105 thoughts on “Dublin 2019 Announces Hugo and Retro Hugo Finalists”

1. Mike:

   “Isn’t there a tendency to treat all fictional comics as genre?”

   Obviously, and I have no idea why. Sucks to no award a great comic in the wrong genre.

   Greg:

   “Well, he did go to the moon once.”

   In a much later story, yes. And there has been comets and secret weapons. I have read all the comics several times, including the original versions and two books about their background.

   But this one is totally devoid of all things genre if I remember correctly.

2. @Darren Garrison, I know that Seanan McGuire and Mira Grant have both been nominated for Hugos, but I *think* that only McGuire has won. However, I don’t know who wrote her qualifying Campbell works, so it’s possible, even likely, that both McGuire and Grant “share” the tiara….

3. For once I’m familiar with a Retro nominee: Der Fuehrer’s Face features a timely message and an very catchy title song. Not sure what makes it genre, though, it seems satire of historical reality to me.

4. @ Andrew M, I’ve reviewed three of the Lodestar nominees (Tess of the Road, Children of Blood and Bone, and The Belles) for Skiffy and Fanty. If you’re interested, you can find them at http://skiffyandfanty.com/author/earlgreyediting/

   Meantime, I’m slightly amused that four of the six nominees for Best Fancast have at least one Australian host. It seems we like to talk.

   It’s just a shame we couldn’t get anything in the fiction categories. I would have liked to see Stephanie Gunn’s sci-fi novella Icefall make the ballot, but Tor.com retains their dominance.

5. @Cassy B.: From a cursory read of both ISFDB and her bibliography, only McGuire won the Campbell—it seems Grant did not appear until the publication of Feed in April 2010.

6. ULTRAGOTHA: Yes, JJ, it would be nice if nominators would stretch their wings a bit. But they obviously like Toby Daye.

   Sorry, the SJW credential posted that too early, and twice!

   I’m a big fan of that series myself, and wouldn’t have a problem with it winning Series (which would also leave room on the ballot for other series in subsequent years). But it’s only one of a host of “second verse” things. I think that Revenant Gun nails the landing for the series, but it doesn’t stand on its own at all. It’s a good series candidate, but the first two novels were already nominated so the series has already received a huge amount of Hugo recognition, and I really don’t think works which don’t stand alone belong in the novel category.

   Neither Binti nor Beneath the Sugar Sky stand alone, and much as I love Murderbot I would have been happy to see some of the other really good novellas which stand alone in those three spots — such as The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Umbernight, and Phoresis.

   I really enjoyed all of the Wayfarers novels, but one of its novels has already been recognized, and I think that both it and the Centenal Cycle are a bit lackluster as series entries.

   There are also some authors, I think, who would get nominated for writing down their shopping list, despite the quality of their work being highly variable, and that their work tends to be “oh, another one of those” (and I’m not referring to Vernon/Kingfisher).

   I think that the second Doctor Who and Good Place episode slots should have gone to other things. We have such a wealth of good DPs these days that I would support limiting a series to one episode in order to see more of it recognized.

   Saga has been nominated for 6 out of 9 volumes, Paper Girls for 3 of 4, and Monstress for 3 of 3.

7. Elizabeth Fitzgerald: I would have liked to see Stephanie Gunn’s sci-fi novella Icefall make the ballot, but Tor.com retains their dominance.

   I don’t think that novella got much promotion outside of Australia. I pay a lot of attention to novellas, and this is the first that I’ve heard of it. It sounds interesting, though, and it’s affordable, so I’ve just bought it.

   Yes, Tor.com has been dominating in the novella category, but they’ve also put out a large quantity of good-quality novellas. Though I think in the last couple of years, they have gotten less discriminating: in each of the first couple of years, I would say that there were only one or two “meh” novellas, and in each of the last couple of years, there have been several. But they are still putting out more of the quality ones than anyone else.

8. Congrats to all the finalists! There’s a lot of great work here, although I’m surprised not to see Peter Watts’s The Freeze-Frame Revolution, given how much buzz I heard about it. (It was on my ballot.)

9. Nina: I’m surprised not to see Peter Watts’s The Freeze-Frame Revolution, given how much buzz I heard about it. (It was on my ballot.)

   That’s probably the one about which I’m most disappointed, followed by Foundryside.

   Sadly, Twitter has become completely useless for news about the Hugo Awards because of the hundreds of fanfiction authors crowing about being Hugo nominees, not realizing that AO3 is not a finalist for its fiction, but for what it does. 😐

10. Pingback: Some Thoughts on the Hugo Award Finalists, Part II: The 2019 Hugo Awards | Cora Buhlert

11. Congratulations, James!

    Thank you!

