Beyond Selidor

This is the obligatory Hugo Awards reaction post. I'll add more links as the appear, but at the moment most of the winners and nominees are probably feeling the aftereffects of last night's celebrations and haven't had time to write anything.

This year was different. There was a sense both of a tipping point, and of a real struggle for the soul of the speculative fiction community. And, as fozmeadows said, the awards results showed that the community turned a corner, and headed in the right direction.

Here is a full breakdown of the voting. I'm feeling particularly gleeful about the result for Novelette.

Here is the writeup by Hannah Ellis-Petersen at The Guardian, which quotes Best Short Story winner John Chu:

Other major winners included John Chu, who won best short story for his deeply personal work The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere, which grapples with questions of sexuality and tradition within a fantasy framework.

Picking up the award, a visibly overwhelmed Chu described the challenges he faced in getting his story published. "I can't begin to describe how much this award means to me," he said. "When I started writing, so many people's words were 'I'm not racist, but …', 'I'm not homophobic, but …' There were so many buts, and they all told me, sometimes in those exact words, that no one was interested and no one would publish anything I would ever write. So to win a Hugo, and for this story, I can't put into words how much that means to me."

John Scalzi's writeup makes some more good points:

[Larry] Correia was foolish to put his own personal capital as a successful and best selling novelist into championing Vox Day and his novelette, because Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being, and his novelette was, to put it charitably, not good (less charitably: It was like Gene Wolfe strained through a thick and rancid cheesecloth of stupid). Doing that changed the argument from something perfectly legitimate, if debatable — that conservative writers are often ignored for or discounted on award ballots because their personal politics generally conflict with those of the award voters — into a different argument entirely, i.e., fuck you, we got an undeserving bigoted shithole on the Hugo ballot, how you like them apples.

Which is a shame. It’s fine for Correia to beclown himself with Day, if such is his joy, and he deserves to reap the fruits of such an association. I suspect, however, there are others whom he championed for his “sad puppy” slate who were less thrilled to find themselves looped in with Day by involuntary association.

I am most happy about Ancillary Justice winning Best Novel. It's the best book I've read all year, and I'm thrilled that it swept the board of speculative fiction awards. A most deserved win.

I was also very happy about the nominees for Best Fan Writer, and to be honest, wished that all five could've won. But Kameron Hurley is a truly deserving winner, and her second Hugo for Best Related Work was just icing on the cake. (Speaking of which, if you haven't yet read 'We Have Always Fought', go out and do so now.

I'll leave you with a quote from Hurley's acceptance speech, which was read by kateelliott:

The conflict of narrative we’re engaged in online, in convention spaces, in stories, and in the wider world is a real one. It’s no less than a struggle for our inclusion in our own history. Not just my history, my future. But yours. Your friends’. Your colleagues. All of us, struggling together to write a better, truer story.

Tell them stories indeed.