Hugo Ballot 2021: Related Work, Dramatic Presentations, and More

As I mentioned in my previous posts on Hugo votes, I was really scrambling to finish enough to vote for the novels and novellas this year, although I had the foresight to spend a couple weekends on the short stories and novelettes. I was definitely more in scramble mode for most of the remaining categories, and I only managed to vote in a handful of categories. You can see the full list of all the categories here.

Will I learn my lesson and start reading for the Hugos earlier in 2022? Honestly: no. But that's okay.

Here's how I voted!

Best Related Work

Aside from the main fiction categories, Related Work is probably my favorite Hugo category. It may be because this is where academic or quasi-academic stuff tends to end up. The category is a lot more diverse this year in terms of the type of stuff included. Not one academic book is on the list (sadly, although I may be one of the few people sad about that). But on the other hand I like to see all this diversity of media! 

My #1 pick is not exactly a biography of Octavia E. Butler, but it's not exactly not a biography, either. Author Lynell George spent some time in the Butler archives, and she brings the reader along for the ride along with some speculations about Butler's notoriously private life. I'm glad I bought the physical book (see the picture above), because there are a lot of photos and I feel like I'm holding the contents of the Butler archives in my hands. Maybe someday I'll visit those archives myself when I decide that someone has to write something about Butler and Buddhism.

My second and third choices are both cons, which is an interesting thing to have in this category, especially the groundbreaking FIYAHCON. My #4 choice is a YouTube video by YouTube star Jenny Nicholson. I've enjoyed some of her videos before, although I admit I'm old and curmudgeonly enough that I still find the very existence of "YouTube celebrities" to be deeply puzzling. 

The last thing, a response to George R. R. Martin's less-than-ideal performance at last year's Hugo Awards ceremony, is fine. Maybe necessary. I don't disagree with the gist of Luhrs's piece and GRRM should do better, but I'm starting to wonder if a better tactic would be to simply leave such regressive stuff behind and go beyond it, which is not the same thing as ignoring it. I'm not sure. But in any case, this is the mindset that drove my votes in this category. (And yes, Butler is a classic author now, but she was always ahead of her time and we have a lot left to learn from her).

1. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, Lynell George (Angel City Press)
2. FIYAHCON, L.D. Lewis–Director, Brent Lambert–Senior Programming Coordinator, Iori Kusano–FIYAHCON Fringe Co-Director, Vida Cruz–FIYAHCON Fringe Co-Director, and the Incredible FIYAHCON team
3. CoNZealand Fringe, Claire Rousseau, C, Cassie Hart, Adri Joy, Marguerite Kenner, Cheryl Morgan, Alasdair Stuart
4. The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy, Jenny Nicholson (YouTube)
5. “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”, Natalie Luhrs (Pretty Terrible, August 2020)

Best Series

I got lucky with this category, having read at least one book in four of the series. I would like to get to R. F. Kuang's Poppy War series at some point. I read and loved the first book in Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy last summer as a creative fantasy inspired by Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. I really enjoyed Murderbot until the most recent one (which surprised me, too). I'm still reading the third Lady Astronaut book and enjoying it more than the second one, but not as much as the first, although I'm not even quite halfway done with it. I read the first Interdependency book a couple years ago, and loved all its smooth reading Scalzi goodness, but haven't gotten to the rest of the series. So you can maybe see a theme here: I'm not good about finishing series, which means it's a miracle I've even read as much of these series as I have. I doubt I will have this kind of luck in this category again, so I figured I should vote while the iron is hot... or whatever mixed metaphor seems appropriate here.

1. The Daevabad Trilogy, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)
2. The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells (Tor.com)
3. The Lady Astronaut Universe, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor Books/Audible/Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
4. The Interdependency, John Scalzi (Tor Books)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

In past years I"ve pretty much watched all the movies (or whatever) organically and didn't need to catch up. This year I only managed to watch two of them. I honestly don't know how I missed Birds of Prey, Soul, The Old Guard, and Eurovision Song Contest, but alas, I did. I meant to try to watch these, but in my rush to finish the reading and all the other stuff I've been watching (including Dune several times), I just ran out of time. Which is appropriate, because the two I did watch were both focused on time.

I really, really wanted to see Tenet in theaters, but the pandemic kept me away. When I finally saw it on HBOMax, I really enjoyed it at a technical level and I think I almost understood the time- and mind-bending story, but I can't say it will rank up there with Nolan's Interstellar or Inception for me.

I really loved Palm Springs as a deceptively complex time loop story with plenty of comedy. As with a lot of time loop stories (like the previous year's Russian Doll), the time loop guides the viewer to addressing a lot of deep existential issues about repetition and where our lives are going. Good stuff.

1. Tenet, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros./Syncopy)
2. Palm Springs, written by Andy Siara, directed by Max Barbakow (Limelight / Sun Entertainment Culture / The Lonely Island / Culmination Productions / Neon / Hulu / Amazon Prime)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Usually I do better with the movies than the TV category. Maybe it was the pandemic's disruption of my normal movie-going, maybe it was just happenstance, but for whatever reason I caught all the TV this year except Doctor Who and She-Ra (I have been meaning to get into new Who again, but never seem to get to it.)

My #1 pick was probably one of my favorite episodes of The Good Place, and the perfect ending to the show. And of course a good existential rumination on the meaning of life and its end. The Expanse continues to be one of the best science fiction shows out there (man, I need to finish those books someday...). I love Baby Yoda more than life itself, but season two of The Mandalorian started to win me over to the rest of the show as well. The visuals in "The Jedi" are also amazing, and if I'm not mistaken, "The Rescue" is where we see Baby Yoda's tiny handcuffs.

1. The Good Place, “Whenever You’re Ready”, written and directed by Michael Schur (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group)
2. The Expanse, “Gaugamela”, written by Dan Nowak, directed by Nick Gomez (Alcon Entertainment / Alcon Television Group / Amazon Studios / Hivemind / Just So)
3. The Mandalorian, “Chapter 13: The Jedi”, written and directed by Dave Filoni (Golem Creations / Lucasfilm / Disney+)
4. The Mandalorian, “Chapter 16: The Rescue”, written by Jon Favreau, directed by Peyton Reed (Golem Creations / Lucasfilm / Disney+)

Best Professional Artist

I'm never quite sure I have any business voting for the artist categories, but I always love opening up the Hugo packet to look at the pretty pictures.

1. John Picacio
2. Galen Dara
3. Tommy Arnold
4. Rovina Cai
5. Maurizio Manzieri
6. Alyssa Winans

Best Fan Writer

I always feel some responsibility to vote in this category seeing as I'm a fan writer of sorts, although not nearly as dedicated or as talented as the people on this list. Sjunneson was the Guest of Honor at the fully masked and vaxxed CONvergence that I attending in August 2021. She impressed me there, and in her work. But it was hard for me to rank this one. All the finalists are impressive and you should check out their work.

1. Elsa Sjunneson
2. Jason Sanford
3. Paul Weimer
4. Cora Buhlert
5. Charles Payseur
6. Alasdair Stuart

Best Fan Artist

Again, I'm not sure I have any business voting in the art categories, but there's some cool stuff in the Hugo packet. Check out all of these artists!

1. Cyan Daly
2. Maya Hahto
3. Sara Felix
4. Grace P. Fong
5. Iain J. Clark
6. Laya Rose