12. Gratz to all the finalists!

    Especially excited to see The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections make the list since of all the things I read from 2018, that was probably the one I liked the most.

13. Many congratulations, James!

14. Thank you! Still hyperventilating!

15. @Andrew M: “. . . given that the Series award was introduced to copy with . . .”

    Given that two of the books are first in a series, thus not eligible for Best Series, I’m not sure that’s really relevant. You didn’t expect people to never nominate first-in-a-series novels after Best Series started, did you?! 😉

    @Goobergunch: “. . . because of how different the finalists are . . .”

    I strongly dislike the category for this reason. Apples and oranges.

    @Hampus Eckerman: For me, if a series has genre elements, individual issues don’t have to; the universe it’s in and the series are still genre. Granted, Tintin isn’t the most genre-ish of comics, though! 😉

    I’m more wondering why “Phantom of the Opera” is on the list (does this version have magic spells or something?!).

    @Mike Glyer: Gak I hope not (treating all fictional comics as genre). Shudder!

16. @Meredith: “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” was one of my two mind-blowers last year, that and “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth”. I slightly prefer the latter but it’s close. I will be thrilled if either wins.

17. Question for those familiar with AO3: Since the Hugos are intended to honor the best of the previous year’s work, how does one consider 2018 in particular as opposed to the site in general?

18. Happiness to all the finalists.

    I am proud to write for the Hugo Finalist Nerds of a Feather.

    I am proud to podcast for The Skiffy and Fanty show. I’ve had an argument all day whether or not that I am personally a Hugo finalist myself, since it lists Shaun, Jen, “And the crew” but not me by name. (also question: Do I deserve a pin? A rocket?). I’ve argued that I am not technically a finalist because my name is not there. Anyway, the PODCAST is a finalist, and thanks to all who nominated us.

19. Given that two of the books are first in a series, thus not eligible for Best Series, I’m not sure that’s really relevant. You didn’t expect people to never nominate first-in-a-series novels after Best Series started, did you?!

    I wasn’t suggesting that Best Series was meant to remove series fiction from Best Novel. Rather, it was meant as a response to the alleged fact that series fiction never got nominated for Best Novel in he first place, which, given that it dominates the market, was seen as an unfair exclusion. This was never entirely true, of course, but to the extent that it was true, it isn’t any more: series fiction dominates Best Novel, and is making inroads on the short fiction categories as well.

    (There are other, better, reasons for having a series category, of course. But ‘Hugos are unfairly biased against series’ formed a large part of the rhetoric with which the proposal was supported.)

20. I was also puzzled about Phantom of the Opera , but I guess it gets in under ‘or related subjects’. Phantoms are a related subject, right?

21. If AO3 is being nominated, not for its content, but as a fandom resource, can it really be called a work?

22. @Laura One of the big landmarks in 2018 for AO3 was a massive overhaul of the search facilities, including adding some very cool exclusion facilities, which has been a big step for the archive. But it’s the kind of project that is difficult to quantify as “this is the best year it’s had”.

    I’ve nominated it a couple of years in a row, so I’m delighted to see it’s a finalist this year. The archive is constantly growing and evolving. On some levels, that doesn’t make it much different from the fancasts that get nominated regularly, or Writing Excuses which has been a related works category finalist a couple of times. It’s not one specific year in its evolution that people were nominating it for, but the cumulative work of the last decade.

23. I’m excited for the nomination of AO3, but I realize I’m not really understanding how to place it in its category.

    If I were nominating it for its stories, I think I’d nominate it as Best Fanzine.
    If I were nominating it for its structure, coding, design….Well, I think I’d try to home in on some particular component completed in the right year. Like the people who nominated EPH (and not, e.g., “The Hugo Awards”).

    I’m not seeing how 2018’s work is distinguished from, well, all the rest of the site. And while I love seeing AO3 being recognized, I’m not sure I’m crazy about it being a perennial slot on Best Related Work from now on?

    Well, we’ll see. 🙂 Congrats, and I look forward to seeing what they choose for the voter’s packet!

24. Slight correction to me and everyone else who noted that Space Opera was a standalone. While that was true yesterday, today it has a sequel.

25. I know that people have been talking about nominating AO3 for a while now. But as someone who has only heard about it and is otherwise completely unfamiliar with the site, I don’t really see how to look at it as a 2018 work.

