The Hugo results are out and first things first, I CALLED IT. Naomi Kritzer got two Hugos, with Better Living Through Algorithms and The Year Without Sunshine both winning their categories. I love being right.

But, let’s start at the beginning and talk about individual results in a little bit. First of all, there was a pretty big news story about the Hugo Awards a couple of weeks ago. The Worldcon Committee came out and confirmed that they had received a number of votes that they were able to confirm as being part of an attempt to rig the results in favour of an undisclosed finalist and removed all the fraudulent votes. Click here for the full story.

After all the issues with last year’s Hugos disqualifying works and writers for no reason and the numbers in their votes not matching up, I am so relieved to see that this year the crew are being transparent about everything. It gives me a lot of hope that in the future, Worldcon organisers will continue to ensure the integrity of the awards.

Now onto the awards. The complete list of winners can be found HERE, and a breakdown of the voting and nomination statistics is HERE. Again, so glad we have these stats released straight away, since the delay in releasing them until the last minute was one of the ways the Chengdu Worldcon team tried to bury their dodgy actions.

Also, the stats are always really interesting. Like, Godzilla Minus One only needed one more vote to qualify for the Best Dramatic Presentation Longform ballot (Damn, I’d forgotten how awesome that movie was until this reminder) and Day Ten Thousand by Isabel J. Kim was also only one vote from getting on the ballot in the Best Short Story category. Hard to say which story it would have replaced, since The Sound of Children Screaming and The Mausoleum’s Children were both tied for second last in the final round of voting for that category.

Again, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Here are the winners in the four main fiction categories.

Best Novel: Some Desperate Glory – Emily Tesh

Best Novella: Thornhedge – T. Kingfisher

Best Novelette: The Year Without Sunshine – Naomi Kritzer

Best Short Story: Better Living Through Algorithms – Naomi Kritzer

I have already reviewed the short stories and the novelettes, so click on those links (short story here, novelettes here.) to get my thoughts on the individual finalists. I don’t think I’ll review all the novels due to time constraints, but I did mention that I’d be reviewing the novellas too, and that is coming, I just didn’t get there in time. To be honest, my novella reading came to a grinding halt once I got to Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet. I’ve been trying to push through the story and give it a fair review, but seeing how poorly it performed (69 first place votes, with the second last story having 330. And also apparently only one second place vote) I feel a bit more validated in not finishing and moving on. Especially since I haven’t gotten to the winner, Thornhedge yet.

Last point I want to bring up in these categories is something strange I noticed in the Short Story stats. The Answerless Journey by Han Song was first place in terms of nominations, having 69 nominations to How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub‘s 53. Despite this though, The Answerless Journey flopped hard in the finals, coming in sixth. Personally, I really disliked that story, and in my review of it I wasn’t sure how much of that dislike was due to the story vs due to the translation. Seeing the numbers, I’m blaming the translation more now, both for this story and the other Alex Woodend translation Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet (though I did like Seeds of Mercury, and I don’t speak or read any Chinese, so take all this speculation with a grain of salt.) The only reason I can see for the discrepancy between how these stories did in the nominations vs the final voting is that most of the nominations came from people who read these stories in Chinese, where as the votes for the winner came from people who only read the English translations, which if this theory is correct must not have been as good as the original version. Which, I think that checks out since members of the Chengdu Worldcon could nominate for the awards, but only members of the Glasgow Worldcon could vote in the final ballot. If anyone out there does read Chinese and has read the original versions of these three stories, please let me know what you think of them.

Now let’s touch on some of the other categories. Baldur’s Gate 3 crushed it in the Best Game category, winning with the most decisive margin this year. Strange Horizons magazine follows FIYAH as the second semiprozine to beat Uncanny Magazine (which is a huge achievement, Uncanny wins so much for a very good reason) and also, a big congratulations are in order for Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer, who won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the Best Fan Writer categories respectably after being deemed ineligible last year for no reason. This is particularly huge for Zhao, who’s eligibility for the Astounding Award was extended an extra year to make up for last year’s dramas.

Now, I’m going to sign off on the Hugos for now, though there will be more Hugos content once I read the novellas. Sorry if this post is a bit of a mess, I seem to be getting sick but I really wanted to get a Hugo post out there before it became old news.

~ Jayde

PS. If your still want more speculative fiction awards, the 2024 World Fantast Award finalists were also released today. Check them out here.