Hugo voting is officially closed! And I even finished reading all the categories I planned to on the day before the deadline, not the day of, so where is my gold star please and thank?

Like apparently a fair number of people, at least from what I see online… I’m not a big fan of this year’s slate. I’m not going to go into essay level detail on each individual book, mostly because I want you not to be too bored to read this all, but I will talk a bit in general about some of the categories I had the most issues with and why, and maybe what I think the slate could have looked like instead, as well as a few predictions (about which I am inevitably wrong, every single year).

Before all this kicked off, however, back in the long ago time of like… May? Maybe May. Whenever I actually submitted my nominations. I was actually really optimistic about this year. 2022 was such a fucking stormer of a year for fiction, I thought. I could come up with two full slates of novels I was happy to nominate, and had a hell of a time cutting down to one, so surely, surely we’d see that astonishing quality on show in the awards, no? Or maybe we’d get to see some Chinese fiction on the ballot, get a couple of novel slots for the host country, maybe some novellas? Wouldn’t that be cool, and if they were available in translation, all the better for me getting to read some stuff I might not otherwise have picked up.

And we did get some Chinese fiction in, though only in short story and novelette (and the novelette wasn’t available anywhere in English, that I could find). That was cool. I really quite liked “Zhurong on Mars” by Regina Kanyu Wang, which is a redo of a Chinese myth with nanobots and space exploration, which was pretty neat. I was much less a fan of “On the Razor’s Edge” by Jiang Bo, whose dryness of language might be written off as an artifact of the machine translation I had, but whose choice of subject matter and slant on it… could not. But still, got to read some new authors and new stories, this is what I was hoping for, even if not as broadly suffused through the award categories as I’d have liked. I’d give it a C+ on the second of my hopes for the awards.

We’re not aspiring to those dizzying heights with my first, let me tell you.

To be blunt, across novel and novella, I put four works below No Award, because I simply did not think they had any place being on an award shortlist, and if any of them won, I would be kicking myself if I hadn’t done my bit to prevent it. Those are four books I think reflect badly on the Hugo Awards if they win. But what’s left doesn’t exactly make up for it either. The only exception is Even Though I Knew the End, which was an unexpected delight for me, someone who had previously not meshed with Polk’s other work at all. Of the rest? The best I can say is “fine, I guess”. We have the lesser entries of better series. We have mush. This hardly feels like the same award that had nominations for Piranesi, A Desolation Called Peace, Harrow the Ninth, She Who Became the Sun, Ninefox Gambit, All the Birds in the Sky, The Fifth Season, Ancillary Justice… if someone engaged only with the Hugo shortlist, they’d be right to think SFF had had an incredibly weak year.

But it wasn’t! This is the thing. And sure, maybe we’ll find out when we get the stats (if we get the stats) that Babel isn’t here because the author withdrew. Maybe she wasn’t even alone in that. But that can’t have been everyone… and so I’m left with the knowledge that this is what we nominated, and that’s kind of tragic, because what it is, beyond all else, is safe.

It’s early 00s nostalgia bait. It’s further entries in popular series. It’s retellings. It’s cosy murder or cosy horror or cosy fantasy, and there’s nothing wrong with cosy, I enjoy cosy, but it’s not pushing the boundaries or stretching the limits or the reader it’s just… nice. So the ballot is just nice. It’s fluff. It’s full of things without substance or thought, where here, of all places, we should be celebrating the things that make us think. And sure, not every entry on every ballot of every year has to be that. But we normally have some. Maybe the rest is stuff that isn’t the newest or the most hard-hitting, but maybe it’s just really very good? Yeah we haven’t got much of that either. It’s a ballot full of pedestrianism. Of safeness and niceness and rehashing things we already know, or continuing things already begun, and it’s just really fucking dull.

We can do better, right? Right? I want to hope so.

I promised predictions too, so predictions I shall provide (please feel free to disregard them; I do not have my finger on the pulse of anyone beside myself).

For best novel… I think it’ll be Nettle and Bone. But I’d not be shocked honestly by any of them. Maybe Nona. Sequels don’t tend to win, especially if the first entry didn’t do it first.

For best novella, I both think and hope it’ll be Even Though I Knew the End.

For novelette, John Chu seems to be winning plenty, and I see now reason to suspect If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You won’t do just as well here.

For short story, I’m pretty split between “Rabbit Test” and “Zhurong on Mars”, but I’m leaning towards the former because of its strong and currently relevant (in the US) themes.

Am I thrilled about most of this? Novella and novelette are both my top picks in their ballot and both stories I love, but I just wish they’d both had competitive years to fight in.

It doesn’t help that between the Hugos and the two awards I got to jury on (this isn’t a complaint SCKA and BFA – I enjoyed them both very much please have me back in future ily), it feels like I’ve spent hardly any time this summer reading books I’ve actively chosen, or at least without other books hanging over my head waiting for me to read them. But now, I am free*. Now I can tackle the massive pile that has been growing and growing all summer. I cannot WAIT. There are so many exciting things in there I’ve been looking forward to so much… there’s The Water Outlaws, there’s He Who Drowned the World, there’s The Dance Tree, there’s The House With The Golden Door, there’s a whole load of cool novellas. The rest of the Neon Hemlock stuff is going to make its way into my kindle. There’s going to be a sequel to Lavender House. And now I get to actually tackle them all and it’s great and… I should actually do that. I don’t actually like having a big tbr, it’s not how I roll, and so I’m hopefully going to spend the rest of the year deconstructing that, and maybe finding some new gems to obsess about when nomination season rolls around again next year. Because the best thing to do after being a little let down by the things making the awards this year is to read things that make me excited, so I can tell everyone about them and hopefully, maybe, do my little part towards making next year all the better.

Fingers crossed!

Also this is the part where I say, if you didn’t know, that Nerds of a Feather are collectively nominated for a Hugo Award for best fanzine, and I am absolutely beside myself with glee every time I think about this. I will be absolutely vibrating with joy for probably at least a month if we win… I cannot even begin to describe. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

*Except that one book I have to read for a NoaF review. And that other one. And the ones I need to read for the NoaF project in January. But other than that.