Hugo Award Finalists Announced

March 29, 2024 8:28 AM

Announcement video: ”Hello, my name is Nicholas Whyte and I have a baller accent.” (video with transcript). Text announcement on the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon Bluesky account. Full list of finalists with details about nominating numbers and disqualified or self-withdrawn items is online at File 770.Previously, censorship report- Previously, scandal erupts - Previously, 2023 boycotts - Previously, full tag list.
posted by bq (41 comments total)

I was delighted to see Dell Magazines intervened on the Astounding Award--always carefully noted as not technically a Hugo and for once pretty meaningfully--to give Xiran Jay Zhao an additional year of eligibility without having to go through WSFS's process. It's also great to see enough Chinese language nominees to suggest votes from Chengdu fans were counted fairly this time.

It's an amazing year for Naomi Kritzer, especially, with 3 Hugo nominations and 3 Nebula nominations too. I haven't read Liberty's Daughter, but I've seen people saying it's being counted as YA mainly because it has a teen protagonist? Not sure. Anyway, as usual, there were many overlaps with the Nebulas: 3 novels, 3 novellas, 2 novelettes, 2 short stories, 2 YA novels, 4 games, and 5 dramatic presentations.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:06 AM on March 29 [9 favorites]

I have the first four of the Best Novel nominees on my iPad and have been meaning to get to all of them, but today's out because it's Opening Day for my baseball team. It's nice to see some transparency, here.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:08 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood declined a nomination for their "promotional tweets for This Is How You Lose the Time War", but I feel like they deserve some recognition, so this comment will have to do.
posted by Plutor at 9:31 AM on March 29 [32 favorites]

Can anyone share background on the Dell Magazines intervention on the Astounding award, or on Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood's declining a nomination? I haven't seen much on either and (cursory, quick) googling isn't pulling much up. In the latter case, I absolutely loved This is How you Lose the Time War and I've been a Trigun fan since the 90s, so that event was a gleeful amazing delight. I respect their choice but also, my god, the very idea of a Hugo for goofy promotional tweets makes me grin ear to ear.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:52 AM on March 29 [4 favorites]

The Astounding Award website has details on how it is run, and the text includes several escape hatches for just stipulating adjustments, e.g. "the rules are determined by the award sponsor, Dell Magazine" and in the "I'm still confused about my eligibility. What should I do?" and "Contact Us" sections. The latter says they're still updating the site for the 2024 award season, so something explicit about this particular situation could still appear there.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:06 AM on March 29 [2 favorites]

I have no idea why Bigolas Dickolas declined the nomination, but I'm personally kind of glad to see it. Best Related Work is such a strange category, and I like it when it contains interesting non-fiction books about the genre, or other media like the long-form YouTube videos about the making of a fantasy movie boondoggle or a strange aspect of fandom. I don't like having to rank well-researched deep dives that could have taken months or years to make, alongside a Tweet thread, as funny as it is.

Anyway, I'm very excited for this list, much more so than when I saw last year's. I'm also happy to see the commitment to transparency in action already from Glasgow.
posted by j.r at 10:12 AM on March 29 [2 favorites]

I did sigh when I saw "oh god, the Hugos again." I'm surprised more drama hasn't come out from last year.

I still want October Daye to win Best Series, though. I continue to be shocked it came in third last time.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:23 AM on March 29 [4 favorites]

Rereading that Bigolas Dickolas thing, I am struck by how many times Colleen Hoover appears in the NYT top ten.

Anyway, as a voter I'll have to get cracking on reading, but am happy that I have already read two of the six novel nominees and already had another two on my holds list at the library, so I'm already in line ahead of the throng.

Pretty classy of Martha Wells to decline yet another nomination for the excellent Murderbot series.

Excellent comment on the File770 link:

StefanB on March 29, 2024 at 8:55 am said:
If someone wants to start:

Shortstory:
Naomi Kritzer Better Living Through Algorithms:
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub P. Djeli Clark
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/

Mausoleum's Children, The Aliette de Bodard
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/

Sound of Children Screaming, The Rachael K. Jones
https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/

Novelette:
Introduction to the 2181 Overture, Second Edition Gu Shi
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/gu_02_23/

Ivy, Angelica, Bay C. L. Polk
https://reactormag.com/ivy-angelica-bay-c-l-polk-2/

On the Fox Roads Nghi Vo
https://reactormag.com/on-the-fox-roads-nghi-vo-2/

One Man's Treasure Sarah Pinsker
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/one-mans-treasure/

Year Without Sunshine, The Naomi Kritzer
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/

posted by joannemerriam at 11:12 AM on March 29 [10 favorites]