    With fancasts (and with Writing Excuses when it was a related work finalist), you still have a very clear distinction of what the previous year’s work is. When comparing to the other finalists in the category, you would only look at episodes that were originally posted during the qualifying year.

    One of the problematic aspects of the people and whole-year’s-content categories is that people don’t necessary evaluate them on the actual qualifying work — but that’s what the award is suppose to actually honor. It can be difficult to figure out what work is from the qualifying year, but it is still possible to find when an editor’s or artist’s works were published, when a podcast or videocast was posted, what issues of a semiprozine are from the correct year, what year a fan writer’s posts are from, etc.

    It’s certainly an interesting finalist. And I do like to see different things being tried. That’s how the categories evolve. As Standback said, I look forward to seeing what they submit for their packet.

26. @N:

    Lindsay Ellis’ nomination surely means that documentaries are eligible for Best Related Work now instead of Dramatic Presentation, right? The Apollo 11 precedent is bunk now?

    AFAICT documentaries were eligible ever since the award became “Best Related Work” (effective for the 2010 awards — before that it was Best Related Book according to the lists at http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/). I don’t think “TV Coverage of Apollo XI” has ever been taken as a precedent; Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 was a docudrama rather than a documentary. (I remember the arguments at the time that it had enough fiction in it to qualify).

    @Kendall: The Wikipedia summary of the 1943 Phantom makes it seem even less genre than the book (e.g., no technofantasy), but all of the people involved with Hugo management that I’ve heard from decline to use personal/subjective definitions in determining what’s nominated — and the boundary between genre and non- is a type specimen for “subjective”. (Ask a dozen fen and get two dozen opinions — or just read the last few weeks’ reactions to Cat’s birthday listings.) I do wonder how many nominations it got (IME a weakness of the Retro Hugos) and how many of the nominators had actually seen it, but the first will come out soon enough and the second is unlikely to be determined.

    Correction to the above: @JJ in the next Scroll says Related Work nominations have been disqualified due to fictional content, so ISTM the subjective question of whether the fiction or the relation is dominant may have been ruled on — but I still suspect most admins wouldn’t touch the genre-boundary question for pie.

27. Laura: I look forward to seeing what they submit for their packet.

    I would be very surprised if there is any fanfic in their packet submission, except perhaps brief excerpts as part of showing how the site works. I think that the best submission by them would be a very user-friendly explanation, with screenshots, of how the site works vis-à-vis posting, tagging, warning, searching, etc.

28. I would also like to see something in their packet submission that touches specifically on what work was done in 2018. Obviously shouldn’t be the whole thing given that it’s a continuous (“serial”) work, but it would be helpful to know what the “latest installment” is, so to speak.

29. JJ: Vice’s Samantha Cole quite determinedly misses the point about what has been nominated in An Internet Fan Fiction Archive Is Nominated for a Hugo.

    Archive of Our Own is a finalist in the prestigious Hugo award’s Best Related Works category—which means thousands of fanfics are Hugo finalists.

30. Andrew M on April 3, 2019 at 7:34 am said:

    I wasn’t suggesting that Best Series was meant to remove series fiction from Best Novel. Rather, it was meant as a response to the alleged fact that series fiction never got nominated for Best Novel in he first place […]

    That would have been a silly reason, since parts of series have been frequently nominated, and have frequently won, for a long time.

    The issue as I understood it is that there are series which are considered outstanding overall, even though individual elements may not rise to award-winning levels. Not that all series are like that; merely that series like that exist. (There’s at least one near-example this year: the Laundry Files series has not had any of its novels on the short-list, but two novellas have taken home rockets).

    Of course, the series where individual works have won are most likely to win Best Series, just by the nature of things. But it’s not a requirement, any more than the opposite is. We have the opportunity to honor either type of series. Which, I suspect, is the most we could have asked for, and perfectly reasonable–the name of the award is “Best Series”, not “Best Series Without Any Previous Awards”. 🙂

31. Mike Glyer: Vice’s Samantha Cole quite determinedly misses the point about what has been nominated

    <headdesk>

32. JJ: I should have said that I will be curious to see what their packet will include and if it will clarify anything on how to evaluate the website itself as 2018 work.

    I also wonder if other websites which don’t qualify as fanzines will show up in related work in the future.

33. Laura: I also wonder if other websites which don’t qualify as fanzines will show up in related work in the future.

    That’s a good point. I think that something like this will always be a one-off. Based on my reading of the Hugo rules, AO3 will not be eligible as a Finalist again unless and until the site makes major revisions to its interface.

