Question about Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff:
If you look the book up on Amazon, in parenthesis it says" Daw Book Collectors, 1979". What does this mean? Is it a refresh of a book originally published back in 1979? Cell phones are mentioned multiple times so it can't just be a straight reprint.
What I'm trying to figure out is if there's any reason it wouldn't be eligible to nominate for a #HugoAward.
Ok, I did find this interview which says it was inspired by wanting comfort reading during Covid: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/interview-author-tanya-huff
So whatever the reason for the 1979 number, this sounds like a straight-up 2025 publication to me.
@kiesa DAW numbers (most of) its books so I suspect Direct Descendant is the 1979th book they’ve published in paperback. If true the number should be listed on the cover, spine, &/or copyright page (assuming you have a physical copy at least, idk how it works for ebooks)
this site reports misprinted numberings and gives some of the history: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1544
and librarything records the publication number for some 1800 titles, the most recent of which is Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire which was published in 2024 as book 1957
I imagine when they started doing this they did not imagine they’d get into “looks like a date” territory
@kiesa its very odd that they put it in the title like that! but i guess they’re treating it like a series, metadata wise?
@Satsuma I guess? I just assumed it was a 2025 book, because I only saw the Libro.fm metadata, until I double checked it was on the 2026 Hugo spreadsheet of doom and saw that it had a ? next to eligibility. That's when I saw how Amazon had it displaying. Perhaps the ? was for something else but I was confused by the 1979 so I'm guessing that's what was confusing others too.
(Hugo spreadsheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tsn95-1Wq24JMPEOyUf_L87FTXunOarXv5QzrOewHNA/edit?gid=0#gid=0)
@Satsuma Ahhh, very interesting. I have the audiobook copy but it looks like Amazon lets me preview the Kindle title page so that does make sense. Thanks for the info!