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Hugo Nominations and Awards - Now onto 2021 Nominations


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About the personal attack on GRRM that was nominated for a Hugo Award, Best Related Work. First, if it were some sophisticated social commentary it would seem to be appropriate, but the post really isn't sophisticated social commentary. It does make some valid points, but that doesn't mean that it suddenly deserves to win an award.
 
It is certainly cruel that Worldcon fandom, which GRRM has loved and celebrated for so many years, has nominated a pretty subpar piece simply as a 'fuck you' to George.
 
In order to prevent the piece from moving up in the ballots, you can make sure NOT to list it when you vote. Instead of putting it at the bottom of the ballot, list NO AWARD in its place.
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17 hours ago, mormont said:

And, if we're talking notable omissions from that Locus list, you could also be listing VE Schwab, Katherine Addison, Elizabeth Bear, Alix Harrow and (as others have noted) Kate Elliott: I'm not attesting to the quality of these books but they're all authors who regularly make the Hugo lists.

Elliot and Schwab have never been nominated for a Hugo. Addison/Monette has only ever been nominated for one, 6 years ago. Bear hasn't been nominated in 9 years (for a podcast) or 12 years (for fiction), though has been on the long list plenty.

I wasn't going to bother updating this list from a couple of years ago, but since it's a topic of discussion again:

2020 Hugos

31 - 9 men (Longlist: 49 - 16 men)

2021 Hugos

31  - 5 men

@LugaJetboyGirl

There were definitely better commentaries around it, including things that had more information like the role of various behind-the-scenes issues that were not clear at the time that piece was written.

I see Chris Garcia and a couple of others are concerned that this piece seems to violate the Discon Code of Conduct. I can't help but think that the administrators of the convention have already ruled that out as an issue, but will be interesting to see if they comment.

 

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9 minutes ago, LugaJetboyGirl said:
About the personal attack on GRRM that was nominated for a Hugo Award, Best Related Work. First, if it were some sophisticated social commentary it would seem to be appropriate, but the post really isn't sophisticated social commentary. It does make some valid points, but that doesn't mean that it suddenly deserves to win an award.
 
It is certainly cruel that Worldcon fandom, which GRRM has loved and celebrated for so many years, has nominated a pretty subpar piece simply as a 'fuck you' to George.

It does seem that some people seem to have bizarrely forgotten the role GRRM played in helping the charge against Puppygate just a few years ago, his numerous anthologies providing venues for new voices and his work in getting more recognition paid to authors from minority backgrounds (including getting Who Fears Death into pre-production on HBO with a female creative team).

I mean, his handling of the Hugos wasn't great, but it feels there's a yearning gulf between that and, say, criticising Joseph W. Campbell who really was an arsehole and used his power to stop authors of colour being published.

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

The Locus Recommended Reading List compiled from a large and very diverse group of critics, editors, and so on, suggests men wrote plenty of noteworthy works.

 

 

I have to agree that there has been an obvious shift in the demographics of the nominations since the puppy years. In my view there has been a clear shift to nominate non-white men for the awards. Of course, the puppy years made people more aware of their nominating, so there would certainly be an inevitable shift in nominating trends. But it seems too extreme for that?

Granted, I have not read any of the 2020 SFF written by men, so I can't say for sure if it really did just suck too bad to be nominated. I will say that I thought Rebecca Roanhorse's previous books were mediocre contemporary fantasy despite their interesting indigenous themes. Harrow the Ninth was a mess. Sure, she was trying to do something cool/intriguing with the book, and 'madness' was a major theme that she used to confuse the reader, but it really didn't live up to the author's ambitions, IMO. It needed a really strong editor to wrangle it a bit.

I have very mixed thoughts on the Lodestar nominations as well.

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It's hardly a recent development that Hugo nominations tend to go to people who have either been nominated in the recent past or are very active in wider fan circles (or both).  I don't think that requires much explanation beyond the obvious positive feedback loop: being nominated for a Hugo makes it much more likely that your next book will be read by the sort of people who submit nominations for the Hugos.  And being read at all makes it much more likely that your book will be nominated.

