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As I imagine most people reading this will have seen by now, this year's Hugo Award winners were announced over the weekend at Renovation. You can see the full list of winners at Locus here, you can find all the voting and nomination stats in one PDF here, and if you feel so inclined you can watch a recording of the ceremony here.

Congratulations, of course, to all the winners. None of my personal favourites went home the winner in the fiction categories (although Best Novella, at least, was a sufficiently strong shortlist that almost any of the nominees would have been a good winner) but I was particularly pleased with three categories: Best Fanzine, in which Chris Garcia and James Bacon won for The Drink Tank; Best Fan Writer, in which I was delighted to see Claire Brialey win at last (particularly because she writes with equal facility about the experience of being an sf reader and fan, and about sf itself -- we've been lucky to publish a few of her reviews here); and Best Editor Short Form, in which Sheila Williams' win was long overdue, given that Asimov's has provided two-thirds of the winners and nominees in the short fiction categories over the last five years.

Commentary elsewhere:

  • Abigail Nussbaum: "That day in late summer when SF fandom blearily pries open its sleep-glued eyes after a long and dimly-remembered evening, and looks dizzily about itself to see just how bad the damage is..."
  • Adam Whitehead: "The Hugo Awards Get It Wrong. Again"
  • Aiden Moher: "Bottom line, it’s an old men’s club that rewards the same people too consistently, doing the entirety of the genre an injustice"
  • Andrew Wheeler: "Hugo voters, I am very disappointed in you. You have one year to do better than this, or There Will Be Consequences"
  • Cheryl Morgan: "This year we have had more people than ever participate in the process, and guess what? Yes, the results are more populist. What did you expect?"
  • Ian Sales: "So the Hugo results are in and… ho-hum"
  • Jamie Todd Rubin: "We're all winners when it comes to the Hugo awards"
  • Jed Hartman: "I think my favorite thing about the Hugos is seeing winners being appreciative of the award, and there was even more of that than usual last night"
  • Jason Sanford: "I just wonder if anyone will care about these Hugo fiction winners a decade or two from now"
  • John Scalzi: "Point is, yes, people are bitching about the Hugo results. When do they not? Let everyone have their fun and we’ll all meet back here next year for more of the same."
  • Kat Howard: "No day is an appropriate day to try and cast tarnish on the shiny rocketship trophies"
  • Larry Nolen: "The Hugos rarely appeal to me; I typically place much more value to the World Fantasy Awards and that certainly shall be the case this year"
  • Mike Glyer: "Inside the 2011 Hugo voting statistics"
  • Nicholas Whyte: "I guess I can't complain too much"
  • Shaun Duke: "I wasn't terribly disappointed by the majority of the selections"
  • Visions of Paradise: "Rather than make subjective qualitative comments on whether I agree with the recent Hugo Awards, I would like to discuss the individual histories of the winners"
  • Yendi: "the transparency of the Hugos is something I really, really love"
  • Discussion at Tor.com
  • Discussion at io9
  • Discussion at James Nicoll's LJ



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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