Back in 2018, when Star Trek received its first Hugo nomination during the CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus) era, I wrote a blog post chronicling the fortunes of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards from 1967 up to then. Well, this year, Star Trek received not just one but two Hugo Awards, so it seemed time to bring that blog post up to date by covering the last seven years.
2018: Discovery
As chronicled in my previous post, 2018 was the first time Star Trek had been a Hugo finalist since 2010. The 2018 nomination (in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) was for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," which in my mind was definitely the best episode of Discovery's somewhat bumpy first "chapter"—and probably still is one of the best Discovery episodes over all, a clever time loop story for the postmodern era.
I was not surprised, however, that Disco did not win the award; the category was won by perennial Hugo darling The Good Place, and Star Trek placed down in fifth on the final ballot, below Black Mirror (a Star Trek–centric episode of it, actually), another episode of The Good Place, and Doctor Who. Most of those I can just about buy... though "Twice Upon a Time" was not, in my mind, a particularly worthy episode of Doctor Who.
Looking at the longlist reveals just one other Star Trek installment... but not an official one; an episode of the dull and mediocre fan series Star Trek Continues, "What Ships Are For," came in tenth. Fairly inexplicable, to be honest.
2019–21: Nothing
2018 was not the beginning of some kind of Star Trek Hugo renaissance, because in 2019, Star Trek didn't land on the ballot at all. The longlist reveals one Star Trek episode, down in fourteenth, so pretty far from making the ballot, the Discovery episode "What's Past Is Prologue." This is a pretty baffling choice; it was the finale of the mirror universe story arc of the first season... and like a lot of Discovery finales, long on spectacle and short on sense.
In 2020, there was no Star Trek on the final ballot or even the longlist. The second season of Discovery would have been eligible. I liked the first half of this season a lot, even though the second half got quite awful, but I don't know that there's an obvious standout for enthusiasm to coalesce around, so it's not very surprising.
2021 would also bring no Star Trek on the final ballot... but the longlist was replete with Star Trek! The Picard episode "Nepenthe" (a fan favorite where Picard catches up with Riker and Troi and their cute kid) came in seventh, just two nominating votes behind the sixth-place recipient, which did make it! Another Picard episode, "Remembrance," was down in fourteenth. Additionally, the longlist featured two episodes of Disco season 3, "Unification III" and "That Hope Is You." But on top of all that, Discovery season 3 was also on the longlist as a complete unit in Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, though decently far down. Probably Star Trek was a victim of its own success here; as 2020 had new episodes in three different Star Trek series (Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks), nominating votes would have been diffused across a bunch of different stuff, making it hard for anything to end up on the ballot.
2022–23: Lower Decks
Finally, in 2022, Star Trek would land on the ballot again, this time for a Lower Decks episode; this one I remember I actually nominated myself! "wej Duj" is a cute episode showing parallel adventures of lower decks crews on three different ships (the title means "three ships" in Klingonese). It would not win, placing in third after episodes of The Expanse and Loki, but thankfully it did beat Arcane. Another episode of Lower Decks, "First First Contact," was on the longlist as well.
We should be skeptical of we're told about the 2023 Hugo Awards, but there was no Star Trek on the final ballot that year. However, there were three different Star Trek episodes on the longlist, from two different Star Trek series: Strange New Worlds's "A Quality of Mercy" and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) and Lower Decks's "Hear All, Trust Nothing." If we believe the nominating data (and we should not), "Quality of Mercy" had one more vote than one of the actual finalists, but didn't make the ballot due to the way EPH redistributes nominations to increase finalist diversity.
Also, it's not branded as "Star Trek," but there was a finalist that was aboutStar Trek in the Best Related Work category in 2023, Wil Wheaton's memoir Still Just a Geek. This is, I think, the only Star Trek–related finalist in the history of the category; it finished in fourth.
2024: Strange New Worlds
After getting two on the longlist in 2023 for its first season, Strange New Worlds finally made the ballot in 2024 for its second, with two finalists. They are both the kind of thing Hugo voters love, with fan-pleasing premises. In "Those Old Scientists," two characters from Lower Decks come aboard Pike's Enterprise, transforming from cartoons into live action, while "Subspace Rhapsody" is a musical episode.
I loved both, but neither won; "Those Old Scientists" finished in a very close second, with "Subspace Rhapsody" down in fifth. The Last of Us seems a worthy enough victor, but I'm less convinced that Doctor Who's "The Giggle" was better than "Subspace Rhapsody"!
It was a very good year for Strange New Worlds, with two other episodes on the longlist: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "Ad Astra Per Aspera."
I am a bit surprised, though, that no episode of the fan-favorite Picard season 3 was even on the longlist!
2025: Lower Decks, Lower Decks!
In 2025, Lower Decks got on the Best Dramatic Presentation ballot again... twice! The last two episodes of the entire series, "Fissure Quest" and "The New Next Generation," were both finalists. Honestly, this was a bit disappointing to me, in that when I caught up on the series, I found there were three 2024 episodes of Lower Decks I would have placed above either of these. To my surprise, "The New Next Generation" ended up winning; as I feel like often happens with the Hugo, it seems more like a vote for the series as a whole than for the specific episode per se. But series creator Mike McMahan gave a pretty nice speech about what the Hugos meant to him.