On 3/12/2021 at 10:41 AM, Plessiez said:

my predictions for the Best Novel finalists are:

  • The City We Became (N. K. Jemisin)
  • Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)
  • Network Effect (Martha Wells)
  • Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)
  • The Once & Future Witches (Alix E. Harrow)
  • Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)

Five out of six isn't bad, I guess.

59 minutes ago, Werthead said:
3 hours ago, David Selig said:

Also, didn't The Ministry of the Future get a lot of hype? Even Obama recommended it. It's as topical as it gets too.

I haven't read it, but it doesn't seem to have made anywhere near as much of an impact as Robinson's last nominated novel (the splendid New York 2140).

I've read it (and in fact rather liked it), but I definitely don't think it's "suspicious" that it didn't get nominated.  I mean, it's barely even a novel in the conventional sense: the narrative is really just a framing device for a series of short essays about the likely impact of and possible technological / political solutions to climate change.  Topical, yes.  Likely to win an award for best novel?  Not really.

The only male author I thought might have had a chance at being nominated this year was John Scalzi for The Last Emperox (I can't speak for the quality of the book itself, as I've read a total of zero books by Scalzi in my life), but even that felt like a bit of a long-shot.

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Unconquerable Sun unquestionably deserved to be on the list

This was my favourite novel of 2020, but I would have been very surprised if it had made the list.

53 minutes ago, mormont said:

And, if we're talking notable omissions from that Locus list, you could also be listing VE Schwab, Katherine Addison, Elizabeth Bear, Alix Harrow and (as others have noted) Kate Elliott: I'm not attesting to the quality of these books but they're all authors who regularly make the Hugo lists.

Definitely agree with your wider point, but -- and I might be missing something -- I don't think Kate Elliott had ever been nominated for a Hugo, has she? (That was actually a significant part of why I didn't think Unconquerable Sun would be nominated this year.)  Googling suggests a couple of Nebula Award nominations and some Locus Award nominations, but no Hugos.

 

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1 minute ago, Werthead said:

It does seem that some people seem to have bizarrely forgotten the role GRRM played in helping the charge against Puppygate just a few years ago, his numerous anthologies providing venues for new voices and his work in getting more recognition paid to authors from minority backgrounds (including getting Who Fears Death into pre-production on HBO with a female creative team).

I mean, his handling of the Hugos wasn't great, but it feels there's a yearning gulf between that and, say, criticising Joseph W. Campbell who really was an arsehole and used his power to stop authors of colour being published.

This.  My assumption is that people were still mad at him over the Hugo Loser's Party fiasco and were really primed to be angry at him, plus some of the really angry voices perhaps were not aware of (or have 'forgotten') the influential role he has played in fostering young talent and supporting women/minority authors (including among fans, not just pros). 

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I think to a certain extent some of the eyebrow raisers this year probably have to do with the unique circumstances of an antipodean Worldcon (which always has a much smaller attendance base and interest due to logistics of geting out there) and the pandemic. Yes, this led to a virtual con that bumped numbers a little (4,000 or so between attending and supporting), but that's half of Helsinki and 70% of Dublin. And the pandemic's impact on Discon, including talk of it being virtual, and just the general concerns about attending something has likely depressed interest from older, more vulnerable persons who have bigger fish to fry. Which makes me suspect that, put all together, the people who took part in the con virtually and who were supporting Discon with an eye towards virtual participation were probably a very very online set, which means that the very very online people are probably a somewhat larger group in this year's nominating body than they were in previous years.

And the very very online people tend to be... well, we have a thread elsewhere on the board about social media and what people make of it and you can guess what the general views are.

 

 

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I nominated novels, and nominated what I enjoyed, which was, this year, all books by women. I typically prefer to read novel length fantasy to sci fi, and I nominated in accordance with that for novels (I nominated some sci fi shorter fiction by both men and women). There are authors I like, follow on SM, whose books I read in 2020/21 that I didn’t nominate, so it wasn’t solely SM focused. I don’t see how or why I should have to explain or apologise for my all female novel slate though. I’d be quite happy to nominate men next year, if I enjoyed their work. 

