154 thoughts on “Best Series Hugo: Eligible Series from 2018”

1. Kevin Standlee on August 28, 2018 at 6:39 pm said:

   That page is a static link to whatever the most recently-updated rules are, not a deep link to an individual year’s rules.

   Thanks. That was my guess, which is why I linked indirectly the way I did.

   edit: Or maybe I misunderstood you. In any case, NBD either way.

   It would be nice if the web page got updated, so people didn’t have to click through and search a PDF, but I understand being a volunteer and limited time and all that, so I’m not complaining. The information is available, even if it’s not quite as obvious as it could be.

2. @Lurkertype

   And someday, me, Cora, her mom, and Lis are going to get JD Robb there! And more of us are going to get Liaden Universe on!

   The Liaden Universe is another series I nominate every year, especially since there usually is a new book out these days.

3. Absent mind this morning: I was already in the middle of #2 (out last month) of Theodora Goss’s “The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club” but didn’t check. This book alone is close to 240,000, and there was a novella in Strange Horizons before the first book, so it meets all the requirements for the 2019 award. IIRC, I recommended the first book at the end of last November; the premise starts with Jekyll’s daughter trying to hold things together as her mother fades after her father’s final disappearance and expands from there. (It’s now on the World Fantasy Award shortlist.) If I’m nominating next year (going to Dublin is not possible), I will probably put this series on the ballot.

   @Anna: my SWAG is that that Emrys doesn’t make the wordcount unless the 2nd novel is significantly bigger than the first — but I’m definitely unsure about this.

   @Mark: 40,000 hasn’t been typical for a very long time; I’d estimate at least 60,000 by shortly after the creation of the Hugos (not consulting my library, but I remember counting 400 words on an average page (of a not-new non-YA book) over 50 years ago, and that books ran 150-180 pages). I vaguely recall Stross saying he broke up 3 Merchant Princes novels into 6 because Tor was aiming for ~100K words/novel, but that’s variable (at the time Tor was still bringing out the end of The Wheel of Time) and more recent.

4. @JJ: Thanks so much for this post!

   @Various: Thanks for the additional information!

   ::remembers box check, this time:: 🙂

5. Point of clarification: the “plus or minus 20% rule” applies to determining in which of the four fiction categories a work belongs. It does not apply to determinining whether a series is eligible for the Series category.

   3.2.8: The Worldcon Committee may relocate a story into a more appropriate category if it feels that it is necessary, provided that the length of the story is within twenty percent (20%) of the new category limits.

    
   The 240,000-word limits for the Series category are absolute limits.

   3.3.5: Best Series. A multi-installment science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one (1) installment of which was published in the previous calendar year, and which has not previously won under 3.3.5.

   3.3.5.1: Previous losing finalists in the Best Series category shall be eligible only upon the publication of at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of the previous calendar year.

6. Innsmouth Legacy by Ruthanna Emrys (eligible at 247,226 words)
   “The Litany of Earth”: 11,691 words
   #1: Winter Tide: 127,809 words
   #2: Deep Roots: 107,726 words

   Planetfall by Emma Newman (eligible)
   #1: Planetfall: 91,034 words (320 pages)
   #2: After Atlas: 109,329 words (365 pages)
   #3: Before Mars: (336 pages)

   The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club by Theodora Goss (eligible)
   “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter”: 7,880 words
   #1: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter: 121,015 words
   #2: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman: 217,223 words

   Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee (eligible)
   “The Battle of Candle Arc”: 7,972 words
   “Extracurricular Activities”: 14,259 words
   “Calendrical Rot” < 7,500 words
   #1: Ninefox Gambit: 98,007 words
   #2: Raven Strategem: 109,246 words
   #3: Revenant Gun: 124,481 words

    
   not eligible:

   The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone
   Ruin of Angels: 143,022 words

   Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (98,780 words)
   #1: All Systems Red: 31,128 words
   #2: Artificial Condition: 32,446 words
   #3: Rogue Protocol: 35,206 words

   Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire (120,372 words)
   #1: Every Heart A Doorway: 41,481 words
   #2: Down Among the Sticks and Bones: 39,744 words
   #3: Beneath the Sugar Sky: 39,147 words

7. So, even presuming Murderbot’s final (sob) novella in October is longer than the others, it’s still nowhere near Series length.