Season five of Lower Decks as a whole was also on the longlist for Long Form, and a nonfiction book about Star Trek, Nana Visitor's A Woman's Trek, on the longlist for Best Related Work.
But the real surprise was that a work of Star Trek fiction was a finalist in Best Graphic Story. An original tie-in graphic novel, Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, placed on the ballot.
Tie-in fiction has not often made the Hugo ballot. To the extent that it has, it's largely been confined to the Best Graphic Story category: comics based on The Dresden Files, Serenity, Doctor Who, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Dune movie have all been on the ballot. There was also one year where a Magic: The Gathering story made the ballot for Best Short Story. None of these have ever won.
But all that changed this year, when not only was a Star Trek tie-in a finalist for the first time ever, but Warp Your Own Way actually won the category! And justifiably so, in my opinion. Most tie-in fiction, in my opinion, is frankly not Hugo-worthy (the tie-ins that have made the ballot since I began voting in 2017 certainly haven't been), but Warp Your Own Way does genuinely clever stuff with the narrative form of the choose-your-own-adventure story.
So, thanks to Lower Decks, Star Trek not only scored its first Hugo Award in thirty years (it last won in 1995 for The Next Generation's "All Good Things..."), it actually scored two!
Final Thoughts
There have been five Star Trek shows of the streaming era. Of these five, two have never made the Hugo ballot: Picard and Prodigy. And while Picard made the longlist a few times, Prodigy never even did that.
I'll be curious to see if Star Trek makes the ballot again any time soon; with Lower Decks over and Strange New Worlds winding down, it seems like the opportunities are dwindling. But perhaps Starfleet Academy will surprise us all and produce some smashing episodes!
This summer, it was my privilege to get to read Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by my former colleague Jordan S. Carroll. I reviewed the book for the academic journal that I am associate editor for, Studies in the Fantastic.
After I read and reviewed the book, the book won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work—which I think was well-deserved, and I think I would think that even if I didn't know Jordan!
Jordan cites the idea of the "modal imagination" that he gets from Mark
Jerng (who in turn got it from the philosopher Adrian M.S. Piper), which
I have found really useful in articulating what makes science fiction
what it is—I used it in my sf class this semester, and I suspect it might even find its way into a book project I've been contemplating.
As Jordan Carroll discusses in the introduction to this slim volume from the University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners: Ideas First” series, “[s]cience fiction thinking turns out to be surprisingly prevalent in the alt-right and antecedent white nationalist movements” (5). Many like to think of science fiction as an inherently progressive genre: its urtext, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is after all the work of the daughter of one of the founding thinkers of feminism, and early sf writers like H. G. Wells used the genre to criticize imperialism and nationalism. Science fiction allows us to imagine a better world. How, then, could the genre attract those who want to take society backward in some kind of way? This is a question often expressed by baffled fans and critics alike, but as Carroll demonstrates, there have long been racist undercurrents in sf and its fandom, as evidenced by controversies such as 2009’s “Racefail,” when authors of color critiqued the field (17), and the “Sad” and “Rabid Puppies” movements (2013–17), when right-wing fans attempted to pack the fan-voted Hugo Awards with their chosen finalists, many of them racist and homophobic (47–8). Prominent racist thinkers such as Richard Spencer and Nick Land are science fiction fans, and adherents of President Donald Trump sometimes refer to him as the “God Emperor,” drawing on a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (1963–85) and the sf wargame Warhammer 40,000. How can all of this happen, given the genre’s supposed leanings and origins? As Pamela Bedore says (drawing on Carolyn Miller), we should “ask not what various genres or subgenres look like, but rather, what they accomplish rhetorically” (9). Is there something about the rhetoric of science fiction itself as a genre that allows it to be a breeding ground for racism?
The review works in a couple of my own obsessions: Pam Bedore's features/project distinction for articulating genre and Isaac Asimov's definition of sf.
But probably the thing I am most proud of is the title, which is a reference to a classic Internet meme, and somehow neither of the two editors I worked with on the review put the kibosh on that... which I totally expected them to do: "Racism? In My Science Fiction? It’s More Likely than You Think."
As always, I end my Hugo posts for the year with my takes on what won. Although, this year they haven't released the full stats yet, so it's possible I'll do another once we get the nominating data, and I can tell to what extent deserving finalists were robbed... or to what extent we were spared even worse finalists! I have also been thinking of bringing back my post on "No Award" that I did a couple times. We'll see!
Last year, I wrote that "[n]ext year's
Worldcon is the U.S., so an evening ceremony will actually be in the
evening, making it a lot easier for me to tune in." What I had forgotten about is that Worldcon would be in Seattle, so an 8:30 ceremony would be at 11:30. I didn't make it! I did, however, wake up at 5:00am because one of my kids crawled into bed with me and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I immediately checked my phone for the results, and texted my friend who was a finalist... not thinking about the fact that for him it was 2:00am at that point... and it had probably been a very long night! I did pull up the livestream that day, but I just jumped around until I found the bit where Jordan gave his speech.
So what did I think of the results? How did they compared to my own votes? I will say, I did really like the fancy graphs they included in the stats packet to demonstrate how the instant runoff works in ranked choice voting. They haven't released, however, the runs for placements lower than first yet, so I don't know how anything I ranked first ultimately fared.
