Hugo Results 2021

The Hugo awards ceremony took place last night at DisCon III in Washington, DC. You can see a list of the winners and finalists here. Congrats to all the winners and finalists!

(If you really want to dig into the weeds, here are the full stats on nominations and the stats on voting.)

The Ceremony

The ceremony itself was great! I watched it streaming at home. Congrats to all the DisCon III volunteers and everyone who made it happen!

There were only a few minor technical glitches, and hosts Andrea Hairston and Sheree Renée Thomas did a great job of moving things along at a brisk but not hurried pace. And as far as I know there weren't any controversial incidents like George R. R. Martin's performance last year (although there have been criticisms of DisCon for being sponsored by military contractor Raytheon).

My Ballot Versus Reality

So, how did I do? It looks like I picked the winners in only two categories this year (last year I got three). I correctly picked Elsa Sjunneson for Best Fan Writer and The Good Place, "Whenever You're Ready" for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. You can see how I voted here, here, and here.

I was way off on most of the literature categories. My #1 pick for Best Novel was the fabulous Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, but it got fourth place in the overall vote. I had the actual winner (Network Effect by Martha Wells) at #5 (I was as surprised as anyone to rank a Murderbot story so low, but it just didn't click for me, or maybe the charms of Murderbot are wearing off for me despite having loved some of the earlier novellas, which is why I ranked the series much higher in the Best Series category).

My tastes seemed even more at odds with the majority of Hugo voters in the Best Novella category, where the winner (The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo) was my #5 pick. I'm not mad it won. It's a fine novella, but maybe just not my thing. Or maybe I missed the point amidst all the subtlety, who knows? My #1 pick (Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark) came in second in the full vote, so I was closer to the mark there. I apparently loved Nino Cipri's Finna more than most Hugo voters (I had it at #2 compared to #5 in the votes).

My misguided preferences continued in the Best Novelette and Best Short Story categories. For novelettes, my picks were almost a mirror image of the results. I had Meg Ellison's "The Pill" and Isabell Fall's "Helicopter Story" at my #1 and #2 picks, but they came in fourth and fifth in the final vote. The winner (Sarah Pinsker's "Two Truths and a Lie") was my #3 pick (I really enjoyed the story, and feel like I almost understood it). 

A similar mirror effect took place in the short story category. I really thought my #1 pick, John Wiswell's delightful riff on a haunted house story "Open House on Haunted Hill," might win, but it came in fourth. Whereas my #4 pick, T. Kingfisher's "Metal Like Blood in the Dark," was the winner. 

It has become clear to me in recent years that the average Hugo voter has a lot more love for retellings of fairy tales or fairy tale like stories than I do, and this category bears that out again. Or maybe people just wanted T. Kingfisher to win so we would get hilarious and intriguing facts about slime molds in the Hugo ceremony (you had to be there, or "there" online).

In Best Related Work, I seem to have totally forgot to rank the winner, Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation of Beowulf. Or maybe I realized I didn't have time to read it. I vaguely remember reading a bit of the introduction in my Hugo packet. Who would have thought people love Beowulf so much? (I'm kidding. Obviously I'm missing out and will have to check it out). My #1 pick, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky:The World of Octavia Butler by Lynell George, came in second, so that's not bad, I guess. I thought it was a great book.

I randomly didn't watch most of the movies this year, so I only voted for Tenet and Palm Springs as my #1 and #2 picks, but I guess I'll have to check out The Old Guard if the love my fellow Hugo voters have for it is any indication. I don't really do video games much, but I was thrilled to see the video game category, and I think it would be great for the Hugos to continue that category (especially for drawing in younger fans to this aging fandom).

I would have maybe liked to see a few of my favorites rank higher. For example, Shannon Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy was #6 in the Best Series category, whereas I had it at #1. I suppose everyone feels that way about something. A friend asked me if there were any surprises for the Hugos. I think there were for me personally, but maybe I was more plugged into the subset of fandom that votes for the Hugos, I would have had fewer surprised, who knows? (To be honest, I feel like I'm barely plugged into professional philosophy these days after 20+ years in the field, so the thought of trying to plug myself into a whole other nexus of human activity is a bit exhausting).

But overall voting for the Hugos and getting involved in fandom more generally has taught me a lot over the years that people have different tastes. And at a deeper level, I think people come to science fiction and fantasy for different reasons, looking for different things. And that's totally okay! It's fun to see.

Worldcons Past and Future

I thought about trying to go to Worldcon this year, especially as DC is relatively close to me, but with the pandemic and a few other trips this year, it just didn't happen. Now that I'm tenured, I may do a little more academic work on science fiction, so I might try for the academic track again as I did in 2016 and 2018 (although another part of being tenured is not doing so much publishing overall...).

I'm unsure if I will attend a Worldcon in person in the near future, although I'm confident I will again someday. It's in Chicago in 2022, which also isn't that far for me, but the pandemic, finances, and other travel plans may dictate otherwise. We'll see. Nonetheless, I will continue to vote by purchasing a Supporting Membership (usually about $40-$50: I recommend it!). It's a great way to stay up to date with the present and recent past of the genre. I tend to read a lot of old stuff in my looming to-be-read piles, so this doesn't always come easy for me.

And sometimes I imagine going back in time and telling my 14-year old self picking up science fiction books from the public library that say "Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel!" on the cover and telling that kid that he will someday be one of the people who decides who wins the Hugos. How cool is that?!