240 thoughts on “2021 Hugo Awards Finalists Announced”

1. I just read ““Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” the other day (i.e. too late to nominate it) – I’m glad I’m getting the chance to rank it among the other nominees.

2. Speaking of related work, I’m sad that my pick, Novel Ideas, from the 99% Invisible podcast about movie novelizations and featuring interviews with Terry Bison and Liz Hand didn’t make it, but I thought I’d stick the link here if you haven’t heard it but would like to:

   https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-9/3/

3. Concerning the Video Games category, I see that it will require, at minimum, a Nintendo Switch and a Playstation 4 or 5. I don’t know whether the PS 4 has a browser suitable for Blaseball, so it will maybe also require a general purpose personal computer as well.
   Maybe, with the extended voting period, if I am willing to buy new hardware, I could actually play these, and finish the ones that aren’t open ended.

4. @Tammy Coxon, I agree with you about not being thrilled about conventions being in the related work category. Although with last year being all virtual, at least some conventions got permissions and have program items up online (e.g. youtube) for future viewing. I certainly hope nominating conventions isn’t a thing in the category going forward.

   I probably would have nominated Natalie Luhrs for fan writer rather than nominate that particular piece of writing on its own in Related Work. But it is nonfiction, which does fit in that particular category. Although my preference in the related work category is for things like the Lynell George book about Octavia Butler or in previous years, Farah Mendlesohn’s academic books.

   While I’ve already read some of the finalists or have the books in the TBR mountain range that is my living room, I have also put together fairly extensive hold lists at the DC, Arlington County, and Montgomery County public libraries.

5. @cathy – I would be more comfortable if it was really clear that it was the “FIYAHcon 2020 Program Archive” or some such that was the nominee, rather than the con itself. Because the con itself was ephemeral, and we all know there is a lot more to a convention than just the program.

6. Did Discon, or Isabel Fall, or someone else change the name of Fall’s nominated novelette from the original title?

7. @bill

   Fall’s wishes. Neil Clarke set the record straight for Discon & some of us in the Discord that wanted to nominate it back during nom period.

   https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1382002865447784454

8. I wonder how the Helicopter Story plays out. I’ve read a while ago that Ms. Jemisin was being blamed for launching a witch hunt against Mr. Fall, which caused the latter to give up science fiction writing. I’m not sure how much, if any, of this is true, but having both of them at the convention may be interesting.

   That said, I’m really excited about the final ballot. Not only did no nominations of mine make the cut, but I haven’t read any of the works that were nominated (except of two of the series). This allows me to explore so much new material that I’ll keep busy all summer.

9. It’s great to be on the ballot again, especially with such a strong material!
   That new translation of Beowulf is an absolute revelation. The intro essay is good but really the translation itself is so much better. I did a semester class on Beowulf had to read it in both the surviving original and two of the translations and this one is so much better, and cleaner, than any other.
   The GRRM screed is a difficult question. It’s a clacking read, for sure, but yeah, it would seem to be a CoC violation, especially when one other nominee was re-named for the ballot.
   Chris

10. First of all, thanks for the congratulations. Also congratulations to Paul, Red Wombat, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Olav and Amanda, Chris, Adri and everybody I may have forgotten.

    @David Shallcross
    DisCon III has promised to post videos of people playing the nominated games on their YouTube channel, so the non-gamers among us can get an insight into the games.

    @Chris Garcia
    The title of the helicopter story was apparently changed at the request of the author, not DisCon III

11. Just to follow up on some of the YA book issues that people have mentioned, the YA Hugo committee discussed (and reported to the BM) that there are a few ways you can identify something as YA when nominating:

    a) the content of the book (especially the age of the protagonist and treatment of ‘adult’ content)
    b) the marketing/listing chosen by the publisher, and
    c) the intent of the author

    These can of course conflict. So, for example, Red Wombat notes that she wrote ‘Wizard’s Guide’ originally as a Middle-Grade book, but the the main character is 14 and many nominators would consider that a teen protagonist (many orgs consider YA to cover books designed for 13-18 year olds, and a protagonist in that age range would reasonably make readers think the book therefore qualifies as Teen fiction). So these lines can blur.