EDIT on 12 SEPT. 2025: I added in the final rankings for each thing I ranked first, and occasionally some commentary.
I ranked this second, and actually predicted it would win: "my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and
thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it
to win on transfers." Well, I was right that it won, but if you look at the data, it had a commanding lead from the beginning, which it held onto throughout, so I was wrong about what the reason would be. My beloved Ministry of Time got the fifth-most amount of first-round votes... but it's hardly surprising. What did surprise me is there wasn't more of a direct relationship between the two finalists by Adrian Tchaikovsky; when his Service Model was eliminated, the votes did not all transfer to Alien Clay.
In a real crime against literature, Ministry of Time finished in last. It received more first-place votes than Service Model, but did quite poorly on transfers. Clearly a polarizing work!
Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by the Hugo electorate. My prediction was that "something I ranked below 'No Award' will win Best Novella"! The Tusks of Extinction, though, had a small lead from the first round that it continually built upon via transfers, even though usually some other work got more transfers every time something was eliminated. Particularly, it picked up a lot of transfers from The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (this makes sense, because that was the other actually good finalist). In the last round, the elimination of The Butcher of the Forest gave more transfers to What Feasts at Night than Tusks, but this wasn't enough to put What Feasts over the edge.
I found Best Novelette weak this year, and I predicted "Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie"... and yes, it was Kritzer! (With Leckie in second Pinsker in third.) Thus I'm not too disappointed even though these creepypasta-style stories by Kritzer and Pinsker that keep getting nominated aren't really my bag.
"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"
2nd
Oof. Interestingly, both "Stitched to Skin" and "Omelas Hole" got 279 first-place votes in the first round... but as lower-ranked finalists were eliminated, "Omelas Hole" picked up noticeably fewer transfers almost every time. Evidently it was quite polarizing! It wasn't that polarizing, though, because it still managed to finish in second. Kowal's "Marginalia" received the third-most amount of first-place votes, but was eliminated sooner than you might expect; it ended up placing in fourth, so also a little polarizing. Alas, "Three Faces of a Beheading," which I put in second, finished in sixth.
Finally, a work of actual quality wins Best Graphic Story! This basically crushed it, with a commanding lead it never lost. The Deep Dark was eliminated last, so clearly the voters had some sense this year; it ultimately finished third.
I did not imagine this! I predicted my friend Jordan would lose to one of the works about the Hugo Awards themselves, but instead he won!! I'm thanked in the Acknowledgements to this book, so it's basically like I won a Hugo, of course. (Where's my rocket???) If you look at the stats, Speculative Whiteness actually starts with the third-most votes in the first round, and indeed, one of the works about the Hugos themselves is in second (and briefly in first, during round two). But when the other "actually a book" finalist (Track Changes) is eliminated, Speculative Whiteness slides into the lead; "actually a book" voters for Best Related Work, unite! I didn't expect the YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel to do so well, though.
At least it wasn't Mad Max, I guess. My prediction that part two of Dune would not have the same oomph as part one was totally wrong. I will predict now that Dune, Part Three will win in 2027. Flow was robbed! (Actually, it did quite well, finishing in second.) Alas, I Saw the TV Glow came in last, but I'm not surprised.
Last year, I wrote that, "Someday Star Trek will win again!" but I didn't think it would be this year. This felt more like a win for the cumulative quality of Lower Decks rather than its somewhat mediocre finale per se. I will need to update my post about the history of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards now! It's a bit nuts to me that the Fallout finale beat out "Dot and Bubble" by four votes.
My top two choices were the top two finalists! Nice! Interestingly, Heavenly Tyrant had more first-round votes than any other finalist, but picked up very little on transfers as other finalists were eliminated. It was in a very tight race with Sheine Lende until the very end! It ended up placing third, beat out by Maid and Crocodile, which I didn't even read.
As always, I had a good time even when reading bad books, and am thankful for the exposure to good work I otherwise would not have come across: this year that's Agatha All Along, "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video," The Deep Dark, Flow, I Saw the TV Glow, The Ministry of Time, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, The Tainted Cup, "Three Faces of a Beheading," Track Changes, and The Tusks of Extinction. Some of these works I had heard of but probably never gotten around to; many I had never even heard of! In particular, I look forward to reading the sequel to The Tainted Cup when it hits paperback, and to reading more short fiction from Thomas Ha, Isabel J. Kim, and Arkady Martine.
Look forward to more posts about the 2025 awards, I think, once more data is available, and an update to my Star Trek and the Hugos post. But this is it for now!
Finally! While I finished my Hugo reading earlier than ever, I was watching stuff right up to the deadline, having made it difficult for myself by deciding to not just watch the actual finalists, but also Mad Max: Fury Road, the rest of Agatha All Along, and the last two seasons of Lower Decks (I was very behind). During the last week in particular, I watched so much stuff... but I did make it, finishing my last movie (Wicked, Part I) just past midnight on Wednesday, when ballots were due at midnight. Thankfully in Pacific Time!
Anyway, here are my notes on the visual categories: (I don't remember what I nominated for certain, but I think I nominated "73 Yards" and "Dot and Bubble," both of which made the ballot).
