85 thoughts on “2022 Hugo Awards”

1. Congratulations to the winners & finalists!

   That was a great Hugo Awards ceremony. I really appreciated the presenters’ efforts to pronounce names correctly. And the acceptance speeches were wonderful.

2. Congratulations to all!

3. Can I pick ’em or what? The answer is what: 3 out of 15… Sigh…

4. Congratulations to the winners!

5. But where are my STATS

6. Congratulations to all the winners!

7. Stats are up now!

   https://chicon.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-Hugo-Award-Details-Final.pdf

8. Thank you!

9. Congratulations to all the winners! Voting looked like a really tough job this year.

10. Cora’s acceptance speech was a pure delight. More acceptance speeches should have action figure assistance.

    Becky Chambers’s acceptance speech almost made me cry. I really needed to hear what she said: “You don’t need permission to rest.” Bet I’m not the only one.

    Our 2022 Toastmasters were excellent Toastmasters.

    It was just a really good Hugo Ceremony from end to end.

11. This has been a very low-amount-of-fuss Hugo season overall.

    Now I feel like I have to do something massively controversial to compensate.

12. I saw some complaints (and anger) about “The Last Graduate” winning because it was not published as a YA title — the series is published by Del Rey. It is not considered a YA book — despite the ages of the characters. One of the accusations was that Hugo voters don’t understand YA. (OTOH some of the publishers have marketed books as YA that should be “new adult,” so maybe it’s not just SFF fans.)

    Does anyone know if there were similar complaints when the first book (“A Deadly Education”) was one of the nominees last year? Has anyone ever pulled their book from nomination because it was not a YA book, or could you see this happening in the future?

    I see how this could be an issue. A lot of fans and writers have criticized the way SFF titles by women are often shelved (even marketed) as YA even when they are adult titles.

    As an example, people often find “The Poppy War” by R.F. Kuang shelved in the YA section because of the age of the protagonist at the start of the book, but it is not YA (and has some very adult content).

13. It was a great ceremony for very deserving finalists and winners. My only modest nit was the continued, all too common absence of the Best Dramatic Performance, Long Form team members to accept the award. I get that real life happens, but they did not (apparently) even send in a speech to be read or make a Zoom speech! I know this category is popular with us in the Worldcon fan community, but I do wonder if this means the movie people just don’t care? Maybe we (WSFS) should reconsider this award? (PS, I loved Dune and was very glad to get the taste of the 1980s debacle out of my mouth)

14. WOW, the stats sheet is really killing it this year. Thank you (I assume) Nicholas!

15. Big congrats to Cora

16. Has the “Long List” of nominees been published yet?

17. @Andrew (not Werdna) – It’s in the stats sheet that Jed linked above.

18. Thanks. Didn’t spot it because it was part of the EPH calculations (which of course it should have been).

19. Congrats to all!!!!!

20. My only modest nit was the continued, all too common absence of the Best Dramatic Performance, Long Form team members to accept the award. I get that real life happens, but they did not (apparently) even send in a speech to be read or make a Zoom speech!

    My recollection is that it’s more common for that category to not have a speech than to have one. Do people involved in the films even get the word that they were nominated?

21. @David Hook–I’m not sure we’re awarding Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for them. I think we’re doing it because, as you noted, we like it. When people associated with the winner do care, that’s gravy, not the entrée.

22. @rcade
    Christopher Reeve accepted for “Superman”, in 1979.

23. If next year’s Hugo Awards in Chengdu are held at 8 p.m. local time, people in the U.S. will be enjoying the livestream with our breakfast.

24. Looking at the stat sheet, it amazes me how few people actually nominate things. It would seem to me it would easier to nominate things than to vote on the ballot. A participating member is presumably just nominating their favorite things they consumed over the past year. But voters are choosing between 6 different things they might not necessarily have consumed when the ballot is released.

    tl;dr: Why are there more voters than nominators? One nominator can have a big impact!

25. Congrats to all the winners!

26. @Anne Marble – I don’t remember any such commentary last year, but then, I’m not on Twitter. I’m surprised people don’t think it’s YA; it feels very YA to me even if it wasn’t marketed as such. It’s worth pointing out the WSFS constitution doesn’t define YA, so it’s basically up to the voters; if it gets enough nominations, it’s in. There definitely have been borderline books before; most of Ursula Vernon’s Lodestar finalists have skewed a bit MG, for example. I don’t know if I can imagine a book that would get enough noms to be a Lodestar finalist, but that the author wouldn’t count as YA.

    @Michael – I nominate at most one or two things in a few categories. I am perpetually behind as a reader; very rarely am I up enough on the previous year’s fiction to have read anything to nominate. This year, for example, I nominated just one thing for Best Novel, We Are Satellites, but often I nominate nothing. I am even less likely to have read recent short fiction, which I usually catch up on via the Hugos and Neil Clarke’s “year’s best” volumes. One of the reason I vote in the Hugos, actually, is to expose me to current sf&f.

