psocoptera

Here, or below. I voted in these!


Best Novel – Adult
for novel-length (40k+ words) works intended for the adult audience

WINNER | Gods of Jade and Shadow – Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
The Dragon Republic – R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager)
Jade War – Fonda Lee (Orbit)
Storm of Locusts – Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press)
Kingdom of Copper – S. A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)

Best Novel – YA
for novel-length (40k+ words) works intended for the young adult audience

WINNER | We Hunt the Flame – Hafsah Faizal (FSG BYR)*
Pet – Akwaeke Emezi (Make Me a World/PRH Children’s Books)
Everlasting Rose – Dhonielle Clayton (Freeform)
Slay – Brittney Morris (Simon Pulse)
War Girls – Tochi Onyebuchi (Razorbill)

Best in MG
for works intended for the middle grade audience

WINNER | Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky – Kwame Mbalia (Disney Hyperion)
Just South of Home – Karen Strong (S&S BYR)*
The Mystwick School of Musicraft – Jessica Khoury (Audible/HMH BYR)* **
Other Words for Home – Jasmine Warga (HarperCollins)
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe – Carlos Hernandez (Disney Hyperion)

Best Novella
for speculative works ranging from 17,500-39,999 words

WINNER | This is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar (Gallery/Saga Press)
The Deep – Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes (Gallery/Saga Press)
The Survival of Molly Southbourne – Tade Thompson (Tor/Forge (Tor.com))
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday – Saad Z. Hossain (Tor/Forge (Tor.com))
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 – P. Djèlí Clark (Tor/Forge (Tor.com))

Best Novelette
for speculative works ranging from 7,500-17,499 words

WINNER | Emergency Skin – N K Jemisin for the Amazon Forward Collection
While Dragons Claim the Sky – Jen Brown for FIYAH Literary Magazine
Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy – JY Neon Yang for Tor.com
The Archronology of Love – Caroline M. Yoachim for Lightspeed
Omphalos – Ted Chiang for Exhalation: Stories

Best Short Story
for speculative works ranging from 2,000-7,499 words

WINNER | A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy – Rebecca Roanhorse for Mythic Dream
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island – Nibedita Sen for Nightmare Magazine
Dune Song – Suyi Davies Okungbowa for Apex Magazine
And Now His Lordship is Laughing – Shiv Ramdas for Strange Horizons
Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan – Christopher Caldwell for Uncanny Magazine

Best in Speculative Poetry

WINNER | A Conversation Between the Embalmed Heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita on Public Display at the Baiano State Forensic Institute, Circa Mid-20th Century – Woody Dismukes for Strange Horizons
Heaven is Expensive – Ruben Reyes, Jr. for Strange Horizons
Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast – Brandon O’Brien for Uncanny Magazine
Those Who Tell the Stories – Davian Aw for Strange Horizons
goddess in forced repose – Tamara Jerée for Uncanny Magazine

Critics Award
for reviews and analysis of the field of speculative literature

WINNER | Alex Brown – Tor.com
Jesse – Bowties & Books
Charles Payseur – Quick Sip Reviews
Maria Haskins
Liz Bourke

Best Fiction Podcast
for excellence in audio performance and production for speculative fiction

WINNER | LeVar Burton Reads – LeVar Burton, Julia Smith, Adam Deibert, Brendan Byrnes, Mischa Stanton, Kristen Torres, Jenny Radelet, Josephine Martorana, Chris Bannon
PodCastle – Editors Jen R. Albert, Cherae Clark, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Host + Assistant Editor Setsu Uzume, & Audio Producer Peter Adrian Behravesh
Nightlight Podcast – Tonia Ransom
Beneath Ceaseless Skies – Editor Scott H. Andrews
Obsidian Podcast – Co-Creators, Producers, and Writers Adetola Abdulkadir & Safiyah Cheatam

Best Artist
for contributions in visual speculative storytelling

WINNER | Grace P. Fong
Geneva Bowers
Nilah Magruder
John Picacio
Paul Lewin

Best Comics Team
for comics, graphic novels, and sequential storytelling

WINNER | These Savage Shores – Ram V, Sumit Kumar, Vitorio Astone, Aditya Bidikar, & Tim Daniel
Blackbird Vol. 1 – Sam Humphries, Jen Bartel, & Triona Farrell
Excellence – Khary Randolph, Brandon Thomas, Emilio Lopez, & Deron Bennett
Coda – Simon Spurrier, Matías Bergara, Michael Doig, Jim Campbell, & Colin Bell
Bitter Root – David F Walker, Chuck Brown, & Sanford Greene

Best Anthology/Collected Works

WINNER | New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color – Editor Nisi Shawl
The Mythic Dream – Editors Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe
Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Fiction in Translation – Editor, Translator Ken Liu
This Place: 150 Years Retold – Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Sonny Assu, Brandon Mitchell, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, David A. Robertson, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, Jen Storm, Richard Van Camp, Katherena Vermette, Chelsea Vowel | illustrated by Tara Audibert, Kyle Charles, GMB Chomichuk, Natasha Donovan, Scott B. Henderson, Ryan Howe, Andrew Lodwick, Jen Storm | colour by Scott A. Ford, Donovan Yaciuk
A People’s Future of the United States – Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams

Best in Creative Nonfiction
for works related to the field of speculative fiction


WINNER | Black Horror Rising – Tananarive Due (Uncanny Magazine)
AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction – Rochelle Spencer (Routledge)
The Dark Fantastic – Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (NYU Press)
Our Opinions are Correct – Charlie Jane Anders & Annalee Newitz
Tongue-Tied: A Catalog of Losses – Layla Al-Bedawi (Fireside Fiction)