    As Mike noted in a previous scroll, Locus Magazine was promoting itself for nomination in the Related Work category this year.

34. Just went back and read the article Mike linked…..oh, no.

    1,864,000 users, and 46,83,000 individual works, accumulated in the 10 years since its launch. All of these are now nominated for a Hugo.

35. AO3 will go off ballot with a No Award as my last entry, for me; it really doesn’t fit the category, not being a work in the way of “Best Related Work,” IMHO. The category is not “best web site” or “best community.” There are, I’m sure, awards for which AO3 would be a great fit; BRW isn’t one of them. Not every concept needs a Hugo and not everything people love must be awarded or eligible for some Hugo.

    @JJ: Locus promoted itself for BRW?! WTF?!?!?! Having a category of their own for many years wasn’t enough? Gah. Anyway, I disagree with their assertion that Locus was eligible in the category. A specific issue, perhaps; the whole year of issues, that seems to be pushing it.

    Maybe I’m just extra cranky today.

    @Chip Hitchcock: I was just baffled by the nomination of “Phantom”; I know the Hugo admins try to avoid any hint of even nominally subjective decisions. Agreed re. the weakness of the Retro Hugos.

36. Gah. Even if AO3 were being nominated on the basis of the works it contains, that doesn’t mean that all those works now have a “fraction of a nomination”. Back when we had awards for Best Professional Magazine (1953-1972), the award was considered to be for the magazine. Individual stories published in the winning magazine were not considered to have won a fraction of a Hugo!

    I’ll reserve judgment on AO3 for now, but I have a hard time imagining anything that would make me want to rank it above any of the other nominees in the category. Whether it goes above or below N/A is really the main question I have a this point. All of which has nothing to do with its content–I don’t see any reason that its content should factor into my ranking.

37. @Xtifr
    I’m feeling the same about ranking AO3. And the reactions expressed in that article aren’t helping. (And the juvenile underlying tone of “Look a bunch of smut is nominated for a Hugo!” ::giggle:: snort::) You don’t see anyone who ever had something in one of the semiprozine finalists for the entire run of the magazine claiming credit (unless they actually are a finalist themselves!). And unlike AO3, the content that appeared during 2018 in those finalists is a contributing factor in the zine’s nomination.

    I’m sure AO3 is a fantastic resource for trying to find the needle in the haystack of what you’re interested in. And for contributors, getting appreciative eyeballs on your stuff. But like Kendall said, not everything can be shoehorned into a Hugo category. Related Work is grab baggy enough. I’d prefer to keep it to apples and oranges and maybe another fruit or two. But not expanded to random kitchen utensils as well. We tried Best Other Forms Hugo and that was just crazy.

    @Kendall
    That was my initial reaction to the idea of Locus promoting itself for related work. Not a third category getting turned into “Best Locus Hugo” until rule changes! (first fanzine and then semiprozine) But a single noteworthy issue could possibly work or maybe something else more specific than a whole year of issues.

38. @Kendall: I really want to see the nomination statistics, just to see how much it took to get “Phantom” on the ballot. And this is hardly the first time retro-nominaters have fluffed; I’ve been told Freas was baffled at his “1951” award, as he hadn’t been doing significant genre work in 1950.

39. I’m pretty sure this is the first time that someone has been a finalist in both a fiction and an art category (Antoine Saint-Exupery). Also, I think, that a woman got four fiction nominations in one year (C. L. Moore).

40. Elizabeth:
    Meantime, I’m slightly amused that four of the six nominees for Best Fancast have at least one Australian host. It seems we like to talk.

    As someone who has podcasted with you for one of those nominees. :Smile:

41. I would argue that PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is a horror film (generally considered part of the Universal horror cycle) and that a horror film needn’t have anything supernatural in it. Would you disqualify BEDLAM as well? I’ll note that the radio version of AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS was on the ballot a few years ago.

42. The World Fantasy Convention is rigorous about including horror, and AFAICT does not differentiate between supernatural and non-supernatural versions. However, I would be happy to exclude non-supernatural horror from the Hugos — IFF there were a way a rule could do so, which I doubt. ISTM that the original of the Verne would not qualify as it’s supposed to be possible with known technology, but I have no idea what’s in the radio show — and again, I expect the administrators would simply sigh and say that if some number of fans feel it’s SF the admins have no rule with which to argue that it’s not.

43. Chip Hitchcock on April 5, 2019 at 7:17 pm said:

    ISTM that the original of the Verne would not qualify as it’s supposed to be possible with known technology

    Um, doesn’t that just make it hard SF? There were plenty of “first trip to the moon” stories written before Apollo 11 which relied on known technology. (Especially after the V2 had been demonstrated.) Are you suggesting that they weren’t SF?