In my post about how I love Naomi Kritzer, there are links to the many previous works of hers that we have enthusiastically discussed here on MeFi. I recommend all of them!
posted by kristi at 11:31 AM on March 29 [7 favorites]

I’m glad that there’s a good representation of Chinese nominees. I’m still furious about how Chinese nominees were tossed off the shortlist of last year’s Hugos, seemingly because Dave McCarty wanted English-language works to win.
posted by Kattullus at 12:08 PM on March 29 [6 favorites]

I think this may be the first year where I've actually read one of the nominees (Saint of Bright Doors) the same year it was nominated? Unfortunately, the author appears to have expired of joy, so we won't be seeing any more books out of him for a few minutes. (The book was SO GOOD btw.)
posted by mittens at 12:17 PM on March 29

I find it slightly amusing that two of the three funniest episodes of this season's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are finalists in "best dramatic presentation".

(yes, I know that's not what "dramatic" means in this context)
posted by hanov3r at 12:51 PM on March 29 [1 favorite]

Can anyone share background ... on Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood's declining a nomination

I don't know the answer, but I suspect it's because they are fully anonymous and perhaps the Hugos don't allow that for nominees. I left Twitter a while ago, but they might answer a question asked there, if someone was so inclined to ask.
posted by Plutor at 12:55 PM on March 29

I'm also happy to see Martha Wells get nominated for two novels this year (she declined the nomination for System Collapse).
posted by Plutor at 12:58 PM on March 29 [1 favorite]

> I did sigh when I saw "oh god, the Hugos again."

same. probably an unpopular opinion but honestly i would be super glad if they burned the whole fucking thing down and something else rose to take its place. the neverending fractal bullshit, year after year, month after month, is the most tiresome goddamn thing.
posted by glonous keming at 12:58 PM on March 29 [4 favorites]

@glonous keming, you could consider just not reading posts about the Hugos. Personally, I find that ignoring posts about topics that I would like to see burned down and replaced with something else to be helpful for maintaining equanimity.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:23 PM on March 29 [9 favorites]

I cannot even convey how weird it is that The Saint of Bright Doors is trending. I wonder why it is - it's really not, to my mind, a Hugo book at all, and I have trouble imaging it winning. I mean, it's great! You should all read it! I have talked it up IRL whenever relevant and have made at least one sale! But it's a really...I don't know, particular, fine-grained book with a lot of atmosphere. If you like books like Lud-In-The-Mist or The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe or The Devourers, you will probably like this one.

I was just re-reading Chandrasekera's short stories to see if I still liked them as much as I had initially, and if anything I like them more. If there are any actual SMOFs reading: the world needs them collected in a paper book, not just scattered online. I myself would pay perfectly good money for a paperback collection. I am not a great short story buyer, so if I would shell out, I bet many others would too.

On that note, if you like The Saint of Bright Doors, you would probably also enjoy:
The Spear Cuts Through Water, another book that is too good for an undeserving world, and The Mad Sisters of Esi, which you will need to special order, buy on eBay, etc since it's not widely distributed in the US.

They're not similar to The Saint of Bright Doors in plot or style, but if you like Bright Doors, then they are probably the type of thing you'll also like.
posted by Frowner at 1:29 PM on March 29 [8 favorites]

Oh, also, the Xuya Universe stories are great; highly recommend.
posted by Frowner at 1:30 PM on March 29 [3 favorites]

Is there a growing participation of fans of Chinese sci-fi in the awards nomination process this year or is this partially compensation for last year? I mean, I read a lot of speculative fiction translated from Chinese, but it's not particularly better or worse than any of the countries and ethnicities that may or may not be represented well this go round (Slavic, Afro-futurist, Japanese, etc...)

Having not been to IRL Hugo events I don't have a good sense if they are representative or dominated by Western culture.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:52 PM on March 29 [1 favorite]

yeah, i'm the one with the problem, not the perfectly normal and controversy-free Hugo awards
posted by glonous keming at 1:54 PM on March 29 [5 favorites]

Apropos of Bigolas the refusnik, I'm chuffed that Wolfwood can be translated to Polish as Wilkolas. Though not very well.
posted by hat_eater at 2:01 PM on March 29

Oh come now, everyone, surely one can be excused for having just a teensy bit of a "oh my god the Hugos again burn it down" vibe? For me, the allure of talking about lists of science fiction novels - and I've actually read more of them than usual this year so I have opinions - outweighs everything else, but I cannot deny that there is a certain mood.

On the big name fan/Hugo note, are you aware that excellent reviewer Abigail Nussbaum has a book coming out?

