Hello everyone!
2019/1944 Hugo Award Finalists have been announced today, and I have some thoughts I wanted to share. And you're contractually obligated to listen to me because I have a blog, and everyone who has a blog gets read all the time, all the way through.
So as tends to happen, I don't know most of the finalists, so I'm obviously only going to be speaking to the things I have some experience with.
You can read the whole list here.
So, the names that stuck out to me most were in Best Novel (I'm not going to touch on the 1944 Retro Hugos in this post.). Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning is here as a first novel, and I've been excited about that book since before it came out. Catherynne M. Valente is one of my favorite authors, so seeing Space Opera make the cut was also exciting. And I always enjoy seeing our old guard pumping out books, so Mary Robinette Kowal's appearance there is good by me.
Aliette de Bodard and Nnedi Okorafor are also favorites of mine, so I'm thrilled to see them both up for Novella (Also, let's give a big shout out to the sheer domination of female candidates this year. We're talking about a genre that was born from Frankenstein, after all.). Best Short Story is full of new names for me, thus further confirming that shorts are still a solid launching point in the genre, and a place to watch or the novelists of tomorrow. I mean, de Bodard herself was someone I marked as really, really skilled off her short work, and now she's all over big books.
Short Form Editors are a strong showing as well. Neil Clarke, the late Gardner Dozois, and Lynne and Michael Thomas from Uncanny Magazine. Although personally, things being what they are, I think Dozois is going to be a hard one to beat. The SF/F community lost him in 2018, and he was so instrumental in the genre...I just think there's not much chance of anyone topping him out this year.
Semiprozine is strong across the board, although I love seeing both FIYAH and Fireside on there, and the now defunct Shimmer as well. And of special note in Related Work are Archive of Our Own, and Lindsay Ellis's Hobbit Duology. Metatextually, those are fascinating. Lindsay is, I believe, the second YouTuber to get a Hugo Final? And Archive of Our Own is...basically just a collection of fan fiction. Those are very different than what we would normally see in Related Work, so those excite me.
Anything from the finalists that really excites you? Let me know in the comments below.
Voss