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
6. Fallout 1x8: "The Beginning", written by Gursimran Sandhu, directed by Wayne Yip
I was excited when I saw this episode was called "The Beginning," because if there's anything that makes Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) stink, it's watching season finales to shows you don't watch, and surely this would not be the case of an episode called "The Beginning." But the writers of Fallout are being obnoxiously clever, and "The End" was the first episode while "The Beginning" was the last. Hence, I pretty much cared about nothing that was happening here. (That said, it doesn't seem to be my thing as a show; I doubt I'd have ranked it higher even if I had seen it all.)
5. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x09: "Fissure Quest", written by Lauren McGuire, directed by Brandon Williams
I have very much enjoyed Lower Decks for most of its run... so it was a little disappointing to get to this episode and realize that it was seemingly more nominated on the basis of fan service than quality per se. This is the first part of the two-part season (and series) finale, bringing an end to a story arc about mysterious fissures popping up across the multiverse. Alternate versions of many classic characters appear, including T'Pol (Enterprise), Garak and Bashir (Deep Space Nine), Lily Sloane (First Contact), and a whole cadre of Harry Kims (Voyager). Probably the best part, though, is when Boimler contains about the overdone pointlessness of making every story be about the multiverse. Anyway, it's basically fine.
4. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x10: "The New Next Generation", written by Mike McMahan, directed by Megan Lloyd
The season finale to Lower Decks was well done, if a bit of a trope at this point: the Cerritos is somehow called upon to save the Federation, and proves itself despite being a California-class. It has some good moments and some excellent jokes, but I found it less successful than some previous iterations of the concept. I get that these particular episodes were probably nominated because they had good fan service, but there are a number of 2024 episodes I would have ranked higher than these two: "A Farewell to Farms," "Fully Dilated," and "Upper Decks" were all stronger.
3. Doctor Who 1x04: "73 Yards", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
I don't think the return of Russell T Davies to Doctor Who has been an unabashed success, but this episode really shows what he does at his best. Oh, you don't have your lead actor available for every episode? Well, let's do a creepy folk horror thing about the companion living the rest of her life never seeing him again but eternally being stalked by a figure always exactly 73 yards away from her. Utterly captivating, thanks in no small part to Millie Gibson as Ruby, but really it's one of those episodes where everything comes together. Plus... the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be inspired by A Swiftly Tilting Planet? I think not up to quite as much as Agatha All Along, but clearly in a class above the two Lower Decks episodes.
2. Agatha All Along, episode #7: "Death's Hand In Mine", written by Gia King and Cameron Squires, directed by Jac Schaeffer
Though I have been enjoying Agatha All Along (as of this writing, I haven't gotten to the finale yet), I would say it does kind of suffer from the same thing as many serialized streaming shows, in that probably it has about seven episodes worth of content but is nine episodes long. That said, I did really enjoy this one, which follows one of the side characters, Lilia, a seer who jumps through her own life out of order, not just putting together a mystery, but also coming to better understand herself and the nature of friendship. I thought it was very well done.
1. Doctor Who 1x05: "Dot and Bubble", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
This episode is partially social media satire, the kind of contemporary pop culture stuff Russell T Davies can do in his sleep... but he does so well. But the episode has an extra substrate to it that only becomes apparent at the very end, which is really well done, and leads to what might be the very best scene Ncuti Gatwa recorded as the Doctor.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller, script by George Miller and Nico Lathouris
I did not care for the previous movie in this series, and I cared for this one even less. I think the first probably accomplished what it set out to perfectly, but I didn't actually care to see it accomplished. The second is brought down by some weird choices: the focus on the gruesome baddies seemed more gratuitous in this one, and why on Earth is her name "Furiosa" when she's a little girl??
5. Dune, Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve, script by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts
I feel like whenever I have watched previous versions of Dune, by the time you get to the second half of the story, I have very much lost steam, and so the second half I am usually pretty bored during. Splitting the second part into its own movie means you can conceive it as its own story, and thus I think this is the most I have ever cared about the second half of Dune. Still, I didn't care a lot; I feel like Paul's arc here is interesting in the abstract, but I was never really pulled into it. Some neat visuals, and I'm broadly sympathetic to it in a way that very much wasn't true of Furiosa.
4. Wicked, Part I, directed by John M. Chu, script by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox
I am an Oz fan who has successfully spent over twenty years of my life avoiding Wicked, but that streak finally came to an end. I thought this was basically fine so far but also feel like I can't really judge it; there are a lot of balls in the air and how good Part I is will really depend on the the extent to which Part II can pay them off. There were some good songs, and I liked the dopey Winkie prince character a lot; also I hope Boq gets it together in Part II. As an Oz fan, I found some of the choices made distracting; why does the map of the four quadrants use the the five colors from the books... but make the Munchkin Country tan and the Winkie Country blue? (Also as much as it's in dialogue with the MGM Oz film, obviously, it struck me that you also can't make a film in 2024 about a magic school that doesn't in some way owe something to Harry Potter, and this very much does.) So, I am ranking it above the two things I didn't really care for, but under the films that were complete in and of themselves.
3. The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders
My wife read all three Wild Robot books aloud to my kids, the first two twice in fact; I haven't read them, but absorbed a lot of it from overhearing. When the movie came out last fall, they went and saw it but I didn't make it with them. So I enjoyed finally getting to experience a version of story for myself. I found this charming and entertaining, with some decent visuals and some excellent performances, especially Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, and Bill Nighy.