I personally am really weirded out by all this. Several authors I'd long viewed as sort of my own private authors, people who were excellent writers but who would never be popular or mainstream, are now becoming well known and successful, and Abigail Nussbaum has a book coming out. It's like when your favorite band suddenly signs to a major label - where is your identity as the spotter of the rarified and too good for the world? I would never have recommended them to all and sundry if I thought people were going to listen! (That's not actually true, but it's still weird because no one ever likes the things I really like.)
posted by Frowner at 2:03 PM on March 29 [8 favorites]

BrotherCaine, that's a result of the nominating body. Every member of Worldcon from the previous year is eligible to nominate, in addition to the current members of Worldcon who registered early enough. Ergo, a lot of the nominators are Chinese fans who registered for Chengdu.

I'm glad to see the scattering of Chinese-language works, because a lot of votes didn't get counted properly last year and the Chinese fans were definitely among those hurt by all the bullshit that went down during the 2023 Hugos.
posted by j.r at 2:13 PM on March 29 [7 favorites]

i would be super glad if they burned the whole fucking thing down and something else rose to take its place

My suggestion to anyone ready for this change is follow one of many awards sort of waiting in the wings and post about them here or at r/Fantasy, r/printSF, r/horrorlit, r/weirdlit, r/books, the huge and heavily moderated Book Lovers Club on Discord, the much smaller Nebulugo Book Club, etc. as appropriate. I mean, some do get posted and talked about, but plenty of interesting alternatives don't get the attention they could.

ISFDB does an OK job of listing a ton of them, like the Nebulas and Locus Awards, which cover basically the same ground as the Hugo from the perspective of different but overlapping communities (SF/F authors and Locus subscribers, respectively, where a Locus subscription is a deal compared to a Worldcon supporting membership--and they allow non-subscribers to vote too, just counting the votes for less). Locus and File770 track the news for these other awards too, e.g. the relatively new Le Guin Prize and (not quite the same ground as the Hugo), the Lambda Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Awards, and the Stoker.

But basically I'd love to hear which awards work better for other readers--even in Hugo threads, where they're tangential but unlikely to dominate until people, like, talk about them more.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:18 PM on March 29 [8 favorites]

...and this is why each year the Hugos push further and further into Fantasy genre.
posted by metametamind at 8:56 PM on March 29

Sure, I don't know about the causes, but that's a long-standing complaint about the Hugo that to me seems like another reason someone might prefer the Locus Award, which tries to distinguish Science Fiction from Fantasy in its multiple Best Novel categories. FWIW others do too, e.g. the Goodreads Award and Dragon Award.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:19 PM on March 29

Since the kids are getting bigger I'm having more reading time available, and for the last few years (after the Sad Puppies debacle) I've read all the Hugo nominees for best novel each year. Which means that I've a) managed to read authors with a bit of current relevance, and b) read outside my usual go-tos. I've found quite a few of the books to be slogs, TBH, but others I have really loved and would never had picked up otherwise.

Of this year's nominees I've read only Starter Villain (by MeFi's own, of course), but I look forward to sinking my teeth into the others. Martha Wells always delivers, so I'll read Witch King even if I don't usually go for high fantasy.
posted by Harald74 at 3:41 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Witch King was good, fun, over surprisingly quickly for a 423 page book. I thought translation state was excellent. I am on the hold list for the others.
posted by bq at 7:40 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

The Hugos are great. Yes, they have problems, sometimes notably so, but that's all awards. I like the idea of a big, high profile, well established award for SFF that is voted on by a large body of people across the readership.

Speaking as a librarian (if an academic one), I think most people have no idea just how little time many librarians have to spend selecting individual books. The not infrequently voiced "we should do away with [MAJOR AWARD]" opinion often assumes that another major award would rise in its place, or that other awards would rise in prominence. Sometimes that does happen, but not always. Librarians, booksellers, etc. would develop other strategies, sure, but this is most definitely a "be careful what you wish for" situation. Also, in the current book challenge-rich environment, it's convenient for librarians to be able to say "look, you might not like this book, and you may question my judgment, but this is a Hugo Winning Book." Smaller awards just don't have that weight.