 

I do think the snide blog post was unwarranted so I’ll probably make an effort to see some of the other nommed work, or simply vote no award

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6 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

This. 1000 times.

No one is asking any individual to apologize for anything. But it's hundreds and thousands of people (over the years) who nominate, and people are discussing what it says about the WSFS body and not what it says about any individuals. I am sure there were people who nominated only men or only women in 2013, a year where the long list ended up split with 32 men and 32 women.

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

Elliot and Schwab have never been nominated for a Hugo. Addison/Monette has only ever been nominated for one, 6 years ago. Bear hasn't been nominated in 9 years (for a podcast) or 12 years (for fiction), though has been on the long list plenty.

I stand corrected. :) I should've realised that about Elliott, but the buzz around that novel (in WSFS-adjacent circles) does still make a case for me that it's an omission on par with any of the male authors in the conversation.

There are some... unrelated reasons why Bear hasn't had a Hugo nom recently, of course, and again, her release this year being SF probably didn't help.

I do think there's a backlash involved here, but my point, I think, is that it's more of a carry-over of the backlash from Puppygate. That saw a lot of female authors nominated to annoy the pups. But then those authors became part of the (well-established by this time) insularity of the Hugo these days, the tendency to nominate the same people repeatedly for a few years in time. I would guess there'll be a shift back in a year or two. Meantime, it's not an awful thing to see someone other than cishet white male writers get a turn in the sun.

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It's a bit depressing how predictable most of the fiction nominees are. It should be much harder to predict since there are so many high quality SFF novels and short stories published every year. I was 100% sure that The City We Became, Harrow the NinthThe Relentless Moon and Network Effect would be nominated and 90% certain about Piranesi.

In the short fiction category things are supposed to be more unpredictable, and they are somewhat, but not enough. The novella lineup is "the most hyped Tor.com novellas" every year (this team without even one other nominee). The other two categories mostly overlap with the Nebulas and frankly the ones I've read so far aren't all that good, except Sarah Pinsker's Two Truths and a Lie.

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6 hours ago, Ran said:

The self-referentiality of the Best Related Works category continues apace. The ouroboros will only be complete when the Best Related Work winner is a takedown of the previous year's Best Related Works winner.

I look forward to seeing a Best Related Work winner that is a takedown of itself.

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3 hours ago, LugaJetboyGirl said:

This.  My assumption is that people were still mad at him over the Hugo Loser's Party fiasco and were really primed to be angry at him, plus some of the really angry voices perhaps were not aware of (or have 'forgotten') the influential role he has played in fostering young talent and supporting women/minority authors (including among fans, not just pros). 

Yes.  Very unfortunate nomination.  It's strange to think that so many people think that GRRM is now part of the problem.

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4 hours ago, LugaJetboyGirl said:

Harrow the Ninth was a mess. Sure, she was trying to do something cool/intriguing with the book, and 'madness' was a major theme that she used to confuse the reader, but it really didn't live up to the author's ambitions, IMO. It needed a really strong editor to wrangle it a bit.

I absolutely loved it and didn't think it needed any changes like that at all, but I did think it was the sort of thing that was very hit and miss based on individual tastes and that there would be a lot of people it wouldn't work for. If it actually wins the Hugo then I'll be surprised it worked for a lot more than I expected.

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I missed this detail, but from the Discon announcement, Mike Glyer notes that this is the lowest amount of nominating ballots sent in since 2012. In 2/3rds of the categories, fewer than 40 nominations were needed to get on the ballot. The 5th place on Related Work had 31 nominations, among the lowest which hovered in that area, except for fan artist (ten was enough for that).