The Ember Award
for unsung contributions to genre

WINNER | LeVar Burton
Tananarive Due
Keidra Chaney
Nisi Shawl
Malon Edwards

The Community Award
for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre

WINNER | Strange Horizons – Gautam Bhatia, Vajra Chandrasekera, Joyce Chng, Kate Cowan, Tahlia Day, William Ellwood, Rebecca Evans, Ciro Faienza, Lila Garrott, Dan Hartland, Amanda Jean, Lulu Kadhim, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Catherine Krahe, Anaea Lay, Dante Luiz, Heather McDougal, AJ Odasso, Vanessa Rose Phin, Clark Seanor, Romie Stott, Aishwarya Subramanian, Fred G. Yost, and the SH copyediting team and first readers
Beth Phelan
Mary Robinette Kowal
Diana M. Pho
Writing The Other – Nisi Shawl + K Tempest Bradford

I have six categories left, augh. I suppose I could simply not vote in them but come on, when would I ever pass up an opportunity to inflict my opinions upon the world. Commentary on Semipros, Short Eds, Fanwriters, and Fanzines behind the cut.

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I don't like to not finish books but I have made it to 15% of the way into The Ruin of Kings and I am not enjoying it and I feel like every new thing that happens is just making me like it less, so I think I'm bailing. The time-and-POV jumping was jarring, the names are such Bad Fantasy Names, and the whole plot just seems... annoying. I think she's trying to do a Patrick Rothfuss kind of thing but it's not working for me even as much as those did. If anyone has read it and would recommend sticking with it, though, I'd be interested to hear that, especially if you think it does something that is the sort of thing I am known to like.

Otherwise let's go rank the Astoundings!( Read more... )

An extra week has fallen out of the sky! Their tweet:

"Hugo voting extension: We are sorry for the delay in opening online Hugo Voting. It should be open no later than Wednesday 8 July. Therefore, we are extending the voting deadline to Wednesday, 22 July 2020 at 23:59 PDT (UTC-7)/Thursday, 23 July 2020 at 18:59 NZST (UTC+12)."

It's not really clear to me *why* they're having these delays - does every Worldcon have to completely recode the voting software? Can't they just get it from the previous Worldcon? But I certainly don't object to that extra week to read!

Yes, I'm catching up on news about awards I vaguely follow! Here we have the Spectrum 27 awards. I care about the Spectrums partly because of ongoing annoyance about how the Hugos recognize art (to recap, the Hugos are so heavily the same people over and over, and I think awarding works rather than people would push back against that, and also I hate "fan artist" meaning only people who illustrate con brochures) and partly just because, hey, art! Here's a blog post where you can see the nominees; scroll down past the text list for the images. Here's the list of winners, or behind the cut. ( Read more... )

I voted in these but I didn't record my votes anywhere, and anyways I've read more stuff since then, so whatever. If you want to see the results without my commentary you can see them here. Everything else behind a cut for length. ( Read more... )

A nice batch this year but I still don't like any of them as much as I liked Chronin, hmph.

Monstress 4 - always gorgeous, always a little confusing, although I think I did a decent job letting go of my need to remember where we saw all these characters last and just rolling with it. I don't think I liked this one quite as much as 3 (which got my second-place vote last year) and I would really like to see something else win this year; Monstress is great but this doesn't have to be the Monstress Award for Best Monstress.

La Guardia - oh, this was neat. I guess it's actually set in Okorafor's Lagoon universe, but you don't need to have read that, and the tone is pretty different. Good story, good stuff about travel bans and racism and the richness of different people coming together, and I really liked the art.

Mooncakes - super sweet YA. A nonbinary werewolf and a witch with hearing aids, childhood friends/sweethearts, reunite to fight a demon, with help from the witch's badass gay grandmas. Felt like it would definitely appeal to fans of Witch Boy even though the protags here are more like young adults; I might get a paper copy for my kids, actually. I'm always glad to see disability rep in sff; there was a great panel early on visually showing deafness with distorted and shrunken letters in a speech bubble that was really nice comicsing.

Oh, and I guess I've already read Paper Girls 6 (spoilery comments here), so I'm actually more than halfway done! (Although if we're measuring by reading time, nine volumes of WicDiv is going to take like twice as long as everything else. Shh.)

(Also, wow, when we got the finalists list, I was so busy being sad about no Chronin that it didn't even hit me that there's also no Saga. I used to be so into Saga (the breastfeeding cover!!) and now my reaction is "yay I didn't have to read Saga this year" which, uh, suggests that maybe that series has not done a great job not squandering my goodwill. Anyways apparently Saga has been on hiatus since the issues that got collected into volume 9, so we don't have Saga this year because there is no Saga, and it's on indefinite hiatus so we may not have Saga again next year either, or, one has to wonder, possibly ever, if Vaughan has run out of kitchen sinks to throw in there. Welp.)

ETA, important fact I have just noticed: voting is closing July 15 this year, that is different than July 31, everyone voting should try to keep this in mind!

Ok, when I said I thought we would get the packet after the Nebulas, I didn't think it would be *that* fast! I'm working on downloading now and will edit this post once I know what's in there. ( Read more... )

Middlegame, Seanan McGuire. Let's just go right to the cut. ( Read more... )

This was my last Hugo Novel and I get to rank novels now! Behind another cut! ( Read more... )

Other miscellaneous theories: publishers are waiting on the Nebulas to decide what they want to put in the packet, and we'll get the packet shortly thereafter, like next Friday.