27. Congrats to all the winners.
    Personal voting, I did vote often for the winner, second or third but voting is hard and I hope for all the ones, who didn’t win, you can be happy to loose to other strong works.
    @Anne Marble: There was also a lot of grumbeling last year. It is funny there was a book that made me very uncomfortable as an YA-book this year and it wasn’t the Novik. And I think you shouldn’t nominate or vote for a book in the category if you don’t think it is YA, but marketing shouldn’t play a role.

28. My only modest nit was the continued, all too common absence of the Best Dramatic Performance, Long Form team members to accept the award.

    Since the first such Hugo Awards, Hollywood has been very individual as to who cares enough to send someone and who doesn’t.

    Sometimes the director or writer or producer or all of them know about the Hugos and care and come to Worldcon.

    More often than not, they’re oblivious or uncaring.

    I don’t think this is any reason to eliminate the award, myself; the awards are to let us know the choices of the voters. What the winners think really isn’t particularly relevant. But that’s just my own opinion.

    I don’t think there’s anything much to do about this, aside from write nice letters to the nominees at the time of nominations. It is what it is.

29. Does anyone know if there were similar complaints when the first book (“A Deadly Education”) was one of the nominees last year? Has anyone ever pulled their book from nomination because it was not a YA book, or could you see this happening in the future?

    Well, I complained here in the comments of File770 — about that book and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking which is a middle-grade book, rather than YA.

    While I liked the idea of the Lodestar, it really feels to me like these are books chosen by adults.

    Are there any YA book awards voted on by young adults?

30. Novik’s teenage protagonist, when she’s not dodging ‘orrible monsters, is negotiating the pitfalls of a lot of pretty standard late-teen stuff (and she is a very good depiction of a teenager, too). So I think The Last Graduate is a good fit for the YA category, and if it hasn’t been marketed that way, well, that may just be a failure of marketing.

31. Lis Riba: Are there any YA book awards voted on by young adults?

    I know of two — they get reported here on File 770 — but they are for French language works. I hope somebody can come up with one for YA written in English.

32. The Lodestar is very much an idiosyncratic YA award. Clearly a mix of things with broader success/buzz but also a lot of books by authors who previously won or were finalists for Hugos (e.g., Lee, Vernon, Novik, Kritzer). Even when the Hugos don’t identify the “best” sf/f work, I still think they let you get a good sense of where the genre is at, but I am not entirely convinced the Lodestar does the same for the YA sf/f genre. (That said, I always enjoy at least half of the Lodestar finalists, so it’s worth it from that perspective, which is the main one I care about.)

33. Eh. I’d like to see someone try to tell my teenaged niece who might very well EXPLODE with excited anticipation before the next book in the Deadly Education series comes out that it’s not YA.

34. A lot of state awards are voted by students. In Maryland, we have the Black-Eyed Susan Awards, and select committees of librarians initially pick the nominees for each category. I rarely see overlap with the Lodestar or the Andre Norton Award because it seems like Hugo/Nebula voters generally follow adult authors in our field and not necessarily what children are actually reading, sometimes.

35. Why are there more voters than nominators? One nominator can have a big impact!

    I rarely cast nominate votes for the simple reason that the field is so broad now that it’s likely i won’t read enough to cast an informed vote. (Especially since I don’t usually read the online magazines.) Once the field is narrowed down to the finalist list, then I can concentrate reading those.

36. I vote and nominate – but nominating is a lot harder, because I have to narrow down from everything I have read (and confirm that it’s from the right year) and provide all the relevant details in my ballot – while to vote, I just have to read the nominees (if I haven’t done so already) and tick the appropriate boxes for the ranking I decide on (choosing the ranking can be tricky, but it’s not finicky).

37. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: “Cora’s acceptance speech was a pure delight. More acceptance speeches should have action figure assistance.”

    Agreed x 1000! There aren’t enough action figures in acceptance speeches (this may not be the first, but I can’t remember off-hand).

    Also, I always love a good “local Filer makes good” story, so WOO-HOO congratulations to @Cora Buhlert (and any other Filer I’m forgetting off-hand; I’m not looking at the list right now)!

    @Lis Carey & @Gary Farber: I totally agree re. gravy/entree and who the awards are for. It’s us expressing our SFF love, though of course it’s a shame we’re small potatoes for TV/movie people.

    @Various in re. Lodestar/YA: IMHO the Lodestar is for our perception, not marketing categories, which can vary and even change for a book (Jumper started being marketed as YA at some point, to my surprise). I expect unless we make a Middle Grade award (please, no), those books will be nominated in Novel, Novella, and/or Lodestar, and I’m okay with that.

    BTW I’d presumed Novik’s series was marketed as YA, since the series name, some of the concept, the protaganist’s age, etc. sounded YA to me. Googling the series name, I see it’s from something in Romanian folklore that sounds kinda horrible and not YA, though (black magic school run by the devil!). Anyway, based on @Steve Wright’s comment, it sounds like it’s a reasonable YA finalist/winner — again, given IMHO the category’s for what we perceive as YA.

    (Caveat: I don’t feel WSFS needed a YA book award anyway.)