That fits the idea that the unique combination of the New Zealand con's restricted membership combined with the continuing pandemic and uncertainty about Discon III's situation led to a pretty small voting body. Glyer assumes this mean that the post-Puppy rush of voters has now disappeared, but I'm not so sure. In any case, I do think it adds support to the idea that the fandom that is particularly online and most accepting of virtual con going may have had a particularly outsized effect compared to some previous years.

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6 hours ago, Mr Gordo said:

So switching drama to other drama, have they announced who the new guest of honor is going to be?

I think they said they weren’t going to have a replacement for Weisskopf

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8 hours ago, karaddin said:

I absolutely loved it and didn't think it needed any changes like that at all, but I did think it was the sort of thing that was very hit and miss based on individual tastes and that there would be a lot of people it wouldn't work for. If it actually wins the Hugo then I'll be surprised it worked for a lot more than I expected.

I didn't mind it but I did think there were some issues with the book and it was a clear step down from Gideon the Ninth for me so I'm a little surprised it's on a best novel of the year list.

I'm not particularly invested in the Hugo Awards as anything other than a way for me to find good books to read that I otherwise might have missed so I don't really care what the makeup of the nominations list is so long as it is a decent effort to find the best few novels of the year are. That doesn't strike me as a great set of nominations though.

Beyond Harrow the Ninth I think there's diminishing returns from the Lady Astronaut series and Piranesi was okay but nothing special. I might be guilty of prejudging The City We Became because I haven't read it yet but I am a bit dubious about it's premise. You could absolutely substitute other novels written by women in that I'd be fine with though.

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Good to see that some people can't be bothered to figure out which authors are trans or non-binary on the overall list before beefing about "too many women." (hint: at least four, including two in novella, one in short story, and one in the Lodestar.)

Re: that essay in Best Related Works: I've read better, more incisive twitter threads about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by people high as balls, so it's an embarrassment that it was nominated. And I say this as someone who generally agrees with many of the criticisms lodged against the ceremony and its creators.

(Edit: I want to be clear here that I think CoNZealand should shoulder more of the blame than it has. It was their show and they should have been more engaged with GRRM and his team during the entire process, including enforcing time limits on segments and reviewing material to make sure that people's names weren't being butchered. And yeah, making editorial decisions like "these segments should not include jokes about genitals or lamenting the cancellation of noted racist shitbag John W. Campbell." This is basic, basic shit that was apparently beyond the capabilities of anyone involved in the production of that show.)

Future con comms are going to need to do some serious introspection and revamping of how they do business IMO. This half-ass shaggy-dog bullshit might have been OK in the 70s, but clearly the newer generations require a more polished and savvy approach. That includes getting a toastmaster who can perform all the duties of the job, including being careful about name pronunciations (GRRM has admitted in public for years that he has problems pronouncing names), rather than have the role being doled out as an honor to prominent authors. 

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This is a fair point and I double-checked names and realized I misgendered Sarah Gailey and Nino Cipri when totalling things up. I also decided to add the Lodestar and Astounding to the count, forgot them way down at the bottom. (I see what people mean with the comments on the confusion going on in the Lodestar category. Shame, but unsurprising.)

This actually nudges the number of men I counted down overall, to 5 self-identified men, 31 women or nonbinary in 2021. No change to 2020 as far as that goes once I adjusted for pronouns.

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On 4/13/2021 at 5:32 PM, Werthead said:

I can't offhand think of any notable 2020 releases by a male author that were good enough to get up there. Maybe men should up their game?

 

21 hours ago, Mr Gordo said:

Other than that one I can't think of a single book from a male author that was awards worthy. And I read a lot more books as they were published last year then I normally do. Maybe male writers should, I dunno, write stuff that doesn't suck?

 

M. R. Carey's The Book of Koli was absolutely outstanding and in my opinion, would be a worthy Hugo winner. It is head and shoulders above at least two books on that list, but in a way, that's how the Hugos have always worked. Fans vote the way they want, as is their absolute right.

However, the idea that there are no excellent books by men in this or any other year, is just as ridiculous as saying there are no excellent books by women. But I'm guessing you both know that already.

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