The nominees for the 2012 Hugo Award were announced over the weekend. Nominees include Metafilter's own jscalzi (who will also be the host for this year's Hugo Awards ceremony) for the beginning of his epic fantasy trilogy April Fool's joke The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City (Prologue). One record being set this year is Mira Grant's - aka Seanan McGuire's - nominations: she is the first woman to have four Hugo nominations in a single year. [more inside]
posted by rmd1023 on Apr 9, 2012 - 85 comments

Blogging the Hugos: Decline (part 1, part 2, part 3), is a series of blog posts covering some dystopian trends in recent Hugo nominees and itself winner of the of the BSFA award for non fiction. Meanwhile the 2011 Hugo finalists have been announced, with Mefi favorites featuring strongly: In Best Novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (previously), In Best Short Story The Things by Peter Watts (previously). Doctor who features heavily under Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (too many posts to mention), but has strong competition from Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.
posted by Artw on Apr 24, 2011 - 27 comments

The Island by Peter Watts (previously), winner of this years Hugo Award for Best Novelette. An audio version is available over at StarShipSofa (previously), itself a Hugo recipient.
posted by Artw on Sep 5, 2010 - 31 comments

Due to a rewording of the rules Science Fiction podcast StarShipSofa (previously, previously, previously) could be eligible for a Hugo award. Meanwhile the current episode features The Gambler (text version here), a story by Paolo Bacigalupi - best known as the author of The Windup Girl, one of TIME Magazine's ten books of the year ("Not just science fiction, mind, but fiction, generally") and almost certainly a favorite for the Hugo's best novel category.
posted by Artw on Feb 19, 2010 - 32 comments

The 2009 Hugo awards have been announced at Worldcon. Winners include Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book for best novel, Ted Chiang getting best short story and Elizabeth Bear getting best novelette. Best Related Book was snagged by MeFi's own jscalzi. The award for best semiprozine, which was to be scrapped, has been saved, this year being won by Weird Tales - a surprise upsets as it's main problem was that it had essentially become the Locus magazine award for best Locus Magazine. As well as the Hugos other awards such as the Prix Aurora award for best Canadian SF and the Chesley Awards for SF art have been announced, and Cory Doctorow accepted the Prometheus award for Libertarian SF. Convention reporter provides continuing coverage (the convention still has another day to run) and Starshipsofa spin-off Sofanauts has an excellent series of podcasts with regular Amy H. Sturgis and others reporting from the con.
posted by Artw on Aug 9, 2009 - 63 comments

OK, this whole Harry Potter thing - while completely out of proportion to any real value in the books - has up till now been pointless but essentially harmless. But wasting a Hugo Award on this crap?! To quote (oh, I don't know, some Clinton-hating Republican): "Where's the outrage?!"
posted by m.polo on Sep 5, 2001 - 60 comments