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.
I have enjoyed a lot of previous books and stories by T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, but this one didn't do it for me at all. I find it a bit hard to enumerate exactly why, to be honest, but I'm going to try.
The book has two protagonists. One is the daughter of a sorceress; the sorceress has (among other powers) the ability to make people "obedient," which forces them to do exactly what she wants. She often uses this on her own daughter as a form of punishment, making her do certain things she doesn't actually want to do. When the book opens, the mother decides she wants to get married, so the two of them head off to woo a rich man, the sorceress coming up with an excuse for them to be houseguests. (The book seems to take place in a place that is vaguely nineteenth-century Britain, though not exactly.)
The other protagonist is the middle-aged sister of the sorceress's target, who is skeptical of this woman intruding into their lives and decides to get rid of her... but also eventually realizes that this woman's daughter needs saving from her too.
In the acknowledgements, Vernon says her influence was the genre of regency romance but it more reminded me of Victorian sensation novels by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon (or later writers influenced by them, like Thomas Hardy), where the main threat is that the Wrong Marriage is going to happen with catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, compared to these novelists, the book very much comes up short. In a book by Collins or Braddon or Hardy, one very much feels the threat of the marriage, the inexorable pull of how it's going to wreck everyone's life. But I found that the tone didn't really come across here, as the sister would talk about how big a threat the sorceress was... but then kind of just sit around and throw a big house party, which didn't seem to correlate. Tonally, the moment where the book really fails is that the sorceress succeeds in marrying the brother... but the characters don't react with horror or anything, they're just like "oh well" and continue with their plans to try to stop (now undo) the marriage. I thought it was very weirdly handled, very much a lost opportunity.
The book is, unfortunately, filled with little moments that don't quite vibe right and thus stopped me from feeling invested. The daughter's only friend in her mother's household is their family's horse; it's supposed to be a big betrayal that the horse is actually her mother's familiar and has thus been funneling information to the mother all along... but we've only just been told this about the horse, so it doesn't come across at all. I had very little sense of what the brother saw in the sorceress; the linchpin of the sorceress's plan is that the brother is in love with her but the sorceress can't use magic to make this happen, yet we don't really get to see how she wins him over. Everyone else is onto her so quickly it makes the brother seem like quite a dunderhead. The sister has this subplot about not wanting to marry the guy she's in love with, but it never clearly came across why she had turned him down.
It's a shame because the basic concept of making people obedient and using it to explore the dynamics of child abuse seems quite potent, but I felt like the book largely squandered it. I don't think there's one big way in which this book whiffed it, but add up all my complaints above, and you end up with a book I never engaged with on any level, perhaps the first time that's ever happened to me with Vernon/Kingfisher.
Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot.
Hugo votes are due July 23, but before that was announced I worked out my reading schedule assuming a slightly tighter due date of July 16; after the announcement, I decided that was doable and so stuck with it. I typically read the finalists in a totally random order, but shuffle things around a little based on availability; this year, that meant saving three big books (Track Changes, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Service Model) until the end. And then, this year one finalist withdrew their book from contention after the ballot was announced, meaning I would actually finish all my reading by July 10 if I stuck with my original pace.
The net effect of these three things together was that I finished my reading for the short fiction categories quite early, on June 20. I don't know that I have ever been done with three categories* over a month before the deadline!
I'm trying to remember if I nominated anything in any of these categories. (Unfortunately, I didn't save my nominating ballot. Maybe I don't have one because I didn't nominate anything at all?) If I did nominate something, it was "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, and it did make the final ballot.
Anyway, here's my rankings and notes. As always, I've linked to longer reviews I've already done when relevant, or to the finalist itself when freely available online.
Best Novella
7. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
"I'm only a silly girl," Nhung said gravely. "Aren't I a child until I get married, when I shall magically become the lady of the house?"
