It’s that time of year again—the time when the Hugo Award nominees are announced, and we get to share our opinions on whether or not we agree with the choices of the Hugo electorate on what’s good and what’s not. This year is slightly different than usual, in that changes to the awards process mean there are now six nominees in each category (while each voter could nominate five works per category) and that this year’s Worldcon is trialling a Hugo Award for Best Series.
This year is a historic one for the Hugo Awards in more ways than one. In addition to the changes to the awards process, this is the first year in which the Best Novel nominees have been so completely devoid in white men. It may also be the first year in which more than one out trans author received a Best Novel nomination for their work.
Look at this list of Best Novel contenders:
- All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Books / Titan Books)
- A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager US)
- Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor Books / Head of Zeus)
- Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris Books)
- The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
- Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Tor Books)
Look at it! I’ve found Jemisin’s recent work a little too grim, and I never managed to get into All the Birds in the Sky or Liu’s work the way some people have, but there’s no denying that they’re seriously good contenders. And the list as a whole is half people of colour, which—well. About damn time.
On a personal level, at least three of these novels mean a very great deal to me. A Closed and Common Orbit, Ninefox Gambit, and Too Like the Lightning are all books that, if you’re paying attention, have really queer orientations towards their worlds. Too Like the Lightning is determined to play self-conscious games with gender and sexuality in its consciously archaising voice, while both A Closed and Common Orbit and Ninefox Gambit take queerness as an unremarkable default, the baseline state of their worlds. And A Closed and Common Orbit is such a book about queer families and queer bodies, it really is.
From an intersectional and feminist point of view, this is a Best Novel list that demonstrates that the SFF field is finally making more than mere gestures towards progress and inclusiveness. While the John W. Campbell Award list of nominees for Best New Writer is not quite so inclusive, it includes among its number queer voices and female ones.
This is the first time, I think, that the Best Novel list has been more inclusive along more axes of diversity than any of the shorter fiction lists. (Which are, to be fair, full of really pretty awesome work, with a couple of notable exceptions.) As a queer woman, it’s amazing to me to see so many queer stories and queer voices represented. As someone who’s invested in seeing a much more inclusive genre, it’s really wonderful to see that the fiction nominees this year in the traditional categories, and especially in the headline category of Best Novel, are definitely stepping up to show that the inclusive view of the genre is gaining ground.
I’m tempted to claim this year as a triumph for queer SFF, and the voices of out queer writers within SFF. I really want to claim this year as a triumph for inclusive SFF in general.
I think, though, that we still probably have some ways to go on that.
PS: Is anyone else going to be really torn about what to vote for? Because I am. Really really torn. So much is just so good.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Find her at her blog. Or her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
I’m on my 4th of the 6 nominees and I’m very torn as to how to rank them. So far they’re all excellent in very different ways.
2 of the nominees were ones on my ballot, which kind of predisposes me towards them, but even then I don’t know how I’m going to rank them.
Honestly, so far, I’ve read 3 of the novels, and for me the ranking for #1 is pretty easy. I liked “A Closed and Common Orbit” a heck of a lot, the others I liked on the whole but with reservations. I’d probably put “Too Like The Lightning” at #2, and “Ninefox Gambit” third. I’ll try to give the other nominees a read but just knowing my tastes and the premise I doubt “All The Birds in the Sky” will get very high, and both “Death’s End” and “The Obelisk Gate” are iffier prospects simply because both are series in which I need to read one other book first to fully appreciate (I read the first of Liu’s trilogy last time it was nominated… of the two, it’d probably speak the most to my reading tastes, but I suspect I’ll still like Chambers’ and maybe Palmer’s work more even if I manage to catch up).
Still looks like a great batch of nominees… while there were other books from that year I liked more than some of them, at least this year I can’t find immediate fault with any of the ones that made it.
I am also very happy and excited about the significance of this year’s nominees…but am also a bit surprised that Matt Ruff’s spectacular LOVECRAFT COUNTRY was not nominated ( I think it was published last year and therefore eligible).
Wow, the novel choices this year are excellent, can’t remember when we had this many good science fiction novels up for the hugo in recent years
Put me down as another person who loved “A Closed and Common Orbit”. And while it’s supposedly a sequel to “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”, you can read “Orbit” without having read “Planet”. I can’t wait to read more by Ms. Chambers, and here’s hoping she writes a third book in this series because (don’t worry no spoilers) there were characters in book 1 that didn’t show up in book 2 that I’d like to see again.
So has the nominations process be de-puppied now?
@6: The rabid variety still attempted to get nominees in by block voting, and succeeded in a few cases (not in the Novel category), but pretty much just one per category, I believe. Some were people who legitimately possibly have been nommed, some were joke noms, and some were just self-promotion for VD. In addition to the rules making slates much less effective, I saw an analysis somewhere that suggests the numbers of Puppy voters were far far lower this year, like only 1/5 the number as previous years. After last year’s shutout I saw a number of them insisting that they were going to move on to the Dragoncon awards.
The more mild, sad variety I believe just became a “we’re going to suggest good things that might have been overlooked” and essentially were, as a group, a non-factor (it’s likely impossible to say any of their nominees were accepted or rejected because they don’t have a single set)
It’s true that you can read Orbit without having read Planet. However, if you care about such things, you should know that Orbit has some spoilers for Planet.
I’m excited about the music nomination in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Splendor & Misery by Clipping, made up of rapper Daveed Diggs (Hamilton) and two talented score composers: Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson.
“Splendor & Misery is an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him.”
https://clppng.bandcamp.com/album/splendor-misery
The last music nomination in this category was in 1971.
Not just a great diversity in authors, but a great diversity in storytelling and structure of the tales. I myself am watching that best series award. With its requirement to have an installment published during the past year, it may end up encouraging some authors to revisit old, familiar characters.
It’s a really good list. I’ve already read “A Closed and Common Orbit” and “Too Like the Lightning” and enjoyed them both a lot. We’ll see where the others take me.
@11, I’m also happy with the ballot (especially the reclaiming of Best Related Work, which has been an unreadable mess for several years but was fascinating before the rise of the Puppies). I’m cautiously optimistic about Best Series. I like the idea as a corrective to the historic Hugo bias against the series format, but I’m wondering how practical it will be to vote it for voters who are significantly behind on many or all of these series. Also, I presume the Series nominees will not be in the packet; I suspect the inclusion of WoT was a one-off by Tor.
I made a big run on my public library after the noms came out and am going to do my best with the new category, but it’s a BIG increase in reading. Likewise, while the six-nominee rule does seem to have been very effective in keeping Puppies from taking over categories, I wonder whether it will affect voter turnout, since it does greatly expand the amount of reading necessary to do a good ballot? I have a carefully planned program to hopefully get through mine before the deadline. Labor of love, but it’s quite the labor for voters who are also conventionally employed.
Second the excitement for the nomination of Splendor and Misery. I hope this raises more awareness of the possibility of alternative drama formats, such as music or radio drama.
I don’t get Liu. I found him to be a phenomenally bad writer. I struggled through two of those books before deciding to cut my losses.
“Queer” is a trigger word for me, so to be able to read this at all, I had to copy it into notepad and replace “queer” with “gay.”
The reason it’s a trigger word for me is that I came out of the closet in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1974 when I was just 15. The only reason we have the rights we do today is because people like me were willing to stand up and take the heat, but as a side effect, we have a certain amount of PTSD. I like to think we’ve earned at least a little consideration for our sacrifice.
Perhaps Tor (and others) could adopt a rule that “queer” can’t be used more than three times in a single article. I think I could cope with that, and I suspect others could too.