    You can tell how a publisher categorizes a book by looking at the Amazon entry, scrolling down to Product Details, and seeing the three categories listed. ‘Wizard’s Guide’ is listed in two Children’s categories and one non-age related (Fantasy). So again, the 14-year old protagonist further blurs that category, as many orgs list Children’s books as ‘up to to 12yrs old.’ Meanwhile, ‘A Deadly Education’s’ primary category is Teen/YA, although naturally the publisher will also try to market it towards adult fans of Naomi Novik.

    There is danger when it comes to the publisher’s categorization, though, because content has so much to do with these evaluations. Sarah Maas’ Court of Thorns and Roses series was marketed as a YA series, but included VERY explicit sexual content…like, adult romance novels level-of-sexual-content. Parents lost their shit over it, and Bloomsbury changed the marketing category. If you look at the Amazon pages now, the books are NOT listed as YA/Teen.

    As a final note, I sometimes see nominators/people say a book doesn’t ‘feel’ like YA, perhaps because it reads ‘adult’ even when the content deals with teen experiences. I think that this is a misconception. Granted, it does relate to a general trend in YA writing during the last two decades, when YA writing styles commonly have become quite simplified and you could even argue ‘infantilize’ the teen experience. But many YA books are written in exactly the same tone as an adult book and deal with difficult subjects. If you read the older Middle-Grade book ‘A Dark is Rising,’ you’ll find that its ‘tone’ is much more serious than most current YA and certainly more so than some of the Lodestar noms from this year. ‘The Art of Starving,’ nominated for the first Lodestar year, is quite serious in its content and tone. So, I caution people against stereotyping YA books as ‘adult’ simply based on their stylistic qualities/tone.

12. @Bruncvik

    Ms Fall

13. I’m hopeful that with the aid of the demonstration videos for the Video Game category, I may finally understand Blaseball. Still voting for Hades, though.

14. I’m happy the Fall novelet is a finalist. Most interesting story I’ve read in a while, though I admit my reading has been largely non fictional for years. It has a very 80s sensibility in a thoroughly contemporary idiom.

15. With regard to the Beowulf translation, I feel like I can draw a clear distinction between that and a retelling (which, interestingly, Headley has done as well, in The Mere Wife). I would say that if Mere Wife had been nominated, it should have gone in the Best Novel category, while Related Work is the best place for the direct translation.

16. Rob Thornton: The anti-GRRM rant – I hope it was not nominated because angry fans wanted to cheese off GRRM… it better be a really damn good Internet rant.

    Of course it was, and it’s not. People (including me) posted a lot of rants about the travesty made of the Hugo Awards ceremony last year by a host who behaved in a childish, petty, passive-aggressive way. All of those rants were justified, but none of them, including Luhrs’, are particularly profound or contribute to the SFF genre in a lasting, meaningful way. It’s just a rant. I grieve for the meaningful SFF nonfiction work deprived of its nomination because a bunch of people thought behaving in a childish, petty, passive-aggressive way was an appropriate response. It was a really shitty thing for them to do.

     
    Rob Thornton: FIYAHCON – Is it a really good idea to nominate an entire convention?

    I don’t think that the two conventions are what the category is supposed to recognize, either. I think it’s time to change the category back to Best Nonfiction Book.

17. Lis Riba: Lodestar nominations include TWO books I didn’t consider YA – one in each direction. A Deadly Education is categorized and marketed as a book for adult audiences, and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is a middle-grade novel.

    To me, the marketing of a book is irrelevant, as are the author’s intentions. If it reads to me like a YA book and I think it’s worthy of a Lodestar nomination, that’s where I’ll nominate it. In fact, it was the childish behavior of the characters which almost kept me from finishing A Deadly Education. I don’t enjoy reading about snotty, petulant teenagers and their petty jealousies and rivalries and political maneuvering. But I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the plot enough to nominate the book for the Lodestar, anyway.

    And my feeling about the Lodestar is that it’s intended to recognize any YA books Worldcon members wish to recognize, which includes books which are supposedly “middle-grade”.

