One of the things that I always like to close Wheel of Time panels with when I’m at conventions that I don’t run is talking about the long-term legacy of the Wheel of Time. One of the things that pops up a lot is, Robert Jordan never won a Hugo award. He never won a Nebula, he never won a Locus…any of these major, major awards, he never won; he was only nominated once for Lord of Chaos , had a nomination for a Locus award. We have one last chance to correct this, which is with the publication of A Memory of Light . When that book comes out, not only is that book eligible for the Hugo for that year, but there’s a quirk in the Hugo voting rules that if a serialized work, no individual portion has ever been nominated for a Hugo as a standalone, then when it becomes complete, the whole thing becomes eligible as one work, and so by virtue of the fact that Robert Jordan was never nominated for a Hugo during his lifetime, the entire Wheel of Time series becomes eligible for Best Novel at its publication. It would be the biggest “novel” ever nominated for a Hugo, but it’s certainly possible to do so. Because of the way the publication works—it’s going to be published at the very beginning of 2013, which means it’s eligible in the 2014 cycle for Hugos—and I just like to put that out there for people. You know, I don’t like to tell people how to vote on the Hugos, ‘cause that’s something that it’s important for you to judge for yourself, what you think is the best novel…um….but really . (laughter)
She just wants you to be aware that the entire series is eligible.
Yeah, it becomes eligible as Best Novel, and when you think of the impact of the Wheel of Time on fantasy writers over the last twenty years, on fantasy publication…I mean, seriously, do you think they would have let George R. R. Martin publish his books the way that he wants to publish them if they didn’t already have some long-running series out there that they could point to and be like, “Look, people will follow it through multiple books, through long periods of waits…you know, people will follow this.” Jordan really paved the way for a lot of what we take for granted in fantasy fiction now. I think that’s one of the reasons why he gets a lot of flak these days, because it’s been going on for so long that the things that were very innovative twenty years ago that the Wheel of Time does are not so innovative anymore, because now everybody does them, because Jim showed us how to do them. And I just feel like it’s important to acknowledge that in some way, and so you’ll be seeing a lot on Dragonmount about the Hugo Awards over the next couple of years to remind people that this is coming up, and if any of you guys are Hugo voters, keep that in mind. If you would like to be a Hugo voter, you just have to be a member of that year’s WorldCon, which will likely be in London that year, so I don’t expect you guys to go to London, but you can buy a supporting membership for about $50 usually, and that gives you voting rights to the convention, without attending.
The nice thing about a supporting membership to the Hugos, they put together a voter packet nowadays which includes electronic copies of all the nominated works, so for usually about fifty bucks, you get five or six novels, five or six novellas, five or six novelettes, and five or six short stories, all Hugo-worthy, for you to read. I do it every year even if I don’t go now because of that, and you get to read the whole thing. And if you’re gonna vote, really you should be reading widely and voting in multiple categories, and things like that, would be my suggestion.
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