    I admit that 80 Days is an edge case at best, but I have a hard time excluding it.

44. @Laura: Yes, I could see some special issue like their year in review or something being a best related work. I’m not really a fan of that either, but it would make more sense.

    @Evelyn C. Leeper: Since the Hugos are for SFF, not SFFH, I don’t see that as a persuasive argument in favor of “Phantom.” 😉

    [ETA: I should mention that I’m not a big horror fan anyway, so I hope horror doesn’t take over the Hugos, whether half of it is technically SFFal or not. But that’s just me.]

    I’m unfamiliar with “Bedlam”; is that the series Google tells me has supernatural elements like hauntings? So, it has fantastical stuff? (I can’t comment beyond saying that sounds like SFF.). I don’t know enough about the radio version of “Around the World in Eighty Days” to have an opinion on it at all.

    @Chip Hitchcock: Yeah, it’s up to the nominators and voters.

45. @Kendall
    That kinda ties into the problem I have with the AO3 nomination: it’s too broad. I’m looking at a website in 2019 which has been developed over the past decade. How do you look at whether this is one of the best related works of 2018? I’m not really sure how to look at the Mexicanx Initiative as a related work either, but at least it all happened in 2018. The other four are distinct 2018 works: three books and a 3-part video. But maybe I’m just an old-fashioned, out-of-touch curmudgeon. ;P

46. @Xtifr: would it have been clearer if I’d said “existing tech”? Or perhaps “proven tech”? Moon shots were pure SF until shown to be possible in practice rather than theory; the driver behind the novel is the report that the trip is possible right now given the completion of a trans-subcontinental rail line. Wikipedia talks in generalities so I don’t find whether the link already existed, or was so close to completion that it could be considered a fait accompli, or was simply projected to be done as had already been done in the US — but at the worst, finishing the rail line didn’t require (e.g.) small turning liquid-fueled engines into large liquid-fueled engines, let alone any of the contrivances in other Verne works.

47. The “BEDLAM” I was referring to was the Val Lewton 1946 film set in and around the St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Asylum.

    Horror is often referred to as “dark fantasy” but I agree that does imply a certain level of the fantastic. PHANTOM is sometimes described as Gothic horror, and the films are generally included in horror film lists. I can’t give a totally rational reason, but I can suggest that Damon Knight’s approach may be at work here.

48. One of my favorite in-jokes is in BEDLAM: the inmate who has invented motion pictures. In fact, since it’s in the form of a flip-book, he has invented animated motion pictures (as I pointed out to my animation apa).

    We visited the Museum of London one day, because we were going to go to the British Library, but the subway entrance we wanted to go in was barricaded, and a bunch of well-armed and protected soldiers were hut-hut-hutting down the steps, so we went wandering instead. The M of L was having an exhibition centered on the Bethlehem Hospital, aka Bedlam, which included representations of art by some of my favorite ‘insane’ artists. Richard Dadd (whose grand unfinished work “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke” wasn’t there, but which craves mention anyway) was represented, as was Louis Wain (who had a breakdown after his fame at cat cartoons had slipped, but who continued drawing and painting them, sometimes to a degree of abstraction that looks positively fractal today) and Jonathan Martin (whose path we had crossed earlier on the trip, in York, where a guide mentioned that some lunatic had attempted to burn the thing down in the, um, seventeenth century, methinks).

    (Here’s the fairy feller. There’s a bigger version of this at the Tate’s website, but this is the largest one that has a nice color balance to it for the best first impression, if such it be.)

49. Chip Hitchcock on April 6, 2019 at 9:36 am said:

    @Xtifr: would it have been clearer if I’d said “existing tech”? Or perhaps “proven tech”? Moon shots were pure SF until shown to be possible in practice rather than theory.

    Mmm. Then how about Gravity? Or The Martian? Those would seem to fail your criteria, but still seem to be pretty definitely SF to me.

    Defining SF is hard–really hard. My own definition boils down to “I knows it when I sees it”, which isn’t all that useful for general discussion. I probably wouldn’t have called Around the World in Eighty Days SF myself, but I can sort of see why someone else might. At least, enough so that I can’t honestly complain about its nomination.

    It was “twenty minutes into the future” before TMITF became a thing! 🙂

50. By the way TCM is running one of the harder-to-find Retro DP nominees this month: A GUY NAMED JOE, April 17, 9:45PM. (EDT–check for local time.)

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