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Hugo Nominations and Awards - Now onto 2021 Nominations


lady narcissa

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Attempting a cursory overview of the Campbell nominees, and the Poppy War ebooks are an unreadable mess :angry: At least there is a pdf, but I was hoping for a bit of time away from my computer.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Best Short Story bugged me. Well-written, but navel-gazing, self-congratulatory "Ooh, we are awesome because we love SFF" fiction is of course going to appeal to a crowd of SFF lovers. It's preaching to the choir and feels cheap as a winner.

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47 minutes ago, Ran said:

Best Short Story bugged me. Well-written, but navel-gazing, self-congratulatory "Ooh, we are awesome because we love SFF" fiction is of course going to appeal to a crowd of SFF lovers. It's preaching to the choir and feels cheap as a winner.

Pandering to the ego and superiority complex of SFF readers is the best strategy to win a Hugo. Apparently it works even when your story is the most blatant example of a white saviour trope I've seen in years.

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On 7/30/2019 at 9:35 PM, Ran said:

Random, but today the news is out that HBO Max has ordered an 8 episode series based on Circe. Jaw dropped. I have no idea if it will be any good -- chances are high it won't be as good as the novel, lets be serious -- but if they make an effort to capture the gods as she describes them.... that would at least be visually pretty spectacular.

Fingers crossed.

I'm there. I liked the book way more than I expected to (especially after The Song of Achilles, which felt like it should've been an open goal). Circe felt more balanced and nuanced - albeit for a book about all powerful beings. 

Anyway, I came here to say that I cannot believe that Children of Blood and Bone beat Dread Nation. Booooooooo.

 

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9 hours ago, Isis said:

I'm there. I liked the book way more than I expected to (especially after The Song of Achilles, which felt like it should've been an open goal). Circe felt more balanced and nuanced - albeit for a book about all powerful beings. 

Anyway, I came here to say that I cannot believe that Children of Blood and Bone beat Dread Nation. Booooooooo.

 

Yeah I find that book winning...upsetting.

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  • 1 month later...
23 minutes ago, enne said:

Uh, howdy.

New user here; anyone looking at this thread? Are we still shopping around potential Hugo nominations? I got a couple suggestions I'd like to hawk around.

 

Recommendations always welcome!

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Alrighty! Here's what I'm considering:

NOVEL

For novels I've only really locked onto Steel Crow Saga by Paul Kreuger (Del Rey), The True Bastards by Jonathan French (Crown) and A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland (Gallery / Saga Press). The latter two are sequels, so the fact that I can read them standalone on top of their quality is a huge plus in my eyes. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is a frontrunner but only the humor really worked for me, I found the worldbuilding boring and the romance stuffed with two many uncomfortable undertones (it's essentially between a slave and her master).

NOVELLA

Nothing off the beaten path here. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press) and To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager). Plan on reading “Waterlines” by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2019) as that's been getting a lot of buzz.

NOVELETTE

“Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” Ted Chiang (Exhalation). Haven't read much novelettes this year. Or short stories (yet).

GRAPHIC STORY

Frustrating category for me, so many good comics get ignored for the usual suspects. Image Comics seems to have an iron-clad grip on the category and Hugo voters rarely seek out other comics.  The only real lock for me at this stage is The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited! by the McElroys, art. Carey Pietsch (First Second). Other than that I'm nominating two things of dubious eligibility - Tom King's run on Mister Miracle (DC) which released a TPB this year, and the third volume of Kill 6 Billion Demons, which finished last year on the web but was put in print by Image this year (in too-small font print). Other than that, I don't know. I'm considering Adam Warren's Empowered Volume 11 (Dark Horse) but that might be too out there.

DRAMATIC PRESENTATION - SHORT FORM

Hard category - one one hand, there's no Doctor Who this year (thank God, though Good Omens might fill that void, which I guess I'm okay with as long as only one episode is a finalist), but on the other hand you have stuff like The Mandalorian, The Man in the High Castle, Watchmen, His Dark Materials, The Good Place (I still adore it very much, but it really should have only been nominated for "Michael's Gambit" and "Janet(s)") and The Expanse filling up the latter half of the year, so it still feels too soon to make a definitive list. The one true lock I have so far is "Twin Cities," a standout of Counterpart's premature final season, with the first part of the web series Interface as a potential dark horse pick. I run an IMDb list to try and catalogue as much stand-alone entries as I can to help me and fellow voters out.