2. I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
This is a horror film about two high school kids who grow up watching a cheesy 1990s tv show that isn't great art but speaks to them. (It's very much based on Buffy, to the extent of using the same font in the opening credits and including a cameo from Amber Benson.) As a child of the era, I thought it did a good job of capturing the 1990s vibe in general, and that specific feeling of stumbling across something late at night that belongs to you and no one else—something kind of lost from our culture of algorithmic discovery. Really sad, really well done; the lead cast were great. I don't know that this would work for everyone, but it very much worked for me. A great movie with important stuff to say.
1. Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, script by Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža
If you want to watch two movies this year about groups of animals coming together in the face of rising sea levels, watch The Wild Robot too, but if you only want to watch one, then Flow is the one. This movie has no dialogue, and does a beautiful job of capturing the visuals and behaviors of animals. Lots of really striking sequences, lots of heart. I would have never heard of this without the Hugos (though I see it did win an Oscar), and it easily takes the top place on my ballot.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
[UNRANKED] Monstress: The Possessed, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
I very much enjoyed the first volume of Monstress when I read it back in 2017 (the fact that I ranked it fifth is more a testament to the quality of that year's other nominees)... but by volume two, I found it impenetrable and ranked it last! I have kept up with the series, even continuing to buy it, in hope that I might someday enjoy it again, but I have failed to do so. Every one of the first seven volumes has been a Hugo finalist, and I almost always rank them last. Finally, last year, volume eight was not, and I used that as an opportunity to finally jump off the series. No volume nine for me! This means I am just leaving it off my ballot, though I think that's functionally the same as listing it in last place.
6. We Called Them Giants, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans
This short graphic novel tells the story of strange, mostly unexplained, events on Earth from the perspective of a teenage girl in foster care: first the majority of humans disappear, causing humanity to degenerate into gangs, then mysterious giants appear. It didn't do much for me; it felt more like a high-level summary of the events in question. I never got interested in the events or characters.
5. The Hunger and the Dusk, Vol. 1, script by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose
This is a fantasy adventure comic from the pen of G. Willow Wilson (of Ms. Marvel fame); it starts with orcs and humans at odds, but then it turns out that both factions are under assault from a fearsome race from across the ocean and must learn to put aside their differences. The two main threads follow an orc healer with a human adventuring party, and two orcs from different clans entering into an arranged marriage. The art by Chris Wildgoose is good, and the writing is fine. Like, you've read better comics from Wilson but certainly many people produce worse comics and they even become Hugo finalists. I think I would have liked it more if the six issues collected here had built to some kind of climax, but it felt to me like it just stopped, and not in a way that left me eager to read on; there's no big resolution or even a cliffhanger to chew on.
4. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris
The first half of this story came out way back in 2017; it was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Awards. Book two was originally supposed to come out in 2018, but didn't materialize until 2024, after an acrimonious lawsuit between Ferris and her publisher. I used to look and see every now and again if it had been released, but eventually I gave up, so I was thankful for the Hugos reminding me to actually get it! The story is about a young girl named Karen growing up in the 1960s, struggling with her growing realization that she's a lesbian versus her Catholic upbringing—not to mention the fact that her mother just died, her father abandoned her family, and her brother is probably a gangster. The story is told in the form of drawings from Karen's looseleaf diary, and it looks beautiful. Karen draws herself as a monster because that's how she sees herself, and the story explores what different kids of monstrousness actually mean: violence versus sexuality vs prejudice. Great read, though I found the end a little frustrating. I don't see any indication of a book three coming, though there certainly is space for one. This book is definitely doing something much more interesting and much better than We Called Them Giants or The Hunger and the Dusk...
3. No Award
...but it's not actually science fiction or fantasy, even if it is about someone who reads those genres! Karen isn't a monster, she just draws herself as one. It seems to me that the Hugo ought not to go to a work that's not actually sf&f, so I have to place No Award above it... even if I would rather see My Favorite Thing win than a bunch of the other finalists.
2. The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
This is a YA graphic novel about a high-school age Hispanic lesbian in rural California who reconnects with a childhood friend who moved away years ago. Only she doesn't want to reconnect, because she doesn't want that friend to discover her secret—a dark one in the basement that her family has hid for generations. This is one of those fantasy stories that does a good job working on two levels, there's a literal monster, but of course it's also a metaphor. Ostertag's characters are well-drawn, and she especially does a great job with the main character's yearning for connection but also pushing of other people away. This is the kind of thing I really like about reading for the Hugos; I never would have come across this I'm sure, but ended up really enjoying the experience a lot.
This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and it surprised me by feeling like the one to beat: it's a choose-your-own-adventure comic that uses Star Trek technology to cleverly explain the form of the entire genre. Never before has a Star Trek tie-in been a Hugo finalist, but very rarely do Star Trek tie-ins do anything interesting with their chosen medium and genre, which is exactly what I want an award finalist to do.
Overall Thoughts
Like last year, I thought Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) was good; only one real dud. Yes, I would have picked other episodes of Lower Decks, but it's a solid show and I'm happy to see it on the ballot.Long Form was also pretty good; sure, I didn't like Furiosa or Dune very much, but also they clearly have their adherents, and I wouldn't be embarrassed if they won (as I was when The Old Guard won). Three whole non-franchise films!