This is the fifth novella in the "Singing Hills" cycle, about a traveling monk collecting stories; it is the fourth to be a Hugo finalist. Having read four of these now, I wish I found them more interesting. The premises always seem good but there's something too languid about them, they never really get off the ground or engage. This has some interesting twists, but largely at a point where I'd stopped caring. I don't actually a have strong opinion about whether this is better or worse than Navigational Entanglements, I found them about equally dull, but I guess I'll give the edge to something that's not an installment in a series that's been nominated three times already.
6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
No, she hated herself for allowing herself to hope. To believe that it could ever be different. [...] [T]hat she'd unlock the ever-shifting and incomprehensible set of rules that allowed her to make sense of other people.
In a science fiction world, navigating between star systems is dangerous because of carnivorous entities that feed on consciousness (akin to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith). One of those entities escapes into the real world, and so the clans that handle navigation need to assemble a team to hunt it down. They must overcome their differences and mistrust as well as a larger conspiracy in order to solve the problem. This is the sixth Hugo finalist by Aliette de Bodard I've read since 2017, and while obviously she has her fans, whatever she's doing just doesn't work for me. I felt there were too many characters who I didn't particularly care about, or even care to tell apart, and without that, the book just doesn't work. Like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas, there's a sapphic romance, but like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas it seems to happen instantaneously for not really much of a reason.
5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
A monster who begat monsters, and I walk with them now; little tyrants.
I felt this started quite promisingly: a tyrant loses his children in magical woods from which no one ever returns; he comes to the one woman who ever entered the woods and returned with whoever was lost and demands she recovers his children. At first it's spooky and weird, but—and it feels weird to say this about a novella—it's too long. There's some interesting stuff in here but not enough compared to the length of the book. There's only so much "bargaining with spooky tricky wood creatures" I can find interesting. Still, I was interested at first, so above Navigational Entanglements it goes.
If you read my full review of this, you'll see I was quite tepid about it—both in the sense I'm not sure What Moves the Dead needed a sequel, and in the sense that it doesn't seem very Hugo-worthy. So that I've placed it here is more a testament to the weakness of the rest of the novella shortlist than anything else. Even if I don't really see the reason for this, you can count on T. Kingfisher to be interesting and amusing all the way through.
3. No Award
Once again, we have a year of entirely Tor novellas, all specifically Tordotcom except What Moves at Night, which comes from a different Tor imprint, Nightfire. Are they all terrible or something? No, they're fine. But is this award doing what I want it do? Not really. People are always proposing new Hugo categories; maybe I'll submit a motion to the Worldcon Business Meeting to split the category into Best Tor Novella and Best Novella by Literally Anyone Else. Anyway, putting "No Award" here is more my protest at the lack of imagination demonstrated by the nominators than anything else; in my mind, there's a huge gap between What Feasts at Night and what comes next.
2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...
This is an sf story (it is no coincidence that sf stories took up my top two spots) about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests.
1. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
"[H]e was a man like you." "Like me?" "Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad." There was silence in the tent, for a moment. Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same." "Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."
This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. The first novella I read for the Hugos, but I instantly knew it would be the one to beat.
[S]he could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumincation, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.
An old magician losing her powers takes on a new apprentice. I think this is probably good at what it does, but stories about old magicians taking on new apprentices are just never going to be my thing, to be honest. On a different day, I could be persuaded to move it up one place on my ballot; "Loneliness Universe" has higher aspirations but "By Salt" has better jokes.
The world was still filled with people, of course. Just people she knew nothing or very little about.
This story seems quite potent: the narrator stops being able to see her friends and family, even though they're right where she is. It feels like it could be a potent metaphor for the isolation brought on by our modern condition, how you can be in the same room as someone but not connected to them because they're on their phone or whatever. But I didn't find the mechanics of how it worked very convincing, and the metaphor didn't really land, didn't feel like it told me anything interesting about how the world works. I feel bad ranking it this low, because I do think Triantafyllou is probably up to something a bit more interesting than Pinsker et al., but I don't think she really pulled off what she was attempting.
Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf, but this feels very much like one of her minor works to me. It's about a woman going to see her sister for the first time in a long while, but weird things are afoot. Pinsker has a couple different modes; I think she's at her best when she's doing science fiction (including near future) or fantasy work (especially where the magic is kind of a metaphor), but to me, she's less interesting when she's in what I think of as her "creepypasta" mode, of which this is very much an example. I find this kind of work well constructed but ultimately kind of hollow. This one in particular has a very rushed and unconvincing ending following the big reveal, and I'm not sure why, because it spent too much time building up to that moment, so there was definitely word count to spare.
I sighed. “Academic jobs are hard to find. My husband Stuart also has a PhD, and he landed a job in Minnesota. One thousand miles away from the nearest seals who aren’t in a zoo. And he’s got tenure. We’re only here because he’s on sabbatical.”
Naomi Kritzer is a favorite of the Hugo electorate, and she also ends up in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes pretty consistently, so I feel like I have read a lot of her work at this point. Based on that sampling, I would say she has two modes: near-future sf focusing on stuff like AI and algorithms, but also community and hope (e.g., the CatNet books, "The Dragon Project," Liberty's Daughter, "The Year Without Sunshine," "Better Living Through Algorithms") and spooky folk horror that is also kind of uplifting (e.g., "The Thing About Ghost Stories," "Little Free Library," "Monster"). This is not too dissimilar to Pinsker, actually, and like with Pinsker, I find Kritzer a lot more interesting in her near-future mode than her horror mode. Unfortunately, this is her in her horror mode... though horror isn't quite the right word for it. This story is well-observed (I am of course always into an accurate depiction of academia) and has some good ideas, but a lot like the Pinsker, actually, feel like too much of a slow burn compared to the length. I doubt it's bad, but it's not really what I am interested in. That said, I did like it more than "Signs of Life"; it felt like it had more of a real pay-off.
This sf novelette is included in Leckie's new short fiction collection of the same title; above, I've linked to my review of the complete volume. Like a lot of Leckie's work, it's a weird, disturbing story about the way our biology drives us. That said, it did feel like minor Leckie to me compared to her novels or even some of the other short fiction collected in the same book. But I think it was asking more interesting questions and doing more interesting things than "Signs of Life" and "Four Sisters," so in this case minor Leckie outranks minor Pinsker or minor Kritzer.
The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.
There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. [...] I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.
I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.
This is a weird near-future story about a world where there's basically no permanent media anymore: physical books and DVDs and such are all gone, and now all media is electronic—and thus all media can be perpetually altered, updated, tinkered with to suit the present moment. The media of the past no longer serves as a window into that past. I'd never heard of Thomas Ha, but he seems to be one to watch out for based on this. I really liked this, it's basically exactly my taste in short sf, and it easily acquired a high place on my ballot.
“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”
I said above that I haven't really enjoyed Vo's Singing Hills novellas very much, but last year I did really like her novelette "On the Fox Roads," an historical fantasy, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a decent story that I just never figured out, a good example of me finding it easier to glom onto an sf premise than a fantasy one.
The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.
This is a piece of flash fiction about a prison planet. It's evocatively written, but I find flash fiction kind of tricky, especially in an sf context; this is more worldbuilding than a story.
“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”
I thought this was perfectly okay. It's set in a fairy-tale world beset by giant snails; the main character is a working-class woman who helps the lord whose estate she lives on defeat one. But that's about it, I felt, except for an overly long epilogue about what happens to everyone later. I get what happened but I didn't think there was much of a hook here. Kowal is a competent writer, so it's well told, but so what? More to my taste than "Five Views," but I didn't think trying to do something as interesting as "We Will Teach You How to Read."†
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
I thought this was very clever, but perhaps more clever than enjoyable to read. Its plays with form to communicate content, and it's about stories and the ways we tell them, and how that can change people.