38. In regards to the Lodestar, I’d like to know how many teen Worldcon members have been nominating/voting for it. Teen memberships have included voting rights for several years now and perhaps the committees ought to be doing more outreach on that front, sending out reminders at various points to younger members that they are in fact eligible to nominate and vote for the awards and maybe even marketing the Lodestars to them (“Tired of seeing your grandparents’ favorites dominate the Worldcon YA award? Nominate/vote now and fix the problem!”)

39. Possibly relevant: Tamora Pierce raised funds and sponsored for 100 kids/teens ages 10-17 to attend WorldCon for their very first time. I did not know about this until results of the fundraising was announced at closing ceremonies, but here’s the deets:

    https://chicon.org/home/for-members/families/tamoras-legends/

    I hope that the one of the results of fantastic endeavors like these is more younger members nominating and voting.

    That said, I can’t imagine that having more teens nominating and voting would lessen the probability of something like The Last Graduate winning. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have gobbled up like potato chips as a teen. (I devoured both books pretty quickly anyway.) I’m absolutely flabbergasted that anyone thinks that book isn’t YA. I mean, what else would it be? Teenage protagonist at a wizardly boarding school doing the coming-of-age thing amidst magic and monsters, how is that not YA?

40. @rcade, @P J Evans: Sean Astin (Sam) accepted for “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 2002.

41. The last 6 years of Hugo awards for professional fiction categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Astounding) that went to individuals have all gone to women. That is 29 wins for women, 1 win for a woman/man duo, and 0 wins for men. This length of gender domination has never happened before in the collective history of these awards, dating back to 1973.

    This drought includes incredibly talented and diverse individuals like P. Djèlí Clark. Clark has won 3 Nebula’s, 3 Locus Award’s, and 1 BFA over that time but the voters at Worldcon have not yet deemed him worthy of a similar honor.

    I don’t believe this pattern stretching on to years 7-10 would be a good thing for the Hugo’s.

42. This length of gender domination has never happened before in the collective history of these awards, dating back to 1973.

    Why did you begin history at 1973?

43. Oh no. Women are winning awards. Something must be done. (/sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious.)

44. Why did you begin history at 1973?

    Because otherwise he would have to explain the 15-year streak of all male winners in the fiction categories from 1953 to 1968.

45. Also, if anybody got a copy of The Gatekeeper print only fanzine at Chicon, they might find my contribution interesting.

46. My wife and I both vote and nominate – this year, we only had one Supporting between us, so we discussed our votes and nominations both.
    This was not an easy year for voters – so many good things on the ballot. Gratz to all those who won!

47. A couple of points were made about my post:

    Women winning awards, why is that bad – The issue isn’t women winning awards, it is the fact that only women are winning them. A couple of years might be chance but this is 6 in a row.
    Why 1973 – This is when the awards seemed to stabilize. Prior to this there wasn’t an astounding award and the usage of Novelette, Novella, and Short Story varied per Worldcon. I will concur that you would have to go back to 1961-1967 to get a 6 year run of gender dominance like this and that is with fewer awards. I am not sure we would want to look at this as a good comp because a lot of structural sexism both in the publishing industry and society in general caused this gender voting inequity.

48. Women winning awards, why is that bad – The issue isn’t women winning awards, it is the fact that only women are winning them. A couple of years might be chance but this is 6 in a row.

    You know what I really, really hate? Somebody trying to tell me that I don’t enjoy what I enjoyed, and I’m voting for them only because they have–and/or identify as having–ladyparts. 🤬

    There’s a reason why something competent but thoroughly old-fashioned like Project Hail Mary finished at the bottom of the ballot (and by the way, P. Djeli Clark finished a quite respectable third). That’s because in my view and many other voters’ views, the most exciting work being done in the field today is being done by women, LGBTQ people, and people of color.

    If you can’t see that, then may I suggest you are nowhere near as informed or well-read as you think you are.

49. For what its worth, the consumers of young adult fiction are 55-70% adults according to various estimates. So adults are already the audience of the genre! The Hugos are just in accord with that.

50. Jesse H: Most of these finalists were available in the Hugo Voter Packet, therefore readily available to voters to read and compare. There’s no reason to argue the results were not the informed judgment of the voters.

    However, you also have to consider that the automatic runoff process of vote counting is aimed at producing a winner supported by a majority of the voters. And it’s informative to look at the way that plays out.

    In the Best Novel category, the six finalists received between 205 and 381 first-place votes. So to start, there obviously was a wide variety of opinions as to which one was best. Master of Djinn was eliminated by the runoff before Project Hail Mary. So where did its 391 votes go at that point? Only 52 when to Project Hail Mary. Over a hundred went to Light From Uncommon Stars and almost 150 to A Desolation Called Peace, the eventual winner. The Andy Weir novel may have been last year’s Dragon Award winner, a 2021 Goodreads Choice winner, and a 2022 Seiun Award winner, but it’s evident that despite its virtues the Hugo voters thought these other works surpassed it.

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