2019 Hugo Nominees

Glad to see Ursula le Guin and Gardner Dozois made it.

This is Le Guin's third year in a row as a Best Related Work finalist; I feel like there are good odds it will be her third year winning it, too.

Not too surprised at the Best Novel list. Later installments of past winners (Record of a Spaceborn Few, Revenant Gun) and some stuff that's been getting good buzz (Calculating Stars, Space Opera). Spinning Silver is the only real surprise for me, as I don't think of the Hugo voters as being too into fairy tale stuff.

Best Novella is predictably 5/6 Tor.com again. Best Novelette is entirely a set of new-to-me authors, though, so I'm excited to sample that list.

>3 Stevil2001: Spinning Silver is the only real surprise for me

Uprooted also got a nomination in its year so this one really did not surprise me that much.

>2 Cecrow: Well, it's likely the last year for them both, so I should hope so.

I'm glad to see that other fans agreed with me on a couple-few things.

For the Retro Hugos, I'm a little sad that Art Widner didn't quite live long enough to see his nomination for his early stuff.

>4 AnnieMod: Uprooted also got a nomination in its year so this one really did not surprise me that much.

Ah, if I'd known that, I forgot. Thanks.

None of the novels are a surprise, but we shouldn't be seeing every book in trilogies getting shortlisted. The pool of writers the voters vote for has shrunk considerably and the award is even less useful now than ever.

>7 iansales: Also, if I haven't read the earlier books in a series, suddenly I have to read, not just 6, but maybe 8-12. Still, good to see so many women in the nominees.

>8 dukedom_enough:

That was my first reaction when I saw the list - but then at least we do not have book #10 or something. :)

The one I have been talking about to local fans as been AO3 in Best Related Work.

I just don't know how to approach that.

It obviously isn't for the individual works on AO3 (although I am sure some, maybe a lot of, people will vote as if it is). So is it for the actual website (and community)? If so what new feature was notable last year? Wasn't nearly all of it in place before then?

>8 dukedom_enough: I don't know though, women writing SF isn't exactly new.

>11 SFF1928-1973: True. And women winning Hugos isn't terribly new. But women being most of the nominees is fairly new.

The Hugo ceremony is today; there's a vimeo link for those of us not present. I've found that the ustream videos tend not to work. Hope vimeo does better. 3:00 pm EDST here on the US East coast.

Thanks for posting the link!

Gut reactions:

Maybe "Archive of Our Own" deserved a Hugo for something but I'm inclined to believe that Alec Nevala-Lee probably got rooked.

Becky Chambers would not have been my first choice for the "Best Series" Hugo but in retrospect it's looking like a bad category to give an award for.

While I could say that it was churlish of Jeannette Ng to denounce the man her award is named for upon acceptance if I'm going to esteem a book that deals with just how sketchy John W. Campbell could be as a person I suspect that in five to ten years it'll be named after someone else; I nominate Fred Pohl as a replacement!

Everything else seemed pretty worthy.

And since the Discon III con committee knows where I live I'm very scared!

Full results here: https://www.tor.com/2019/08/18/announcing-the-2019-hugo-award-winners/

If you go to the vimeo link, you'll see that some Hugos folks created a text-only version of the ceremony that includes photos of some of the nominees and winners (in a hallway, not on stage).

Stats are here if anyone (like me) wants to get into the weeds: https://dublin2019.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/201Hu@o%5Efulre@su@lt@s.pdf

I can't believe Astounding finished in sixth!

That Nevala-Lee didn't do better is a shame. Then again, between the people who have moved on from Campbell and the people who don't want to hear about Campbell at his worst perhaps there's less of an audience than I might have imagined for this book.

re: Best Related Book
Well, I was somewhat surprised that the Le Guin book didn't win, since this was likely her last work. Looking at the first-round numbers, though, AO3 got 100 more more votes than the Le Guin and Astounding combined. Clearly AO3 is important to a lot of fans today.

This doesn't mean that the other finalists were bad, just that they were less important to this year's crop of ~2,000 voters.

Maybe it just shows that I'm old as fan-fic as an endeavor is just not very important to me!

>20 karenb: I thought it was kind of a mediocre offering from Le Guin, though Le Guin's mediocre is better than many others' best! It seemed to mostly summarize things she'd said better elsewhere (including 2017's Hugo winner). I knew AO3 had some support, but I also knew its nomination was controversial, so I expected those things to cancel each other out.

I guess she did win for the Complete Books of Earthsea, though; I saw two rockets when Charles Vess went up.

A few things i noted from watching the ceremony yesterday:

* The automatic subtitles were distracting, occasionally hilarious and then rightfully switched off. I suppose it was worth a try.

* There were some very passionate acceptance speeches, the first one in particular. Jeannette Ng seemed very nervous and passionate about what she had to say and that's quite alright.

* The list of laureates (as were the nominations to some extent) was dominated by women and - for lack of a better word - minorities. As can unfortunately be expected that is generating some rather uncivilized discussion online. I do wonder somewhat about how representative the voters are for "the field" but I'm too uninformed to comment.

One went for the book and one went to Vess as the illustrator and Vess handled the acceptance for both.

>21 Shrike58: I don't get the appeal of fanfic, but readers I respect like it. If AO3 winds up with a lock on the related-work category, then maybe we need a separate fanfic category?

>25 dukedom_enough: As someone who was pushing for Ao3 to win this year, I am hoping it doesn't next year - and in fact I'm already seeing memes and things going around the AO3 community prompting people to *not* nominate it anymore now that it's won. I don't think AO3's supporters want it to own the category forever anymore than anyone else does - most of us just wanted a proof-of-concept that something like AO3 could be nominated, and could win, and could have something to point at to say that AO3 fandom is and always has been many of the same people and the same communities and the same stories that make up Worldcon fandom.

Also none of us want a fanfic category in the Hugos, that mere idea makes me shudder! Oh please no. And fanfic writers are already perfectly eligible in Best Fan Writer anyway (and there's been fanwork noms in almost all the other categories in the past; sometimes they've won - it's never not been a part of the Hugos, it's just never been said this loud before.) AO3 was nominated as an infrustructure and a community, much as Mexicanx Initiative was, not as A Fanfic.

Hopefully the result is not AO3 forever, but that we will continue to see a lot more creativity and variety in the Related Works category (and the other categories as well - I keep hoping for it to finally be the year when something other than a TV serial episode wins Short Dramatic Presentation, given how many amazing actual shorts are being made these days. Dirty Computer came so close!) Or more changes to the categories to make a better fitting place for new media sorts of things, without having to mush them together with also really excellent history books.

>23 igorken: Well, the voters are the Worldcon members; out of the 6900+ registered members, about 5400+ turned up in person, and the demographic is still pretty mixed, though BME members are still very much a minority, though less than at previous Worldcons I've attended. OTOH, a little analysis of the countries of origin of the members shows that only 40% of members came from the continental US. 19% from mainland Europe, and 49% from the non-US Anglosphere. Make of that what you will.

"black and minority ethnic" (BME)
Apparently very much a UK term. 1st time I've heard of it. Seems problematic in terms of USA usage.

>28 Diabolical_DrZ: and >27 RobertDay: Thanks!