   Stoked that “Innsmouth Legacy” is, though!

   @Chip: Which is why Tor’s reprinted “Merchant Princes” books are back to 3 novels as they should be. We no longer fear the 400 page book. Also, because everything looks short after WoT, ASoIaF, and Stormlight.

8. Doesn’t the publication of Fire and Blood make A Song of Ice and Fire eligible? If so, it must surely be counted among the front-runners.

9. Lurkertype: So, even presuming Murderbot’s final (sob) novella in October is longer than the others, it’s still nowhere near Series length.

   MURDERBOT NOVEL!   😀

10. Thanks for all of the additions and changes. Those received in comments thus far have now been applied.

    We are currently at 119 series (including those listed so as to clarify their questionable or confirmed ineligibility).

11. I do think the idea of an “absolute limit” in word count is unfortunate, even though the fact that most everything is available in electronic form these days makes it feasible to administer. One thing that made sense about the 10% limit was that it allowed for wiggle room in placing stories that might have been word-counted by the magazine editor or even the writer based on a typescript and a rule of thumb like 6 characters/word, x characters per type line, y lines per page; or something like that.

12. Rich Horton: I do think the idea of an “absolute limit” in word count is unfortunate, even though the fact that most everything is available in electronic form these days makes it feasible to administer. One thing that made sense about the 10% limit was that it allowed for wiggle room in placing stories that might have been word-counted by the magazine editor or even the writer based on a typescript and a rule of thumb like 6 characters/word, x characters per type line, y lines per page; or something like that.

    Which is exactly why the +/- 20% “wiggle room” was placed into the WSFS rules for determining fiction category — and rightly so.

    But the Series category doesn’t need that wiggle room. If an entry this year doesn’t quite hit the 240,000 total, then the next entry in the series will.

    And if you instituted a +/- 20% for Series, that would mean that a series of only 192,000 words (easily hit by 2 books in many cases, or in the case of Game of Thrones, by 1 book) would qualify — which really destroys the point of requiring a substantial body of work in order for something to qualify, or requalify, as a Series.

13. The Doctor Who novelisations are surely eligible again – this year they have published:
    Rose by Russell T. Davies
    The Christmas Invasion by Jenny T Colgan
    The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
    Twice Upon A Time by Paul Cornell

14. Just to correct Rich Horton – Apollo 13 was not defined as sf, to my knowledge. The rubric for Best Dramatic Presentation is “dramatized science fiction, fantasy or related subjects” and I don’t think you can get much more closely related than the moon landings, particularly considering that the Apollo 11 news coverage won a previous Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo!!!

15. Demon Cycle, Peter V Brett, Barren (a novella) due out next month.
    5 previous novels so will be eligible. Personally I bailed after hating book 2 but it’s a popular series.

    @JJ

    Agree that Series doesn’t need any wriggle room. While there are arguments for 240k being too high or low it was arrived at after discussion and seems to be doing a fair job so far.
    If someone writes a well-received trilogy and it’s below 240k then there might be an argument for working in some flexibility but at the moment it’s just a theoretical problem.
    I’m more concerned about the theoretical problem of 1 doorstopper + 2 shorts (or 2+1) providing eligibility, and at the moment I’d hope that if that comes up people just exercise some common sense when nominating and ask themselves if it’s really a coherent series yet.

