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Hugo Nominations and Awards - Now onto 2021 Nominations


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28 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I don’t normally say meh, but, meh. If Space Opera wins I’m going to throw things.

I'd think Space Opera is going to be near the bottom of most ranked ballots. Just a feeling.

File 770 has a post with links to where to read excerpts or full versions of nominees. The title of Alix E. Harrow's entry in Short Story caught my eye, so I read it. Nice idea, but there's an insufferable smugness about the narrator voice that really started to grind at me as the story progressed. It's also one of these explicitly self-regarding, love-letters-to-genre-literature-and/or-fandom pieces that have increasingly made appearances at the Hugos in the last decade or so.

ETA: As to F&B, I think like TWoIaF, it's a combination of being something you can't really get into unless you're a fan of the series. Plus F&B sort of kind of has the argument to be made that it is a novel rather than a related work. Wouldn't be surprised if it's on the long list, though.

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Disappointed about Fire&Blood not being nominated, and congratulations to Peadar. Well deserved.

Spinning Silver is the only novel I've read out of the nominees, so at least one less book to read before voting ends.

But I am most disappointed in the Dramatic Presentations - surprised no TV show made in the long form category. At least, The Expanse has one episode in the short form category, but the entire season was fantastic. And what kind of show is The Good Place again?

Also, usually less interested in the Related Works category, but hey I watched The Hobbit Duology documentary. It was good.

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The Good Place is THE BEST SHOW ON TV. :box:

49 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'd think Space Opera is going to be near the bottom of most ranked ballots. Just a feeling.

File 770 has a post with links to where to read excerpts or full versions of nominees. The title of Alix E. Harrow's entry in Short Story caught my eye, so I read it. Nice idea, but there's an insufferable smugness about the narrator voice that really started to grind at me as the story progressed. It's also one of these explicitly self-regarding, love-letters-to-genre-literature-and/or-fandom pieces that have increasingly made appearances at the Hugos in the last decade or so.

ETA: As to F&B, I think like TWoIaF, it's a combination of being something you can't really get into unless you're a fan of the series. Plus F&B sort of kind of has the argument to be made that it is a novel rather than a related work. Wouldn't be surprised if it's on the long list, though.

Heh, that's why I dislike most of Valente's work.

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"The Trolley Problem" won last year. There's absolutely no argument that the WSFS voting body considers it suitable to win the Hugo.

I will say that I kind of fell off with the show party way into the 2nd season. I don't want to say it was repetitive, exactly, because it wasn't really. But it felt very much like going through the motions of telling a narrative while always waiting to reset things within broadly the same parameters, and that I couldn't really abide. 

Also, I'm sorry to say I found the Jason Mendoza character an insufferable dullard.

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37 minutes ago, David Selig said:

Why? It's clearly speculative fiction.

Soo, mea culpa, I was actually thinking of another show: The Good Fight. :leaving:

I've never watched either, so because part of the title is the same, I thought one was a spin off of the other. I was thinking the voters were doing another Hidden Figures thing. Great movie, not SF.

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4 hours ago, Ran said:

Sad to see that Madeline Miller's Circe didn't make it. Will be curious where it was at on the long list. It's commanding victory in the Goodreads poll made me think that Miller's lack of involvement in SF/F fandom was not going to be a big factor, but I guess it wasn't enough. Based on what I've read, will be voting for Spinning Silver.

Would be lovely if the Le Guin book won Best Related. It was one of my nominees.

Long Form Dramatic looks like a rough one -- Annihilation has the Vandermeer connection, BP was a landmark film, A Quiet Place was a huge hit. I feel like it'll be one of those three, with Into the Spiderverse as an outsider.

In Short Form, I suspect "Calypso" from Short Treks would have made it if only more people had seen it. A lot of people who might have seen it in Europe on Netflix never realized it was there because of how Netflix placed it as additional material rather than giving it its own listing, and of course in the US you need CBS All Access which doesn't have that much market penetration as of yet. Shame, it's so good.

Glad to see Gardner on there for editor. Really impressed by the best pro artist collection. Jaime Jones is primarily a concept artist (as his website shows) but he's dabbled in cover work for Martha Wells and, I think, others, and so that's interesting; you don't tend to get artists predominantly known for concept work nominated.

Art Book is a good one as well. Hoping for the Vess, but happy to see the Into the Spiderverse or Tolkien books take it as well. Spectrum too would be fine, obviously, but I prefer something more focused getting it rather than a general showcase of art talents.

And, of course, here's to Peadar taking the inaugural Lodestar. Fingers crossed.

 

Loved Circe too, sad to see it not make the list. I noticed today it seems to be getting promoted in a more mainstream way than most fantasy - it's front and centre of displays at my Waterstones with "if you read one book this Easter..." Tags and such over it. Unless the shop manager is just a massive sci-fi nerd :D

Short form, it's tough. I'm watching the third season of the expanse now so I will comment on that in due course. Based on the quality of this and previous seasons though I suspect it's a strong contender. I would also be ecstatic seeing The Goo Place's Janet's episode win

congratulations to @Peadar! Your books have been on my list for a while, but fingers crossed for a fellow board member :)

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I guess I will the one to revive the controversial discussion from the first page of the thread using the new data:

Out of 42 nominated authors in the 6 fiction categories and the Campbell award there is a grand total of 3 white men. Do you still think it's a coincidence?

