… And enjoy a hearty laugh at the incestuous wasteland the once-prestigious Hugo Awards have become.
Predictions that the Hugo field would degenerate into a circle jerk of olpdub purse puppies beloved by editors in New York–and pretty much no one else–have been realized ahead of schedule.
Here’s a partial list of this year’s finalists.
Best Novel
- The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
- Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
- The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
- A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
- Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
Best Novella
- “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))
- The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes (Saga Press/Gallery)
- The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com Publishing)
- In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
- This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press; Jo Fletcher Books)
- To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager; Hodder & Stoughton)
Best Novelette
- “The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019)
- “Away With the Wolves”, by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019)
- “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019)
- Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection (Amazon))
- “For He Can Creep”, by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019)
- “Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))
Best Short Story
- “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
- “As the Last I May Know”, by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
- “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
- “A Catalog of Storms”, by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
- “Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
- “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)
One positive outcome of Sad Puppies was forcing the Worldcon crowd to admit that the Hugos reflect their clique’s debased preferences, not wider SFF fandom’s tastes. Indeed, that collection of finalists could never be mistaken for a list of contemporary sci fi fans’ favorite reads.
Instead, it’s the same Death Cult agitprop repackaged in the same handful of unimaginative oldpub covers written by the same Inner Party darlings that show up among the Hugo finalists again and again and again.
A cursory glance at the last few years of Hugo nominations reveals the well-worn Death Cult career path. Do a podcast where circus sideshow folk make approved noises about the Worldcon clique, graduate to a regular column at Tor.com reviewing books by the Worldcon clique, and finally publish a book with Tor that gets a Hugo from the Worldcon clique. Once a year, the Mad Hatter running the operation tells everybody to change places.
This morbid charade was already fascinating to watch. It’s gonna get downright hilarious now that oldpub’s accelerating death has turned the mad tea party into a frantic game of musical chairs.
Enjoy the show, and as always …
