The 2025 Hugo Award were awarded last night, and first of all, a big congratulations to all the winners. And the nominees; just being on the ballot is a huge achievement. I have to be honest, This will be a quick post because I have not been following the Hugo Awards closely this year. This isn’t really a Hugo Award or Worldcon problem, though their were issues, such as a controversy about using AI to select panelists. Nothing on the scale of the 2023 Hugo Awards though.
My ongoing lack of interest is simply due to a number of changes in my finances, available time and reading habits. I might talk about some of these factors in a future post, because I think deciding what media to read or watch when time and money is short is an interesting topic. For now though, let’s focus on the Hugos. The only category where I read every nominee was the Short Story award, so that’s probably what I’ll be talking about the most. First though, let’s look at the results.
2025 Hugo Award Voting Statistics
First off, lets get the controversial stuff out of the way. There were as usual a few works that were found ineligible due to things like wordcount (Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle) or release date (Dune The Musical) but there were a few withdrawals as well. The most notable was Yoon Ha Lee withdrawing his book Moonstorm for consideration for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book after the ballot was finalised. This is very rare, and created a bit of an awkward situation since it was too late to remove it from the ballot and it still received 17 votes, but I applaud Lee for making that stand.
The withdrawal came on May 1st after it was revealed that ChatGPT was used to assist in vetting panelists. LLMs were NOT used for the Hugo Awards themselves, so I can understand other creators not withdrawing their work, but it is still a huge issue. Others have explained why better than me (File 770 has a really good article tracking the controversy and showing relevant posts. Check them out HERE) but I’ll just add that this is bad for privacy concerns and also because LLMs hallucinate. The amount of human supervision needed to ensure good results from this process would nullify any time saved by the process if it was being done right. In the end, three Hugo Administrators resigned over this. Their Bluesky statement can be found HERE.
Moving on though, let’s look at the good. What I like to think of THE BIG AWARD, the Hugo for Best Novel, was won by Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. I know, I know, I have been told I need to read this one, I am still shaken from his 2019 novella Vigilance, and it has now won both the Hugo Award and the Goodreads Choice Award. It is embarrassing that I haven’t gotten to it before making this post, but I will fix that. Looking at the voting statistics, Tainted Cup won not just after the preferences, but was the first preference by a margin of over 200 votes. It received 470 first preferences, whilst the next most popular first preference vote (and the overall second place book) A Sorceress Comes to Call, received only 266 first preferences.
This was a huge win for Robert Jackson Bennett. Absolutely huge.
In this statistics report, they included some nice graphs that showed how the preferences flowed. Whilst a lot of categories were won by the primary vote winner, not all were. In the Best Game or Interactive Work category for example, the winner, Caves of Qud, was actually 3rd in the primary vote, behind Dragon Age: The Veilgaurd (2nd) and Legend of Zelda: Echos of Wisdom (4th). Interestingly, in the Short Story category, two works were tied for 1st in the primary vote.
Stitched to Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo and Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omalas Hole by Isabel J. Kim both received 279 first place votes from Hugo members, with Vo’s story winning on preferences, with a final score of 678 to 532. I am shocked by this result. I thought the Kid in the Omalas Hole story was the most likely winner, even though I personally didn’t gel with it that much. It captured a lot of what I can best describe as rage at the system, which this year especially I thought would be impactful. It was also the winner of the Locus and the Nebula this year, so I thought a clean sweep was very likely. And even if Kim wasn’t going to get the triple crown, I’m surprised that Stitched to Skin was the story to beat it. I personally found it to be the least memorable story on the ballot, and it’s not like it got through just because it was by Nghi Vo. Everyone on that ballot was a well known and loved Hugo Veteran. Except for Kim, though she was nominated for the Best New Writer Award once. I guess it’s time for me to insert the Principle Skinner meme.
Looking at how many opinions I have on the Short Story category, I really do need to get back on the Hugo horse. it’s fun comparing great stories. And even though I would have ranked Stitched to Skin Like Family Is last or second last on my ballot, I’m not saying its a bad story. You don’t get bad stories in the Hugos. Not unless it’s 2015 or 2016. Hopefully next year I’m back fully. And more importantly, I hope they don’t screw it up next year in California.
~ Lauren
Jayde Holmes 