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I did not realize that Archive of Our Own which is nominated for Best Related Work is AO3 which is a website where a lot of people post their fanfics.  I'm beginning to see a bunch of people who have fanfic posted on AO3 changing their bios to "Hugo nominated author"...rotf!  

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27 minutes ago, David Selig said:

Out of 42 nominated authors in the 6 fiction categories and the Campbell award there is a grand total of 3 white men. Do you still think it's a coincidence?

Given the openness of the ballot, I don't see how it's some kind of gamed system, as you imply. I mean, if you go back 30 years you might get completely the reverse result with only 3 women on the list. Would that have been a coincidence?

Science fiction - particularly American science fiction - was in an utterly terrible state between about 10 and 15 years ago. An absolute dearth of good talent, and the good work coming through was mostly from older writers or from outside the US, but because of the US dominance of the awards, that was never going to break through. Thankfully, that's changed over the last few years and the authors leading that charge have been mostly American female authors. It is unsurprising to see a lot of female authors leading that charge this year on that basis. If white men have a problem with that, they need to write better stuff (or, if you're being uncharitable, try to write some kind of "zippy" love letter to fan even though it's not very good, like Space Opera or Scalzi, although I think the latter has recused himself for the last few years).

That's not to say there isn't a lot lowest-common-denominator, bottom-of-the-barrel, space opera still being churned out by the likes of David Drake and David Weber, but that's never going to get near a Hugo Award (and rightly so).

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10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Given the openness of the ballot, I don't see how it's some kind of gamed system, as you imply. I mean, if you go back 30 years you might get completely the reverse result with only 3 women on the list. Would that have been a coincidence?

I am not saying it's a gamed system. The most likely reason IMO is a desire by the voters to show how progressive they are and for some of them also to spite the Puppies clique. So if you are such a voter and you like two works about equally, you rank the one written by a woman before the one written by the man. And since there an awful lot of good stuff published every year, such seemingly small advantage aggregated becomes a complete domination of the ballot. That's my theory at least, it seem much more plausible to me than to think that suddenly there are barely any nomination worthy male writers in SFF  And I say that as someone who have read something like 80% works by women in my last 4-5 years of SFF reading.

 

16 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Science fiction - particularly American science fiction - was in an utterly terrible state between about 10 and 15 years ago. An absolute dearth of good talent, and the good work coming through was mostly from older writers or from outside the US, but because of the US dominance of the awards, that was never going to break through. Thankfully, that's changed over the last few years and the authors leading that charge have been mostly American female authors. It is unsurprising to see a lot of female authors leading that charge this year on that basis. If white men have a problem with that, they need to write better stuff (or, if you're being uncharitable, try to write some kind of "zippy" love letter to fan even though it's not very good, like Space Opera or Scalzi, although I think the latter has recused himself for the last few years). 

The award isn't only for science fiction. US fantasy has been doing great during this period. Jemisin's books that won the Hugo in the last 3 years were fantasy too. And in the short fiction categories the situation was never as bad as you say anyway.

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1 hour ago, David Selig said:

I guess I will the one to revive the controversial discussion from the first page of the thread using the new data:

Out of 42 nominated authors in the 6 fiction categories and the Campbell award there is a grand total of 3 white men. Do you still think it's a coincidence?

i don't really know about the politics involved but that stat is staggering.  i could, most certainly, understand if someone were to complain of over-correction...or maybe white men can't write successful, engaging prose anymore.

regardless, should i ever be nominated, i will be sure to claim the filipino 50 percent of my heritage.

FR

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6 hours ago, Ran said:

In Short Form, I suspect "Calypso" from Short Treks would have made it if only more people had seen it. A lot of people who might have seen it in Europe on Netflix never realized it was there because of how Netflix placed it as additional material rather than giving it its own listing, and of course in the US you need CBS All Access which doesn't have that much market penetration as of yet. Shame, it's so good.

I did nominate it, but I agree Netflix seemed to be going out of their way to hide it and that can't have helped.

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28 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I dunno, I'm kind of with Wert on this one. Can;t think of many books of the type that get nominated for the Hugo that have been written by dudes.

I think the Puppies were definitely a portion of it, but now that the puppy problems have been entirely squished, the skew remains fairly obvious when compared to the contemporaneous Locus and Nebula awards.  By way of comparison, this year's Nebula nominees (announced in February) features 14 women and 10 men, by my count, which feels close enough to neutral that gender doesn't seem a substantial voting factor.

I think it may take a little while for the full post-Puppy thing to shake out. But it may be that the Hugos are set to favor female voices for the forseeable future, if that's what the voting body skews towards. We'll have to wait and see.

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