In past years, I grouped my ballots together by theme. But this year, I
have much more time to get them all up, so I'll be doing a single post
for each category in which I am voting. First up is Best Related Work, that increasingly weird catch-all category. (The titles of works link to either full reviews I did, or where you can freely access the work in question on the Internet.)
Things I Nominated
I am not a very systematic nominator, but I did nominate one thing in this category: Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole (Columbia UP), which I reviewed for the SFRA Review (not that the review has actually been published yet even though I turned it in in February 2020). I'm not very surprised it did not make the ballot, however, as it is the kind of book not really in the orbit of sf&f fandom. But I didn't read much sf&f nonfiction from 2020!
7. CoNZealand Fringe by Claire Rousseau, C, Cassie Hart, Adri Joy, Marguerite Kenner, Cheryl Morgan, and Alasdair Stuart
I don't like Hugo finalists that are about things that happen at Worldcon (more on that for #6 below) and I don't like Best Related Work finalists that I don't think are "works" in a conventional sense (more on that for #5 below). CoNZealand Fringe was a set of supplementary programs to last year's Worldcon, so it in fact falls into both buckets, making it everything I do not like to see. This is no judgement on the CoNZealand Fringe itself; it's just not the kind of thing I think the Hugos should be awarding. (Not everything that can happen in the sf&f space needs a Hugo Award; see also this year's special Best Video Game award.)
6. "George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off into the Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)" by Natalie Luhrs
This is a blog post about how bad a job George R.R. Martin did hosting the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony. I did not watch it, so I have no opinion on how he did, but it seems pretty widely agreed that he didn't do a great job (though also some of the fault clearly rests with the 2020 Worldcon events team), and it's one of many that circulated at the time, and I seem to recall I enjoyed reading it then. Anyway, one of the things I hate about Hugos are Hugo Awards for things about Hugo Awards and/or Worldcon. It's so insular. One of the six best things related to science fiction and fantasy was about the awards devoted to recognizing such things? Bleh. It would have been an easy last place if not for CoNZealand Fringe combining two of my Hugo peeves.
"Best Related Work" was previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" and then "Best Related Book"; the category definition has become increasingly broad over the years in an attempt to encompass things people may do that are about sf&f, but are not themselves sf&f; I agree with the broadening in the sense that I think there have been a number of very worthy finalists that would not have made it with a more restrictive definition (e.g., 2020's Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary, 2019's Hobbit videos from Lindsay Ellis)... but I don't really buy the argument that though putting on a convention is "a work" even if it is clearly "work."
4. No Award
Everything beyond this point I would be fine with it winning a Hugo Award, even when it's not my favorite. Really, my preference for this category is nonfiction books about sf&f, though other things have interested me in the past (as I stated in #5 above). But this year we got just one of those!
This book is based on George's time going over the Butler papers at the Huntington Library. It's not a biography or anything; it's meant to give you insight into Butler's working mind and thought process. How did she perceive herself as a writer? Unfortunately, I felt like there wasn't enough of Butler and there was too much George, who seemed to be getting in the way of her subject. Those papers will be the basis of a really good book someday, but this isn't it.
This is a YouTube video about the rise and fall of My Little Pony "brony" fandom, through the lens of the last BronyCon, a convention held from 2011 to 2019. I thought it would be documentary-style, like Ellis's Hobbit videos, but it was more like an extended (70 minutes!) vlog; Hayley and I watched it while folding laundry. I enjoyed it, especially the digs into some of the weirder aspects of brony fandom (the body pillows, ugh, but also the idea of being "horse famous," and the weird Netflix brony documentary), but some of it felt poorly sourced (I wouldn't be surprised to find homophobia in brony fandom, but I found her discussion of it unconvincing). Fundamentally, though, an enjoyable look at an aspect of fandom I am only peripherally aware of.
The award rules are that fiction is eligible in Best Related Work if "noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the
fictional text, and... [if] not eligible in any other category." This book is noteworthy for its translation and apparatus, and as it was originally published c. 1,000 C.E., it certainly is not eligible in any of the fiction categories! It's not exactly the kind of thing this category was designed for, I must admit, but I enjoyed it best of the three works I experienced, and I think it will surely have the most lasting impact of any of them. (It does seem odd, though, to grant an sf&f award to an edition that downplays the fantastic elements. I mean, there's still a dragon of course, but in Headley's version, Grendel's mother is not a supernatural monster.) Anyway, I don't know if I want this category to become "Best Translation" but this is definitely a worthy winner.
Overall Thoughts
My first year voting, 2017, this category was made up of five nonfiction books and one series of blog posts; in 2018, it was six nonfiction books. Since then, it's gotten weird. Though I like the occasional oddity, the category containing just one nonfiction book is a swing too far away from what I find appealing, and what it was originally designed to recognize. I don't have a good solution, though. What is a definition of "work" that would admit things I like and keep out things I don't? If this is what the nominators want, this is what we'll get, and all I can do is rank them on the final ballot.
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