Series Versus Episode

Some kinds of eligible material (written fiction and dramatic presentations) can be published or presented in discrete pieces so that it is not immediately clear whether the individual pieces are stand-alone works or the set of them, together, constitutes a single work. The WSFS constitution says:

3.2.6: Works appearing in a series are eligible as individual works, but the series as a whole is not eligible. However, a work appearing in a number of parts shall be eligible for the year of the final part.

This makes it clear that if a single work appears in installments, the work as a whole and not the installments if eligible to be nominated. But this leaves open the question of how one can tell if a series of episodes are many works or one work.

The clue here is how this has been handled in Best Novel over the last fifty years: When a single novel is published as a serial, it is a single work. But when a series of short stories are set in a common frame (having a common background and perhaps common characters) but are essentially stand-alone stories, they are eligible individually and the overall series is not eligible.

This is essentially an aesthetic judgment: Is the story more told over the arc of multiple episodes or is it more told in each story separately? This cannot be reduced to the application of a rule or algorithm and must be decided by each voter individually. (In the end, the Hugo administrator must decide what to place on the ballot, which can be non-trivial when some voters nominate individual episodes, and some nominate the series as a whole. A wise Hugo administrator listens to the freely expressed will of the voters.)

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Award

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