18. My nominations for Best Related Work are books and projects that required a significant amount of time and effort to create, like the Beowulf translation that took over two years. If I saw a blog post that I liked enough to think about it at Hugo time, I’d be more likely to nominate the author for best fan writer than to make a single post a choice for Best Related Work.

    Is there another award in SFF that only recognizes non-fiction books?

19. @rcade: The Locus Awards have that category.

20. rcade on April 13, 2021 at 8:25 pm said:
    My nominations for Best Related Work are books and projects that required a significant amount of time and effort to create, like the Beowulf translation that took over two years. If I saw a blog post that I liked enough to think about it at Hugo time, I’d be more likely to nominate the author for best fan writer than to make a single post a choice for Best Related Work.

    Same. Personally, I thought Tom Scioli’s biography of Jack Kirby was highly meritorious.

21. @JJ:

    “It’s just a rant. I grieve for the meaningful SFF nonfiction work deprived of its nomination because a bunch of people thought behaving in a childish, petty, passive-aggressive way was an appropriate response. It was a really shitty thing for them to do.”

    This is…pretty presumptive of the people that nominated it. And unfair. I didn’t nominate it and won’t be voting for it (torn between the Octavia Butler bio and the Jenny Nicholson vid), but the fact of the matter is GRRM acted in a poor manner and Luhr’s blog post captured that moment’s anger in a succinct manner that still got her points across. If anything, it captures a continued tension that’s been occurring across fandom throughout the decade, with fandom’s propensity towards self-congratulation and elevating figures to high status being continually questioned. The Campbells, Asimovs and Whedons of the world did far worse that GRRM, but it’s a similar situation of the more famous members of fandom getting swelled heads, flaunting their status and looking over the little guys. To that end, Luhr’s piece might be more representative as a microcosm of an aspect of the fandom discourse than we’d like to admit.

    Not that the category doesn’t clearly need an overhaul. i’ve been saying “Non-Fiction Work” instead of “Book” because I feel like the latter would shut out documentaries and video essays of equal academic merit and relegate them to a hypothetical Miscellany category (where they’d probably dominate).

    EDIT: (Maybe there oughta be a Long Form and Short Form Non-Fiction Work separation, rather?)

22. @rcade:

    Well…ah ha. Bear with me here.

    The Ursa Major Awards have had a Non-Fiction Work category since 2011. There’s also (interesting to me, at least) a Best miscellany category dedicated to stuff that wouldn’t fit in with the other categories. It’s their version of a grab bag.

    EDIT: that pun was not intended

23. Okay, last one:

    In a year chock full of long-form genre TV and under-the-radar indie movies, frankly there should be maybe a tad more bafflement as to how the heck Eurovision Song Contest: Fire Saga made the ballot.

    I finally gave it a watch; it’s funny/charming and all (there’s a musical interlude with cameos from real Eurovision participants and winners that’s fun and goes on a bit too long, and Will Ferrell’s a little past his prime but McAdams is charming, but I’m digressing), but it’s still largely a straight comedy. While there are elves and ghosts, their inclusion in the film is very tenuous at best (we don’t even see the elves). They’re more like…sudden moments of surrealism, the removal of which wouldn’t drastically change the story. By that notion, any comedy movie that uses magical realism for a humorous device could be classified as fantasy.

    Much respect to Seanan McGuire, whose writing I greatly enjoy, but my suspicion’s long been that nominators followed her push on social media because she’s a famous, well-respected author and voters wanted to see a bunch of famous, well-respected authors put on a Eurovision routine at Worldcon. Plus I just plain disagree with her/the general assertion that 2020 was lacking in quality genre movies. There were plenty, and plenty of people were recommending them.

24. Congratulations to @Various Filer finalists! 😀 w00t!

    Congratulations to people/works I nominated (5), ones I almost nominated (3), finalists I own but haven’t read yet (4), and finalists I was already interested in or I’ve enjoyed in the past (9)!

    Special congratulations to Tommy Arnold for his second time as a finalist!

    @Cora Buhlert: Either I’ve had your last name wrong in my head for years, or they mispronounced it. Probably my head’s wrong, blush, in which case, sorry.