Best Graphic Story was kind of meh this year but I guess you can't win them all.
What will win? I am typically very bad at calling these categories. I'm guessing Star Trek won't win in Dramatic Presentation; it hasn't done so since 1995, despite making the ballot fairly consistently. If "Those Old Scientists" or "Subspace Rhapsody" can't win, I don't see what can! But I actually do feel like it might have a shot with Warp Your Own Way. (Who'm I kidding, though... it'll probably be Monstress again.) I don't think there's an obvious favorite in the Dramatic Presentation categories. Dune, Part One won, but I don't think the sequel will have the same oomph. I Saw the TV Glow is too queer to win, Wicked too girly, and the others too kiddy. So who knows! Maybe one of the Doctor Whos for Short Form?
Cover blurbs are interesting, in that they give you a sense of what kind of reader the publisher thinks a book will appeal to. For example, following the publication of Ancillary Justice, it seemed to me that basically every book with any vague space opera trappings was blurbed by Ann Leckie. I was surprised, then, to note that Adrian Tchaikovksky's Service Model was blurbed by John Scalzi, because it's hard for me to imagine that there is significant overlap there. Tchaikovsky writes hard sf with a biological bent, which isn't really the Scalzi tone at all. But as I began reading Service Model, I got it.
This is supposed to be funny.
Unfortunately, I didn't find it funny at all, aside from one joke about remote work. The book is about a valet robot who accidentally(?) kills its owner and then goes on a quest for purpose; the book takes place after the majority of human have died, and only robots remain. The book goes from the robot's original estate, to the central planning office for robots, to a collective farm, to a library, to God. What might have been a perfectly fine novella is a bloated tedious novel; there are by no means enough ideas, depth, or character work to fill almost 400 pages.
Okay, second in my series of 2025 Hugo posts we have my reviews of all the books: Best Novel, Best Related Work (though once again we have a year with very few books), and Best Young Adult Book. Like I said in my previous post, I didn't save my nominating ballot, but I know I nominated one thing in one of these categories... Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, and it made the ballot. Fun fact: this is the only Hugo finalist where I am mentioned in the acknowledgements!
As enumerated in my above review, I very much didn't get into this, certainly my least favorite thing I've ever read from the pen of T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon. I think honestly it's about on a par with Someone you can Build a Nest in, in that I don't really want either one to win. I broke the tie between them by deciding that if one of them had to win, I'd rather see someone new win the award (Wiswell), rather than someone who has won Best Novel before (plus other Hugo Awards besides).
Look, clearly this is someone's cup of tea, but it isn't mine. Arguably this is cozy fantasy, and it might be overdramatic to say it, but I hate cozy fantasy. I think Abigail Nussbaum puts it really well in her review of Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden:
Too often, what these novels call kindness is actually the flattening of all difference, and what they call coziness is a refusal to acknowledge cruelty. This novel recognizes that kindness is hard,
that well-intended people can have wildly diverging points of view that
can lead them to abuse and dehumanize others, and that conflicts are
not won by "destroying" your opponent with a killer argument, but by
getting them to see you as someone worth compromising with—even if that
means sitting across a table from someone who thinks you shouldn't be
allowed to make your own decisions.
I don't know that this book is "cozy" per se but I do think it fails to recognize the difficulty of kindness, and everything falls apart because of that. If this wins, I'll be as mad as I would have been if Legends & Lattes had won.
A tedious bloated novel that's supposed to be funny but very much isn't. I guess I'm excited Adrian Tchaikovsky is finally getting attention from the Hugo electorate but the novels of his that have been chosen for this are surely not his best.
4. No Award
I don't think I often use "No Award" in Best Novel, where there's usually at least one book I really like, and the rest tend to follow a spectrum. Sure, you don't like the book you rank sixth very much, but that shouldn't be unexpected, because what are the odds of you loving all six books in a category? But this year, I found myself struggling to decide which of three books I disliked the least so that I could figure out the whole bottom half of my ballot, and I feel like that if you end up in that situation, it demonstrates that none of those finalists ought to have been on the ballot to begin with.
As you'll see in my linked-to review, I thought this book started strong and had a lot of potential it didn't totally deliver on. It's alien biology sf, a subgenre that Tchaikovsky is the current kind of for sure, even if I think he doesn't quite succeed in bringing the science elements together with the political elements thematically. But it's definitely up to something more interesting than Someone You Can or even Tchaikovsky's own Service Model by a significant margin, and I wouldn't be mad if it won, though to my mind the remaining books on my ballot are clearly better.
This is a fantasy murder mystery, and I ended up really enjoying it, moreso than I expected. Just a really good example of its genre, very immersive and interesting; exploring the world is as compelling as the mystery, perhaps more so, but so is exploring the characters. Not as ambitious as The Ministry of Time, but other than that, a very good book, and I'd happily see it win... well, except for my disappointment at the clearly deserving Ministry not winning!
There are some books that are optimized to be of interest me, and this is one of them, even if I did not expect it. Very literary, good jokes, sharp character work, interesting themes. "What if Graham Greene but time travel and the Cambodian genocide and interrogating Victorian-ness?" is the kind of question more sf should ask, clearly. Much better than "What if D&D but nothing bad ever happens?" I do like space adventures a lot but this is why I read the genre.