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
Now this is one of those stories where I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I understood enough, and I found it absorbing regardless. Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan books (I particularly liked the first of those, A Memory Called Empire), and like those, this is a story about empire, but moreso it's about history, the way we interpret and reinterpret the past. I found it really sharply written and thought-provoking; on a different day, I think I gladly could have put it in first. (Am I just a sucker for stories that include excerpts from made-up works of scholarly writing with real citations? Probably but I guess everyone's got to have their thing.)
This is the one story in this whole post that I had before the ballot was announced, and like I said at the top, if I nominated anything, I nominated this. You can read my full review at the link, but I really enjoyed this a lot; a clever engagement with sf criticism's eternal Omelas debates, and beautifully told in its own way. I kind of think this is the obvious candidate to win (fandom does love its self-referential stuff), so obviously so that maybe I should put "Three Faces" in first just to give it an edge in a potential upset, but oh well, this story is that good.
Overall Thoughts
Last year, I was excited that Best Novella was actually kind of diverse... but this year we're back to the same-old same-old of Tor Tor Tor. I mean, I'm part of the problem here (I don't nominate anything because I don't keep up with novellas) but it does make me grumpy. And not only is it so much Tor, but three of them are written by writers who have been finalists multiple previous times: this is Nghi Vo's fourth nomination, de Bodard's fourth, and Kingfisher's third, and at least two of them are follow-ups to previous finalists. (I have read conflicting information on whether Navigational Entanglements takes place in the same "Xuya Universe" as de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective.) If the point of sf&f is to take the reader to new worlds, it's not really happening here.
Similar problems with nominee diversity afflict the other two categories: of the twelve finalists in Best Novelette and Short Story, nearly half from Uncanny, who I think benefit from being freely available online and soliciting stories from Internet favorites. Usually there are a couple that make the Uncanny dominance worthwhile (e.g., I really enjoyed Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine" in 2024) but not this year. Thankfully there is a little bit of diversity at the edges: in contrast to Uncanny appearing on the ballot in these two categories a cumulative thirty-five times since 2016, this is only the fourth appearance by a Strange Horizons story since 2007... too bad I didn't like it more. We also have an original story from a single-author collection (I don't think this happens much) and the first appearance of a story from the once-dominant Asimov's since 2018. (Asimov's, admittedly, was the Tor/Uncanny of 1986 to 2010!)‡
All that said, maybe my real problem isn't a lack of nominee diversity so much as that the tastes of Uncanny editors Lynne M. and Michael Damian Thomas just aren't my tastes, as my top spots in Best Novelette and Best Short Story both went to Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld has had at least twenty stories in those two categories since 2010. But, well, I'm always gushing about how much I like editor Neil Clarke. I'm guessing that whenever volume ten of Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out, I will find a lot more to my taste there.
I'll wrap this up by making my predictions, with the caveat that I have not been very plugged into the discourse this year, beyond reading the threads about Hugo finalists on r/Fantasy and Nicholas Whyte's blog posts, neither of whom I think is very representative. I'm guessing:
something I ranked below "No Award" will win Best Novella (I am always disappointed by this category)
Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie (voters love them, and to be fair, they are all good writers)
Isabel J. Kim will win Best Short Story (the story is so very online, and sort of a meta-take on fandom discourse... plus actually quite good!)
* Well, actually five, since I also finished my last Lodestar finalist on June 7 and my last Best Graphic Story one on June 11. But those are other posts.
† After I wrote up my rankings, I read the discussion thread for "Marginalia" on r/Fantasy, which was pretty savage, and made me like the story less. I was kind of tempted to downgrade it after that, but laziness won out; and anyway, fundamentally I don't have a strong opinion between the bottom three in this category.
‡ Hm, I am starting to feel a blog post with charts and graphs coming on...
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 
Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot. 