    @Various: Unfortunately, I expect to No Award a few things.

    I’d love it if we did away with BRW, but I’d support almost any halfway-decent proposal to change it.

    IMHO zines should get one rocket, with the zine name on it. At some point (hint: this year!) it’s just shenanigans.

25. Oh, good grief. Too much time tweaking things and putting in numbers, so I forgot to check the blessed little box. ::blush::

26. As a trans woman, I’m actually quite upset about the Luhrs piece being nominated. I’m sure some trans folks are fine with it being nominated, because, shocker, we have a diversity of opinions. But that rant in particular made me more uncomfortable than Martin’s bit itself.

    The trans but in the article reads as: “I’m not trans, but it icked me, so trans people must be feeling what I am, but multiplied!” It’s a style of presenting an outsider’s personal response which always rubs me the wrong way, as it presents an etic perspective as inherently authoritative. A good ally lifts up the voices of the marginalized group, they do not present their perspective as an outsider as definitive. Natalie Luhrs does not inherently speak for trans people, and yet, that rage blog was picked up in subsequent journalism as if it were the definitive trans perspective on the ceremony. Martin didn’t assume to speak for my perspective, but the Luhrs piece did, and that honestly bothered me even more.

    So yeah, yeet yourself into a conversation with more trans folks, maybe? And not just the most vocal folks on Twitter. If all the trans folks you speak to share the same perspectives on the nuances of social justice, you’re not talking to enough trans folks to speak authoritatively on the perspective(s) from that community.

    I’m just so tired of people acting like they can speak for me simply because they care about trans people generally. And even some other trans folks acting like they speak for ALL of us, leading to shit like the Isabell Fall fiasco where they bullied a trans woman into hiding.

    Way to be allies to each other. sigh

27. I didn’t nominate Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, but as someone who had trouble finding enough nominations for dramatic long form, I wonder if that played a factor in an unusual choice making the ballot.

    I had The Old Guard and Palm Springs among my nominations and The Old Guard only made it because someone on File 770 told me it was good so I watched it the night before nominations closed. My other choices included The Invisible Man and Upload Season 1, which were entertaining but likely wouldn’t have made my top 5 in a year with a normal amount of movie releases.

    Of course, I say this as someone who finds out in many different ways each year that my tastes often vary widely with the Hugo electorate.

28. @N: BUT IT WAS A GREAT PUN! 🙂

29. @Kendall
    @Cora Buhlert: Either I’ve had your last name wrong in my head for years, or they mispronounced it. Probably my head’s wrong, blush, in which case, sorry.

    Malka Older pronounced my name correctly, which I also noted in my initial Hugo blogpost. It’s pronounced Boolert like the sounds ghosts make.

    @rcade
    That might have been me, since I enjoyed The Old Guard a whole lot. It’s also the only of my Best Dramatic Presentation long nominees to make the ballot.

    Regarding Best Related Work, I agree that it’s time to tighten the category definition, because the non-fiction books it was created for are getting crowded out and the category is turning into “Best Fannish Thing”. I do think that Best Related should cover documentaries, because they would get drowned out by movies and TV shows in Dramatic Presentation, as well as online knowledge databases like the SF Encyclopedia. I’m even okay with the Beowulf translation, because I don’t know where else it would fit and I’m always happy to see translators recognised.

    However, virtual conventions, no matter how well oganised, filk CDs, fanfiction archives, acceptance speeches, etc… don’t really belong in Best Related. Maybe we need a Best Miscellany category to cover works which don’t really fit anywhere else.

30. bill on April 13, 2021 at 10:41 am said:

    @Martin Easterbrook
    Yes, the WSFS Awards page does say that the Lodestar is Not A Hugo. But look at the WSFS Constitution — it makes no such distinction, and lists the Lodestar as a Category of Hugo. I would think that is determinative.

    If the Lodestar Award was a Hugo Award, it wouldn’t be called the Lodestar Award; it would be “Best Young Adult Work” or something like that. It is specifically not a Hugo Award for the exact reason that it is not intended to create a ghetto for YA works. A work can be a finalist for the Lodestar and also for the appropriate-by-length Hugo Award. This is absolutely clear in the legislative history and intent of the award, which can be found in the minutes and recordings of the meetings that debated and adopted it. That’s why the Hugo Awards web site explains it the way that it does.

    Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, the people who win the Lodestar Award do not get a Hugo Award trophy rocket. The Lodestar Award has a different design. That’s pretty definitive.

31. That might have been me, since I enjoyed The Old Guard a whole lot. It’s also the only of my Best Dramatic Presentation long nominees to make the ballot.

    Thank you! That was a terrific movie — Charlize Theron is a great badass in this kind of role — and now I need to chase down the comic.

32. GRRM blogged this afternoon and it seemed like he might be working up towards mentioning a certain subject, but instead he avoided it entirely.

33. @Cora Buhlert: Thanks, and darn, I was afraid it was me. I’ll try to remember.

    I’d be happy with BRW being improved, but I don’t want yet another category. Not everything needs a Hugo category. Tightening up BRW would be a big improvement, though.

34. N: If anything, it captures a continued tension that’s been occurring across fandom throughout the decade, with fandom’s propensity towards self-congratulation and elevating figures to high status being continually questioned.

    Representative of a moment? Sure. Took a lot of hard work and research, and is a lasting, meaningful contribution to the SFF genre? Absolutely not. Pushed actually-deserving work off the ballot? Definitely.

    It’s people abusing the Hugo Awards to grind their personal axes, and I’m sick of it. It’s like someone bought a bunch of Hugo memberships for a hundred kindergartners with the “Boaty McBoatface” mentality.

    It’s funny how so many people stridently demand respect for themselves and their works, but are so quick to disrespect the Hugo Awards, the works of others, and other Worldcon members.

35. I think BRW is being used by fandom to make points about the Worldcon and Hugo Awards failures

    the well past sell by date praising of Campbell with an award (an award that changed things)
    here convention events that dealt with various events and managed to avoid controversy (all delivered in less time than a Worldcon managed
    the Martin piece for me shows that a lot of people felt the Hugos last year insulted the genre thanks to Martin’s approach which any organiser could have not run the hours of video tape if they had given any thought.

    If Hugos want fandom to stop using some categories to point out its failings the onus is on the awards and the Worldcons to do better jobs not fandom to ignore these problems

36. Matt Cavanagh: I think BRW is being used by fandom to make points about the Worldcon and Hugo Awards failures

    Surely that was obvious. That doesn’t make it okay.

    You’re equating “the Hugos” to poor decisions made by a handful of people. They’re not the same thing, and a bunch of people using the BRW in a childish and petty way is not okay. It’s incredibly disrespectful to the other Hugo voters, and to the works which don’t get the recognition they rightly deserve, because some people decided to throw a big baby tantrum.

37. Matt Cavanagh: Dr. Robert Forward gave a talk to LASFS once about antimatter where he brought out CERN’s opinion that now that they had proved it existed, the rest was “just engineering.”

    Once Larry Correia and Vox Day found you could round up enough voters to torture people by putting on the Hugo ballot not only badly-written stories and porn but faux works like Michael Z. Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet and books with vindictive titles like SJWs Always Lie, the rest was just engineering for anyone else who can round up 30 or 40 votes.

    There is no morality at work in this kind of acting out, just destructiveness.

38. If Hugos want fandom to stop using some categories to point out its failings the onus is on the awards and the Worldcons to do better jobs not fandom to ignore these problems

    The flaw in this logic is that the Hugo Awards and Worldcon are run by Worldcon fandom. You’re saying that fandom rebuked fandom because fandom thinks fandom needs to do a better job. I think we can send a message to ourselves without doing it through Best Related Work nominations.

    And we did. There was no shortage of opinions within Worldcon fandom about the 2020 ceremony.

39. @Matt Cavanagh

    I think BRW is being used by fandom to make points about the Worldcon and Hugo Awards failures

    Yes, fans are using Best Related Work to make such points, but that’s not what the category was initially created for.