DRAMATIC PRESENTATION - LONG FORM

Mildly easier: The Lighthouse is the one film that's a lock on my ballot. Everything else - Avengers: Endgame, Ad Astra, Joker - feels imperfect, each held back by some factor(s) that make me question putting it on my ballot. 2019 is a rough year for genre filmmaking.* Genre television, on the other hand? I've had the first seasons of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (the best epic fantasy show of the year, sorry if that's heretical on this site) and Russian Doll (a fresh, hilarious yet emotional take on the time loop concept that I haven't stopped thinking about all year - a complete story that shouldn't have been renewed) on my list. IMO, it seems like most of the inventive speculative dramatic fiction has moved on to smaller screens; I've been more impressed by longform television. Oh, and Chernobyl. That may be pushing it but the Hugos have had no challenged nominating works like Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures. Chernobyl isn't as positive as those two works but it is heavily based in science, both in its damaging negatives and its heroic, if futile positives.

Also running an IMDb list for this. Guess what my favorite (and most frustrating) categories are. 

LODESTAR

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi (Make Me a World), Deeplight by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children's Books), The Wicked King by Holly Black (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee and Michael Dante DiMartino (Amulet Books) and Fireborne by Rosaria Munda (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers). This is the only category I've filled in so that feels nice.

Thoughts? Critiques? Roasts? What are you guys nominating?

*I've written up a proposal to extend the eligibility of Bacurau, a weird western/dystopian Brazilian film that played in the festival circuit and little elsewhere. So keep an eye out for that.

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18 hours ago, enne said:

 The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (the best epic fantasy show of the year, sorry if that's heretical on this site)

I don't think you'll find a lot of people will say there was a better fantasy epic show on this particular forum, lets put it that way. ;)

I admit, after the first couple of episodes, I thought it was going to be one for the ages. Was really, really wowed by the first episode in particular. But as it wore on, juvenile stuff intruded more often; which is fine, it's a kid's show, but it felt unbalanced compared to the promise of the first episode.

But I certainly haven't seen any other epic fantasy shows, so I'm definitely considering it as a long form (since, as you correctly note, the short form category looks like it's going to be over-stuffed).

 

If I were to predict next year's long form nominees, I'd guess Star Wars: The Last JediCaptain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame are shoe-ins (yay for Disney, I guess...) So that leaves two spots. 

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22 minutes ago, Ran said:

If I were to predict next year's long form nominees, I'd guess Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame are shoe-ins (yay for Disney, I guess...) So that leaves two spots. 

umm, what?

The Hugos allow for non-English nominees, too, right? Because I'm thinking Dark deserves a spot either in the short form or long form. I have a feeling an episode of Stranger Things will make it, too. There's other upcoming shows besides mentioned. His Dark Materials, The Witcher, Lost in Space, Watchmen (just started).

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18 hours ago, enne said:

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is a frontrunner but only the humor really worked for me, I found the worldbuilding boring and the romance stuffed with two many uncomfortable undertones (it's essentially between a slave and her master).

It's a bit more complicated than that. There is a power imbalance, yes, but they grew up together as the only two kids in an environment that was pretty awful for both of them, spent most of their lives fighting each other, and she had to be bribed into going along with the plan. I'm not sure I'd call the central relationship a romance, either. I thought it was great!

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32 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

umm, what?

Oh, yeah, The Rise of Skywalker is what I meant.

32 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

The Hugos allow for non-English nominees, too, right? Because I'm thinking Dark deserves a spot either in the short form or long form. I have a feeling an episode of Stranger Things will make it, too. There's other upcoming shows besides mentioned. His Dark Materials, The Witcher, Lost in Space, Watchmen (just started).

Lots of these are going to be short form rather than long form nominees. No chance Lost in Space will get in in either category. His Dark Materials could be long form, yes, since as I understand it it's a book per season.

The Marvel/Disney domination is based on the fact that the Marvel/Disney films are constantly nominated in the Hugos.

As to Dark or Stranger Things, only the first season of Stranger Things was nommed at all, and Dark has never been, so... color me dubious. Though I could see the episode 7 of ST getting nominated, just for that movie theater bathroom scene.

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2 minutes ago, Ran said:

The Marvel/Disney domination is based on the fact that the Marvel/Disney films are constantly nominated in the Hugos.

I think he was just referring to your typo. Rise of Skywalker is what's coming out this year. The Last Jedi was 2017.

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2 minutes ago, enne said:

I think he was just referring to your typo. Rise of Skywalker is what's coming out this year. The Last Jedi was 2017.

Yeah, realized that after a long moment of thinking about other things!

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