Congratulations, I am very happy for you even if I am sad at myself.

Copying from the previous thread, re Chicago/September and pub crawling, visitors from elsewhere may be teased/tested with this drink:
Jeppson's Malört
In a similar vein, Tremaine Atkinson, founder of CH Distillery, was introduced to Malört when he first moved to Chicago, he compared it to "taking a bite out of a grapefruit and then drinking a shot of gasoline".
(I'm currently working remotely for an org in the area and so hear about such things e.g. on Slack.)

Going to fully read the list this year, starting with the novellas and short stories. (Started Elder Race/Adrian Tchaikovsky today.)

Now the question is how soon the Hugo readers' packets will come out.

there's a pandemic on, and who the hell knows what hopeful mutants will emerge in the next five or six months.

Plus there might be new Covid-19 variants!

Going to fully read the list this year, starting with the novellas and short stories. (Started Elder Race/Adrian Tchaikovsky today.)

Good luck reading your way through the Merchant Princes universe (9 novels/1 million words), never mind Seanan's significantly longer October Daye series (13 books?) and the other series works! (Minimum length to qualify: 3 books/a third of a million words, IIRC).

Plus there might be new Covid-19 variants!

That's what I was suggesting.

Hope to see you in Chicago (my home region) - I was pleased to meet you at the last Chicon. Same hotel as last time -- which has been host to more worldcons than any city in the world.

Note that McGuire's nominated series is the Wayward Children, which is a mere 7 novellas.

Good. I hope you win. And I hope Covid will be kind so you can accept the award in person.

It's Seanan's Wayward Children's series, which are mostly novellas I think.Probably the easiest to get through.

This is excellent news. Congratulations!

Huzzah! And again, huzzah!

I can only say, should you win, that it would be well earned and much deserved.

Congratulations and good luck!

I am a bit sad that Genevieve Cogman's Library series isn't there.

The Invisible Library series deserves to be there, but Genevieve is primarily published in the UK and then resold into the US market -- the first book came out 18 months late in the US so didn't make a big splash at launch, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't get marketed properly over there.

Her new series might do better. (Scarlet Pimpernel, only the French aristocrats are vampires ...)

Para 1 - Agreed, and thanks for the recommendation.

I'm so sad WoldCon 2020 didn't happen in Wellington, I was planning to pack up the family and show them the windiest place on earth (and nerd the F out). Good luck!

I think you should win - it is an amazing and brilliant series.

(I admit I am a bit biased since I have not yet read the other contenders)

Congratulations. I just finished Invisible Sun a couple of hours ago, and it is a brilliant end to a brilliant series.

Charlie, I just realized I have to thank you. My first two, no, three novels (including the one I'm trying to get an agent for, and the one after that) both started as a number of shorts that then got stitched together. How to do it, in some cases, had some of the Merchant Princes in mind.

The two novels I'm working on now - one took off not two weeks ago, and I've rwitten 20k words in that time, are being written as novels. And I realized that thinking about Miriam, then her daughter, is part of what's guiding me on how to build the tension, and not to know too much too soon.

So, thanks, muchly.

I think the Merchant Princes series not only deserves to win, but also deserves a supplementary award for maintaining brilliance under adversity, what with all the repeated truckloads of heavy personal shit you've had dumped on your head at multiple times while writing it. So here's hoping!

Congrats. I'm a big fan of the series and really hope it wins.

In other Hugo bean-counting news:

• Apparently the record for the author with most years on the Hugo shortlist for best novel is held by ... myself (six consecutive years on that shortlist in the 2000s; no wins, natch). Second-place is Robert Silverberg, with four consecutive years in the 1970s. He didn't win either, but he also set another record (the only author ever to have two novels on the same shortlist).

• I'm also the record holder for most Hugo fiction nominations by a non-American author (but barely in the top 10 for nominations if you include NorAm).

None of these things really mean anything, but I find them mildly helpful whenever I start to question what I've done with my life.

For some reason this prompted me to see what it would cost get a small sculpture made of chocolate delivered to Scotland. Turns out to be relatively affordable.

I'm thinking a Sisyphus figure pushing a book up a hill...

But perhaps giving someone who can't eat much chocolate an award made of the stuff is probably better as a thought experiment.

Or a chocolate spaceship? You might need to hustle on to get one, but Marks and Spencer are presently selling a chocolate Space Shuttle for Easter.

Hey, I like chocolate! But sugar is bad for me (Type II diabetes, y'all) so it has to be very high-grade cacoa. And anything above 90% is basically a drug not a food group.

Hmmm. There are certainly ways to make sugar-free chocolate, with and without interesting GI effects. Hopefully you're not also lactose intolerant? The details might matter if admirers want to give you theobromine in appropriate forms.

Good luck.

Free chockie Eggs at the current Eastercon - Charlie seems missing in action, unfortunately.

I'm not lactose intolerant and as it happens my regular bimonthly order of sugar-free chocolate pralines arrives tomorrow.

Greg: I skipped Eastercon because getting there requires me either to hire a car and drive 8 hours each way (I sold the tank a few weeks ago -- it was going to fall foul of the Edinburgh emissions control zone if I kept it), or spend multiple hours in airports/on a plane/on trains in proximity to maskless doorknob-lickers in the middle of the BA.2 pandemic spike.

If this war was being fought purely on the basis of propaganda, Russia would be a single, flat desert of radioactive green glass:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1515696900342788103

The only better tune might be "Clean Clean" by the Buggles.