    Best Related Work was initially intended for non-fiction books. It was later expanded to allow e.g. for the online SF-Encyclopedia, but it was never intended to cover virtual conventions, filk CDs, ranty blogposts, fanfiction archives, acceptance speeches, etc… Which does not mean that any of those things are unworthy, but simply that the works that the category was actually intended for are being crowded out.

    Non-fiction books tend to be very research intensive and pay very little or even cost the author money (the practices of academic publishing would be inacceptable elsewhere). Non-fiction books are a labour of love and their authors intend to broaden our knowledge and analysis of the genre. And for that, they deserve recognition, which they are all too often denied, because Best Related Work is increasingly turning into “Best fannish thing” or “We wanted to make a point”.

    For example, the year before Jeannette Ng won the Hugo for Best Related Wrok for her Campbell (as it was then) Award acceptance speech, Alec Nevala-Lee, an author of colour, wrote an excellent and well researched non-fiction book called Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which made more or less the same point Jeannette Ng made in her speech, namely that Campbell and his trio of star writers were problematic figures and that their outsized impact on the genre still echoes today. Astounding not only lost to AO3, it finished dead last. Not because it wasn’t a good book – it was excellent, but because a lot of Hugo voters never even bothered to read it.

40. Mike fundamentally disagree

    As I recall Box Day led to many many debates (a lot held on File 770 I remember back in the day) as to what the genre and the awards are for. It led to an influx of modern fans who gave voting a much needed increase and got rid of the Puppies (who also JJ were a handful of people)

    However that increased fandom is still here and there are other things about the Hugos and Worldcons those groups are finding fairly outdated and if not tackled also will be destructive.

    The Astounding Award is good progress and regardless of Silverberg and Martin’s obnoxious sarcasm didn’t end the genre as we know it.

    For me a Hugos to actually have something that says Fandom found your handling of events wanting Mr Martin is also a powerful sign that just because you’ve a long long history doesn’t mean you can behave this way any more. Hopefully a reminder that Hugo ceremonies should treat finalists with respect like getting their names right and not being patronising to the audience – all of which I found far more destructive

    Cora – I agree that’s what the award is for but I think fandom is using it for well deserved criticism and in the spirit of the award.

41. @Kevin Standlee –
    I think it’s pretty clear that, following the belief of the majority of Fandom and the membership of the WSFS, the Lodestar is de facto (at least) Not-A-Hugo. So long as the voters treat it as such, that’s what it will be.

    But surely you can see that a fairly straightforward reading of the Constitution adds some ambiguity to the proposition. (and therefore, maybe the Nit Pickers and Fly Speckers would do well to review the language, and propose a modification to clarify it).

    But as far as what’s definitive, I’m a little surprised that someone like yourself, Fandom’s parliamentarian, would suggest that somehow the shape of an award is definitive, or its name, in lieu of black-and-white language of the Consititution.

    A work can be a finalist for the Lodestar and also for the appropriate-by-length Hugo Award.

    Stacey raised this issue upthread, and OGH said in response that a book can appear only in one category. I, remembering the discussions during the creation of the award and fairly direct statements that “Lodestar is Not-A-Hugo” [legislative intent and history aren’t definitive, either, but certainly can inform the discussion], thought to myself “that doesn’t apply since the Lodestar isn’t a Hugo” and went to look up explicit language to that effect from the Constitution. I was suprised that I didn’t find such, and that instead, the language supported Mike’s position: Lodestar is a category of Hugo, and so a work can’t be awarded both the Lodestar and Best Novel awards — thus my post, and my previous suggestion to the contrary.

42. Matt Cavanagh: For me a Hugos to actually have something that says Fandom found your handling of events wanting Mr Martin is also a powerful sign that just because you’ve a long long history doesn’t mean you can behave this way any more.

    Plenty of Worldcon fans have already done that, and based on their responses, seated and bidding Worldcons got that message.

    A small group of fans fucking over the Hugo Awards just because throwing a big baby tantrum makes them feel better is a shitty thing to do to the rest of the Worldcon fans, who – after the absolute clusterfuck of last year’s Hugos – would like to have something to celebrate, instead of having to constantly look at yet another big turd, which is almost sunk to the level of the Puppies, on the ballot.

