While the Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form are for individual episodes, many people have made the case that each season of Heroes is actually one long multi-part story, and multi-part stories can be nominated as a single dramatic unit. For instance, if enough people thought the entire season of Heroes was a single serialized dramatic unit and nominated in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, it seems likely that it would be placed on the ballot in that category.
Actually, the Hugo Awards are for anything that first appeared in calendar year 2006. They do not refer to television "seasons."
In addition, the WSFS Business Meeting renewed a provision that allows that works first published or appearing prior to 2007 outside the USA that are first published or appear in the USA in 2007 get an extra year of eligibility. For example, a show that airs in the UK in 2006 (but didn't get nominated) but then airs for the first time in the USA in 2007 would be eligible for the 2008 Hugo Awards.
Better is to check the standards used for the specific award. These have changed over time but for the 2005 Worldcon they will be as follows:
Either something got trimmed out of your message or it's not displaying on my system. Anyway, the category definitions for written fiction are:
Novel: over 40,000 words
Novella: 15,000 - 40,000 words
Novelette: 7,500 - 15,000 words
Short Story: under 7,500 words
There is also a leeway of 20% or 5,000 words (whichever is smaller) that allows the administrators to move works between categories and implicitly recognizes the difficulty of precisely definining "word" and that people are apt to nominate "borderline" works in either category.
There are four written fiction categories primarily because (IMO) authors want it that way. WSFS has swung back and forth between 2 and 4 written fiction categories, with a series of oscillations between 3 and 4 that happened before I started getting involved in 1984, and has been relatively stable at 4 since then. While it seems pretty easy to distinguish between short story and novel, I personally can't see a whole lot of difference between the two "middle length" categories. Nonetheless, I predict that any attempt to consolidate the two back down to a single category would be met by considerable protests. Many people who never go to WSFS Business Meetings would get up early so that they could appear to dennounce such a proposal. Want to see a bunch of angry authors? Submit a consolidation proposal to next year's WSFS Business Meeting.
The Hugo Awards are regulated by Article 3 of the WSFS Constitution, and while the version I've referenced is a couple years old, it's substantially correct. (I hope we'll have the most recent version online by the end of this year.)
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While the Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form are for individual episodes, many people have made the case that each season of Heroes is actually one long multi-part story, and multi-part stories can be nominated as a single dramatic unit. For instance, if enough people thought the entire season of Heroes was a single serialized dramatic unit and nominated in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, it seems likely that it would be placed on the ballot in that category.
Actually, the Hugo Awards are for anything that first appeared in calendar year 2006. They do not refer to television "seasons."
In addition, the WSFS Business Meeting renewed a provision that allows that works first published or appearing prior to 2007 outside the USA that are first published or appear in the USA in 2007 get an extra year of eligibility. For example, a show that airs in the UK in 2006 (but didn't get nominated) but then airs for the first time in the USA in 2007 would be eligible for the 2008 Hugo Awards.
Kevin Standlee
Former Hugo Awards Administrator
Novel: over 40,000 words
Novella: 15,000 - 40,000 words
Novelette: 7,500 - 15,000 words
Short Story: under 7,500 words
There is also a leeway of 20% or 5,000 words (whichever is smaller) that allows the administrators to move works between categories and implicitly recognizes the difficulty of precisely definining "word" and that people are apt to nominate "borderline" works in either category.
There are four written fiction categories primarily because (IMO) authors want it that way. WSFS has swung back and forth between 2 and 4 written fiction categories, with a series of oscillations between 3 and 4 that happened before I started getting involved in 1984, and has been relatively stable at 4 since then. While it seems pretty easy to distinguish between short story and novel, I personally can't see a whole lot of difference between the two "middle length" categories. Nonetheless, I predict that any attempt to consolidate the two back down to a single category would be met by considerable protests. Many people who never go to WSFS Business Meetings would get up early so that they could appear to dennounce such a proposal. Want to see a bunch of angry authors? Submit a consolidation proposal to next year's WSFS Business Meeting.
The Hugo Awards are regulated by Article 3 of the WSFS Constitution, and while the version I've referenced is a couple years old, it's substantially correct. (I hope we'll have the most recent version online by the end of this year.)
Kevin Standlee
Kevin Standlee (Hugo Awards Administrator, 1993, 1994, 2002)
Practically, speaking, because a bunch of members of the Worldcon liked it.
Kevin Standlee