2018 Hugo awards!!

Winners (and also my first-place votes and predictions and commentary) behind the cut. ( Read more... )

more about the Hugo Artist awards

Re Artist Hugos - after further reflection, I think scrapping person awards in favor of works awards is too radical a change for the Hugos, which are not wrong to value continuity and consistency (so that in some sense an award given in 2018 is "the same award" that someone got in 1953 or whatever). Professional Artist is in fact one of the original awards (as "Best Interior Illustrator" and "Best Cover Artist"; it has also been "Best Artist"), and I think any changes made in the arts categories should prioritize making sure this award has broad and easily understood eligibility.

To that end, I think it would be better to drop the notion of "Professional" and just award it to the Best Artist regardless of whether/how they got paid. (I personally would like to spend zero hours of the rest of my life ever thinking about whether Patreon-supported art or Kickstartered art or whatever newfangled funding streams they're going to have in another twenty years are "professional", for instance.) And then I propose dropping the category of "Fan Artist" entirely and instead introducing a new award for "Best New Artist" in parallel with the Campbell Award and following similar eligibility rules. I think the Campbell does great work recognizing and celebrating exciting new voices and that's something it would be great to be doing for art too, and it's *not* something the Chesleys are already doing. I think this would be much more useful and important for the genre than this idea that Fan Artist is meant to thank people for helping out with con programs and fanzines, which seems to me like a backwards-looking approach focused on irrelevant details of payment and venue. We voters already have a good understanding of what the Campbell is and the admins know how to wrangle it, so I think, for a completely new award, this would be actually be a relatively conservative addition.

I am serious about this proposal to the extent that I may try to write it up in better language and email it to someone on the new committee, but people should feel free to link to this post, or to share the general idea without attribution, I think it's a good enough idea that I'd be happy for it to get some traction in any fashion.

other Hugo business opinions

Referring here to the Hugo Study Committee Report - these are (as I understand it) proposals that are "out there" for consideration but have not yet made it as far as the formal agenda item/amendment phases.

There's a proposal for a Best Translated category. I really dislike this, as a first reaction - right now works in translation are nominated to the appropriate length categories, and I think that's where they belong, competing as equals and not sequestered off to a less-prestigious category. I hear the argument that a special category would help welcome and recognize international and marginalized fans and creators, but I think the "ghettoization" risk outweighs that. Like, it clearly would not have been better for international sff fandom for Three-Body Problem to win some special Translated Work Hugo instead of the big one, that was such a powerful moment for internationality. Also if the Hugo is meant to honor *the work of translators*, I don't feel remotely qualified as a voter to say whether something was "a good translation" as opposed to a good story. To me that feels more appropriate for some kind of professional society/peer award, or maybe a juried award.

There's a proposal to reorganize/replace Semipro and the two Editor categories with Magazine, Anthology/Collection, and Publisher/Imprint. In contrast my kneejerk reaction here is that it's terrific and they should totally do it. Semipro and Short Editor are, although not entirely, significantly redundant; the "four installments" requirement for Short Editors means that I can't nominate the editors of outstanding one-off anthologies (I mean, I keep trying to, but I think they're not actually qualified); and I don't nominate for Long Editor despite reading plenty of novels because there's no easy/straightforward way to figure out the name of the person who edited any given work, unless I guess they happen to be thanked by name in acknowledgments which I happened to read and write this information down, which has never all happened so far but theoretically could. Anyways, the proposal to turn this into Magazine/Anthology/Imprint would solve all of these problems (publisher, unlike editor, is right there in the Goodreads header) and seems so clearly superior to the current state of affairs that I suspect there's some major catch I haven't noticed yet. Possibly Tradition but we've only been doing this Long and Short editor business since 2007, and Semipro since 1984 but honestly the magazine world is so different now (and also evolving) that it feels overdue to me for an overhaul. I don't really see it happening though, I don't think there's enough unhappiness with the current situation to drive it.

There's a discussion re monkeying with the Dramatic categories. I definitely have some horses in this race, a, I like to watch and vote for Movies but am uninterested (or, well, more accurately, logistically unwilling) to watch Serieses, and b, Clipping is the most interesting thing to happen to the Dramatic Hugos in ages and I don't want to see the categories codified in a "TV vs Movies" split such that albums/radio/theater end up out in the cold. I see how there are frustrations in various directions with the current situation but the tentative proposal here, to add two more categories, such that there would be Short, Episodes, Long, and Serieses, doesn't really feel coherent to me, and it's too many dang categories.

There was a proposal to split Best Novel into Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is a terrible idea and fortunately seems to have been decisively shot down, thank you Hugo Committee.

Hugo longlist thoughts

The detailed results and nominee longlists are in this pdf here.

Some thoughts behind this cut. ( Read more... )