16. That’s right, Nicholas, but there were certainly lots of complaints when Apollo 13 won, as I recall!

    JJ — I see your point about the series length, but I think, though it’s a minor issue, that a more modest wiggle room that allowed for some rough and ready counting would make sense to me. Say 250,000 as the official “limit” with a 10% tolerance. It’s not that much of an issue now, with electronic publication, but imagine the angst if we were still doing handcounting (still necessary for much stuff even a decade ago), and someone decided a trilogy of 3 80,000 word books was eligible, and it was nominated, and just before the awards someone obsessively counted each word and determined the three books were only 238,000 words total. I just think, philosophically, that it’s almost never a good idea to insist on hard and fast limits like that. (And the issue can bite you — see the kerfuffle about Cat Rambo’s excellent story that was nominated for a Nebula as Best Novelette a couple of years ago, because it was listed as a Novelet in F&SF, but which was determined to be a few hundred words (well less than 10% of 7500) short of the Nebula’s bright line boundary. (A line that I am pretty certain was violated back in the dark ages of the 20th century on several occasions.))

    It’s not big enough deal to insist on a rule change or anything, I just think it’s a minor problem with the current definition of the category.

17. Rich Horton: It’s not big enough deal to insist on a rule change or anything, I just think it’s a minor problem with the current definition of the category.

    As you say, it used to be a problem. Now that accurate counting of words is trivially easy, it is no longer a problem, and it is not any deal, much less a big deal, to have the exact limits, especially given that the +/- 20% easement exists.

    The hard-and-fast 240,000 word limit in Series is fine; it is trivially easy (for values of “trivial” when you’re the author who has to write them 😉 ) to hit that bar with 3 novels of at least 80,000 words each.

    And the Nebula issue is their issue to address or not, as they see fit. It is not a Hugo issue.

18. The Dark Gifts Trilogy by Vic James, Bright Ruin. (Haven’t read this, the first one is languishing on the tbr so this is a good excuse to break it out)

    Blood of Earth trilogy by Beth Cato, Roar of Sky. (Read the first and liked it well enough but didn’t rush to get the rest)

19. Re: Murderbot, Wayward Children, and other novella series

    You need at least 6 to qualify and that’s if all of them are right around to slightly over max novella length. For example, the six Penric and Desdemona novellas/short novels didn’t quite make the word count on their own as a subseries. Now that Five Gods has won, does that make the subseries ineligible from here on out?

20. Laura: Now that Five Gods has won, does that make the subseries ineligible from here on out?

    My read on that is an emphatic “yes”.

    On a related note, it would do the ardent fans of Bujold, McGuire, Sanderson, Aaronovitch, Corey, and GRRM well to understand that nothing will get the WSFS Business Meeting members to kill the category faster than the same series showing up on the ballot year after year after year.

    3 of the Series finalists from 2017 had to be disqualified despite very obviously not having met the re-eligibility requirements, and a 4th which was just a few more places down the longlist would have been disqualified as well. This is just stupid.

    My advice is that nominators spread the love around, if they want to keep it as a Hugo category in the long-term. 😐

21. there were certainly lots of complaints when Apollo 13 won, as I recall!

    It didn’t win. It was beaten by the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows”.

22. JJ,

    Yes, that’s how I would interpret it too. Both as a personal preference and as the intention of the makers of the category. After all, Five Gods would not have been eligible without that new subseries.

    Yup, it is crazy that the short list went to number 10 on the longlist. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Temeraire is lurking just past number 15. Not sure if people didn’t really look at the re-eligibility rules or were hedging their bets that Hugo admin might not count last year’s trial run. Glad the re-qualification limits are pretty robust and that Hugo admin did count last year. I want to see the category continue.

23. Nicholas Whyte on August 29, 2018 at 5:49 am said:

    there were certainly lots of complaints when Apollo 13 won, as I recall!

    It didn’t win. It was beaten by the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows”.

    Conflating it with 1970’s winner: news coverage of Apollo XI?

24. Laura: Not sure if people didn’t really look at the re-eligibility rules or were hedging their bets that Hugo admin might not count last year’s trial run.
    
    A combination of both, I am sure.

    I was extremely pleased that the 2018 Hugo Admins chose to regard the 2017 iteration of the category as part of the ongoing Series category, and disqualified the previous year’s finalists — and I really hope that the 2019 Hugo Admins do the same.

    We’ve now got 114 clearly-eligible series in the list above. Nominators, please make an effort to spread the love around; there are plenty of worthy candidates apart from the 12 which have already been finalists.