As any longtime follower of the Hugo Awards knows, there's one thing members of Worldcon are a little too into when it comes to the "Best Related Work" category, and that's finalists that are about Worldcon itself. This is an example of that genre; it investigates the issues that came with the Hugos administered at the Chengdu Worldcon, where members of the Hugo subcomittee preemptively removed works from the ballots without justification, violating the procedures laid out in the WSFS Constitution. Sure, this was definitely a significant piece of journalism when it comes to the Hugo Awards... but does that make it a significant piece of nonfiction writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy? I don't think so.
This is another piece of investigative journalism about the Chengdu Hugos. I gave it the edge over the other one because 1) I tend to find Barkley's prose style pretty pompous, and 2) Nicholas Whyte said it was better done, and if anyone would know, it would be him.
5. No Award
Like I said, I don't really care for when Hugo finalists are about the Hugos. If a piece of writing about Chengdu had to be a finalist, I would much rather it have been Ada Palmer's "Tools for Thinking about Censorship,"
which was inspired by Chengdu but has applicability beyond it...
unfortunately much moreso with each passing day here in the U.S. I find
myself recommending it to people who have nothing to do with the
sf&f community all the time. But I didn't think to nominate it, alas; I wonder if it will turn up on the longlist.
Is this a "related work"? I guess so. These redditors seem like nice folk but a bunch of redditors doing stuff isn't really what I want out of "Best Related Work"; again, does this really advance our understanding of the genre? Could be worse, though: it's not a Seanan McGuire tweet.
This is a four-hour YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel at Disney, chronicling its initial development and marketing, the host's (not very good) experiences there, and its long-term lack of success. I am not the target audience for four-hour YouTube videos to be honest, but if they have to exist, this is probably a good one. I watched it at 1.25 speed and was reasonably entertained throughout, and am now informed on a topic of mild interest to me.
2. Track Changes: Selected Reviews by Abigail Nussbaum
This collects a bunch of reviews by the sf critic Abigail Nussbaum from the last twenty years, mostly from her own blogs and Strange Horizons. Nicholas Whyte often says something like that a good critic: 1) gives you more insight into texts you already read, and 2) makes you want to read ones you haven't. Of course, these things are helped along by the critic having tastes that are, if not identical to yours, sympathetic and comprehensible.
I think Nussbaum succeeds on all of those marks. Her broadly positive reviews of works like N. K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, The Good Place season one, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun, and so on gave me a stronger sense of what those works were up to, even when I wouldn't have given them a positive review myself. I didn't particularly care for The Stone Sky, for example, even though I enjoyed the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy, but I did like her discussion of how the "dangerous minority" trope turns up in sf&f, where the persecuted minority has some kind of special power (like mutants in X-Men): "Instead of abandoning it, Jemisin compounds it, and then dares us to keep reacting to it from the same place of comfort that originally made it so popular. What does it mean, after all, to build a world in which there is no choice but to oppress and abuse certain people? It tells us nothing about real racism, but it might say a great deal about the kind of people for whom that kind of story holds an appeal."
She's also an incisive negative critic, figuring out what a text was trying to do and articulating how it fell short, as we see with Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Severance season one, Helen Wecker's The Golem and Jinni, Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, Jac Schaeffer's WandaVision, and so more. In her discussion of The Last Jedi, for example, she puts really well something that often bothers me about falling-to-the-Dark-Side stories in Star Wars: "Like nearly every Star Wars movie before it, The Last Jedi
is a film in which no one seems to have a firm understanding of what
good and evil actually are. In which the metaphor of the light and dark
sides of the force has been allowed to so thoroughly dominate that the
actual meaning of it--the idea that people are 'on the dark side' when
they do bad things to others--is treated almost as an
afterthought. The result is a film about a struggle for a man's soul in
which the matter of morality never even comes up. In which our heroes
try to convince a villain to become good without ever articulating
either what good is, or why being bad is undesirable." Some of these stories, I actually see more positively than she does, but a good negative review can still let you understand a work more deeply.
In particular, Nussbaum often puts works into their generic context,
pointing out how they resemble each other. Not to do the "gotcha" move
you sometimes see in genre criticism ("oho you thought this book was
original but isn't it just doing Iain Banks again?") but to better
reveal each text's own rhetorical project. Because she's done such a good job laying out her perspective on texts I do know, I find myself intrigued to read ones she gives positive reviews to that I haven't. It's clear that, like me, she's interested in both space opera and epic fantasy, but also wants works that interrogate how those genres work in interesting ways. Anyway, great stuff here, and I'd happily see this win.
1. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll
I've written a full review of this, but it will appear in the next issue of Studies in the Fantastic, so here I'll just be brief... but I really liked this! Jordan's take on exactly what the appeal of sf is to racists and fascists helped me understand the genre as a whole and our present political moment. What else could you want? Exactly the kind of thing the Best Related Work Hugo ought to be rewarding in my opinion. Am I biased in favor of my friend? Almost certainly, but if voting to help your friend win a Hugo Award is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
[UNRANKED] The Maid and the Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko / Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee
I left these two books off my ballot for different reasons. Jordan Ifueko was a finalist for the Lodestar Award two previous times, in 2021 and 2022, but neither book did much for me. I felt like I didn't need to read a third book by her that I would end up ranking in fourth or fifth. (Nicholas Whyte, though, said the kinks had been ironed out from the earlier books and ranked it first! Oh well, I made my decision.)