I'd add the Shirley Jackson Awards to the list above, as well as the British Fantasy Awards. Titles up for the former often hit my fantasy-weird-horror sweet spot, and the latter tend to work for my broad fantasy and horror interests, with perhaps less genre boundary policing than goes on in the U.S. genre scene.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:50 AM on March 30 [5 favorites]

I'm not against the Hugo Awards in general, I just really hate/do not comprehend their crackass, easily tampered with, takes-two-years!!!!-to-fix method of running them. I never hear of the Nebulas or anything else having these problems. Just Hugos, repeatedly. I wish they could just throw out their whole mechanism and build something less tamperable.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:40 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Some Desperate Glory was quite good I thought, particularly for a first novel! Plus I'm all in on anything giving the finger to the fascists at this point in time. I have a quibble or two with one of the protagonists choices later in the book (of the sort where things ended up in the right place but I'm iffy on how they got there) but overall good stuff.
posted by Justinian at 9:32 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Guess which awards are designed by committee, in general...

Great ballot this year. I'm pleasantly surprised that Moniquill Blackgoose made it, To Shape A Dragon's Breath has stayed with me even more than Saint of Bright Doors did. And I only have two Best Novel nominees left to read! Best series is going to be very difficult but I might rank October Daye just below Xuya. Seanan needs a cool award to soothe her fingers for requalifying back to back because damn, two books over 240K words in the same year and her other two ongoing series to boot?
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:17 AM on March 30

I just read and enjoyed Translation State, but found it lacking in one very particular aspect: I never really got a strong visual or sensory feeling for the universe it invented. We’re told that it takes place on multiple planets and space ships and an alien space station, but there’s almost nothing on the page that tells me what these places look like. It almost feels like an old low-budget sci-fi show where the big effects are limited to a handful of scenes, and the rest are just people talking in generic rooms and corridors.

This also bugged me to some extent in The Mimicking of Known Successes, and some of Martha Wells’ books, and a lot of other recent-ish science fiction that I otherwise quite liked. I don’t need every author to be Iain M. Banks (who occasionally seemed to focus on scenery more than plot), but I do have a personal preference for SF literature where every setting feels fully envisioned, and authors who help my imagination paint pictures more dazzling than even big-budget TV and movies. Naomi Novik and Ursula Le Guin, for example, have many works that do this well without distracting from characters and story.
posted by mbrubeck at 12:40 PM on March 30 [3 favorites]

In other news related to the 2023 Chengdu Hugo mess, the main perpetrator Dave McCarthy tried to attend Eastercon - the event where the 2024 ballot was announced - and got booted. Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow was allowed to enter upon promising to behave and shut up (plus he's apparently a regular at the con) but no-one trusted Dave not to make a scene.

I wonder what decision Glasgow Worldcon will make. Dave bought a membership/ticket way before Chengdu even happened, but I suspect having an attendee tarred and feathered by a mob in front of the convention centre might bring the wrong kind of publicity...
posted by I claim sanctuary at 1:10 AM on March 31 [2 favorites]

In a comment to the File 770 post that I claim sanctuary linked to, Abigail Nussbaum says: “In case it had slipped some people’s attention, on the very day McCarty was ejected from Eastercon, we learned that a 2024 Hugo nominee declined a spot on the ballot because they could no longer trust the award after 2023’s shenanigans.”

This has completely slipped me by. Which nominee declined a spot on the ballot because they didn’t trust the Hugo Awards anymore?
posted by Kattullus at 3:25 AM on March 31

Natasha Bardon, who was R. F. Kuang's editor on The Poppy War, declined in Best Editor Long Form.
posted by penguinliz at 7:19 AM on March 31 [2 favorites]

here’s how I like to imagine things went at Eastercon
posted by bq at 8:08 AM on March 31

Goodness the man flew across the Atlantic to attend a con? That’s some heavy denial.
ETA: I see they had actually emailed him ahead of time and told him he wouldn’t be allowed in. So he’s just an asshole, no surprise.
posted by bq at 8:10 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

That's some whopping "confidence of a mediocre white man," right there. Like, he honestly thinks people are gonna let him in because he spent money and dropped by? Wowwwwwwww. Da nerve.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:19 AM on March 31 [2 favorites]

Natasha Bardon, who was R. F. Kuang's editor on The Poppy War, declined in Best Editor Long Form.

I'd never heard of her, and she's now instantly a favorite long form editor for using an industry role as a platform and supporting writers. I'm sure no one blames other nominees for accepting accolades they obviously deserve, and I've been glad to see very incremental signs of improvement. It is just also great to see someone with a key position saying she's in solidarity with the many innocent folks affected in 2023 and not satisfied that this has been resolved--meanwhile count her out. Good job--amazing leadership.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:43 AM on March 31 [5 favorites]

2024 Hugo Awards Gives Second Chance to Two Nominees Wrongfully Excluded in 2023 Scandal: The 2024 Hugo Awards has re-nominated Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer, victims of last year's censorship scandal.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:33 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]