25. @Laura, @Nicholas — No, I just forgot that APOLLO 13 didn’t win. But it was nominated, and I certainly remember (probably on Usenet) some carping that it wasn’t really science fiction. I take Nicholas’ point, however, that the rules do allow that. That said, because defining science fiction is really hard, I think the rules for novel would allow, let’s just pick one [not] at random … Arrowsmith to have been nominated had there been Hugos its year, if enough of the nominators had chosen it.

26. Laura on August 29, 2018 at 6:16 am said:

    Yup, it is crazy that the short list went to number 10 on the longlist. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Temeraire is lurking just past number 15. Not sure if people didn’t really look at the re-eligibility rules or were hedging their bets that Hugo admin might not count last year’s trial run. Glad the re-qualification limits are pretty robust and that Hugo admin did count last year. I want to see the category continue.

    I’m hoping a chunk of the nominators were not considering last year’s results when calculating added words, because my largest concern as I sat in a bar after the ceremony looking over the nominating stats was that so many of last year’s nominees had been re-nominated with insufficient additional words.

    I’ll certainly be keenly awaiting the results after the ceremony next year. I *really hope* we don’t see that again. I think five years is a reasonable time to see how a new category shakes out. If we’re still nominating series that made the finalist list in five years time I’ll be disappointed.

27. Correction: Graydon Saunders’s series is about the Commonweal, not the Commonwealth.

    And it’s really (a) good, (b) different, and (c) remarkably non-grim considering the setting (a magical ecology of Dark Lords conquering Dark Lords stretching back at least hundreds of thousands of years).

28. @Rich

    Wasn’t around for Apollo 13’s nomination discussion, but I definitely remember the complaints about Hidden Figures last year. And both Apollos being brought up in defense.

29. I certainly plan to nominate the Commonweal. I wonder if Graydon has enough readers here and on Usenet to make the shortlist – at least the longlist would be nice.

30. Seanan McGuire would like us to know that she believes October Daye will be eligible for Series again, and also that she writes way too much.

31. @David Shallcross:

    How about “dwarf novel”? Or does that sound too subgenre specific.

    That’s for SF novels set on Pluto or Ceres, isn’t it?

32. I’m not sure the 20% slop was a reaction to loose wordcounts; there was discussion at one of the meetings relating to (some form of) this rule in which authors argued that length is less significant than intent/design/…. This is my recollection from 1994 (one of the few meetings I attended), so it may relate to an older form of the rule. I’d be interested in seeing minutes discussing this.

33. David Goldfarb@

    I am going to nominate Graydon as well. He certainly deserves it.

    The last longlisted item in this category had 46 votes this year, so not very likely, but who knows?

34. @Chip
    1994 minutes available here. Items 13 and 14.

35. I’m thirding the Commonweal books. In fact, I liked them so much I’m re-reading them before I get to the already-purchased newest release….

36. @Laura: I knew where to find the 1994 minutes; the problem is that the items make clear that the slop rule already existed. I was hoping to find the discussion that caused the slop rule to appear in the first place, which would involve downloading masses of minutes and maybe still not finding anything; unfortunately, there are few old versions of the Constitution available, which would make finding the year much easier.

37. Suggested additions in descending order of defensibility:

    Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn (“Heroine’s Journey”, 2018 novel, adds to 2 existing novels in named series.)
    Railhead by Philip Reeve (“Station Zero”, 2018 novel, adds to 2 existing novels in named series.)
    Web Shifters by Julie Czerneda (“The Only Thing to Fear”, 2018 novella, adds to existing trilogy of novels)
    Mortal Engines (UK)/Predator Cities (US) by Philip Reeve (“Night Flights”, 2018 collection of original short stories, adds to 4 existing novels in named series.)
    Tortall Books by Tamora Pierce (“Tempests and Slaughter”, 2018 novel, adds to 17+ existing novels in shared world, including 4 with overlapping characters. It’s also starting its own subseries but I believe it’s as coherent as some of the others on the list)
    Goredd Books by Rachel Hartman (“Tess of the Road”, 2018 novel, adds to 2 existing novels in same world with overlapping characters. Again, it’s starting its own subseries but could be nominated as a whole).