Moonstorm I would have read, even though I find Yoon Ha Lee a little variable. But after Worldcon created controversy by using ChatGPT to vet panelists, Lee withdrew Moonstorm. This was after the final ballot was published, so you technically still can vote for it, but he also took it out of the voter packet, and I hadn't downloaded the YA packet yet. So there you go.
4. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
This book follows parallel narratives of two sisters. There's certainly a good premise in here, but it very much struggles to get out. Rather than depict a war to liberate an oppressed country, it takes place years later, and shows the struggle to rebuild—both a nation and yourself. If you were the Chosen One who saved your people, what would you do next? Unfortunately, the backstory is a bit too complicated and a bit too relevant; it feels like you're reading a sequel to a book you never read, and the relationships between characters depend too much on things you're only told in brief bits of exposition. In the present-day narrative, one sister goes to dragon school in the nation that conquered her, but this is woefully underdeveloped. (To Shape a Dragon's Breath did the same basic idea much better.) The other sister experiments with dark powers to save her sister, but not much seems to happen there either. Both plotlines are more interested in romance; both sisters end up in very obvious enemies-to-lovers plots. "oh this person seems to hate me and i hate them but everytime i see them i get butterflies idk what this means..."
And this might seem small, but I found the linguistic worldbuilding very unconvincing. Like, the names didn't cohere or fit.
3. The Feast Makers by H. A. Clarke
While So Let Them Burn may have felt like a sequel to a book I didn't read, this actually was—and yet I enjoyed it much more. Mostly, I must admit, on vibes. This book gives no quarter to someone who hasn't read the previous ones; it seemed to have no clear central plotline, but instead be paying off character threads from earlier books, mostly about who the main character would get together with. But the vibes are good; it's about a teenage lesbian witch coven in (I am pretty sure) rural Ohio. It's not really my thing, to be honest, but it's so completely itself I found it charming regardless.
Unusually, I had actually read two Lodestar Award finalists before the ballot was even announced. This was a prequel to Elatsoe, which I read and ranked second in 2021. I enjoyed it a lot; as I said in my review, "Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole."
This is also a follow-up to a previous finalist. Often I might complain about that, but I guess a good follow-up to a previous finalist is better than a weak original novel (even if a weak original novel is better than a weak follow-up). I found this novel very interesting and unexpected; while the first novel was about the main character battling sexism so she can become an awesome mecha pilot and fight kaiju, the second is about her coming into an awareness of (essentially) Marxism and attempting to impose revolution on her society. Not really where I thought it was all going. Not a perfect book but a fascinating one, which is what I am happy to award.
Final Thoughts
I might have deployed "No Award" higher than normal in Best Novel but I actually think it was a decent shortlist. Of the six finalists, five were by authors who hadn't been Best Novel finalists before, and one by an author who hadn't been a Hugo finalist in any category at all. (That one ended up being my favorite, so there you go.) Yes, I thought three of them sucked but the good ones were quite good.
After last year's book-heavy shortlist, I had hopes that Best Related Work was back on track but unfortunately this year, we have just two actual books, two pieces of self-referential Worldcon journalism, a YouTube video, and bunch of people making posts on Reddit. Hopefully next year is better, because I really like discovering interesting sf criticism via this category, and that only happened once (kinda twice) this year!
What do I think will win? Best Novel is a tough one to judge, I think. Kingfisher has won in the past but I don't think Sorceress is strong enough to be a repeat winner. The Wiswell doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that will win over a majority (thankfully). If it's a Tchaikovsky, I think the voters will prefer Alien Clay to Service Model. I would of course dearly love it to be Ministry of Time, but I also see that it's the kind of book that is probably divisive (a lot of people on r/Fantasy have it on the bottom of their ballots; of course those people have bad taste). So my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it to win on transfers.
I'm guessing one of the about-the-Hugos works wins Related Work, it's that kind of year.
The tastes of the Hugo electorate in YA fiction are largely inscrutable. The two debuts in this category (So Let Them Burn and Feast Makers) don't strike me as having quite the wide appeal you need to clinch it. We have three follow-ups to previous finalists, sequels to books that came in second (Heavenly Tyrant), third (Sheine Lende), and sixth (Maid and the Crocodile). Based on that, I'm going to guess Heavenly Tyrant wins, but I am not very confident in this.
2022–23: Lower Decks 
Also, it's not branded as "Star Trek," but there was a finalist that was about Star Trek in the Best Related Work category in 2023, Wil Wheaton's memoir Still Just a Geek. This is, I think, the only Star Trek–related finalist in the history of the category; it finished in fourth.
2025: Lower Decks, Lower Decks! 
But the real surprise was that a work of Star Trek fiction was a finalist in Best Graphic Story. An original tie-in graphic novel, Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, placed on the ballot. 
Okay, second in my series of 2025 Hugo posts we have my reviews of all the books: Best Novel, Best Related Work (though once again we have a year with very few books), and Best Young Adult Book. Like I said 