43. Matt Cavanagh: However that increased fandom is still here….

    No, they’re not. The number of nominating ballots cast this year is the lowest it’s been since 2012 — DisCon III got only 148 more than came in that year. While EPH is the method that determines the finalists, we know from the con’s news release that in two-thirds of the categories it was possible to make the ballot with fewer than 40 nominations.

    The thousands who jumped in to participate in the Puppy years have largely gone back where they came from, unfortunately.

44. Mike that number worried me too though I’m hoping Covid may be more responsible but if a lot of fandom leave Hugos then that award will ossify

    Perhaps people have got tired of Worldcons not learning lessons – future Worldcons need to do better

    For me a protest vote should be allowed and the wider community can then value accordingly

    Observation linked to Cora’s point did fandom act to rename the Campbell in the Months after Astounding the Novel’s launch or because Ng stood up and highlight the gross inappropriateness of the award name leading to rapid change?

45. Speaking of Awards which may, or may not, be Hugo Awards:
    The Pixel Scroll of 4/11 had an entry about Isaac Asimov awarding himself a Hugo at Discon I. The award in question isn’t mentioned in the WSFS records, but it’s pretty clear from contemporary accounts that everyone involved considered it to be a Hugo Award.
    Was it in fact a Hugo Award?

46. Natalie Luhrs is a talented fan writer. The work she included in the 2017 Hugo packet was rocket-worthy. I’d prefer she skipped this comment instead of seeing me rain on her parade.

    But to me, “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun” is a blog rant written so hastily that it required six corrections or clarifications and leaned really hard into the transgressive glee of the profane title.

    Even if I enjoy a good rant, whether on a blog or the comments here, I don’t see how it is worthy of beating out books, large projects and similar efforts.

    Camestros Felapton currently is writing a massive series of blog posts called Debarkle, “a history of the Puppy Kerfuffle of 2015, the events that preceded it, the political context and how it presaged events in US politics that followed it.”

    To me that’s the kind of blog content that might become a Best Related Work. I don’t see a 1,700-word rant making the grade unless the goal is something other than rewarding high-quality work that required significant expenditures of time and effort.

    P.s. I’m not thrilled that a convention whose Code of Conduct prohibits “[c]omments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave” is going to make a presenter invite GRRM to “fuck off into the sun” during the Hugo Awards ceremony.

47. bill: What Asimov received today would be classified as a special committee award — given by the committee, not voted by the members. See Fancyclopedia 3, 1963 Hugos. These used to be Hugo rockets until the rules were changed to forbid that, in the Seventies as I recall.

48. Matt Cavanagh: did fandom act to rename the Campbell in the Months after Astounding the Novel’s launch or because Ng stood up and highlight the gross inappropriateness of the award name leading to rapid change?

    Fandom didn’t act to rename the Campbell, either because of Astounding the Novel’s launch, or because Ng stood up and highlighted the gross inappropriateness of the award name.

    “Fandom” has never had the ability to rename the Campbell Award, because it wasn’t “fandom’s” award. It’s Dell Magazines’ award.

    Trevor Quachri, editor of Analog, made that decision.

    From the South China Morning Post:
    The controversy has not gone unnoticed. Trevor Quachri, editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (the science fiction magazine is owned by Dell Magazines, which sponsors the award), admits he is considering renaming the award and it is only a matter of finding the right time, given it is Analog’s 90th anniversary next year.

    Reading an early draft of Nevala-Lee’s book on Campbell prompted the decision, says Quachri.

     
    If you’re going to weigh in on this, then for god’s sake actually bother to get your facts straight. 🙄

49. And I suppose that’s why they didn’t announce anything until after the speech hmmm

50. Matt Cavanagh on April 13, 2021 at 11:40 pm said:
    Mike that number worried me too though I’m hoping Covid may be more responsible but if a lot of fandom leave Hugos then that award will ossify

    Perhaps people have got tired of Worldcons not learning lessons – future Worldcons need to do better

    I dunno, I have zero interest in participating in Worldcon if the Hugos are about factionalism and this kind of outrage posturing.

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