’s win last year was due to the local UK vote, then, presumably? This year Locus led all the way.

Campbell Award– As everyone predicted, Scalzi won, and he led commandingly from the first round. A better writer than Roberson or Monette or Swainston or Bishop or Sanderson? Maybe, maybe not, but none of them write popular blogs.

Interactive Video Game– This year’s special category on the nomination ballot, deleted from the final ballot for ‘lack of interest’, drew no more than 13 nominations for any particular item. (The next lowest category was 28, for Resnick’s short story.) The 13 were for ‘World of Warcraft’. The only thing I nominated, ‘Myst V: End of Ages’ got only one other nomination.

This year’s Hugo Awards were not the efficient hour-long affair of last year’s event in Glasgow; they went on just about two hours, but were enjoyable and entertaining nonetheless. There were virtually no slack periods or screw-ups (well, one) or embarrassments. The overriding theme was the familiar but popular Connie Willis shtick of promising to avoid the tension-building delays of past ceremonies, which cause great agony among nominees waiting to learn whether or not they’ve won, and then causing such delays anyway, via apparently spontaneous interjections about events concerning the nominees or past ceremonies. This time the theme was expanded with the participation of Robert Silverberg, who came on stage at the very start, as the video screens displayed the caption “Connie Willis, Toastmaster”, and after Connie arrived (with two space opera security guard types) to take charge, re-appeared at intervals during the evening as if determined to sabotage the event, causing spotlights to go out, captions of “Willie Connis”, and so on.

I’ll not do a blow-by-blow description of the evening, but a few moments deserve recognition.

Elizabeth Bear, presenting the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, to, as it turned out (and everyone had predicted), John Scalzi, announced a new instant tradition, the bestowal of a tiara upon the new winner. Scalzi accepted it with grace, and went on in his acceptance speech to recommend works by the other nominees in impressive detail.

Andy Porter presented the award for Best Semiprozine, first relaying a history of the category and his own record of Hugo nominations and wins in various categories for Algol and Starship and SF Chronicle (including a win by one vote one year over Locus), before announcing the winner this year as… Locus. (It’s not my fault this time, he said.) Charles Brown abandoned his cane as he lept across the stage to embrace Porter and accept the award, and then called up, in addition to fellow winners Liza Groen Trombi and Kirsten Gong-Wong, all the other attending Locus staffers, including Karlyn Pratt, Amelia Beamer, Carolyn Cushman, Jonathan Strahan, and Gary K. Wolfe. Brown said it was getting so he could barely remember all the staff’s names, but that he was confident the magazine would remain in good hands.

Betty Ballantine presented the Best Professional Editor award to…. David G. Hartwell, by far the greatest and most pleasing surprise of the evening. Hartwell has held the record (see The Locus Index to SF Awards: Hugo Awards Records and Tallies, under “Hugo Never-Winners”) for most number of Hugo nominations ever without having won. Finally, he’s lost that record, and won a Hugo even without the impending category split (approved this year, though I haven’t followed the details) for separate categories for long-form editors and short-form editors.

Hartwell concluded his brief acceptance speech by saying, though he didn’t think he would have done the same for him, he’d like to recommend that next year’s Hugo be awarded to Jim Baen.

The Best Related Book category included the one screw-up that I noticed: as the nominees were read, with cover images and photos of the authors displayed on the large screens to either side of the stage, the slide for Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996 by [Locus reviewer] Gary K.Wolfe had a photo of the other Gary K. Wolfe, author of the book Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who is a different person than Locus reviewer and critic Gary K. Wolfe who was nominated for a Hugo. Judging from lack of audience reaction, alas, few seemed to notice.

The final four categories featured the appearance of presenter Harlan Ellison for the short story category, who led with an extended defense of the short story category as the pre-eminent form of SF, where writers establish their voices and learn their craft. After the Hugo was presented to David D. Levine, the announcement was made of the Special Committee Award (a plaque) to Harlan for 50 years of writing SF, an honor apparently not revealed in advance to the recipient (same for Betty Ballantine). Harlan took the opportunity to talk about the forthcoming TV series “Masters of Science Fiction”, which adapts one of his own stories and includes an appearance by him in a cameo role he wrote for himself — the first time in 40 years he’s managed to actually be cast in such a role. He went on and on in over-the-top Harlan style, and mentioned that this might be his last convention. Though the audience seemed entertained, it was hard not to detect the wish that this might be an actual promise.

James Patrick Kelly, presenting the novelette award, discussed the spelling of novelette/novelet and proposed that the existing set of category names go metric: novel, decinovel, centinovel, millinovel.

Robert Silverberg came out in serious mode to present the novella award, to… Connie Willis. Who was genuinely surprised and moved, to the point of becoming choked up, that the fantasies of her youth, of attending her first Worldcon among writer gods such as Robert Silverberg, had become so fulfilled.

And if there was a surprise to match Hartwell’s win for best editor, it was Robert Charles Wilson’s win for best novel (against predictions of Charles Stross or George R.R. Martin). It was a triumph for Tor and editors Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who have been trumpeting the book against the apparent odds, and for Robert Charles Wilson, about whom commentators all weekend had been saying was one of those underappreciated writers whose books kept getting better and better, who would someday eventually win, even if he wouldn’t this weekend. But he did win, and everyone was very pleased.

As the evening ended, newssheets were passed out listing the complete voting breakdown as well as the lists of nominees including those below the cut on the final ballot. (It can now be revealed: Neil Gaiman withdrew Anansi Boys, though it had the third-highest number of nominations in the novel category.) These statistics don’t seem to have been posted on the convention’s website (unlike last year), so I will do my own summary of those results, discussing who came in second and third and last, in my next post here. Which, this evening’s time having run out, will be tomorrow morning.