Worldcon helpfully gets in touch:
I’m very glad to be able to tell you that nominations for the 2017 Hugo Awards are now open! As a member of MAC2, you are eligible to nominate in the 17 Hugo ballot categories covering the best of the genre in the last year, and for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
The deadline for nominations is 17 March 2017 at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:59 am Eastern Daylight Time, 06:59 Greenwich Mean Time, 0:859 in Finland, all on 18 March). Although members of MidAmeriCon II, Worldcon 75 and Worldcon 76 in San José can nominate, only members of Worldcon 75 will be eligible to vote on the final ballot and choose the winners of the 2017 Hugo Awards. We expect to announce the final ballot in early April, and the awards will be presented on 11 August at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.
The World Science Fiction Society’s Business Meetings in 2015 and 2016 made some changes to the way nominations will be tallied this year to produce the final ballot. You can find a summary of the changes here. In addition, Worldcon 75 is trialling a proposed new category, Best Series. Nothing, however, has changed about the mechanics of making nominations. You still choose up to five nominees in each category. We recommend that you nominate whatever works and creators you have personally read or seen that were your favorites from 2016.
While I will certainly be making my 2017 recommendations soon – particularly for Best Series – I would NOT recommend anyone to register. As the God-Emperor Ascendant demonstrated so masterfully, there is a time to press forward and there is a time to sit back and see how things play out. Now, obviously, those of us who are already registered can, and should, nominate, but there is no sense in wasting money that might be more effectively utilized elsewhere on Worldcon this year.
Let the SF-SJWs do their happy dances and celebrate the success of EPH, little realizing that in adopting it, they have done exactly what we intended in pursuit of our long term objective. Let’s face it, thinking through the logical consequences of their actions has never exactly been their strong suit. It’s bewildering that they genuinely appear to believe that we did not anticipate their changing the rules, even though I said right from the very start that they would have no choice but to do so if we were successful.
Later this year I will also be making recommendations for the Dragon Award, which is in the process of becoming the more significant SF/F award. Keep in mind that you should NOT vote yet for the Dragon Award.