Charlie
* requires me either to hire a car and drive 8 hours each way* EUW - enough said. Train is the best option, & though the disease level may be dropping, it's still too high.
Incidentally, I had my 4th "jab" last week, but I'm wondering why/how I have not even noticed anything even resembling C-19 symptoms in myself - am I now folly immune, or doesn't it "like me" ( good news if so ) or what?

Oops. That was intended for the other thread, so feel free to nuke it. I'd wondered where it had gotten to.

or spend multiple hours in airports/on a plane/on trains in proximity to maskless doorknob-lickers in the middle of the BA.2 pandemic spike.

When I visit stores in the area where I live 50% to 80% of the patrons are wearing masks. Yesterday I was at a fairly full Lowe's home center south of my city. I only saw one other mask other than mine. JBS knows the area.

Sigh.

Charlie, your health is important, as staying alive seems important to completing The New Management and moving on to even greater heights of writing.

if you select a P100 respirator, such as the 3M 6200 with P100 filters, you'll see such a mask substitute protects you 6.67X more than an N95/KN94 mask. Please do dial in your circumstances for a more precise calculation, and feel free to substitute your hardware vendor of choice for the Big River Conglomerate.

My health profile seems similar to yours, and the P100 filters protected me from Portland's doorknob lickers for the past two years.

Don't get complacent!

Strains BA.4 and BA.5 are out there -- not in the UK yet, but present in France and the USA, so they'll be here within a few weeks at most.

They're Omicron mutations similar to BA.2, i.e. more contagious than measles, but in a happy fun twist they've picked up a gene for immune response evasion, meaning the vaccines are less effective at reducing symptoms!

Scotland just dropped mask mandates as of this morning.

I made a (masked) weekly supermarket trip. In my normal store, about 70% of the staff were masked, down from 100%; and about 60-70% of the shoppers, down from 90%. (They trend elderly and scared, which is why I go there.)

I'm currently using FFP2 masks, sourced in and manufactured in Germany. I'm mostly staying indoors and limiting exposure to 10s of minutes in-store on shopping trips, having home deliveries where possible. I don't think I need to upgrade to a full respirator unless I'm planning a long duration journey on public transport (>>1 hour).

See you in Chicago then, I hope

With the Hugos / Raytheon connection, well, kinda seems like the Hugos are something better boycotted now.

Even setting aside Covid risks, Raytheon does objectively more harm than, say, the Sad Puppies.

With the Hugos / Raytheon connection, well, kinda seems like the Hugos are something better boycotted now.

That was a one-off. The Hugos ceremony costs money to put on, and usually someone or other sponsors it -- frequently the big five publishers. Apparently the concom got badly burned over the Raytheon thing and the current worldcon are alert to double-check the sponsors this year.

(Remember, each worldcon is run by a committee independent of past and future events: it has to be, the whole thing moves around, often internationally, every year.)

I made a (masked) weekly supermarket trip. In my normal store, about 70% of the staff were masked, down from 100%; and about 60-70% of the shoppers, down from 90%. (They trend elderly and scared, which is why I go there.)

We have an election in early June, so of course public health protections were dropped here, along with testing, and public school boards were forbidden to require masking in schools.

I'm currently shopping at a Chinese grocery chain which still requires masks. Last time I was at Loblaws less than half the people there were masked (staff and shoppers), and most of the ones masked were Asian which gave me the idea. Healthier, too, as I can walk there rather than having to drive.

Probably no flying this year — hospital ICUs are currently at or over capacity, wastewater levels are still rising, and no one is addressing the (long-term) problem of medical staff burnout. As one hospital doctor pointed out (before being fired), it does little good to buy more beds if you don't have the staff to look after the patients in those beds.

Re:'... Omicron mutations similar to BA.2, i.e. more contagious than measles, but in a happy fun twist they've picked up a gene for immune response evasion, meaning the vaccines are less effective at reducing symptoms!'

Agree: Don't get complacent!

Also - the re-infection rates are climbing among people who'd previously caught an earlier COVID-19 and/or been vaccinated. Saw a story a couple weeks back about someone who was reinfected only 20 days after their first infection. Typically, you'd think that their immune systems would be so fired up that a slightly tweaked version of the same virus wouldn't be able to get through and replicate enough to be measurable let alone produce enough symptoms that the person decided to get tested/confirm re-infection.

Also, also -- Because most countries have stopped mass testing it's impossible to know exactly how many people/what proportion of the population have been infected and reinfected. (Maybe China will have some info on this.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00438-3

The latest variant of concern (XE) appears to be a hybrid of A and B - and is even more transmissible.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8759365/covid-omicron-xe-variant-explainer/

And now on to other topics ...

Putin - okay, his background is mostly leveraging finance as an instrument of war. Maybe he's declaring 'victory' because the Russian military has basically razed some major cities to the point that in order for the UA to rebuild it would have to borrow so much money that it would put umpteen generations into debt. How many/which countries would be willing to finance the reconstruction of the UA? (Maybe China and mostly because of their Belt and Road program - however there's some concern about member countries getting debt-trapped.)

Erm... (might contain spoilers)

I've finally cracked open 'Quantum of Nightmares'*. Gotta say that I hope folks like Be2os/for-profit prison farms don't read the bits about Jennifer/Abe cuz there's a good chance they'll use this real-life tech - intended for good medical/humanitarian purposes - as per your novel.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01047-w

'The brain-reading devices helping paralysed people to move, talk and touch'

*No offense intended about the delay - but scary fiction is harder to pick up and read when real life is already pretty damned scary.