    Apocalypse Nyx is an interesting one: four of the five collected stories were originally published on Patreon and I believe all originally came out there before 2017 (as did the fifth). Whether or not this counts as a new entry in the series therefore depends on how the limited Patreon publication is viewed.

38. I’m having a hard time pinning down an exact word count, and the estimated publication date for the third book is currently December 2018 so any delay would push it back a year, but my wife has requested that I add:

    Janet Edwards, “Hive Mind” series. 2 novels and a novella currently out, third novel due out in December.

39. Pingback: Loose-leaf Links #67 | Earl Grey Editing

40. An addition: John Varley’s Irontown Blues creates eligibility for his Eight Worlds setting, and/or the trilogy that begins with Steel Beach.

41. I loved Varley’s Eight Worlds books, and Persistance of Vision, and Press Enter []*, so much when I was younger. I haven’t read the newer ones, though.

    *I don’t know if “loved” is the best word for Press Enter [].

42. Dave Hutchinson has confirmed the next Fractured Europe book is out in November. I would imagine this should be eligible as that’s the fourth volume in the series, each of which are 300+ pages. (I get the impression these books aren’t very well known in the US, but previous volumes were nominated for the BSFA, Clarke and Kitschies awards, and won the BSFA in 2016.)

43. Suggested updates have been made, along with the following additional series:

    Diving Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Searching for the Fleet, and novellas The Rescue of the Renegat, Lieutenant Tightass, and Dix
    Gaia Chronicles by Naomi Foyle, Stained Light
    Gates of the World by K.M. McKinley, The Brass God
    Green Rider by Kristen Britain, The Dream Gatherer
    Majestic-12 / MJ-12 by Michael J. Martinez, Endgame
    PERN by Anne McCaffrey and Gigi McCaffrey, Dragon’s Code
    Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake, Two Dark Reigns
    Uglies / Impostors by Scott Westerfeld, Impostors

44. For the Wild Cards series, please also add _Low Chicago_, published June 2018. (I’m in it, so I happen to know this one…)

    https://www.amazon.com/Low-Chicago-Wild-Cards-Novel/dp/0765390566

45. I think David Levithan’s Every Day series is eligible.

    Books in series: Every Day (2012); Six Earlier Days (2012) (collection/novella); Another Day (2015); Someday (2018).

    Wordcount estimates suggest the total length so far is on the order of 400k words; I’m not sure of exact numbers, but pretty sure it’s well over 240k.

    Marketed as YA rather than as sf per se, but given that it’s about a person who wakes up in a different body every morning, I consider it to count as sf.

46. How is the Peter Hamilton eligible? It appears to have been published in 2016.

47. For the Jon Sprunk series, you’ve got the novel and series names backwards. The novel is Blade and Bone; the series is Book of the Black Earth.

48. Yeah, looks like Hamilton’s 2018 book Salvation is the first in a new series.

49. Resubscribing after having removed all WordPress e-mail subscriptions. Fingers crossed. Sorry for the off-topic comment spam.

50. Suggested updates have been made, along with the following additional series:

    Dorina Basarab, Dhampir by Karen Chance, Shadow’s Bane
    Godserfs by N.S. Dolkart, A Breach in the Heavens
    Harry Potter / Fantastic Beasts by J.K. Rowling, The Crimes of Grindelwald (must be nominated under the main series, because the subseries does not yet have 3 volumes)
    Lady Helen by Alison Goodman, The Dark Days Deceit
    Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, A Map of Days
    Motherless Children by Glen Hirshberg, Nothing to Devour
    Nick Medea by Richard A. Knaak, Black City Dragon
    Shadow by Lila Bowen (aka Delilah S. Dawson), Treason of Hawks
    Star Trek: The Next Generation by Dayton Ward, Available Light
    Voidwitch Saga by Corey J. White, Static Ruin (ineligible due to insufficient word count)
    Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter, Xeelee: Redemption

Comments are closed.